The Double Standard Sporting House, page 4
She blinked. “You must be the only employer trying to get rid of her workers.”
I laughed, loving her already. “Vivie,” I said, “how would you feel about staying here with us?”
She shook her head, downcast. “Mrs. Wrigley would never allow it.”
“Putting that aside, would you like to?”
“Of course,” she said in a tiny voice. “Anyone would.”
“I’ll work it out with Mrs. Wrigley, then. I know she claims you have debts, but that’s not right. I don’t believe girls should be kept against their will.”
Still doubtful, she said, “I’d rather owe you of course. Is it true that Double girls see only one man a night?” She looked up.
“You’ll owe me nothing, Vivie, except to be honest and do your best to shake the laudanum.”
Now she grew suspicious, as well she should. “I don’t understand.”
I took my time deciding what to say next, and resisting the urge to take her hand, sat down on the end of the bed. “Minnie told me you were kidnapped.”
She swallowed, eyes wide and teary.
My eyes watered too. “I hate that above all things, Vivie, that some villain stole you from your life and your family. Do you know the man’s name?”
She wept for half a minute, and I rubbed her back. “He called himself Vernon Trent. I haven’t seen him since he left me at that first house in Albany.”
“I’m so sorry. Did he drug you?”
She half shrugged, meaning she guessed so. “We were dancing, and I teased him because he wasn’t any good. He’s big and kind of lumbering. So many times I thought back to what I could have done to provoke him, and the only thing that might explain it were those few seconds of laughter.” This came with a sob, and gutted me.
I did take her hand then. “Vivie, it was nothing you did, I promise. We search for reasons to give it some kind of sense, but there is none. All he had to do was see you. You mustn’t blame yourself, you are not at fault in any way.”
Despairing of her bad luck, she said, “I hate him!”
“He’s contemptible. Listen now, my dear. I can’t send you back to be that innocent girl who had such a terrible crime done against her. But neither do I have use for a fragile little chickadee addicted to laudanum. You can still be a strong young woman who once lived through something terrible, and take your revenge with a full and happy life, far better than that coward. I’d like to help you pick yourself up. Does that sound like the right way forward?”
“Yes, of course. Maybe I could find something else sooner than two years.”
I was never as grateful for my wealth as I was in that moment, all my sacrifices seeming small. “You have months of recovery ahead of you but as I said, Double girls are never coerced. You must choose that line of work. After a few weeks’ rest, you may decide you never want an old man in your bed until you’re his old wife.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have to decide now.”
“I could give it up?”
“Truthfully, you’re too young to be a Double Standard harlot. My girls are at least twenty when they start.” Twenty was considered old for harlots, but younger girls could not, as a rule, do what I asked of them: read and respond to a sophisticated man’s desires. If a man wanted a child, sadly he could find one in specialty houses near the Bowery and Chatham Square.
Vivie said, “Why would a girl ever choose it?”
Indeed. I could have spoken on that topic at length but considered what she needed at that moment. “For freedom. Money buys independence and there are precious few ways for girls to earn so quickly. You could do needlework or be a shopgirl your whole life and not earn what you can here in two years. You can launch yourself into a new life afterwards. It’s a skill and an art, satisfying a man. But it helps to like men, and sex. And power.”
“Ugh,” she said.
“Well, from now on you get to choose whom you take to bed.”
She sagged with bone-deep relief, tears streaming. Now she did seem like a waif, half child of another world. Her instability came from the shock of her abduction, and she had a better than average chance of not dying by Christmas if I could keep her with us. I could help twenty other girls with the money it would take to pry her from Wrigley, and it was a risk ten ways, not least that this Vernon Trent character might come looking for her.
Her sobs ran their course, and next she said, “I don’t have any clothes.”
I laughed. “Our dressmaker Philomena will fix that.”
“Oh, I love you, Doc!”
