by Anya Seton
Wi’ strength you can get the things you want, the dear bonnie things you’ve never had. The soft clean linen, the bright gowns, and the horse and carriage of your own. ’Tis maybe a man’ll get them for you, lassie. A man you dinna love, so you may rule. For love is a craven, hapless thing that makes one servant. For you no more love, and no fruit of love to hamper. The woman was right—the base meddling woman was right.
The voice spoke like this in Fey’s head. When her hat was on, she put the money, still uncounted, in her purse, then she leaned over and picked Madame Restell’s advertisement off the rug. She put that also in her purse. Outside in the street, she pulled off the twisted brass wedding ring and dropped it in the gutter.
She walked from the lodging house in Bleecker Street, up Broadway to Madison Square, and then up Fifth Avenue. She walked very fast, but with a jerky movement. Passers-by stared at her. Her mouth was indrawn, her face so white and tense as to be shocking against the garish red of her bonnet. Above Forty-Second Street the monotonous line of brownstone stoops thinned out; there were many vacant lots. Fey walked steadily on. The house on Fifth Avenue she sought was at Fifty-Second Street. She raised her eyes only to glance at the street signs.
It was late afternoon when she reached Fiftieth Street. Ahead on the right there was a solitary brownstone house looming five stories high above vacant lots, for no one would build near Madame Restell’s infamous mansion. It stood alone. Fey walked faster. At each window were crimson brocaded shades like red eyelids; through the corner window there was a glimpse of Parian marble and a shimmering cut-glass gasolier.
At the foot of the brownstone steps, Fey stopped. She looked up at the glass front door and behind the Brussels lace curtain, a face peered and went away. Fey put her foot on the bottom step, and in so doing she turned a little. She saw an unfinished building in the next block. She had passed it without noticing it, but now there was a familiarity in its outline. She stared at the rough gray stone, and the scaffolding which hid part of it, at the low towers not yet topped by spires. Her heart gave a slow, sideways lurch. There was a thickening and pressure in her chest as though she were afraid. The fear was not in her head, just in her chest. A workman came by, on the sidewalk, whistling and swinging his lunch-pail.
‘What is that building?’ said Fey, pointing. She spoke in a whisper, and for a moment the man did not understand her.
‘That’ll be Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, miss,’ he said. ‘And when it’s finished, it’ll be the finest church in all the States.’ He glanced sharply at Fey, up at the brownstone house behind her, spat explosively on the step by her skirt, and walked on.
‘The Parroquia,’ said Fey. The thickness and pressure in her chest turned to cold pain. She began to move toward the cathedral. She walked now as one who walks through water, each step dragged forward in struggle.
She saw that a small side door was open. ‘ Only for a moment,’ she said to the protesting voice. She slid through the door into a vast dimness. From behind the chancel came the faint tap of hammering. She stood looking, and the darkness cleared. There seemed no limits to the great empty cathedral, its magnificent forest of marble piers glimmered endlessly into shadowy space. She moved between them and her hushed feet made no noise on the marble floor.
The distant hammering stopped, and silence like the silence of the Sangre de Cristos at dawn filled the cathedral.
She fell to her knees on the lowest step which would lead up to the High Altar. There was nothing there now, but her straining eyes saw it as it would be. She saw the golden cross and the white figures of priests. She heard their voices and the answering hum of the worshiping multitude behind. She smelled the delicate odor of wax and incense. She felt the vibrations of music, rolling like a many-colored river, resounding from the vaulted gray stone high above.
‘It will be beautiful,’ she whispered.
She knelt there, and the unfinished cathedral spoke in her heart. Unfinished. Only begun. But it would go on building, until, completed and glorious, it fulfilled the purpose for which it had been conceived. No vandal would destroy it, no gigantic ruthless hand stay its courageous growth.
