Sex Wars (15 page)

She talked Tennie into going with her. They pinned their hair up under caps and put on men’s jackets and trousers. It would have shocked just about everyone they knew, perhaps even Annie Wood, but the sisters had discovered several years ago that wearing men’s attire enabled them to fade into crowds and go places ladies would never dare or be permitted, and women not considered ladies would be in danger. They simply passed as youths out together.

The parade was lively, raucous. The smell of the burning torches charred the air. Many of the men were drunk already, but the sisters knew
how to handle themselves and nobody did more than jostle them. The parade streamed through the city, stopping traffic, filling Broadway from gutter to gutter. The rally was at Park Row where the newspapers were, so that they would be sure to carry word the next day of the huge turnout the Republicans had in this Democratic stronghold. Tennie wanted to leave, but Victoria didn’t.

“I want to hear the speeches.” She listened to them, not to be moved, not to be persuaded of anything, but to dissect their rhetorical devices, to see what kind of a speech worked and what fell flat. She studied each speaker’s delivery. “I’ll be giving speeches someday soon, Demosthenes told me so,” she whispered to Tennie so that no one would overhear her voice. “I must study how it’s done.” They wormed their way toward the raised platform constructed of planks.
GENERAL GRANT IN ’68. HE WILL SET THE COUNTRY STRAIGHT
.

She stood attentive through two and a half hours of speeches. The torches flared, the crowd roared and booed on cue. Half the audience were passing bottles around. The whores were working the crowd. They couldn’t take the night off with so many men gathered. They would service as many as they could, one after the other, some in the cold alleys, some back in their own rooms in a nearby tenement or in a cheap hotel friendly to their trade. Victoria was glad she had brought only a dollar in a front pocket as she noticed pickpockets working the crowd, homeless boys probably. With so many men jostling each other, most of them drunk, distracted by the speeches and the excitement of the crowd, pickpockets would do well. She saw her reporter friend from the
Sun,
Charlie, but he did not recognize her dressed as a man. They were no longer lovers. Occasionally she would drop in on him at the newspaper, causing a stir when she walked past the desks. It was well that they came to know her, for one day she would need the help of newspapermen to become famous.

When they got home, she took out the notebook that stood beside her bed to make copious notes while she could still recall the various speakers. Women were not supposed to speak in public, but that taboo had been broken by women preachers, abolitionists and spiritualists. That was one of the things that had drawn her to spiritualism, although Roxanne had always had visions and premonitions and seen things other people thought were not there. Victoria had been brought up to expect the supernatural in daily life, and the spirits had not failed to manifest themselves when she was still a girl. It was the spirits that had first brought her in front of a
crowd and banished fear, so that she enjoyed the attention instead of being immobilized by it.

There was a soft knock on the door. James’s knock. “Come in.” If she had not been alone, she would have gone to the door and opened it a crack to speak with him. That was their way. He had taught her the theory of free love, but she had put it into practice.

He was wearing a navy silk dressing gown, his bearing erect and foursquare as always, almost military. He looked quite handsome. His beard when she met him had been rather overgrown and scraggly, but now it was neatly trimmed—because she regularly trimmed it to save the cost of a barber. She felt a current between them this night. She smiled at him.

“How was the rally?”

“Exciting at first. Then boring. But I am trying to study rhetoric. The art of making speeches that actually move people.”

“Would you like me to get you a book or two on the subject?”

James would know exactly what she should read. “I’d love that.”

He looked toward the bed and then back toward her in silent question. She rose from her vanity and came toward him, letting her dressing gown fall to the floor in a slither of silk. She reached for the little box beside the bed with sponges soaked in boracic acid and inserted one. She spoke in a low, almost purring voice that she had observed worked well on James. “Put another log in the fireplace. Then put yourself next to me.”

