by Pete Hamill
“Time is everything in music,” she said, demonstrating with a booted foot the way to maintain tempo.
“In life too.”
“Please, cheri, it’s too early for philosophy.”
The tempo of his days was also shifting. He could not always appear beside her at the piano at eleven in the morning. His duties to the Evening Post often had him running from one event to another, and the work had greater urgency now because a Scotsman named James Gordon Bennett was bringing something new to the newspaper trade. He had founded the Herald and, after some false starts, was beginning to find readers. He published the sort of details that Cormac put in his notes and failed to get into the Evening Post. Instead of burying tales of mayhem and horror in the back of the paper, Bennett put them on the front page, which all other journals devoted to advertising. He used crude woodcuts as illustrations. He broke the neutral tone of the writing. As his sales increased, particularly after his accounts of the murder of a prostitute named Helen Jewett, the other editors dismissed him as a cheap vulgarian. But the Evening Post was now selling eight thousand copies each day, delivered to the desks of businessmen, while Bennett was selling thirty-five thousand, peddled on the streets by boys. The Evening Post began to run more tales of murders than before, discreetly, of course, and still buried in the rear of the newspaper. That meant more work for Cormac O’Connor. He moved around the town with a mask pulled across his lower face to reduce the miasma, checking with policemen and lowlifes for stories, humming the tunes that he was taught by the Countess de Chardon.
On slow days, or Sunday mornings, he sat beside her on the piano bench and ran his fingers over the keys, savoring each chord, astonished at the way music brought something from deep inside him. A choppy Celtic anger. A longing for a world already lost.
“You have very good hands,” she said one morning. “But then I already knew that.”
“They’re not good enough for music,” he said.
“They will be.”
She showed him what to do with her own long-fingered hands, telling him to watch the way those fingers moved. Sometimes she lost herself in the music, doing a concert for an audience of one, her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly backward, listening as if the rest of the world were a vast silence. Her music was lyrical and romantic, and he saw her as a girl in some stately white mansion in Port-au-Prince, alone in a vast room, or with some French exile serving as her musical overseer. In his imagination, her instructor looked like the dancing master from John Hughson’s tavern, small, a dandy, and then he wondered: Where did the dancing master go? Where did all of those people go who were in my life for a month or a year and then moved off the stage?
And so music merged with water as he meshed more closely with the Countess de Chardon. A set of rules was being formed between them, unwritten, unposted, but part of their shared time. He understood, as he painted the women of the house in his studio down the hall, that he might finish the night with a token of mutual gratitude. With shrugs, or phrases, the countess encouraged it, for she insisted that jealousy of the flesh was an absurd form of human weakness.
“Jealousy kills,” she said. “It kills love. It kills people. You know that. You see the results at least once a week in your job. The cemeteries are filled with people who thought jealousy was love.”
“But it’s there; it’s part of human nature.”
“No, it’s part of the idea of property. Read Mary Shelley, Cormac. I mean, truly read her. Men think women are their personal property. When women decide that they own their own bodies and will use them as they please, men kill them.”
“Women kill men too,” he said. “Jealous women.”
“To protect themselves. To kill before they are killed. They don’t really care if men go off with other women, as long as they come home, as long as they don’t pick up a disease and carry it into their beds and their bodies. I know. I see certain men here all the time, and then see them with their wives going down to Trinity or St. Paul’s on Sunday mornings. Then I see a notice in a newspaper that poor Missus So-and-so has died after a long illness, and I know she’s died from what he brought home. Not from this place, because I have the doctor to check each woman every week. But from a hundred dives on South Street. My point is simple: More women are murdered by men’s pricks than by gunshots, Cormac.”
“Can I quote you in the Post?” he said, and laughed.
“You can translate me into Latin and chisel it over the courthouse door.”
She implied that when he was alone while she traveled to Philadelphia or Boston on business, she would not care if he sampled the other women of the house. They were there for many men, even Cormac. He was entitled to small pleasures, and so was she.
“I just don’t want your personal report,” she said. “I don’t want you to tell me that Fiammetta is wonderful. If she is, I want to be there myself, with the two of you.” She smiled. “The only way to prevent jealousy is to share one’s flesh. To be generous. To break down the notion of permanent ownership.”
“I don’t want to know what you might do in Philadelphia or Boston, either.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “But I won’t do anything. That’s not a promise to you. That’s a promise to me.”
Together, they often engaged in what the countess called “research.” The suite and the bed and the bath were all part of the laboratory. She wanted to do with her body (and Cormac’s) everything she could imagine as a woman. She guided him on some nights the way she guided him at the piano. There were chords in bed too, and solos, and glissandos. She tried to do things so impossible they both fell laughing into uselessness. But some worked. And then, as a businesswoman, she would offer such services, after the proper training of her young ladies, to all of the customers. Every house in New York had its specialties, and she wanted to keep changing the menu in hers.
