Authors: Marge Piercy
A
NTHONY GRIEVED WITH
Maggie over her miscarriage, but the doctor was not pleased. “She can’t take much more of this. She’s a delicate woman.” It was true, she was like a fine porcelain teacup. But they needed a child. He prayed for guidance. The Lord had given Abraham Isaac when Sarah was old and not in the way of women, as the Good Book said. Surely the Lord could give him a child. It need not be a boy; he would be happy with a girl, to replace dear Lillie, who had been called to heaven.
He was now in the employ of the Committee for the Suppression of Vice of the YMCA, his work sanctioned and remunerated. The wealthy financiers and businessmen who supported the Y were backing him. “The working class is in danger of losing itself in vice, wasting their bodies in drink and loose living. Our young men could drown in pools of vice produced by immigrant vermin, polluters of our genes,” a board member said. There were stirring speeches in support when he finished his report. If only Maggie were stronger, he could fully enjoy his new sense of power. From a dry goods salesman, he had transformed himself into a fist of justice.
He was stalking a purveyor of obscene rubber articles near Chinatown one Wednesday in October when he came upon a scene of chaos in a tenement. A woman was crying on the stairs, clutching a baby—a little girl as blond as the silk on an ear of corn. The woman had dirty reddish hair and a nose that looked as if it had been broken. It was hard to tell with these women how old they were—in her ragged dirty dress and unwashed face blotched with tears, she could have been twenty or thirty. If this was trouble, he was always prepared. He touched his revolver through his black frock coat. “Madam, are you all right?” He tried to be polite even with these wretched creatures.
“My sis died in the night and this is her baby. She died of consumption
and now there’s no one to care for the wee one. I’m living in the next building and they say I can’t bring in the baby ’cause I have too many childers already And I’m a widow, with nothing extra to spare.”
“Can you look for another place to live with your children and this poor babe?”
“I don’t have no money. I don’t have two cents.” She looked him over, her tears abating. She was thinking, he guessed, whether to try to beg from him.
“What will you do with this little babe?”
“Take her to the church and put her on the steps, I reckon. What else can I do?”
“You don’t want her?”
“My sis didn’t leave a penny to care for her. I have three of my own. What can I do?” Again she shrugged her bony shoulders in the dirty ragged dress.
“I’ll pay you twenty dollars for her and take her away to raise as my own.”
The woman sat up as if he had poked her in the behind. Her eyes met his with a suddenly appraising stare. “Twenty? She’s a fine pretty babe. She’s worth more than that.”
So she had revealed her true character, a shameless seller of babies. “Take it or leave it. There’s plenty of abandoned babies to be had.”
The woman frowned at the baby. Then she held out her palm. “Twenty in cash.”
Anthony counted out the money for her, but held on to it until he took the baby from her. “What’s her name?”
“Bridget, but you can name her whatever. She don’t know her name—she’s only three months. The woman upstairs was nursing her—Sis couldn’t—but she won’t do it no more without you paying her.”
“I’ll find a wet nurse, don’t worry.” Not that he thought this slattern would concern herself with the baby for five minutes after he went down the steps. He took the baby and hastened toward the Bowery, where he should be able to hail a cab to take him to the ferry. The baby began to cry, feebly, and he held her close. This little child would be saved and save Maggie, all at once. He looked down at her in the cab, trying feebly to suckle on his overcoat, and he melted with pity.
They named her Adele. Maggie’s mother found a wet nurse. The nursery had been set up already, so it was just a matter of putting Adele where
Lillie had once lived. Maggie took to her at once. “It’s the most wonderful present in the world you’ve brought me, Tony.”
“She’ll be our own darling to raise.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways. Now he has given me a child.”
“I prayed for a child for us, Maggie. I do the Lord’s hard work in the ditches of filth to preserve what’s right, and the Lord rewards us. The Lord’s given us this babe to raise.”
“Can we legally adopt her?”
“We have powerful friends. They’ll make the proper arrangements. There should be no problem at all in securing Adele.”
