Forever

by Pete Hamill

  Sales of all newspapers fell as their rich readers departed and the illiterate immigrants were left behind. Advertising ceased, for few shops were open. The South Street waterfront was deserted, the streets empty day and night, crews and captains refusing to enter the infected port. There were theories for a few days in the Evening Post about diet being the cause of the deaths. But meat-eaters died in the same streets as vegetarians. Cranks who ate only nuts and grains (while chanting Iroquois prayers) fell as if axed. A week later, the drastic New York weather was blamed. But they died on dry days and damp, in the hammering heat of noon and at the black midnight hour, calling at all hours for water, cold water. The poor died most of all, but so did the favorite daughter of John Jacob Astor in flight to Europe. Shit collectors died and so did insurance peddlers. Some of the infected grew mad after the first symptoms struck and lurched into the streets and reached for strangers to give them the infection, as if insisting they would not go alone on the swift journey to Heaven or Hell. There were many brave doctors who obeyed their oaths, but even they were hampered by much ignorance and not enough hospitals. The cholera is, said one, and that is all we know. New York Hospital slammed its doors to the dying and the new Bellevue, a combination of hospital and almshouse, was transformed into a vast filthy limbo. Nurses died. Doctors died. Too many churches slammed shut their doors too, the clergymen bolting them before departing. Policemen were assigned to the abandoned churches and the empty houses of the rich to prevent looting, but soon they too were gone, fleeing the city or buried in its crowded trenches.

  As he had been in the yellow fever epidemics, Cormac discovered he was immune. An immunity to yellow fever could be traced to African blood, to Kongo. Cholera was another matter. But as he roamed among the dead and dying, gathering facts that were written with haste and anger on foolscap but never appeared in the newspaper, or trying to comfort the afflicted with useless words, part of him longed to be taken by the cholera. If this was life, he did not want it. Until that summer, he had never thought such things. Now they came to him almost every day. Life, in this season, was about shit and death.

  To keep from thinking, he wrote many stories for the Evening Post while Bryant and his most favored editor, William Leggett, gathered their families together across the Hudson in Hoboken and found shelter from the storm. At last, some stories made their way into the newspaper. Stories about water and corruption. Stories that told people where to go for help but offered no easy hope. Cormac hoped that a person who could read would tell ten persons who could not. He hoped thousands would demand water.

  Cormac was ignorant of the causes of the cholera but knew that it wasn’t the Irish (blamed as the Jews were blamed for the Black Death) and knew it wasn’t something as vague as the miasma. Whatever it was, science would discover the cause. He was convinced that the cure would come from water, cold water.

  Finally it ended. After nine terrifying weeks. And three thousand five hundred and twenty-six known deaths. The rich slowly returned, sending in their African or Irish servants as the advance patrols, like canaries into a coal mine. Bryant and Leggett returned too, and Cormac urged them to start a crusade in the Evening Post, demanding that the city obtain a big, strong, muscular supply of clean water. They nodded, they listened, they thanked him, they published a few polite editorials.

  New York got no clean water.

  The miasma returned with the people.

  The cholera returned in 1833.

  Shit and filth got worse.

  The cholera returned in 1834.

  All that dying passed through him again as he went home after sundown on his birthday, September 9, 1834. The flat was an oven. He opened the windows, removed his tie and shirt, pulled off his shoes. He sat in a chair, very still, gazing at his books and paintings, at the pots of color and the clean brushes. But his skin was crawling. The room filled with the stink of his feet and his armpits and his balls. He scratched at his skin, which felt as if millions of insects were crawling under the surface. He scratched at his hair. He dipped a cloth into the bowl of water and scrubbed his armpits, feet, and balls. The stench did not leave.

  He heard a window breaking somewhere in the night and the barking of dogs and a woman wailing. Tomorrow’s murder. Dubious Jones had named herself, said Inspector Ford in time for the morning edition. Her true name was Mildred Vandeventer, and she was from Rochester. She was nineteen and had been a whore for four years. She was killed by a man named Collins, from Philadelphia, who went back to his boardinghouse on Pearl Street, wrote a note saying how much he loved her, and then hanged himself. Case closed.

