Sex Wars (11 page)

Tennie rather liked the Commodore. Old boy, she called him to his face, and he preened in her attention. She felt she could handle him. “He’s falling apart, sure, everything from top to bottom is wrong with him. He lived hard and he’s paying the price. He eats as if food were going to vanish from the earth in the next hour and leave only stones to gnaw on. You’ve seen him shovel it in.”

Indeed, they dined with the Commodore regularly, when he ate more than both of them together times four. He would consume several dozen oysters, most of a ham and roast beef and pudding besides, with maybe a turkey leg or two thrown in. “You must improve his habits. We want him to last a while.”

“I’m working on it. I’ve got him to cut back on his smoking. He enjoys my scolding him. It makes him jolly.”

“As long as you can manage him. I couldn’t, frankly. And as long as you’re comfortable. I don’t want you doing anything you don’t want to.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve been with some real oafs, Vickie, and more than one brute. The old boy’s okay. He can be really mean when he wants to be, but with me he wants to be warm and almost cuddly. I like the way he treats me. I’m not interested in being kept like Josie. I want money, not presents. I want my own life to come home to. Unless he marries me, of course. That I’d go along with.”

“Be careful. There is one very alive Mrs. Vanderbilt.”

“She’s not that alive. They haven’t shared a bed in thirty years.”

“They shared one pretty vigorously before that. Eleven children, is it?”

“She stays up in her part of the house. All the times we’ve both been there, you ever seen her?”

“Never. Are you saying she doesn’t exist?”

“I caught a glimpse of her once, going out as I was coming in. She simply nodded at me and got into a maroon landau and the coachman drove her off—visiting one of her daughters. The Commodore is a stone-cold miser with his daughters. They aren’t real Vanderbilts, he says, and he begrudges them every dollar.”

“He was crazy about George, the son he has me communing with.”

“Well, if he did love George, that was his only kid he has any feeling for. All those children, and he couldn’t care less. She’s his cousin, you know.” Seeing Victoria’s blank expression, she added, “His wife. He says that was a mistake and that’s why all his kids except the dear departed George are idiots.” Tennie shook her head. “He says his wife isn’t well.”

“They all say that. She doesn’t understand me. She’s on death’s doorstep. We haven’t been together in thirty years. She has a lover. Or she has no interest in sex and she doesn’t mind…”

Tennie laughed from the belly, that infectious unladylike bellow of amusement that always made Victoria smile. When she caught her breath, Tennie said, “Yeah, I never had a client in the old days who said, I love my wife, she understands me just fine. We get along perfectly. I just want to fuck.”

“Did Mrs. Vanderbilt strike you as unbalanced? Remember, Josie said he had her committed to an insane asylum.”

“He said he’d figured out how to get her to stay out of his way. She didn’t look crazy, but then, how does a crazy person look?”

“Be careful what you say around Buck and Roxanne and the rest of the clan.”

Tennie sighed, propping her round chin on her folded arms with their luxurious dimples showing above her chemise. Her dress lay on the bed ready to put on to dine with Vanderbilt. “I do watch my step with the old boy, Vickie, ’cause I don’t think he’s the forgiving sort.”

T
HE GASLIGHT WAS DIMMED
and only candles were burning, the way she liked it. She opened her mind and waited until she felt a spirit approaching. She believed in communicating with those who had passed over, some recently, some long, long ago. She experienced them in visions and when their minds brushed hers. The spirits did not care for loud noises or too many people. Theirs was a more tranquil, harmonious existence. But it was possible to mentally urge the spirits to communicate certain facts or ideas. After all, the dead were not stupid. They kept up with what was happening in their families.

Vanderbilt sat up expectantly across the round table from her. She liked to use a round table and had requested one. He had this table delivered that they’d used ever since, with a black cloth over it and a candle burning in the center. Tennie sat to her left, Vanderbilt to her right but farther away.

