Almost no one can resist an appeal that rests on the premise that they are better, finer people than their friends. Orville Pickett was no exception.
“Maybe it would be better if Bill went home early. The cold does make him ornery.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pickett. I’m so grateful.” The hymns would be loud, I thought, but it would be better than dung on the stoop or rocks through the window.
* * *
Whenever I went home, I liked to speak with Berthe Froehlich first. Except for my uncle, no one had been at the refuge longer. Most women left in a matter of months, a year at most. But Berthe’s face had been badly scarred by acid in a suicide attempt; she was also over six feet tall. No matter what her skills, life outside would have been difficult. So she became the cook, as well as doing a hundred other jobs that might have fallen to me had I stayed. She not only knew everything that went on at the refuge but, unlike my uncle, was willing to talk about it. And so I went straight to the kitchen and sat while Berthe brought me up to date. She told me about a new woman who just arrived two days ago and was struggling to stay off drink, the jobs found by three women who had left, a leak in the roof, beds that needed new mattresses, and her trials with Sadie Ellis.
Sadie Ellis had arrived at the refuge four months ago. When she came, her eye was swollen shut, the brow purple and ballooning. Her lip bulged grotesquely, cut and bloodied by broken teeth. Even her bright auburn hair was tangled and matted with blood. Her gait was unsteady, and she mumbled odd answers to Berthe’s questions.
She had been brought by her friend Carrie Biel, who had left the refuge a year ago. Carrie had known the moment Sadie took up with Joe McInerny that he wasn’t in it for love. But even she had been shocked by what he had done to Sadie for what he called “acting up.”
At the refuge, Sadie recovered her spirits. She had the vivacity of the intensely self-absorbed, and she made many friends at first. Each new friend was her savior, her wise counselor. But as each friend found, Sadie really only had one interest: Joe. Yes, he had lied to her, beaten her, and loaned her out to other men so he didn’t have to find work. But she missed him. Or at least, she missed a life where she did not have to sit in a classroom all day and work at things she found dull. She’d start by saying she would never see Joe again and end by remembering that sweet thing he had said or a trinket he’d bought her. The women lost patience with her soon, and these days Sadie had few people left to listen to her. Lately, she had started to “wander,” leaving the refuge without permission. And Berthe was fairly sure she was meeting Joe.
Now Berthe said, “She don’t want to stay put, don’t want to learn. Just wants to get back to the man who sold her and beat her up. Your uncle should let her go for good.”
“How can you let a girl go back to a man who did that to her?”
“If she’s foolish enough to want to, who can stop her? At least he’s stopped coming around here.”
When Sadie had first arrived, Mr. McInerny had turned up drunk several times, bellowing to be let in or for Sadie to come out. He would go from remorseful to frustrated and then enraged, threatening to kill her the first chance he got.
I said, “I suppose I should present myself to my uncle.”
“Tell him he needs to do something about Sadie. She’s making trouble, and I don’t need more of that.” She nodded toward the street. “Not with the Bible thumpers and stone throwers.”
Just then Sal Karlsson looked in. “There’s a phone call for you, Miss Prescott.”
“Same as before?” asked Berthe.
“Think so,” said Sal, who was a girl of good humor and better sense. “She sounds kind of desperate.”
Knowing immediately who the caller was, I said, “Thank you, Sal,” and went to take the call.
Anna Ardito was my oldest friend—and closest, although we were very different people. I toiled for the rich; Anna fought for their destruction, currently with the Industrial Workers of the World. Her work was the sole focus of Anna’s life; she had no other interests or passions. But at the moment, she was finding the object of her devotion a headache. Anna had done many things for the cause. Now the IWW had asked her to do a task she not only found morally repugnant, but for which she was extremely ill-equipped: fund-raising.
