These Shallow Graves

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “Sit down, Jo!” Eddie said through gritted teeth.

  Jo, peeking through a pair of red velvet curtains trimmed with gold fringe, didn’t even hear him.

  They were in a small parlor inside the residence of Esther Arinovsky, on East Twenty-Fifth Street in the Tenderloin. She and Eddie had told the burly man at the door, Benny, that they were from a newspaper and wanted to speak with Esther. He’d nearly tossed them off the stoop, but assurances that they were only after information about Della McEvoy, and a dollar placed into his hand, had softened him. He’d led them through a garish foyer to the parlor and told them to wait there while he spoke with Esther.

  “Why is it called the Tenderloin?” Jo had asked as they walked uptown, past the area’s flashy restaurants, hotels, and bars.

  “The cops gave it that name because it’s rich and tasty, and they want a piece of it. Esther, like every other madam in the city, only stays open because she pays them off,” Eddie replied.

  “There’s more than one disorderly house here?” Jo had asked, astonished.

  “In the Tenderloin? Are you kidding? There are scores of them. And thousands of girls.”

  Jo, saucer-eyed, was watching some of those very girls now. They were clad only in skimpy silk combinations—one-piece undergarments that served as both chemise and knickers. Some wore stockings. Others were bare-legged. They had powdered cheeks and painted lips. Most were drinking.

  Jo found their bareness shocking, but it was their eyes that truly unnerved her. They were empty and dead. The girls sat slumped on chairs and settees, retying a ribbon, twirling a tendril of hair, or smoking—until a customer walked in. Then, like windup dolls, they came to life. They sat up and blew kisses, displayed a pretty leg, or undid a few buttons to better show their wares.

  “Most of them look like they’re my age,” Jo said, still staring out from the curtains.

  “They probably are. Will you please sit down?” Eddie asked, exasperated.

  Jo watched as a scrawny man in a cheap suit and scuffed shoes came in. He puffed his chest out like a rooster and strolled among the girls, eyeing them each in turn. “You,” he finally said, pointing to a petite brunette. She dutifully stood and followed him up the dark stairwell. Jo couldn’t bear to imagine what happened next.

  “He didn’t even ask her name,” she murmured, sitting down.

  “I told you not to come here,” Eddie said.

  “He eyed her the way Mrs. Nelson eyes a rib roast.”

  “This is yet another bad idea. We should leave.”

  Jo went silent. She thought about Oscar and his cadaver. He said the body was a female’s, and that she’d died from syphilis. Had she been a prostitute, too? Jo had heard the disease whispered about. She’d seen beggars with their faces eaten away by it, and Katie had told her hair-raising tales of people going insane from it.

  “Who writes about them, Eddie?” she asked.

  “Who?” Eddie asked, his wary eyes on the doorway.

  “Esther’s girls.”

  Eddie’s gaze shifted from the doorway to Jo. “You could have,” he said, his blue eyes wistful.

  Jo flinched. His words cut deeply. Not because they were thoughtless or cruel, but because they were true. She could have written about these girls, if she hadn’t accepted Bram’s proposal. Now she never would.

  “Esther’ll see you two now,” a voice said.

  It was Benny. Jo and Eddie stood.

  “Let me do the talking,” Eddie whispered as they followed Benny out of the parlor.

  He led them to what Jo assumed was a study, though it was nothing like her father’s study, or her uncle’s. Gilded furniture—its finish chipped, its cushions worn and dusty—had been placed haphazardly. Three toy poodles roamed the room. As Jo watched, one lifted its leg and soaked the wallpaper. At the far end of the room, a large woman sat at a desk, writing in a ledger.

  “Sit,” she said without looking up.

  Eddie took one of the chairs in front of her desk; Jo took the other. Jo tried not to stare but couldn’t help it.

  Esther Arinovsky looked to be about fifty. Her hair, dyed black and thinning, was worn in a high roll. Powder had settled into the creases of her cheeks; lip rouge had bled into the lines around her mouth. She wore ropes of fake pearls. Her enormous breasts strained at the front of her dress, which was covered with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. A plateful of pastries rested on the desk.