  But Cormac told himself, There’s no such thing as a closed case. Who will bury Dubious Jones? Why did she choose the name? And when they bury her as Mildred Vandeventer, who will tell her family how she died, and how she lived? She and Collins will be together forever now in the democracy of Potter’s Field. And at least they’re free of the miasma.

  He was not.

  He scratched and shook and rubbed his back against the wall. His body hair felt as if it were growing inward, follicles fed by the fertilizer of the shit-stained air. He pulled at the curtains. He yanked his hair. Then he dressed again and went into the night. Near Broadway he saw a woman come out of tavern with a basket of wilting geraniums. He bought four of them and a length of string and tied them to his face, the petals tight against his nose.

  He walked toward the water, hoping for a breeze, one fresh zephyr of air. But then the smell of shit overwhelmed the flowers. He began to weep. He imagined leaping into the river and swimming away. An act of suicide. Motive: shit.

  And instead turned right into Duane Street. His eyes searched the rooftops, looking for a water tower. There, he said. There. Up there. On the roof of the bordello near Chapel Street. There.

  74.

  She greeted him at the front door.

  “Do come in,” she said. “I’m the Countess de Chardon.”

  “Cormac O’Connor,” he said.

  “I’ve seen you in town,” she said, “but never, alas, in this place.”

  She was dressed as if married to one of the richest merchants in the city, with a swelling high-necked bodice that suggested (but did not display) full breasts, her waist impossibly tightened, and a dark maroon crescent-shaped bustle that rose airily behind her when she moved, hinting at layered crinolines and plump hidden cheeks and thighs. Her lustrous brown hair was piled in plaited coils held tight with a bone tiara. Diamond earrings glittered in her ears, matched by a diamond ring on each finger. Her skin was tawny in the shifting light of oil lamps, her cheeks lightly rouged, her full lips painted a muted crimson. They exchanged platitudes in French, hers polished, his as crude as any self-taught language. She closed the door behind him. She was certainly no ordinary madam of a bawdy house.

  “Do have a drink, monsieur,” she said, reverting to English to help Cormac out of his clumsy French. As he passed, she gave off a scent of lavender. He told her he didn’t drink. She smiled in relief. She said she had a perfect young woman for him, just recently arrived only months before from the upstate town of Waterloo, and she made a small joke about the fate of Napoleon. “Do not,” she said, “be too daring.”

  Cormac paused, and then said he’d much prefer a bath to anything else.

  “Yes, it’s been a smothering day,” she said. “I’ll arrange a bath. Can you wait for…”

  “I’ve learned to wait for everything,” he said.

  She led him to a sitting room where mustached businessmen sat with some of the nine women who worked in the nine upstairs rooms. One young woman played Mozart badly on a stand-up piano. Gilt-framed paintings of ruined castles and the Roman Colosseum adorned the pale papered walls. The lights were muted here too. The men made bad jokes. The women giggled. Cormac sipped water. The countess returned and motioned with her head for him to follow her.

  She led him up a back stairway to her suite on the top floor. The music ended when she closed the perfectly carpenter
ed door, and Cormac relaxed. Thick drapes warded off the city, and the smell of shit was replaced by the scent of lavender. The main room of the suite was dominated by a four-poster bed, high off the floor, covered in bridal white, trimmed with purple, and plump with silken cushions. The walls were covered with patterned red plush. The countess pointed out three small landscapes by Asher B. Durand, who was the best American painter so far, she said, and would surely produce even more impressive work. “He needs to paint some human beings,” she said. “If he can.” A tall glass-fronted bookcase was crammed with books in democratic disarray, the sign of a true reader. She was enthusiastic about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (“Only a woman could have written such a book”) and was reading George Sand’s Indiana, which had arrived from France just before the epidemic struck. She loved Boccaccio too, she said, opening the case to bring out a worn volume in French, delighted that Cormac could name four of the seven traveling women: Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, and Emilia.

