“A girl has to live,” she said seriously, her finger pointed up in the air like she was quoting scripture.
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“Who taught you to say that?”
“My mamma, I think.”
“Your mamma? Was your mamma a . . . was she
like us?”
Sally turned away and picked up a shard of plate from the floor. “This had a pretty border on it.”
“Listen,” said Molly, taking her by the elbow. “That weasel is going to be back in a tick, and I need us to agree about what we’re going to do and what we won’t be doing.
And we ain’t going to be spreading our legs for anyone.”
“What do you mean?” said Sally. “You want to kill Johnny? Is that it?”
“Christ almighty, I wasn’t talking about killing anyone.
I just want us to be clear about what we won’t do for these johns. I ain’t given up my cunny but two times.” She grimaced. “Almost made me go back to my sister’s. But then I seen how you can make a living without. All you got to do is play the pipe, if you know what I mean.”
Sally’s face was a perfect blank.
“Playing the pipe?” Molly said, lowering her voice.
“You take ’em in your mouth. Get ’em off that way. That way you don’t get a baby, and you don’t get the pox.”
Sally clapped her hands over her mouth and squealed.
“Ooooh. That’s horrible. I don’t think I could ever . . . Do the men like that?”
“They think they died and went to heaven. I make ’em wash it first, but mostly they don’t mind, and if you wash it for ’em, it’s part of the fun. There were some fellows down in Boston who swore they’d never have it off any other way,” Molly said. “When Johnny gets back, I’ll go with him, and you can watch how I manage it. Some of the johns, they
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like being watched, but that’s extra. I’m telling him it’s the only trick we do, and if he don’t like it, then we’re off.”
“And if he ain’t fair with our money, then we kill him,”
Sally said.
“Are you teasing me?”
Sally smiled and went on with the sweeping.
Stanwood returned carrying a bucket, a mop, and some boiled eggs from Easter. Molly took him outside to talk business. He agreed to supplying johns for half the take and when Molly explained their services, he said, “I got no problem with it,” and tried not to appear too eager. There wasn’t any of that sort of thing to be had elsewhere on Cape Ann, and he was just the one to sell it. “But I gotta make sure that you two know what you’re doing first.”
“Nothing’s free,” Molly said.
“Free?” he bellowed. “You bag of bones. Here I been carrying and carting like some kind of mule. You owe me for that, and for what it’s going to cost me to get you some kind of beds in there.”
“I’ll do you twice for it,” she said.
“The other one, too.”
“Sally will go you once.”
“Twice.”
“Once.”
Stanwood shrugged. He was aroused and ready to go, and he followed Molly into the woods like a dog trailing a plate of meat. Sally snuck up to watch as Stanwood leaned up against a tree and unbuttoned his trousers. Molly knelt before him and, using one of the flannels she’d brought from Boston, started rubbing his skinny stalk with the cool, damp cloth.
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“Goddamn,” he roared, but in a moment he was
moaning a different tune.
Sally couldn’t really see the mechanics of the act, only the back of Molly’s head, pumping in and out. It was over fast. Stanwood whinnied and leaned against the tree as Molly bent over, spat, wiped her mouth, and started back for the house. When he returned to the house, he looked at Sally up and down and said, “You as good as your sister?”
He spent the rest of the day sitting and watching as they cleaned the shack and hung paper over the empty window-panes. Molly felt his eyes on her, like a wet wool coat. When he finally left, she sat on the floor and put her head in her hands.
Sally sat beside her and pulled her close, stroking her hair until she calmed down. As the sun started to set, she said, “Let’s go to sleep.”
Silently, they made a nest of blankets and cloaks, and burrowed into each other’s arms. As she drifted off, Molly remembered the perfect safety she’d felt as a little girl in her mother’s lap, and hugged Sally tight.
Stanwood woke them up midmorning with the tip of his boot. A red-faced youngster in a dirty uniform stood at the door.
“My turn,” Sally whispered. “Outside,” she ordered the cabin boy, found a flannel, and was gone before Molly was fully awake.
When she returned, Molly was still in bed, the blanket over her face.
“It’s not so bad,” said Sally. “Salty. He was a baby, that one. I don’t think he’d been with a woman ever, not that he has now, either. It’s the quickest money I ever made.” Sally’s
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voice was flat, lower than usual. Molly felt her eyes burn with tears.
“Now, don’t you get to feeling bad,” she said, as though she’d heard Molly’s thoughts. “You ain’t the one turned me out. You saved me from Ned, and now I have me a sister and a roof.”
Molly pulled back the covers and stared.
“Don’t be scared if I rattle on about what’s going on in your head,” Sally said. “It’s my gift. I always know when a pot’s about to boil over, and sometimes I can tell when there’s going to be trouble in a room so I clear out first. It don’t work all the time, though. And I’m better on girls than boys.
“I ain’t smart in the other ways,” Sally said. “Can’t sign my name. Can’t read, though I reckon you can.”
