“Seventeen, and fragile as an eggshell. Frankly, I’ve been wondering what to do with her. Her refusal to leave her room has been making things difficult for our cooking and cleaning staff.”
I’d still like to see her, even if I couldn’t ask about her captors. “Perhaps I could help. My specialty is medical psychology.”
Her eyebrows rose. “A doctor of the mind?” She nodded. “This, I think, is exactly what she needs.”
“I’m not saying I can affect any immediate improvement,” I added hastily. “But I have had some experience with people suffering from psychic shock. I might be able to suggest ways to help her move forward.”
“Then certainly, you must try. I should warn you though, she doesn’t speak much English. We’ll need to have our cook, Angela, translate for you.” She glanced at the wall clock. “Angela will be finished cleaning up from lunch soon. Why don’t I show you around the place, and then we’ll go fetch her?”
The bottom floor of the building, she explained, had been converted to a theater by its former occupant in hopes of cashing in on the moving picture craze. When that scheme failed, the desperate owner agreed to let out the entire building to Pauline’s enterprise for slightly less than market rate. The cheap rent allowed her to provide beds, food, and training space for twenty-four women at a time.
Leaving behind the gated vestibule—once used for ticket collection, she explained, and now a handy barrier to the occasional angry pimp—we entered the former seating area, where the shelter’s sewing and ironing operations were housed. Some two dozen young women sat at four long tables, wielding irons, practicing stitching on sheets of newspaper, or bent over sewing machines. Several open windows in the rear provided ventilation, while a generous scattering of hanging incandescent lamps cast an even light over the work space. Scratchy music played on a phonograph in the corner.
Pauline led me up a side stairwell to a narrow balcony that hung over the work area. “This is my office,” she said, indicating a battered desk and chair in the middle of the open space. “And these,” she added, turning and gesturing over the balcony rail, “are my girls.”
I joined her at the rail, from where we could easily observe the industry below.
“The shirtwaists the women sew and the bread they bake in the basement ovens are sold directly to stores and hotels,” she told me proudly. “We don’t do piecework for garment manufacturers, paying the women a pittance for their labor, as other shelters do. Here, the women keep all the profits from their work, minus only the cost of materials. Even after they’ve moved out, they may continue to work for our established customers, without paying us any commission.” She gave me a probing look. “Which is why we depend so heavily on outsiders for support. We wouldn’t be able to carry on our work without donations.”
“Of course. I understand,” I said, resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t be leaving without making a sizeable one.
“Look, Miss G!” one of the youngest girls called from the floor, holding up a nearly finished shirtwaist.
“Molly! How smart you are! Two weeks only you have been here, and already you sew like a Paris seamstress!”
The girl grinned and went back to her hemming.
“She’s one of the lucky ones,” Pauline said with satisfaction. “We got to her before the vultures could, when she ran away from home. She is eager to learn and make something of herself.”
“And the rest of them? The unlucky ones?”
She shrugged. “Some will take up a new life, once they have the skills. But many will not. Often, these girls are so filled with shame that they can’t be convinced they deserve another chance and decide to go back to the streets. Others simply tire of the monotony of honest labor.”
“That must be a bitter pill for you to swallow, after all you do for them.”
She gave me a stern look. “I don’t judge. I wish only to give them a choice. What they do with it is up to them.”
I gazed at the sea of bent heads below me, trying to imagine the paths that had led them here. “Could you tell me some of their stories? What about that woman in blue there, filling the water bowls on the ironing tables?”
“Sarah,” she said with a nod. “She came to New York from Austria three years ago to make money to send back to her family. Because she didn’t have the dollars to prove she wouldn’t become a public charge, she was told she must either go back home, or be committed to the Austrian Society’s guardianship for a year. She chose the second, of course, and was bonded to the home of a jeweler as a servant by her ‘guardians.’ After a week, the husband began to make advances. The wife caught him trying to pull up her skirts in the kitchen and chased her out of the house.”
“Good Lord! Did her guardians have the man arrested?”
She turned to me with a grimace. “They told her she had to go back.”
I stared at her. “And did she?”
“Would you?” She looked back out over the railing. “It was winter, and after two days of wandering without finding employment, she took a job as a waitress in a saloon. They paid her just enough for her to split the cost of a boardinghouse room with three other girls. There was barely enough money to eat, let alone send anything home to her family, and she was constantly propositioned by rough men in the saloon. One night, one of the regular customers, a big spender who’d always been kind to her, offered to pay her two dollars to go behind the curtain with him in the back.” She glanced at me. “Two dollars, you understand, is nearly half of a waitress’s weekly wages.” She shrugged. “So she went. And kept on going after that, one or two times a week.”
I thought of what I’d said to Simon, about there always being other choices. But what if your only other choice was to toil twelve hours a day in a low-wage shop or saloon or factory, with nothing to look forward to but another week, another year, of the same soul-draining tedium? For the first time, I wondered if I’d be able to resist the lure of an easier life if that was the lot I’d been given.
