Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  Besides his own suit in federal court, the sisters were being sued for libel by the gentleman Claflin claimed had deflowered a virgin at the French Ball. It was disgusting that any woman could write about such a thing, using words to describe the sexual act as if giving a recipe for roast turkey. At such moments he thought about his Maggie and his precious little daughter Adele and resolved that he would forever stand between them and such filth. Oh, he had the evil sisters, no doubt about it. No doubt at all. They were going to spend a long time in prison.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ALETTER CAME THAT SAID Freydeh’s older sister Sara and family were taking a ship out of Leipzig—a recently instituted run to New York—well in time for Freydeh to meet them. She and Kezia scrubbed the three small rooms to make them as clean as they could, while Sammy hauled water up again and again. She sent Sammy out to the markets to buy pallets to put down on the floor. The day before the ship was to arrive, Sammy checked with the shipping office to make sure the ship was on schedule, for the weather had been rough and Freydeh was worried. Ships had been known to go down. It was cold already, and there had been driving rain. No snow yet, but some mornings ice crusted the mud in the street and icicles hung from the cornice past their window. This day had dawned cold but clear with a pale blue sky showing between buildings. The air smelled more of coal and less of sewage. Freydeh could scarcely choke down a bit of stale bread dipped in tea. Lately she had been drinking coffee sometimes—Sammy had taught her the habit—but this morning she was too nervous. She had not seen Sara for ten years. She inspected Sammy’s cleanliness, then scrubbed Kezia until she cried that her skin was rubbing off. They put on their nicest clothes.

  They arrived way too early and waited and waited. Freydeh had made sure they all wore warm clothing now that they could afford it—secondhand, but not fifth-hand, not worn out already. Kezia was bundled up so she looked like a fat dumpling, although she was still a thin child—not nearly as thin as she had been when Freydeh found her, but thinner than she ought to be. They bought hot corn and roasted chestnuts from vendors to nibble while they waited. On such a chilly morning, few strolled the paths of the park in front of Castle Garden and no one sat on the benches except a homeless man who might have been sleeping and might have been dead. Kezia ran off to watch a boat that was docking. Freydeh chased her and dragged her back, keeping hold of her hand. Today she wasn’t going to lose anybody.

  At last passengers from Sara’s boat began to spill out of Castle Garden. Freydeh, Sammy and Kezia pushed up close to the doors so that her sister and family could not be swept away by hawkers from boardinghouses, men seeking cheap day labor, brothel keepers—who swarmed the immigrants as they straggled through the high formidable doors of the port of entry. It seemed to Freydeh that several hundred bedraggled travelers passed her and still no one looked like her sister. Had she missed Sara? Asher she had never known well. She remembered him as religious, austere. She began to sweat, a cold sheen of fear under her dress. Finally she recognized Sara, her face more lined but sweet as ever, her dark eyes searching the crowd. Freydeh began to yell. The brother-in-law Asher was gripping a boy by the hand tightly while a little girl hung on Sara’s black skirt. Sara carried a large bundle and so did Asher, a short stocky man, although thinner than she remembered him, with a great bushy beard and payess. The older girl, Debra, a toddler when Freydeh left, had a pack tied to her back and dragged a basket.

  “Shvester, shvester!” Freydeh cried at the top of her lungs.

  Sara’s face changed, breaking open. “I was so afraid,” she said in Yiddish, “after what happened with Shaineh, that you wouldn’t meet us.”

  “So these are your children?”

  “Chaim, Feygeleh and Debra—my oldest.” She motioned Debra forward, who gave a shrug of a curtsy, eyes cast down.

  “This is Samuel and this is Kezia.” Sammy held out his hand to shake while Kezia stuck her thumb in her mouth, as she did when she was nervous or fearful.

