Chapter 12 Abby

12

ABBY

Agnes Bly was no friend of Abby’s, not even in the way she and Swede Kate maintained their tenuous truce. Agnes’s parlor house lacked the charm of Kate’s, too: the Bly girls occupied a dim brick building on Main Street, in the shadow of Jennie Jones’s three stories of bright awnings. Bly’s had the feel of a spillover house. If Jennie’s was too busy, Agnes could be relied upon to offer second best.

The ride across the river had left Abby feeling shaky-kneed, a little damp. The falls were roiling, fed by the recent snow, and she regretted asking her driver to take them in the open-sided phaeton. A light spray still dusted her face.

At the curb, Miss Rhoades took Abby’s hand and helped her from the buggy. The air smelled of river algae mixed with a doughy whiff of wheat waste. Agnes’s brick fa?ade was filmed in a greenish moss. Church bells, somewhere nearby, chimed eleven.

Miss Rhoades sighed. Abby knew she hated this sort of business, pouncing on the madams unannounced. This wasn’t even their first bordello visit of the day. In the morning, they had ridden to one on First Avenue to fetch a new arrival’s trunk.

Under normal circumstances, Abby herself didn’t mind confrontation. Enjoyed it, even; she’d been known to show up in brothel parlors just to read the Bible aloud. Today, however, her stomach churned like the Mississippi. She watched her driver lead the horse round to the back of the building, where there would be a trough of water.

“Tuva should be awake by now,” Miss Rhoades said, taking a step forward. “Should I knock, or will you?”

“Don’t knock.” Abby caught her sleeve. “I need to say something, Beth.”

The corner of Miss Rhoades’s mouth crimped as she stared up at the house.

“I worry you think I’ve been too hard on Faith, and on May Lombard.” Abby laid a hand on the matron’s shoulder. “Yet I mustn’t show any of them special consideration. There are too many lives dependent on us, and we need to be fair: every girl is allowed one year.”

She’d expected Miss Rhoades to push back, to bring up the lie Abby had told the reporter about May’s being a new arrival. Instead, Miss Rhoades looked at her awhile, face impassive. Her gaze then shifted away, up to the second-floor windows of Agnes Bly’s.

“We all protect our hearts somehow,” Miss Rhoades murmured.

Abby thought about asking what she meant, then decided against it.

They went in the back door, Abby in the lead. She had long since learned she’d be turned away from most of these places if she attempted to knock; she’d also discovered that in the morning hours, especially on Fridays, cooks and maids tended to leave their back entrances unlocked as they took out garbage and brought in supplies.

She and Miss Rhoades surprised a scullery maid, always the last to be fed, leaning against the kitchen wall, eating cold grits with her eyes closed. The maid took one look at them, at Abby’s black frock and white bonnet, and shrieked for the madam.

“You can tell her I’ll see her in the reception room,” said Abby as she made her way there. Miss Rhoades’s mortification wafted, in palpable waves, behind her.

—

“You have quite a nerve, you know, showing up here like this.”

Agnes Bly sat on the divan opposite Abby and Miss Rhoades, a shawl pulled tightly around her, her mouth puckered as if she sucked sour candy. She was known for her high crown of golden hair, her cascade of blond sausage curls, which Abby had always suspected belonged to a wig—something she could now confirm. The hairs clinging to Agnes’s scalp were wispy and gray, no longer than Leigh’s after the chop. She looked like a perturbed fledgling hawk.

Tuva sat beside her, hands between her knees. She wore a modest day dress, dark blue, costlier than what she would have worn in the Bethany Home, with a draped overskirt and full sleeves. She wouldn’t look at either Abby or Miss Rhoades, or at Agnes, but kept her eyes cast toward the metal boot-scraper at the far corner of the reception room, beside the front door.

Abby looked into Agnes’s bloodshot eyes. “We’d like a moment alone with Tuva, please. Just to make sure she’s getting by.”

Agnes scoffed. A speck of spittle landed on her skirt. “She’s getting by. She’s better fed here than she was with you, isn’t she?”

