Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York Read online

  “We’ve come,” Victoria said in her clear contralto voice, “to offer our help to you. We are both spiritual adepts who have had great success over the years in putting people into communication with their loved ones who have passed over. We are also magnetic healers, again with years of successful practice. I want to put you in communication with your mother, and my sister is going to ease some of your physical problems. You’ll tell us when you want us to start.”

  They both beamed at him and Tennessee leaned a little forward, flashing him some cleavage.

  “That’s quite a tall order, my dears. Quite a tall order. I’ve gone through forty mediums over the decade since my mother passed on, and I’ve had paltry success. Most mediums are scallywags and frauds. And the same with healers.”

  “Therefore, if we can’t help you, you can say goodbye. We won’t charge you.”

  “Everybody charges. What’s your racket?”

  “If we help you, you’ll help us. If we can’t help you, then we’re off and you’re none the worse for it. But if we do assist you in the spiritual and physical ways I’ve mentioned, then you can decide what you want to do for us. How’s that for a bargain? No risk to you.”

  “What about you, the redhead? You haven’t got much to say for yourself.” He inserted a wad of chewing tobacco into his jowly cheek.

  “I’m more of a physical worker,” Tennie said, imbuing the statement with innuendo. “I can help you, but not sitting across a desk.”

  He spat on the floor, watching their reaction. Victoria allowed none to show. She had grown up around enough taverns to be used to men spitting tobacco juice wherever they felt like it, in a spittoon, often on the floor or whatever else got in their way. Charlie had warned her about the Commodore’s less genteel habits, so they were prepared. Neither of them was put off by rough males; their father Buck was a tough rascal and a hard-drinking man. Nothing that Vanderbilt, who had a reputation for chasing servant girls around his mansion, was likely to pull would shock either of them.

  The factotum who ushered the visitors in and out appeared, but the Commodore waved him away. The man backed out of the room like a courtier in the royal presence.

  “If you’ll appoint a time,” Victoria said while Tennie was giving him the eye, “we’ll come to you at your home. You’ll see exactly what we can do.”

  “Next Monday at nine in the evening. Do you know where I live?”

  Of course they did, but Victoria shook her head. “We’ve only just arrived in the city. Do you have a card?”

  “Write it down, dear. Ten Washington Place. This office backs onto my house.”

  Victoria had been looking around the office. A large stuffed tabby cat stood on top of a row of cabinets. Vanderbilt was not known as a kind or sentimental man. He had grown up on a Staten Island farm, and farmers saw cats as barn animals. But he had been a sailing and then a steamship captain. Captains often had cats. To have a cat stuffed he must have regarded it highly. “Even your ship’s cat has a presence here. A very benign one.”

  “Pouncer. Sailed with me to Nicaragua and up the river they said I couldn’t navigate in a steamship. During the gold rush. Best damned cat for ratting I ever knew.”

  “A handsome animal.” Victoria rose and motioned to Tennie to do the same. “We’ll see you then. Thank you for your time. Next time we meet, you’ll thank us.” They swept out in a rustling of skirts.

  She would have liked to take a horse cab but it would cost. They sat on a stoop to put on more sensible shoes from Victoria’s commodious bag, then walked downtown toward their boardinghouse. Victoria could walk miles when necessary. It was a dry mild evening with a hint of freshness in the rank smoky air, perhaps coming off the river. Victoria took Tennie’s arm as they strolled. The smells of roasting corn and frying oysters and sausage made her mouth fill with saliva, but there would be some kind of food back in the boardinghouse. Watery stew with a few pieces of leathery something. Times were hard, but Victoria was convinced they would soon be less lean. Like so many others, she had come to New York to make her fortune, but she had the wherewithal to succeed. Her voices had told her she was to lead a great crusade, but she would need money to do that. And money to keep them out of the stinking warrens of poverty. They would not only survive in this hard place, they would thrive.

  They picked their way through the teeming streets, lifting their skirts carefully to avoid the offal and horse shit. As they walked downtown, the sidewalks grew crowded with men shouldering each other returning from work, whores accosting them, pickpockets working the crowd, carts loading and unloading, vendors selling oranges, hot corn, oysters, coffee and chestnuts, girls crying their wares of matches or flowers, street musicans tootling or sawing away or loudly singing. They ducked out of the way of carriages and once a thundering water cart from a company rushing to claim a fire. Twice sporting men accosted them—young men on the prowl—but Victoria clutched Tennie and they slipped away. Arm in arm, she and her favorite sister marched on. She had stolen Tennie away from Buck to save her—the other sane and bright member of their family. Together with her husband James, they would be formidable.

  TWO

  FREYDEH GOT UP before dawn as usual. The Silvermans always woke her, even on the rare morning when she might have slept in. She had a straw mattress in the windowless kitchen, three dollars a week. The baby was already crying to be fed. The girls and Mrs. Silverman had to get breakfast for everyone before they started making paper flowers in the front room, the only room with windows and some natural light and ventilation, where the boys and male boarder slept. Freydeh washed quickly in a basin she filled a third full from the bucket hauled up the night before from the pump in the yard behind the tenement—to finish before the men rose. It was always a race because Karl the twelve-year-old would try to catch her with her blouse open or her skirt rucked up. She ate her bread, smoked herring and tea sitting on her cot, and then she was off to the pharmacy, leaving the tiny flat with its eight other inhabitants.

