The Virgin Cure (2 page)

After he left us, Mama tried calling me Ada anyway, but it was too late. I only ever answered to Moth.

“Where’s my papa?” I would ask. “Why isn’t he here?”

“Wouldn’t I like to know. Maybe you should go and talk to the tree.”

“What if I get lost?”

“Well, if you do, be sure not to cry about it. There’s wild hogs that run through the city at night, and they’d like nothing better than to eat a scared little girl like you.”

My father had thought to put coal in the stove before he walked out the door. Mama held onto that last bit of his kindness until it drove her mad. “Who does such a thing if they don’t mean to come back?” she’d mutter to herself each time she lifted the grate to clean out the ashes.

She knew exactly what had happened to him, but it was so common and cruel she didn’t want to believe it.

Miss Katie Adams, over on Mott Street, had caught my father’s eye. She was sixteen, childless and mean, with nothing to hold her back. Mrs. Riordan, who lived in the rear tenement, told Mama she’d seen them carrying on together in the alley on more than one occasion.

“You’re a liar!” Mama screamed at her, but Mrs. Riordan just shook her head and said, “I’ve nothing to gain from lies.”

Standing in front of the girl’s house, Mama yelled up at the windows, “Katie Adams, you whore, give me my husband back!”

When Miss Adams’ neighbours complained about all the noise Mama was making, my father came down to quiet her. He kissed her until she cried, but didn’t come home.

“He’s gone for good,” Mrs. Riordan told Mama. “Your man was a first-time man, and that’s just the kind of man who breaks a woman’s heart.”

She meant he was only after the firsts of a girl—the first time she smiles at him, their first kiss, the first time he takes her to bed. There was nothing Mama could have done to keep him around. Her first times with him were gone.

“God damn Katie Adams …” Mama would whisper under her breath whenever something went wrong.

Hearing that girl’s name scared me more than when Mama said
piss
or
shit
or
fuck
right to my face.

The day my father left was the day the newsboys called out in the streets, “Victory at Shiloh!” They shouted it from every corner as I stood on the stoop watching my father walk away. When he got to the curb, he tipped his hat to me and smiled. There was sugar trailing out of a hole in his pocket where he’d hidden Mama’s silver bowl. It was spilling to the ground at his feet.

Some people have grand, important memories of the years when the war was on—like the moment a brother, or lover, or husband returned safe and sound, or the sight of President Lincoln’s funeral hearse being pulled up Broadway by all those beautiful black horses with plumes on their heads.

“Victory at Shiloh!” and my father’s smile is all I’ve got.

The rooms I shared with Mama were in the middle of a row of four-storey tenements called “the slaughter houses.” There were six of them altogether—three sitting side by side on the street with three more close behind on the back lots. If you lived there, there was every chance you’d die there too. People boiled to death in the summer and froze to death in the winter. They were killed by disease or starvation, by a neighbour’s anger, or by their own hand.

Mothers went days without eating so they could afford food for their children. If there was any money left, they put ads in the
Evening Star
hoping to get their lost husbands back.

They stood in the courtyards behind the buildings, pushing stones over the ribs of their washboards and sighing over the men they’d lost. Elbow to elbow they put their wash on the lines that stretched like cat’s cradles over that dark, narrow space.

Our back court was especially unlucky, having only three sides instead of four. The main attractions were one leaky pump and the row of five privies that sat across from it. The walls and roof of the outhouses leaned on each other like drunken whores, all tipsy, weeping and foul. Only one of the stall doors would stay shut, while the other four dangled half off their hinges. The landlord’s man, Mr. Cowan, never bothered to fix them and he never bothered to take the trash away either, so all the things people didn’t have a use for anymore got piled up in the court. Rotten scraps, crippled footstools, broken bits of china, a thin, mewling cat with her hungry litter of kittens.

The women gossiped and groused while waiting for their turn at the pump, hordes of flies and children crawling all around them. The smallest babes begged to get up to their mama’s teats while the older children made a game picking through boards and bricks, building bridges and stepping-stones over the streams of refuse that cut through the dirt. They’d spend all day that way as their mothers clanged doors open and shut on that little prison.

Boys grew into guttersnipes, then pickpockets, then roughs. They roamed the streets living for rare, fist-sized chunks of coal from ash barrels or the sweet hiss of beans running from the burlap bags they wounded with their knives at Tompkins Market. They ran down ladies for handouts and swarmed gentlemen for watches and chains.