“And then, one day, she was arrested by an undercover detective and sentenced to two weeks in the workhouse,” Pauline went on. “When she was released, there was a man waiting outside who told her she’d need police protection if she didn’t want to be arrested again and offered her his services. Before she knew what was happening, this man had taken control of her life, forcing her to have sex whenever and with whomever he wanted. When she tried to run away one time too many, he sold her to one of the worst resorts in the Tenderloin, where she was kept prisoner for over a year. On Christmas Day, a customer started a fire when he kicked over a candle, and in the confusion, she managed to escape. But not before she had been infected with syphilis.”
“Dear God” was all I could manage.
She frowned at me. “God, I think, has nothing to do with such things.”
I looked back out over the room. “Is that how it usually begins?” I asked after a moment. “I mean, the girls enter more or less willingly into the enterprise?”
She shrugged. “Of the women who have come to my shelter, perhaps two-thirds have entered willingly. The rest were either tricked or forced into the trade. The macks are everywhere these days, masquerading as employment agents and theater managers and boardinghouse representatives. I know of one man out west who gained entry into homes in the guise of a Graphophone salesman, pretending to fall in love with any pretty young woman who lived inside. They talk the girls into leaving home by promising to marry them or find them employment. Sometimes, they actually do marry them; there are pimps who have married dozens of times over.”
“How can there be so many young men willing to engage in such deceit?” I exclaimed. “Don’t these men have mothers and sisters? How can they be so cruel?”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “You’re the doctor of psychology. You tell me.”
I shook my head. “They must be masterful liars.”
A clock struck the hour somewhere below. “Angela should be finished by now,” she said, turning away from the railing.
“Miss Goldstein—”
“Pauline,” she insisted.
“Pauline, do you think you could tell me a little about Caterina’s history before I meet with her? It might help me decide how to proceed.”
She shrugged. “Why don’t you read the report for yourself?” Crossing the three steps to her “office,” she pulled a two-page document from a stack of papers on her desk and held it out to me.
The Chicago Law and Order Society was engraved across the top of the first sheet. The caption below read simply Case No. 196, Caterina Bressi.
“You might want to sit down,” Pauline suggested, nodding toward the single chair. She leaned against the desk with her arms crossed, watching me with an inscrutable expression.
Stomach fluttering with apprehension, I lowered myself onto the chair and began to read.
Chapter Ten
According to the report, Caterina Bressi had been found “in a state of abject terror” during a brothel raid conducted by Assistant State’s Attorney Clifford Roe. She had insisted at first that she was working at the brothel by choice, apparently fearing she’d be recaptured and punished by the brothel owner. Only after Roe convinced her she was under the protection of the U.S. government did she break down and confess the true story.
One year earlier, she told her interrogators, an Italian-born American lady wearing beautiful clothes had visited her village just outside Naples. The lady met Caterina and her mother at their market stand, striking up a conversation with the two of them after buying some of their figs and apricots. After remarking on Caterina’s modesty and uncommon beauty, she introduced the possibility that the girl might come to America to work as her companion. Excited by the woman’s attention, the family invited her to come to their humble home for supper, where she spoke about her grand house in New York City and her many carriages and all the other fine things she owned. Shrewdly, the report suggested, she didn’t attempt to take the girl with her when she left. A few weeks later, however, just as the family was beginning to fear the offer of employment had only been a dream, a letter arrived renewing her invitation and including money for the girl’s New York passage.
Caterina’s parents sent her off by the next boat, celebrating the family’s good fortune. At Ellis Island, the girl was met by her sponsor, who attended to her entrance papers and rode the barge with her to Manhattan. At the Barge Office, the woman handed her into a carriage with two men, explaining that she had errands to attend to but that the men would take her to her new home. Exactly where these men took Caterina, she didn’t know—but they quickly accomplished her ruin, by violent and brutal means. The next day, she was moved to a place with other Italian girls, also recently arrived, where for two weeks she was subjected to “the most unspeakable treatment” until made to feel that her degradation was complete. “And here let it be said,” the report’s author noted, “that the breaking of spirit, the crushing of all hope for any future save that of shame, is always a part of the initiation of the white slave.”
The girl was then shipped to Chicago and sold to a dive resort holding exclusively Italian women, where she was locked in a room without food or light until she became thoroughly submissive. Having been deprived of everything but her undergarments in New York, she was then supplied with gaudy new apparel, which, she was told, she must pay for with six hundred dollars of her earnings before she could leave her keeper’s employ. From that day on, she lived in a locked room with barred windows, servicing anywhere from eight to fifteen men each night.
