Belle Cora Page 5

  They would be with us six months or a year or two. Then, because they found better work or a husband, or for some other reason, they’d leave, and their time became the basis of our household’s private calendar—my mother would date a past event by saying “when we had Frieda,” or “when we had Bertha,” and my father, adopting her practice and gently mocking it, would say, “That was back in the reign of Gretchen.”

  The departures were usually tearful, with the help weeping as much as the children did. If a girl left without a big tragic goodbye, it was a betrayal; my love would sour temporarily into hatred. My mother became attached to them, too, but she worried about their influence on us. She was shocked when, instead of saving for their dowries or to keep their little brothers and sisters off the streets, they spent their money on pretty bows and hats and dresses, and used their little scraps of leisure to walk up Broadway or Bowery or to go to dance halls or theaters. She wondered if they were subtly imparting to us (maybe just by the way they put their weight more on one leg than the other, or arched their backs and flung out their arms to stretch their young bones) some invisible taint of immorality carried from the squalid districts where their families lived.

  One of them left when her belly grew, amid rebukes from my mother (“You were like a daughter to us!”), tears and defiance from the girl, and conversations that stopped when I came into the room. My mother said that Anna had found work in a house with more help uptown (which was plausible: the help were always saying that we ought to ease their labor by hiring another girl, and forever recommending friends who would work cheaply), but my father said that Anna had taken a boat back to Hesse. My brother Robert said, “Anna had a weak character. She fell.” I asked how and where. He said, “She fell morally.” He refused to add to his explanation.

  After Anna, my parents made an exception and hired Sally, an American. Sally did not fuss over me like the German girls, nor was she as pretty, but she had a careless, absentminded, amoral manner I found relaxing. When we played, she played to win. She never used anything as the occasion for a lesson. She took Lewis and me with her when she did the marketing, and one day I noticed a departure from my mother’s instructions. Sally wasn’t asking for the best cut of beef, but for something cheaper. When I corrected her, I saw a look pass between her and the butcher.

  My mother had told me to watch the help to make sure they weren’t stealing, and had warned me of the methods they might use. Though I liked Sally, my loyalty was to my mother. I told her what I had seen, and she rose from her sickbed to interview the storekeepers and the peddlers, thereby uncovering Sally’s corrupt practices, identical with those implemented on a larger scale, later in the century, by the great names in army provisioning, streetcar manufacturing, and municipal office construction. My father was tenderhearted and wanted merely to give Sally a scolding, but my mother, who took everything these girls did very personally, said that Sally had taken a low advantage of the illness in the house. So Sally was fired without notice, and my father acted the part that our ideas of the world demanded by telling her he hoped it would be a lesson to her.

  I went into her room while she was packing. She had thrown her week’s allotment of wood into the stove as a final gesture of defiance, and the heat was stifling. She crouched on the floor, jamming clothes into an old leather trunk that had broken straps. “You’re just a dumb little girl, you didn’t know any better,” she said, bidding me to stand on the trunk while she secured it with rope and tugged as if she meant to strangle it. “There’s things I could say. Like why I’m grudged a few coppers saved by good management, that’s all it was, while doing three girls’ work. Why a New York Yankee merchant’s son, with a house in Bowling Green, has got to live poor as Job’s turkey with one help and no carriage. Does he gamble? Has he got a gal on the side? I could say all that, but I won’t. I’ll put my capital into a nasty dress and go on the town.”

  My detection of Sally’s embezzlements brought me extra attention a few days later, at Thanksgiving, a feast our family celebrated the second week of December. It was our one big holiday of the season, for in those days people of New England stock still nourished a Puritan disdain for Christmas. Since Christmas was already an elaborate affair in New York, the signs of it all around us helped to make us feel we were a colony of sober New Englanders, here on a mission in a city whose leading families cared only for money, pleasure, and appearances.