The silk workers of Paterson, New Jersey, had been on strike since late February. The New York press’s apathy about anything that took place across the Hudson was no doubt intensified by the discomfort of newspaper magnates at the thought of labor unrest so close to their doorstep. So as far as Manhattan was concerned, the strike was not taking place. Remembering the impact of the children’s parade on the sympathies of New Yorkers during the Lawrence strike, Mabel Dodge, a lady with keen tastes for beauty in spectacle and radical young men, suggested the strikers be brought before the public. Why, the strikers could tell their own stories! Just as actors might! Why not, everyone agreed, make it a real show? And so on June 7 the Pageant of the Paterson Strike would be performed in Madison Square Garden.
Taking up the front desk phone, I said, “Hello, Anna.”
“I was thinking”—Anna was not one for time-wasting niceties—“maybe your uncle would like to bring some of the women to the pageant.”
“My uncle has no money for pageants. But I’ll be there, I promise.”
“Maybe you could bring a friend? Two friends? Ten friends?”
“I don’t have ten friends, Anna. I have you.” Briefly I thought of Michael Behan, but it was not appropriate to ask him, and his review would be scathing.
“What about your boss? It would be very educational for her.”
“I’m sorry they’re making you sell tickets,” I said gently. “You’re an excellent comrade.”
For a moment Anna was silent in defeat. Then she said, “I saw those lunatics outside your building. Why don’t you throw a piss pot over them?”
I glanced out the front window. “Tempting, but provocative.”
“You should get rid of them,” she said, suddenly serious. “Religious fanatics are no joke.”
“It’s calmer now,” I said. “I think the police scared them.”
“People obsessed with heaven don’t scare easily. But I hope you’re right. Happy Cotillion Day.”
As I climbed the stairs to my uncle’s office, I thought how I might phrase Berthe’s concerns about Sadie. My uncle valued Berthe’s opinion. Although he had never said so; he was not the sort of man to make his affections plain. I sometimes doubted whether he had affections.
When I was three, my father left me on the street with my uncle’s address pinned to my coat. Summoned to the police station, he had said, “Well, now. I am your father’s brother. He has gone, so you will come and stay with me.”
Then he held out his hand and I took it. And that was the most we had ever spoken about our connection. If he resented the burden his brother left him, he never said so. If he ever tried to reach my father, he never said that either. I don’t remember what my father looked like, so I cannot say if the brothers resembled each other. My uncle was a small, compact man with bright blue eyes and thick gray hair. He reminded me of a terrier, stern, bushy browed, and once set on something, difficult to dissuade. As I knocked on the door, I hoped I would not have to argue with him about Sadie.
I got a smile as I entered, but he finished his letter, signing it with a quick, brief stroke before coming around the desk and accepting a kiss on the cheek.
“So,” he said, sitting down again, “you’re here for the week.”
“I would never miss the cotillion. I see Mrs. Pickett and her group are still with us.”
“As sleet in February. Predictable, persistent, and chilling.”
“The Duchess livens things up, I suppose.”
This was followed by a pause, common in conversations with my uncle. I thought there was more to be said on a subject; he did not.
And so I changed it, saying, “The weather doesn’t seem to bother Sadie Ellis.”
“Berthe says she’s been leaving without permission.”
“This is not a prison. We don’t keep the women under lock and key.”
“Of course not. But while the women are here, they’re meant to be focused on their future. Berthe thinks Sadie’s sneaking out to see Joe McInerny. You saw what he did to her.”
“I’m sure she’ll settle eventually.”
This was vague—and unlike my uncle.
“It’s been four months. She’s fully healed. If she doesn’t want to be here, why not let her go? There are other women who would gladly take her place.”
“She’s never told me she wishes to leave.”
“But if staying here comes with conditions and she’s unwilling to meet those conditions—”
My uncle took out his watch and consulted it. “You have been here for less than an hour, and yet you’re telling me how to run an organization I have managed for more than two decades.”
My choice to leave the refuge and work in service had always been a sore point with my uncle. He had never said outright that having taken me in, he might have reasonably expected some years of free work when I was old enough to be useful. Or that employment as a lady’s maid, helping wealthy women be attractive, was less worthy than helping poor women find their footing in the work world. But then … he didn’t have to.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I hate seeing Berthe troubled.”
