Belle Cora Read online

  As it had been discovered that dry air causes threads to snap, the windows of the weaving room were never opened and steam was pumped in through pipes, and it was always warm and damp. Cotton fibers flew into our throats and lungs. Despite these discomforts, the thing that made the strongest impression on me was the amazing regularity of the place. The one room ran the whole length of the building. We saw the long rows of pillars, the farthest diminishing in apparent size as perfectly as in books that teach drawing. A rotating shaft over each identical loom helped turn a barrel-like cylinder. A black band around each cylinder ran to the loom, somehow causing it to open and close, open and close, while the shuttle flew between the threads, and we mill girls, dressed alike the better to illustrate rules of linear perspective, watched the perfect manufacture of our identical seconds, minutes, and hours. When the falls ran dry, causing the machines to stop, and we left the mill to stroll through the impressive natural scenery of the Mohawk Valley, it was like being woken from dreams too strange for the waking mind to grasp.

  At the seven o’clock, evening bell, we went back to the company-owned boarding house, had supper, and did as we pleased until ten, when, by company law, we had to be in bed. We were permitted to go out, but Cohoes was not a lively town, so we spent our few hours of leisure in a large room furnished to resemble the sitting room in a home more prosperous than those from which any of us had come. We played games, drew, made clothes, wrote in diaries. Unbelievably, some girls knitted. I read to Jocelyn from Godey’s Lady’s Book and memorized passages from a cheap one-volume copy of Byron’s works, with tiny type in two columns per page.

  We were expected to go to church. Jocelyn and I chose the Cohoes Presbyterian Church. It had the most comfortable pews for the price, good heating and ventilation. On Saturday afternoons, young Reverend Adams gave lectures on the terrible vice of self-abuse, an epidemic of which was filling America’s insane asylums with madmen, its hospitals with consumptives, and its brothels with girls exactly like us.

  XXVII

  ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS IN THE WEAVING ROOM, minding my three looms, I became aware of a stir, an additional alertness among the other operatives. A stern-looking senior clerk was walking in my direction. “Arabella Moody?” he inquired.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A man is asking for you. He says he’s your brother.”

  An overseer took charge of my machines, and I was allowed to take a half-hour off. I went to the counting house, which was where I went once a week to collect my wages; and there, to my joy, I found Lewis waiting for me. He had a cigar butt in his mouth, which he removed and tossed with careless accuracy into a distant spittoon. We embraced hungrily. Then we stood holding each other at arm’s length, to give our eyes the pleasure. In the six months since I had last seen him, he had grown taller and leaner, and he was dressed and groomed in a way that would set him apart from any man in Livy or Cohoes; he had a plug hat, under which his hair was cut very short behind, but long and greasy and puffed out at the sides. These side locks were made to curl forward, in front of the ears, with the help of soap. He wore black broadcloth trousers, which vanished into high-heeled boots; an open tailcoat; a woolen shirt with a bright-orange silk cravat.

  I introduced him to the clerks in the counting house, “This is my brother Lewis,” I told them proudly. The clerks nodded with wary expressions, and I could tell that they disliked him, resenting the clothes, the hair, even the posture. As I came to understand later, it was the outfit of the New York City “Bowery Boy.” That Lewis should be so dressed and groomed was especially odd: since as our conversation progressed I learned that he had not been to New York City during our separation.

  We went down the dark, winding stairs and out of the factory. I made him stand on the side of me nearest the street and walk arm in arm with me. “Well, what have you been doing, Lewis? How have you been surviving?”

  “One thing and another. I been traveling with somebody.”

  I have not troubled myself with exact reproduction of people’s speech in this memoir; but what Lewis said was really more like this: “One t’ing ’n’ anudda,” and “I been travelin’ wit’ sumbuddy.” He spoke in the dialect now considered the accent of New York’s lower strata, and then as the specific accent of the Bowery.

  “Oh? Who?”

  “Tom Cross. We met up in Lockport”—he said “Lockpawt”—“and we’ve been doing this and doing that and getting jobs on the canal and the farms around here. He’s a grand fella, Tom is. He’s done a thousand things—you’ll get a kick out of him. He’s from York. We’re staying at the Cohoes Inn. He’s dying to meet you.”

