by John Jakes
Paul was upset. “I thought there was enough money for the rent. I loaned you all I had.”
Wex seemed to shrivel inside his coat. “I paid two months. But I owed for six. I hoped for a quick stroke of luck. I wagered the rest, my money and yours, at various tracks down South.”
“By telephone and telegraph?”
“Oh, you know how that’s done?”
“I found out. How much did you lose?”
Wex gazed at the chilly stars, as though hoping some deity might descend to rescue him.
“Everything.”
“All of my savings?”
“Yes, I regret to say.”
“How could you do that?”
Wexford Rooney wheeled on him. “Who are you to take that tone with me? You’re just a youth. I am fifty-seven years old! Do you think I like this? That it makes me proud? I’m a weak man, Dutch. Many creative artists are weak. You expect me to be a good, perfect German. Well, God damn it, I’m not German, and I’m not perfect.”
Wex swung away to stare at the workmen carrying out his largest camera and tripod. His sparse hair blew in the night wind. A laughing whore and her customer hurried into Wampler’s Hotel. For a moment Paul wanted to hit Wex Rooney in the face. Then he saw how old, small, defeated he was, facing the winter, facing the merriest season of the year with all his goods, cameras, reflectors, lens boxes, piled up higgledy-piggledy in the overloaded wagon.
The drayman in charge adjusted his earmuffs and gloves. “No more this trip, we’ll be back in the morning.” They drove off toward the gaudy glow of Clark Street.
“So tomorrow we are thrown into the street,” Paul said.
“Dutch, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I cursed you, and even sorrier that this happened. I suspected it was coming, I wanted to warn you. A dozen times I started to tell you, but I couldn’t do it, I’m a coward. At the end of the week I will be leaving town. I am forced to take a position elsewhere. I applied for it through a classified several weeks ago, when I saw the end coming. I’m going to a large photographic studio, as a general helper and artist in charge of color tinting. Look, it isn’t Shakespearean tragedy,” Wex said, with a glimmer of his old pixy smile. “I won’t starve. Neither will you. It’s time you moved on anyway, we discussed that. Perhaps Shadow will take you on. Do you need a letter of reference?”
“No, that isn’t what I need. I hope this place you’re going is good. Is it New York or some other large city?”
“Would that it were so.” He sighed. “Charleston, West Virginia.”
“Where is that?”
“Nowhere. It’s nowhere,” Wex said, so faintly Paul could scarcely hear it.
Standing in the bitter air, gazing at the Temple’s dark facade, Paul realized how much the place meant to him. How much this cantankerous, weak, strange, contradictory, idealistic, impractical old man meant to him.
“Is there any food inside?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Well, come on, I still have thirty cents. We can have sausage and rolls and coffee for supper.”
Wex fell in step like an obedient child.
Light snow was falling through gaps in the roof of the train shed. Paul had put Wex’s two cheap valises into the second-class car. He knew Wex couldn’t afford a tip for a porter.
The Baltimore and Ohio conductor cupped his hands around his mouth. “Boooard!”
“I hate this,” Wex said.
“Please give me the studio address. You promised to write it out.”
“Yes, I have it.” He put a scrap of paper in Paul’s hand. “You forgive me?”
“For what? We’re friends. I can never repay you for all you’ve done.”
“Oh God.” Wex flung himself on Paul and they embraced. “I’d be proud to have a son like you. Proud.” Hugging the old man, Paul managed to tuck five dollars into his pocket; money he’d begged as a salary advance from Mr. Grace’s payroll clerk.
Steam hissed. The bell rang. The anxious conductor motioned his last passenger to the steps. “I’ll write to you when I know where I’m staying,” Paul promised.
Wex jumped to the lowest step. “I’ll write you too. Someone has to be your conscience. You’re too fine a vessel to be wasted. Goodbye, Paul, goodbye, goodbye—”
The train swayed off into the winter night. Falling snow melted on Paul’s face. He had felt alone like this on the pier at Hamburg. He had felt like this an hour after Uncle Joe cast him out.