“That could be,” Abby conceded. Her heartbeat had quickened, but she kept her voice even and benign. She knew Agnes would find it maddening. “We have many mouths to feed.” She tried addressing Tuva directly. “My child, we shan’t lecture you or attempt to drag you back with us. We aren’t angry about what you said in the Examiner . May we talk?”

“You won’t believe what Cook’s done now,” Miss Rhoades added, a hint of conspiratorial humor in her voice.

Tuva’s mouth twitched. She looked at Miss Rhoades from the corner of one eye, then at Agnes Bly. With more insolence than Abby would have predicted, Tuva told Agnes, “You can shove off. I don’t mind sitting with them.”

Agnes muttered something about pulling out the girl’s tongue, but her words felt ineffectual, weak. When she had left the room—stiffly, her chin held in an indignant pout—Tuva moved to the center of the love seat and sat back against the bolster, taking up as much room as she could.

“Tell me about Cook,” she said to Miss Rhoades with Agnes gone.

Miss Rhoades filled her in on the “night in Venice” supper gone wrong, Cook’s attempt to substitute catsup for tomato sauce. Abby studied Tuva as she laughed, fingers interlocked around one knee, bouncing her heel. Tuva looked to be doing fine, thriving, even: her cheeks had good color, her arms were plump, the whites of her eyes, unlike Agnes’s, were clear. Youth, Abby worried, could sometimes hide neglect of the body, of the spirit.

When Miss Rhoades handed Tuva the scant belongings she’d left behind—her two dresses, a pair of clean aprons, sturdy work boots—Tuva accepted them with a grim smile.

Something about the clothes seemed to jog a memory in her; she looked up sharply.

“What about Faith?” she said. “How is she getting along?”

“I’m concerned about her, to be frank,” Miss Rhoades said before Abby could answer. “Without you, I’m not sure she has a friend left in the place. With May about to leave…” Miss Rhoades trailed off. She put her hands up and let them fall, limp, to her lap. She looked at Tuva, then, quickly, at Abby, leaving Abby to wonder if she’d intended to guilt them both.

Tuva bit her thumbnail.

“What about you, Constance?” Abby asked, using her Bethany name deliberately. “Are you well? We would gladly have kept you the rest of the—”

But Tuva was still on about Faith. “Is she showing yet?”

Abby and Miss Rhoades glanced at each other. “She will,” replied Abby.

“You won’t make her leave, will you, if she doesn’t show? If it turns out to be a ghost baby?”

Abby felt Miss Rhoades watching her. “No, child, we won’t make her leave. She can stay the one year. As I was saying, so could you—”

“There was a man here asking about her,” Tuva whispered.

Abby started. She looked down at Miss Rhoades’s hand squeezing the couch cushion, bones visible through her thin skin. Somewhere beyond the swinging parlor door, Agnes loudly admonished a servant. They didn’t have long.

“Please, tell us about it,” Abby said quietly.

Tuva told them, excitedly, that she enjoyed some notoriety now as a recent Bethany Home inmate, especially one who’d been featured in the paper. Customers liked the idea that she’d been out of service for a while, that she was “fresh.”

Abby kept a straight face as she took in this information, even as her heart sank.

“I could leave here tomorrow and work in any number of sporting houses,” Tuva explained, but she liked the big room Agnes had given her. “A four-poster bed,” Tuva boasted. “All to myself.”

Not exactly, Abby thought. “And the man who asked after Faith…?”

“He was a young one, baby-faced. Seemed like a goody, to me. Saw me in the paper and had to wait a few days to get on my dance card.” Tuva pursed her lips. “Afterward, he wanted to know if I’d seen a girl in the home with long dark hair and freckles. A mute, he said. He was after a mute.”

“What did you tell him?” asked Miss Rhoades.

“Told him I’d never seen the likes of her, of course. What do you take me for?”

Abby’s shoulders came down, just an inch. “Did he say what he wanted with Faith?”

