Sex Wars (31 page)

As they were walking home, Freydeh clapped Sammy on the shoulder. “You were great, Sammy, you did just what was needed. I can’t believe how mean you sounded. Without you, I would have left him and learned not one thing.”

“But what did we learn? Not much that helps us find her.”

She stopped at a fish market. “We can have fresh whitefish. I love
whitefish. I can’t bake it like we did at home, but I can make it good on the burner. This is a treat for all of us, but especially for Sammy.”

At supper Sammy enjoyed the fish, certainly, for it was a big treat, but he seemed preoccupied. After they had hauled up water from the pump and washed dishes in the basin, he perched by the window, motioning her to come sit by him.

“I have to stay out of school this week. I’ll help you write a note how sick I am.”

“Why do you want to stay out of school? Education is important, Sammy. I want you to make something of yourself.”

“I need to go around to the stables. So he has some money. He has a fancy carriage and fancy clothes and a footman in livery, but I bet he doesn’t have his own stables. I bet he keeps his horse and carriage in a stable near where he lives.”

“But how will you find it?”

“I bet he don’t live up on Fifth Avenue by Madame Restell’s. I’ll start in the Twenties and Thirties.”

“You stay in school. I’ll look.”

“Freydeh, you can’t go around to stables. I can hang around pretending I’m looking for a job and find out where he keeps his maroon spider phaeton and his gray horse. Then I can find out who he is and where he lives.”

“He may have Shaineh locked up some other place.”

“Once we find him, we can follow him. We’re only four weeks behind now.”

She was torn. She desperately wanted to find Shaineh, but she was afraid of the temptations that would beset Sammy if he stayed out of school. She doubted if stableboys were a good influence. It was hard to keep a young man from getting into trouble, and Sammy was growing into a fine young man. But he was right: if they did not follow up on what they had been told quickly, they would lose their only shot at finding her lost sister. She had to trust him. She had to. Slowly she nodded.

A
NTHONY WAS DEEPLY
satisfied with his personal life. His dear wife was in the family way at last. He cosseted her. Sometimes he even cooked, to keep her from tiring herself by standing too long on her feet, for her ankles were swollen and her back often ached. He knew most men refused to do what was regarded as women’s work and thus demeaning, but he felt himself too securely a man to worry. He carried out all his church duties, Sunday school, prayer meetings at the jail, special meetings at the Y, but always he hastened home to his Maggie. He was proud of their house with its comfortable furnishings, the piano in the parlor that even now she often played for him, old favorite songs and hymns. He liked the neighborhood, where many prosperous Christian families lived. He could walk to church, although now that Maggie was so far along, he had a cab take them. He would have liked to have a carriage, but he was not advancing in the dry goods trade.

He was bored with his toil of fancy and fashion. He tried to do the Lord’s business on his own time for these were wicked days, when depravity was spewed out by countless presses, flaunted on the stage, sold from shop after shop. Newspapers carried open advertisements for the prevention
of children and the killing of them once fecundated. The sporting papers for men spoke openly of so-called star courtesans, filthy women with the gates of hell between their legs. Brothels were corrupting youth on every other block in Manhattan. Streetwalkers roamed alone or in packs even on Broadway; in the theaters they filled the balconies. Wicked upper-class women disposed of potential offspring as if they were tossing out spoiled fruit. All they cared about was pleasure and fancy clothes, jewels, hats, gloves, boots. Maggie was nothing like that. She made her own dresses and she kept a tight budget—as they had to. Success was eluding him, and here he was starting a family. He was frustrated into impotent rages in which he strode the streets of Brooklyn until he had worn out his temper lest he carry it home.

The city was rotten, like Nineveh in the Good Book that Jonah was sent to warn, and a strong man was needed to set things right. He attended meetings of the National Reform Association, full of devout men and clergy. They wanted the nation to pass a constitutional amendment to place the United States firmly under God, to declare God and Jesus Christ the rulers and the Bible the supreme authority. A Presbyterian who had been president was now a justice of the Supreme Court. Anthony did not think much of Presbyterians, for he did not find them evangelical enough, but certainly they were supporting this fine project. After all, his wife had been raised Presbyterian, and her father, the shopkeeper, had been an elder of his church. They had a certain strictness that was appropriate. The proposed amendment would settle the nation once again on the way of virtue and restore Bible teaching to schools. There would be no room for freethinkers or freelusters, for radicals with dangerous ideas. But the movement was not making the headway the founders had expected. Some of them were moving into reforming morals, fighting obscenity that destroyed the bodies and minds of so many young growing boys, leading to enervation and insanity.