That evening, Anthony worked on his notes, updating his diary of arrests while the coal furnace heated the house and Maggie settled in the baby. He had an additional fire in the stove set into his fireplace. The wet nurse would come three times a day to feed the baby, upstairs out of his way should he be home.
Over the next weeks, his impulsive purchase proved a good one, confirming his judgment and the Lord’s protection. Adele turned out to be a good baby; she did not cry nearly as much as Lillie had. She smiled readily and gurgled and cooed as Maggie amused her with a rattle. She seemed healthy and happy, and Maggie was brighter than he had seen her since Lillie took ill. He looked over at the brand-new 16-shot Winchester repeating rifle one of his backers had given him, mounted over the mantel. There were raids on which his revolver was not protection enough. Now he had this dandy powerful new weapon. The Lord did provide. He felt twice the man he had recently been.
H
IS NEXT SEIZURE
was one Patrick Bannon, a forty-five-year-old Irish immigrant and papist who was selling circulars for a woman’s rights convention. In defiance of all decent behavior, he had his two young sons circulating the vile pamphlets. All this demanding of rights by viragos was contrary to the word of God in the Bible, contrary to nature, which clearly separated the man as head from woman created from his rib, who should cleave unto him, honor and obey and be his helpmate, as was his own dear wife. He brought Bannon before Judge Benedict. Anthony never lost a case in Benedict’s court. Benedict always sided with him and always sentenced the criminal to jail. Bannon got a year and a $500 fine. That would wipe him out good.
Satan was busy night and day in the city If Anthony had an army at his disposal, he could cleanse the city All he could do was go out every day to fight the Lord’s battles. So he went with his pistol and his notebook, feeling his strength, his vigor as never before. Sometimes he won and sometimes the police, instead of aiding him, tipped off his prey He had an assistant now, a burly man of German descent named Bamberger, handy with his fists. He also had a few volunteers he could call on, young men from the Y. One of them had come into possession of a madam’s card advertising a lewd show called the Busy Flea Dance at a brothel just below Houston. The madam charged them five dollars a head to watch a disgusting performance of four girls naked and performing obscene acts on each other, oral, anal, simulated congress with a large pink imitation organ. Anthony paid for himself, Bamberger and the young volunteer named Fred. He made mental notes so that after the arrests he could write up exactly what they did. He could not believe these creatures belonged to the same sex as his Maggie. Surely the daughters of Eve were born wicked unless saved. He could not imagine what he saw before his own eyes, mouths in the dirtiest places. He could not even look away. When the show was over, Anthony pulled his pistol and arrested everyone.
“Wrap yourself in a blanket,” he said to the four prostitutes, pointing his pistol at the madam’s head. “You’re going to the station right now. As you are.”
“I’m not going out that door without my clothes.” The mulatto woman put her hands on her hips and looked him straight in the eyes. “Shoot me.”
After ten minutes of these floozies screaming at him, Anthony let them get dressed and then marched them to the nearby Fourteenth Ward station. “What’s up, Sally?” the policeman at the desk asked the madam.
“This gent has been pointing a pistol at my girls and me. He paid for the show, he watched the show, and then he wanted to parade my girls naked down the street.”
“Are you okay, Janie?” the policeman addressed one of the prostitutes. “Have a seat, girls. You need anything?”
To Anthony’s overpowering disgust, the police captain himself came out to greet the madam, with whom he seemed to have an intimate relationship. He glared at Anthony. “Who are you to go around arresting folks? You’ve no authority. Waving a pistol at these girls.”
Anthony wrote up detailed notes on the performance, but the case was dismissed. The police often were hand in glove with the prostitutes, he reported
to his backers at the Y. Something more was needed than the laws already on the books. He needed direct authority to arrest and prosecute without the agreement of a corrupt police force.
Anthony had better success against pornographers, blasphemers, free lusters and authors of books that displayed anatomy. Any discussion of the private parts, any drawings or photos of the naked body could incite dangerous longings. Once excited, such desires and fantasies were impossible to contain. He moved against two abortionists, small prey compared to Madame Restell, but he could not seem to touch her. She had powerful and rich friends who protected her as she lived openly in bloody luxury.
