Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  Whenever I went out, no matter where, whether it was to do my own business or my mistresses’, men looked at me; some of them called out to me, and sometimes they followed me until I escaped into a store; the most determined men would go right into that store and would corner me there. If I met their eyes, they took it as encouragement. Soon I hardly dared to look up when a man was near. “Where are you going, sweetheart?” they would ask. “What do you do, little angel?” and if I told them I was a maid—meaning that I had a job, I worked, I was not to be taken so lightly—they would smile and say, “A pretty girl like you, a maid? A girl like you shouldn’t have to work.”

  Often, following me, they would ask this question: “Why the long face, pretty girl? Why so sad?” Of all their remarks, I hated that one most.

  XXXI

  WHEN THE SUBJECT OF MY FINAL DESCENT into dishonor came up later, I had one story for patrons, and another for my intimates. I told members of the first group that a handsome man had taken advantage of my youth, and when my disgrace became known, my family cast me out. I told friends that I had entered upon this life in order to save the life of my brother Lewis. I believed this second story, although, with the passage of years, I have come to see that it does not exactly make sense by itself and cannot be the whole story. For what it’s worth, here is what I used to say. The facts are accurate, so far as they go.

  On a day in January when the road was full of deep ice puddles within which leaves and oyster shells were suspended like exhibits in glass museum cases, I opened the door of my employers’ house to see a small, slender man, under five feet tall. His name was Johnny O’Faolin, he said, and he told me that my brother Lewis was in the Tombs, the prison on Centre Street. Johnny had just come back from visiting his own brother there, and Lewis had asked him to come and tell me.

  It seemed that Lewis had been walking by the piano factory on Bowery when he saw, coming the other way, his former friend Tom Cross, whose real name was Jack Cutter. Cutter wore a long coat with a silver star pinned to it—it was true, what we had heard: he had become a policeman.

  Lewis pushed him in the chest, told him he was a dirty, cowardly, thieving skunk, and announced to spectators, who had begun to gather immediately, that the star Cutter wore had been purchased by a bribe to an alderman, with bribe money obtained by theft from a friend and by the sale of a fourteen-year-old girl to a brothel. “See the man now paid to keep the peace,” Lewis shouted. “And there’s more I know, and more I could say.”

  O’Faolin did not tell me, because Lewis hadn’t told him, that Cutter at that point said, “Watch your mouth, Lew; don’t forget what I know about you.”

  Lewis told Cutter, “I’m gonna give you a mild pasting, not the mortal pasting you deserve. Then you’ll pay me the money you stole.”

  Cutter swung his truncheon. Lewis evaded it and knocked it out of Cutter’s hand. They fought, Cutter getting much the worst of it, until he broke free and ran on Bayard all the way to Mott, with Lewis behind him. New York City’s police did not wear uniforms back then, only the star, so this chase did not look as strange as it would today, but it cannot have done much for Cutter’s reputation in the Sixth Ward. Cutter was about to escape into an alley on Mott between Bayard and Pell when someone stuck a foot out and tripped him. Lewis leapt on top of Cutter and began punching him in the face.

  It began to snow. People who would ordinarily have gone inside stayed in the streets, taking bets and shouting, “Get his eyes,” and “Kick his stones,” and crying foul as another man with a star on his coat began choking Lewis from behind. My brother was fortunate in the character of the second policeman. He used the truncheon on Lewis’s body only, did not use it after Lewis was subdued, and would not let Jack Cutter use it.

  So now Lewis, badly bruised but not crippled, was in the strange Egyptian-looking prison a few blocks from the street where he had caught up with Officer Jack Cutter, alias Tom Cross, and with my employers’ permission I went to visit him there, bearing a basket full of apple pie, bread, cheese, sausage, candles, and newspapers.

  Perhaps you have seen pictures of the famous edifice, whose appearance inspires a feeling less of the law’s might than of its mystery—a thing too bizarre to reason with. There was a broad flight of dark stone steps, and massive columns whose capitals, in the shape of palm leaves, were on that day partly obscured by icicles.