  Soon after we arrived at the big house on Bond Street, with the usual round of cheerful but stiff greetings, my grandfather announced to the company that he would have a word alone with Arabella in his study. He took my hand and led me to a small, cluttered room where a window with many light-warping panes looked out on trees whose branches drooped with snow, and a yard dotted with the footprints of dogs. He took a stack of papers off a chair so that I could climb onto it, flipped back the tail of his coat, and sat down. He praised me for discovering Sally’s trickery. “I could wish that my chief clerk had as sharp an eye as yours.”

  He asked me if I was as attentive to my Sunday-school lessons as I was to the misdeeds of the help, and I said I hoped so, and he tested me with a series of questions of advancing difficulty. I told him who made the world; I identified Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Lot, Joseph in Egypt, Moses, Mary, Mary’s Joseph, Paul, and Peter. He nodded his approval as I affirmed—without the least idea of the implications of what I was saying—that because of Adam’s disobedience we were all wicked sinners, and that every evil thought we had was our own, and every good thought we had was put there expressly by the Lord. We all deserved to go to hell, but some of us would be redeemed anyway. He asked me what I had to do to be saved, and I said, “To love God.”

  He started to speak, and stopped himself.

  I added, “And to have the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

  This pleased him. “And who can have the gift of the Holy Spirit?”

  “Anyone, if they sincerely repent.” A lady in the sewing circle, now deceased, had laid great stress on this, and evidently it was the right thing to say. My grandfather reached forward awkwardly and patted me on the shoulder. He did not have an easy way with children. All the same, I knew he liked me. I liked him back, without ever once wondering how people could like each other if, thanks to Adam’s sin, they were totally depraved and there was no good in them.

  “Tell Louise I said to give you an extra helping of pudding,” he said at last.

  I would have gotten the extra helping anyway, but I thanked him. “Grandfather?”

  “Yes, child.”

  “Grandfather, what does ‘go on the town’ mean?”

  He blinked. “Who used these words?”

  “Sally.”

  “I see.”

  “She said she was going to buy a nasty dress and go on the town.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose she meant that she would find other work,” he said brightly.

  My grandfather was a busy reformer. Beyond such projects as the printing of religious tracts, the building of workhouses, and campaigns to suppress drunkenness and Sabbath breaking and to abolish slavery, he was a sponsor of the Magdalene Society and other efforts to promote the reclamation of fallen women. He knew very well that “going on the town” was what girls of the laboring class said they were doing when they went out to prostitute themselves in the street.

  He rose and opened the door, and I followed him back to the second-floor dining room for Thanksgiving dinner, where I ate until my stomach hurt.

  The feast was marred by two incidents.

  First, Lewis had used the time I spent talking to my grandfather to wander into forbidden parts of the house and was found playing with my grandmother’s collection of fine lace. My grandmother had no patience for small boys. She let my mother feel her frosty displeasure for the rest of the afternoon.

  Second, as is traditional at Thanksgiving, someone’s feelings were hurt. That person was my father. I know because at our house that night I heard my mother consoling hi
m in their bedroom, a wall away from the room I shared with Lewis and Frank. There was weeping, which I realized with a shock was his, and a groan of anguish, and this mysterious shout: “… thirty-seven!” Years later, I realized it was his age. I held my breath, and they went on talking, but I couldn’t understand any more of it.

  The next day, when he was having his coffee alone at the table, and reading letters that he had taken in a messy bundle out of a leather bag, I asked if I might sit with him. Yes, if I was quiet, he said. I watched him read and turn the pages and sip his coffee, and scratch his cheek, and write notes. He looked at me. I asked him if his work was very hard. I said that he must be very smart to do such work, and he smiled, saying, “Arabella, you promised not to make noise,” and sent me away. My father usually showed us a cheerful face, but I know from my mother’s diary that he was given to attacks of what in those days we called “the melancholy.”

  III

  A FEW DAYS LATER, IT BECAME SO COLD THAT, to save wood, we moved our bedding downstairs and slept near the big sitting-room fireplace—my mother, my father, my brothers, Christina (the girl who replaced Sally), and me. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and sat on stools and chairs, faces ruddy in the firelight, and Lewis begged my father: “Tell us about the Turk.”

