Sin in the Second City (19 page)

They set out for the walk, a mile and a half south, stepping around manure and vomit and urine and puddles of beer, singing hymns along the way. Bell listened for the cries of prostitutes, some of them younger than his own daughters, being whipped behind barred windows and doors.

“Imagine yourself,” Bell wrote, “in this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

When they arrived on South Dearborn Street, the Everleigh Club before them, he halted and thrust out his arm. The hot August wind kicked up scraps of trash. Music spilled from open windows. Swarms of men ducked behind the brims of their derbies, skittered into side alleys. Dozens more stopped and turned to Bell, faces open and curious.

Bell placed his wooden box six feet from the curb and mounted it. Now he stood a foot taller than the mob. Reverend Boynton herded several saints closer to the resort’s front doors. A few feet away, Lucy Page Gaston lifted her arms skyward, the long full sleeves of her blouse drooping like wings.

Bell cleared his throat. He was on.

“Young men, where are your heads?” he bellowed. He touched his own head for emphasis.

A laugh bubbled up in the crowd. Bell pressed on.

“One night I dreamed that I saw a young man stepping carelessly on and off a railway track, near a curve around which the express would come thundering and screaming at any moment. Whether on the track or off it, the young man was indifferent to danger and wanton in his movements. But as I looked I saw in my dream that there was nothing whatever above his coat collar—he had no head.”

Again laughter, longer this time. Bell paused, rolled the end of his mustache between two fingers, and took a breath. A difficult group, but he’d had them before.

“That explained his recklessness,” he called. “He was void of understanding.”

No laughs this time, but a low, gathering murmur. Bell raised his Bible, the pages facing the crowd.

“The word of God which says, ‘Void of understanding they gather by troops at the harlots’ houses not knowing that the dead are there and her guests are in the depths of hell.’”

There—there she was. A velvet curtain swept across a wide window and the Everleigh madam’s face appeared, tentative at first, feature by feature, forehead then nose and then that mouth, again pursed in an expression at once impish and imperious. The streetlights picked up glints from the knot of diamonds at her throat. Shadows and shapes moved behind her, bodies twirling in dance, glasses rising.

A
nd there he was again. Minna had grown used to the “visiting firemen,” as she called them privately to Ada. They’d been out there nearly every night since the Marshall Field debacle in November 1905, almost a year now, and she’d stopped telling herself their antics had nothing to do with the Club. But she and Ada didn’t understand the scrutiny—why single out the only madams on the line who wanted to make the profession as honorable as it could be?

“Truthfully,” she said, “we were open to offers. We believed we could have adjusted an age-old problem if given half the chance to supervise its operation. We weren’t consulted. In fact, we were never consulted about anything constructive. It was a personal crusade against us. We were touted as the forces of evil invading a God-fearing community to lure the innocent to perdition. Give the weeds a chance and destroy the flowers seemed to be the hymn—hallelujah!”

Still, no harm done—none yet, anyway. Persistence didn’t necessarily evolve into success, and who knew, they might soon tire of their hellfire hollering and go somewhere else. Everleigh Club customers politely ignored the entreaties, discarded those grotesque pamphlets. Sometimes, if the mob grew too thick and unruly, clients were ushered in, discreetly, through a back door. No complaints about slower traffic here, that night included.

Behind her now, talking her ear off in between indulgent swallows of champagne, was one Vernon Shaw Kennedy, director of the Hammond, Whiting & East Chicago Electric Company and the South Chicago City Railway Company, and formerly “interested” in the Kennedy Biscuit Company. He enjoyed spending time in his office suite at the First National Bank Building or at the prestigious Chicago Athletic Club or playing in golf tournaments or trolling around California or vacationing in Africa (he just returned from a thirteen-month safari, in fact, had the madam ever been?)—anywhere, it seemed, but with his wife of seventeen years, Grace Cummings Shaw Kennedy, a “large holder” of First National Bank stock and proud owner of “one of the finest collections of gems in the city” (but surely not as fine as the madam’s, he must say).

His wife would be filing for divorce soon, he was sure of it, and he felt bad about the four children. But really, they’d been “practically separated” for the past nine years and had always strained to be pleasant in front of the children and the servants, so it should be painless. Certainly Grace was aware of his, shall he say,
indiscretions;
a number of her friends even told her they no longer wanted to visit at the house because he’d made a few “improper proposals” to them. Tearfully at first, then matter-of-factly, she’d confronted him. In one case, deciding it was time, he’d admitted to an affair. Liberating. And when his wife invited a young woman to board at their Michigan Avenue mansion for a few weeks (perhaps as bait?), he seduced her—loudly—at 3:00 a.m., behind a tapestry hanging near the stairway. His wife, perched on the middle steps, listened the entire time….

