Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  See? Nothing is as easy as it looks. Even whores have a duty to “improve,” if they can, and show up to work relatively sober and on time.

  For a while, I kept alive the thought of using the pistol on Jack Cutter, and perhaps Mrs. Donoho while I was at it. I tried to think of ways to get them in the same room, so that I could shoot them both before I shot myself.

  Gradually, I reordered my mind, as I had to if I was not to sink into despair. I lived among people who had special ideas of right and wrong, and what deserved admiration or contempt. Their views were such as to make a whore’s life tolerable, and I accepted them as simply as I would have wrapped a blanket around me if I were cold. I became as changed a person as the possession of such opinions could make me.

  THERE IS A STORY ABOUT A YOUNG PURITAN who goes into the woods to meet the devil. He goes furtively. He hides whenever his godly neighbors pass, and more and more of them do pass. There’s an amazing amount of traffic in this part of the woods, all in one direction. He realizes that every single person in the village is on the same foul mission. They are all on their way to meet the devil! They are all hypocrites.

  Whores of the highest type experience a similar illumination. They see society inside out; they meet the reputable pillars of the community on the occasion of their visit to the devil. We do not encounter quite every preacher, to be sure, or every crusader against vice, or every mill owner who claims that a higher wage would deny his workers the opportunity of learning thrift. Some of these folks are just what they seem. But we meet the other ones, and they are a mighty and numerous host. We meet as in the forest, in a great witches’ sabbath—fallen women, and eminent men with a name for sobriety and chastity. We drink and we fornicate; we laugh until our sides ache at all you gullible fools.

  …

  I BEGAN TO HAVE THE RECURRENT DREAM I have already mentioned. I was back on my uncle Elihu’s farm. I was cleaning the cider barrel, bringing water to the mowers, brewing sassafras tea. I was innocent, I was weeping.

  My aunt was there. “Arabella,” she said. “Belle, my angel, why are you crying?”

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Of course you can.”

  “I’m too ashamed. I dreamed that I was bad, very bad. Oh, Aunt Agatha, even to dream such things, such wicked things—I’m so ashamed.”

  “Don’t be sad.” She held me and patted my back. “Everyone does bad things in dreams. The Lord won’t hold us to account for what we do in dreams.”

  She was so wise! “But what if I really did these things, in real life?”

  “Then you would burn forever with your father,” she said with a tender smile.

  I awoke in my room, my face damp with the tears I had dreamed, and I was not alone, but with Philip Heywood, who was only a year older than I, and not unattractive except for a weak chin. He was fair, with blue eyes, long lashes, and a soft, pudgy white body, never having done a day of manual labor. He was shaking me awake, very gently; he had not been so gentle the night before. “What’s wrong? Did you have a bad dream?”

  “No,” I said, wiping my face and looking in true evergreen surprise at my own tears. The only time I cried was in my sleep, as if another soul, one with more tender feelings, inhabited my body in the night. “Yes. In a way. Not exactly.”

  He had been with me before, but this was the first time he had spent the night. His father, Mrs. Bower had told me, was Arthur Heywood, the editor and publisher of the New York Courier, a penny newspaper with Democratic leanings.

  “Tell me about the dream,” said Philip.

  “I dreamed I was back in Boston.” It was time to tell him a version of the story I had made up at Mrs. Bower’s suggestion. “I grew up in Boston. My father was—rather, he is, he still lives—my father is an importer, very pious and respectable. His name—I’m going to respect his wishes and not tell you his name. It wasn’t Knowles.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I had two brothers”—making a snap decision, I added—“and three sisters.” I knew the undoubted pain of this memory would account for my silence as I took thought. “My father demands a great deal of himself and his clerks. He was not much seen around the house when I was growing up. My mother is very religious, as the wives of Boston merchants tend to be. She’s a good woman, but not a good judge of character.” I looked at a picture of Lord Byron that hung on the wall nearest my side. “Or so I tell myself when I want to blame her for what happened. Anyway, a few years ago, she had come under the spell of a handsome young minister, whom she asked to help bring her daughters to the love of Jesus.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh dear.”