As soon as she had earned six hundred dollars, Caterina tried to pay off her account, only to be told that she had since incurred an additional four hundred dollars for room and board. Realizing she would never be let go, she made a frantic dash for escape but was caught at the door by her captors. They dragged her back inside and slashed her cheek, ear, and eyelid with a razor, explaining that she’d brought this punishment on herself by failing to appreciate her keeper’s care and protection. A doctor came and crudely stitched her up, but her face was now badly scarred, and her right eye remained permanently open. The resort owner had been about to transport her to a mining camp farther west, where some profit might yet be squeezed from her, when the den was raided and Caterina was set free.
I lowered the papers slowly to my lap. “No wonder she doesn’t want to leave her room.”
“There’s another page,” Pauline said.
I flipped to page two. It was titled “Disposition of Case” and contained just two short paragraphs:
Caterina Bressi refused to testify. She was remanded to the care of the Chicago Law and Order Society for safe transport to the port of New York and eventual return to her family in Italy.
As a result of the raid at 407 Clark Street, charges were brought against the brothel owner, Battisti Pizzi, and the procurers, Frank Romano and Antonio Colufiore. Based on the testimony of Santina Bomba, one of six other women rescued in the raid, all three men were convicted and fined the maximum penalty of two hundred dollars.
I reread the final sentence in disbelief. “A fine? That’s all?”
“There are no laws in Illinois applying specifically to procurers,” Pauline explained. “They can only be charged with crimes against public morals, which is a misdemeanor.”
“That’s…” I groped for a word big enough to express my outrage. “What about in New York?”
“Here, the worst a pimp usually has to worry about is being charged as a vagrant, which carries a maximum six-month penalty. But he needn’t worry overly much, since the women under his thumb know better than to testify against him.”
I looked back at the report. “Did they at least get the names of the men who sold the girls to the resort?”
“It’s always the same: the pimps claim they bought the girls at the stockades, the markets where new girls are put on display. Why should they reveal their suppliers’ names, when the most they are threatened with is a two-hundred-dollar fine? A big house can make that up in a few nights.”
“What about the other girls who were rescued?” I asked, thinking they might have revealed something that could help trace the supply line back to New York. “Were they all enticed in the same way?”
“I only know about the other two who came here. One was also tricked with a false promise of employment. The other answered an ad from a marriage broker who claimed to be seeking a wife for a man working in the Colorado mines.”
“And none of the girls could give the authorities any useful information about their abductors?”
“What could they give? They know nothing real about the people who deceived them. The procurers all use false names, and the employment and marriage brokers, even if they could be found, can always claim they believed their client was an honest customer.”
I tossed the report on her desk. “How do you do it? How can you work day after day under such discouraging conditions without going mad?”
“Who says I haven’t?” she asked, returning the report to the stack.
I smiled and shook my head. “How did you get involved in this line of work, anyway?”
Her face was turned away from me, but I still saw the shadow that moved across it. She laid her hand on top of the pile, resting it there for a moment. “Come,” she said finally, moving away from the desk without answering me. “Let’s go see just how good a doctor you are.”
• • •
Our
first stop was the basement kitchen, where the shelter’s cook, Angela, was hanging pots on an overhead rack when we arrived. She was a middle-aged woman with voluptuous curves, a full mouth, and liquid eyes as deep as the Adriatic.
“Checking up on me, eh, Boss?” she said to Pauline. She winked at me. “She’s worried I’m going to use too much butter in the sauce tonight.”
“I know you’ll use too much butter, Angela,” Pauline replied. “That’s why I pay you so little; to make up for all the extra money you cost me. Just don’t try to bake that cheesecake of yours for the girls behind my back, when I leave for my meeting. That special cheese you order costs more than I pay you altogether.”
“Boss!” she protested, affecting a hurt expression. “I would never!”
Pauline rolled her eyes. “Angela Marino,” she said, “meet Dr. Genevieve Summerford.”
Angela wiped her hand on her apron and held it out. Her grasp was firm and welcoming.
“Angela showed up here the day we opened to ask if we needed help,” Pauline told me. “That’s not the usual reaction from our neighbors, I can tell you. One local minister threatened to burn us down.”
Angela grimaced. “Stronzo di asino.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said he is a”—she rolled her hand back and forth in the air as she worked out the translation—“a donkey’s turd. What man of God turns his back on unfortunates?”
“But now we have Angela,” Pauline said, “and she is worth three ministers.”
Angela eyed me curiously. “Have you come in Dr. Burnham’s place?”
I looked blankly at Pauline.
“Burnham is the doctor who looks after my girls,” she explained. “He has a heart as big as a horse and treats the girls for free. But unfortunately, his thirst is even bigger than his heart, and he is drunk more often than not. He hasn’t shown up at all this week.” Turning to Angela, she added, “But we must hope that he sobers up soon, for Dr. Summerford has come here for reasons of her own.” She repeated the gist of our earlier conversation.
A Promise of Ruin Page 13