Madam (4 page)

“Tell him,” the john murmured again. He was a first-timer, and Mary suspected he wasn’t from New Orleans—she’d watched him take his billfold from his trouser pocket, setting it on the bedside table, and surmised that only a traveling man would walk around with that many bills. His origins were only important in that Mary could assess the chance that she’d ever see him again—with one-timers, she knew not to put herself out too much. Why wring yourself on someone who wasn’t likely to give you regular business? And yet, for some reason, she had a yearning to please this man beyond just supplying her body. Unlike all the others, this man hadn’t looked away, hadn’t looked beyond her, or through her. His eyes stayed locked on hers, searching, yearning to connect.

“Tell him,” he said again. “Tell him he’s a good boy.”

Mary leaned in, nuzzling his ear, then whispered, “You’re a good boy.”

Suddenly, he pushed her. “Not me, ya dim whore!” he hollered. “Him!”

He pointed to his crotch.

The warmth instantly drained from Mary’s body. Right, she thought . . .
him
. Slumping a bit, she sighed to herself. She should know better by now than to let a man fool her. No matter how deeply he stared into her eyes.

“Well?” the john demanded.

Mary silently chided herself for having thought this john may not be trapped like all the others. That was how she saw them all: trapped, secretly coming to her for escape from their wives, their families, their lives. But just because they looked like men didn’t mean they weren’t still little boys. How many of them weren’t still fascinated with the toy between their legs? And how many of them weren’t still searching for Mama’s acceptance? For a quarter of an hour, she’d play with that toy, entertain it, satisfy it. For a quarter of an hour, she would also be Mama. She would smile as if she fancied him just the way he was. She would make him the center of her world no matter if he had tattered clothes, dirty fingernails, or a lifetime of failures; no matter if he had a face only his real mother could love but perhaps didn’t.

Mary sucked in her breath. She sat back on her calves and mustered up her most sultry voice. Then she purred to his loins, “You’re a good boy.”

His eyes urgently reconnected with hers.

“A good boy,” he breathed. He let out a quivering sigh, then murmured reassuringly to himself, “A very good boy.”

Mary watched him, feeling the vulnerability of the moment. On both sides. Maybe, she supposed, it wasn’t so bad to trip up every once in a while, to be able to hold hope for another person and expect them to be the best way. Yes, she thought, allowing her face to soften, perhaps it was nice to know that Venus Alley hadn’t completely hardened her.

Grabbing Mary’s hair, the john finished with a yelp that sounded like someone stepped on a dog’s tail. And then, lightning-fast, he jumped up. The intensity was so abruptly broken, it was as if it had never happened. With a quick swoop, he pulled up his pants and snapped his suspenders. Then he reached for his billfold. For a moment, he paused, fingering the bills.

Mary tightened the drawstrings of her chippie, its fraying, thinned cotton just barely serving the purpose of covering her. Eagerly, she watched the man touch each bill, his lips silently moving as he counted. If he could just give me an extra dollar, she thought, please, just one extra dollar—we could eat well this whole week and put some coins aside for the baby.

Refusing to look at her now, he asked, “How old’re you?”

Mary brushed wisps of her long, dark hair behind her ear. “Nineteen,” she said.

The man’s jaw tightened. Without removing any bills, he pocketed his billfold and turned to the door.

“Mistah . . . ?” Mary started, taking a barefoot step toward him.

He unfolded his hand, and some change tumbled from his palm onto the floor. The crib door smacked shut behind him.

The coins spun on the floorboards before falling. Mary scanned where they landed—a quarter, two dimes, and a muddy coin she barely recognized. She crouched down and picked it up, inspecting both sides. A picayune? She traced her finger along its weathered surface. 1853.

“Dastard!” she announced to the emptiness of her crib. Although she was too young to remember when picayunes were penny currency, she knew of the coin from her mama’s stories. Mama would tell of earning a picayune per trick, only that was back in the days of the Swamp, which was as close as any place could come to Devil’s territory.