  After another minute or so, Esther closed her ledger and looked at them.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Arinovsky,” Eddie said. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are, pisher,” Esther said with a Russian accent. “You think I let just anyone come in here?”

  She looked at Jo next, cocking her head like a bird of prey. “But you? What brings you here, my darling? I cannot imagine such a pretty girl would need to go looking for work, but if you are—”

  Jo blushed. Eddie cut Esther off. “This is Miss Jones. She’s a reporter, too. We’re looking for information,” he said.

  “What kind of information?”

  “Information that will help secure justice for the murder of Alvah Beekman,” Jo said.

  Esther laughed. “You are looking for justice in New York? Good luck.” She leaned back in her chair and picked a piece of food from her teeth with a fingernail. “I give you what information you want. The police, as always, have it wrong. Alvah Beekman was not killed by the meshuggener with the tattoos.”

  “Could one of Della’s girls have done it?” Jo asked. “Or Della herself?”

  Esther gave her a contemptuous look. “You ever cut a man’s throat?”

  Jo shook her head.

  “It takes strength, let me tell you. Della’s as thin as a piece of old rope. Her girls, they’re not so strong, either. Della doesn’t feed them well. Too afraid to spend a little money. She doesn’t have my standards,” Esther sniffed as a poodle squatted in a corner behind her desk. “There was a fourth man on the sidewalk that night. Montfort, Beekman, Kinch, plus one more,” she continued. “This I know for a fact. I was told it by one of the girls at the farshtinkener Della’s house. Lucy’s her name.”

  I was right, Jo thought smugly. Esther Arinovsky can’t resist the chance to bury a rival.

  “How do you know?” Eddie asked skeptically.

  “Because I paid her to tell me.”

  “Beekman would meet with this girl Lucy?” Eddie asked.

  “No, chochem, he would meet with a chimpanzee!” Esther said, shaking her head. “Of course he meets with the girl! Beekman, he goes to her three times a week. She’s seventeen years old. Print that in your paper!”

  Mr. Beekman carrying on with a girl my age. His daughter’s age. Jo felt ill at the thought.

  “He was late coming to her that night. She looked out of the window for him and saw him standing on the sidewalk, one house over from Della’s. He was talking with his friend the macher, Montfort. As they stood there, two other men came up to them. One had tattoos all over him. The other was big. According to Lucy, it was the big one who knocked Montfort down and cut Beekman.”

  “Did she tell the police?” Jo asked. “Is she helping them track the man down?”

  “Help the cops? Us?” Esther spat on the floor. “We hate them. That is the one thing, the only thing, we have in common, Della and I. They take half what we make—half!—and use the girls for free.”

  “Did Lucy see the big man’s face?” Eddie asked.

  “Well enough to see that he had dark hair and a scar on his cheek,” Esther replied.

  Jo and Eddie traded excited glances.

  “The other one, the one with the marks on him, Lucy said he looked sick,” Esther added. “He was staggering. Shouting. Like he wasn’t right in the head.”

  Jo wondered at that. Kinch hadn’t been staggering or ou
t of his mind when he was with Scully. He’d been perfectly lucid.

  Esther smiled at them then with a mouthful of coffee-stained teeth. The smile did not touch her eyes. “I give you good information about what goes on at Della McEvoy’s house. For free,” she said. “You use it and I am happy, but you write one word about my house, children, and I send Benny to cut off your hands. Then you never write nothing no more. We have an understanding?”

  “We do,” Eddie said.

  Jo quickly nodded. She’d seen Benny and didn’t doubt for a minute that he’d do it.

  Esther returned her attention to her ledger. Jo and Eddie were dismissed. They thanked her. She acknowledged their thanks with a flap of her hand.

  “They were there together,” Jo whispered as they left Esther’s study. “Kinch and the scar-faced man are working together!”

  “It certainly looks that way,” Eddie agreed. “But only one of them’s behind bars. You’ve got to be careful. Promise me you won’t go out alone at night anymore. Promise me right now, or I’ll … I’ll go tell your mother.”

  Jo laughed. “Really, Eddie? You’d tattle on me?”