Later, he walked past the Temple and stopped to tug at the padlock and chain on the front door. He trudged on, carrying his small valise of clothes and mementos. The globe and stand, the paper flag, a packet of souvenir postcards wrapped with an elastic, the stereopticon card.
He was too proud to approach one of the madams, tell her he had no place to go, ask her to let him sleep in some corner. He prowled the alleys of the Levee until he found a discarded wooden packing case with one end broken open. He crawled in and slept there.
In his dreams, the baker of Wuppertal appeared. Vindicated, he was laughing at Paul and his misery and stupidity.
He awoke at daylight, nearly frozen. The Steam Laundry opened its doors at five, so he sneaked in early and cleaned up in the room allocated to male employees. His hands were so stiff, he could barely hold his straight razor. Shaving without shaving soap, he scraped and reddened his face. Some of the girls noticed. Paul said it was the winter weather.
The next few nights he slept wherever he could find shelter. The first night back in the packing case, he awoke to find a rat chewing on his shoe. Another night he fled the packing case ahead of a snarling wild dog intent on sampling his leg.
At the end of the week he settled up with Mr. Grace’s pay clerk for the money advanced to him and gave notice.
Albert Grace heard of this and was waiting for Paul at the end of the workday. Grace was no longer the blustering autocrat, he was a penitent. Everyone on the routes loved Paul, business had risen noticeably because of his steady and diligent attention to his duties. The owner wrung his hands and asked if some thoughtless action on his part had precipitated this abrupt departure. Paul said no. Grace begged him to reconsider, assuring him that a fine career in laundry was his for the asking. Paul thanked him and said his life was taking a different direction. That same night he stored his valise with Madame Camille. At midnight, in the yards of the Monon Railroad, he jumped aboard a freight and huddled in the corner of a boxcar as the train rattled south to Indiana.
He staggered over the hard ground at daybreak. He’d jumped off the Monon at Greencastle. A sleepy depot agent gave him directions. He walked all the miles from there to Reelsville.
A white fog enveloped the world, muting sounds. Trees looked like strange constructs of wire, tortuously shaped. Winter had folded and frozen the land into solid waves of mud, with a dusting of snow in the troughs. His stumbling feet snapped off dead cornstalks as he crossed the fields. His forehead and cheeks burned. How could he be so warm in December? He had a good idea.
He wanted to lie down. He lifted his left foot and placed it ahead. He lifted his right foot and placed it ahead. The horizon tilted. He waited till it settled, then went on. He was reliving the trek to Chicago, with a different purpose but the same determination.
Three pigs squealed and ran as he entered the dooryard. He fell against weathered siding, rested a moment, then stumbled along the side of the house in the cutting wind.
Lamplight shone behind a bleached gingham curtain in the window of the back door. Paul knocked on the glass. He leaned his forehead on the siding and shut his eyes.
Someone lifted the window curtain. The door opened. Her voice, stunned, bewildered, rolled over him like a blessing.
“Dutch. What are you doing here?”
He opened his eyes but could barely focus them. “Nancy. You said once you’d help me if I needed it. I need help now. I need to borrow money. I need eleven dollars and fifty cents, exactly …”
70
Ros
ie
ROSIE WENT TO NEW York in the spring of 1895. She’d saved the money in Chicago, but as it turned out, she didn’t have to spend it. She screwed a railway conductor twice, in an empty Pullman compartment, and he wrote a slip for a full refund of her coach fare. Till she died, she’d never forget the garlic on his breath, or the smell of his wool uniform.
When she left the New York Central depot and plunged into the giant, thundering, clangorous, stupefyingly crowded city, she was excited as never before. Lugging her cheap floral-printed suitcase, she asked a policeman for directions and went directly to the only street she knew, the Bowery. It was downtown; she’d read that it was the heart of New York’s theater district and a thoroughfare high-class gents visited for special entertainment.
She was disappointed when she saw the Bowery. The theaters were few and rundown. They presented variety bills and were squeezed between shooting galleries, dime museums, Turkish baths, hotels that advertised “night, day, or by the hour.” There were no gents visible, either, just ratty bums with bottles in paper sacks.
A tout sidled up to her. His clothes smelled like vomit and his breath was worse. “Want some smoke, girlie? I know a place to get it.”
