Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  At last, with our meal about finished but brandy still before us, he wondered if I had guessed the matter he wished to discuss with me.

  “Does it concern these?” Removing an inch-thick bundle of Philip’s letters from a pocket hidden within the folds of my dress, I gave them to his father, whose face showed alarm gradually subsiding to relief, as if a falling pianoforte had just landed a few feet away from him; I thought it had gone very well so far. “I see,” I said. “You didn’t know about these. Then you’re here to ask me to—to give him up.”

  In fact, I had assumed as much. Philip was a garrulous bedmate; he complained constantly about his father, and I had a pretty good idea of his father’s plans for him. I had also retained two of the choicer letters.

  “Regretfully,” said Arthur Heywood, “and with the utmost respect.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “He’s engaged to be married. She’s a fine girl, not that you—”

  “I’m fine in my own way, but still. Only a stone fence separates her father’s newspaper from yours.”

  “Not a business connection. But they’re an old family, and we’re new money. He had agreed. Only now …”

  “He’s infatuated with a Cyprian.”

  He spread his meaty hands. I reached out, and he gave me one to hold. “In my heart,” I said, “I knew it couldn’t go on forever; it was a beautiful dream, but dreamers awake. I must stand aside. But how? How? How shall I find the strength?”

  “I know how difficult it will be for you.”

  “Does it even mean anything, for me to do what’s right, just because it’s right? Can I afford the luxury of such scruples? Is there not something strangely false in it?”

  “I am prepared to be generous.”

  “I don’t want money from you. That is, not for this.” I laced our fingers together. He blushed—mostly in his nose.

  “What do you want?” His breath came short.

  Here it was. Much less confident than I was trying to appear, I took the leap: “Remember, earlier, we were talking of police corruption? There is a very bad policeman in the Sixth Ward who acquired his position through bribery.”

  “As do they all,” he said, with a certain distance still from his own words.

  “Let God attend to the others. I’m interested in one who goes by the name Jack Cutter. This tavern is also an inn, did you know that? There are rooms upstairs. I wonder about them. Do you share my curiosity?”

  “Yes,” he said hoarsely. I reached under the table and put my hand on his knee. “Oh,” he said, just like his son. “Oh.”

  I took him upstairs and applied my skills; before long, he lay gasping on the bed like a fish on a deck. When we were both sure he wasn’t going to die, I broached the subject of his newspaper’s upcoming investigation of police corruption in the person of Jack Cutter, and the Sixth Ward politicians such as—possibly—Alderman O’Daniel and Constantine Donoho.

  I had never before tried to influence a powerful man to do me an elaborate favor, but I had met and talked with many such men when they had their hair down, and I had heard them talking to each other. I had come to know them better than their wives and their employees knew them, and I had an instinctive understanding of what was required. At the center of it was a bargain: I would stop seeing Philip, keeping his father’s involvement secret. The father, in return, would conduct investigations and write, or have written, the exposés, timed to hurt O’Daniel and Donoho in the upcoming Democratic primary.

  That was not all, however. He would replace his son as one of my regular customers. This was to keep him before my eyes, where I could watch him and urge him on when necessary. It was also another inducement, because, as he was aware, money alone could not purchase my favors: I was popular and I had choices.

  He was shrewd enough to guess that I might at the last minute ask him not to mention O’Daniel or Donoho or others who fell into his net, if they undertook to promise—promise me—that in the future they would mend their ways. After all, he said, “No human soul is beyond redemption.”

  It was my turn to gasp. “You put that so well. I see the literary man in you.”

  “It is no more than I believe.”

  “So you have shown, by appealing to my better nature today,” I agreed.

  I WENT TO THE DONOHO GROCERY, and Mrs. Donoho took me to the basement and poured me a glass of beer. I had only to smell it to know what it was. “Is this how you show your displeasure with me?”

  “You don’t like lees beer. I forgot. Well, you’re forgetful, too, it strikes me.”

  “You mean the one hundred dollars I promised you?”

  “You know I mean that.”

  “You overcharged me.”

  “It was the agreed price.”