  He waited outside while I went into the boarding house. Mrs. Robinson was on her fat white knees, washing the stairs with her great hanging arms and a bucket, her hair pasted to her neck and brow from sweat; from her two talkative grown daughters, who helped in the boarding house and slept in our room, I had learned that she was the widow of a housepainter, who had succumbed to an illness she called “painter’s colic” after lingering a year in bed. Her strange manner and physical appearance had frightened me when I first arrived: I did not know what to make of her big, shapeless, sweaty, sour-smelling body, and her bulging eyes, always startled and distracted, as if staring at some horror she alone could see—maybe her husband’s illness and the financial ruin it caused. She had nine children in all, some living with relatives, some others, boys and girls, working at the mill.

  I asked her if my brother and a friend could visit us for supper. “So long as they act like gentlemen,” she replied, and as usual the thoughts behind her bulging eyes were unreadable. I wanted her to think well of me. It was foolish, but there it was.

  TOM WAS A LITTLE LARGER THAN LEWIS, and ten years older, blue-eyed, with brown hair and a prominent Adam’s apple, which, when he drained a glass of water, the mill girls watched as if it were a circus acrobat. His overall good looks were marred by a crooked little scar that ran from his temple to his right eye. The real Tom resided in that scar. He was dressed in an outfit much like the one Lewis wore. Under his coat, which he kept on at supper, he wore the tight-fitting red woolen shirt of the volunteer fire department. As a member of Engine Company 9, he had put out many fires; until almost a year ago he was led north by the love of adventure and the opportunity of helping a pal (Tom’s stories were liberally punctuated with offhand references to unnamed pals). He had been kicking around here, doing manly work on the canal, ever since.

  He was voluble, though not always believable, on other subjects: lives and property he had saved, brawls with other fire companies, times he and his pals had defended the honest working women of New York against insulting advances from aristocratic dandies.

  He reminded me of Matthew; a more cosmopolitan Matthew from New York. I wondered if Lewis had ever noted the resemblance.

  I suppose it was pleasant for a sturdy young fellow to sit down to supper at a long table surrounded by man-starved young mill girls. Lewis’s and Tom’s plates were heaped high. The girls listened raptly to their stories of life on the big freight boats, and of all the “scraps” they had gotten in between Albany and Buffalo. Whenever the boys’ big gestures threatened to overturn pitchers or candlesticks, a girl sitting nearby would uncomplainingly rescue these items.

  One story struck an unpleasant note: The two of them, adding details and correcting each other, told how, a few months ago, in Rome, they had wanted to get a job together as freight-boat drivers. They befriended two drivers, took them to a tavern, and stood them to many drinks. When these two fellows were corned so badly the last trump wouldn’t have woken them, Lewis and Tom showed up for work in their place. Concluding his story, Tom speared a potato with his knife and thrust it whole into his mouth.

  And he thought this was something to brag about! It hurt me. I said, “I can’t help feeling sorry for those men. Some people would say that was a dirty trick.”

  Tom, chewing and swallowing hurriedly, said, “Well, sure, yeah, we
wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known what those men were like. We did it after I saw the way they was treating the team—ain’t that so, Lewis?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “They was killing them. They just laid on the whip. They wasn’t fed right.”

  “We saved those creatures’ lives,” Lewis agreed.

  Another sour note came when they were praising each other’s fighting abilities. Tom said, “Lewis looks nice, but he can do harm if he’s of a mind to. He’s a killer.”

  Lewis was opposite from me at the table; I saw the smile vanish, then return as a hardened mask of itself. He flashed a look at Tom, who winked.

  One girl, who knew that firefighting is an unpaid profession, asked Tom what he did for a living back in New York City. After a brief hesitation, he said he was a journeyman butcher. It was a trade that commanded a good wage, he assured us, and considerable respect in the Bowery, where much of the city’s butchering was done.

  “What do you do for fun around here?” asked Tom after we had retired to the sitting room, and he and Lewis were looking around for the first time at its grandmotherly wallpaper, rag carpets, framed samplers, big stuffed chairs and sofas.