In his Connecticut village, if someone was doing something bad, everybody shortly knew and could punish that person, drive him out of town. Here in the city, a boy could go astray and no one pay heed. Young men’s lives, like poor Edward’s, were wasted. Now that Anthony was about to be a father, his duty to fight evil was clearer than ever. Budington encouraged him, something he needed these days when his job oppressed him.

He pondered the YMCA. They had money, for many important men of business belonged, some even serving on their board, like J. Pierpont Morgan. Such men cared deeply about the generation growing up, that
they learn to cultivate good habits and avoid evil ones. If only he could demonstrate to these rich and powerful men his usefulness, his ability to serve as their strong arm in the war against those who would corrupt and enervate youth, he could carry out the Lord’s work and support his family at the same time. The Y had recently limited membership to evangelical Christians. They had been responsible for passage of the state law against obscenity. Surely if he could reach the men in charge, he could persuade them of his zeal.

He had been studying the YMCA structure. William E. Dodge was one of the leaders, young and wealthy, son of the man who had led the New York Tract Society that proselytized widely. The father had poured money into evangelical causes, and the son was following in his footsteps. Another leader was Cephas Brainerd, a prominent lawyer and active in Republican inner circles. Then there was Morris Jesup, who had lost his father at twelve, as Anthony had lost his mother. He knew about hard work and scrabbling his way to the top. Only a decade older than Anthony, he was a banker and railroad financier everyone said was worth millions upon millions. Yet he too had been raised in a devout Congregationalist family in Connecticut. Anthony was particularly avid to make personal contact with Jesup. He knew in his bones that they would speak the same language, would understand the world in a similar way.

The great day arrived when Maggie was taken abed to deliver his first child. He rushed home but the doctor threw him out. He paced the streets, then took refuge at the Clinton Avenue Church, where Budington consoled him and they prayed together. After several hours, Anthony went home, where Maggie’s mother had arrived, but the doctor again shooed him away. Maggie was still in labor. He could hear her screaming. He was terrified and knelt on the porch begging the Lord to deliver her. Then he rushed back to the church and Budington joined him in a prayer vigil through the night. In the morning, Budington sent a boy to see what was happening. Nothing. Maggie was still in labor. The doctor feared for her life. She had been trying to deliver the child for more than thirty hours.

Budington bid the boy stay on the porch of the house until there was news. Finally, at noon, the boy came. Maggie had given birth to a baby girl. Anthony got to his feet shakily. He had been kneeling for so long he could scarcely stand, but he stomped his feet and then set out for the house, after tipping the boy.

Maggie lay pale and listless. He was afraid, for she looked like his mother as she was dying, but the doctor slapped his back. “It’s just the way
of women. She’s narrow in the hips. It was a hard birth, but I got the baby out safely. She needs a long rest and she’ll be as good as ever.”

Mrs. Hamilton, his mother-in-law, was muttering to herself. “Should have had a midwife, not a doctor. They know what to do. Look at the marks on the poor baby from his nasty devices, yanking her out.”

He ignored the old woman. Doctors were the modern way. Midwives he did not trust. It was said they could help women avoid pregnancy and even to abort. Doctors were on the side of the father. He thanked Mrs. Hamilton politely for having attended his wife and tried to pack her off, but she resisted. Maggie begged him in a tiny voice to let her mother stay. He agreed reluctantly. Gingerly he touched the baby. Her head was creased and she was red and blue and bruised, but she had everything, little fingers, little toes, a little nose, a rosebud mouth. Lillie, he would call her, after his own mother. She was an angel come to earth to be his sweet child. “Lillie,” he said aloud. “Our dear Lillie. My first child.”

The doctor took him aside. “I wouldn’t be in any hurry for a second. Your wife is very weak. Childbirth is taxing for her. Give her time to recover.”

Anthony agreed. He would sleep in the child’s room for a period of weeks while his dear Maggie recovered her strength. Maggie must not die. He would protect her. Maggie had the same long face and long-fingered hands as his mother. Her hair was even the same light brown with a slight curl. They were both such good women, but unlike his father, who had made his mother bear ten children, five of whom died too young for him to remember them, he would not force Maggie to bear more than another couple of children. A Christian man should be able to control his base appetites. Although they were bidden to be fruitful and multiply, the Scriptures did not say a man must force his wife to bear more children than she had the strength for. In the meantime, he had an adorable little baby daughter.

Outside the door, he had to be hard, to compete. Outside the oak door of his narrow but ample house, he fought for a living and to create a world fit for his children and other people’s—the clean upstanding people who counted. The city was flooded with dirty noisy immigrants who let their children run in the streets like packs of wild dogs. They cursed, they drank, they brought unhealthy and primitive customs with them like their smelly ill-cooked food. They brought diseases that flourished in their filthy slums, whose pestilence crept like a sewer fog through the city, into the houses of those who tried to live upright, virtuous lives.

