Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  “Yes?” asked Cora.

  The man’s eyes found the pistol, and he looked startled. “What’s that?”

  “Bacon,” replied Cora blandly; there was bacon not far from the gun.

  The man’s face reddened, and for a moment I thought that Cora was going to have to use my pistol, but evidently Cora did not think so, and the man walked on and out of the dining saloon. Then Cora did something that endeared him to me: he picked up his napkin and patted his brow with it.

  “You’re a coward,” said Eric Gordon. “Hiding behind a woman’s skirts.”

  “He could have called me out,” said Cora mildly.

  “What would you have done if he had?” asked Eric Gordon.

  “Swim.”

  I could not tell if he was joking.

  “I’ve half a mind to call you out myself. How’d you like that?”

  “Please don’t do that,” said Cora. “It’s been such a nice trip.”

  Despite Eric Gordon’s great concern for me, he did not offer to help me with my luggage or to get me a hack uptown. I assumed that this was because someone was waiting to meet him when he left the boat, maybe a wife, or a relative, or a business associate more reputable and less broad-minded than Charles Cora.

  IN THE SUMMER LIGHT, EVERY DETAIL of the waterfront sparkled. Each dirty face, scuffed sign, crate, dog, and puddle looked its best, ready to have its picture taken, when I stepped from the mere tumult of the emptying steamboat to the churning chaos of the docks. I walked, disoriented, past bewildered immigrants dragging chests and searching the crowd for their husbands or their brothers; past children running, men holding placards with the names of hotels; past heaps of sacks, pyramids of barrels, streams of spilled rum and oil. Two boys fought on the bricks of the street while boys around them shouted advice. A cabman called out, “Come to the cheapest house in all the world!”

  All that in the first paltry seconds, as if New York were saying: “Last Judgment? We have it for breakfast here. This is the Big Town.” Waterfront buildings loomed over me, formidably businesslike, warehouses with wide awnings and wooden overhangs projecting from the second story. The names of firms and their trades were blazoned in giant painted letters interrupted by windows. Everything up there was fine and majestic. Everything down here was grimy and chaotic and twice my eyes recoiled from the corpse of some unlucky rat that had been flattened and embossed many times by wagon wheels. Since I had last been here, New York had grown out of human scale. Though it crossed my mind that I might have stood right on this spot with Horace and Lewis in 1837, really I had only a dim idea of where I was, other than smack in the middle of everything. I remembered a few streets from my childhood, and I knew that the infamous Five Points lay in a sort of fat triangle bounded by Broadway, Bowery, and Walker. I reasoned that if I walked east from the North River I would come first to Broadway. Walker would lie either north or south; if necessary, I would take an omnibus. Then I would ask directions to Anthony Street.

  It was easy for a newcomer to get lost in the New York of those days. Though the eye found printed words everywhere—on rooftops and awnings, etched into flagstones in front of the stores, on the sides of wagons (and, the oddest sight, on sandwich boards slung over the shoulders of ragged men who trudged up and down the street)—simple street signs were hard to find. They existed, but they were on the lampposts, and small; and since I did not know that, my only clue as to which street I was on was the occasional store sign that included the full address. I walked away from the river and came presently to cleaner, better-smelling purlieus, with fewer stores, and many impressive buildings of brick and limestone, or white marble. I reached a big park surrounded by rails and trees, and at one end of it stood a giant fountain, at the other a white palace with flags and a cupola. During all my years in Livy I had been the girl from New York, and I had taken the characterization very seriously. I had expected that within a few minutes of my return it would all come back to me; and instead I was lost within sight of a prominent landmark.