He did not think much of Plymouth Church—too lax. However, an attack on one minister could lead to a contempt for all, backsliding and, ultimately, atheism. He was shown a copy of
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly,
as the smut journal was called, within a couple of days of its publication. It contained an obvious attempt to discredit the preacher of Plymouth Church, Henry Ward Beecher, known all over the United States as a Christian speaker of tremendous power, by detailing rumors of affairs. He considered Beecher full of hogwash, but the preacher was a Congregationalist and as such entitled to Anthony’s full protection. Besides, Woodhull was notorious, in the papers as often as the president. It would please his backers and the Lord to put her away. Most of the issue was taken up with a scurrilous interview with Woodhull, whose name had come to his attention before as one of those free lusters, an unsexed woman who demanded that women do things not even proper for men, a slut who hung out with communists and atheists and other lowlife. But there was worse obscenity in the same issue, an account of the French Ball, a scandalous orgy attended by a mix of prominent men, whores, society ladies and lowlife—all in masks. If it were not so strongly protected by men with money, he would have moved against it. The article in question, written by Tennie C. Claflin, was about the rape of a young virgin who had been foolish enough to go to the ball and who ended up in a brothel. He did not doubt the story, but such tales could not be printed and distributed where the eyes of the innocent could fall upon them. He couldn’t imagine the woman who could write such a report.
He swung into action at once with help from Beecher’s parishioners, fine upstanding men in positions of authority. One bought copies of the paper and mailed it to another. The district attorney met Anthony in his office on Sunday to issue a warrant for the arrest of Woodhull and Claflin for sending obscene matter through the mails. Anthony then went with his men and officers. He waited for almost an hour. Then one of the patrolmen
called out, “Here they come!” He and his men intercepted the sisters in an open carriage, with five hundred copies of the dirty rag at their feet. Oh, he could tell they were caught totally by surprise. They were taken straight to the Ludlow Street jail.
In the morning he got them moved to the jurisdiction of the U.S. commissioner Davenport—an officer of the court he could trust—who sent them back to jail. Woodhull claimed to be running for president, so it was only fitting she spend Election Day in a cell. Woodhull was the worst kind of woman, and that men called her fair only made her more dangerous. The face of an angel and the soul of a devil, one of the prosecutors said. The Reverend Beecher staunchly denied the foul story of adultery the sisters had printed, probably when a blackmail attempt failed. Anthony got them moved from Ludlow to the Tombs—a dark, filthy, overcrowded dungeon that stank of the open sewage that flowed through it—a fit place for the likes of these low women.
Their next time in court, suddenly they were represented by that notorious shyster Howe of Howe and Hummel, who specialized in getting off criminals of all stripes. Howe was a huge bear of a man—bigger than Anthony himself—who dressed like the barker of a circus on the Bowery in loud clashing colors, plaids and silks. He glittered with diamonds on stickpins and studs, on rings and pins. On his head, instead of a respectable top hat or derby, he wore in all seasons a yachting cap. Anthony had crossed swords with Howe over three belly dancers gyrating in transparent veils. Howe had got the sluts off by claiming the dance was sacred to their Islamic faith—Anthony knew all three hailed from Philadelphia but he couldn’t prove they were fakes.
Besides his own suit in federal court, the sisters were being sued for libel by the gentleman Claflin claimed had deflowered a virgin at the French Ball. It was disgusting that any woman could write about such a thing, using words to describe the sexual act as if giving a recipe for roast turkey. At such moments he thought about his Maggie and his precious little daughter Adele and resolved that he would forever stand between them and such filth. Oh, he had the evil sisters, no doubt about it. No doubt at all. They were going to spend a long time in prison.