  “It’s not funny, Jo, and I swear to God I will. I don’t want to wake up one morning and hear the newsboys shouting that you’ve been found dead in an alley,” he said solemnly.

  “I can’t promise that, Eddie,” Jo said. “I’m too close to finding out why my father was killed to stop now.” She was as scared of the man who’d attacked her as she’d ever been, but she would no longer let that fear stop her. Scarface was scared, too—scared that she and Eddie were getting close to him, and to the truth. That was why he’d attacked them.

  As they made their way to the front door, Jo saw that business had picked up while they’d been with Esther. At least half a dozen men were surveying the merchandise now. One was kissing a redheaded girl. Another was fondling a brunette’s bottom.

  Eddie grabbed Jo’s hand and hurried her along. They passed a man sitting in a chair with a blond girl in his lap. She was trying to engage him.

  “C’mon, handsome,” she cooed. “Come upstairs. You won’t be sorry.”

  She leaned in to kiss the man, but he pushed her off his lap. She hit the floor hard, banging her head against a table.

  “I wan’ a blon’, dammit!” the man yelled drunkenly. “A real blon’ who can prove it!”

  The girl, dazed, struggled to sit up. Jo stopped dead, furious. She yanked her hand free.

  “What are you doing?” Eddie hissed.

  But it was too late. She marched over to the girl and helped her up. Then she turned to the man, eyes blazing, and said, “You owe this girl an apology.”

  Eddie’s eyes widened in alarm. “Jo! Come on!” he said.

  The drunken man looked up at Jo, astonished. “What?” he said.

  “You heard me,” Jo said. “Would you like someone to treat your mother, or sister, or daughter the way you just treated this young lady?”

  The man guffawed. “She ain’t no lady, you silly bitch. She’s a whore!”

  “And you, sir,” Jo said loudly—so loudly that everyone in the room stopped to listen to her—“are a vile, drunken pig!”

  The man growled a nasty reply, but Jo didn’t hear it. She’d turned on her heel and was marching back to Esther’s office. Esther was still buried in her accounts as Jo walked up to her desk.

  “Please don’t buy Fay from the Tailor,” she said.

  Esther looked up. Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”

  Eddie, who’d caught up with Jo, took hold of her arm and tried to pull her away, but she shook him off.

  “This is no place for her. She’s had a hard life. If she comes here, it’ll only get harder,” Jo said, pleading for her friend.

  “We’ve all had hard lives, my darling. This is business. Between myself and the Tailor. I’ve already bought her. I was the highest bidder. The deed’s done and it’s none of your affair.”

  “I have nine hundred dollars,” Jo said. “I’ll buy her from you.”

  Esther snorted. “It would take a lot more than that for me to sell her. She’s young and pretty. She can work for a good ten years if she doesn’t get sick. She’ll bring me thousands.”

  “But she’s a human being,” Jo protested, heartsick at the thought of Fay’s fate. “You can’t just buy and sell her. That’s slavery. Have you no sense of morality?”

  “Morality is a luxury, my darling. A very expensive one,” Esther said.

  “But—”

  Esther cut her off. Her eyes, cold and calculating, locked on Jo’s. “I know who you are Miss Jones,” she said. “I read the papers. I look at the pictures. And I know you’ve just gone to the highest bidder yourself.”

  Jo felt as if she’d been slapped. “I beg your pardon!” she said, outraged.

  “You’re engaged to Abraham Aldrich, are you not? No doubt your dear mama—if she’s worth a damn—tallied the fortunes and prospects of every young man of means in the city, weighing their dollars against your assets: beauty and breeding.” She paused to let her words sink in, then said, “One day soon, my darling, you’ll be doing the very same thing the girls here do, only you won’t get paid for it.”

  Jo, cheeks burning, was too mortified to reply. Eddie grabbed her arm again, and this time she let him pull her away.

  “Esther shouldn’t have said that. Just forget about it,” he told her, once they were on the sidewalk. “It was harsh and cruel and it’s not true.”

  But Jo barely heard him. Instead, she heard her mother’s voice. It doesn’t do to be absent from the market too long, she’d said, the night of the Young Patrons’ Ball.