“I don’t use no dope. Get the hell away from me or I’ll find a copper.”
He called her a cunt, but he left.
Music issued from many of the dives she passed. One piano had a mandolin attachment, which made the professor’s frenetic playing sound like hammers on an anvil. Men in evening dress spieled in front of the dime museums. In the midst of the drays, hansoms, and pony carts rolling through piles of horse shit, there came a gaudy open-air wagon full of well-dressed people rubbernecking and looking properly shocked. The side of the wagon said BROADWAY SIGHTSEEING CO. The Safe Comfortable Way to See New York’s Street Life. A guide standing up in the front blared his commentary through a megaphone.
A bum wobbling, next to Rosie threw his empty wine bottle at the wagon. “Ga’damn slummers.” She sure wasn’t in the middle of the high life. As she drifted along, tired and hungry, her hopes sank.
In a dim-lit café she bought a stale roll and coffee for two pennies, and at that point her luck improved. She was accosted by a handsome middle-aged man with a drink-blotched face. By nightfall she had a bed in a two-room flat on the top floor of a tenement. The bed and the flat belonged to the man, whose last name was Stopes and whose first name was Buck, short for Buckingham.
Stopes was crazy for female flesh, the younger the better, and Rosie didn’t mind surrendering in return for a temporary haven. At least Stopes was clean. And he spoke like an educated man. His quarters, unfortunately, demonstrated that he was unable to use his intelligence to rise high, except in his building. The upper floors of a tenement always housed the poorest people; she knew that from Chicago.
The flat had no electricity. No closets. Instead of a sink, a faucet poked through one wall, with a catch basin on the floor underneath. The tenement roof was a sort of park and promenade for all the residents. Many similar roofs separated by narrow air spaces formed a street above the streets; a regular turnpike for sneak thieves, bill collectors, rent dodgers. Rosie had seen some pretty miserable places in her young life but never one as filthy, dark, and depressing as this. She intended to get out at the first opportunity. She didn’t mention this to her benefactor, of course.
Buck Stopes called himself an “impresario.” She’d never heard the word. He said it meant he produced entertainment events. She was excited until she discovered his productions were limited to illegal fights pitting a fox terrier against fifty to a hundred rats in a zinc-lined pit surrounded by benches, inside a carefully guarded warehouse entered from an alley. Spectators who enjoyed this sort of thing—it was rather out of vogue, Stopes admitted—bet on the number of rats the dog would kill in a certain amount of time.
Stopes’s terrier, Boss Tweed, was named in honor of the late politician, leader of a ring of grafters that had embezzled thousands, maybe millions from the New York City treasury. Rosie made it clear to Stopes that she would never attend one of his little sporting events.
Stopes couldn’t make a living from them; his regular job was barking for Nagle’s Dime Museum. P. T. Barnum had been the first to make a great success of such a museum, and the many imitators were still popular. At Nagle’s, the bedazzled bumpkin from out of town could see all kinds of curiosities, human and mechanical. The chess-playing Egyptian Enigma, a painted pharaohlike figure with a gold headdress, operated from inside by a dwarf named Archie. The Panoramic Man, said to display on his totally tattooed person a complete capsuled version of human history, from Adam and Eve forward. The Limbless Wonder, and Henrietta the Four-Legged Hen, and the Bearded Boy (Archie, switching roles with a clever disguise). The star attraction was Professor Quine, the Man with the Miracle Throat; four times a day he smashed a bottle and a water tumbler and a sheet of glass and chewed and swallowed fragments of all.
Down in the cellar of Nagle’s there was a large papier-mache grotto. For an extra nickel, male customers could enter and enjoy “The Living Picture Gallery.” On a tiny stage, three women, all unattractive and overweight, posed and postured for a few minutes in full-body see-through tights, while the professor of the establishment performed airs on his violin. Stopes offered to get Rosie into the Gallery but she declined; she wanted to work someplace with a better class of customers. A place that might offer a chance at a singing job.
