City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  There was a little cottage on the edge of the town, flowers all around, and even a few sheep grazing in a pasture out behind. And it was for sale. Like a country estate it was, like the dachas the rich Russians had. Perfect for Countess Romanov. Cheap, too. She had plenty of brass left after she bought it, but that’s not what she planned to live on. Too clever for that she was, whatever name she called herself. Do a bit of business with the lady needles, real quiet and only for the gentry, that was her plan.

  Then, when she was just getting started, two women—leastwise they were dressed like women, though she’d never seen ladies who looked so much like men—came and beat her silly. She was black and blue for days, and ever after missing one of her front teeth. Don’t do to cut in on business as is already established, love. Have to make your living, best you get ’em in the family way rather than out of it. Later she found out they were called Sapphos, women as were lovers with other women, though God knows what they actually did. And in these parts it turned out, Sapphos had the abortion business stitched up tight.

  Whores, however, were another matter. Always plenty of whores in a waterfront town like Portsmouth. Most lifted their skirts behind any convenient fence, but some aspired to a better class of activity and required a safe and discreet place to bring their johns. There were parlor houses aplenty in London, but in working class Portsmouth there was a real need, and Countess Romanov managed to fill it. The sheep became a real feature of the place. Some of the ladies dressed up like Little Bo-Peep sometimes. One or two of the gents thought that was the most exciting thing ever. You never could tell what would excite nobs, Lilac learned.

  She might have ended her days in Portsmouth, thinking up new entertainments to titillate a better class of johns, except that in the autumn of 1851 Lilac took a trip to London on the brand-new Crystal Palace Railway to see the brand-new Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Built entirely of wrought iron and great sheets of glass it was. Eighth wonder of the world, folks said. Lilac was quite looking forward to visiting it and seeing the Great Exhibition it had been built to house. But she never got there, because as soon as she got off the train at the terminus on Stewarts Lane in Battersea she read about chloroform.

  In all the papers it was. How women could have painless childbirth by taking a few whiffs of this new gas and going to sleep, though some said that was against nature and no decent woman would consider such a thing. Some preacher had led a whole pack of protesters to object to the immorality of using chloroform to ease the agony of labor. “A parade of men from every walk of life,” the paper said. As far as Lilac was concerned, no man should have anything to say as to whether a woman—

  Good God Almighty. Painless surgery.

  Lilac hadn’t thought about painless surgery in years. Never heard a word about it in St. Petersburg. ’Course, she couldn’t read the papers there. And in Portsmouth, well, it was a backwater sort of place when it came to science.

  How much could she make if a woman could take a couple of breaths of something and go into such a sound sleep than she wouldn’t feel the lady needles? A bloody fortune, that’s how much. England was out of the question; didn’t want to lose the rest of her teeth, did she? That left New York.

  Addie Bellingham was in New York. And Mrs. Manon Turner. And Reverend Finney.

  Same question as before. When had Lilac Langton who’d been Francy Finders in Spitalfields and survived to be Countess Romanov today not been able to deal with the likes of them? Right now her job was to find out where in London she could buy some of this chloroform, then arrange to take it to New York. Because with it Countess Romanov could well and truly be the most popular abortionist in the city as well as the richest. Maybe as rich as Nicholas I, Tsar of all the Russias.

  It was thanks to New York’s doctors and their dislike of competition from persons they called irregulars that abortion after quickening, generally believed to be in the fourth month, had been made illegal in 1828. If after that time an abortion was required to save the mother’s life, two doctors must agree on the necessity for the procedure. That was the law, though throughout the 1830s no one paid it much attention. Indeed, there were those who argued that it was neither moral nor desirable for families to grow beyond their means, and that given how unreliable were most methods of birth control, abortion was a societal good.