  And Grandmama’s, at Herondale: We make matches with our heads, not our hearts, in order to preserve our families and fortunes.

  And suddenly Jo saw her engagement to Bram for what it was: a business deal, and she was the commodity that had been traded. She didn’t love Bram. And he didn’t love her. He cared for her in his way, as she did for him. But it wasn’t love. It wasn’t what she felt for Eddie.

  “She was only trying to embarrass you and get you to leave. She was wrong to say it, and—”

  Jo, her hands balled into fists, turned to him and yelled, “Oh, Eddie, shut up!”

  Eddie looked dumbfounded. “Gee, thanks. I was only trying to—”

  “Well, stop trying! Don’t you see? Madam Esther’s not harsh and she’s not cruel. Madam Esther’s right.”

  She didn’t wait for Benny to get the door for her; she pushed it open herself. Outside on the street, Eddie spotted an empty cab and hailed it. As the driver pulled to the curb, Eddie gave him Jo’s address. She tried to hide her face from him as she climbed in, so he wouldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes, but failed. He made a motion for her to lower the window and handed her his handkerchief.

  “Did you know Fay saved me once?” Jo asked him, dabbing at her eyes. “When I was in Brooklyn, paying a call on Mr. Markham. I was nearly robbed and dumped in the river. She got me out of it. We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge afterward. We were talking about …” She hesitated, not wanting him to know they had talked about him. “About choices,” she finally said. “I asked her what the best thing was and she said freedom. Freedom, Eddie.”

  “Oh, Jo.” Eddie covered one of her hands with his own.

  “I want her to be free. Why does no one ever get to break free? Not Fay. Not Eleanor Owens. Not the girls at Esther’s. Or—”

  “Or you,” Eddie said.

  The cabbie cracked his whip and the carriage slowly rolled away.

  “An exaggerated sleeve on one so young is aging,” said Madame Gavard. “I suggest a small pouf, a pointed bodice, and a gathered skirt with a sensible train. Three feet in length, no more.”

  “I agree,” Anna said. “The trains are becoming ridiculous. Why, t
he elder Adams girl, the one who married last year, was practically at the altar, and her train was still in the carriage!”

  Jo eyed herself in Madame Gavard’s enormous gilt mirror. She was in the dressmaker’s atelier, trying on sample wedding dresses.

  Anna glanced at the pretty painted clock on the atelier’s wall and frowned. “Can you bring a veil, please, Madame Gavard? Oh, I do wish Madeleine were here to give us an opinion. I wonder why she’s so late?” She turned to Jo almost as if she were an afterthought. “What do you think of the dress, Josephine?” she asked.

  “It’s very pretty,” Jo said dutifully.

  “It’s more than pretty. You look like an absolute dream in it!”

  “Sorry, Mama. My mind was elsewhere. It’s beautiful.”

  A worried frown creased Anna’s face. “Are you all right? What is it?”

  Ever since yesterday, when Esther had spoken the ugly truth to her, Jo had been restless, tense, and unable to think of anything but the woman’s words. Esther had opened her eyes. Her engagement was a business transaction. She loved Eddie and he loved her. Yet here she was, deciding on the dress she’d wear to wed Bram.

  Marriage wasn’t a dance, or a party, or a summer flirtation. It was forever. Once she said her vows to Bram, all she would ever have of Eddie was memories. Only weeks ago, at school, she’d lamented the idea of Trudy marrying a man she didn’t love, and now she was doing the very same thing.

  Mornings spent with a breakfast tray in bed. Luncheon with friends. Afternoons spent strolling in the park, or embroidering. That would be her life. Supper with Bram. And then, when the dull day was finally over, off to bed to make all those babies Grandmama wanted. Lovemaking, they called it. But shouldn’t one be in love to make love?

  She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. She would tell her mother. Right now. She would tell her she was going to break it off with Bram because she loved someone else. Surely her mother would understand.

  “Is the dress not to your liking? Is that it?” her mother asked. “You could be right. The cut suits you, and yet something’s not quite correct.”