  This was a frequent request, arising out of Lewis’s refusal to eat pork and my father calling him a “little Mussulman” and asking him how many wives he meant to have when he grew up. Lewis had responded with questions of his own, and in time my father’s answers developed into an absurd lecture which operated powerfully on my little brother’s mind. In the house and on the street, Lewis went about holding a stick for sword fighting, now pretending to be the Turk and now a doughty American sailor, the Turk’s enemy, whom my father had added to the lecture in the second or third telling.

  “The Turk hates houses,” said my father solemnly. “He lives in a tent. He always wears a hat, even in church. He doesn’t eat pork, but turkey and Turkish Delight. He has so many wives he can’t remember all of their names.”

  “He boils you in oil!” interjected Lewis, jumping to his feet. Boiling in oil was his favorite part; often he brought it up prematurely, afraid my father would forget to include it.

  “Don’t interrupt, Lewis,” my mother admonished him.

  He sat, but as he did he confided to Frank, “He tried to make the sailor a Mussulman!”

  “Let Papa tell it,” said Frank, who liked this nonsense almost as much as Lewis did. My father had originally thrown in the sailor for Frank’s benefit. The others in the room were Edward, mainly intent on staying warm; Robert, who lay with his back to the fire, the better to get its light onto the tiny print in The Penny Magazine; and Christina, whose English was limited; and my mother. They all looked up, amused by Lewis’s reactions.

  “That is in fact what happened to a sailor of my acquaintance who was captured by the Turk,” continued my father. “The Turk said, ‘Be a Mussulman or be boiled.’ But this sailor had personally been handed a Bible by your grandfather—I was there; we were walking on the docks, handing out improving tracts and Bibles to drunken sailors and watching the change start to come over them by the very touch of it in their fingers—a wonderful sight to behold—and he had read his Bible and become a strong, stouthearted Christian. ‘Boil me in oil?’ he said. ‘I double-dare you to.’ ‘I’ll do it,’ said the Turk. ‘I don’t believe you,’ said the sailor. ‘You asked for it,’ said the Turk, and threw him into the bubbling pot! Oh, the poor sailor! He found it very uncomfortable. Luckily, his skin had been toughened by years of salt spray washing over him as he hauled the ropes on the deck of a two-hundred-ton three-masted brig, and he stood up to boiling in oil remarkably well, though he told me he would hate to go through it again, and I have no reason to doubt him. He was a very honest sailor, at least after he had gotten his Bible.”

  “I won’t let the Turk boil me at all!” declared Lewis. “I’ll take his sword away and cut his head off! I’ll shoot him between the eyes!” My mother, who hated the Turk story both for itself—for its violence—as well as for its effects on Lewis, said he should not talk of cutting off heads and shooting, and I told him that if he kept interrupting, Papa would not be able to finish, and he managed to keep silent after that.

  Later that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard the wind rattling the windows and doors like a prowler trying to find one left unlocked. I heard my mother cough and sit up to spit in a pot placed nearby for this purpose. In the morning, she would look at the sputum. Now she lay in the dark, wondering what color it was, and so did I.

  That night, I dreamed that Dr. Boyle had come to see her. He opened up her chest as if he were opening the doors of an armoire, and he showed us the rot inside: old bottles, bits of newsprint, creeping centipedes molded to the humps and valleys of limp brown cabbage leaves. He took out her lungs and held them up to light suddenly streaming through the window. “As I thought: phthisis in every tissue. Only the fruit of a tree in Cyprus can save her; but, inconveniently, the Turk has it. Somehow your family must obtain it from the Turk, who hates us; to get it you may have to kill him.”

  Lewis leapt to his feet. “I will shoot the Turk, Mama. Belle will help me to do it.” She looked at him as though very sad that he should still be talking of shooting when she had told him not to, and I tried to explain that he meant merely that he would do whatever was necessary and I would help him. I tried to speak. No sound came out.

