The Virgin Cure (14 page)

“I’ll do all the work,” I’d promise her. “I’ll take on whatever position you find for me. You can sell me away as many times as you like.” I imagined myself coming home again and again with whatever I could get my hands on—silver, jewels, money, gold. All Mama would have to do was sit on her mattress and wait. If anything went wrong, there was always Ohio.

“It’s just up there,” I said to Nestor. “You can let me off any time.”

The horse’s ears were turning, catching my words and then letting them go again. The leather straps in Nestor’s hands gently moved up and down with the horse’s gait.

“All right then,” he said, looking at me with concern. “I’ll stop at the corner and wait until you get inside.”

“You can’t,” I told him. “The boys here don’t sleep. They’ll swarm the wagon if they see the quality of your clothes. They’ll take your hat and tear off your coat. They’ll cut the straps on the horse and take her too.”

“I have to see you safe,” Nestor argued.

“Circle around if you must, but don’t wait for me,” I said. “You needn’t worry. I’ve got somewhere to go if she won’t take me back.”

Nestor nodded, giving a gentle tug at the reins. The horse let out a snort.

“Be well, Miss Fenwick,” he said, reaching out to touch my hand.

I wondered for a moment if I was making a mistake. “Will she be different when Mr. Wentworth comes home?” I asked. “Would things have gotten any better?”

“No, my dear, they would’ve gotten worse.”

Leaving him was more difficult than I’d imagined. My cheeks burned and my throat swelled with not knowing what to say. I hoped that he’d be at least a little bit lonely without me.

Jumping from the cart, I landed square on the street.

“My name’s Moth,” I told him, not waiting for him to say anything more.

Someone I hold in great esteem would one day explain to me that Nestor’s actions (although meant to save me) were just as criminal as Mrs. Wentworth’s.

His motives were not pure (enough)
.

True.

He asked you to commit a crime
.

True.

He allowed harm to come to you in order to serve his needs
.

Perhaps.

September 25, 1871
The New York Infirmary
for Indigent Women and Children
128 Second Avenue, New York, New York.

They are everywhere I look—girl after girl left behind by their mothers, their families, and society.

Mandy Clarke, sixteen years old, looking as aged and tired as a Fulton Street whore, sores and chancres covering every inch of her body.

Penny Giles, thirteen years old, ruined by her uncle.

Fran Tasch, nineteen, her face badly burned by the carbolic she drank to end her life.

Girl Unknown, approximately nineteen to twenty-five years of age, her corpse found stuffed inside a trunk at the Chambers Street station. Her death was caused by an abortion gone wrong.

These were just the girls I saw today.

S.F.

I
tried the latch but found it bolted. I knocked, first quietly rapping at the door, then pounding hard with my fist.

“Mama?” I called, but there was no answer.

I called again, this time louder, figuring she must’ve tipped back too much Dr. Godfrey’s before bed. “Mama, are you there?”

When the door finally came open, the face that greeted me wasn’t hers. A stranger stood in her place, a fair-haired woman holding a lamp, her cheeks lined with sleep. She wore a black-fringed shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders just like Mama’s.

“I’m looking for my mother,” I told the woman as I tried to see past her into the front room.

She scowled at me and said, “You a beggar—go away.”

Her voice was throaty and mean, as if she meant for the words to stick in my ears. She was, like so many of the women in this part of the city, filled with distrust. The language of her homeland had not been welcomed by strangers.
A-mer-i-ca
had turned out to be a false friend.

Mama still had her mother’s tongue locked up inside her head, but refused to use it. Every so often I’d catch her whispering strings of unknown words to a dress or skirt she was mending. They sounded tender and haunting to me, like someone telling a secret.

“Teach me to speak like that,” I’d said one night, settling down next to her while she was sewing.

“No,” she said, biting thread between her teeth.

“Don’t you miss having someone to talk to?” I asked.

“Let me be lonely, Moth,” she answered. “You don’t need to learn more words for sorrow.”

As the woman moved to close the door, I stepped forward to stop her. “Please,” I said, quickly pointing to Mama’s fortunetelling sign still sitting in the window. “Do you know where she is?”

“Gypsy of Chrystie Street,” the woman said, nodding as if she’d understood.

I could hear the wheels of Nestor’s cart behind me in the street. He whistled to the horse to pick up her pace, and drove on. I hoped he could see that I wasn’t in the clear and that he’d choose to keep circling for a bit longer.

“The Gyspy is my mother,” I said to the woman. “Where has she gone?”