  “You guess? So quickly? I guess it’s an old story, but it seems my mother hadn’t heard it! If my father had been more present, he might have prevented what happened. The minister—I do not feel as obliged to protect him—his name was Jeptha Childe, Childe with an ‘e.’ He preached to all the girls in the house—we attended him very eagerly.”

  I stopped a long time. At last he prompted me: “What happened? If it does not hurt too much for you to speak of it.”

  I laid my head down on his hairless chest and regretted it, because it was sticky. But it was too late: I stayed and endured. He put his arm around me. “He was married,” I continued. “His wife was consumptive, and they had stopped having physical relations on her doctor’s advice. When Jeptha first began talking to me of hellfire and salvation, my figure was not as well developed as it is now, but I guess I was a temptation for him all the same; he would stroke my neck as I bent down over my Bible. One day we fell into sin. It was quite mutual. I was sixteen. I had a baby, a girl. My mother is raising it. She says it is innocent of my crimes, and my father grudgingly agrees. I am not allowed to see the child.” Another pause. “There were three portraits of me in the house, one of them in oils. They have all been burned, along with the compositions I wrote at school, the diaries in which I used to pen my childish thoughts, and the pad in which I used to do my clumsy drawings. Everything of mine that could not be carried in a single portmanteau has been given to the poor. My name may not be spoken. Even I do not speak it, since I use a new name now. They tell my little daughter her mother is in heaven, but they know the opposite is true. They tell each other that I was born bad, and this was always my destiny, even if, unaccountably, they did not notice it when I was small. Maybe they’re right. Who can say?”

  “I can,” he said. “It’s rotten, the way they’ve treated you. It’s callous and stupid and rotten. I know you aren’t bad. Anyone should be able to see that.”

  “Your tool says otherwise,” I observed, stroking him.

  “Oh, that, that happens every morning,” he said, as if I were likely to be unaware of this phenomenon. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

  “Let’s use it,” I suggested.

  “What are you doing?” he inquired, for he was on his back and I was straddling him, and this was new for him. “Oh.” I pulled his hands to my bosom.

  “Do you like this? Do you like it this way?” He groaned. “I think that must mean yes! So do I. It helps me to please myself.” He was one of a select group of men with whom I could take pleasure. I made lovers of them if they were young, and rich enough to have me often. With the loathsome ones I shut my eyes and pretended I was with one of the handsome ones. I never pretended that I was with Jeptha. “Maybe I wasn’t born bad, but I think I must be bad now. I think I must be very, very bad.”

  “Oh. Oh my Lord. Oh Jesus. Oh. Oh. No, don’t!” I dismounted—if I could help it, I never let any of them spend their seed in my womb—and switched to other methods, learned in frank discussion with the other girls. “Oh, you’re wonderful,” he said at the end. “You’re not bad at all. You’re fine. There’s no other girl like you.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you care for me? A little?”

&nb
sp; “Oh, very much.”

  “And if things had been different? If I were not—oh, if I had never met that minister, if I were still a respectable Boston merchant’s daughter?”

  “I would have asked you to marry me.”

  “And Juliette Bowden?”

  “What about her?”

  “I saw the look you gave her last night.”

  “I didn’t give her any look.”

  “Would you have married her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good,” I said, and lay beside him as if very glad to know that he did not care for Juliette. Then I asked him to tell me how he spent his day. I wanted to know how he occupied himself when I wasn’t there. Where was he at this hour, where was he at that hour? Flattered, he told me (with a lot of complaints, for he didn’t like working and didn’t see why he should work, since he was rich), and later that day I sent him a long-stemmed rose, along with a note to say that I was thinking of him.