My uncle waved his hand. “If we only helped those who were easy to help, our work would have no meaning. Miss Ellis is young. She may need more time than others to see her future clearly. If you find her so misguided, perhaps you might make an effort. Make her feel she has a place here, that she’s welcome.”
As if every woman at the refuge had not already listened to Sadie’s woes. Still, I said, “Very well. She can help me with the cotillion.”
That got a brief nod of approval.
“And where will you go this evening?” I asked him. My uncle adhered strictly and gladly to the rule of no men at the ball. “Will you be dining with Mrs. Forbes or the Reverend Endicott?”
“Neither.” Then, taking up his pen, he said, “I’ll say good-bye before I go.”
Leaving his office, I wondered if all men of the cloth managed to make people feel that they had failed to be pleasing in the sight of God or whether it was a particular skill of my uncle’s. Feeling deflated and dissatisfied with myself, I went to the front parlor. The women were already getting the room ready. The dining table had been moved out, the chairs set against the wall, and now garlands were being hung on the walls. Next to the piano was a new addition: a phonograph.
Then I spotted Sadie. She lolled by the window, foot swinging as she gazed out. Remembering my uncle’s request, I asked her, “Have they gone away?”
“Who?”
“The Committee for Moral Rectitude or whatever it is they call themselves.”
Sadie giggled. “Oh, no, they’re still there. Dried-up old Mrs. Hilquit and that Bill Danvers, too. He’s always looking at me. The other day, I said, Mr. Danvers, you need to bring me flowers or something, you come here so much. He told me I was going to hell. I said, Well, to hell with you, then.”
The giggle made me realize the truth of what my uncle had said: Sadie was young. “Sadie, would you help me with something? I don’t know much about the new dances.” She nodded sympathetically; I was, after all, five years older. Senility would have set in by now. “Would you show me? And maybe some of the other women?”
Her face darkened. “They don’t care about me.”
“They do care, Sadie. That’s why they want you to break with Mr. McInerny.”
It was a mistake to mention him. She flared at the criticism, saying, “Joe wants me back. A neighbor told me he’d been round to the house, asking for me.”
There was an obvious, cruel reply to this, but I said, “Of course he wants you back. You’re very pretty, and you were good to him. But he wasn’t good to you.”
“He wasn’t so bad. Me seeing men, that was my idea. He didn’t really like me doing it, I think.”
Then why did he beat you up when you refused a man he owed money to? Why did he stand out in the street, howling that he would kill you if you didn’t leave the refuge that night?
But I bit my tongue and said instead, “Do you remember how you felt, the night you came to the refuge? What you saw when you looked in the mirror?” Sadie frowned. “He did that to you, Sadie.”
“I didn’t want to come,” she said. “My friend Carrie made me.”
“Are you sorry she did?”
“Sometimes,” she said defiantly. “No, I don’t mean that. Only I wish there was a way I could be here and have Joe.”
She posed it as a serious question, clearly expecting me to give in. Taking her hand, I said, “Come. Let’s pick a song for the dance.”
At the phonograph, I chose the first record I found, and in a moment we heard the first tinkling sounds of “The Peachtree Rag.” The other women paused in their work to glance at one another, excited at this early break into frivolity.
A letter writer to the Times once bemoaned ragtime’s immoral influence, especially on the young: “Songs that are clearly immoral are being issued with unabated energy—even sung by little girls on their way to school.”
The pompous gentleman was right in one thing: ragtime was about energy. The waltz might have been scandalous in its day, but its elegant orchestral sounds were a bit grand for girls who moved faster and more heedlessly through the world than their mothers had. They swapped the swooning strings for the bounce and beat of the piano and a sound called ragtime, for its ragged syncopated style. Hard, bright, and a bit cheap, ragtime’s rhythms bypassed the brain and worked directly on the sinews. You’re young, it said, you’ve got no business being still, get up. Get up and saunter right into the future.
