The Double Standard Sporting House, page 3
This was news he neglected to tell me, despite the obvious opening in our conversation about building the Double. I said, “He’s edgy about fitting in here.”
Susannah said, “Short man troubles.”
Tati said, “Always on the verge of clocking you one.”
That was a good reminder. I said, “Remember to be on your guard with him. He has a history of violence with women.” A rumor had made the rounds that on the night Tweed made him ward boss, he threw a naked girl out the window of an assignation house. Maybe she didn’t grovel enough.
Tatiana said, “He likes to be flattered.”
“All men like to be flattered,” said Ruby.
“He can smell insincerity.”
“What kind of flattery doesn’t smell of insincerity?” Ruby was a natural performer mugging to lighten the mood. Her jaunty beauty—blonde corkscrew curls, twinkling eyes, and big elastic mouth—reeked happy mischief, an interesting favorite for a grim man.
“The kind with something to it. Praise his best features, what you actually like about him.”
“Aw Benno, I love you because your dick’s so little and you come so fast!”
“Be his shoulder to cry on,” said Willow, one of two newer girls.
“No!” I said sternly, shaking my head. “No. Men like Benno do not cry, and you are not to get maternal or soft with him. Softness makes him fearful, and fear makes him violent. Think: buddy, accomplice, one of the boys.”
Meg said, “Okay, someone summarize what we know about handling Benno. Georgia?”
The other new girl looked up and sat straighter. “When sluggers like Benno feel out of control or vulnerable, they’re dangerous. Be tough, be mean about his enemies, let him run the show.”
The girls clapped, and Georgia took a reluctant bow. I wondered if Benno and I had common enemies and how much he meant to run my show.
During his usual monthly visit to collect Tammany’s take from the Double Standard, Henry Philip Wotley, aka Hanky Pank, looked aggravated. Benno kept all the collectors from the old regime, and Hanky Pank and I had transacted this business for years. He owned two concert saloons, the Eureka and the Reveille, and dressed the part. A round, ruddy man, he brought a neighborhood policeman with him, which he’d never done before. The payment was in part to keep the police away from us. In other wards, houses paid them directly, but in the Sixteenth where sport was rampant, the ward boss made those arrangements. Martin Mitchell was a spry, friendly fellow who got along with everyone, and I noted the fix’s new transparency.
I led them to the library. “Drink?”
“No thanks, Doc.”
I sat at the desk, leaving them the comfortable chairs.
“What’s eating you, Hank?” I asked. He sat there like the chair hurt him, his brow so low over his eyes it gave me neck pain.
He spat out, “What would be the big deal about letting a guy play a game of faro?”
I blinked.
He grew enthusiastic. “It’d up your take by half.”
I said, “It’d up your take by half.”
He ticked off elite houses on his fingers. “Seven Sisters, Millie Street’s, they all have faro or vingt-et-un or the occasional dice game, but not you.”
“Gamblers fight, Hank. As I told Benno, they lose, throw punches, smash expensive furniture, pull knives and guns, and then it’s a whole other kind of night for me. That’s not the kind of place I run.”
He ran his thumb along his fingertips, a sign of money. Here was Benno putting the squeeze on me. “You don’t like it because you have to patch up the damage done by losers.”
“In part.”
“See, that’s a perfect arrangement. You get paid when they get messed up, you get paid when they get fixed up.”
But Hank was sweating. He didn’t want to tell me how to run my place.
“Is this shakedown happening everywhere, or is it special for me?”
Hank said, “Everywhere.”
I sighed. “Well, it stands to reason he’s going to make some changes. I know about the clubhouse. What else does he have in mind?”
Hank blanched, stumbled, and finally said, “He’s still getting the lay of the land.”
That was laughably awkward. Hank might be hiding Benno’s mysterious problem with Peter Sweeny, or his dislike of me or the house. Or maybe Benno just felt invincible with Tweed’s backing, and it left Hank in a strange position with his friends in the ward. The papers, the courts, and the police were all in Tammany’s pockets, so no one stood up to them. Well, I would make a thankless stand right here on a faro table.