He did. She was always gentle with him, because of his war wounds. She had learned the places that pained him and the places he liked to be caressed. The skin around his mouth was sensitive to her tongue and so were his eyelids. If she reached under his balls, there was a spot between his balls and anus where pressure caused his prick to harden at once, magically. He would kiss and caress her breasts, but he got most excited when he squeezed her buttocks. He had told her she had a firm ass, something Woodhull had complained of, saying she had a behind like a boy’s. They reached the point where she no longer had to be so careful not to bump against his six wounds, when his passion began to excite him beyond noticing. She closed her eyes then, giving over to the pressure of his hands and then his prick against her. He rubbed it back and forth against her seat of pleasure, as she had taught him, before thrusting in. He could keep at it for a goodly time once he was excited enough, more than enough time for her to push and push and push up the slope of sensation until her pleasure burst in her. He always knew that moment, and he began to thrust harder
toward his own pleasure. In a minute he came and then subsided next to her. She held him for a time, making sure he felt loved, then rose to douche. She did not take chances with pregnancy. She could tell from James’s breathing he had dozed off. She did not sleep well with him because of his thrashing nightmares, but once in a while after sex they spent the night in her bed. Carefully she slid in beside him, turning onto her side to study his face in the dying light of the fire. Love warmed her as she gazed. Her partner.

S
IX MONTHS EARLIER,
Freydeh and Moishe had arrived in the clamor and confusion of Castle Garden. Now they were sleeping on the floor of a third-story flat on Essex with a German Jewish family, the Kuppersmiths. Mr. Kuppersmith was a butcher who hoped someday to have his own shop, but for now worked in a market. Mrs. Kuppersmith sold baskets in a shop run by her brother-in-law. The oldest boy curried horses in a stable. The daughter tried selling matches, but when the Kuppersmiths learned how many matchgirls were prostitutes, they sent her to make felt in a factory.

Freydeh and Moishe crossed to Brooklyn on the earliest ferry to buy bread half a cent cheaper. They would bring the bread back on the ferry in huge bundles on their backs and then set up curbside on Orchard Street. After three months, they bought an old cart from a retiring peddler. Then they could manage more bread. Most of their business was conducted in German, but they had a handful of Yiddish-speaking customers who sought them out to hear the
mamme loshen.
They were mostly Russian Jews, tailors by trade. Moishe tried to talk them into hiring him in some
capacity, but they had families to supply them with all the workers they needed. They were a close-knit group for they had been alone without other Jews from Eastern Europe.

Here everything was different—everything. When she woke in the morning, lying on a pallet on the floor of the airless kitchen pressed against Moishe, she did not hear the noises of home—the children calling, her mother at the hearth, the cows lowing in the attached stable, the baaing of sheep and the cackling of the hens, the rooster with his high rasping call, the crows, the finches singing. Here the noise never ceased. Yes, horses neighed and she could hear a rooster, cats fighting in the courtyard where latrines poured their stinking overflow between the tenement facing the street and the rear house, dogs barking, cows lowing. Hooves on the paved cross street struck on the stones, the metal wheels roared. Hundreds of wagons were dragged through the narrow dusty streets. All day long, all night, wagons passed loaded with everything that must be shipped in and out of a great city. Always a murmur of voices, a huckster yelling, a beaten woman screaming, a gambler cursing, a mother calling out a window or up from the street. The dark stinking hallway shuddered with footsteps up and down every time water was needed, every time somebody decided to use the latrine in the courtyard, every time anyone went to work or came back, went out to buy or sell anything, needed some air. Factories stood on every cross street and toward the river, slaughterhouses and rendering shops made the air heavy with grease and blood. Herds of cows were driven through the wider streets toward their death. Peddlers hawked their wares all day as loudly as their hoarse voices could carry, hot corn, used clothes, hats, chickens, fruit, vegetables, used shoes and boots, knives or scissors to be sharpened. Sometimes she thought her head would burst. The first nights, she simply could not doze no matter how exhausted she was. She began to sleep with a rag tied around her head to muffle the sounds.

Everything overloaded her senses. Signs hung from every building—the tenements usually had a business or a store on the ground floor. Every fence, every building front and side, everything that could be printed upon demanded attention, yelled at her to look, to do, to buy whatever that sign was selling. It was a visual explosion of demands and claims. Their tenements were lit only by candles or oil lamps, but if they walked to the Bowery or Broadway, gaslights were everywhere, hissing and yellowish and far brighter than any lights she had known before.

