The Banished Children of Eve (48 page)

Eliza packed her few things and left the boardinghouse. She wandered the streets. She looked in the windows of the shops. Not a single Negro clerk in any of them. What would they say if she asked for a job? Would they laugh? Or throw her out? Or stand in speechless wonderment? She kept walking.

The same boy opened the door of Madame
Julia's. He reached to take her carpetbag. She held on to it.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He directed her into the parlor. Madame Julia was sitting where Eliza had left her. Her eyes were closed. Eliza stood motionless for a moment, then let her bag drop. Madame Julia opened her eyes slowly.

“You here to work?” she asked.

“No.”

“Them that won't work, neither shall they eat. The Good Book says that.”

“I'll work. I'll clean up.”

“I already told you, I don't need more bed makers.”

The ice in the towel over Madame Julia's foot had melted. There was a puddle on the rug. Her glass had been refilled. She seemed to be having difficulty keeping her eyes open.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“About six,” Eliza said.

“They'll start arriving in steady numbers soon. The soldiers first. They're the eagerest.” She pointed at the chair where Eliza had sat earlier in the afternoon. “Sit.”

Eliza sat with her bag in her lap. She was perched in the same position as before, as if she were waiting for a train.

“I was as good-looking as you are now when I started. The men wanted me in the worst way, and I quickly learned to pretend likewise. I imitated their hunger, and that drives them wild, when they think you want it as bad as them. Of course, a man in the grip of his own desire will believe anything. That's what a whore learns better than anyone. Now they laugh when they see me. ‘Mount Julia,' one of them called me. Thought he was being smart. Said I was as big as one of those Catskill mountains. ‘You wish you could mount Julia,' says I, ‘but the kind of man could make such things worth the doing has long since disappeared.'

“How they love to talk when they come down from
upstairs. How calm and capable of conversation they are. But before they go up it's a different story. It's hard for me not to laugh in their faces when I bring them in to find out what they're after and to explain the rules. A nightly procession of love-hungry pups masquerading as pleasure hounds, reeking of alcohol, nervous, so damned anxious to get it done, so impatient, as though the fate of the Republic hung between their legs. I like to sit them right where you're sitting. Just sit and watch them squirm. They're worse than schoolboys, and all of them got it in their heads the colored women are going to show them something they've never seen before.”

“I don't know where to go.”

“Don't go anywhere. I never forced a girl into doing what she didn't want. But I guarantee you'll get used to it. Doesn't take much more effort than to ride a horse. If you're good, maybe I'll recommend you to Josie Woods. She's always had a colored girl on her rolls, and her girls don't have but one customer a night. It's not much worse than being married.”

Eliza lived a month in The Arms of Love, in an attic room with a bed, dresser, chair, mirror, and a wardrobe for the dresses Madame Julia provided and for which she added two dollars to the weekly charge. She sent Eliza the youngest and most inexperienced men, the ones who squirmed the most. “They'll be done before they start,” she said.

The routine dulled Eliza's revulsion. She had an average of six or seven customers a night, all nervous and quick to satisfy themselves. They were hayseeds, tourists, young clerks, soldiers with boys' faces. “Be sure not to let them fall asleep,” Madame Julia said. “They're filled with liquor, and once they're asleep it's like trying to wake the dead.”

Eliza slept most of the day. There was a cook who prepared the girls' meals, and Madame Julia insisted they eat
in the kitchen and not bring food to their rooms. There were five other women who resided in The Arms of Love. Four spoke with southern accents. They were not openly hostile to Eliza, but they never went out of their way to make conversation.

“Don't expect help from anyone in this house,” Madame Julia told her. “This business is already crowded, and you can't blame them for not wanting to encourage the competition. Money means more than color. Negro or not, you might end up taking business away from them, and nobody is gonna abide that eventuality, not in this town. But if you're here long enough, they'll warm up.”