The Swamp was filled with outlaws and outcasts and, as Mama would say, folks so poor they didn’t even own a last name. It was only right that these most undesirable folks of New Orleans staked their claim on the most undesirable part of the bayou.

But her mama wasn’t undesirable at all, not with her auburn hair and dimpled grin—no, her mama just had the unfortunate luck to be born to a penniless drunkard who drove his wife to madness. And so, with nowhere else to go, Mama landed herself in the Swamp, where she lived in a brothel in the mud, among clouds of gnats and mosquitoes and wandering gators and copperheads. Murders would tally nearly a dozen a week in the Swamp, and it was common knowledge that even the police were afraid to enter. No wonder Mama had quickly learned to take care of herself—she kept a knife in one boot and a pistol in the other, and she could grab one or both faster than any blue nose on the police force anyway.

It was this scrappiness she’d wanted to impart to Mary, and she would tell her little girl tales of life with the Swamp folk the way other children were told Mother Goose. She barely spared any details, knowing full well her daughter, with no father present, had little chance for a life much different.

But, oh, did Mary love to hear Mama’s stories! Stories of how the ladies would jig the night away to Fiddlin’ Henry and Banjo Jim, and how they’d dive stark naked into the Mississippi under a full moon, and bet on cock fights, and suck on berled crawfish heads. The people Mama spoke of were larger than life, and Mary wanted to be just like them.

She’d curl up on Mama’s lap in a rocker on the porch of the brothel, back when whores could live a dozen to a house without fear of being cleared out by the police. “Did I tell you about America Williams, the World’s Strongest Whore?” Mama would ask. She certainly had, but Mary wanted to hear it again and again.

“Men would pay a whole dollar just to try and beat her at arm wrestlin’,” Mama began. “And you should see how red those men’s faces got when they’d come to find America Williams’s arm bent over their own! Those men, they’d be so affronted that they’d pay up even more for a trick with America, wanting to see for themselves if she might be a fraudulent woman. Hard to say, though, what a man preferred to find when America pulled up her dress. A man’s pride is a strong and strange thing, Mary.”

Then there was Red-Light Liz, the one-eyed harlot. As Mama told it, “If Liz took kindly to a john, she would let him peek under her eye patch. Those johns were sworn never to tell what they saw, but it was known that a glimpse of whatever was hiding there would bring all sorts of good luck.” Little Mary imagined a sunbeam of light shining from behind Liz’s eye patch.

“And then there was the dimmest whore in the entire Swamp,” Mama would continue. “We called her Molly Ding-Ding. She once blinded a john when he stiffed her ten cents. But she hadn’t counted the coins right—the poor john had actually tipped her an extra nickel.”

Only when Mary grew older did she come to realize that according to most people’s standards these women were nothing more than lowly whores. Still, they would never be that to her. These were women who had made their way in the world, all on their own, and Mary had decided long ago that was the kind of woman she wanted to be.

Mama was able to get out of the Swamp when a great thing happened: the banks of the Mississippi became filled with sailors. At last, a swell of business on dry land! Mama and her friends packed up their few mud-caked possessions and overtook an abandoned building on Gallatin Street. They nailed a sign out front: HOUSE OF REST FOR WEARY BOATMEN. Truth was, the place was hardly habitable enough to be called a house, and the last thing going on there was rest. But Mama and the others were the best welcome a homesick sailor could hope for, and that stretch of the river soon became known as the Port of Missing Men. Mama regaled how, as a ship would dock, she’d lean out the window, flaunting her cleavage. “Hey, sailor!” she’d call. “A picayune will get ya a bed for the night, a drink o’ whiskey . . . and some company!”

Mary rolled the picayune over in her palm, Mama’s voice echoing in her head. She caught her reflection in a little cracked mirror she’d hung with twine, the only decoration on the crumbling walls of the crib. Her own eyes stared back at her. Mama and MawMaw before her had these slate gray eyes too, a trait passed down through the generations. But only the women. Gray eyes that didn’t often cry, but also didn’t sparkle. Rarely would they give away what was going on behind them. Eyes of mystery, Mama would say. Use them, Mary. Use them.