Victoria had discovered the power of being a medium when she was still a child. Women were not supposed to speak in public. But if they were spiritualists, they could collect an audience and make a decent living, or they might be really good at it like Laura Cuppy Smith or Cora Hachen, who worked the lecture circuit. Otherwise, only actresses could stand up in front of an audience and get paid instead of punished, but mediums were far more respectable. Mediums were almost holy, vessels for the spirits of those who had passed over. People came to mediums wanting reassurance, comfort, information. They wanted to be told they were not guilty. In most families, half the children died in infancy or early childhood. Their parents wanted to hear that the children were in a good place and happy, perhaps that they were still growing up there, and that their life on the other side was better than their life had been in this world. People wanted to be told the eternal hellfire that preachers had threatened them with did not exist; that the afterlife was much like this, only better. Almost every family had lost a young man in the Civil War, and they wanted to hear that their dead were doing fine on the other side.

Victoria had learned to be skilled at reading people’s postures and small, often involuntary movements, unconscious reactions with their eyes, their mouth, their hands. She began with a kind of droning evocation, intended as much to put Vanderbilt in the mood as to do anything for the spirits. When she had him intent but relaxed, expectant, she went into what she thought of as her higher state.

“Someone is here. O spirit who wants to approach Cornelius, O spirit of a loved one perhaps, speak! Hear my voice, heed my plea, and speak to us…

At this point Tennie would make a kind of sound with a rattle she kept under her skirt. She had attached it to her leg before they sat down, so that she could make the sound when they were holding hands around the circle. Afterward, she would pass it off to Victoria while she had her intimate time with the Commodore. The rattle—filled with dry beans and sand—made an unearthly sound. It was just to create a mood. The spirits didn’t mind and it helped create the kind of quiet receptivity she needed.

Victoria altered her voice. She could feel the spirit nearing. She could feel the power moving through her. She spoke in the voice she had learned by trial and error made Vanderbilt think of his mother. “My son…my son…”

“Mother? Are you here?” He sat forward, clutching her hand till she winced.

“I am here, son. I’m glad you are beginning to take care of yourself. My son, often you take better care of your money and your horses than of your own body.”

“Well, we all get damned old, Mama. I’m no brawling youth any longer.”

“You will pass over to me in God’s good time, but in the meantime I want you to take better care of your body.”

“Do you have any news for me, Mama?”

“Yes, my son. You have been having trouble with the jackals of Erie.”

“Fisk and Gould and Daniel Drew. Damned sons of bitches, blast them to hell. I could eat their balls for breakfast, Mama.”

“You sound the same as you ever did, son. But don’t despair. Something is about to change, I can see.”

“What, Mama? Am I going to beat them?”

“I don’t see that, son, But they are going to come to you. They are going to come begging an end to the wars of Erie. I can see that.”

“When, Mama?”

“Time is not the same here as it is there, my son. I can’t tell you when. Now I’m tired. You know this is difficult. I will speak with you again soon, my son, soon.”

“Mama, don’t leave me yet. Don’t go.”

Victoria let her head droop. She was silent. There, she had got her message across. Vanderbilt would be prepared for what Josie had let drop, that Fisk and Gould were hoping to settle with the Commodore. They weren’t about to turn over their profits, but they were seeking some kind of compromise that would let everybody go home with a piece of the Erie pie. They were tired of the battle of corrupt judge versus corrupt judge, constant payoffs. They were tired of bribing legislators wholesale and piecemeal. They were tired of their toughs from the Irish gang in Chelsea against Vanderbilt’s gang of hired Dead Rabbits. It was time to end the Erie War. They must reach a negotiated peace. Now Vanderbilt would have time to prepare, to expect the approach of the two men who had fleeced him with watered stock for months and taken seven million of his hundred million. He could not forgive that. But he could get some of his own back.

The Commodore was extremely pleased. He bussed her on the cheek and handed her fifty dollars in gold. “If they come to me and offer me a deal I can live with, then Erie will go up. I’ll keep you posted. Maybe I’ll give you some of the wallpaper they fed to me when I was trying to gain control. Yes, if what you say comes true, I’ll give you both some Erie stock.”