  In the 1840s, however, a few years after Lilac Langton had left the city, a man by the name of George W. Dixon, owner of a weekly journal, appointed himself guardian of public morals. Dixon was not concerned with the health of the mother or the life of the fetus; his interest was in female virtue. If abortions were easily obtainable, Dixon said, women might commit adultery without fear of detection. Indeed, a man who thought he was marrying a virginal maiden might, because of birth control and abortion, have not “a medal of sure metal fresh from the mint, but a base lacquered counter that has undergone the sweaty contamination of a hundred palms.”

  Dixon said nothing about the adultery of the thousands upon thousands of New York men who supported the many, many hundreds of prostitutes who flourished in the town. He did, however, set out on a vendetta aimed to make an example of a woman calling herself Madame Restell. She did such a thriving business in birth control pills and abortions that she could not avoid coming to his notice.

  By Christmas 1851, when Lilac sailed into New York harbor on Mr. Collins’s luxurious, steam-driven ocean liner Atlantic, Madame Restell had been in prison twice.

  She was arrested the first time in 1841, when a man accused her of a botched abortion that killed his wife. After a few weeks in the Tombs she was tried for murder but convicted of only a minor infraction and went free to enjoy the added business brought on by the publicity. Six years later, after a trial witnessed by lawyers from all over the country and still more publicity, she was convicted of a misdemeanor and sentenced to a year in the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. Word was that her supporters—many powerful men who counted on being able to bring a young friend to Madame Restell when necessary—insured a comfortable incarceration.

  Given that it was the medical profession that pushed through the first antiabortion law, it surprised no one when the doctors continued to agitate for strict control of what was called female medicine. Particularly since in these modern times they had found lucrative specialties overseeing midwifery and the diseases of women and children. Feminists too, given their view of the laws that put women’s entire lives in the legal control of their husbands, were opposed to easy access to abortion. One of the burdens women were supposed to bear in silence was the unrestrained philandering of their husbands. That behavior was bound to be encouraged by quick and simple methods of avoiding the consequences. As for those New Evangelicals who still held such sway in the city, the ones who promoted the notion of domestic bliss and women as saintly homebodies who shed light and grace on the world from the sanctity of their decorous parlors, they supported the new notion of prosecuting not only the abortionists but also the women who sought their services. They did not, of course, suggest that the men who impregnated the women be held to any account.

  Those mothers-to-be, however, who either had no husband or had one who wasn’t around and who could therefore take no joy in the thought of birthing a child, had few options. There was in New York no lying-in hospital that would take in unmarried women. To be accepted at the New York Asylum for Lying-In Women on Orange Street close to Five Points you had to prove you were married and produce references saying you were respectable.

  There was not a single foundling home in the city. Only Bellevue would accept abandoned or deserted children, and it remained part of the almshouse. Infants too young for that institution’s orphanage were boarded with poor women, who were paid less than the amount actually necessary to support the child. According to the records, nearly ninety percent died, as many as a thousand babies a year.

  Lilac, or Countess Romanov as she preferred to be called, stepped off her luxury liner into this buzzing hornets’ n
est with only her wits, her bit of brass—a fair bit to be sure—and her chloroform. Never mind. She’d landed on her feet every time and she would again. And crikey, wasn’t the old town looking grand!

  One of the best places to get an eyeful of what had happened in New York since Lilac left fourteen years before was on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, from inside or outside the new Stewart’s Emporium. What Lilac liked best was to stand across the road and gaze up at the place. Five stories tall like his earlier store, this one was built entirely of white marble. The street-level facade had fifteen huge glass display windows separated by ornate cast-iron pillars, and inside everything was arranged around a great glass dome that allowed each floor to be flooded with daylight. Every aisle was wide enough to allow ladies in the new hoopskirts to walk without difficulty, and God Almighty, wasn’t Lilac glad to see those hoopskirts that had come over from Paris. It felt like being let out of prison not to carry the weight of four or five petticoats. But women wearing trousers like men, that was something else again.