  Asher and Sara were staring at Sammy and Kezia, then at her, then at them again. She could tell what they were thinking: Sammy was too old to be her son by Moishe, and Kezia was too young. “They’re adopted,” Freydeh said. “But I love them like my own flesh and blood. Moishe gave me a baby but I lost it when he was killed. So Hashem has given me these. Come. Have you eaten?”

  “Not for two days,” Asher said. “We ran out of provisions. We couldn’t get kosher food.”

  “Then we’ll go home and you can eat. Can you wait that long?”

  Sara was looking around. “Is it near here?”

  “Not too far. We take a horsecar. Come. I have money to pay”

  They all crowded onto the car, standing huddled together with the bundles in the middle for fear they would be stolen. “So many buildings,” Asher said. “So much noise. So many people. Who are they? Where are they going?”

  “I remember how it was when we came out those same doors. We didn’t know where we were or what to do.”

  “Is it much farther?” Debra asked, speaking for the first time. Her voice reminded Freydeh of how Shaineh had sounded as a girl. It was good to hear the accents of home—although it was no longer home and never would be. Often immigrants talked of going back to their homeland once they had made their gelt, their money, but Jews didn’t think of that.

  “It’s a ways. The roads are always crowded like this. Day and night,” Sammy said in Yiddish. She could tell he was nervous in front of her family. She squeezed his hand.

  “So many people,” Sara echoed. “So much noise. And it’s dirty. I thought everything would be new and clean and shining.”

  “We live in the dirtiest part of town, almost,” Sammy said. He sounded more confident, finding a comfortable role as guide. “Over by Corlears Hook it’s even worse. Five Points is worse. But where we live, there’s Jews. You can find shuls and kosher butchers and bakeries and places that will hire you, if they have work.”

  When they got off the car and walked through the streets of their neighborhood, Asher and Sara kept staring up. “They’re so tall, the buildings. You hardly see the sky. Where do people have their latrine?” Asher asked.

  “You’ll smell it when we go in the building,” Freydeh said, taking her sister’s elbow. How thin they all were. “In the courtyard. Fortunately, we face the street. But people empty their pots out the windows. Never walk too close to the buildings, especially in early morning. Don’t be afraid. In a month, you’ll be at home.”

  They labored up the steps to the top floor. “What’s all this?” Asher asked of her equipment.

  “I make a living with rubber goods…condoms.”

  Sara made the sign of the evil eye. “How can you do that, my sister?”

  “I was left a widow with no money. I worked in a pharmacy. I saw that making condoms was something I could do. It’s harder for a woman to run a business here than back in the Pale. I make good money, sister, and I keep my family. I saved enough to bring you over with your family. Be glad for what I do.”

  “It doesn’t seem fitting for a woman,” Asher said. He was no taller than Sammy and slighter.

  “Back in the Pale, women run taverns and grog shops. Our mother made vodka. So? My work is better than being in a brothel, what happened to Shaineh.”

  Sara began to weep, beating her breast. “The shame on us!”

  “Nobody needs to know, once we can get her away from the man who’s keeping her. We’ve tracked her keeper and we know where he lives. She has a little girl by him, Sara, and you have to behave yourself when we finally find them. Here everybody can start over and over again, and nobody need know about the shame. This is a hard place. But if you’re strong, you can do well, you can set up your children to do even better.”

  Sammy took over and briefly explained how they had been tracking Shaineh. He had followed Alfred twice but he could not keep up with the carriage. He lost him going south each time. But they would persist and they would find Shaineh and her daughter
Reba. They were far too close to give up.

  Freydeh heard soft giggles and turned to see Feygeleh and Kezia down on the floor playing with a doll Freydeh had made for Kezia out of odds and ends of fabric with skin of rubber and a face Kezia herself had drawn.

  Freydeh fed everybody the soup she had made earlier. She would give up her bed to the family and sleep in the front room. Besides, she didn’t want anybody else sleeping near her apparatus, for fear they might lurch into it in the dark and break it. She would take care of her family, but she would not let them interfere in her business.