S
INCE HIS PROMOTION,
Anthony had lost touch with Edward. Now Anthony was a salesman in women’s notions—ribbons, laces, embroideries, sewing supplies. He worked wholesale, not door to door, contracting with the new enormous stores like Stewart’s and Lord & Taylor and with many smaller shops throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Other salesmen were
jealous he had been given such a choice route when usually beginning salesmen were sent off to remote regions where they had to travel from town to town. Getting that stellar route might have had something to do with his joining the same Brooklyn church as his boss. Or perhaps his boss thought he was of good character—as he tried to be.

He felt at home in the Reformed Church in Brooklyn Heights, for its straight and narrow approach resembled the churches of his upbringing in rural Connecticut. None of that loose and anything-goes smarminess of pastors like Beecher over at the Plymouth, that should be named the Wide Mouth, for wide and spacious was the road to hell. He went not only to services on Sundays, a half-day affair, but also to prayers two nights a week. In his childhood, his family had gone to church twice on Sundays and his saintly mother had conducted prayers every morning. In his loneliness and isolation, he needed the church. At least there he was visible. People greeted him by name. The pastor took an interest. “You should marry, young Anthony. A man is only half a man until he has a wife of his own. And children.”

He was making twenty-five dollars a week from commissions. He was saving what he could, but he doubted he could afford marriage. A wife was an expensive proposition. Still, he needed one. Living in boardinghouses offered too much temptation, bad food and too little in the way of virtue and seemliness. His boardinghouse keeper was a respectable widow, Mrs. Hanley, who took in only male boarders, but many of them were loose in their morals and spent their evenings in what they called “the sporting life”—as Edward had.

He felt a pang of guilt when he realized he had completely forgotten Edward. Edward had not been ready to pay attention to his warnings, but perhaps by now he would be more open. Anthony had a duty to look up his friend and see if he could yet be saved. On one of his excursions to lower Manhattan, he stopped by their old boardinghouse. “Is Edward Lor-rilard still living here?”

The woman shook her head. “Not that one. You won’t find him here or anyplace else.”

“Did he leave the city?” That would be a good sign. Edward, like himself, came from a small town, in his case in upstate New York.

The woman heaved a great sigh, as if she cared, although Anthony knew her to be a hard case who cared about nothing but her oaf of a daughter and money. “He’s left the city, all right, Mr. Comstock. He’s left this earth.”

Anthony grasped the woman’s hand. “He’s departed? What happened to him? He was only twenty-five.”

“Got into a drunken fight over a tart, he did, and her pimp stabbed him. It was a scandal, but they never caught the tart or her pimp—they got clean away and nobody would point the finger at them. Poor Mr. Lorri-lard. Cut down in his youth and for what?”

“For what, indeed… Thanks for the information, although it’s not what I was hoping for.” He went home, stricken with a mixture of guilt and a kind of queer satisfaction in having been so right in the warnings he had given Edward.

On the way to the dry goods firm the next day, he passed the establishment he had noticed in the old days in the basement of a building on Warren Street.
CONROY SPECIALTY BOOKS. BOOKS FOR YOUNG MEN. ADVENTURE, COWBOYS, LIFE ON THE OPEN ROAD, FRENCH BOOKS, SAILORS’ STORIES, EXPLORERS, LIFE IN A TURKISH HAREM, CONVENT LIFE REVEALED
. Dirty books like those in yellow wrappers that Edward used to carry around and read when he could sneak the time, when work was slow. Anthony stood before the door clenching his fists in anger. This demon sold hell to young men.

Every day he glared at the store as he passed. This man Conroy could openly advertise, corrupting the souls of young clerks. Conroy had seduced Edward away from respectability and the desire for the love of a good Christian woman, all the values he had been raised in, as had Anthony, back in the moral societies of rural and small-town America. Conroy had seduced Edward to his death. Something had to be done. Anthony owed it to Edward’s memory, dear Edward who was so like his dead brother Samuel, and now untimely dead himself. Dead and forgotten by almost everyone, but not by him. He would avenge Edward. He would put Conroy out of business.