I turned to Martin Mitchell. “You drumming up business too?”
He winked. “No ma’am, just keeping Hank company on his rounds today.”
Martin’s ease calmed me, reminded me to stick to my strengths. I said to Hank, “Let me ask you this: does Benno appreciate what goes on here, on the whole block?”
“Sure, Doc. I told him how much you helped old Breen.” The previous boss fancied Broadway dancers, who occasionally conceived. And I set his fingers now and then from boxing fractures.
“Well, remind him that I can take care of all those problems for him, and I keep my mouth shut.” I paused to make sure he heard that. “I’m sorry to disappoint him, truly, I like to help him out when I can, but I won’t have gambling at the Double Standard.”
“That ain’t gonna go down well, Doc.”
I shrugged and slid an envelope full of bills onto the desk. “Next time Benno has an idea for my house, tell him to come by and he and I can talk it through over a drink.”
“Funny about that,” said Hank, watching me. “He told me he didn’t have time to spend a whole night with one fancy girl.” So Benno was that afraid of Peter Sweeny. I couldn’t yet say if it was a tactical rift or a more personal beef, but I had my suspicions, given the peculiarities of both men. Meanwhile, I was pleased to let him rut elsewhere.
I shrugged. “Maybe he ought to try two, then.”
Martin Mitchell shook my hand and gave me a crisp nod on his way out.
Vivie slept for three days, sometimes agitated. As the swelling of her face abated, she seemed to recede, hardly spoke. Worried she was giving up, I sat with her in the evenings, reading my letters and papers. One night she woke and bade me go to bed. I became a lion then, protective, but complied when she was settled. During my own convalescence many years prior, my healer Gwin had never fussed over me, and dark waking hours had been when the work of returning to myself got done. Gwin’s ghost seemed often to be over my shoulder since Vivie’s arrival. “As long as you know you’re not alone,” I said, and squeezed her hand.
Another night Nina, the lead student, waylaid me when I came in after dinner. Vivie had woken from a nightmare and cried so violently they worried for her sutures. Another girl said she would fetch me and Vivie pleaded against it, promised to calm herself. We didn’t always get the laudanum dosing right. By the time I arrived she was asleep again, a tiny snore on each exhale. I smoothed her hair.
The next morning she and I disputed on her diet, as she was desperate for bread. I explained the danger to her sutures from pressure and strain, and she reddened.
I said, “Laudanum can be very constipating. Did you find that so?”
Her eyes widened in mortification.
“It’s your body, Vivie. The more you know about how it works, the better you’ll live in it.”
She shook her head in disgust. Half a year of brutal prostitution and she was still squeamish about a bowel movement.
“One piece of bread,” I said.
It appealed less. She said, “My mother used to give me castor oil.” And with that chance mention of her mother, a cloud descended. She didn’t want to talk about it.
The core staff of the Double Standard had been together for years, and we were family. Four days after Vivie arrived at the clinic, I asked for a few minutes with all of them, and we convened in the kitchen around midnight.
The twins were not actually twins, but first cousins born months apart to twin mothers who passed on their shiny red hair and enchanting cheekbones. In the winter of 1860 Meg burst into the brand-new clinic carrying a very pale Ciara on her back. She was hemorrhaging, having been about six weeks along and dosed herself with too much tansy and ergot. My standard hemostatic tincture (yarrow, shepherd’s purse, and witch hazel, mostly) slowed the bleeding enough that I didn’t have to go into her uterus. I might have sent them home the next day but kept them talking, so funny and seamless were they together.
Born in Galway, they grew up in Five Points and became waiter girls at a series of ever larger and lusher concert saloons, ending at Harry Hill’s by the time they turned sixteen. They’d go upstairs separately or together with a good-looking high spender. Everyone told them to go on the stage. Then they met a pair of brothers, iron traders from the Alleghenies who took an apartment for them at Broadway and Grand. On any given night, some number of the brothers and their friends would drop by. Daytime the girls read plays to each other and practiced accents, worked up a twins act.