  That bad idea started right here in America, and Lilac wasn’t surprised to learn the feminists were behind it. The outfits the papers called “bloomers” consisted of a dress that reached to just below the knee, with diaphanous pantaloons beneath. How were you going to wee in such a thing? In petticoats or a hoop, with proper crotchless pantaloons, you could lift your skirts, spread your legs, straddle whatever, and there you were. But in bloomers…make yourself all wet before you got the pantaloons down you would. All right for men with something they could pull out and aim, but women had needs of another sort. Lilac was not at all impressed by bloomers.

  Everything else on Broadway, however, she deemed simply splendid, especially now with the town done up for Christmas and particularly after dark when the gaslights came on and the whole of the avenue sparkled like fairyland as far as the eye could see. Let the Russians have St. Petersburg and the English have London. She might call herself Countess Romanov these days, but there was nothing and nowhere she’d ever seen that lifted her heart the way New York did. And to think she’d almost let herself forget the city of her dreams.

  Chapter Thirty

  ONE OF MEI Lin’s deepest desires—along with Baba no longer swallowing clouds, and at least one girl at the convent deciding to really be her friend—was that her mother and Ah Chee would become Catholics. Mei Lin worried constantly about the possibility that Mother Renault, who taught French, was correct when she insisted that not to be baptized a Catholic damned one to the eternal fires of hell. Mother Josephs, who taught religion, once came across Mei Lin weeping over this notion and had gone to great pains to explain about baptism of desire. All who earnestly wish to know and serve God, and worship Him in sincerity, may be saved by His mercy, my child. But Mei Lin was not sure that loophole was available when the worship, however sincere, entailed burning joss sticks to dozens of gods on dozens of different occasions, so that one way or another the rooms on the top floor of thirty-nine Cherry Street were always full of the smell of incense.

  It occurred to her that if Mamee and Ah Chee could see an entire city decorated in honor of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ they might have a better understanding of how He alone was the Savior. It was certainly worth a try. Particularly since that time Dr. Turner came to visit Baba he had insisted on giving her money when he left, and said she must buy herself something she’d like as a Christmas present.

  “I have arranged a tour of Broadway for you, Mamee. Ah Chee too.”

  “How I go on a tour of Broadway?” Mei-hua pointed to her golden lilies. “I look out the window, I never see a litter in this place. Not one. Not one.” Her tone in this most toneful of languages was one of scorn, but she could not keep the trace of longing from her voice. She was quite sure that at home in the Middle Kingdom even the most important supreme lady tai-tai went on tours sometimes. A tour would be exciting. “Who will carry me? Taste Bad and Leper Face and the others all too old. How? How?”

  “I have hired a carriage, Mamee. For the three of us. No one needs to carry it. No one. Pulled by horses.”

  Mei-hua remembered the other time she had been in a carriage pulled by a horse. “No good. Everyone can see. I look out the window, I see this horse-pull litter. Open. No good.”

  “It will be good, Mamee. Promise, promise. You are thinking of a buggy with open sides. No buggy. Closed-up carriage with curtains on the windows. You peek out, but no one see in. Promise.”

  Mei-hua did not open her mouth to answer because she was afraid “yes” words would come out when she knew they should be “no” words.

  Ah Chee, who had listened in silence to the whole conversation, spoke for the first time. “Very much true,” she said. “Closed-up litters pulled by horses. No see inside. Never. All over the town. True. True.”

  Mei-hua looked for a moment at her old servant and her young daughter. “Yes, go,” she said at last. “Go. Go.”

  Charles Tiffany and John Young started their stationery and dry-goods shop on Broadway in 1837. They survived the panic brought on by the post-fire inflation and soon enough saw the need to distinguish themselves from dozens of other shops exactly like their own. In the forties it became fashionable to buy imported goods from Tiffany & Young, luxuries such as English silver and Belgian crystal and gold jewelry and watches from Switzerland. In 1848, Mr. Tiffany acquired the jewels of a deposed French queen: tiaras and brooches and pendants and earrings such as New York had never seen went on display in his shop. Henceforth Tiffany was known as the King of Diamonds. Better still, when a gentleman bought an expensive trinket for his wife or his sweetheart, the excitement began as soon as she saw the package, always wrapped in a distinctive shade of blue. Mr. Tiffany, it seemed, had caught the temper of the times.