  When I opened my eyes, only a few hours after I had shut them, I saw my father, Robert, Edward, and Frank all standing in the firelight, dressed for the cold in coats, scarves, and hats. It was still dark. I heard bells clanging. One of my grandfather’s clerks, a young man whose hands and face shook from the cold, crouched close to the fire while giving a grim report to my father, who asked him questions. At first I did not understand, but gradually I learned that there was a fire, a big one, spreading quickly (“eating up blocks,” the clerk said), near my grandfather’s store. I was still muzzy-headed from sleep, and for a few moments I thought I could cheer everyone with the good news that my mother could be cured, until the urgency of my father’s voice woke me fully.

  “Robert, Edward, you will come with us,” said my father, in a strong voice, but in a strangely pensive tone, as if it were more of a prediction than a command.

  Frank said, “May I go, too, please?”

  My father, after a hesitation, said yes, a decision he came to regret.

  “What’s happening?” asked Lewis, just woken, blinking. “What is it?”

  “There’s a fire on the docks,” I told him, happy to have something to do—help control Lewis—and wanting to show that, though I was only seven myself, I understood what was happening and what was important. “Papa will empty the warehouse in case it catches fire. He’s taking Robert and Edward and Frank.”

  “I’ll go, too.” Lewis wriggled out of Christina’s grasp. “Papa, please, may I go to the fire?”

  “You can go to the next fire,” my father promised.

  “I want to see this fire! Let me see this fire!”

  As they got ready to leave, he kept on begging and complaining, saying he never got to go anywhere and he wouldn’t be a burden. I had to hold onto him tightly until they had gone. Then I took him to the top floor of the house to look out the east-facing dormer windows; we saw no flames, only a great swath of darkness where smoke blocked out the stars. But we heard the fire’s distant roar, and the bells of the fire engines, and later, as the drift to sleep disheveled my thoughts, I imagined that the bells were a magical attempt to break up the fire by tearing through its voice.

  The Herald reported later that the fire had broken out at nine o’clock at night in the store of Comstock & Andrews, in Merchant Street, a narrow crooked lane of dry-goods merchants and auctioneers in the rear of the Merchants’ Exchange. Someone had forgotten to close a gas cock when the store was shut; gas had filled the room, and when the gas reached some lit
coals in the grate, it exploded. Within twenty minutes, conflagration was spreading to other blocks. Fire brigades from all over the city—later, from other cities—fought the blaze in weather so cold that the water in the hydrants had frozen. Horses dragged the engines to the East River; firemen chopped holes in the ice, linked hoses and pumps to carry the water from the river to the fire, and poured brandy into the hoses to keep the water liquid; when they pointed the hoses at the flames, the wind blew the water back in their faces as pieces of ice.

  My grandfather, father, and brothers emptied the warehouse, assisted by their clerks and by anyone else willing to lend a hand. The merchants gave things away to whoever would help them save their stock. “Thank you: here’s a coat, here’s a hat,” they would say, as heaps of goods rose in the street, acquiring a film of fine soot, and the carters charged several times their usual rate to take the heaps to safety.

  My mother and I knew none of these details at the time—we were at home, worrying, until at last I fell asleep.

  When I woke the next morning, my mother was coughing uncontrollably into a bowl. Her pale hands were speckled with blood. “Don’t look,” she gasped, “don’t cry.” For I was crying; I had never been so frightened for her. In a wheezy voice she gave me some instruction which I did not understand, and she had to repeat it: “Tell Sally to start the fire in my room.”

  When the fire had warmed my parents’ room, Christina helped my mother into her bed. I stood by the door and heard again my mother call Christina “Sally.”

  My father sometimes went on business trips, or went early to the store, so it was not unusual to wake and find him gone in the morning, but that Frank and Edward should also be gone felt strange. My grandfather’s clerk had described the fire as “eating blocks,” and I had pictured it immediately as a beast; I had pictured its mouth. But I had confidence in my father, and I was not as worried as I would have been if I were older. That my mother should go to heaven while we still had need of her, that was the particular calamity threatening us from as far back as I could remember, and this morning she had vomited blood.