Sex Wars (8 page)

“Central heating—hot water rises into the radiators. We’ll need someone to come in and stoke the furnace every morning,” James was explaining politely, knowing they were not accustomed to bourgeois living. “But we don’t have to think about that until fall, when we should have money in hand to pay a couple of servants and a cook. This house has two water closets. The stove in the kitchen heats water.”

Victoria was well pleased. These were luxuries she had never known, although they were a matter of common comfort to James. Even though they had to go into debt, it was important to furnish the place well—to project an air of money. Unlike Josie, she had no desire to spend for its own sake. Shopping was not her favorite form of entertainment. Yet she liked the woman for her frankness, her direct sensuality, her boldness. While Victoria preferred to maintain a certain dignity and greatly prized intelligence, what she most disliked in women was pride in what they weren’t—pride in being passive, silent, put upon, pride in having no desire they would acknowledge. A so-called good woman often appeared a cipher, defined by what she wasn’t and what she never had done and perhaps refused to let herself imagine ever doing. Josie had been molested by
her stepfather, who later pandered her to other men until she ran away. Josie and she had met in the tawdry world of San Francisco theater and given each other advice and information on openings and auditions.

Victoria saw herself as a multiplicity of possibilities, some of which were surely better, healthier, more satisfying than others, but there was little of which she did not imagine herself capable. She could see herself leading an army. She could see herself addressing Congress. She could see herself leading a congregation—hadn’t she done so already in tent revival meetings as a child? She could imagine herself as Cleopatra or Joan of Arc or Queen Elizabeth or Boadicea. She felt she contained within herself a hundred vital magnificent women in potentiality. If she had taken the lot passed out to her at birth, she would still be back in Ohio doing other women’s laundry, married to a drunk. At fifteen she had no idea what she was getting into, but she had understood clearly what she was escaping. Marriage to Woodhull had seemed a step up from her family, leaving her free to try to make her way, even if she had to drag him along.

Byron went right to sleep, curled up on the floor like a puppy. They must get beds. Everything had to be done as soon as possible. They had an address, and that was a start.

T
HE EVENING ARRIVED WHEN
the sisters had their appointment with Cornelius Vanderbilt. His foursquare house was furnished in the style of a generation earlier, with maudlin or fleshy undistinguished paintings on the walls and a row of silver and gold steamships sailing across the marble mantelpiece. The Commodore was impatient to begin, probably mistrustful. He was a hard man. No woman had ever succeeded in rounding his rough edges. His wife must be somewhere on the premises, if she had not gone off visiting relatives or to a spa. Apparently visitors seldom beheld Sophia, who was also his cousin.

Victoria requested that the gaslights be turned off and candles lit. They gathered around a table at which the Commodore usually played whist. There were certainly spirits here. Victoria could feel the tingling. “You were haunted by ghosts but they can no longer enter. I feel them just beyond. A boy and a man.”

The Commodore jerked to attention. “Don’t you bring them back. I paid good money to get rid of them.”

“Don’t be afraid. They can’t enter here. Someone has blocked them.”

“The only real medium I ever hired. She got rid of them, bless the old witch.”

“But there is someone who wants to speak with you.”

“Is it my mother? You said you could reach my mother.”

“There’s someone else who wants far more vehemently to speak with you. A man in the prime of life. Pale.”

“Pale! Is he coughing?”

“He says you are thinking of how he passed over, but now he has no cough, no disease, no pain.”

“It’s my son! George Washington Vanderbilt. My youngest son. My good boy.”

“He served in the Civil War. He is standing in his uniform now. He says he knows my husband, Colonel Blood. But he wants to ask you about…about a horse. Does that make sense?”

“He had a favorite horse. Oh, Georgie!” The big man’s voice broke. “Silversides. He’s fine, Georgie, he’s in my stable right in back. I take him out riding and I think of you, always, Georgie, I think of you. I keep him real fine. He’s curried every day.”