  Mrs. Bower was always pushing me to earn more, but she would not mind it if, as eventually happened, most of my income derived from a relatively small group with whom I enacted a charade of love, accompanying them to restaurants and the theater and exchanging billets doux and presents. When I say presents, I include the ones I bought them. Where I had gotten this idea I cannot say—from a novel probably, I drew so many of my ideas from novels—but I had begun, very early, to buy certain of my gentlemen presents (accompanied by a brief note, “Thinking of you … wish I could stop thinking of you,” or “No man has shown me, never, never, what you showed me last night”). The effect of this had astonished me; it was magical; it was more persuasive than anything I had ever done in bed. Though they might with a little thought realize that the present, a silver pin or a silk cravat, was only a fraction of their own money returning to them, the recipients were at the very least flattered and sometimes virtually enslaved. With every reason to be skeptical they believed, because it was a delightful thing to believe, that while there were other men, they were exceptional; their prowess in the boudoir had taken them through brambles and over high walls into my heart.

  I tried to persuade them that they had breached the defenses of a special heart. Portraits of Byron and Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft hung on the walls of my room, and a shelf near my bed displayed their books, along with the works of similar folk, like Fanny Wright and George Sand. Men who stayed the night tended to ask about them. If the right kind of interest was shown, I would say that these writers were my idols, tell their story and mine, and with numerous small touches present myself as a Boston-bred Marguerite Gautier, awaiting the Armand who would revive her finer feelings. I claimed to live just for gaiety—let us revel, revel and forget! I claimed to be grateful for the fall that had made me into a fascinating woman, but I was a creature of sudden fancies and contradictions, and in intimate moments I would reveal my tragic self, unable to hide the truth that I would have given anything not to have taken the wrong path. (If only you hadn’t come along, reminding me of all that I can never possess!)

  By special arrangement with me, Sean Donovan, the eleven-year-old son of my former landlady, was on call at the house a few hours each day to carry messages to the various men whose affections I cultivated. I was careful not to endanger their marriages, engagements, or reputations with puritanical employers. Sean delivered the letters to their place of business or to their habitual tavern or saloon. My letters were florid and romantic, and, I realize now, longer than they really needed to be. I enjoyed writing them. To make my state bearable, I had accepted without question the traditional hierarchy of whores, which looms very large for those within the profession, and when I wielded my pen I was always conscious of performing an action that marked me out for a rung near the top, with a skill that Lewis’s friend Bridget would never master, though she might do certain other things just as well as I.

  Not all men want a Marguerite; I could be other things. I could be shy or naughty or obedient or a good sport; I could be of the opinion that men were beasts and we women loved them for it. Unfortunately, sometimes there would appear in Mrs. Bower’s parlor one of those men who cannot have a good time unless the girl suffers. If I was fortunate enough to recognize such a man for what he was, I would avoid him by occupying myself with another gentleman. But my instinct was not infallible. I had my share of unpleasant experiences, and all and all, I received a thorough education in a relatively short time.

  Mrs. Bower began to show me special signs of her favor. She would ask me to come with her into the kitchen while she did the books, or invite me to go out riding with her, and tell me how superior I was to the other girls: “I like talking to you. You notice things. My words aren’t wasted on you. Gwendolyn can act refined, but it’s all tricks, it doesn’t go deep, like it does with you.” A little later she would say, “Annabel would do murder to have your figure; that’s why she speaks ill of you behind your back.” She would tell me how lucky I was to be working in her house. She did not do the things that other madams did: She did not bring us to dress shops where we were charged twice the going rate and the madam got a kickback from the dressmaker. She did not take us to be overcharged by druggists and doctors and restaurants with whom she had the same cozy arrangement, so that she might make extra money and keep us in debt. Her competitors did that sort of thing: not she. So she said, and she did not think she was lying, because, although she did in fact take us to a handful of stores where we paid more than everyday people paid, we were not cheated so badly that we would remain her slaves forever. She couldn’t do that to us; we had more choices than the miserable girls on lower rungs of our profession and would not have put up with such treatment. Besides, Mrs. Bower did not need to keep us in peonage. Like most madams of fashionable parlor houses, she tried to bring in a fresh girl every few months. She wanted us to stay for about a year and a half and then move on to some other house, in another city. Earlier in her career, she had run a cheaper establishment and had practiced all the mean, dishonest methods she described. I knew better than to trust her.