  I approached two well-dressed women, one young, the older one walking with the young one’s help. “Excuse me, could you tell me the name of that big white building with the two flags?” I asked. The younger one told me it was City Hall. I thanked her and asked, “How would I find 160 Anthony Street from here?” At this they looked at each other, made a decision about me, and walked on. Several of the men who passed by looked at me and a couple of them attempted to catch my eye. I preferred not to ask directions of them. I kept asking women, who kept pretending they didn’t know. At last I put my inquiry to a gentleman. He was walking slowly, smoking a slim cigar, and tapping his cane on the black railing. He was about thirty, with soft, longish, poet’s hair, parted in the middle, and dewy, sympathetic brown eyes, and he asked me with an expression of concern if I was certain that I had the right address. I said that I was sure I did. If it was not too bold of him to ask, why was I going there? I hesitated and then told him that my brother was living in a rooming house at that address, which I knew to be a bad one, and that he was sick, and I had come to help him.

  “Well, let me think,” he said. “You know, it’s really not that far. It’s—I’m not very good at giving directions. It’s no use; I’ll have to take you there. No, I don’t mind. Don’t be silly. Come on.” He flicked away the cigar and took my portmanteau in one hand. I was grateful to be relieved of the burden. He hooked his free arm through mine, and we walked on, while he asked me about my trip and talked about New York, how interesting I would find it, and how, even though it was quite a large city, the bad places and the good places were only a short distance from each other. I must be careful.

  We turned into a neat, clean, quiet street, where there were only a few carts and people. He said, “I promised my sister I would look in on her. If you don’t mind, I need to stop here for a few minutes. You can come up with me.”

  “All right,” I said, beginning to be suspicious, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll wait for you out here.”

  “Don’t be absurd. It’s right inside. You can rest your feet. You must be tired.”

  I was sure it would be a mistake to go inside with him. I wondered whether I should demand my luggage. Would he keep it? Perhaps he would, making a joke of it, in the hope that I would follow him. I wondered if I should take out the pocket pistol. I wondered if I was being foolish and worrying about nothing.

  “All right,” I said, and I held onto his arm firmly, while he reached for the key to the door. He had to put down the portmanteau in order to reach into his pocket. I grabbed the bag and ran.

  “Wait!” I heard him call after me. “Wait! You don’t understand! I’d have made it worth your while!”

  Eventually, I slowed to a brisk walk, passed a child who must have been playing hide-and-seek, because he stood with his back flat against a wall and put his index finger to his lips when he saw me; and passed a maid carrying a basket, and a young man helping an old woman out of a carriage. I turned and saw no one pursuing me.

  In my panic, I hadn’t paid attention to where I was going, but, calmer now, I recognized the street I had fled to: It was Bowling Green. I looked up. Rows of gray chimneys tugged with lethal precision at those mystic chords of memory that have been said to link hearts to hearths, and perhaps I sighed, or perhaps I just stood there with my mouth agape.

  I had come to my old house, where a hot meal cooked by Anna or Sally or Christina used to be waiting for me after I had spent a Saturday playing in the snow, where my mother coughed into a bowl and looked at the color and wrote letters her children were meant to read when she was dead, and where she took mercury and paregoric and made mustard plasters and said I was a joy and a boon to her.

  I rapped the brass knocker, imagining—I could not help it—that they would all be there, my father, my mother, my brothers as children; my little self, nine years old. And she would say: Who are you? I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Go away.

  After a minute
the door opened, and there appeared in it a short, fat, blousy, red-faced, brown-haired, blue-eyed woman whose features were crowded into the center of her blotchy countenance, like certain old-fashioned representations of the sun and the moon when they have faces. She was only a little over thirty, as I learned a bit later, but I took her for a woman in her middle years. She wore a dress and an apron. Her left hand held a rag. I asked her who lived here. Glancing at my bag, she said it was a boarding house mostly for young clerks, only men. She had an Irish brogue. I said I had been born in this house and lived here until I was nine years old.

  At this her manner changed. “Go on! You lived here?” she said, and she invited me in. “Tell me how it was in the old days. Come, I don’t bite.”