  “They all work here,” she said in an excited voice, “or at least that is what I’ve named them. For everybody in New York must have a public name that is not their own. I’m waiting for the remaining three to arrive on my doorstep, women of the life who can also tell tales: Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa.”

  As she riffled the pages of the book, Cormac noticed that the nails on her slim fingers were long and painted white. Except for the nail on her right forefinger. That nail was severely trimmed.

  She casually opened a side door, and in the light of a candle he saw the bathtub. Seven feet long, up on golden lion’s feet, with a drain leading somewhere, and a tap that she explained was attached to an immense tank on the roof. The tub was porcelain, the taps and soap dish gold.

  “Would you like your bath now?” she said.

  “Yes. I’d like that very much.”

  She smiled in an enigmatic way and then pulled a cord. A tall white-haired African man came in and she told him to prepare coffee and the bath. He nodded and slipped away. The countess and Cormac sat near a bay window in facing chairs, and when she heard that he was a newspaperman, a journalist, she asked what he thought about Lord Byron and Coleridge and her own favorite, Shelley, whose death was such an abomination. He gave glib answers. The African came in with coffee on a silver plate and then retreated to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. She asked Cormac about William Cullen Bryant.

  “His poetry is dreadful, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have one of his books here,” she said, shaking her head slowly. And then laughed out loud and squeezed his hand.

  “Let’s wash him out of our hair,” she murmured.

  And led him to the bath. The clear, scented water was heated elsewhere and kept hot by a tray of coals beneath the steel-bottomed porcelain tub. The countess opened his shirt. He opened her bodice, with its eyelets and hooks. She then backed away while he completed his undressing. He hung his trousers on a peg. Then she was back, wearing a thin white gown.

  “Get in,” she said.

  He slipped into the healing water. The gown fell. She stepped in behind him, uttering a small squeal at the hot water, then squatted and wrapped her hands around his chest. Fingers caressed the ridge of dead flesh on his shoulder.

  “I love a man with a scar,” she said. “He’s lived at least some small life.”

  In the months that followed, the bath was always the prelude. By day, he worked at the Evening Post. He went home now to the Countess de Chardon, where he lived in a small room down the hall from her suite. She had insisted that he give up his flat, and the promise of water and the scent of lavender convinced him she was right. He paid off his rent and arrived back on Duane Street with his books and clothes and the traveling bag filled with his father’s letter, his mother’s earrings, and the sword.

  “You’re a perfect companion,” she said one morning, with a flicker of irony on her face and a taste of France in her accent. “Busy and quiet. Literate, funny, strange, and free of disease. You’re what I need and I hope I’m what you need too.”

  “You’ll never know how much I need you,” he said, trying to match the lightness of her tone.

  “For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t tell me.”

  He certainly didn’t tell the countess that at first he thought of her as an escape. In her company, or alone in his room on the top floor, he escaped the miasma. His flesh had revived with water and the aroma of soap and lavender, and so he also escaped into her body. As he savored her ironies, her private codes, he also understood that with the Countess de Chardon he would be free of any delusion of domesticity. He suspected that she knew what he was thinking, and accepted it, even welcomed it. They just never spoke about the details.

  “Human beings want to know too much about each other,” she said. “And that’s why there are so many lies.”

  She did tell him some of her own story. She was then thirty-two years old. Or so she said. She was born in Port-au-Prince and was a creole refugee from the uprising on Hispaniola that had driven so many of her class to the United States. Or so she said. If her tale was true, she must have come from the side of the island called Haiti, ruled for so long by the French. But Cormac didn’t know if any part of the Chardon story was true. And it didn’t matter. Many people came to New York with a script, one that allowed them to begin again, to be other than the unhappy persons they’d been in the places they’d left behind. In his own way, Cormac himself was one of them. But Cormac did sense that the countess had seen much horror. Only those who had lived with appalling horror could fully understand the consolations of living flesh. And she did speak excellent French.