  It was the best job she had found since arriving in New York six years before—years of selling old shoes from a pushcart, then bread, then aprons. Like her, her boss Yonkelman was one of the few Jews from the Pale—the Silvermans were German Jews, who often seemed more German than Jew. They didn’t even speak Yiddish, but rather German, and they winced when she spoke. Yonkelman wasn’t bad to work for. He didn’t try anything funny. He was an elderly man in his fifties, once tall but now stooped, shiny bald on top but bristling from his brows, his chin, his nose, his ears. He had a sick wife he was crazy about, who used to do the job Freydeh did now. He paid Freydeh more than she had ever earned, which wasn’t much but every bit helped her survive and save a little—a few pennies a week.

  But the best thing about this job, she thought as she worked at her new task of grinding materials for pills, was that she got ideas how she might do something that would let her see ahead further than the end of the week. She wanted, oh, she wanted a place of her own. She wouldn’t mind taking in boarders like the Silvermans, like the other two places she had lived in New York, but she would be the woman who got the money and kept the couple of rooms the way she wanted them kept. A place of her own: she dreamed of that day and night.

  That loudmouth Izzy White came in. White! He had changed his name to be more American, he said. He was shorter than she was, a little wizened as if something in him had dried out or been pickled in brine, but his voice was that of a barrel-chested ogre. Even when she was in the back room doing inventory or preparing pills and medicines—something Yonkelman trusted her with more and more—she could hear Izzy the moment he barged into the shop.

  “So how many gross you want this time, Yonkelman?”

  “Four gross this week. But these better be good ones. My customers, they complain if they break. That’s no good for them, no good for me. I can go back to getting condoms from Colgate, I can do that anytime.”

  “Sure, at twice what I charge you. So sometimes the rubber i
sn’t so good, but I do a pretty nice job. I include a gross of the fancy ones—I make fancy and cheap.”

  She looked quickly for one of those little mirrors Yonkelman sold. Then she brushed her hair hard, pinched her cheeks and rubbed at her lips. She had never been a beauty—that was Shaineh in her family, who took after their mother, and not their father, as she did. But she had a good full figure and Izzy had an eye for her. Not that that would do him any good the way he wanted, not in a thousand years. But she liked to get him talking. Making condoms was a great way to make a living. Now that was something a woman could do in a kitchen, and soon Freydeh would have her own house, maybe in Brooklyn, and live like a queen.

  Every time Izzy came to pester her, she got him to talk more about how he did it and afterward she wrote everything down in a little notebook. She wrote in Yiddish. Her English was not so good yet. She had learned to read and write, her mother had insisted, so she could keep accounts for her mother’s business—making and selling vodka out of a shed. Her father had been a woodcutter, like her dear dead Moishe.

  “Now a woman like you,” Izzy said, sitting on the counter so they were eye to eye, “you have to miss the comfort of a husband to warm your bed. A big healthy strapping woman full of juice, still young enough…”

  She had loved Moishe since she was sixteen and they were married under the chuppah. She had seen him around for years because he worked the same as her father in the forest cutting timber. But they had never exchanged five words before they were betrothed by their parents. Although her parents had barely one coin to rub on another, they’d had no trouble finding a husband for her because she had a reputation as a hard worker and she could keep books. So while Moishe as a woodcutter had not been considered a great catch, he had a job and her parents could never afford a scholar or a rabbinical student for a husband. Secretly she was glad, because she didn’t want to be the sole breadwinner in the family. Women had to work of course, but if she had one of those fancy husbands studying Torah or halachah all day, he would not have brought in enough to buy stale bread.

  She had been afraid on her wedding night, but Moishe had been gentle with her. He had been with the whores in the brothel by the river many times and he liked women and their bodies. He loved her body and made her love his. Many weeks, no matter how tired they were, they had joined their bodies far more often than required for a man who did physical labor, according to Talmudic law. She had been rich with joy, but until they had come to this city, she had never conceived.

  That was her great grief, the lack of a baby from Moishe, her love, but she wasn’t about to have a bastard with Izzy, so he could just forget it—but no, better he went on hoping she would fall plop in his arms like a ripe plum off the trees in the orchard near the shtetl where she had been born. A ripe purple plum just about to split its skin with sweet juice. He could hope all he liked, but what she wanted from him was information. Every time he came back to flirt with her, she learned more. Yonkelman let Izzy pester her because he wanted Izzy to give him a good price on condoms, and he thought she was a lure for that. So they all played their little games on each other and it went on week after week. Izzy wasn’t about to lower his price, she wasn’t about to let Izzy tumble her, and Yonkelman wasn’t about to start buying his condoms from Colgate.

  “So how is your business going? You still have your nephew helping you cook the rubber and fill the molds?” she asked.

  “He’s a starker, eats his weight every night, but he works good, so I should complain?”

  “You told me sometimes he overcooks the rubber. So how can you tell?”