“He says he knows you love your horses and you’re good to them. He says you take too many chances, however, when you are driving them on Bloomingdale Road.”

Vanderbilt snorted. “Tell him to mind his own business. I like to drive fast. It’s one of my pleasures. Nobody can handle horses better than me.”

“He says he knows that. But there’s something about a train?”

“I like to cross the tracks just in front of the five twenty-two. Nobody else can do that. The horses know me and they know I won’t let it hit us. It just gives the crowd a scare. You know, people come out there to watch us race. We have to give them a thrill. And I win my races nine times out of ten.”

“He thinks you take too many chances on your afternoon rides. He watches over you, but he can’t help you. He says to tell you he’s happy where he is. He’s advancing along a path that feels good to him and he has found a spiritual mate there. He hopes you find someone to ease your loneliness. He knows that in spite of all your other children and your wife, you’re lonely. He feels that strongly and that too worries him. That worry is holding him back on his path.”

The Commodore seemed shaken and moved by the séance.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just lie on the sofa and rest.”

“You don’t go in for table-rapping or the whooshing or ectoplasmic spirits other mediums have tried on me.”

“That’s all fake. I have no need for any of that. I just open myself to the voices, and if someone wants to come through and communicate with you, I listen and tell you what they say. No rapping, no Ouija boards, no materializations, no strange music. I can’t command the spirits. I can only tell you what they want me to. I’m sorry to disappoint you, because I couldn’t make contact with your mother this time.”

“Don’t apologize, little lady. To hear from my dear son was fine enough. He was my favorite and he died too young of tuberculosis he caught in the war. He was the best of a sorry lot.”

“Now it’s my turn, old boy,” Tennie said. “Let me start with your neck.”

Victoria lay on a sofa in the next room to give Tennessee privacy with Vanderbilt. She would start by massaging him and then move on from there as his responses indicated. Mesmeric healing. Her electrical hands. Victoria dozed off on the velvet sofa as she waited patiently for her sister to finish.

Tennie was flushed when she woke Victoria. “He’s going to take me in his carriage tomorrow when he goes to race his horses on Bloomingdale Road.”

Vanderbilt ordered his coachman to take the sisters home. They gathered their stuff and left. Tennie showed her a fifty-dollar gold piece. Victoria took it. “We’ll buy some furniture. I gather it went very well indeed.”

“I eased his muscles. I eased his tension. I got him up and then I got him down. All in a night’s work. He wants to take us to dinner the night after next. I don’t think the Colonel is invited.”

“He won’t mind. He wants to see his brother in New Jersey.”

“Then it’s all for the best.” Tennie stretched luxuriously. “I only wish we had a bed at home so I could sleep well instead of huddling on the floor in a coat.”

“Tomorrow. Thanks to our skills tonight, tomorrow we’ll have beds of our own.” Something she had promised herself since childhood, when she had shared a mattress with four of her siblings. “We will each have our bed, our bedroom and our privacy.” That was dignity. Victoria knew she had refined taste, for she had studied ladies and worked out a vision of what was appropriate for her new life—nothing showy, nothing overblown, just fine stuff in dress, in furnishings, in decorating. The house would not impress Vanderbilt, for likely he would never see it. No, it was for others whom eventually she would meet, artists, intellectuals, politicians, those who thought deeply, spoke well and made things happen.

F
REYDEH COULD TAKE
over her new apartment May 1, a traditional moving day in New York. The evening before, she sat late on the stoop outside the Silvermans’ tenement. Families were moving because their leases were up, because they couldn’t pay the rent and were leaving on the sly, because they had found a better or cheaper place. Even after dark, people were dragging their goods through the streets, over the cobblestones and wood planks, through mud and puddles from yesterday’s rain. Early the next morning, Sammy and she hastened up and down the nearby blocks for odd pieces of furniture discarded here and there. They rescued two ladder-back chairs and a kitchen table only slightly burned.