  After a silence, a girl name Rosaline asked, “Would you like to play a game of checkers, or backgammon?”

  Tom laughed. “I meant in Cohoes. When you want to get out of this stuffy room. Where do you go for a glass of beer? Where do you go for fun?”

  “We ain’t much for fun,” said Barbara, who had arrived in Cohoes the week after I did: they had cut her braids off because of the risk that they might be caught in the machinery. She had cried bitterly over those braids, but their sacrifice had made her into a company girl. “We’ve got to save our money.”

  Barbara had more than the usual suspicion of idle amusement. But none of us were supposed to like it; we were of New England stock.

  “Sure, that’s smart. But don’t the boys here take you out and spend their money on you?”

  We had a pretty correct idea of what boys who spent money on girls wanted in return, and those of us who weren’t shocked felt obliged to pretend we were.

  “When boys come, they visit us in the sitting room, as you are doing. There isn’t much of that, though. Mostly we read or sew.”

  “Sometimes we rent a rowboat and go on the river,” volunteered Jocelyn.

  Well, one could, but we never did. During the rare daylight hour not spent in the mill or at church, we packed a lunch and walked by the river. We watched the canal boats being loaded, and the men working the locks.

  “You gals are wasting your lives,” said Tom.

  “Would you like a game of checkers?” Rosaline repeated her offer.

  “New York has spoiled me for checkers,” said Tom.

  Behind me, I heard Lewis ask Jocelyn, “Would you go out on a boat with me?”

  I heard her say, “Maybe.”

  “Who else wants to come?” said Lewis.

  “You asked me!” said Jocelyn.

  “But you only said maybe. Say you’ll go and no mistake.”

  “All right.”

  “All right, what?”

  “All right, I’ll go with you.”

  “Good,” said Lewis, laughing in a helpless, uncontained way, like a boy. “Who else is coming?”

  “You’re bad,” said Jocelyn. “I knew it. You’re no good at all.”

  “You’re right,” Lewis admitted. “I spend all my pay soon as I get it. I fight and I cuss. I take all the girls on boat rides and I try to kiss them.”

  “I knew it,” said Jocelyn. “I knew you was bad.”

  I felt a pang of jealousy and couldn’t have told you whom or what I was jealous of—I suppose I wanted them both to love me and not each other. But I could see they made a sort of sense together; they were very alike.

  “A rowboat is all right if you’re used to checkers, I guess,” said Tom, and he started to tell the mill girls of the plentiful and cheap amusements of the Bowery, already known then as the workingman’s Broadway. He spoke of firehouse balls; oyster saloons offering “all you can eat” for six cents; ice-cream saloons; pleasure gardens; plays, baseball games, dime museums. In the warm weather, there were steamboat trips in the East River and ferry rides to Long Island; picnics in New Jersey and Staten Island. If you didn’t like spending money, just watching the people promenading in their finery up and down Bowery was a thrill. They were all spoiled for checkers, all the Bowery Boys and Bowery Gals. Pretty girls, such as we all were, did not need to pay for anything, but if they were the independent type, why, most of them were wage earners and didn’t have to take any guff from anybody.

  That’s where Lewis and Tom were headed. They were on their way to New York City, where Tom would resume his work as a butcher and Lewis would start as an apprentice. “Anyone who wants to come with us is welcome.”

  Some tittered, as if he were joking. Others took offense, explaining frostily that we were girls of hard-nosed Yankee stock who labored not for a day’s amusement but for a dowry, or a home to start our married lives in, or to pay for a clever brother’s education. No doubt it was tedious of us, but we were rather inclined to worry that such shortsighted expenditures would lead a girl in time to the almshouse.

  “Oh, the almshouse,” said Tom. “I don’t know about that. Not while we’re young.” With a smile of conspiracy, he looked past the prudent girls to the fools.

  I suppose we all had a little more trouble sleeping that night. Certainly Jocelyn and I did, watching the slow-dying glow through the grate of the heating stove.

  “Let’s go with them,” she whispered.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. We’d wind up on the streets.”