In the room next to Eliza's was a girl her own age who said she was from Pennsylvania. She had been sent to the Quaker School in New York to be trained as a teacher. She had run away. Most afternoons she stayed in her room and cried. On Sundays she went to the French church on Twenty-third Street to hear Mass. She tried to get Eliza to go with her. “The ceremony is so … so …” She threw up her hands, “I am tired of all that is drab. I want a world of beautiful colors.” She said she was saving her money so that she could move to Europe. “Negroes are accepted as equals by the French,” she told Eliza.

“I worry about that girl,” Madame Julia said to Eliza. “She has more delusions than a man.”

Madame Julia spent the greater part of the day sitting in the parlor, drinking, napping, talking to the guests, her great bulk bathed in the weak light that seeped through the shutters. Each Monday the inhabitants of the house stopped in the parlor to pay their rent. On the fourth Monday that Eliza was a resident, Madame Julia had a female guest with her when Eliza entered, a slim, attractive, middle-aged white woman in an elegant velvet dress and a hat with a green plume.

Madame Julia introduced her to Eliza as Mrs. Josie Woods.

“Your employer speaks highly of you,” Mrs. Woods said.

Madame Julia nodded in Mrs. Woods's direction. “You could hardly tell we started in this business together. We had the same figure once. Josie expanded her interests. I expanded my size.”

Mrs. Woods said, “Tell me, what do you think of
this profession?”

“I try not to think about it,” Eliza said.

“That's a mistake. Thinking is essential to all success.
‘Cogito, ergo prospero.'
I've had that motto placed on my coat of arms. ‘I think, therefore I prosper.'”

“Your coat of arms?” Madame Julia laughed and clapped her hands. The fat on her arms shook. “We've come up in the world, haven't we, Josie?”

“It's either up or down,” Mrs. Woods said. “No one stands still.”

“Most days I'm as still as can be. The gout makes sure of that. I sit here and watch the world go its own skittish way, and as far as I can see the great majority of people is traveling sideways. A portion may be going down, but very few are going up.”

“Ah, my dear Julia, the problem is that you can't see much from this self-imposed Elba of yours. Come for a carriage ride with me, and have a look at the city. It's changing every day, the buildings and ambitions growing higher at the same time, new faces, new businesses, new notions, expectations increasing, capital expanding, investments growing, the panic is over, the country is on the move again. There are fortunes to be won. This is an age made by God for the industrious.”

“I get tired just listening to you talk, Josie.”

“And you,” Mrs. Woods said to Eliza, “have you ambitions?”

“I thought so once.”

“And now?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Are you freeborn?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters, or I
wouldn't ask. We are entering a period of such progress that even the Negro shall share in it. Emancipation is only a matter of time, and the freeborn will be the leaders of their race.”

“You sound like a Republican,” said Madame Julia.

“I am a Republican, and proud of it. The party has my financial support, and the day that our sex is enfranchised, a day I pray for with some urgency, the Republicans shall have my vote also.”

“Please, no politicking on these premises. I do not permit the discussion of politics in The Arms of Love. It bores me and distracts my customers.”

“You're the one who raised the issue, but I respect your wishes.” Mrs. Woods turned in her chair to face Eliza. “Besides, my real reason for coming was to see if you were as pretty and alluring as Madame Julia told me you were, and having seen for myself, I would, with the permission of our hostess, like to offer you a position with my establishment.”

“I'm not a Republican,” Madame Julia said, “but I never stand in the way of ambition. As I told you before, you may offer her whatever you wish.”

Mrs. Woods said to Eliza, “Do you know the difference between a whore and a courtesan?”

“The price she's paid,” said Eliza.

“That's a consequence of the difference, not the difference itself. The real difference is here.” Mrs. Woods tapped her forefinger against the side of her head. “In the mind. A whore sees herself as a commodity. A courtesan understands that what she is selling is not herself but her services. She respects herself as a member of a profession, the way a lawyer or a broker does, and she never allows her patrons to ignore that fact. Have you ever heard of Theodora?”

“Another Republican?” asked Madame Julia.

“She was the empress of Byzantium, the wife of Justinian, and she'd been the most famous courtesan in the imperial city.”