The woman shook her head and frowned. Motioning to the sign and then to herself she said, “Fortune teller—that’s me.”

A man’s voice echoed from the dark of the backroom. “Lottie,” he grumbled. “Come to bed!”

She pushed me out to the step. “No Mama here,” she insisted, and shut the door.

I looked around, wondering if I’d forgotten where I’d lived. Perhaps Mama had been right all along about the dangers of not keeping track of my hair.

Standing on the curb, I waited on Nestor for as long as I thought safe, but he was gone. He must have thought the woman on the doorstep was my mother and that all had ended well. The streetlight closest to Mama’s door was just the same as when I’d left—glass cracked on two sides, the post leaning as if it were too tired to stand straight. In its faint glow, I saw that Chrystie Street, too, was just as it had always been—dark and hungry, waiting to devour the weak.

I picked up a piece of broken brick from a pile of rubble and hid it in the palm of my hand.

Head up, eyes ahead, move fast, don’t run
.

“She’s gone, dear,” Mrs. Riordan explained after she’d let me through her door. “You didn’t get word?”

“No.” I sat down on the wobbly stool she’d offered me. The death notices of a hundred paupers came to mind.
No one has come forward to claim the body and it is probable she will be buried in Potter’s Field
. The back page of the
Evening Star
was never without them. “Was she sick? Did someone hurt her?” I tried to push away the thought that Mama had come to a terrible end.

Mrs. Riordan took my hand. “Oh, no, dear child,” she sighed. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just she left Chrystie Street some time ago and I don’t know where she’s got to.”

After I’d gone, Mama had strutted around for a week, bragging about the fine lady who’d taken me into her house with too many rooms to count. And then she’d disappeared. Her place was nearly empty when Mr. Cowan came to call, nothing in the rooms to speak of except an old frying pan sitting on the rusted stove. It was clear she’d planned to go.

“He wasn’t too pleased, as you can well imagine. He claimed your mother robbed him blind, that she hadn’t paid rent since July. Make sure you watch for him when you’re about. He’ll take what she owes him out of your hide if he can catch you.”

Staring at me with sympathy, Mrs. Riordan asked, “Have you any place to stay?”

“No,” I replied. I had no one in the world but myself.

“Then you’ll stay here with me,” she said. “There’s not much room, I know, but it’s a place to rest your head. Get a proper night’s sleep and in the morning you can begin again.”

Mrs. Riordan’s house was nothing more than a shack—one in a row of makeshift shelters that had been tacked on to the back of the tenements. Mostly let by immigrants fresh off the boat, they were an easy way for landlords to make fast cash. People got out of them as quickly as they could, moving to a spot on the floor of a distant cousin or friend—a place with proper walls and perhaps even a window or two. Poor Mrs. Riordan had travelled in the opposite direction. Her status had slipped away bit by bit, until this shack, crumbling and sad, was all that remained between her and the street.

“I’ll take the wall side, dear,” she said, pulling back the tattered quilt covering her bed.

I curled up next to her, unsure of our closeness, but thankful to have a place to sleep. She smelled of fish and smoke, and every time she exhaled there was the slightest hint of turning milk in the air.

As I tried to settle down, I heard the twitchy
pinch-pinch-pinch
of rats in the wall. Mama always said that rats would eat anything, including the fingers and toes right off a person’s body while they were sleeping.

In a single year, a female rat can produce two-hundred-and-eighty-five offspring. The best ratcatchers in New York are revered for their talents. At dawn, they rise like tricksters from beneath the finest hotels, twirling their bags with deft wrists, carrying hundreds of squirming rodents.

I’d brought home a stray cat once, thinking it would help keep the rats away. He was sleek and black, with ears so thin they looked like bat’s wings. I called him Soot. I named him before I caught him because I thought if he had a name, he’d be more likely to stay in one place. Mama scolded me as soon as she saw him and then she threw him out the door. “Shame on you, Moth,” she complained. “You know proper Gypsies don’t keep cats.”

Whenever she heard a rat in our rooms, she’d stomp around the place with a broom, banging the end of the handle on the walls, floors and ceilings. Then she’d pass the rest of the night in fits and starts, bolting up in bed and saying, “Ssst. Did you hear that? Damn rat. Oh, Moth, did you hear it?” I would lie next to her, listening hard, fighting to keep my eyes open. I hoped that if a rat did try to eat me, I’d be strong enough to beat the hungry, chattering thing to death.