A
LETTER CAME THAT SAID
Freydeh’s older sister Sara and family were taking a ship out of Leipzig—a recently instituted run to New York—well in time for Freydeh to meet them. She and Kezia scrubbed the three small rooms to make them as clean as they could, while Sammy hauled water up again and again. She sent Sammy out to the markets to buy pallets to put down on the floor. The day before the ship was to arrive, Sammy checked with the shipping office to make sure the ship was on schedule, for the weather had been rough and Freydeh was worried. Ships had been known to go down. It was cold already, and there had been driving rain. No snow yet, but some mornings ice crusted the mud in the street and icicles hung from the cornice past their window. This day had dawned cold but clear with a pale blue sky showing between buildings. The air smelled more of coal and less of sewage. Freydeh could scarcely choke down a bit of stale bread dipped in tea. Lately she had been drinking coffee sometimes—Sammy had taught her the habit—but this morning she was too nervous. She had not seen Sara for ten years. She inspected Sammy’s cleanliness, then scrubbed Kezia until she cried that her skin was rubbing off. They put on their nicest clothes.
They arrived way too early and waited and waited. Freydeh had made sure they all wore warm clothing now that they could afford it—secondhand, but not fifth-hand, not worn out already. Kezia was bundled up so she looked like a fat dumpling, although she was still a thin child—not nearly as thin as she had been when Freydeh found her, but thinner than she ought to be. They bought hot corn and roasted chestnuts from vendors to nibble while they waited. On such a chilly morning, few strolled the paths of the park in front of Castle Garden and no one sat on the benches except a homeless man who might have been sleeping and might have been dead. Kezia ran off to watch a boat that was docking.
Freydeh chased her and dragged her back, keeping hold of her hand. Today she wasn’t going to lose anybody.
At last passengers from Sara’s boat began to spill out of Castle Garden. Freydeh, Sammy and Kezia pushed up close to the doors so that her sister and family could not be swept away by hawkers from boardinghouses, men seeking cheap day labor, brothel keepers—who swarmed the immigrants as they straggled through the high formidable doors of the port of entry. It seemed to Freydeh that several hundred bedraggled travelers passed her and still no one looked like her sister. Had she missed Sara? Asher she had never known well. She remembered him as religious, austere. She began to sweat, a cold sheen of fear under her dress. Finally she recognized Sara, her face more lined but sweet as ever, her dark eyes searching the crowd. Freydeh began to yell. The brother-in-law Asher was gripping a boy by the hand tightly while a little girl hung on Sara’s black skirt. Sara carried a large bundle and so did Asher, a short stocky man, although thinner than she remembered him, with a great bushy beard and
payess.
The older girl, Debra, a toddler when Freydeh left, had a pack tied to her back and dragged a basket.
“Shvester, shvester!”
Freydeh cried at the top of her lungs.
Sara’s face changed, breaking open. “I was so afraid,” she said in Yiddish, “after what happened with Shaineh, that you wouldn’t meet us.”
“So these are your children?”
“Chaim, Feygeleh and Debra—my oldest.” She motioned Debra forward, who gave a shrug of a curtsy, eyes cast down.
“This is Samuel and this is Kezia.” Sammy held out his hand to shake while Kezia stuck her thumb in her mouth, as she did when she was nervous or fearful.
Asher and Sara were staring at Sammy and Kezia, then at her, then at them again. She could tell what they were thinking: Sammy was too old to be her son by Moishe, and Kezia was too young. “They’re adopted,” Freydeh said. “But I love them like my own flesh and blood. Moishe gave me a baby but I lost it when he was killed. So Hashem has given me these. Come. Have you eaten?”
“Not for two days,” Asher said. “We ran out of provisions. We couldn’t get kosher food.”
“Then we’ll go home and you can eat. Can you wait that long?”
Sara was looking around. “Is it near here?”
“Not too far. We take a horsecar. Come. I have money to pay”
They all crowded onto the car, standing huddled together with the bundles in the middle for fear they would be stolen. “So many buildings,”
Asher said. “So much noise. So many people. Who are they? Where are they going?”
“I remember how it was when we came out those same doors. We didn’t know where we were or what to do.”
“Is it much farther?” Debra asked, speaking for the first time. Her voice reminded Freydeh of how Shaineh had sounded as a girl. It was good to hear the accents of home—although it was no longer home and never would be. Often immigrants talked of going back to their homeland once they had made their
gelt,
their money, but Jews didn’t think of that.