  “How do you know that? You sound like Barbara. We’d find work. You heard him. Girls work in New York, and they have money to spend on oyster cellars and ferries.”

  “We don’t know anything about those girls. Can’t you see that that Tom is a bad egg? You can’t trust him.”

  “Your brother trusts him.”

  “I wish he didn’t. I’m going to warn him about Tom, as soon as I get him alone.”

  After a bit more time had passed, I thought she had gone to sleep, and I drifted off to confused dreams of Tammany parades, beach picnics, beer gardens, and dime museums. I woke abruptly to the voice of Jocelyn whispering, “I’m dying here. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The cotton fly is giving me consumption. Do you want me to die? I can’t stand the wet air, the heat, the same thing day in, day out. Maybe reading Byron and Godey’s Lady’s Book is your idea of a good time, but that won’t do for me.” I saw she meant to hurt me, but I kept my peace. “If we go to New York, we can work as dressmakers.”

  “It takes years to become a dressmaker. You start out as an apprentice. Do you know how to make a dress?”

  “I can sew.”

  “Who can’t? That’s what the good widows do in the newspaper stories, the worthy old widows everyone pities, who freeze in the cellars without the shrift to buy a lump of coal for the stove. They sew shirts; they starve.”

  “I won’t starve,” said Jocelyn lightly. “I know how not to starve.”

  I knew what she meant. She had dropped one hint after another. The moment I first understood had passed without notice. She hadn’t lost her virginity in a careless frolic with a boy. She had given herself for gain—not every day, just occasionally, for dollars, and for steak dinners and trips to the city. Though she had been slow to reveal it to me, she wasn’t ashamed. It was just the way she managed; she kept it a secret only because of the fuss other people would make.

  It is hard to remember how strenuously I resisted the knowledge that Jocelyn had been a prostitute—or, rather, that, as I thought then, she was a prostitute, for certainly, once you had prostituted yourself, you were a prostitute forever, and it was the main thing you were from then on. Is the mark invisible? Invisible marks cannot be erased. You can never think the same about someone after you learn sh
e has been a prostitute. If she stops, she is a former prostitute, just as a man who was once in prison is an ex-convict. If she reforms, which is more than stopping, a stale odor of repentance hangs over her until she goes to meet her Maker, with the final disposition of her case still in doubt.

  Honest women shun prostitutes. Even if we view prostitutes as unfortunates rather than as sinners, they are unclean, and they ought to keep away from respectable women. My fondness for Jocelyn outweighed these feelings, and I could not wish we hadn’t met, but I believed that, without intending to, she had contaminated me.

  Certainly I did not want her to return to that trade. “All right, then,” I said. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll be smart about it. From now on, in the evenings, we’ll practice fine sewing and dressmaking. We’ll make clothes out of Godey’s Lady’s Book. We’ll practice until we’re good enough to offer ourselves as dressmaker’s apprentices in New York. And in the meantime, we’ll visit now and then. We’ll try to get positions before we move. If we must, we’ll get positions as help. It would be less money, and we wouldn’t be together, but maybe it would be worth it to live in New York City.”

  On Sunday, after church, Tom and Lewis took Jocelyn and me out boating on the Mohawk. The falls roared, seabirds shrieked; Tom boasted. I watched water purl around the oar, and thought: Dressmakers, why not.

  We ate—the boys paid—at a tavern near the locks, got back in the boat, and rowed to the shelter of a pretty channel. A breeze combed the water; green leaves, blown off the branches, glided twirling down as their reflections rose twirling upward to meet them; tiny fish darted among the slimy rocks in the drifting shadow of the boat. Jocelyn let Lewis kiss her. As a sort of experiment, to see how I would feel, I let Tom kiss me. His kisses were subtler than his speech, and were not unpleasant. But when his hand reached under my skirt, I pulled away with an unthinking gasp, the boat rocked, and Jocelyn cried out, having banged her head. Tom glanced at Lewis, perhaps remembering that he was my brother, and for the rest of the afternoon had the surliness of a man who has been cheated out of half the price of a boat rental, a plate of chicken and corn fixings, and a sarsaparilla.