  “I was ignorant; you would have enlightened me if you thought my opinion of you could ever matter. And you didn’t think that Jack Cutter would brag to me that you had bribed him with my money. I would like us to be friends, but you know you didn’t earn the hundred, and I didn’t come here to give it to you.”

  Of course I had more against her than this relatively small matter. I believed she had helped Jack Cutter to bring me to Mrs. Bower’s house. But I wasn’t ever going to let her know of my suspicions. I hoped merely to make her wish she hadn’t done it.

  “I know no such thing. What are you here for, if not for that?”

  “I’m here to warn you, Mrs. Donoho, because, as I said, I think we should be friends. Read the Courier. You will find there a series of stories about people known to you, and I fear that some of them will not be mentioned in a favorable light.”

  “And how would a little slut like you know such a thing?”

  “One has only to look at your face to know that you’ve always been a chaste woman, Mrs. Donoho. So it is left for me to tell you that all kinds of men make fools of themselves for pretty young girls. They tell things to them and promise to do things for them, in order to work their wicked will on them. It’s unfair, I agree. Consider this as you read or have read to you the stories about your friends and your husband.”

  I left her and walked out of Five Points, where some remembered me, and no one was in any doubt as to how I had come by my finery; they acknowledged it with a mixture of cynicism, contempt, and envy. I looked men in the eye now, and often it was they who turned away, shamed, shifting their gaze to painted signs or struggling horses or broken bottles in the street while they tried to imagine being rich enough to fuck a beautiful whore.

  ONLY DAYS AFTER MY MEETING with the newspaper editor Arthur Heywood, I learned something that caused a revolution in my ideas about myself and my circumstances. I had been at Mrs. Bower’s house less than a year, though it seemed much longer. It was early in the evening. The owner of an omnibus company, a man in the mayor’s office, a manufacturer of gutta-percha cement roofing, an India-rubber importer, and a buyer from Cincinnati (being entertained at the expense of the India-rubber importer) were enjoying cigars and champagne in the company of Beatrice, Jocelyn, Juliette, Gwendolyn, and Harriet. They were getting us to drink whiskey, and we kept saying we shouldn’t because we had no head for it, it made us misbehave; it made us do what we should not! To show how true that was, ten minutes later Juliette was sitting on the lap of Mr. Martin, the buyer; Mrs. Bower noticed and promptly fined Mr. Martin fifty cents. There was a strict rule in her parlor against such breaches of decorum, with different fines for permitting a girl to sit on one’s lap, for kisses on the neck, for kisses on the lips, for curious hands straying to naughty places, and so on.

  I sipped and giggled with the others, while the men talked business and politics, and I gave their words more attention than I showed, because I wanted to educate myself, and also because acting out an obscene travesty of the behavior of a girl of good family required only a fraction of my mind once I had learned how it was done.

  So I was already listening, when I heard the syllables that would have snapped me into attention anyway.
“Godwin,” said the omnibus man. My whole being vibrated like a struck bell, but not even the India-rubber importer, upon whose lap I had just settled, seemed to notice.

  “Harriet, what do you think you’re doing? Just because Juliette is bad, do you have to be worse? Must you do everything Juliette does? And, Harold, you disappoint me; you know how suggestible Harriet is. Fifty cents,” said Mrs. Bower.

  They were talking about credit. A man named Godwin had started an ingenious new business, supplying as a service an estimate of the creditworthiness of other businesses and also of the bonds issued by states and municipalities. Mr. Martin said it was a shocking fraud, he supposed, and he wished he’d thought of it, ha ha!

  Harold, causing a great deal of movement beneath me as he reached into his pocket for coins, said that it was not a fraud, and the need for such a service was obvious, but it had taken a very special personality to think of it.

  “What personality?” said Mr. Martin.

  “A Tractarian, an abolitionist, a man accustomed to judging other men.”

  Then I had no doubt they were talking about my grandfather.