The warm pool crept from her heart to her eyes. She turned her head and gazed fearfully into the left transept where La Conquistadora, Our Lady of Victory, had stood in the Parroquia. She did not see the Blessed Lady in any of her forms. She saw instead the remembered image of the Santo Niño, the little Christ Child of Chimayo. She saw him as she had seen him represented a hundred times in the Analco—holding his cotton gown up from his bare feet, his small face puckered in tenderness and concern as he wandered the muddy roads on his errands of mercy.
‘Perdóneme! ’ she cried to Him. She rested her forehead on the cold step.
After a while she rose. She went out through the small door and onto Fifth Avenue. She began to walk back toward Bleecker Street.
Chapter Nine
FEY RETURNED to the back room at Mrs. Flynn’s and existed for two days in a hazy trance-like state. She was neither happy nor unhappy. No emotion colored the numbness, and she slept almost continuously.
She awoke on the third morning to find that she was achingly hungry, and that her mind presented her with a cool practical diagram of her problem. She must have food and she must have work.
Of Terry she did not think at all. Sometime during those two days an iron door had clanged shut upon the past. She felt the hardness and the coldness of metal in her mind like actual iron. She welcomed it and turned her back on it, trusting in its strength.
She went down to the basement to Mrs. Flynn, who received her frigidly, knowing that her advice had not been taken. ‘And what would you be wanting, Mrs. Dillon?’ said the landlady, twitching her shoulder and rattling pots.
Fey put a dollar bill on the table. ‘I need food—will you buy some? I’ll cook it myself.’
The woman took the dollar. ‘You look bad,’ she said, more amiably. ‘Ten year older, I do believe, and you’ll be worse afore you’re through—if you hadn’t been so pig-headed——’
‘We won’t talk about it, I think.’ said Fey, her eyes glinting. There she goes again—the countess—thought Mrs. Flynn, but she felt a grudging respect. She put on her bonnet and shawl and went out to buy food while Fey sat in the kitchen and watched the sour, puny baby in his cradle. Mine won’t be like that, she thought. Mine will have the best there is from the beginning, and I shall get it for him.
‘What will you be doing now with yourself?’ questioned the landlady after Fey had eaten. Curiosity had again conquered her resentment.
‘Look for work,’ said Fey. ‘I can work for maybe six months.’
Mrs. Flynn cocked her sardonic eye—‘What kind of work; are you skilled? ’
‘You mentioned the concert saloons. I’ve seen them on the Bowery. I can sing a bit, wait on table.’
‘They’re not for the likes of you!’ cried Mrs. Flynn, genuinely horrified. ‘Them’s mostly fancy gels; their job’s to get the men to buy drinks.’
‘I could do that,’ said Fey.
‘But in your condition! ’ protested the woman. ‘ ’Twouldn’t do!’
‘No one will know my condition, and I can take care of myself.’ Mrs. Flynn stared at the small pale face. The full mouth was set, the gray eyes were steady and calm. Bedad, but mebbe she can at that, thought the woman. She’s a deep one, and yet I’m still sorry for her. You can’t get around it that she’s a gel in trouble whose man’s walked out on her.
‘You’d best go in to service, dearie. ’Twould be easier in some good place—though why I’m bothering to give you advice again I wouldn’t be knowing.’
‘I know you mean to help,’ said Fey. ‘ I might go into service, but I think I can earn more in a concert saloon until I find something better. I want money.’
Mrs. Flynn gave a raucous snort. ‘And what will you be doing when your time comes, money or no money? I’ll have no brats birthed here in my house.’
‘
No,’ said Fey. ‘I think I shall go to a hospital.’
‘Horspital!’ screamed Mrs. Flynn. ‘Now I know you’re out of your head. They kill you in them places; you never come out but feet first. Whoever heard of birthing a baby in the horspital!’
Who, indeed? thought Fey; no one in New Mexico, no one whom she had ever known, and for a moment her new composure was shaken. Last week in that different life which was gone forever, she and Terry had been walking down Second Avenue. She had noticed a small building near the corner of Seventh Street. There had been a sign, ‘ New York Infirmary for Women and Children,’ and underneath, ‘ Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell and Doctor Emily Blackwell, Directors.’