She threw her arms around me and I laughed and choked up and held her close. “Aren’t you sweet. I’m glad we met, Vivie.” Was I so lonely I would buy myself a little daughter-friend to adore me? She was edging toward safety but not yet convinced, and I made her promise to rest.
When I went to see Emily Wrigley, she admitted that $1000 was steep for a top-earning girl abducted only months past, but was disinclined to part with her prize. I proposed to charge her $1000 for saving the girl’s life. At last Wrigley confessed she’d promised the dealer not to sell the girl. He was probably still getting a cut.
“Tell him a client shredded her and you had no choice with her leaking urine on everything and everyone.”
Her face knotted up.
I said, “A newspaperman spotting her would bring the whole Vermont State Legislature slashing their way through here.”
“They can find their way uptown too,” she said.
I sighed rather theatrically. “If they do, I’ll tell them how she got from Bennington to Albany, your daily regimen, and what that client of yours did to her with a knife. I don’t suppose you want to tell me the worm’s name, or why he tried to kill her.”
She narrowed her eyes and said, “Since when do they need a reason?”
“Seems personal. Or maybe contractual. Who does he work for?”
She feigned boredom, and when we settled on $650, she called me a dog-faced whore.
“Do yourself a favor,” I told her. “Don’t deal with slavers. A wretched harlot is never a good idea.”
“What is a harlot but wretched?”
“On her way to someplace else.”
I remember pine cones. Our lane was lined with Eastern white pines, giants raining these woody little carcasses in the fall, an endless supply of blocks and weapons. I kicked them at fence posts and skipped them off outcrops, built walled settlements. My father, always instructive, must have asked me to deduce their purpose. After cutting and gluing my hands with sap, I finally smashed one with a rock and found the seeds inside. My mother gave me lupines and bee balm and a lady slipper as introduction to the softer, more flamboyant side of reproduction, but I loved the pine cones’ wooden petals, spiraling shields dug into strong resin, and the impossibly tall trees’ knuckled roots threading beds of fallen needles.
We left Darmstadt when I was three, and I remember the sea. My parents took over a practice among the farmers and fishermen of Newbury, Massachusetts. He came from a city surgery with a hospital affiliation, she from midwifery at a lying-in hospital. In Newbury, she traveled constantly to births. After school I read or assisted my father, and I had one year attending her when I was twelve. My only distinct memory of that time is leaving a house at dawn with her weeping over a new mother lost to childbed fever, kicking the ground and pulling her face. But that was unusual.
She tended a thriving herb garden, and smelled of earth and leaves. I have her height, her eyes, and her industry.
TWO
In the third floor sitting room, I found Marianne laughing at a woodcut on a National Police Gazette cover. A girl was taking revenge on her faithless suitor with an axe. Sophronia, her bare legs entwined with Marianne’s, couldn’t decide if the cover girl was meant to be a villain or a heroine.
Marianne said, “And there you have the entirety of the woman question.”
Sophie pulled her legs in and looked guilty, though I didn’t mind if the girls pet or pleasured one another. This floor was their sanctum. The room was cluttered and homey and smelled of French perfume and fresh rolls with butter.
I said, “Who’s first?”
Once a week I examined each girl for venereal disease. I also asked them to inspect themselves daily with a mirror, and taught them to identify various ulcers. We used a jelly bolus with boric acid as a preventative for syphilis, and in the rare case a girl did get infected, we treated her with calomel or other forms of mercury, though the benefits hardly outweighed the risks. I noticed girls infected in summer did better than those infected in winter, and had begun to experiment with steam and hot baths.
Exams took place in the third-floor bedrooms, where girls slept by twos when they weren’t with a client. This arrangement minimized secret addictions and melancholias, and going into the rooms each week aided my assessments. Some girls like Tatiana stayed in the suites whenever possible, while Georgia and others bolted for their little beds.