  “A prig, but also a phoenix,” and they explained to the out-of-town buyer that Solomon Godwin, formerly a silk importer, had gone bankrupt in the Panic. It had taken him a few years to go down; and they must have been gloomy years for the old man, for they had come fresh on the suicide of his only son. The fellow had jumped off his father’s seven-story warehouse on Pearl Street, which the father then sold—either because of its unpleasant associations, or because he needed cash. But he had retained enough other property to have recovered financially by now even without the credit business. In the end, no investment was more reliable than New York real estate.

  “I knew him,” said Harold.

  I waited for more to be said. Finally, I had to ask, “Who? Godwin?”

  He looked at me as if I were a cat that had suddenly spoken English. “The son,” he said, gripping my waist and addressing the others generally. “He used to come to the old place on Anne Street. It was I who brought him first. Do you remember him, Dolly?” Mrs. Bower shook her head. “Sure, you do,” said Harold, and he described my father. “He wasn’t as religious as the old man, and his wife was so feeble after her last child that he didn’t dare use her for fear of killing her. Besides”—he smiled at me—“she was too good to be fun. There was a girl he was fond of. What was her name?”

  “Frances,” said Mrs. Bower.

  “What happened with her?” asked Harold, looking up and squinting.

  “Alas, they seldom keep in touch,” said Mrs. Bower, as if she ran a school for girls.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Harold. Turning to me, he said, “Of course, this was long before your time. How old were you in ’37? What’s wrong?”

  I had jumped off his lap. I walked unsteadily to the sideboard, poured myself a shot of whiskey, and gulped it.

  “Well, you’re a big girl now,” said Harold admiringly.

  “I’m not feeling well,” I said. “I have to lie down.”

  “I’m sorry, dear,” said Mrs. Bower. “Why don’t you go upstairs to your bed?”

  “I will.”

  “And, Harold, why don’t you go with her and make sure she’s comfortable? Help her out of her clothes.”

  We went up to my room. When I had pleased Harold, I told him that my family in Boston had been connected with the Godwins, who were originally from Boston, as he might know, and I had met the Godwins’ grandchildren a few times when I was a girl.

  “Is that why you took that drink all of a sudden?”

  “Yes, it reminded me of my former life.”

  “I see.” He did not care. He was not romantic. He was forty-five, with a big hairy bottom, a flabby, womanish chest, a narrow face, and a tiny mouth with crowded yellow teeth, almost in double rows on the lower jaw. “I always thought you made that up.”

  “The children,” I said. “The children of the man who liked Frances. Do you know what happened to them?”

  “One of them, Edward, is clerking for the old man,” Harold answered. “The other, the older one, I forget his name, is a lawyer.”

  “Godwin’s son had four children,” I said. “Five—one died.”

  “Did he? I think you’re right. You really did know the Godwins, didn’t you? I don’t know what happened to the others.” After hitching up his trousers, he added: “She’s dead, you know. You can be sure Mrs. Bower remembers. Frances. She took arsenic. They were always quarreling. It was like a love affair. He was jealous. She said she was finished with him. He jumped off the roof of the warehouse, and she took arsenic.”

  I HAD A BAD NIGHT. On fresh sheets, studying the lights a street lamp scattered across the ceiling, I was amazed at how much innocence had remained within me long after I thought I had destroyed it all. I had never questioned my father’s love for my mother. Hadn’t he given it the ultimate demonstration, killing himself because he could not live without her? But, no, he had killed himself because he could not live without a prostitute named Frances. It was an attack on my oldest illusions, a stake in the heart of the girl I had been. I tried to laugh at it—what a joke on that girl—but I could only lie there, pinned, unable to wriggle free from the weight of this knowledge.

  My grandfather, not only alive but rich again—that was just as bad. If I had known, when Lewis was in trouble I could have gone to my grandfather. Whether his rectitude would have permitted him to bribe the police I didn’t know, but he’d have done something. Why hadn’t I tried to find him? Mrs. Shea had told me he was dead, but long before then I had given up the hope of assistance from my grandfather. If you had asked me to calculate his age, I would have been able to say that he was sixty-seven, and that many people lived to be much older. I had never thought to do it. My childhood in New York seemed such a distant epoch to me. And if he was alive, why had he not written? None of the Godwins had been in touch with us, and casual acquaintances had been permitted to receive the impression that we had never existed. They had abandoned me, and Jeptha had abandoned me, and I had been left to wander off the regular paths of life and into the wilderness where the devil dances with his friends.