  The next day, they held a conference around the rickety kitchen table. It was warm in the little kitchen, for the stove was lit. Water was heating on it and gruel sat keeping warm. The adults, she noticed, now automatically included Sammy.

  “You can help us in the rubber business, or you can look for work. It won’t be easy. Times are getting harder,” Sammy said. “A lot of people have been thrown out of work lately, and jobs are tight. The German Jews don’t speak Yiddish, so you have to talk German with them.”

  “I can do that some,” Asher said. “I thought all Jews spoke Yiddish.”

  “Not the Germans,” Sammy said. He was showing off a bit, proving himself to her relatives. “There are Jews downtown who talk Ladino, nothing like Yiddish. They been here the longest. When you go around Manhattan, you hear German, you hear Yiddish, you hear Hungarian and Irish and English and Czech and Italian and even Chinese. Everybody under the sun comes here. But you got to learn English to get by and you got to speak German with the German Jews.”

  “How about Polish?” Sara asked. “I speak Polish.”

  “There are some Poles too. But they don’t have the jobs you need.” Sammy hit his palm on the table, looking at Asher. “Tomorrow you come with me and we’ll go around and see what we can find. You’re pretty skinny. Are you strong?”

  “I can do whatever needs to be done, for my family,” Asher said.

  “I can work with you,” Sara said to Freydeh. “I don’t approve of it, but if I can feed my children, then I do it.”

  “Me too.” Debra stood behind her mother. “I am thirteen. I can work as hard as anyone.”

  “You should be in school,” Freydeh said. “There’s free school here.”

  “The youngest children can go,” Sara said. “Debra has to work. Is there enough to do for her and me, to earn our way?”

  “More than enough.” Freydeh put her hand over her sister’s. How worn it was already. Sara was only thirty-five but looked years older. “Times are hard in the Pale?”

  “Impossible,” Sara said. “Neighbors were dying all around us from cholera, from hunger, from pleurisy, from consumption. People are so hungry they eat the grass of the fields and they eat the dirt of the ground.”

  “Here we can survive. But you have to let go of some of the old ways and the old ideas.”

  “I won’t give up some things,” Sara said. “I will not put off my shaytl and I will not eat traif and I will not give up being a Jew.”

  “You don’t have to,” Freydeh said. “You just have to stretch what you think of as natural and ordinary. There’s nothing in our religion against what I do. You’re just not used to such a business. But here they use these things up by the cartload. I do what I can for my children and for you.”

  Wednesday Freydeh went out on her rounds to the clients she serviced that day, a couple of brothels, four pharmacies and a purveyor of rubber goods. She had just entered the premises of Mr. Gillespie on Ann Street and was showing him the new item in her line, the pasha, which had little ridges on it supposed to provide extra pleasure for the woman. Another customer entered, a hulking gentleman in a rusty black frock coat with ginger whiskers and a broad high forehead. While Mr. Gillespie examined the pasha and she made out a receipt for the items he carried, the gentleman wandered around the store picking up items and putting them down, a little shy about stating his business. “I’ll give the pasha a try before I order a gross of them,” Gillespie said. “I’ll keep this sample and let you know.”

  She didn’t want to give up her sample, but he was a good customer. “If you need to try it out, then do it. But you’ll find it a winner.”

  “I wouldn’t mind trying it out with you, sweetheart. You’re a right handsome strapping figure of a woman.”

  “I’m a widow with two children and I’m still mourning my husband.”

  He turned to the gentleman. “I’m going to be a while with this lady, so tell me what you want and I can ring it up. You don’t mind waiting,” he said, turning to Freydeh.

  “A customer is a customer. Go ahead with him. I’ll finish your receipt.”

  “I want a box of those.” The whiskery gent pointed to the tiger condom.

  “That’s a real popular item. This here is the lady who makes them and she makes them right and tight.”