And so on and so forth. Edmund, would you be a dear and get Mr. Kennedy another champagne?

It appeared Mr. Kennedy was right about one thing—his wife would likely be filing for divorce. The Reverend Bell wasn’t the only one peering into the Everleigh Club windows that night. After six years, a madam gets to know all her city’s detectives, even the private kind, and one, a Mr. J. G. Gunderloch, had been stationed outside the Club since at least 8:00 p.m. He might as well lie down and take a nap on Dearborn Street—at the rate Mr. Kennedy was going, he’d be at the Club until sunrise, at least. She had to laugh: Those visiting firemen might have stamina, but they never outlasted the customers.

B
ell kept the Bible aloft and reached with his right hand into the pocket of his trousers, fishing out a silver dollar.

“You bring your money with the burning name of God upon it”—here Bell raised the coin—“to buy the abominations of Sodom.”

He stood with each arm lifted and taut, like Christ nailed to the cross, and fell silent. Let his words sink in. He heard harsh whispering around him, voices that seemed to scratch the air. To one side, through a sliver of vision—he did not want to disturb his stance by turning his head—he saw a small commotion, a burst of energy, and then an arm pulling back like the band of a slingshot. A small object whizzed and spun, hurtling toward him, and made solid contact with the side of his head.

An egg.

The yolk and muck settled into his hair and trickled down. Streaks traced the curves of his ear, wet the stiff strands of his mustache. From behind, another egg slapped his neck, dripped inside his collar, sluiced through the hollow of his back.

He thought of Mary, staring out their front window, exhausted but sleepless, waiting for the sound of his steps, the shadow of his waving hand.

Reciting any passage that came to him, out of order and unrelated, he crafted a patchwork sermon:

“Thus saith the Lord, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but let the wicked turn from his evil way and live;

“‘From all your filthiness I will cleanse you’

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

Without warning, his sight went hazy. Bell stepped from his box, and the crowd divided to form a slim passageway. Entering the alley between Ed Weiss’s and the Everleigh Club, the reverend fell to his knees and let his face rest in his palms. He needed to pause a moment, to “tap the resources of God.”

Rested, he pulled himself up and wiped the streaks of egg from his face. Hours of work still stretched before him—he had to pace himself to last until 3:00 a.m. He glanced back at 2131–2133 Dearborn Street, into the windows arched like half-moons, and this time they were empty.

ULTRA DÉCOLLETÉ AND OTHER EVILS

Ike Bloom.

In Chicago our God lurks everywhere.
In the elevated train’s husky roar…in the humid mists of summer by the lake.

—F
ATHER
A
NDREW
G
REELEY

T
he new Abraham Lincoln Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his uncle, a reverend, was a brown rectangle of a building on Oakwood Boulevard, boxy windows dotting its façade like rows of gritted teeth. Early in the afternoon on October 9, 1906, more than 150 purity workers from all over the country—Philadelphia and New York, St. Louis and California—streamed into the auditorium. Bell and his saints had been waiting for this, the National Purity Congress, for months, especially since Chicago was once again playing host. They wandered through the crowd, connecting names with faces, learning about the red-light districts in other cities and the work being done to stop them. In turn, the visitors asked about Chicago—they’d heard so much about the Levee—and observed that the Lincoln Center was the ideal venue for a discussion about white slavery.

Mayor Dunne gave a welcoming address, and delegates debated resolutions against numerous “evils,” including “any form of state, local, or police regulation of vice which may be in any way regarded as a permit” and “ultra décolleté.” There was a scheduled debate between renowned anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and his archnemesis, Theodore Schroeder of the Free Speech League of New York, but the former fell ill and never showed. Schroeder took full advantage of the empty podium beside him, ridiculing Comstock’s “hobbies” and arguing that “what is deemed objectionable is always a personal matter.”

The Reverend John Halcom Shaw, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, illuminated the troubling conditions in Chicago.

“If there is one person to be pitied more than another in this great city,” Shaw thundered, “it is the boarding house young woman. She comes from Dakota or Oklahoma to make her living. If she is fortunate she gets into a big shop at $8 or $9 a week. If less fortunate, she gets less.”

Shaw paused, wiped his brow. Bell leaned forward. The auditorium was silent as the reverend closed in on a dreadful truth.

“No young woman,” Shaw continued, “can live in this city as she ought on that amount of money. She takes a hall bedroom in an inferior house and eats at cheap cafes. Instantly she is assaulted by fierce temptations—one financial and the other social. She must have the money and she craves the society of the other sex to which she is justly entitled. Many times she is doomed.”

But the most powerful speaker, in Bell’s opinion, was the Reverend Sidney C. Kendall, who was terminally ill and would die within the year.