She was used to prostitutes back home, but they kept to their house
on the river. When they went out, they were dressed much like other women and did their business of shopping, praying in shul, seeing the wise woman who tended to bodily complaints. On the Bowery she stayed close to Moishe, clutching his arm in the crowd of people such as she had never seen—Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Negroes, an occasional Chinaman, the Yanks themselves—what the others called narrowbacks—all stirred together in a strange smelly bubbling soup of desires and fears and curiosity. Prostitutes were everywhere garishly got up, exposing half their breasts and ankles, painted and showy under the gaslights like the paper flowers women made here. She did not mean to stare, but she could not help it. Moishe always tried to look away. They embarrassed him. Maybe they reminded him that before they married, he had frequented that house on the river some Saturday nights, when Shabbos was over and the workweek not yet begun. Maybe he was embarrassed by so much exposed flesh. They made love passionately, but in the dark. They went up to the roof to make love when the weather permitted. There was no privacy in the apartment. They could hear the Kuppersmiths whenever they went at it, and so could the children and the other boarder, Herman. They could tell when Herman gave himself pleasure, usually when the Kuppersmiths were busy in bed with each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night when snoring assured them everyone else was asleep, silently they coupled on their pallet. A moan or movement from one of the many sleepers stilled them at once.

The Bowery B’hoys and their ladies were everywhere, thrusting confidently through the crowds as if others were just water and they were swimming along to shore, in this case a saloon, an oyster palace, a dance hall, a concert saloon, a peep show, a gambling hell, a pawnshop, a flophouse, a dime museum of freakish things or a theatrical presentation. Moishe and she had no money to waste, but they enjoyed staring at people and what they could see from the sidewalks. In a big window, mermaids swayed with paper seaweed around them—bare-breasted women got up as fish below the waist. In store windows, men were being tattooed. A fortune-teller called to them, saying she could see a great destiny for Moishe. Sailors on leave, Chinese in pigtails, even toffs from uptown wearing silk top hats sauntered past.

T
HE BREAD BUSINESS
was not good—sometimes it rained on their bread before they got a tarpaulin to protect it. Some days they made a little, some
days almost nothing. The river iced over in the middle of January and they could not get to Brooklyn to buy the bread. Moishe got a temporary job cleaning up in a slaughterhouse and came home reeking of death. He only got the job because so many had died of a strange high fever that swept the Lower East Side and killed the weak, the young, the old with a terrible racking cough you could hear even with the windows shut. She began peddling aprons a neighbor made and notions—ribbons, thread, yarn, needles, pins. It was slow but she began to develop a clientele. Women needed those things in every season, to make do, to repair clothing and make new clothing out of old. She called her wares from the street.

The job at the slaughterhouse ended in the spring, but Moishe got a better job hauling barrels. He was strong and he could lift and carry more than most men his size. A drayman who owned a heavy wagon pulled by two great bay horses hired him. They worked six days a week hauling beer barrels, nails, molasses, vinegar to groceries, grog shops, the docks, to and from railroad yards. Moishe began to build a map of the city in his head until he knew it like a native. They moved into their own flat and rented to three young men who slept on their floor. Moishe and she had a bedroom with a door that shut. It was dark and airless, only big enough for a bed and a chair, but they had privacy at last.

She got into trouble a couple of times with her peddling. Once she set up in a place by the curb on Orchard that a burly German told her was his own special spot.

“You got ownership papers? It looks like a public curb to me.”

He whistled shrilly and within minutes a group of tough young men had gathered around her, all wearing the same kind of stiff black hats. They knocked her pushcart over, spilling her merchandise and trampling it underfoot. Two of them punched her in the face and arms. Her nose was bloody and she had a bruised and swollen eye and lip afterward. She could not raise her arm for days.

“You come here again and we’ll break your arms and legs. You stay out of our territory, all along this block.”