  After I had gone through the entrance, I was in a large courtyard, facing a second building, which was the men’s prison, made of four galleries, one on top of another. Laborers were making repairs on the bottom floor—the prison was sinking into its soggy foundations. The light was dim, the air foul. A jailer on the third tier led me to my brother’s cell. On the way, we passed many others, one of which had the door open, so I could see a woman with a bowed head talking to the unseen inmate. Finally, the jailer opened a massive black iron door to a small, bare cell lit by a chink in the wall, with one table and two bedsteads, a sink, a chamber pot, and my brother and another prisoner, whom Lewis introduced to me as Hugh O’Faolin.

  “Johnny’s brother,” I said, and Hugh smiled as if we were old friends because I knew Johnny.

  While the two of them shared the food I’d brought, Lewis told me, with a careless air, as if it made a funny story, that he was being charged with robbery, assault, resisting arrest, and half a dozen other things that slipped his mind. Cutter claimed that he had recognized Lewis as fitting the description of a man who robbed a grocery on Pell Street, that Lewis had run, and he, Cutter, had given chase.

  When I asked how I could help, he said by not worrying. He had sent for me because he knew I would be mad if he didn’t and I found out later he’d been in jail. But if I wanted to—if it would amuse me—perhaps I could help him find a lawyer, one who would waive a fee in view of the easy victory he was bound to achieve by representing Lewis. For it was sure to be easy! Dozens of witnesses had seen that it was he, Lewis, who had followed Cutter, shouting “Stop, thief.”

  My brother Lewis was an open book to me. I knew that under his bluster he was terrified. He had never seen the inside of a jail cell before, and a moment later I learned that his circumstances were in fact graver than he had yet revealed to me.

  O’Faolin, who looked several years older than Lewis, said, “You left something out.”

  Lewis looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment and then shook his head.

  “What?” I cried. “What is it? What? I must know everything.”

  “I was there,” said his cellmate. “I was there at the police station when they brought him in, and the other coppers, when they saw Lewis, and how small he was next to Cutter, they all let go a big laugh. Because they had already heard about the chase. They heard it was Lewis chasing Cutter.”

  “You see,” said my brother, “everyone knows.”

  “And Cutter being so much the bigger man, that makes it funny. Your brother, he looks just half alive, but he laughs, too. And Cutter takes Lewis by the head and whispers something and gives him a knock.”

  He stopped, and we both looked at Lewis, who threw another angry look at Hugh.

  “What did he say to you, Lewis?”

  We just listened to the sound of hammering below, until O’Faolin spoke. “He says, ‘A friend of mine is a guard in Sing Sing. You won’t last a month there.’ He says, ‘My friend’ll see to that.’ ”

  I looked at Lewis, and then I looked back at his cellmate. “Mr. O’Faolin, do you think this is true? Tell me,” I implored him, because I needed expert opinion.

  “It happens,” he said with a judicious air. After a little pause for recollection, he explained, “They can punish you. They say you broke this rule, and that rule, and they work you to death.” He named some men who had suffered this fate, and others who had been stabbed by fellow prisoners who had been paid to do it.

  “I can take care of myself,” said Lewis, his words belied by a fat lip, and various swellings and discolorations on his face; to make his claim
even less convincing, he erupted into a complex, protracted cough.

  “But the court, Mr. O’Faolin—what do you say to my brother’s chances in court?”

  “He needs a miracle.”

  OUTSIDE THE TOMBS, THE WIND BLEW SNOW horizontally into my face and I did not feel it—I could only think and fret and wish. My brother was the world to me. He was all the family I had, and in all creation he was the only man who had ever stood up for me, really stood up for me so it counted. He had shown me the truest, purest, most absolute loyalty there is: loyalty that had to make up for the absence of a mother, a father, and a lover; loyalty to lift my steps across the mindless drudgery of an ordinary day, or to carry me on beating wings over the sudden abyss of an emergency. He had made a cripple of his hero, just as soon as he learned that the hero had harmed me. For my sake, he had become a fugitive. And now he was killing me with his recklessness. I could not live and see my brother crushed, and he was being crushed, he would be crushed, without a miracle. Where could I get one?