He closed his eyes, sitting at the bedside of his precious Maggie, who loosely held the baby in her arms as she dozed, her mouth fallen open, her cheeks pale and sunken from loss of blood. The room still reeked of blood, but he did not want to open a window for fear she would become chilled. He wondered if she would mind if he removed his black suit coat. He hung it carefully on the back of the chair, for she told him he was always rumpling his clothes. He was a big man and a strong one. Strong enough for both of them. Strong enough to fight the fight for Jesus every day. He closed his eyes again, perhaps he dozed too, sitting in the chair keeping vigil. Perhaps he dozed or perhaps he didn’t, but he saw a vision.

It was like something from the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle. It was a great red beast with the face of a swarthy man with black shining eyes and many long pointed teeth, a huge beast like a bull. One of its horns was red and one of its horns was black. It was trampling through fields of young corn that were really young boys growing up green and straight, but now trampled into the muck beneath the cloven hooves of this great red beast. A voice like that of an angel spoke loudly to him and said, “And the one horn was Drink and the second horn was Smut.” The beast was thundering toward him trampling the fine boys under its hooves, and it was chanting about freedom and free love and free lust and bad women as it stomped the youth, their blood mixing with the mud. He rose up and stood to meet it. He was going to stop the beast, to wrestle it to the ground like Samson. The beast rushed toward him snorting. Anthony stood his ground, then woke with a start, staring around him.

Maggie was still sleeping, but she looked better. He touched her forehead. It was clammy. He would make broth. He knew perfectly well how to make beef broth. He had many good household skills acquired growing up in a motherless house, before he went away to school. He would cook a healthy digestive broth for her and bring it to her on a tray. In all ways, he was a much better husband than his father had been. He would have kept his mother alive if he had been her husband. He would have coddled and cosseted her as he did his Maggie.

There was a case in the papers of a young fair-haired woman whose naked body had been found in a trunk shipped railway express from New York to Chicago. It was a sensational murder, for she had clearly bled to death from an abortion. Her body was put on ice at Bellevue. Hundreds of men filed by to look at her, the picture of tragedy, purity defiled and then vilely killed by a dirty abortionist. It was the moral outrage of the entire metropolitan area, on the front page of every paper.
MAIDEN BETRAYED.

The police soon arrested a Polish Jew named Rosenzweig, although he called himself Dr. Franklin to disguise his origins. His family all lined up in court and insisted he had been with them and had never done such a thing. He just dispensed pills and powders and in Poland he had been a doctor, they said. Anthony followed the case and one day he stole away from his sales rounds and went to court. He had to arrive very early because crowds of men attended the trial every day. It was the sensation of the month.

The men’s sporting papers ran huge stories clamoring for the Jew to be hanged. Anthony despised the sporting papers because they played to the young men who came to the city, ignorant of what could happen to them. They lauded prostitution and ran lascivious ads, but they did oppose abortionists and called for their prosecution. They got one thing right with all the evil they did.

Anthony watched the prosecutor carefully. He was earnest but not forceful enough. He used too much legal language and didn’t make the jury feel outrage. Anthony could do a better job. It should be him going after the scum of the city. It should be him shouldering the weight of justice. That was what he had been born for. A destiny awaited him, but how to break through to it? Not by selling notions.

The murdered girl was Alyce Bowlsby. Her murderer spoke with a strong accent that the newspapers made fun of. He kept saying Alyce had threatened to kill herself. A handkerchief with her initials had been found in his office. The defense tried to call a woman friend of Alyce’s. However the judge would not let the witness be sworn in. The judge exhibited, Anthony felt, an appropriate sense of decency. No female ears should hear of such a subject.

The miscreant was found guilty and taken away to prison. But still, Anthony did not feel satisfied. He wanted to punish Rosenzweig in a way that would crush him and deter others. He should be publicly flogged; he should be hanged in Union Square. Anthony could have handled everything more powerfully. He ought to be up there prosecuting evildoers. He ought to be out catching them.

Maggie finally recovered enough to get out of bed. They had to use a wet nurse, as she hadn’t enough milk. However, she was her cheerful self and once again providing him with a home that was a haven from all the ugly things in the city and the hardness of the commercial world. She was the angel in his house, frail still. He wondered if it was time to move back into their shared bedroom. The baby cried sometimes at night and woke
him. That also woke Maggie, who would carry the baby to bed with her. After a week of this, she simply took Lillie into her bed for the entire night. Anthony began to sleep through again. Perhaps it was a little soon to return to Maggie’s bed.