It was providential. The house was nearly finished so I offered them an as-yet to be determined part in it. I showed them the building out the window of Ciara’s room in the clinic, and Meg looked at me like I had two heads.
“You own that?”
“I do. I’m calling it the Double Standard Sporting House.”
They froze. Ciara’s a bit more buttoned up, and Meg has a dirty mouth on her. In two blinks, Ciara smiled like an angel fresh from Sunday service, and Meg cocked her hip and looked me up and down like I was fresh pie. On top of gall, they brought a strategic grasp of New York’s underworld.
As a compassionate and forgiving Mary, Ciara received confidences, and suffused the house with a benign, affectionate order. As party girl Magdalena, Meg helped everyone laugh and loosen up, and paired each man with the right harlot. Meg stoked extravagance, and Ciara noted each expenditure. They shared responsibility for the harlots’ disposition, appearance, and performance.
Meg was also the longtime consort of my attorney and man of business, Lyman Beecher, the principal of a prominent law practice who managed my device concern and was its public face. It was an opportunity I spotted just as the house began producing enough money to invest in a brass foundry. As silent owner, I’d sold thousands of ether and chloroform inhalers to the Union Army, and hinged prostheses, for which there was sad demand. Lyman kept an office in one of the Twenty-Fifth Street buildings.
Israel and Perlie Bixby ran the house as butler and housekeeper. Israel worked the door and trained the porters who served food and drink, delivered messages, and directed traffic. Perlie and her fifteen maids and six laundresses kept the girls dressed and coiffed, and the house immaculate, with great tact. About half of the house staff, including Israel and Perlie, were Negro.
I first met Perlie on Fourteenth Street when I saw her helping a boy who had fallen into the gutter, fainting from hunger. She lifted him up though he was none too grateful, gave him an apple, and waited for him to eat it and stand. He scarpered with a curse, but I fell into step with her and said, “That was kind.”
“He did not agree,” she said in a voice brimming with humor and sense.
“Forgive my presumption, but do you mind if I walk with you a ways?”
“If you like.”
When I learned she had years behind her as a housekeeper of a Fifth Avenue mansion, I invited her to the Double. When I proposed to pay her three times her present wage, she exploded in great hoots of mirth and told me I was crazy.
Israel became my first coachman. A strong, fatherly man, every inch the Biblical patriarch, he had a facility for refusing guests without angering them. They had both grown up free in New York and had no babes of their own, a sadness that led them to bring in scores of street children as maids and porters and help them to become whatever they wanted to be. Perlie would sigh and say, “This is how the Lord made us, we do the best we can.”
With the five of us gathered, I described Vivie’s plight and injuries, my suspicions about her identity, and how unhappy I would be to send her back to the miserable care of Emily Wrigley.
Israel said, “You like her.”
Meg said, “Doc, what are you thinking?”
This was tricky, but I was honest with them. “I plan to buy her debt, and let her recover at the clinic.”
“How much debt?”
“Wrigley claims a thousand.”
“God forbid!” said Perlie, and then the table remained quiet.
I said, “I’ll negotiate the amount, but I have a chance to save this girl’s life and I’m going to take it.”
Meg was doubtful. “Bringing her here won’t solve anything, Doc. She won’t want to see clients, so what then?”
“Then she’ll have a choice and we’ll help her.”
Ciara rubbed her face. “She can’t go home.”
I said, “What’s the best place for her?”
After a long silence, Perlie said softly, “With people who understand what she’s been through, and won’t shame her.”
It seemed to them like a whim, answering no need in the house. Making an exception for one girl invited a hundred desperate pleas. I said, “It’ll be two or three months at most.”
Meg worked her mouth. She didn’t like managing jealousy among the girls.
“Who was the last slaver girl we had?” asked Ciara.
With a sour face, Meg said, “Cordelia.”