  I have always been a quick study. I had been five months in New York City, and I knew where miracles were sold. I went to the grocery store of Con Donoho, the mighty Sixth Ward street inspector, and asked Mrs. Donoho to speak with me alone. Without a word, she took me down to a musty-smelling basement full of sacks and barrels and broken furniture. She lit another candle to improve the light, and said to me, “This would be about your brother Lewis?” I nodded, not very surprised—glad of it, since her omniscience suggested power, and I needed power—and she went to a barrel and drained a mug of beer from it and handed it to me. “Tell me what you think of this variety,” she said. My two elderly employers had a secret fondness for beer and sometimes sent me out to get it for them, so I knew a little about it. I sniffed the mug and guessed that it was stale beer from the lees. A cup of it gave one a killing headache, but it was a cheap way to get drunk, and—so a flirtatious bartender had told me—the Five Points was full of dank cellars in which men determinedly obliterated themselves with this stuff. Supposing that the cup had been put before me to test my good sense, I ignored it. Trying to sound businesslike and not too worried, I began repeating what I had learned while visiting my brother in the Tombs—my brother’s words, O’Faolin’s words—and after repeatedly nodding, as if she knew all this, Mrs. Donoho said impatiently, “And Cutter has threatened to have your brother killed in prison.”

  Here I suppose my brave front dropped. “How do you know this?”

  “Oh, word gets around.”

  I was at a loss for a few seconds. At last I asked her, “And is it empty talk?”

  She shrugged. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Tell me what I need to do to fix it. I’ll do anything.”

  She blinked at me. “Anything? Is that so? Or is that just a figure of speech?” I didn’t answer. She took away the mug of lees without comment, got up, and brought me another mug. “Try this and see if you like it better.”

  I smelled it and took a sip; it tasted exactly like the drink I had once stolen from the two elderly sisters in an impulsive act of vengeance.

  “What makes you think Constantine can fix this?” she asked.

  “I guess he’ll know who can, and what they’ll want in return.”

  “I’ll ask him, and he’ll ask around. But if you forced me to guess, I’d say they’d want five hundred dollars. And you a housemaid. Where are you going to get money like that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I don’t mind your asking, but where I get it is my lookout.”

  “I guess so. Well, you’re loyal to that brother of yours. I hope he appreciates it.”

  I had to get back to the elderly sisters, so I walked fast, and a young fellow in a stovepipe hat noticed me. “Hello! Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  I was in that state when one schemes to quell panic and make the next minute bearable. If necessary, you think, I will do this unpleasant thing, and give up that dear thing, and you feel better because at least these ugly choices are your own. I decided that I would really need six hundred dollars, not just five hundred. That way, I could promise Mrs. Donoho an extra hundred when my brother was actually freed. I know now that five hundred alone would have been enough: her cut had been figured into it.

  Six hundred dollars was twice my yearly salary. My rich grandfather was dead. I had not heard from my older brothers since I was twelve, or any other relative of mine save my aunt and uncle, who hated Lewis. Distasteful as it might be to ask Jocelyn to loan me the money she had earned by selling her flesh, I would have asked her, but I knew she didn’t have it. She owed money to Mrs. Bower.

  So my mind turned to my steamboat companion Eric Gordon. He must be very rich, to have one home in Brooklyn and another just a ferry ride away, at the most expensive hotel in New York, so that he could amuse himself with light women while his wife enjoyed a house with trees, a garden, and servants. Such a man could solve carelessly, almost absentmindedly, problems that meant life or death to me and to Lewis.

  There was never any doubt in my mind what I would have to give Mr. Gordon in exchange for such a large sum. Shivering in my bed in my cold attic room that night, in the house of the two sisters who had predicted that I would eventually do just what I was about to do, I went through many phases of decision and indecision. What if Cutter had been merely lying or boasting when he said that he would have my brother killed in prison? In that case, the trade was this—either Lewis, thanks to his own folly, would go to prison for a certain time, or I would dishonor myself forever. And after that, what? What would I be? Who would I be? Was it a fair exchange?