  When she first saw him unpack his drawings, she was joyful. At Christmas, she bought him a new easel, brushes, paint, and paper. And so that he would not feel like a kept man, she commissioned him to do some drawings that she would use as decoration in the nine rooms of her nine young women. These were nine views of her own vulva, and one view each of the vulvae of the other women. They were drawn in black and red chalk in a Renaissance style on tinted paper and designed in such a way that a casual viewer would not instantly recognize the subjects. They could have been flowers. The countess posed gladly, her knees drawn up, her rosy buttocks high on silken cushions. She had Cormac draw her before the bath and after, before sex and later. The first four drawings were framed by her dark brown silky pubic hair. Then she shaved off all of her hair, and the final five were as bald and naked as drawings of fruit or orchids. Once she was overcome by the sound of chalk on paper and could wait no longer and reached deliriously for the focus of his attention.

  The other women were not so enthusiastic about the project but did what the countess ordered, and in the closed space of his studio room often lost their reluctance. Pampinea was universally plump. Fiammetta was shy and lean, lying back with her eyes closed, and kept asking Cormac to tell her it was pretty. Filomena was ashamed of her thick beardlike hair and squirmed to hide it from his sight. Emilia was a large girl with a small buried vulva and an almost invisible button. It always hurts, she whispered. Every man hurts me. Every one of them. In Cormac’s drawing, her lips seemed to whimper. All stared at the finished drawings as if trying to understand something about themselves.

  For Cormac, those were the months when there was no water anywhere in New York except in that house, the secret garden of the Countess de Chardon. And water became part of life itself. It was prelude. It was culmination. It was a reward for concentrated work. Or it made work possible. Clear, warm water was a source of entertainment and luxury and sex. In a way, Cormac told himself, I’m a kind of novel for the countess, as she is for me, and water is the connecting device of the tale. The heat departed in cool October, and then, shuddering with winter cold, they would leave the bath and dry themselves and then lie upon the vast white bed. She was lover, mother, teacher.

  She taught him, among other things, the joy of fasting. She would stop all sexual play on a certain date and remain aloofly ce
libate for ten days or two weeks. She would let her desire build slowly, deny it, welcome it, deny it again, until there was some enormous need that always started in her imagination, in some dark cave of denial. He matched her fasting and then erupted with her in a shared paroxysm of flesh and water.

  She never once used the word love and said nothing about the two of them forging a private pact. He didn’t even sleep with her through the nights. “Nothing,” she said, “is more horrible than seeing each other after a night of sleep.” She didn’t have any form of conventional jealousy, certainly not about the flesh. And definitely not his flesh. As long as they began each evening with the bath, just she and Cormac, she didn’t even mind if he made love to the other women. It was simply understood, without being said, that he would not develop any emotions for them beyond the simple needs of the flesh. And shared talk. And the details of food and books and music.

  “You’re always humming tunes,” she said. “You should learn to play an instrument.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the piano. We have one downstairs, you know.”

  He laughed. “If I play it, the customers will revolt, and so will you.”

  “The rooms are sealed,” she said. “There’s no one here until the lunch hour. And nobody can hear if you close the door.”

  “And who would teach me?” “I would,” she said.

  And so she began teaching him the fundamentals, explaining the keys and the correct position of his hands, and then scales and the mysterious notations of music sheets. You need three fingers to make a chord, she said. Your fingers have specific targets, she said, those keys, and you must hit the keys cleanly. He kept hitting between keys, clanging them too hard, and she cried out in mock horror, laughed, and made him try again. She explained about flats and sharps, and how chords were major, minor, or dominant. She showed him the language of music too, and he realized that he had first heard Irish and Yoruba and French as sounds without meaning and then slowly broken them down into individual words, which were here called notes. He told himself that music was a language like any other, and he would learn it.