“It’s a ways. The roads are always crowded like this. Day and night,” Sammy said in Yiddish. She could tell he was nervous in front of her family. She squeezed his hand.
“So many people,” Sara echoed. “So much noise. And it’s dirty. I thought everything would be new and clean and shining.”
“We live in the dirtiest part of town, almost,” Sammy said. He sounded more confident, finding a comfortable role as guide. “Over by Corlears Hook it’s even worse. Five Points is worse. But where we live, there’s Jews. You can find shuls and kosher butchers and bakeries and places that will hire you, if they have work.”
When they got off the car and walked through the streets of their neighborhood, Asher and Sara kept staring up. “They’re so tall, the buildings. You hardly see the sky. Where do people have their latrine?” Asher asked.
“You’ll smell it when we go in the building,” Freydeh said, taking her sister’s elbow. How thin they all were. “In the courtyard. Fortunately, we face the street. But people empty their pots out the windows. Never walk too close to the buildings, especially in early morning. Don’t be afraid. In a month, you’ll be at home.”
They labored up the steps to the top floor. “What’s all this?” Asher asked of her equipment.
“I make a living with rubber goods…condoms.”
Sara made the sign of the evil eye. “How can you do that, my sister?”
“I was left a widow with no money. I worked in a pharmacy. I saw that making condoms was something I could do. It’s harder for a woman to run a business here than back in the Pale. I make good money, sister, and I keep my family. I saved enough to bring you over with your family. Be glad for what I do.”
“It doesn’t seem fitting for a woman,” Asher said. He was no taller than Sammy and slighter.
“Back in the Pale, women run taverns and grog shops. Our mother made vodka. So? My work is better than being in a brothel, what happened to Shaineh.”
Sara began to weep, beating her breast. “The shame on us!”
“Nobody needs to know, once we can get her away from the man who’s keeping her. We’ve tracked her keeper and we know where he lives. She has a little girl by him, Sara, and you have to behave yourself when we finally find them. Here everybody can start over and over again, and nobody need know about the shame. This is a hard place. But if you’re strong, you can do well, you can set up your children to do even better.”
Sammy took over and briefly explained how they had been tracking Shaineh. He had followed Alfred twice but he could not keep up with the carriage. He lost him going south each time. But they would persist and they would find Shaineh and her daughter Reba. They were far too close to give up.
Freydeh heard soft giggles and turned to see Feygeleh and Kezia down on the floor playing with a doll Freydeh had made for Kezia out of odds and ends of fabric with skin of rubber and a face Kezia herself had drawn.
Freydeh fed everybody the soup she had made earlier. She would give up her bed to the family and sleep in the front room. Besides, she didn’t want anybody else sleeping near her apparatus, for fear they might lurch into it in the dark and break it. She would take care of her family, but she would not let them interfere in her business.
The next day, they held a conference around the rickety kitchen table. It was warm in the little kitchen, for the stove was lit. Water was heating on it and gruel sat keeping warm. The adults, she noticed, now automatically included Sammy.
“You can help us in the rubber business, or you can look for work. It won’t be easy. Times are getting harder,” Sammy said. “A lot of people have been thrown out of work lately, and jobs are tight. The German Jews don’t speak Yiddish, so you have to talk German with them.”
“I can do that some,” Asher said. “I thought all Jews spoke Yiddish.”
“Not the Germans,” Sammy said. He was showing off a bit, proving himself to her relatives. “There are Jews downtown who talk Ladino, nothing like Yiddish. They been here the longest. When you go around Manhattan, you hear German, you hear Yiddish, you hear Hungarian and Irish and English and Czech and Italian and even Chinese. Everybody under the sun comes here. But you got to learn English to get by and you got to speak German with the German Jews.”
“How about Polish?” Sara asked. “I speak Polish.”
“There are some Poles too. But they don’t have the jobs you need.” Sammy hit his palm on the table, looking at Asher. “Tomorrow you come with me and we’ll go around and see what we can find. You’re pretty skinny. Are you strong?”
“I can do whatever needs to be done, for my family,” Asher said.