We all sighed. That girl came from a fancy house on Washington Square. She’d been snared at the dock by Jane the Grabber, who split the slave market with her great rival Red Light Lizzie. They each ran houses and sold girls, publishing regular stock lists. We had taken her on about four years prior, but Cordelia hid her troubles, stole liquor from the house and jewels from other girls, and never learned to ask for help. I gave her options and chances until the twins said to stop. The life was tough enough as a choice.
Ciara said, “Doc, to be clear, do you want to turn this girl Vivie into a Double harlot or move her along?”
“Let’s come back to that later, when she’s physically recovered.”
No one agreed, but no one raised an objection. They didn’t like it, but it was my choice. Israel was least likely among them to be troubled by Vivie’s presence, but seemed the most irritated, and then I remembered that Ciara had called Cordelia a “slaver girl.” He didn’t like using that word in this context. I was about to say something when Ciara corrected herself with some distaste. “Sorry, Israel. Stolen girl, abducted girl.”
Perlie faced her husband. “This girl was stolen from home and forced to brutal work. What else is it?”
He softened, looking at her. “The girl grew up free in a powerful family. She’s no slave.”
“Doc still has to buy her freedom,” said Perlie, low and sharp.
Keeping calm, Israel said, “It’s not the same. It’s terrible bad luck, but she wasn’t born to slavery, and thanks to Doc, she’s escaped it now.”
I said, “No, it’s not the same. But that fancy father of hers was no protection.” The differences between race and sex always reminded me of the differences between chronic disease and acute injury. Each could be endlessly debilitating or intermittently life-threatening in their distinct and intertwined ways. Perlie and I shared a look agreeing this was not worth arguing. The remedies for both were few and poor enough.
I said to Israel, “The word makes a point when you apply it to a girl like her for the exact reason you raise.”
He shook his head. “Well, as you know, that’s trading on the backs of real slaves in a way that doesn’t sit right with me.”
He was usually right when he took the trouble to correct me, but I was sick to death of minimizing and sidestepping around rape. “In the absence of a dedicated word for a girl being stolen from home into sexual captivity, what do we call it? Kidnapping, grabbing, snatching?”
“I don’t know Doc, but not slavery.”
I heaved a big sigh, thinking I’d reserve the word for certain people or situations. “Between us we can call it kidnapping or abduction.”
Israel nodded once, but Perlie looked vexed when we said goodnight. She might have been puzzling over the language, or she might have been unhappy that Israel challenged me. No matter how well we got on and how much I trusted and respected them, I still owned the house. I appeased myself by paying plenty and planning big settlements when I sold the house or we otherwise parted.
I stopped in to see Vivie on my way to bed. She was asleep, as were the student nurses. I went upstairs and scanned some letters and the evening papers. The quiet, usually welcome, felt hollow, and I imagined her living with the nurses. Had she seen herself as a slave? To be taken so abruptly from a safe, ordered world into forced prostitution was dismal, but I was overeager. Perturbed by the way I was imposing myself on this girl, I slept in a tangle.
As I checked Vivie’s eyes and temperature in the morning, she said, “Miss Hastings, may I ask, what is the meaning of the house’s name, the Double Standard?”
In pain and withdrawal, she asked a question I often asked prospective girls. I stopped what I was doing to watch her. “Call me Doc. What do you think it means?”
She swallowed. “Perhaps that women are supposed to be chaste, but men go to brothels whenever they please?”
A classic answer about sexual freedoms, expressed without rancor. “You put a nice point on it.”
She showed no sign of infection. I asked how much blood and urine she was passing, and she shrank at the question. While I took her pulse, she said, “What do the girls talk about at their breakfasts?” She was artful in deflecting.
“Whatever’s on their minds. Lydia Thompson and the Blonde Belles of Burlesque, lately. How to take care of ourselves. Crushes, of course, someone’s always in love. And we talk about what they’ll do when they leave. A harlot may work at the Double Standard for no more than two years, and we do all we can to launch them into some other line of work.”