Finally, after two weeks of brooding and fuming, he went to see George Graves, chairman of the Y on Varick Street, where Anthony spent many happy and fruitful evenings. There he had attended lectures on avoiding obscenity, and the most recent speaker had mentioned some kind of legal remedy. He had to wait for an hour for Graves to see him. He used the time reciting speeches in his head. He had come to respect Mr. Graves for his piety and his good works. He would confess to Graves his desire to find justice for his murdered friend. He would never know who the pimp was who had stabbed him, but he could punish the man responsible for Edward having been in that vile place in the company of a prostitute. No
doubt that degraded woman was much like the ones who had swarmed their table the one night he had been persuaded to accompany Edward to that concert saloon.

At last Graves opened his office door and waved him in. “It’s good to see you, Anthony. But why the long face? Is your job going badly?”

“Not at all. I have a choice route. But I am in a quandary.” He pulled up a chair that Graves pointed to and spilled out the story of Edward Lorrilard.

“So you want to cause trouble for this Conroy. You say he’s a purveyor of pornography?”

“Openly so.”

“You want to close him down? You’re determined?”

“I am, sir.”

“If you’re serious, you have a good shot at it. We finally got an obscenity bill with teeth through the legislature this year.”

That was what the lecturer had meant. “Can we put him in jail?”

“You can try. It’s a law for the suppression of the trade in obscene materials—illustrations, ads, articles of indecent or immoral use. We’ve been working on this for years, Anthony, years. Officers can seize obscene books and indecent objects. If an indictment is forthcoming against Conroy, all his stock will be destroyed.”

“That’s thrilling, Mr. Graves. The power is there to be used.”

“You’re determined to proceed?” The man looked skeptical.

“I am.”

“Well, this is how you might go about getting him. It may be a bit distasteful, but it should work—providing the police cooperate. They don’t like to arrest these fellows. But I know a captain who will act—if you go through with it.”

Anthony could tell Graves thought he was made of words and not deeds. He would show him. Still, his work kept him from confronting Conroy for nearly three weeks. It was a busy season for women’s notions—moving into warm weather when different styles of attire were worn by ladies. He was kept hopping, and although when he retired for the night he thought of Edward and vowed to bring Conroy to justice, he could not pry the time from his schedule. It was a profitable time for him and his commissions, but he had to admit, when he studied his bankbook with the long columns of very small amounts, that at this rate it would be years before he could acquire a wife. He saved a nickel here, a quarter there. He was a successful salesman, but his commissions did not amount to enough to set him up as he wished to live.

In spite of his good relationship with his boss, he was going to look for something that paid more. It came down to that. Move on or atrophy. He saw clerks in the offices of the dry goods firm who had withered at their desks, never married, never had children—husks of men. He looked too at the older salesmen, always on the road. Sometimes they took to drink or women. Being away from home so much, either they had never taken the time and trouble to court a good woman and marry or they had some poor drudge at home but enjoyed the company of more exciting women in hotels across the country. He did not want their lives. Although he was good at sales and knew a great deal by now about women’s notions—more than most women could boast—he could not say he found his work satisfying. If he failed to sell his notions, would it make a bit of difference to anyone except himself and his sad little bank account? It was trivial work that accomplished no higher moral good, did not improve men’s souls or the society in which they lived.

One night he woke from a nightmare, or was it a vision? Edward was standing hip deep in flames shaking his finger at him. Edward was burning and cursing him for not seeking revenge, for not keeping other young men from his fate. Anthony was covered in cold sweat and shaken. He had been sent that dream as a prod. He was sure he could smell burning flesh, like scorched bacon.

Finally the day came when he could get back to Warren Street. He checked his wallet and marched down the block. The place next door to Conroy was just as bad—purveyors of rubber goods. Everybody knew what that meant. Filthy business, all of it. But he had a special grudge against Conroy.

He felt queasy as he paused outside Conroy’s establishment.
LATEST PAUL DE KOCK, 100 NIGHTS IN A GIRLS’ SCHOOL.
He forced himself down the steps and inside. It looked like any other bookstore, just racks and racks of books. The first ones he saw as he veered to the left were books about fishing and the out-of-doors. He stared at drawings of trout until he regained his nerve. Then he came upon anatomy books. Drawings of the inner organs, the digestive system, the circulation of the blood, and yes, here was a cutaway of the male reproductive system. He did not doubt that the female reproductive system would be likely sliced asunder and laid out on the page to tempt impure thoughts in the heedless young.