  The gentleman purchased his box, asked for a receipt—which surprised Gillespie, she could tell—and left the store. They resumed going over his order. She was just totaling it up when the gentleman entered again, this time with another man just as big and burly and a policeman. The gentleman brandished a pistol. Freydeh shrank behind a row of sporting equipment. “You’re under arrest, Gillespie, for selling obscene materials. And you. The Jewess. What’s your name?” He waved his pistol at Freydeh.

  She did not know what to say. At first she pretended she did not understand. But her name was on the receipt she had been writing out.

  “Frieda Levin, you’re under arrest for selling obscene materials.”

  He quick-marched them down the street to the station house. She was terrified. What would happen to her? He kept waving that big pistol around. Did they shoot people here? Would she disappear forever? Would she be sent off to some place like Siberia? While she was being booked, she gave a quarter to a street urchin to run to her house with a note for Sammy, who would give the boy another quarter if he handed the note straight to him. Usually there was a kid hanging around the station hoping for just this sort of job. People wanted to contact their lawyers, their family, their business. She gave a false address to the officer—she used Big Head’s address. She figured that while they wouldn’t get much satisfaction about her there, they might find other things that would interest them.

  She hoped the kid had delivered her note to Sammy and not just pocketed the quarter and vanished. She knew the kid wouldn’t pass on the address to the police. Not that they would care. They had booked her in a perfunctory way as if annoyed. The police in her neighborhood were aware of her business and sometimes put the touch on her for free boxes, but they never bothered her. It was like hitting up the butcher for a steak or drinking free at the local saloon.

  “Who was the gent who bagged me?” she asked one of the policemen.

  “Anthony Comstock.”

  “Who’s he? He didn’t have a badge.”

  “He works for the YMCA—Young Men’s Christian Association. He goes around bagging everybody who has to do with sex—booksellers, publishers, guys who sell French postcards, actresses, whores, dancers—you name it. He’s one of those crazy do-gooders that want to tell you what you can do with your free time.”

  “Am I going to go to jail?”

  “He’ll try to send you to Blackwell. Depends on the judge you get. Some of them think like him. Some just dismiss his cases. They think he’s a nosy piker and they don’t like him any better than you or me do.”

  She was taken in a police wagon to the Tombs to await trial. It was a huge gloomy damp building with funny thick pillars out front and inside, like a real tomb—dark and dank and evil-smelling, as if the walls themselves sweated sewage and death. It smelled like steerage after a few days at sea in rough weather. Men howled like animals as she was led past their cells to the women’s wing. She noticed an inner building separated from this one by an area with a dirt floor, where a gallows stood.

  The prison guard, a stocky man with a red mustache and brown hair, s
aid to her, “Better get some money from your family if you want to survive here. Also they can bring you blankets and food.”

  “They have to find me first.”

  “For a dollar, I’ll get word to them.”

  “And tell the police where they are?”

  He laughed. “The police don’t care. You’re not rolling in it, I can tell, so what’s to be gained? The police would never have arrested you for what Comstock brought you in for. But he’s got powerful connections, so they got to mind him.”

  “He took me before I could get paid by the guy he busted with me. I got only two dollars. I give you one and a note, you’ll get it to my family?”

  She had more than that pinned in her blouse, but she wasn’t about to let on. She was sure she could be robbed in here.

  After the guard had gone, a clear, cultivated American voice from the next cell said, “The guards do what they say, generally If you buy them, they stay bought. That’s the political definition of an honest man, I was told once by a man who should know.”

  Freydeh could not see the woman, for the walls were stone—moldy, damp with grease and grime. In one corner, toadstools were growing, poisonous she assumed. A tiny slit of window gave on the inner courtyard where she had seen the gallows. “I’m afraid,” Freydeh said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

  “Comstock got you too, is that what the guard said?”

  “Yeah. I never heard of him before.”

  “Lucky woman. I wish I never had,” another voice said. “He stuck us in here to rot. For telling the truth.”