During exams I collected their journal pages. I required daily notation on their sexual health: numbers and kinds of sexual acts, use of sponges, pessaries, douches, and suppositories, menses, level of sex drive, orgasm, infection. I wanted to know which days in the menstrual cycle were the most fertile, and which methods of contraception were most effective. Common knowledge said that a woman was fertile for two weeks after menstruation and the three days before. My teacher Sister Gwin called that malarkey, and maintained that it was around the midpoint of the menses. After eight years of excellent record-keeping, we knew that a pessary and a sponge together were over 95 percent effective at preventing conception, and that Gwin was as usual correct, conception generally occurred mid-cycle. If their menses were regular enough to predict fertility, Double girls took those days off or did only French. And we all began to notice that we could tell when we were fertile. Our juices changed, we craved sex more, and there was a certain pulling on either side of the abdomen, which I ascribed to bilateral ovaries. We hadn’t had a pregnancy in a year.
I also kept records of my clinic patients, though not so thorough. There I studied broader questions pertaining to women in the larger population of shop girls, street girls, and occasional prostitutes, wives of laborers and clerks. We tallied pregnancies, births, disease, assault, and death. One in three or four had suffered sexual predation, and virtually all faced stalking and hectoring. Unmarried women were more likely to die of disease, married women by violence. Some days I thought my truest calling was to collect their stories, to let the lives of women and girls accrue somewhere and not, as usual, fade and vanish.
It was possible I was the only medical practitioner in the world with this depth of documentation on reproductive health, but there also might have been a hundred brothel nurses from Belfast to Hong Kong doing similar work. No medical journal anywhere would touch it. Predictably, the Revolution, a new women’s rights newspaper published right down on Park Row by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, desperate to appear sexless and respectable, rejected two different articles, one on recognizing venereal diseases, and the other, just days earlier, summarizing what we’d learned about the menstrual cycle. I considered writing a pamphlet and publishing it at my own expense, but that would draw unwelcome attention to the procedures I did at the clinic. Any female surgeon was assumed to be a godless baby killer or a quack, but as yet there was no formal regulation of medicine or licensing. Midwives and healers were nonetheless pushed further underground each year. We depended on invisibility for certain clinic procedures and for client discretion at the house, but this same invisibility undermined the spread of vital information about fertility, and hid my expertise. Such was life. Only rarely did it get to me.
Clemence wanted to go first. She had come to the Double after a stint as a Mississippi riverboat dancer, and suffered from pelvic inflammation. A recent journal article made me think she had menstrual tissue growing outside her uterus, but offered no good suggestions for treatment. I had tried both stimulating and impeding bleeding and neither gave her any relief. After she told me her latest symptoms, we went down to the kitchen to speak to our beloved demon of a chef, Bertram Hibberd, to ask if he had ideas to decrease inflammation.
“Oh you peaky, lass? A vegetable broth and some fermented cabbages and cucumbers, I should think.”
Bert was an unusual person who wore skirts and twirled in place when upset, which occurred when his efforts at the stove did not go according to plan. He was not chatty except with our baker Aunty Laure, a sinewy old bawd with a wealth of fables. Everyone loved their kitchen, a big room at ground level in the back with its round table and enchanting aromas. Here loitered idle porters and coachmen, maids and laundresses, drinking coffee and eating whatever Bert felt like giving them. Occasionally a deliveryman would bully Bert, and that person learned that Double Standard porters did not tolerate cruelty. Twice he was beaten on nearby streets. He rarely went out anymore and was happiest in the kitchen, where he practiced his art from early in the morning until late at night. He, like the twins and the Bixbys, lived in the building next door.
“That spirit need a sitdown,” said Aunty Laure, having an animistic view of medicine and Clem’s troubles. Laure was a light-skinned Creyol with West African, Haitian, and French lineages.
“Say more?” I asked her.
She looked at Clemence’s belly. “The spirit in you is wandering, child. She needs to go back where she belong.”