“Can I help you?” It was a middle-aged man, completely bald with bright blue eyes and a big smile, perhaps six inches shorter than Anthony and slighter of frame.

He could not very well say, Sell me a piece of pornography, please. The sign came into his mind. “I’d like the new Paul de Kock.”

“You’ll find it a most satisfying read. He’s a very popular author.” The man was so depraved he might have been talking about the book on trout. “We can scarcely keep him in stock.” The man bustled behind the counter and slapped down a book in a yellow wrapper, much like the ones that Edward had insisted on reading.

Anthony paid him and asked for a receipt. The man seemed surprised—probably buyers of pornography did not usually want a written record of the transaction—but he obliged Anthony with a receipt that said what the book was and how much it cost, with the name of the bookstore printed at the top.

Before he proceeded, Anthony decided he must study what he had bought, to make sure it was evil and to understand his prey He took the book home, well hidden in the portmanteau in which he carried samples, and that night in his room he read it cover to cover, going without sleep to carry out his mission. A weaker man would have succumbed to the solitary vice, but he resisted. It was as vile as he had imagined. Young girls, supposedly innocent, tampered with each other and then were seduced by teachers, ministers, their own parents. Each scene was dirtier than the last, with couples leading to threesomes and then vast orgies. He finished it by dawn. That he had not touched himself made him feel strong. He had tested himself by fire and not been found wanting. He could enter the flames and not be burned.

Anthony marched to the relevant police station. He asked for a Captain Curtis, for Graves had told him he might receive satisfaction from this man as he might not from a run-of-the-mill policeman. Captain Curtis kept him waiting half an hour, but he was patient, reminding himself of his mission and the satisfaction it would bring him to see Conroy punished.

Finally Captain Curtis met with him. “What can I do for you? Has someone harmed you?” He was a burly man, as befitted a policeman, with muttonchop whiskers beginning to gray, a prominent square jaw and bushy brows.

“Someone has harmed the community in the eyes of God and man.” He drew the dirty book from its plain wrapper and slammed it down on Curtis’s desk. Beside it he placed the receipt. “I bought this piece of filth at Conroy’s Books on Warren. This violates the law passed this year against obscenity.”

“Right you are. Are you willing to swear out a complaint? I know about the law, but we haven’t had an opportunity to enforce it.”

Anthony held his tongue. After all, on any day they could easily have done what he had and coaxed the evil Conroy into selling an illicit book. That they had not bothered to do so made Anthony feel that he had a duty to fulfill because they were shirking theirs. “I’m ready. Will you accompany me?”

Curtis looked annoyed but rose at once. “I’ll get a constable and we’ll arrest him in his den.”

So the three men, Anthony and Captain Curtis side by side and the constable just behind them, marched the several blocks to Conroy’s establishment. When Conroy understood what was up, he responded with anger. “I’m not doing any harm. Look at the streets around here. There’s dozens selling racier books than mine.”

“The more shame to all of you. Aren’t you going to cuff him?”

“Not necessary,” the constable said. “He’s not a rough one. He’ll come along lamb-like. Just down to the station house.”

Curtis said he would send a couple of men with a wagon. Anthony sat on the stoop to wait. He was not going to take a chance that they’d let Conroy go with a cheap fine and he’d come right back and open up his den. He sat there for two hours until a dray pulled up drawn by a sway-backed piebald horse, with two policemen in uniform sitting on the box. From how often he was kept waiting, he felt how unimportant other men judged him to be. Anthony helped them load books. He made sure they took the anatomy books also, although one of the policemen said they were perfectly legal. “Well, they oughtn’t to be.”

He was sure that both men had slipped a book or two into their pockets, but he could not prove it and he did not have the right to search them. They were probably past vulnerability. He was here today to save the young clerks who frequented the neighborhood, not case-hardened police who might well be on the take. He was sure from their attitude of amusement that if he had gone to them with his complaint, they would have put him off. Anthony went home exhausted but satisfied. He had done his duty. He felt as if others should see in him as he passed a certain authority, a light of rectitude and strength. No one seemed to notice, but he felt the difference in himself.