Terry had been humorous at the expense of women doctors, and for Fey the small brown building had had little interest then. It was just now in talking to Mrs. Flynn that the idea had come to her with the force of inner command. She did not know whether a baby might be born there, she knew nothing about it, but the thought of the building brought comfort and certainty. She said no more about it to Mrs. Flynn. She listened quietly to the landlady’s spate of words.
After a while she went out to Broadway with her purse in her hand. She found a small cheap shop not far from A. T. Stewart’s magnificent dry goods store on Eighth Street. Here she bought a black skirt, a white lace shawl, high comb, and coral lip salve. She also bought a red silk rose imported from Paris and this cost more than all the rest put together. She took these home and laying them on the bed stared at them. Then she packed them all in a small box, and holding it under her arm she went downstairs.
As she passed the areaway, Mrs. Flynn hung out the basement window. ‘If you’re looking for work,’ she called, ‘the Louvre and Oriental on Broadway and the Arcadia on the Bowery’s the most respectable.’
‘Thank you,’ said Fey, turning and nodding gravely.
They’ll never take her, thought Mrs. Flynn; she ain’t got the looks or the come-hither for that work.
Mrs. Flynn’s opinion was shared by the doormen at the Louvre and the Oriental. Neither would let her get near the manager. Fey trudged on doggedly back to the Bowery and down to Grand Street. Here at the dingy gilt entrance to the Arcadia, she stood a moment and collected herself.
She lifted her chin and walked into the nearly deserted hall. It was afternoon, and the Arcadia did not open for business until six. She pushed her way amongst the beer-stained tables. A bored bartender in shirt-sleeves called, ‘Whatcher want, girlie?’
‘The manager,’ said Fey.
The bartender hunched a shoulder toward a fat man on the stage.
‘That’s him.’
Fey mounted the two steps to the stage and moved with her peculiarly graceful gliding walk toward the fat man. He watched her morosely, drumming his fingers on the piano top.
‘I want to work here as a waiter-girl,’ said Fey, without preliminary.
‘Not the type,’ said the manager, equally brief. He went on drumming at the piano.
‘Wait,’ said Fey. She threw her cloak onto the piano, flung off her bonnet, and opened her box. The manager watched in mild astonishment. She thrust the high comb into her hair and threw over that the white lace shawl and tucked the red rose low on her neck. She drew a deep breath and resting her hands on her hips, she drooped her eyelids and smiled up into the startled face. ‘ I’m Spanish,’she said. ‘Frasquita Gomez is my name. I can sing Spanish songs and’—she hesitated —‘dance a little.’
A gleam came into the fat man’s lack-luster eye. Like a conjuring trick that was. Nothing at all when she come in, nondescript; then all of a sudden she wraps a white scarf around her head and smiles and you’ve got as fetching a little piece as you could find anywhere. Fine eyes and hair. Big mouth, but passionate-like. Good ankles.
‘Let’s hear you sing,’ he said.
‘Is there a guitar—?’
‘Sure—we got a full dancing or-chestra. Hey, Joe—bring out a guitar from the back!’
Fey accompanied herself with the few simple chords she knew. She sang a gay New Mexican ‘Indita’ and she sang ‘La Golondrina.’ While she sang, she was nearly overpowered by a sudden lascerating homesickness. This gave her husky voice a poignancy and appeal which decided the manager. The customers wouldn’t understand a word she sang, but she would be a novelty.
Nobody’d ever had a Spanish waiter-girl; mostly they were harps or hicks off the farms. The Louvre had a girl was supposed to come from Paris, and now the Arcadia would have a Spaniard.
‘Can you start tonight? ’ he said.
Fey nodded.
‘Ten dollars a week and your commissions from the drinks you can talk ’em into. We pay good here. You can go home with the customers if you want to make a little extra, that’s your business. But keep it clean and respectable on the premises. We’re a high-class place.’