“Hell, babe, I don’t blame you,” Buck Stopes said. “You’ve got the looks for it. You should make the rounds in the tenderloin, up on Sixth Avenue. Some of the dance halls like the Haymarket are real poison pits, but some are okay. Stitch Meyer’s Alhambra at Sixth and Twenty-ninth, that’s one of the best.”
The Alhambra Dance Hall was a two-story building with an Arabian Nights look outside and inside. To Rosie’s surprise, Stitch Meyer saw her in his office five minutes after she walked in. Meyer was a short, tough, red-haired man who wore a gold wedding ring and the neat, conservative clothes of a banker. He interviewed Rosie with the office door shut and never laid a hand on her or uttered so much as one suggestive word.
“You’re a pretty girl, I can always use a pretty girl as a waitress. I’ll describe how things work in the Alhambra and you can decide if you like it, or not. We got a dance floor downstairs—”
“Yes, sir, I saw it.”
“Tables, good eats, a fair drink for the price. There’s entertainment, three shows a night. Nothing real smutty. Basically this is a meeting place. Respectable gents from uptown, or Westchester, or across the Hudson in Jersey, they come here for a little relaxation. A little pleasure. They come to meet attractive young ladies. What goes on after a gent meets a young lady at the Alhambra ain’t my affair. I get my percentage from the food and drinks and the admission charge of fifty cents—that’s for the gents, ladies come in free.”
“I see.”
“Also, we don’t allow no close dancing, not on the floor. If a gent wants to dance close with a lady, they go into one of those little curtained rooms at the sides. In other words, the Alhambra ain’t like some of the dives in the district. I know what men will do even if they’re married, so I give ’em a respectable place to do it.”
He leaned back and clasped his hands over his vest of brocaded gold satin. “How does that sound?”
“It sounds okay, Mr. Meyer. You’re straight with me, I’ll be straight with you. What I really want in New York is to be a singer.”
“Well, I don’t hire no waitresses to double as singers. Maybe we’ll try you out in the show sometime, but not until you been here awhile. To start, it’s just two dollars a week, but you keep every cent in tips. That can add up. Oh, yeah, this is important. You’re not to interfere with the ladies who come in every night. If some gent fancies you, makes a private arrangement, all right, it’s your affair, and his. But I don’t allow my girls to be out there competing with the regulars. I hire you to work for me. Fair?”
; “Fair.”
Stitch Meyer’s grin showed a number of gold and silver teeth. “Swell. Want to start tonight?”
Stitch Meyer’s Alhambra was warmly lit, cheerfully noisy, usually crowded because of its reputation as a safe place. Rosie found her employment there profitable and congenial. Not her last stop in life by any means, but an excellent way station. She wished Joey Crown could see her in her fringed red dress; or Jimmy, who’d been a terrific lover but frighteningly scrambled in his head. Wouldn’t they think she was something, her hair neatly pinned up, her face rouged, her bare arms and cleavage perfumed? Wouldn’t they think she was really coming up in the world?
She was scrupulous about following orders. If she flirted with a customer, it was done quietly, almost coyly. Even so, just the first week she earned twenty-eight dollars from four late-night liaisons, without incurring the displeasure or even the notice of the management.
She made friends at the Alhambra, too. Professor Spark, who led the little trio of piano, violin, and cornet, listened to her sing one night after closing and said she had “promise” but “needed formal training.” She sensed that what the professor meant—they were all called professor, these piano pounders—was that she didn’t sing very well. No matter; singing on the bill at some famous place like Tony Pastor’s on Fourteenth Street was only another rung, not the top, of the ladder. She could barely see the top of the ladder, it reached so high into the white clouds where the walls and turrets of a rich man’s golden mansion gleamed.
One of the variety acts at Stitch Meyer’s was a five-member kick line of female impersonators. The best of them, Fanny Hawkins, took to Rosie right away, and she to him. The night they met, Fanny confided that his teal name was Franklin, which he hated.
Fanny Hawkins was on the stout side, but stoutness was quite popular with gentlemen. He wore a wig of long blond curls, knew how to apply makeup artfully, had china-blue eyes and soft skin virtually without body hair (Rosie saw him almost naked in his dressing room many times). In Rosie’s view Fanny was more beautiful than Lillian Russell; his masculinity was virtually undetectable.