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

  The offices were near the docks, on a cobblestone street with many signs for makers of sails and other gear for ships. Where the docks came up to the street, the bowsprits of ships stuck out overhead, among the wharf shipping sheds and ferry houses on the water side. The street was thick with wagons loading and unloading from warehouses, draymen shouting to get out of the way, roustabouts heaving boxes and barrels. Sailors went lurching past and an occasional natty officer, one in uniform with a lady in a mauve overdress and bustle as big as a bushel basket sticking out on her behind, sashaying along. Over her head she held a matching parasol. A Negro servant walked behind them carrying a satchel and a cloak, and behind him came a cart loaded with four trunks, pulled by a weary gray horse. On the land side of the street stood offices of maritime brokers and lawyers, sail lofts, occasional restaurants. The nearby taverns were dark and rowdy and dangerous. It was said that a drink called the Mickey Finn could knock a man right out so he could be robbed or shanghaied aboard a ship leaving port. The offices of the steamship company, however, were clean and orderly, with many clerks at high desks writing rapidly on ledgers and foolscap. Freydeh and Sammy stood there for what felt like hours before anyone spoke to them.

  Sammy introduced himself. “My mother and me, we’re trying to find my aunt Shaineh Leibowitz, my mom’s youngest sister. She was supposed to come over on one of your ships, the Freiheit, but we didn’t get the letter until this week. It went to the wrong house.”

  The clerk made them wait around, but finally he found Shaineh’s name on the manifest of the Freiheit that had arrived in port on November 9 of the previous year. Shaineh had really come. Of course they had no idea where she had gone or what had happened to her. When they left the office, Freydeh covered her face and leaned on the stones of the building. “Poor girl. What did she think when I wasn’t there for her? What could she do?” She stared out over the gray waters where a huge steamship low in the water was being drawn by a tug toward the Hudson.

  “You know how those people from the boardinghouses around here, they try to grab the luggage of the greenhorns and drag them off to board with them.”

  “I don’t think she spoke a word of English. She must have been terrified.”

  “But, Freydeh, wouldn’t she go to the address she had?”

  “If she could figure out how to get there, sure. But Big Head never told me she came by, and Pearl didn’t mention it. So I wonder if she ever got there.”

  “How much you trust that crook?”

  “Not a pinprick worth, believe me.”

  She had planned to go to immigration next. The clerk at the Hamburg line told her they would have a record if Shaineh had been denied immigration and gone back. “A girl alone,” the clerk had said, “probably they’d keep her for a few hours, but there’s no record they sent her back. They don’t like young women traveling alone. Still, providing she had your name and address, they’d take that into account.”

  She decided to sit for a moment and think about what they should do. She bought a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some hot corn cakes and coffee from vendors and they walked into the park to eat. This park by the Battery had been closed to ordinary people for years when this had been a fancy neighborhood, but now anybody could sit in it. In the center stood a bandstand. Middle-class people liked to promenade there and listen to concerts. Sometimes there were rallies or parades, as there had been the day Moishe and she had arrived. The people in fancy clothes had glared at them as they staggered out of immigration.

  The wind was strong here but it smelled better as they sat on the bench eating their lunch. Seagulls swooped down on them crying out like street arabs in hopes of grabbing crumbs—but they weren’t about to leave any. They watched ships pass each other off the Battery, most of the sailing ships going toward the East River, most of the steamships into the Hudson. The masts of the sailing ships stood up in a forest of poles above the warehouses and shops of sailmakers and outfitters. The horns of the steamships blared as smaller fishing vessels and ferries crossed their path. It looked like chaos but every vessel seemed to go where it intended.

  The immigration center was an old fort roofed in with a high round three-level room ending in a cupola with a huge flag flapping in the rough wind. It had been a concert hall between being a fort and being what it was now. To one side stood an employment exchange in a long shed. The hawkers were already out, waiting to hire likely-looking men at cheap wages. The boardinghouse keepers and brothel recruiters were beginning to mass by the huge double doors of the fort, where the immigrants would pour out.