  Lucky for her, Izzy liked to talk and she was happy to listen. When he finished his explanation he launched into a long story about how some other widow was making eyes at him, and that was a woman who knew a good thing when she saw it.

  Freydeh sighed, and Izzy moved nearer, thinking he had gotten through her reserve and she was pining. With a little laugh she swung out of his arm and away. “I got to get back to work or Yonkelman will toss me into the street and somebody else take my job, Izzy. So let me get back to it.”

  “He’s not going to fire you, you work too hard. You do two jobs. Even his wife, good and pious as she is, he never let her mix the medicines. So give me a little kiss.”

  “Give yourself one for me. Now out of here.” She gave him a semi-playful shove.

  “You’re a strong woman, Freydeleh. Sometimes I think you could pick me up and carry me over the threshold.”

  Some men were put off by her strength, the strength of her father who cut trees all day in the forests near Vilna, the strength of her mother who bore eight children and saw three of them die before their second year. But some men like Izzy liked a big strong woman, and tough for him, because her pushing him out of the back room was the closest he was ever getting to her.

  When Yonkelman closed the pharmacy at four for Shabbos, she had to go over to Hester Street and buy a chicken for the Silvermans and herself. One chicken would make soup for all of them tonight, and Mrs. Silverman had asked her to pick it up, pluck and cook it for them because she had to finish a whole box of the flowers and deliver them to the manufacturer before sundown. The baby had been sick and Mrs. Silverman, who looked forward to the Shabbos shopping that included gossiping with friends she never got to see otherwise, had to pass off the job. Freydeh didn’t mind. On a mild April afternoon, she’d rather be in the street because inside smelled even worse.

  Hester Street was curb to curb with people, a mass of pushcarts and women haggling and pushcart vendors, men and women and sometimes children, shouting their wares. The sound rose between the narrow buildings like the roar of a waterfall of voices. In the forest where she had gone to take her father bread and cheese and an onion, sometimes he was working near a stream tumbling down in a waterfall. How clean the forest had smelled.

  She made herself remember the pervasive stench of fear, the tightness in the belly when she had to walk by a group of peasant men, the goyim who surrounded them in the Pale, where they were forced to live crowded together. The fear of their violence. Here she could work freely at what she could find. Here there were neighborhoods where she might be attacked but others where she felt safe, and she could even go up to the shops on Fifth Avenue and walk around staring in the windows like any rich lady. Here she could earn money and put it away little by little and send it off to her family whenever she had enough to mail a money order. Here she could sometimes go to night school and improve her English and learn. Here school was free to children, and surely Shaineh would be married by now and have children she could care for as soon as she could send them all passage money. Those children, her nieces and nephews, would go to school and be educated, girls as well as boys. She had made the right choice and soon others from the Pale would see. They had been pioneers, Moishe and she, for they had read a book about America and they had burned to go and be free. They had been carried out of the Pale of Settlement where Jews were forced by the czar to live, hidden under sacks of grain. Then they sailed from Danzig, changed to a ship in Hamburg, landed at Castle Garden and finally, finally entered. As they stood at the rail of the steamer entering New York Harbor, after only a twelve-day crossing instead of the forty days before steamships had been put into service, she had taken Moishe’s hard hand in her own. “Like your namesake, you’ve led us to the promised land. But unlike him, you’re going to set foot in it and live out your life here.”

  She sighed, making her way in the melee of bodies gesticulating, bargaining, prodding, shouting. She had been right, but she had not guessed how short that life would be. She straightened her shoulders and plowed into the crowd. Enough of this sad musing on what was gone like water to the sea. At five six, she was taller than almost all of the women and a good many of the men—her father’s legacy—but it was still hard to see ahead of her in the press. Mrs. Silverman had not given her enough for a good chicken, but she would see what she could do. As a female boarder, she not onl
y paid her rent, she was expected to watch the baby, the younger children when needed, to run errands, to help with the laundry, to cook on occasion. Still, it was much better than the last place she lived.

  She had just tried bargaining with two different purveyors of kosher chickens when, as if the thought had conjured him up, she saw Big Head Wolf, her previous landlord—a con man and sometimes a thief, who had tried to press her into service in his scams. She thought of turning away but he had seen her. “Freydeleh, Freydeleh, you look blooming and bright. Got yourself a new man?”

  “Good day to you, Big Head. What I do is none of your business.”

  He seized her by the elbow. “You still owe me two dollars.”

  “You took my necklace. That covers all debts.”

  “I want my two dollars.” He let go of her elbow, leaning toward her with a little grin. “Of course, if you don’t want your letter from your family…”

  “You got a letter for me? Since when?” For more than a year she had heard nothing from her family back in the Pale. She had sent money for her parents to emigrate, but she never heard from them. She wrote again and again without an answer. So much could go wrong in the Pale. Troubles could descend like the plagues of Exodus, on the good as well as the wicked.

  “Since some time ago while I’m waiting for my two dollars you owe.”

  “You can’t keep my letter from me. That’s my property.”

  “But I can forget where I put it.”

  “You got me over a gulley, Big Head. I want that letter. Those are my only people. Don’t you care about anybody but yourself?”