  I gave in and took laudanum, and slept, and had many vivid dreams, of which I remember only the last, the one I had just before waking. I dreamed that I had never come to Mrs. Bower; I had looked my grandfather up as soon as I had arrived in New York. It was not until I had woken from this dream that I realized, with a terrible piercing thrill, that I could go back! I could be Arabella Godwin again, with luck, if I managed it carefully. I would have to account for my activities during the gulf of time between my employment as a maid and the time of my reappearance. Maybe I could say that I had worked as a maid in some house with some family out of the city, in Brooklyn or New Jersey, some people who had moved west, so we would not expect to meet them again.

  Still, I was not sure I wished to be Arabella Godwin again just yet. Perhaps this shocks you. I think I have shown that I did not become a prostitute lightly, and that I suffered, as a girl should, when she becomes a prostitute. The point is, I had suffered. I had paid a price in shame, and buried that shame, and I would have to unearth it if I went out among respectable people, once more to see life through their eyes while feigning the innocence I had lost. Then I would know shame again, and I would be in virtually constant fear. A former customer had only to recognize me and point me out, and I would be humiliated and disowned. If I remained in New York, it was bound to happen.

  The life of Harriet Knowles had its compensations. I belonged to the aristocracy of my kind. A handful of rich men were in love with me. Others, less romantic, paid a coarser tribute to my appeal, which I had become coarse enough to appreciate. I had long since paid my debt to Mrs. Bower. I had money. My world was in some ways wider than the world of a good wife or daughter. I had even had a taste of power, through my influence on men like Arthur Heywood. These advantages may strike you as a pathetic
recompense for my degradation; I valued them the more for their high price. In my current circumstance, to re-enter my former life was as frightening as leaving it had been. And what were the inducements? To see my brothers and my grandfather again—knowing they would despise me if they learned the truth, and I must hide my bitterness at their treatment of me? To be married, to a larger fortune than I could acquire with my own efforts? Yes, but I was still sentimental enough to be dismayed rather than elated by that prospect. I had never wanted to marry anyone but Jeptha. To think of marriage meant thinking of him, and I tried never to do that.

  Perhaps you have heard of “caisson disease,” discovered when the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge were laid. Divers, breathing through tubes, stayed for hours deep under the water, and those who rose too quickly to the surface were ill for the remainder of their lives. The transition from one world to another is inherently dangerous.

  Lewis’s situation was different from mine. After his release from jail he had gone back to live with the Donovans on Mulberry Street. He knew what I had become, and eventually he had adjusted to the knowledge. He did not know why I had decided to sell myself. He thought, in his simplicity, that Jocelyn had talked me into following her example, and he often said that he wished he had not asked me to see her.

  He lived by unskilled labor, and would not take money from me. I watched him changing week by week. I watched him adapting to life in the Sixth Ward, becoming in reality the Bowery Boy whose external manners he used to ape. He spent his pay immediately. He won money in tenpin alleys which he promptly lost in card games. He drank, he had women. He fought. Men like him had accidents and got sick. They were old at forty. And then, of course, there was his cough.

  Since I have last described him, he had acquired a fresh bruise on his temple and a new gold-capped incisor: the tooth had been broken in an encounter a month earlier with Jack Cutter in a gambling hell on Pell Street. Cutter had come for his weekly payoff. Lewis had been there. Cutter had said he was thinking about going to Mrs. Bower’s to try me out and see whether, after all the men I’d had by now, he, Jack Cutter, had anything to teach me. He outlined some of his ideas. Lewis, considering himself smart to sit calmly through most of this so he could make his attack unexpected, had finally lashed out. Cutter had struck him across the face with a truncheon. Lewis had told me amiably that he planned to kill Cutter. He would call him out. If Cutter hid behind his star, Lewis would force the issue. There was no hurry.