Kid Yaller, Pie-Eater, Bag o’ Bones, Slobbery Tom, Four-Fingered Nick. Their names were made from body parts and scars, bragging rights and bad luck. Jack the Rake, Paper-Collar Jack, One-Lung Jack, Jack the Oyster, Crazy Jack. They cut their hair short and pinned the ragged ends of their sleeves to their shirts. They left nothing for the shopkeeper’s angry hand to grab hold of, nothing even a nit would desire.

Girls sold matches and pins, then flowers and hot corn, and then themselves.

By nine, ten, eleven years old, you could feel it coming, the empty-bellied life of your mother—always having to decide what to give up next, which trinket to sell, which dreams to forget.

The most valuable thing a girl possessed was hidden between her legs, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. It was never a question of yes or no. It was simply a matter of which man would have you first.

There was a whole other city of us, on rooftops, beneath stair steps, behind hay bins, between crates of old shoes and apples. Rag pickers, hot-corn girls, thread pullers.

We got by, living on pennies from a lady’s purse or nickels from men who paid us to let them look at our ankles or the backs of our necks for “just a little while longer.” Some of us were orphans, most of us might as well have been. “Dirty rags,” Mr. Alsop the fishmonger called us, as he stood there waiting with a long, thin stick, ready to crack our shins black. His stall was lined with barrels of salt herring—dried, chewy secrets with lonely little eyes.

In summer we slept sideways on fire escapes. In winter we fought rats and beggars for filthy stable corners.

We came from rear tenements and cellar floors, from poverty and pride. All sneak and steal, hush and flight, those of us who lived past thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, those of us who managed to make any luck for ourselves at all—we became New York.

M
ama sold me the summer I turned twelve.

Everything stuck like corn silk that season—my dress to the small of my back, the catcalls of the bootblack boys, the debts Mama owed every man with a “Mister” in front of his name for five blocks around. There were riots just after the strawberries, and people went mad from the heat all June, July and August. Miss Lydia Worth, the seamstress next door, got sliced across the face with a knife by Mr. Striech, the butcher, just because she refused to marry him. The woman who lived above Mama and me, Mrs. Glendenning, hid her baby away in a stovepipe when it died because she didn’t know what else to do with it. I listened at our door when the police came to take her away. She’d only been able to afford swill milk and she was sure it was the milk that had killed her child. She wailed and sobbed, her cries of sadness filling the dark of the stairwell like the howls of a dying dog.

In the evenings, when it was too hot to sit inside, I’d leave Chrystie Street and walk up Second Avenue. Moving between pushcarts and passersby, I’d get as far away from Mama and our rooms as I dared. The journey was safe enough, even for a girl, alone, as long as I paid attention to the alleys and corners. Crossing Houston my heart would twist, not because there was any danger to it or Mama forbid me to go there, but because reaching the other side of the street always made me feel as if I were headed more towards home than away from it.

Peering through windows, I’d gaze into people’s gaslit homes, keeping track of all the things I wanted for myself. Number 110 Second Avenue held a handsome gentleman, resting his arm on a mantel, mouth rounding into a satisfied O each time he puffed on his cigar. In the parlour of number 114, three little boys were sprawled out on their bellies across a flowery rug, rolling marbles in the channels of petals and leaves. At number 116, two lovers were sitting together on a settee, their elbows barely touching. A thin-lipped woman lorded over them, her arms crossed in front of her chest as if to say,
Don’t you dare
. Glowing, moving pictures of ease, they made me want to lick my lips, my longing burning the sides of my tongue like I’d been lucky enough to have too much sugar.

Businessmen paraded by me in fitted, neat suits, their shoes perfectly black. Street vendors pushed and pulled their carts, the wares still looking orderly and fresh, even at the end of the day. The pigeon man came blowing a bosun’s whistle, carrying braces of birds across his back. Shopkeepers cranked up their awnings and swept off their stoops, forcing clouds of dust to fly up around their feet. They scowled as the dirt settled back down into the cracks between the cobblestones, staring after it as if it ought to be ashamed for coming too near their door. If it weren’t for Mrs. Riordan once telling me you had to cross the East River to get there, I would have sworn I’d walked all the way to the beautiful place she called Brooklyn.

At the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue was a grand house on a large plot, rising five storeys above the street. Although the other houses surrounding it had been divvied up into
a
’s and
b
’s to accommodate the growing number of merchants who were setting up shops in the area, this house, with its blood-red brick and white marble trim, belonged to just one person, Miss Alice Keteltas.