“Think of this place as a restaurant,” she said one midnight, after dining with Cormac in the suite. “We have to satisfy certain… basic appetites. Every house must have a fat woman, of course. Every house must have a negress. Every house must have its ugly woman. And its girl dressed as a nun. The menu must contain the basics.” She laughed. “Livened up, of course, with a few… specialties.”
Some of her competitors had their own restricted menus. In one house, the customers would not be admitted if they were older than eighteen, a shameless play for the Columbia College trade. The older women, said the countess, loved working there, in spite of the low wages. Another house provided a silk-lined coffin for necrophiliac men. A dozen catered to those who wanted lashings. We can’t offer everything here, said the Countess de Chardon. But we can give them the odd surprise. Variety was good for business, and all these bored men, bored with wives, bored with life, needed those surprises. But there was a personal motive too for her own experiments. “I don’t want to die without trying everything, at least once,” she whispered to Cormac one night. “I don’t know anything about the soul, but I want to know everything about flesh. Everything that I can possibly know. To see it. To feel it. To do it. For I could die tomorrow.”
So Cormac realized that he was also living with a woman who knew something about mortality. In a room on the top floor of a building on Duane Street. The palace of water and flesh and music.
One Tuesday morning, she moved a new piano into the suite, and across the long evenings, while the countess mingled with the customers, flirting, teasing, confiding, Cormac played. He learned to read music without much of a struggle; it was, as he’d thought, another language, and if he could think in Yoruba and Irish, if he could teach himself French, if he could decode Latin, then these notations, which were a kind of drawing too, did not intimidate him. Execution was another matter. Sometimes his hands felt encased in wool. He hit the wrong keys, smashed chords, lost the tempo. And started over.
On some solitary nights, he ignored the music sheets and allowed his hands to drift, to caress each key, to discover music he had never
heard and could not imagine. It was as if he were bringing forth some hidden spirit from the secret caves within the piano, revealing its desperate yearning for pleasure. He could feel Ireland in the music. And Africa. And the ocean sea.
On other nights, he felt music as a form of landscape, with rolling hills and a placid river and trees with rustling leaves. He could feel it in his painter’s hands, which were not yet the hands of a musician. The terrain was not made of earth, or paint, but sound. He would try to find paths through the hills of sound, he would try to find a way to the river. He always failed. His hands were too crude. The paths were not marked. Then he would try again. He did not feel frustrated. Frustration, after all, was an impatience with the ticking of clocks. He had all the time in the world.
On some nights in early spring, after their bath, the countess would sit naked at the piano, commanding him to lie on the bed. Teaching him had brought back the passion she felt, long ago, for music. Or so she said. A passion she’d erased through an act of will. Now it rose from her again, like a ghost. Here is Vivaldi, she said. Here is Scarlatti. Here is something without a composer. Here is France. Here is Haiti. She would play then as if the notes were licking his flesh and entering his body. The music of such nights always made him hard.
The countess was one of his best sources. She knew stockbrokers and real estate speculators, police spies and politicians. She knew who was planning the newest financial scheme that would reward those who knew before others did. She sometimes invested her own money and made even more than the men in the know. She knew too which marriages were disasters, which rich young men were bound for personal calamities. She discreetly fed private information to Cormac, who put some of it in the newspaper and held some of it for himself. She knew, above all, how New York worked.
“Nothing is as it seems,” she said. “Not here and not in France. Not anywhere. And everything is driven by money. The thing you must do is find out what is truly happening, not what seems to be happening. Understand the lie, and you’ll see the truth. Start off by believing that everything is a lie.”
She paused. “The God story is a lie, told by archbishops to enrich themselves. Democracy is a lie. The police are a lie.”
“And us?”
“We’re a lie too,” she said with a smile. “A good lie.”
75.
Cormac didn’t hear them come in. It was after midnight on a frigid January night, and he was putting final touches on a somber portrait of a woman named Millicent. She was from Poughkeepsie and the other women called her Millie the Weeper. She cried the way other people laughed. That was her specialty. She cried when she heard a sad song. She cried reading a sad tale in the newspaper. She cried when the weather was beautiful and cried when the weather was ugly. If a customer performed with unusual vigor, she wept torrents. If a customer failed to perform at all, she wept as if the apocalypse were due in an hour.
On this night, she was off in her own room, and Cormac was alone, adding highlights to her painted raw sienna hair, humming Scarlatti. Then he heard a door slam down below. Then voices raised. Then something shattering. He went to the landing and looked down.
Three men wearing rough cloth caps were confronting the countess. One growling voice came up the stairwell.
“We’ll close ye down, ye bloody whore, if you don’t do what we say.”
“Get out of here now,” she shouted back. “Go now, and I’ll do nothing. Stay, and keep this up, and there’ll be hell to pay.”
The heaviest man, his face still hidden to Cormac’s view, shoved her hard against a banister.
Cormac went into his room and took the sword off its hook on the wall. Then he moved silently down the stairs.
“It’s a hundred a month,” the big man was saying. “If you don’t pay the hundred, we’ll close ye shut.”