  “There’s a ship, look, bringing the greenhorns. Pretty soon the folks will start coming out. That’s when the boardinghouse keepers swarm them. We can ask if they remember Shaineh.”

  “We can try. You’re a good boy, Sammy.”

  “Not so good. I got to get by what way I can.”

  “So do we all.”

  A decision was forming in her. She was always making plans, it was her nature. She had to try, always. “The only good thing that’s come out of all this pain is that I have some money now, money I saved for my parents and my family to come over. I sent them the money order but it came back.” Freydeh licked her fingers for the last taste of the corn. “I have enough once I get this money order cashed to get my own place. Then when I save up more, I’m going to start my own business.”

  “What kind of business?” Sammy squinted at her. She couldn’t even say if he was fair or ruddy or dark, although she had tried to clean him up. He needed a real bath, a good scrub-down. Baths were hard to come by except in the summer when the pools in the East River were open.

  “I’m going to make rubber condoms.”

  Sammy laughed. Then he squinted at her again. “You serious?”

  “There’s money in it. I know a gonif makes a living at it. I can do it as well as him. And you’re going to help me, Sammy.” She had noticed the squinting before. She wondered if he needed glasses. Of course he wouldn’t know if he did.

  He turned and glared at her. “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “You want to live in a box in Pig Alley?”

  “I get by.”

  “Barely. You’re a smart kid, Sammy. I got nobody to look after till I find Shaineh and I’m going to need help.”

  “Like what kind of help?” His eyes were fixed on hers now. He sat rigidly, waiting to hear what she would say. “I can do anything.”

  “I’ll need help making the molds. We buy the rubber in sheets. I’ll do the selling, to establish customers, and you’ll do a lot of the deliveries. I can’t be making the stuff and running around delivering it too.”

  “But after you find your sister, you won’t need me.”

  “For all I know, Shaineh is married by now. She was the pretty one in the family. Looking at me, you can’t picture her. She was slighter than me, very light brown hair, with a face like a flower, Sammy.”

  She stood, paced for a moment, sat back down on the bench. “And how do I know if she’d want to work for me? She might be a seamstress by now.” She sighed, putting her hand on his arm. “Sammy, I haven’t seen her since she was twelve—just a couple of years older than you are now. So what do I know from nothing about her? She’s my kid sister and she’s lost somewhere in New York—and that’s all I know.”

  “Bad things can happen when you’re all alone.”

  “You know it.” And she was sure he did. She wasn’t about to ask. Better he should keep those things to himself, not to be ashamed. “Okay, let’s go to where the boardinghouse keepers shout their wares to corral the poor people staggering out.”

  The boardinghouse hawkers were lined up waiting, although nobody had come through the doors yet. She and Sammy pushed from one to another, describing Shaineh, mentioning the ship she had come on, the date she had landed. They had almost given up when they found one enormous red-faced woman who smelled like soup.

  “I remember her. She wasn’t interested. Then that evening, sh
e came staggering in, exhausted. She couldn’t find you. When she finally got to the address you’d given her, they said you didn’t live there. So she came back to me. I remember her because she was so pretty and little and she cried so.”

  “Is she still living with you?” Freydeh took the woman by the arm and she must have grabbed too hard, for the woman flinched.

  “Watch it! That hurts.”

  Freydeh let go. “I’m worried about my sister. Is she with you?”

  “She ran out of money, so she had to go.”

  “Where?”

  “How would I know?” The woman was glaring at Freydeh, rubbing her arm ostentatiously.

  “Didn’t she leave a forwarding address?”

  “How long do you think I keep that? I’m one woman running a boardinghouse full of people who come and go, who sneak out without paying their bills, who eat like pigs at the trough. You’re lucky I remember her at all.” She turned and dived back into the milling crowd of hawkers and the confused immigrants staggering out with their battered luggage and bags and bundles on their heads, on their backs, clutched to their chests like babies. Women in shawls looking as scared and overwhelmed as she had felt six years before.

  She sat back on a bench with Sammy, her head in her hands. “Sammy, what would you do if you were Shaineh and dumped down in the city without no one to care for you? Where would you go?”

  “Girls go on the streets all the time, just for that. ’Cause they got no home, no money, no friends.”