“Yes,” said Molly. “I can read.”
“That might come in handy. But this here is going to be all right for us, so don’t fret. I saw some berry bushes outside so come summer we’ll have fruit and there are rose hips for tea and jelly. But right now, we need to see about getting us some tea and cornmeal and such. That Johnny-boy brought nothing with him. We might want to buy a chicken or two, soon as we suck off a few more gents, eh, my dear? I could eat an egg right now, if there was one to hand.”
Molly burst out laughing, and Sally smiled her sunniest, pleased to have lightened her friend’s mood. They walked arm in arm to Easter, whose guilt was still fresh enough to give them three baby chicks as a gift.
By the time the chicks were laying eggs of their own, there was a regular pattern to their lives in Dogtown.
Stanwood would bring two or three sailors on Saturday
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nights, sometimes Friday and mid-week too, depending on the dockings and which day the quartermaster paid out. He was an excellent salesman, sidling up to men in the taverns and whispering, “I’ve got some mouth whores up there in Dogtown. Suckstresses. You ain’t lived till you tried it.
“Worth a walk in the woods, I can tell you. And no risk of the pox,” he winked. He’d get the gobs so worked up, some of them would race ahead of him, half-cocked and unbuttoned when they walked in the door.
Most were far too drunk to notice the misery of the place until they came to the morning after. One sailor opened his eyes and declared it the saddest excuse for a whorehouse he’d ever seen, and swore it was enough to put a man off harlots for good. No one stayed for long.
The house was stark as a jail. Stanwood had scavenged a wormy table and a bench with wobbling leg
s, just so he’d have somewhere to bend his elbow. Molly filled a few of the chinks with mud, but there wasn’t much clay to it, so the stuff crumbled onto the floor. The chickens roamed in and out as they liked.
There were eggs most days, and corn mush and game, which some of the local boys offered instead of money. Sally did the gutting and plucking but wouldn’t cook. With only one pot in the place, Molly boiled everything to a tasteless mess. They rinsed their shifts once in a while, letting them dry in the sun while they waited, naked, under dirt-stiffened dresses. There wasn’t a speck of beauty in their lives, and Molly tried not to think about what would happen to them come winter.
But Mrs. Stanley moved in before the first snow, and everything changed.
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Stanwood saw her on her first day in Gloucester, sitting in a tavern where her alabaster throat and corn-silk hair seemed to light up the dim room. When she fixed her eyes on him and smiled, he was a goner. He brought her to the cabin with three crates filled with clothes, bedding, and china.
“These are the girls I told you about,” said Stanwood.
“The dark one is Molly?”
Molly stared at the deep-bosomed woman, wearing kid gloves and a silk skirt.
“Who the hell are you?” said Sally.
Stanwood slapped her face so fast, she barely knew what had happened. “You never talk to Mrs. Stanley like that.”
Mrs. Stanley watched this exchange without comment, and then walked the four steps up and down the front room.
Her lips tightened. “The chickens go outside,” she said.
“Build a pen, or a coop, or whatever you like. I will not live in a barn.”
She turned to the back room. “I’ll be wanting a real door there,” and pointed to the blanket tacked over the empty frame. “You’ll be wanting a door, too, if you want to see any more of me.”
Stanwood scowled but knew he’d do anything she
asked. In the full light of day, Mrs. Stanley was older than he’d first thought, with fine lines around her eyes and blue veins starting to show on the backs of her hands. Still, he was dazzled by the straightness of her nose, the curl in her hair, the throaty pitch of her voice, the way she touched her finger to her lip as she considered her next move.
“Now,” said Mrs. Stanley, pointing to the door and tapping her foot.
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“You do what she tells you,” he said to Molly and Sally as he hurried away.
“Help me with the trunks, ladies,” Mrs. Stanley said with a bland authority that quickly became the ruling force of their lives.
Within a week of her arrival, she had a door for “her”
room and moved the girls into the front room, with blankets hung from the ceiling to separate their chamber from the parlor and kitchen. She got Stanwood to put glass in the windows and rehang the front door so it closed properly. One of her crates produced a few curtains and sheets enough for three beds. A sturdy table and two chairs appeared soon thereafter, and by Christmas she acquired a small chest of drawers and a real bedstead for her room.
All of this was paid for by whoring, though Mrs.
Stanley was never heard to use the word. She behaved as though the three of them were merely women of reduced circumstances. “I myself am a widow,” she’d say, softly.
“Lacking any family, I have been blessed by the charity of dear friends, gentlemen, all.”
No one ever learned her Christian name—not even
Stanwood, who over time became familiar with every inch of her. No one ever called her anything but Mrs. Stanley for all her days in Dogtown. Sally never even called her that, managing to avoid using any form of address. “You there”
was as much as she could squeeze out. With Molly, she referred to her as Beelzebub.
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“What?”
“That’s the devil’s first name, don’t you know? I get the feeling she’s run away from something,” Sally said, with the glassy look that tipped Molly to the fact that Sally was having one of her visions.