“I don’t want to make trouble for her, but he said she stole from him.”

“You haven’t gotten her in trouble, child.” They asked Tuva if she’d learned his name, at which she laughed hard, and then they asked if she could describe him: young, in his late twenties or early thirties, light to medium hair, slim build, and, as she’d said, a boyish face.

“Wish I could give you more details than that,” Tuva said, twisting the strand of pink pearls around her neck. “But, as I told you, I’ve seen a lot of gentlemen these last few days.”

A voice came from upstairs, hollering that they’d run out of hot water. A maid’s feet came scurrying.

“Constance, child,” Abby said, launching into her plea even though she knew it would go nowhere, “you can come back with us if you want to. We’ll keep you the rest of your year without question. In fact, we’d love to have you return. Miss Rhoades and I. Faith.”

Tuva winced at Faith’s name, but then she slowly shook her head. “I can’t go back. That place makes me think of him.”

Abby puzzled over this for a moment, wondering who “him” could be at the Bethany Home, but then Miss Rhoades said, softly, “Luke.”

The baby Tuva had given away. “Why, Luke is—” Abby started to say that Luke was doing just fine, he had been adopted by a kind, Christian couple, but Miss Rhoades’s expression stopped her.

Tuva swiped a tear from under her eye with the back of her pinkie. Her voice turned harsher. “What did you expect me to do, anyway? Go work as a seamstress? They’re paid three dollars a week now, Mrs. Mendenhall. A month’s bed and board can be as much as twenty. How’s a girl to live?”

“We’d help you find better work than that. We’d help you find a—”

Tuva’s eyes were red now; her neck was splotched above the collar. “The only good way out is to get married, Mrs. Mendenhall. You don’t teach the good trades, like rolling cigars. Instead, you boast how many of us have been married in the chapel. It’s catch a husband or back to the sporting house. Everyone at the Bethany Home knows it, except for you.”

Abby felt as if she’d been kicked. This wasn’t true—surely, it wasn’t. But Miss Rhoades wouldn’t look at her. “I’m very sorry to hear you feel this way,” she said. Her own voice sounded odd to her, far away, as if she were speaking under a bridge. “But I assure you, you’re mistaken. Countless girls have left to pursue fulfilling work.” There were many of them, but her mind drew a blank at their names.

“The lot of us think this is the better life,” Tuva continued, her voice rising in volume, the words coming one after another as though she’d been waiting to say this for years. “You know what it is, to look after a man, and children. Men who beat you. Children who die. At least here we’ve got someone taking care of us.”

Someone shoved open the parlor door: Agnes. Abby had never been happier to see her. “Time’s up. No more visitors today, Tuva. Not till four.” She jutted her chin at Abby. “You can show yourselves out through the front.” They heard her bang through the kitchen. Something metal clanged to the floor. She hollered at the cook to keep the back door locked.

Tuva had composed herself. She gathered her Bethany Home bundle into her lap. “You’ll have to excuse her,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “She’s on edge, now they’ve found Priscilla Black.”

“Priscilla Black?” Abby’s heart was still racing, her thoughts moving slowly, like honey poured from a jar. Priscilla Black—that was the name of the madam who’d gone missing without her shoes. “Is she alive?”

Tuva laughed, a jaded, incredulous laugh. “I should say not. They found her over at Wessex Mill. One of the water wheels had jammed, and they sent a boy down with a stick to see what had clogged it.”

“Have mercy, Lord,” Miss Rhoades muttered.

“It was her,” said Tuva. “Her body was swollen with river water. They say the black dye had completely bled from her hair. Solid gray, she’d turned, both hair and flesh.”

“How awful.” Abby tried to remember the words to the prayer for the dead, but her head felt stuffy.

“Strangest thing, too,” Tuva whispered just before Agnes burst back in. “One of her eyebrows. I hear it was gone. Completely gone.”

“Priscilla Black’s?” Abby managed to ask.

Tuva nodded. “Yes. Just the one eyebrow. Now, how’s a river supposed to do that?”