Now on the great day itself, Sammy and she moved her effects. Sammy had nothing that didn’t fit in the pockets of his dirty cutoff pants or couldn’t be hung in the patched sack he wore around his neck to keep his few coins in. She had been storing the good secondhand pants and jacket for him. Her stuff fit into a hamper and a basket. They borrowed a cart from a peddler who was laid up with a broken foot. He was glad for a few coins for the lending of the cart. They had to make a detour as two blocks were flooded a foot deep from backed-up sewage—that happened a lot after heavy rain.

They were moving to Allen Street, a fifth-floor front—always the best since it faced the street and not the privies, with a high rent of eighteen dollars a month. In layout it was like the Silvermans’—the airless bedroom just big enough for a bed and a chair, the dark little kitchen with a fireplace that had a coal stove piped into it to warm them in the winter, plus a fireplace in the largest room, the front room lit by the only windows. The flat even had a fire escape—the back apartments never did. The previous tenants had left a rickety little table and a kerosene lamp that had lost its glass lantern, plus a chair that needed fixing—one leg broken. She would
have to buy a bed, a couple of mattresses and a table big enough to work on. The bedroom had pegs in place for hanging clothes. The kitchen was well equipped with shelves some previous tenant had banged up. She had her own chamber pot, some dishes and pans from when she had been married, a knife, two forks, four spoons, three glasses and two cups. The first things she sent Sammy out to buy were a bucket to haul water and a basin to wash in.

They took turns toting their effects up the four flights so that the cart or its meager contents would not be stolen. A cart was a useful thing. Somebody who owned a cart could set up as a peddler or make a little money moving other people’s belongings. People moved a lot down here. They hoped for a better place, they moved to get away from prostitution or thievery, they moved because they couldn’t pay the rent. In hope and in despair, they moved.

Within a week of asking around and putting a little sign in their window, they had a boarder, Mrs. Stone, a widowed German Jew from Bavaria. She seemed to think that counted for a lot, but neither Freydeh nor Sammy had the least idea where or what Bavaria was. She spoke German rather than Yiddish, and her English was better than Freydeh’s, although not as good as Sammy’s. She thought it was. She said that Sammy spoke like an uneducated lout. Freydeh did not like her, but she needed the money Mrs. Stone would pay her every Friday afternoon. Mrs. Stone was a seamstress, but not a dressmaker. She did alterations. She too would be working in the front room.

She was two years older than Freydeh’s twenty-seven years, but looked five years older. She was skinny as a lamppost, a head shorter than Freydeh and freckled like a trout. She used a pince-nez when sewing. She considered herself psychic and was always trying to impress Sammy or Freydeh with her powers. “Mark me well, that Mrs. Shapiro is pregnant again. And her barely recovered from the last one.” She shook her head. “That Mr. Fiedler has some bad news coming to him within two, three weeks, you wait and see.” That was a reasonable guess, since almost everyone in the tenement would have something bad to worry about in the next week, in the next month, every month in the next year.

Freydeh had not quit her job at the pharmacy. Until Sammy and she had the business started, they needed every penny. Freydeh had talked Yonkelman into hiring Sammy to run errands and deliver medicines to people too sick to come in. It paid pennies, but it was something and it
kept Sammy busy. The street still had its lure for him. His old pals would try to seduce him into schemes every few days, although it was better since they had moved.

Their first attempt at vulcanization was a disaster. The rubber got too sticky and when she went to peel it off the mold it ripped. The next batch was too runny. So far her condom business was costing her money, not making it. Mrs. Stone complained of the smell. “Go sit outside if you don’t like it,” Freydeh told her.

Freydeh was waiting on a woman in the pharmacy who needed pills for dyspepsia. The woman asked, “So are you the one who took in Mrs. Stone?”

“She’s my boarder.”

“I am wondering, is this the same woman I know? Middle-aged, maybe thirty. Skinny like a stick. With freckles.”

“Yah. A widow who does alterations.”