“Well, there’s nowhere farther to run than this,”
Molly said.
“I figure she kill’t a man.”
“Oh, Sal, you have murder on the brain.”
But Sally shook her head with conviction, and Molly felt the hairs at the back of her neck prickle. There was something icy and entirely calculating about Mrs. Stanley, which was as plain as the nose on her face. But men didn’t see past the flattery and fluttery glances that promised more than any woman could deliver, and they gladly paid her twice what it cost to have it off with Molly or Sally.
Mrs. Stanley led her customers to her tiny bedroom like she was showing them into a gilded drawing room, and she used the words “lady” and “gentleman” so often that Molly wondered if the old tart actually believed her own lies. She and Sally rolled their eyes when the bass groan, baritone howl, or tenor hoot issued from behind the door, where Mrs.
Stanley made quick work of them. They stumbled out minutes later, faces still flushed, with boots, trousers, and coats in hand.
Few of her callers returned for a second visit. Sally said they didn’t come back because “Beelzebub” smelled so strongly of brimstone, but Molly said it was because her price was so high. Whatever they thought of her, Mrs.
Stanley’s johns were satisfied enough to send plenty of others, so there was often meat on the table as well as sugar
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for tea, and even a banana when the madam had a
hankering.
Mrs. Stanley spoke to Molly and Sally as though they were her servants. She expected them to do as they were told, and in return gave them her old shifts and dresses, which meant they were better dressed than either had ever been before. On cool, sunny days when she was inspired to go shopping, Mrs. Stanley insisted they attend her, and led the way with stately, measured steps, holding her head so high her hat seemed to float above her shoulders. Walking the Gloucester streets, she fixed a knowing half smile on her lips, which seemed an insult to any woman who recognized her and a greeting to any man, whether he’d made her acquaintance or not. Sally and Molly trailed behind her wide wake, huddled against each other, barely noticed.
They hated those excursions into town; Molly wilted under the glare of the women on the street. Sally couldn’t bear the smell of fish, which permeated the whole city. Mrs.
Stanley made a show of paying for their shoes and buying an orange for them to share. This prompted the most forgiving souls in town to credit Mrs. Stanley for looking after the two simpleminded women.
One day, when Mrs. Stanley announced an outing to town, Sally claimed she had a headache, “something terrible,” and Molly begged to be left to take care of her.
Mrs. Stanley considered: without them, there would be no need to buy a second orange and she might even get a cake for herself. “As you wish,” she said, and went on her own.
No sooner was she gone than Sally threw her arms around Molly and giggled.
“You’re not sick?”
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“You are the most believingest girl,” Sally said. “Now, come over here and read me the papers.”
Tucked in a nest of clothes and blankets on the
mattress, they leafed through cast-off newspapers and magazines, stopping at every advertisement for skin cream and kitchen soap, patent medicine and farm machinery. Sally could not believe that there were people stupid enough to think that Mrs. Philby’s milk tonic would remove frec
kles or that Hanson’s thresher would double the yield of a rocky field. “And them’s people smart enough to read!”
On the day of the feigned headache, Sally took the newspaper from Molly’s hands and kissed her on the mouth.
Molly hugged her and kissed back, but when she felt the advance of Sally’s tongue, she was startled and drew back.
There was a new slyness in Sally’s eyes, and something else, too. Longing. “My Mol,” she said, and kissed her nose.
Molly felt the rise and fall of Sally’s bosom through their shifts: her own breath quickened to match. Eyes locked, Sally took Molly’s face between her hands and began covering her eyes and cheeks with soft, running kisses, returning again to her lips.
“Are you game, my darling?”
Molly still had no idea what Sally was driving at.
“Didn’t you never make yourself, well, feel nice?” Sally whispered and reached under the covers, cupping Molly’s breasts, and lightly dancing her fingers over her belly and on down to her sex. Molly clamped her legs together and pulled away.
“It’s not like with them,” Sally promised. “It’s nice. Nice as kissing me.”
“Then let’s just kiss.”
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Sally sighed and turned her back to Molly.
“Don’t be angry,” she begged. “I was just surprised is all. You know that I love you, don’t you?” Molly threw her arm over Sally’s side and pressed up against her, making spoons. Sally took Molly’s hand and kissed each finger.
“That’s my dearheart.” Molly sighed with relief.
“Shhhhh,” said Sally as she took her friend’s hand and led it back under the covers, under her shift, to her need.
Molly kept her eyes closed and let her friend do what she wanted. Feeling Sally pant and gasp, Molly felt an odd pressure between her legs, and an urgency to go somewhere, though she didn’t quite know where. Finally, Sally sighed, let go of her hand, and fell asleep.
Molly rolled to her back and stared up at the ceiling, happy and frightened and suddenly resolved. She didn’t know what to think about what they’d done, nor how to speak of it, but it had changed something between her and Sally, and she couldn’t remember when she’d been so happy.
The Last Days of Dogtown Page 14