  “Sha! I won’t think that. She could go to a shul for help. Go back to the neighborhood where she expected to find me and where at least some people speak Yiddish and start asking. That’s what we’ll try next.”

  “Are you really going to cash that money order?”

  “You bet I am. When I find Shaineh, I need a place to put her, I need a place to work from, and you need a place to sleep too, if you’re going to help me.” She tried to make herself sound more cheerful than she felt. Whenever she imagined Shaineh alone and friendless and lost on the streets of the city, she panicked. “So are you in?”

  “Of course I’m for it. If you really mean it.”

  She stood, motioning for Sammy to walk with her toward where they could catch a horsecar uptown. She was a little sorry to leave the trees, their buds just opening into tiny leaflets. The smell off the water was a combination of salt and sewage, freshness and decay. It felt good to have wind in her face, trees over them, but it was time to go to their neighborhood. As they left the park, ladies drew their skirts aside as if their passing could soil the fine silks. Gentlemen strolling along, pipes in their mouths, expected them to get out of the way. Now they were back on cobblestones slippery with horse urine and manure. Sailing ships stuck their sprits overhead, some with carved ladies. Big truculent-looking steamships loomed over, stories high. “I hate living in other people’s kitchens, sleeping in chairs, sleeping on the floor. This is blood money. I saved it a penny at a time to bring my parents over. Now they’re dead and Shaineh’s lost. But if I work for myself, I can look for her without begging Yonkelman, Oh, please, mister, please, let me have Monday off, please, sir.”

  “I thought you liked working in the pharmacy.”

  “It’s better than being a peddler or making flowers like the Silvermans. But I just get by. I can just scrape up a tiny bit each month to save. The way it is with me now, I’ll never get ahead.”

  “What do you really want?” Sammy swung around to stare at her, his hazel eyes startling in his face reddened and weather-beaten by his days and nights on the street, ingrained with dirt and coal dust in spite of her earlier scrubbing.

  They waited for a horse-drawn streetcar, in a crowd of others collected on a corner. “I want a little house. I want to be independent. I want Shaineh to live with me.”

  “Don’t you want to marry again? The guys say that’s what every widow wants.”

  “I loved my husband. I don’t know if I can love another man that way. What I want, I can work for.” They pushed onto the trolley and it was too crowded to talk for the half hour it took for the streetcar to shove its way through the mobbed streets. After they had gotten off and begun to walk again, she said, “There’s this woman I heard speak, Ernestine Rose, and she’s all for women. She says we’re the equal of men and we should keep our own money and we should be treated equal by the law and in the courts. She’s a Jew like us, a rabbi’s daughter who fought and won her inheritance in the courts. I liked hearing her talk that way. She made me feel like I could do anything.”

  “Until you get slammed down again,” Sammy muttered.

  “You get knocked down, you get back up. Nobody’s going to help you up. Except if you have a good partner and good friends and a good family. Then somebody will help you. Otherwise, if you fall and you don’t get up, you’ll be stepped on, you’ll be run over and die in the street. Understand me?”

  “I got no family.”

  “Ah, but you have something better. Me.” She clapped him on the back. “I will find Shaineh, I swear it. But now we got to figure out how to get my money back out of this stupid piece of paper.” She touched the money order in her bosom. She would not let go of it for anything till it was turned into real money. Gold coins, not paper money. Until then, she would sleep with it, she would eat with it, she would wear it to work. It was her future and Shaineh’s and Sammy’s too. Their future in a single piece of paper.

  THREE

  MONDAY MORNING EARLY, Henry Stanton caught the train for the city. In Elizabeth’s spacious house in Tenafly, New Jersey, there was a room for her husband, but it was far easier when he stayed at the flat in Manhattan. Once their parting embrace would have been passionate. Now they spoke a lukewarm goodbye, she waved perfunctorily and returned to her breakfast.

  “Has Mr. Stanton gone?” Susan stuck her head around the corner, ready to retreat. Susan preferred when Henry wasn’t around. He demanded too much of Elizabeth’s energy, and since his misconduct in the customs office, Susan had allowed her contempt for him to burgeon. Susan’s family, the Anthonys, were Hicksite Quaker, unyielding in their moral views.