‘Yes,’ said Fey. ‘I understand.’
Fey worked through the winter at the Arcadia Concert Saloon. She was not popular with the other girls, nor very successful with the customers whom she continually disappointed. While she sang, wandering from table to table strumming her guitar and smiling, she diffused sex magnetism, and she titivated the goggling out-of-towners who comprised three-quarters of the Arcadia’s patronage. But later, in her other job of waitress, she was less alluring. She took orders, and transported steins of beer and glasses of raw whiskey from the bar to the tables, and she dutifully sat down with those who invited her. But she was subtly, very tactfully unapproachable. This was easier because she pretended to speak no English, and met all invitations and proposals with a faintly smiling silence. Usually it took no longer than the first drink for the customer to begin to wonder why he had even thought her pretty, and by the second he would have summoned another waiter-girl. Her commissions were, therefore, small, but the manager kept her on. She gave class to the place, she was different, and she was a modest attraction. Sometimes a party of swells from uptown would come slumming at the Arcadia and they applauded Frasquita Gomez far more vigorously than did the regular patrons.
The Arcadia was thus patronized one cold February night two weeks after Fey’s eighteenth birthday. The day itself had passed as uneventfully as did all her days. She slept until nine, then went down to Mrs. Flynn’s kitchen and made her own breakfast. She seldom saw her landlady now, as Mrs. Flynn had discovered a crony in a dilapidated ballet girl on the top floor and had lost interest in Fey.
Fey spent the greater part of her days in reading. She haunted a small bookstore on Broadway where Mr. Tibbins, the proprietor, took an interest in her and often lent her books to take home. He soon understood that it was a program of self-education which she wished, and, flattered by her eager attention to anything he recommended, he guided her through those classics which appealed to him personally. In this way she consumed some of Shakespeare, in an abridged and expurgated edition, Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and Longfellow’s newly published Dante.
She read Snowbound and The Vision of Sir Launfal and The House of the Seven Gables —Mr. Tibbins did not approve of The Scarlet Letter —she read several works by Mrs. Sedgwick and Fanny Fern; she read David Copperfield and The Bride’s Tragic Secret, each with the same devouring speed. Mr. Tibbins soon realized that there was quest beneath all these feverish gulping of pages, interest stronger than desire for knowledge. Her imagination seemed to be captured by what one might call ‘success stories,’ in any character who achieved success despite material handicaps. Too, she soon depleted his scanty stock of books about New York. ‘I want to understand this city,’ she told Mr. Tibbins in one of her rare explanations. ‘I want to know what those people who live in the big houses think about, what they wear and what they do.’ To this end she also bought newspapers and magazines and read them with equal concentration, her purpose no less intense for being unformulated. This was preparation, and when the time came she would be ready.
On the whole, poetry bored her, and most of the novels did, too. She enjoyed the story
in them, but each time as she achieved the last page there was disappointment. The people were not real; at no point did they talk or behave in any way familiar to her, and for most of Mr. Tibbins’s preferred heroes and heroines she felt contempt. They got themselves into trouble and they lay down under it, whining noble sentiments and suffering, until a hazy thing called ‘Heaven’ or ‘the state of grace’ or even just ‘Providence’ pitied and extricated them.
However, for weeks, humbled by her own ignorance, she docilely followed Mr. Tibbins’s guidance. It was in the back of the store on a corner shelf that she unearthed a book which did not whine or bore her. Its words, rhythm, and thought seemed to strike lightning into her heart and find there an answering flash.
She opened first at a short stanza—‘Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,’ and she read on,
‘One’s-self must never give way—that is the final substance—that out of all is sure,
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up what but One’s-Self is sure?’
Fey breathed sharply. That’s what I mean, she thought. She pulled the high stool back from the shelves, so that the dusty sunlight from the window might fall on it. She crouched over the book, her heart beating fast.
Mr. Tibbins, at length noting her absorption, finished a sale and walked back to inquire what she had found. She looked up and showed him the title, Leaves of Grass.