  After a little hesitation, I followed her. She introduced herself as Mrs. Shea; it was her place—that is, she rented it and ran it. With misgivings, because the Irish of New York were known to dislike my family, I told her that my name was Arabella Godwin. She did not respond to the name, except that she called me by my first name often in the first few minutes after I told it to her (“Come this way, Arabella”), as if to help herself learn it. She led me on a tour of my childhood home. I recognized a few pieces of furniture that must not have been thought worth the trouble of carting out and selling, and most of the wallpaper was the same; in two rooms it had been painted over. Everything was drabber and more worn, with nicks in the wainscoting and patched sections in the plaster. There were wooden numbers nailed to the doors. The one Lewis and I had slept in was number 4.

  When we made our way back downstairs, she sat me down at a long table, in a room smelling of stale tobacco, and I noticed a Turkey carpet, whose complicated pattern of big orange squares and impossible blue flower petals had mesmerized me as a child. It was badly frayed and stained now, as changed, I thought, as I was. Mrs. Shea served me reheated coffee, bread, and jam. She asked me for my story, and I told it, leaving out the most shameful details but including my parents’ deaths (I found out by her remarks then that she knew my father had committed suicide, and that she knew the previous owner of the house had been Solomon Godwin). I told her about Livy and Cohoes, and I told her, in a general way, of my purpose in New York. I said that my friend had disappeared and, I feared, had fallen into bad company, and that my brother was sick in a Five Points lodging house.

  When I told her about William Miller and Adventism, she said, “It was an honest mistake. There were many here in New York that made it.” She added, “There are those in Ireland now who could wish that Jesus would return and bring the world’s end, and a stern judgment, while He’s about it.” I often thought, in later years, that she must have been thinking of the potato famine, which had not been going on long enough to cause much notice in the United States, except among the Irish.

  It had felt strange at first, to be here in my childhood home telling my story to this stranger, but after a while I began to enjoy myself.

  When I told her about running away from the man with poet’s hair shortly before I stumbled into Bowling Green, I placed great emphasis on his outward respectability, how well-dressed and gentlemanly he was, how improbable it had seemed that such a man could have bad intentions. I said these things because I did not want Mrs. Shea to have a bad opinion of me, but also because I was genuinely shocked. I told her that I was still not sure what the well-spoken stranger had meant to do.

  She shook her head. “No honest man would ask you to come alone with him into a strange place when you didn’t know him. You showed good sense when you ran.”

  I showed her the miniature of my mother. “How dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Shea. “A window on lost times. Oh, I wish I had a likeness of my mother. I know that room. Mr. Holland stays there now.”

  She told me about her life, a few years of it spent in Ireland and the rest in New York. Her family had been poor, and her story was full of untimely deaths from illnesses and work accidents. Her surviving brothers and sisters were all good honest working people. She told me a little about what life was like in the house now. The young boarders were good sorts who spent most of their evenings around this table, joking or singing songs, and holidays were celebrated here in a splendid, warm, familylike way.

  Perhaps an hour had gone by with all of this, and I decided I must return to business. I asked her if she knew the way to 160 Anthony Street.

  “Of course, your brother is sick—you’ll be wanting to go to him. Let me think,” she said. “You can walk it if you’re not too tired, and if you get lost, well, if you get lost, ask any man you see wearing a leather apron”—suddenly her fair wide face, with its features strangely positioned near its center, became pink with emotion—“or a man holding a broom or a trowel or a shovel; he may or may not be able to tell you, but he won’t try to take a mean advantage of you, like a man whose only tool is a black cane with a brass grip will, if you ask me, who knows something about it. Ask the hot-corn girl or the woman who sells apples; she’ll tell you, and she won’t want anything for it other than maybe for you to buy an apple, and sure you’ll be no worse off for that.” Her voice shook. She was angry, but I guessed not at me—or only a little at me, for my divided loyalties and misplaced suspicions. “Better to ask the apple woman than some man who thinks himself the lord of creation because his mother never had to sell apples, and looks on a poor girl’s worry and confusion as another gift to him from the gods.”

  And she gave me the directions. I thanked her and got up to leave.