Cormac saw him clearly now. Most reporters were coming to know him. Hughie Mulligan from the Five Points. One of the gang of young men called the Dead Rabbits. As a reporter, Cormac had witnessed him a year ago, standing before a judge in the courthouse, charged with gouging a man’s eyes out in a brawl. His mother sat weeping without conviction. “My son, my son,” she moaned, “my poor wee boy.” But the judge was fixed and Hughie Mulligan walked free, while his fellow Dead Rabbits cheered.
His face was veined and red now, his eyes glittery with danger, his arms hanging from his shoulders as if prepared to punch. Two others, smaller and younger, stood behind him. Most of the women were on the stairs, peering down, while the night’s last customers huddled in the rooms. Mulligan glanced at Cormac as he came down the final flight of stairs. And saw the sword.
“Look, lads, this poof’s got him a sword.”
The two smaller men grinned and each drew a new English-style revolver, made to fire five bullets without reloading. The countess backed up, eyes wide. The women on the staircase made a sighing sound. Millie the Weeper was weeping.
“You’re in the wrong house, aren’t you, Hughie?” Cormac said. “If you want a woman, you should be at thirteen Baxter Street, isn’t that the case, Hughie?” He smiled and moved around, turning his shoulder toward the three men to make himself a smaller target. “That is where your mother lives, isn’t it?”
Mulligan howled Youdirtybastardofawhoringponce and charged, and Cormac turned into the charge and put the tip of the sword under the larger man’s chin. Everything stopped. Mulligan seemed to stop breathing.
“Oh, poor Hughie Mulligan!” Cormac said. “What’s that red stuff coming from your neck?”
Mulligan’s face went pale. He started moving a hand to his neck, and Cormac jabbed with the tip of the sword and then blood actually did trickle down the man’s neck.
“Now, tell these two midgets of yours to hand those pistols to the countess. If you don’t, this sword will come out the back of your fucking head.”
Mulligan made a gesture with his hands, directing the two smaller men to hand over the guns.
“Hold the barrel with your thumb and forefinger, boys. You know which fingers they are? That’s it. Nice and easy, now. Real dainty-like.”
The countess took the guns, gazing at them with a curious respect.
“Countess, you can now shoot these three idiots for breaking into your establishment.”
“What a marvelous idea,” she said. “Look what they’ve done. Those three vases are worth, oh, a hundred dollars. And the door…” She shouted up the stairs. “Ladies, you saw what happened, didn’t you?”
A chorus of yeses.
“Should I shoot them?”
The words came rolling down from above: Right now, of course, between the eyes, why not?
Cormac took the tip of the sword away from Mulligan’s chin, and the big man swiped at his neck and saw blood on his finger-tips. His nostrils widened in rage.
“You’ve got some nerve,” he said.
Cormac laughed out loud.
“You come in here to break the place up and try to extort money, and we’ve got some nerve?”
“You’re foolin’ wit’ the wrong people.”
“In that case, we should kill you. To make sure you never come back.”
Mulligan turned as if to leave, then charged. He shoved Cormac against the banister of the stairwell, and Cormac fell, rolled, came up with the sword in both hands, and put its point against Mulligan’s heart.
“That was stupid.”
He turned to the countess, who was holding both revolvers. He nodded. She aimed.
“Take off your shoes,” Cormac said to Mulligan. Then turned to the other two. “And you two idiots: shoes, jackets, and trousers.”
The two smaller men were alarmed. They looked at Mulligan’s back, at Cormac, and the guns in the hands of the countess. They started undressing.
“You too, big boy,” Cormac said to Mulligan.
“I’ll not do that.”
“Let me help.”
He sliced Mulligan’s belt and the man’s trousers fell. He wasn’t wearing dr
awers. From the stairs came giggles and titters and one woman’s loud sob.
“The rest,” Cormac said.
Within minutes, all three men were naked, using hands to cover themselves, and the chorus on the stairs erupted in applause. Even the countess was grinning.
“Now go home.”
“It’s ten bloody degrees out there!” one of the younger men said. His teeth were already clacking.
“If you run hard, you’ll be warm enough, boys.”
They went out, and Cormac saw that it was snowing.
The next afternoon, with a foot of snow upon the ground, a mob showed up at the door of the brothel of the Countess de Chardon. It was led by clergymen, who declared themselves firmly against sin. One Methodist, one Anglican, one Presbyterian. They prayed. They hurled anathemas. They chanted. They sang. A few policemen watched carefully but did nothing. There were no laws against prostitution, since, as the countess observed, the laws were written by men. The age of consent in New York was ten. Watching with the countess from a high window, Cormac saw Hughie Mulligan and a dozen other Dead Rabbits on the edge of the crowd.
“I hope I haven’t caused more trouble than it’s worth,” he said.
“It was worth it,” she said, and giggled.
“What will you do?”
“Pay a few visits.”
While the mob still chanted, the countess slipped out the back door, dressed warmly against the cold. When she returned three hours later, the mob was gone.
“They won’t be back,” she said.