  “Gone to the city. He won’t come out again for a couple of weeks.” Elizabeth took another pastry from the platter Amelia had set out. Amelia was more friend than servant, a Quaker woman who had been her housekeeper for a quarter century.

  Susan grasped her hand. Elizabeth glared. Susan’s bony hand was tight around her more fleshy wrist. “Mrs. Stanton!” Susan employed that starchy formality even when they were alone, in spite of their twenty-five years of intimate friendship, often sharing Elizabeth’s house. “You must not gain more weight.”

  “I enjoy my food. Heaven knows how we fight battles every single day, every week, every month, every year, every decade… You’re badgering me about food the way you used to badger me about the conjugal bed.”

  “Every time Mr. Stanton bothered to come home, you’d end up expecting again. Why couldn’t you abstain? For a moment of pleasure, you once again plunged yourself into an exhausting round of child-rearing.”

  “I enjoyed it, Susan. I was still in love with him. I liked making love with him. I didn’t wish anything to interfere…” She could never make Susan understand how crazy she had been for Henry—her knight—full of courage, facing down mobs of pro-slavery zealots, fighting passionately for abolition. He had been tall and handsome with a resonant voice, a fine speaker. If now he was shopworn with bad political compromises, she could still remember when he had seemed the epitome of bravery. “I liked motherhood, or I wouldn’t have had so many. Anyhow, there’s never been a woman so happy to reach menopause. Not that I ever had trouble in childbirth till the last. The midwife used to say I dropped babies like a mother cat birthing kittens.”

  Susan made a sour face. “You took more care with your children than that!”

  Amelia came in with some darning. She winked at Elizabeth from behind Susan’s narrow back, laying a letter on the table. “This
came for thee, Susan.”

  Elizabeth grabbed it, for the address was printed Susan Bitch Anthony. Another hate letter. They both got enough of them. She tore it in two and tossed it with good aim into the wastebasket. “I just meant the birthing.” Neighbor women in Seneca Falls—even the Irishwomen down the hill among the factories and tanneries—used to come to her for remedies for whooping cough and colic. She never lost a child. She crossed her arms over her full bosom, smiling. She did not know another mother who had not lost babies or children, including her own mother, half of whose children had died. She had not minded being the one who knew best, the woman who had mastered running a household and rearing healthy bright offspring.

  Susan frowned. “Yes, you can always call on your authority as a respectable married woman, mother of a tribe.”

  “Well, she’s been a good mother to them all,” Amelia said. She didn’t interrupt often, for she had the Quaker sense that she should not speak unless the spirit moved her. She was a quiet but strong presence in the house. “She can love with clear eyes that see what each one needs.”

  Elizabeth patted Susan’s shoulder. “My dear, don’t let them get to you when they call you an old maid. You have your freedom, the way I never had for all those years of choking domesticity—years I’d never have survived without you. I simply would have exploded with frustration and rage and you’d have had to scrape pieces of my innards off the ceiling. And the truth is, Susan, you’d have made a perfect wife if you’d wanted. You had proposals.”

  Susan let that thin but warm smile of hers spread across her face. “We’ve always helped each other. You’re the brains, Mrs. Stanton. I’m but your mouthpiece.”

  That was how it had been for many years, but Elizabeth had observed now that she could travel after a decade housebound in Seneca Falls, she was the better speaker. She could sway a crowd more easily than Susan could. Time after time, they would make the same points, and people would say they agreed with Elizabeth and disagreed with Susan. She knew she came across as motherly and warm, that she had the ability to think of a little witticism in the moment. Susan, who was kind and generous to a fault, never had been able to joke on her feet or tell the anecdote that made something real to people—unless Elizabeth in writing her speech inserted stories. But Susan had the organizational talents she lacked—the ability to sit endlessly in committee meetings, to steer proposals through the maze of subcommittees, to disagree without causing rancor and continue pushing for her agenda without seeming strident. Susan had her own genius. Susan could function in an organization behind the scenes as Elizabeth never could.