A husky voice from outside the crib startled Mary from her thoughts. “Gettin’ on in time, Mary!”

Yes, yes, Mary thought, quickly reminded that Venus Alley may well be on dry ground, but it wasn’t like the Swamp, where the whores looked out for one another. Here, it was everyone for herself. It didn’t matter a darn if a john were mid-action on top of Mary, not if her cribmate’s shift were due to begin. Someday, Mary told herself, she’d never have to hear Beulah Ripley’s voice at her door again.

But for now, she didn’t let Beulah’s whining rush her. She brushed off her dirty feet and reached for her boots. In the right toe bed she’d hidden her burlap purse, and from that, she pulled out a little amber bottle of rose oil she’d purchased for a nickel at the apothecary. Removing its tiny cork, she tilted it upside down, using her finger as a stopper. With a dab on one side of her neck, then the other, she inhaled the brightness of the rosy scent. How nice to smell something fresh in this dank, close crib. For good measure, she dabbed some oil on her armpits before corking the bottle. She pressed her feet into her boots and was careful not to tug too hard as she hooked the threadbare laces. Then she hoisted her kip over her back.

As expected, Beulah was hovering on the stoop, fists dug into her hips. Her dark hair, which was usually in dozens of tight braids, had been sheared close to her head ever since the lice had spread around her family. All Mary knew of Beulah’s people was that they were Negroes from the cotton plantations. Truth be told she barely knew much more about her own people, just that Mama’s father had been a young stowaway on a boat from Germany—as Mama would say, a fitting beginning to a low life.

“Well, la de do!” Beulah said, giving Mary a smirk. “Pretty girl keepin’ time today.”

Mary gave her a weary glance.

“Why you keepin’ time today? Ain’t there no johns ’round?” Beulah taunted. “No ship come in?”

“You want I can go find another trick and be a while,” Mary barked back.

“Just that you been late three times already this week,” Beulah said with a wag of her finger. “Always actin’ like you’re above your raising.”

Mary let out a sigh. “We’re all just tryin’ to earn a living.”

Beulah snorted. “So the bossman can pour your livin’ down his throat?”

Mary couldn’t have agreed more, but she didn’t let on. It was Philip Lobrano who held the crib in his name, and he liked to think he pimped Mary and Beulah even though business tended to come in with no help from him.

“Bossman come collect your pay today?” Beulah asked.

Mary shook her head.

“Oh, he’ll be finding you,” Beulah warned, her eyes growing wide. “Saw him stumblin’ around, and he’s crazy with drink. Crazy Devil Man today. Lookin’ like something the dog’s been hidin’ under the porch.”

The last thing Mary wanted to do was stick around knowing Lobrano had spent hours sidled up to a bottle of absinthe. She gave a nod to Beulah, for as much as each resented the other, they both shared the millstone of Lobrano. Beulah lifted her own kip onto her back and Mary moved past, stepping from the warped stoop of the crib onto Venus Alley.

Venus Alley was really a street, though it was so narrow and cramped with row-to-row cribs that it had come to be called an alley—also seemed easier for johns to hide their illegal indiscretions on an
alley
as opposed to a wide-open
street
.

Mary had long ago dulled her senses to Venus Alley. There was no way someone could work a place like this day after day without overlooking most of it. She no longer saw how potholes became film-covered pools of muck that sat and stank until the next rain. Or how rats scuttered about like they ruled the place, not even flinching when you stomped at them, their droppings, along with horse dung, a fixed layer on the bottoms of your shoes.

Snotty-nosed children scampered about the Alley too—the unintended consequences of a whore’s thriving business. Barefoot, unwashed, unschooled, skinny things, all of them, their stomachs always rumbling, their faces pinched. They ran around with no one bothering to mind them. The stray children barely outnumbered the dogs and cats roaming about, whining for attention. Although the animals often looked better fed than the children since they were wise to all the back doors of saloons and restaurants that threw out scraps. Even the whores seemed more inclined to toss crumbs to the animals than to the kids—animals were a nuisance, but a baby could halt your career and suck up your earnings.