“I can work with you,” Sara said to Freydeh. “I don’t approve of it, but if I can feed my children, then I do it.”
“Me too.” Debra stood behind her mother. “I am thirteen. I can work as hard as anyone.”
“You should be in school,” Freydeh said. “There’s free school here.”
“The youngest children can go,” Sara said. “Debra has to work. Is there enough to do for her and me, to earn our way?”
“More than enough.” Freydeh put her hand over her sister’s. How worn it was already. Sara was only thirty-five but looked years older. “Times are hard in the Pale?”
“Impossible,” Sara said. “Neighbors were dying all around us from cholera, from hunger, from pleurisy, from consumption. People are so hungry they eat the grass of the fields and they eat the dirt of the ground.”
“Here we can survive. But you have to let go of some of the old ways and the old ideas.”
“I won’t give up some things,” Sara said. “I will not put off my
shaytl
and I will not eat
traif and
I will not give up being a Jew.”
“You don’t have to,” Freydeh said. “You just have to stretch what you think of as natural and ordinary. There’s nothing in our religion against what I do. You’re just not used to such a business. But here they use these things up by the cartload. I do what I can for my children and for you.”
Wednesday Freydeh went out on her rounds to the clients she serviced that day, a couple of brothels, four pharmacies and a purveyor of rubber goods. She had just entered the premises of Mr. Gillespie on Ann Street and was showing him the new item in her line, the pasha, which had little ridges on it supposed to provide extra pleasure for the woman. Another customer entered, a hulking gentleman in a rusty black frock coat with ginger whiskers and a broad high forehead. While Mr. Gillespie examined the pasha and she made out a receipt for the items he carried, the gentleman wandered around the store picking up items and putting them down, a little shy about stating his business. “I’ll give the pasha a try before I order a gross of them,” Gillespie said. “I’ll keep this sample and let you know.”
She didn’t want to give up her sample, but he was a good customer. “If you need to try it out, then do it. But you’ll find it a winner.”
“I wouldn’t mind trying it out with you, sweetheart. You’re a right handsome strapping figure of a woman.”
“I’m a widow with two children and I’m still mourning my husband.”
He turned to the gentleman. “I’m going to be a while with this lady, so tell me what you want and I can ring it up. You don’t mind waiting,” he said, turning to Freydeh.
“A customer is a customer. Go ahead with him. I’ll finish your receipt.”
“I want a box of those.” The whiskery gent pointed to the tiger condom.
“That’s a real popular item. This here is the lady who makes them and she makes them right and tight.”
The gentleman purchased his box, asked for a receipt—which surprised Gillespie, she could tell—and left the store. They resumed going over his order. She was just totaling it up when the gentleman entered again, this time with another man just as big and burly and a policeman. The gentleman brandished a pistol. Freydeh shrank behind a row of sporting equipment. “You’re under arrest, Gillespie, for selling obscene materials. And you. The Jewess. What’s your name?” He waved his pistol at Freydeh.
She did not know what to say. At first she pretended she did not understand. But her name was on the receipt she had been writing out.
“Frieda Levin, you’re under arrest for selling obscene materials.”
He quick-marched them down the street to the station house. She was terrified. What would happen to her? He kept waving that big pistol around. Did they shoot people here? Would she disappear forever? Would she be sent off to some place like Siberia? While she was being booked, she gave a quarter to a street urchin to run to her house with a note for Sammy, who would give the boy another quarter if he handed the note straight to him. Usually there was a kid hanging around the station hoping for just this sort of job. People wanted to contact their lawyers, their family, their business. She gave a false address to the officer—she used Big Head’s address. She figured that while they wouldn’t get much satisfaction about her there, they might find other things that would interest them.
She hoped the kid had delivered her note to Sammy and not just pocketed the quarter and vanished. She knew the kid wouldn’t pass on the address to the police. Not that they would care. They had booked her in a
perfunctory way as if annoyed. The police in her neighborhood were aware of her business and sometimes put the touch on her for free boxes, but they never bothered her. It was like hitting up the butcher for a steak or drinking free at the local saloon.