  I had been with her about four months when I broke the lock on her desk and examined her day books, where she entered the payments she had made and received. There was a book for 1845, last year, and 1846, the current year. Every page was dated, and letters beside each of the payments identified grocers, dressmakers, hairdressers, vintners, patrons, policemen. She used abbreviations, but since her memory was not good she made them simple and obvious, and I recognized many names easily. Hurrying because someone might come upon me at any moment, I flipped through the 1845 book to the date of Jocelyn’s arrival at the child brothel. I found, as I had expected, a payment explained this way: “J. Cut’r—Jcl’n.” That would be Jack Cutter’s finder’s fee for bringing Jocelyn from Harmony Mills to the arms of Mrs. Bower. With an excitement that had less to do with the risk of being caught reading the day book than with the unpleasant suspicion I was about to confirm, I switched to the beginning of the 1846 book and the date of my arrival at the parlor house. Sure enough, an entry said: “J. Cut’r—HK.” HK would be Harriet Knowles, me. It was as I had thought. I had done a lot of thinking by this time, and it was my belief that Cutter’s arrest of my brother had been part of a plan to drive me by deceit into Mrs. Bower’s clutches. I found no payments either to Mrs. Donoho or Hugh O’Faolin, both of whom I suspected of helping to trick me by insisting that my brother was likely to be killed in prison, but their absence from the book did not exonerate them. I had paid Mrs. Donoho; and Cutter could have rewarded O’Faolin either with money or easy treatment at the hands of the law.

  It was too late to do anything about it, but I had wanted to know. I did not want to be a fool anymore. I did not want to be a fool ever again. I wanted to know my past folly, to suck all the humiliation out of it until there was nothing left and it could not hurt me again. And then to shrug and say: All right, never mind, the damage is done; it was my fate. I had to believe that somehow I had always been meant f
or this. Anything else would be torture.

  XXXIII

  ONE DAY I RECEIVED A LETTER FROM A MAN I had heard of but never met. Its tone was formal but friendly—the message of one potentate to another. It made me feel important. Arthur Heywood, publisher of the New York Courier, wished that we might meet to discuss the welfare of a person for whom he was sure we both cared greatly. Though the letter did not say so, I had no doubt that the person in question was Arthur’s son, Philip.

  We met at a tavern where Heywood could provide us both with a pleasant luncheon but far enough uptown so that no one who knew him was likely to see us.

  I took a hack to our meeting. I felt nervous—I must not waste this opportunity—but I complimented myself, too. I was not the suffering creature I had been ten months ago: Eric Gordon, Italy, Take me away. I would never be that foolish girl again. When, with a folded parasol, I entered the tavern, I was told that Heywood had arrived first, and I was directed to his table. He was a well-dressed man in his late forties, portly, with a drunkard’s twisted radish of a nose, hanks of greasy hair athwart his balding head, jowls, spectacles, dandruff on his coat, bread crumbs on his waistcoat. He struggled stiffly to his feet and bowed, saying that no one could mistake such breathtaking beauty, and a glance was enough to explain the enchantment under which his son had fallen.

  It followed from the tone of his letter that he would treat me this way, which flattered us both: he could be gallant and feel like a gentleman. I understood this, and knew that if I showed weakness or frustrated him too much he would change his tone. I removed my gloves, held out my hand; for a moment, I was worried that he would not kiss it, but he did. I sat and then he sat. The two of us spoke as we imagined fine high-tea-taking people in England did; I asked questions about the running of his newspaper and certain stories I had condescended to read therein, and he avowed himself impressed and surprised—though not to an insulting degree—by my knowledge of and citizenly interest in such topics as police corruption and election fraud.