Another time, she got too far into the Irish neighborhood over by Cor-lears Hook and again she got beaten and her merchandise stolen. She was learning which streets and which blocks she must avoid. Gangs controlled some areas more tightly than others.

By the next winter, she was sure she was carrying. The baby had not quickened yet but her breasts were sore and her time had not come in two months. She had not told Moishe yet because she wanted to be positive.
She vomited occasionally and that was difficult to disguise. She thought Moishe must suspect something, but then men often didn’t know enough about the ways of women to guess until the wife’s belly stood out like a sack of potatoes. Neither of them spoke about it. She wondered if it were a superstition they held in common.

They sat in the front room the first night of Chanukah. Even though they didn’t go to shul, she lit candles in the
chanukiyah
she had brought from Vilna. The little candle and the
shamesh
candle were burning as they sat in their two chairs. Their boarders were still out. It was six but already night, with the moon shining between the buildings on the snow on cornices and patches not yet rendered into ice and mud. They sat close to each other, just their knees touching.

“For two people who just arrived here a bit more than two years ago, I think we’re doing not so badly after all,” Moishe said in Yiddish.
“Nu,
are you satisfied, wife?”

“I am very satisfied, Moisheleh mine.”

“Then is there something you want to tell me?”

“Can’t keep anything from you, you old woodcutter. Yes. I’m carrying.”

He gripped her hands. “Be careful now, be careful, Freydeleh. Don’t go on those blocks where the Irish gangs rule. Stay in Germantown. The Hungarians are safe. Just watch yourself. I wish you didn’t have to go out peddling.”

“I can’t sew a straight fine seam. I can’t embroider or make lace. It’s healthier than being stuck dawn till dark in a fetid factory bent over a machine or working at a table with men trying to paw you. I promise I’ll be careful. This life in me is precious—our first child.”

“First, but I hope not the last.” He held her hands in his big callused hands, warm and dry and powerful.

I
T WAS A GRAY DAY
in early February, a sharp wind off the East River. It had snowed hard three days before, then thawed briefly, then frozen again. The streets were paved with dirty ice stained with horse urine and droppings. She had come home from her peddling to cook a stew of chicken necks, gizzards and hearts, with potatoes, turnips and onions. With bread that would make supper for Moishe, the two boarders and herself. She was cutting onions, the tears running freely down her face as she wiped it with an old handkerchief of Moishe’s. She would have to wash it out afterward
in the basin, for it was his only one. She wanted to tell him when he came home that she thought she had felt the baby quicken that afternoon as she was going along Mott Street with her cart. She wasn’t sure—she had never been pregnant before—but she had felt
something.
She wished her mama were here beside her to advise her if there were any special precautions she should take now, if there were herbs or simples she should be taking to help her baby along. She had always imagined that, like her older sister, Sara, when she had her first baby, Mama would be at her side, whispering in her ear, singing to her.

She heard running up the steps. One of the street kids came banging on the door. “Missus, you got to come.”

“What’s wrong?” She clutched her apron in her hands.

“It’s your old man. They’re bringing him up.”

Without even shutting the door she ran down the steps pell-mell in the dark of the staircase, round the first turn and down, round the second turn and down, round the third turn, and then she saw the men trying to carry Moishe up the steps. His head was all bloody. His arm hung at an angle and his leg was bleeding.

“Stop!” she yelled at them, and rushed forward. She missed a step and plummeted down toward them, banging on step after step to end up in a heap at the feet of the men dragging her battered and broken husband.

One of them helped her to her feet. “We bring him upstairs.”

“He’s hurt too bad. We have to take him to hospital.”

They carried him through the streets to the Hebrew Hospital with her limping behind them and Moishe still dropping blood in a trail on the dirty ice. One of the men told her what had happened: the horse was startled by a loud noise as they were almost done loading barrels of beer. The horse reared in the shafts. The wagon tipped. The barrels cascaded down on Moishe.

She had felt herself begin to bleed as she sat beside him in the hospital, beside his unconscious broken body. Before morning, she had lost her husband and her unborn baby. She had nothing now, nothing.