“Any of your girls ever marry
emperors?”

“One married a senator, another the president of a railroad. Should an emperor ever appear on the scene, I wouldn't hesitate to offer one of my girls as a suitable candidate for his attentions.” Mrs. Woods directed herself to Eliza again. “Can you play a musical instrument?”

“No.”

“Can you sing?”

“Yes.”

“You read and write, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Certain of the gentlemen who patronize my establishment have a predilection for women of color.”

“Are they all Republicans?” asked Madame Julia.

“For a woman who bars politics from her establishment, you nevertheless seem incapable of divorcing yourself from its associations. No, they are not all Republicans. Some are Democrats. But it is not color alone that interests them. They look for poise, gentleness, refinement, a facility for conversation, a delicate nature, and an educated sensuality devoid of the gross and distasteful. You,” she said to Eliza, “seem possessed of these or, at least, capable of mastering them, and since I am at present lacking a woman of color, I'm glad to offer you the opportunity to join my staff on a trial basis.”

“Old men will ask you to beat them with whips,” Madame Julia commented, “and you shall see for yourself that no matter what his age, a man is always a boy. But the pay is good and the demands are few. My advice is, Take it.”

“Julia, you are the prisoner of your cynicism. It is what keeps you locked up in this tomb.”

“There isn't a better view of the city to be had than the one from this chair.”

Eliza took the offer. The best part of Josie Woods's establishment was the library, a whole room of leather-bound books that the staff was free to use; novels, histories, poetry, a complete set of Shakespeare. The other women ignored Eliza as much as they could. With their coldness they
made it clear that if some of the clients had a taste for the dusky, it wasn't shared by the staff. The only one to be friendly was Ellie Van Shaick, a young woman with thick black hair and deep green eyes. She and Eliza sat in the library during afternoons and read aloud to each other. Sometimes they would enact an entire play, each taking several parts, and speak with such verve and enthusiasm that a few of the girls would stop outside the door, where they didn't think they could be seen, and listen.

At night, the girls would receive the customers in the parlor. Certain men maintained their anonymity, entering and leaving by the rear entrance, especially men of political stature or of the cloth. But a significant number of the older men enjoyed sitting and listening to a recital or a dramatic reading. They drank champagne or brandy, and then one by one they slipped away with their escorts for the privacy of the upstairs. Eliza had a roster of six. One a night. They were not inexperienced like those she had encountered in The Arms of Love, and she learned their preferences very quickly and did what was expected of her in an expert way, her mind detached from the mechanics of her work, the poetry she had read that day in the library repeating itself in her head.

Ellie Van Shaick left after two years. She said she was going to California and would write Eliza when she got there. She never did write. Six months after Ellie had left, Mrs. Woods discovered that Ellie had never left the city.

“I can't believe it,” Mrs. Woods said, “but from what I'm told she trusted a man with her money. She always impressed me as smarter than that. It seems he was from a good family, and Ellie fell in love with him, which is understandable, I suppose, but to have let him take charge of her finances, such foolishness on the part of an intelligent girl! The boy did what you might expect him to do. He fled to England with Ellie's money and has married a British woman—titled, of course.”

“Where is she now?” Eliza asked.

“This is the strangest part. She is working in a concert saloon just around the corner. A concert saloon! I sent word that she was welcome back here but never heard anything in response. Ellie has her pride. She comes from one of the city's ancient families, and I respect that. I know that she might feel some embarrassment at the consequences of her naïveté and wish to avoid old acquaintances, but a concert saloon!”

Eliza thought about going to see Ellie, but she knew that Ellie must feel humiliated by her mistake. Eliza remembered the enthusiasm with which Ellie had left Mrs. Woods's, and her high hopes for finding a new life in California. Eliza had felt her own expectation rise with Ellie's. She had seen Ellie as a pioneer who would open paths that even a colored girl might follow. She had no desire to cause any embarrassment to Ellie or to aggravate Ellie's sense of disappointment, so she never approached her.