“Widow, my elbow. Her husband ran off with another woman. They say he may be in the South.”

“If she drove him crazy like she does me, no wonder he took off.”

“She’s a gossip, so watch out.”

So I’m well warned, Freydeh thought to herself. But we all have to get along. That’s how it goes when you share a too little space with strangers. They don’t stay strangers. You learn how dirty they are, what doesn’t work so good in their body, every little habit and quirk and tic, you learn it all.

Their experiments with vulcanizing rubber sheets they bought were costing them, but she was convinced they would master it. If it was easy, every other fool would be making condoms in their front rooms. She would not give up. It was only a matter of practice until they could produce usable items. She was convinced it was the right move, a trade a woman could carry on, one she could do in her kitchen and make a decent profit.

When she figured out what they were doing, Mrs. Stone had plenty to say. “It’s no trade for a respectable woman.”

“This respectable woman wants some money. I don’t want to live my life out in darkness and bad air.”

“You’re young enough to marry again. Believe me, I would if I could. A woman needs a man.”

“I need a trade to support me. A good living so I can live good. A man I don’t need. I got a boy, that’s good enough.”

Sammy didn’t like Mrs. Stone and she despised him. He found little
ways to be mean to her, hiding her sock, breaking the thread when she left a piece of work, spilling the chamber pot near her bed. In her turn, she made it clear she thought him a thug from the street. Freydeh tried to keep peace between them. Sammy had a mean streak when he felt someone disrespected him. It came from years in the street, where to overlook an insult was to invite a beating.

Sammy and she had tried going from boardinghouse to boardinghouse describing Shaineh, to no avail. Sammy shook his head. “We’ll never find her like this. We need a picture. A picture we can show people.”

“I don’t have a picture of her. I don’t even have one of me. It wasn’t like here, where there are photographers in the street ready to take your likeness.”

“Then we need to have someone draw a picture of her.”

“But I haven’t seen her since she was twelve.”

“So you got to tell what she looks like, to guess the best you can.” Sammy knew far more the ways of the city than she did.

“We’ll try it.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good boy, Sammy. You got brains.” He also, she discovered, had lice. She had to douse him with kerosene and then pick at his scalp to get rid of them. There were enough bugs in the tenement without having lice as well.

The following Saturday, they walked to the Bowery. They had to wait in a cloud of dust and stink because a herd of cattle was being driven through the narrow street toward the slaughterhouse on the East River. “Be careful where you step,” she warned when the drive had passed. On the Bowery, in the mass of humanity and carts and trolleys and horses, they found a street artist. They were always about the streets between the hot-corn girls and the orange and match peddlers—artists who cut silhouettes and, in this case, a woman who did pencil sketches—usually someone sitting on the stool she provided. After haggling over a price and once walking away, Freydeh got the artist to agree to try to draw a picture of the woman Freydeh would describe, and to correct it as Freydeh described Shaineh.

“Light brown curly hair. No, not loose curls like that. Tight. Like ringlets.”

“Frizzy?”

“If you want to call it that. Thinner. She had a small waist. Not like me, with my hips and my
tuchus.
Make the chin more pointed. Triangular like a cat—make her face that way. The eyes bigger. The mouth smaller.”

A portrait was emerging. Freydeh wondered if it would bear any resemblance
to her lost sister. She was just trying to guess how the twelve-year-old Shaineh would fare as an eighteen-year-old. She knew from family letters that Shaineh was remarkably pretty. She trusted her mother’s judgment, for her mother had never insisted that she or Sara was pretty, only that they were strong healthy girls and would make good wives and mothers. Freydeh didn’t have a lot of faith in the drawing, but now they had something they could show people. People just didn’t listen when she went into a long description of what she thought Shaineh looked like. A picture could hold their attention while she talked.