  Perhaps I would not be able to find Eric Gordon. Maybe he was out of town. Whereas before I had calmed myself with the idea of action, now I took refuge in the thought that the final outcome was up to chance and fate, and at last I was able to sleep.

  IN A FUR-COLLARED COAT, a pretty blue dress, an India-muslin pelerine, and white kid gloves, all just purchased secondhand with my entire savings, I crossed the street, which was full of dirty snow, big-wheeled, boatlike omnibuses, gigs, hacks, and carriages, and I approached the world-famous Astor House. The great hotel looked majestic from a distance, but at ground level it resembled a bazaar, gripped by a disorderly collection of canvas awnings that put the sidewalk in shadow, by street hawkers, and by hanging placards and bills that advertised restaurants, patent medicines, and theatrical productions in those tall letters that remind one of men on stilts. I passed between a pair of Roman columns, and up a flight of steps into a tall, wide, gaslit lobby. The marble floor was strewn with luggage. Guests handed coats and capes and silk hats to a fellow in a room to the side. In another alcove, a man stood still while a hotel employee brushed his coat.

  An imposing, double-chinned desk clerk stood before a great book and near a mysterious glass case full of sickle-shaped pieces of brass. After he had assisted a few of the customers in line before me, I handed him a letter for Mr. Gordon; he gave no sign of whether he knew who Eric Gordon was, or had any opinions about the kind of girl who might leave a letter for him. He turned and put the letter into a pigeonhole in the wall behind him.

  The letter told of my brother’s trouble and asked for Eric Gordon’s help, not saying what I might give in return, or the amount of money that would be needed. I said that I would come back to the hotel desk at the same time next week, on my day off.

  As I was leaving the hotel, I saw him. He looked richer to me now than he had before, and nearly as handsome as I remembered. He gave me the glance a man of his type gives a pretty girl, and then his face lit up. “Miss Moody! From the Israel Putnam!” He pressed my right hand between his hands. “Look at you. Don’t you look lovely. Do you know someone at the hotel?”

  “Only you,” I said, frightened—it was happening too quickly. “I left a letter for you.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. Only just now.”

  “I see. Is there someplace you must be right now? Or do you h
ave time to speak to me in person?”

  “I have time.”

  “Then you must dine with me,” he said, as though it were a matter of course and he said that he was planning to dine here—would I mind that terribly?—and when I said no, he hooked his arm in mine, took my letter from the clerk, who did not look at me, and led me through the Astor House, which became to me at that point a labyrinth. I suppose if Eric had left me there I would have been able to find my way out, but it did not feel like that as we walked through doorways and down halls; I decided that twice the combined population of Livy and Patavium were contained within these walls and most of them were strangers to each other. The thought was comforting. No one knew or cared what I did.

  There were children in the corridors, rich men’s children, running and screaming. What an easy life they had!

  At last Eric led me into an opulently furnished, gaslit room, with heavy drapes and rich carpets and chandeliers, and a few round tables with lacy white tablecloths. There were women and children as well as men in the chamber. When we came in Eric nodded to a few of the other patrons, evidently casual acquaintances of his—and who, I was sure, must know I was not his wife. Though he had not introduced me, the men, and also a few women in the proximity of children probably their own, returned his speechless greeting in a way that seemed to acknowledge and welcome me into their company, and afterward ignored us, and I felt that I had learned something about the morals and manners appropriate to a fashionable hotel dining room. A well-dressed waiter filled our glasses with clear, sweet Croton water and some chunks of ice, handed us a printed bill of fare, and retreated to a corner. “The table d’hôte here is considered one of the best in the city,” Eric said. “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  “I’m sure I won’t. I have very little basis for comparison.”

  He looked at me. “I remember that about you. That you talk that way.”

  It was not clear quite what he meant, but I liked his saying it. It made me feel that he had noticed me for something other than my proportions, and I found a bit of courage in that, enough to mask my nerves.