  Soon at least some of the spectacular jewelry he sold was made in his own workroom and displayed not just inside his shop but in a window facing the street. During the holiday season of 1851 Tiffany’s window featured the crown August Belmont had commissioned for his young wife, Commodore Perry’s daughter Caroline, to wear to the opera. It was made of finely worked gold and decorated with emerald and ruby flowers hung with diamond dewdrops. Crowds lined up to gawk, and two coppers armed with billies stood either side of the window lest anyone seriously consider a smash and grab assault.

  Peeping from the curtained window of her carriage, Mei-hua spied the throng that was crowding the sidewalk for a full block. “All those people, what they look at? What? What?”

  “Jewels, Mamee.” Mei Lin tapped on the window separating them from the driver of the hansom cab, who was seated high and in the rear. There was a little flap she could push open so he could hear her, and she asked if he could get closer to the display.

  “Not much closer than this, miss. But I can stay where I am for a bit if you and the others want to get out and have a look at the baubles.”

  Mei Lin looked at her mother pressing her face to the slit in the window curtains while Ah Chee struggled to see over her shoulder. “We get out here,” she said. “A short while only. Just to see.”

  At first Mei-hua protested, but when her daughter hopped onto the pavement and lifted her mother out of the carriage, Mei-hua could not bring herself to seriously resist. “Down, down,” she whispered urgently when it seemed Mei Lin might be going to carry her all the way to the window into which everyone was looking. “Down. I am supreme lady. Must have dignity.”

  Mei Lin dutifully set her mother on her own feet and turned to help Ah Chee, who had joined them. “What you think, this old woman can’t walk, see what’s there? Need help from little bud was shitting her pants yesterday only? Not need. Not need.”

  So the three women approached the line, each under her own power. Mei Lin wore the winter uniform of the students of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a regulation bonnet and gray wool cloak over a gray dress; she might have been any respectable young woman out to enjoy what everyone these days called window shopping. Ah Chee wore a g
ray quilted tunic and long trousers and of course her conical straw bonnet tied under her chin with a sturdy piece of hemp. Mei-hua was resplendent in a short jacket that was a variation of the longer robe, the lung p’ao. This one was made from a length of silk her lord had given her when their daughter was born. It was scarlet shot with gold thread, and she paired it with a long, slim red satin skirt that was slit knee high on either side so she could totter with more comfort on her beautiful golden lilies, which were on this special occasion wrapped in satin ribbons of red and gold and black. Ribbons of the same color were twisted into her upswept hair along with the jeweled butterfly that was one of her favorite ornaments, and she carried a red and gold and black fan, though it was winter and the fan was more for show than for necessity. Never mind.

  One by one the people waiting to get their chance to gaze at Mrs. Belmont’s golden crown turned to look at this still more extraordinary sight. Mei Lin realized what a bad idea it had been to get out of the carriage and tried to whisper into her mother’s ear that they should return, but Mei-hua was now taking mincing little steps along an open path created by the fact that acting as one, the crowd had fallen back to permit her to pass.

  Mei-hua made her way along this pathway slowly, smiling and nodding, accepting the supreme first lady tai-tai’s due. She was aware that some of the stares of the big uglies either side of her were not friendly. Never mind. Her lord was the ruler of the kingdom. One of the rulers at least. She had come to accept that this was a very big foreign devil place and it was likely that the Lord Samuel did not rule it all. Still, she was a princess and supreme first lady tai-tai, and that’s why the big uglies were hard watching, as if maybe their eyes would fall out of their heads.

  She reached the window and looked for a brief time at the jeweled crown sitting on a black velvet cushion with two gaslights either side. “Nice. Nice,” she said, when she had looked as long as she felt she must. “Now we go back inside the horse-pull litter.” With this she turned and began walking back to the carriage.