—

Abby rode home from Agnes’s in silence, which seemed to satisfy Miss Rhoades as well. She looked out the window at the frothy gray river and considered what Tuva had said, about marriage being the only alternative.

Everyone at the Bethany Home knows it, except for you.

It was true, Abby reflected, that she’d always considered marriage a good option for the girls who entered the home. The Sisterhood didn’t make matches, but it did serve to restore girls’ marriageability. It cleansed them, in a sense, scraped their records clean. Now that Abby considered this, it did make her uncomfortable, as if they were in the business of scouring women.

Marriage had come late for Abby herself, after she’d passed the age of twenty-five and her parents had resigned themselves to the idea that their youngest daughter, the sickly child, would live out her days as a spinster. Her mother hadn’t seemed bothered by it; they’d settled into a comfortable existence in that cottage by the sea, making raspberry vinegar, thinning the irises in spring, and curing bacon in fall. What would have happened if Junius Mendenhall hadn’t come to teach at the Quaker school nearby, if she hadn’t noticed in him a kindred oddness, a bookish nature, a shy charm that other young women had overlooked? She’d have continued like that with her mother, with their jelly jars and their storybooks, and she might have been just fine.

What if women could live that way forever, not married to men or serving their needs in other ways, but with one another, in peace, for all their years? What if she and, say, Euphemia…?

Never mind. Abby bade a distracted farewell to Miss Rhoades and headed for the office.

The hallways inside the Bethany Home were dark, and her thoughts were similarly clouded. Did the women here wish to be married, for reasons beside the security it provided? Why, she herself hadn’t enjoyed marriage at all, at first. Almost immediately, Junius had been drawn west, to chase his fortune in this frontier town. Though she’d kept a brave face for her new husband, she’d initially been horrified by this place: its flatness, the muddy tracks that passed as roads, the white men’s ghastly talk of the violence they’d inflicted upon the native peoples when they staked their claims. Only Junius had been allowed to drive their carriage, which at that time was really a lumber wagon, through the rutted and uneven streets lined with frame houses. She’d been more or less a prisoner in their home, or at least she’d felt that way. She’d undertaken the same chores she did on Cape Cod—she blacked the stove, canned preserves, gutted hogs. She used the ham bones to prepare their mutual favorite dinner, New England pork and beans, a dish that reminded her of home. But here, the air smelled of singed wood, not salt, and she had no sea birds, no thatch of wild irises, no mother to keep her company.

Men who beat you, Tuva had said. Children who die . Junius had never laid a hand on Abby, but she had seen her share of babies and children taken before their time, had heard their mothers’ screams. Not long after she moved to Minnesota, a neighbor’s child nearly succumbed to cholera; she’d brought the family a cauldron of soup and paid the doctor’s bill. The son of a family of freedmen died in a wagon accident not long after that, and she’d again gotten involved. Junius had begun making serious money, running a bank of his own; Abby took some of it to cover the costs of the child’s funeral. She began visiting the workhouse, bringing blankets and tins of biscuits. Two years in a row, she missed her wedding anniversary with Junius: she was out visiting the burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods, tending to the sick. And then a sort of limb dangled above her, which she grasped on to tightly: Charlotte’s invitation to form a branch of the Magdalene Society, which would become the Sisterhood of Bethany.

The first two inmates they helped were a pair of madams, whom the city had been poised to imprison. The Sisterhood argued for their release, paid their fines, and brought them back to Charlotte’s house, unsure what to do with them next, but excited to have acted so boldly. It had felt exhilarating, and oddly good, to be in all those women’s company, even the madams’.

Abby swung open the door to the office to find Euphemia sitting behind the desk. Her hand flew to her cheek, as though her troubled thoughts were written there.

Euphemia cleared her throat. She had something spread on the desk in front of her, fanned out like a deck of cards. Abby took a step closer to see that it was money: the banknotes that had been in Faith’s purse.

“We have a problem,” said Euphemia.