  “Wait,” she said. “I know that place where your brother is. It’s a bad house on a bad street. I wouldn’t let my brother stay there. Get him out. If you must stay in New York for any time, I can tell you where to find cheap board and lodgings.”

  She left to fetch a pencil and some paper. Then, reciting addresses slowly, she gave me the name of a house where six girls who sewed hats in a factory lived, and another where a widow took in lodgers.

  If I had any clothes to sell or to buy, or if I needed to borrow money or to pawn something, I should go to her uncle’s secondhand shop on Orange Street, just below Walker—she gave me the address—but I must stay clear of the secondhand stores farther down on Orange: they were all run by Jews. What’s more, and this was very important, I must introduce myself to Con Donoho and his wife, Mrs. Donoho, whom I would find at their grocery, also on Orange Street. Donoho was the Sixth Ward street inspector, and might find my brother a job when he recovered; in any case, he was a good man to pay one’s respects to, and I could endear myself to him by using her name—I should introduce myself to the wife first, and make it clear that I was a factory girl. “And it’s all right that you’re a Protestant, if you’re civil. But don’t say your name is Godwin, for the love of heaven. Not to hurt your feelings, but in the Points, only niggers remember that name fondly.”

  Since she had brought up the Godwin name, I thought I might as well ask her: “Do you know what happened to them—my grandfather—his wife—my brothers?”

  The hard look in her eyes melted. “I heard he was ruined in the Panic and died of a broken heart. That’s all I know.”

  I WALKED, FOLLOWING MRS. SHEA’S DIRECTIONS. Step by step the streets were more crowded with people and incidents, with fewer carriages, more cheap goods being lifted for skeptical examination by short stout women, more children selling things. I came to Chatham Square, a middling neighborhood frequented by rich and poor, with a circus-midway atmosphere created by garish advertising placards and by the presence of men who stood in front of stores praising the goods within.

  Another turn, another block, and I did not have to ask, I knew I was in Five Points. Children carrying scraps of wood in their arms, dandified young hooligans, Jews in skullcaps, Negroes pushing carts, staggering drunkards, dispirited men with heavy burdens strapped to their backs, women holding wicker baskets against their hips, men with patches on their trousers, people arguing at the top of their voices in the street—such folk had made up a fraction of the population wherever I
had been in New York until now: here the proportions were reversed: here they lived in all their multitudes; this was the source; this was their home. They rushed toward me, they passed me from behind (sometimes tarrying to cast a curious, hostile, or lascivious glance my way), going in and out of places that stenciled wooden signs identified as dime-a-night lodging houses, cheap restaurants, saloons, groceries, old-clothes stores, coal yards and horse sheds. Patches of color, paint from another century, clung to the gray clapboards of which most of the buildings to my left and right were made. In every tenth window broken glass had been replaced with a plank or canvas or newspaper. A long ridge of trash ran along the middle of the street, and the mire on either side was imprinted with crisscrossing wheel ruts.

  THOUGH THE CROWD WAS SO DENSE that sometimes I could not see from one side of the street to the other, there were no friendly apple women in sight. Two women stood near a doorway and I decided to ask them where 160 Anthony was. I noticed after I had changed course to walk toward them that they were sharing a bottle, and were only half dressed, and by the time I was close enough to speak to them I had no doubt they were prostitutes. They were both quite young, about my own age, and homely: one thin, missing a front tooth, the other fat with curly blond hair and fair skin but the features of a colored woman. Only my fear of insulting them kept me from turning and walking away. I asked my question. The skinny one said this was 160 Anthony—we were all standing in front of it! I asked if there was a lodging house for men here, and said I was looking for my brother. They asked me his name. When I answered, the thin one, whose missing tooth gave her a juicy lisp, said, “Lewish!” She passed the bottle to the fat one and grabbed my hand. Her grip was tight. She pulled me to a flight of stairs and started down it. “Come on,” she said, when I resisted.