The music seemed to take Sadie out of her mood. “Do you know the Grizzly Bear?” she asked me.
“I do not,” I said, and held up my hands.
Animal dances were all the rage, with the Fox Trot joined by the Bunny Hop, the Turkey Trot, the Squirrel, and so forth. The Grizzly Bear was said to imitate a dancing bear, so Sadie and I circled each other, arms, or rather paws, up as we stepped to the music. Sadie was surprised at the speed of my feet, taking the revelation that I was not entirely decrepit with a smile and a “Say, you’re good!”
“I have a good teacher,” I called over my shoulder.
With my uncle upstairs and Berthe occupied, the other women in the room joined hands and began polka-ing around the parlor. Someone turned up the phonograph. Women twirled, bumped into chairs, caught one another, and, laughing, launched back into motion. Some sashayed, one hand to their hair, the other on their hip. Others leapt like ballerinas. Hair fell, blouses came untucked. At one point, a shoe went flying, to much hilarity.
Then somebody cried, “Is that the door?” and I stopped to listen. Yes, there it was, the bell. Gesturing that we should turn the phonograph off, I went to open it. And found Orville Pickett standing on the step, a bunch of flowers in his hand.
“For you,” he said.
Bewildered, I took them. “Thank you, Mr. Pickett.”
“And I wish you a very happy birthday.”
Curious, the other women had come out from the parlor, still breathing deeply, their cheeks pink from dancing. They were flushed, disheveled, and happy. Orville Pickett stared.
Aware that my own blouse had come loose from my skirt, I was about to thank Orville and shut the door when Sadie piped up, “But it’s not your birthday.”
I hastily assured her it was. But Orville Pickett had the keen sensitivity of the often mocked, and his eyes narrowed. “You said there was a party…”
“Oh, that’s the Whores’ Ball,” said Sadie provocatively. “We’re going to dance, Mr. Pickett. ‘That Scandalous Rag.’ ‘Everybody’s Doing It.’ ‘The Syn
copated Boogie Boo.’ You watch. Never know what you might see.”
I gave her the flowers. “Would you take these to the kitchen, Sadie? Thank you.” She headed down the hall, more slowly than I would have liked, the other women parting to let her through.
Reaching the kitchen door, she gave a backward glance to Orville Pickett, then kicked her right foot up, briefly showing a plump, stockinged calf before she disappeared inside.
Turning back, I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pickett.”
I meant to apologize for Sadie’s behavior, but Orville gazed at me until I said, “I truly am sorry.”
Then I closed the door.
* * *
That evening, the Duchess and her ladies went off to work, while Mrs. Pickett’s Puritans stood sentry outside. But I was relieved to see that there was no sign of Bill Danvers, and those that stayed behind couldn’t kill the excitement that hummed through the rooms and halls of the refuge. In deference to my uncle, everything was kept quiet until we heard his footsteps on the staircase, the creak of the door, and the metallic snap of the locks as it shut. One woman raced downstairs to put on a record while several other women scrambled into chairs, ready to be styled for the evening. “The Frog Legs Rag” floated upstairs as I went from woman to woman, styling their hair. It took longer than I hoped, but I had lost my assistant. Sadie was nowhere to be found. I had given her some sharp words after the incident with Mr. Pickett, and it seemed she was still sulking.
By tradition, the ladies descended the stairs in a line when everyone was ready. Applause and cheers greeted each lady as she came down. The parlor, restored after the romp earlier, looked lovely. Berthe had set out small sandwiches and punch, and the chairs were arranged at the edge of the room. Every year it was the same: some of the women elected to sit patiently, waiting to be asked to dance, while others took the floor with gleeful abandon the moment the first note sounded. The more high-spirited women usually managed to get the shyer ones dancing. Sometimes the ritual of invitation, refusal, and acceptance took on a feeling of courtship.
Death of an American Beauty Page 3