Clemence said, “How do we get her to do that?” I also perked up, remembering that wandering uterus.
Laure closed her eyes and nodded several times. “Strong song. A drum is good.”
Clemence looked wary and I said, “When you feel like dancing.”
The most persistent question I got the rest of that day was whether I would allow the girls to dye their hair blonde like the Belles. I told them no, as the chemicals burned hair and skin. “Get a wig.”
Judge George Barnard burst into the main salon where I was having my first quiet moment of the day with Harper’s. Though we were not strictly open, he had taken to dropping by on his way home. I didn’t much mind the presumption, as he was good company. He lived nearby on Twenty-Third Street.
“I’ll never play the piano again!” He clutched his right wrist like it was an injured animal. The judge was busy churning out new Tammany voters before Election Day on the third of November, three and a half weeks away. During the war, hardly any men became citizens because of the draft. But now in exchange for votes, Tammany dispensed plenty of no-show patronage jobs and wads of cash as they sought to install friendlies as mayor and governor. It required a lot of judicial signatures.
“How many new Americans did you mint today, George?”
“McCann does two thousand a day. I tried four at a time but at that rate I’ll lose all feeling in my hand.”
“Come over here,” I said, waving him toward a small table.
“I can’t hold cards, Doc.”
I never played cards. “Take off your coat and roll up your sleeve.”
“Why Doc, that’ll keep my mind off the pain.” I poured him a bourbon and sat to his right rubbing my hands together.
George came from a good family and went adventuring when he finished school. He tried the California gold fields but lost what little ore he found at poker, ran up a big debt that he worked off as a shill. Next he joined a minstrel troupe that toured the mining camps, having a fine tenor honed in the choirs of Yale.
After his western adventures, he read law with an uncle. Tweed, alert to a sporting toff with a price tag, plucked him from that drudgery and installed him in a vacant spot on the New York Supreme Court. In session George wore a white top hat, whittled sticks, and sipped brandy. He was hardworking and knew some law—how much was in dispute by those with occasion to know—but he was wholly owned by Tweed, and had recently helped him to steal the Erie Railroad. Tweed’s new friends Diamond Jim Fisk and Mephistopheles Jay Gould used dubious bonds to float their Erie bid, and when it landed in the courts, George had issued the crucial injunction.
The exact price for his cooperation was not known, but Peter Sweeny (I had lately informed myself) got $150,000 and a seat on the Erie Board for going along. The rate for a friendly vote in the legislature, where the Erie fight landed after an appellate judge begged to differ with George, was about $4,000. Safe to say the judge was flush.
That fight had ended in July, and by October George’s utility to Tammany—and to his own election to the bench he occupied—was in creating voters.
I dug my fingers into the tissue between the two bones of his forearm, and he moaned like I had performed some new French twist on his cock. I put gentle pressure on the tendons of his wrist and thumb before turning the hand palm up and addressing the flexors. His mouth hung open in stupefied relief.
“My God,” he said, “are you sure you don’t see clients? If you can do that to my hand, I’d love to find out—”
I cut him off. “Perhaps Clemence is available this evening. Someone should work on your upper arm and shoulder as well, and she’s good at that. Strong hands.”
He gave a penitent look. “Doc, I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“Not at all, George, but I’m no more equipped to be a harlot than you are.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I can be very entertaining when a man comes before me with his pants down.”
I went to work on his elbow, and he closed his eyes and relaxed further. I wondered what else it did to him to write his own name over and over and over. Like many men, George came to the Double Standard to unfurl his full self. At work he pretended to serve the law, at home he pretended to worship his family, all the while violating countless oaths, statutes, and common sense. He dissipated the pressure of his many hypocrisies with drink and by riding himself to oblivion on luscious, unjudging girls, for whom he paid a fortune. It was a strange way to live.
I went fishing. “So we have a new ward boss, Benjamin O’Connor. I understand Benno was a childhood friend of the boss.”