They began their search again farther downtown, closer to the Battery. Down here were lots of businesses and warehouses as well as boarding-houses, and to judge by the women leaning out the windows with their bosoms flopping free, lots of whorehouses as well. She wasn’t afraid of the whores. She had grown up near the whorehouse on the river. The only Jews allowed to travel freely out of the Pale in czarist Russia were prostitutes—Jewish prostitutes being in high demand. Some women like Mrs. Stone would draw up their skirts when they saw whores as if the sight of the women would sully them, would soil their clothing.

She squeezed Sammy’s callused hand. “Here things are hard, but you have some kind of a choice. Where we come from, no hope, no chance, no luck. Just hunger and danger.”

“There’s plenty of both here, Freydeh.”

“True. But there’s other things for Jews here. I know, a cart could run us down in the street, a coach could trample us. We could catch the cholera or consumption. But maybe not. Don’t we have a place to live now? Our own place?”

He nodded solemnly, eyeing a girl who was eyeing him. A young whore of perhaps thirteen. “First time in five years I get to sleep inside regular. Sometimes a bunch of us would work for Shifty Bean and he would let us all sleep on pallets in his second basement, under the place where he prints the numbers tickets. But there were rats and it was wet, really dark and drippy.” He was still gazing at the girl, who was motioning to him, wriggling her ass.

“That girl is just a child,” Freydeh said. “How can this happen?”

“Toffs like kids to do it with,” Sammy said knowingly. “They think they can’t get the clap from them. The girls know they can’t get a baby yet.” He and the girl were still making eyes.

She grabbed his arm and dragged him along. “None of that for you. You start in now and it will stunt your growth. You’re small enough. You
got to grow some before you start thinking about women and getting yourself into trouble.”

“I know all about men and women. I seen it done, you know. I’m not a baby.”

“If you don’t want to be the size of a little boy your whole life long, you forget what you know till it’s time to use it.”

He was silent for a few minutes. Then he said softly, “I wish I would grow. Big guys get all the respect.”

“Not necessarily. You look at some of them prizefighters, and they aren’t always the biggest gonifs. Sometimes a little guy can take one of them by knowing how to hit where it hurts.”

The first boardinghouse, the woman lost interest when they told her what they wanted. “I got to clean up after these pigs. I only rent to men.”

The next boardinghouse took women but not Jews, never Jews. They were too dirty.

“We bathe once a week, missus. When was the last time you took a dip?” Freydeh yelled over her shoulder.

They had been at it for three hours and were about ready to give up when a woman came to the door of what had been a Federal mansion before all the carriage trade moved uptown. “I’m not running a boardinghouse, darling, but let me see that picture.” She studied it carefully. “I know her.”

“Is she here?” Freydeh clutched herself.

“She worked for me for two, three months a year ago winter. She came to me scarcely speaking a word of English and really hard up…” She read Freydeh’s face. “Not as one of my girls, darling. She was a housemaid. Sometimes it’s better if they can’t speak English. They don’t comment on what’s going on and they work for less. Come on in. I have her name written down in my desk. We can see if it’s your sister.”

The house was weirdly painted, all purple and black and with odd tin-kly curtains of beads. Whips were hung on the wall of the parlor. The madam, a pretty plump lady with auburn hair in curls around her face, sat down at a neat old-fashioned desk and began to look down a ledger. “I keep track of everyone who works for me, as well as my customers and my girls.” She was wearing a bustle that collapsed when she sat, a purple-and-black-striped overskirt and a bright green satin petticoat trimmed with black lace, a fitted velvet jacket with black frogging and green kid gloves. She removed them to lick a finger and turn the pages.

She motioned Freydeh to an overstuffed plush chair. Freydeh sank
into it, her hands clasped across her belly. She tried to breathe normally, dizzy with anticipation.

“Here it is.” The madam showed her the ledger. The name was written Shayna. Shayna Leebowish. “Is that she?”

Freydeh nodded, unable to speak. “But she doesn’t work for you now?”

“She wasn’t comfortable with what goes on here. She appeared to be a virgin.”