Roxy and Delphine are sitting at the dining-room table. Alma stares at Irving. He’s too thin. He’s just a child. “You’re skin and bones.” It makes her stomach lurch. She feels like she might get sick. She despises the gaunt look of his cheeks, the hollowness to his eyes. He’s sunken. There’s a smudge on his cheek, mud or blood. “What happened to Mr. Bucci and the rest?”
“The show closed, and they went on to the next town.” He puts his hands on his hips, puffs his chest, the way his father might upon interrogation. He looks around the room distractedly.
“Have you used up the money?”
“I can take care of myself. I just wanted Delphine’s hand washed out.”
She looks at Delphine. “Sir Lee do that?”
Delphine nods. “He’s some son of a bitch.”
Now Alma looks at Roxy and says, “My mother is dead. You can go if you want to. You don’t have to stay on. You didn’t sign anything.”
Roxy shakes her head. “I’ll stay, thank you. If it’s all right by you. I’m not surprised by death anymore. It doesn’t shock me.”
Alma nods. Roxy’s got nowhere to go, and that’s sad enough. She has been aching for a mother, and Alma for her children. They’ve made a good match. There’s an unspoken tenderness between them, hidden in all of this straight talk.
Lettie says, “Is it true?”
Alma turns to Lettie, who stands there holding her skinny arms, sniffling and wide-eyed. “It’s true that she’s dead. Yes. Don’t cry on it.”
Alma’s flush of anger returns. She looks at Delphine and Roxy. She thinks, This is what I have. These two women and me, my babies to look after—Irving and Lettie are just babies, after all, just babies; my mother’s a dead baby—and we are all lost in the world. Except, perhaps, Willard, who seems now pinned down safely, protected by the convent’s long drive, heavy doors, and stone halls. And she remembers that a woman cast out with her children cannot make it in the world. Her husband has left her. She is of no use. If she had crops, they would surely dry up and die. The children will kill animals they trap in the yard, collect coal toppled from train cars. Her mother’s house and land will sell for enough to cover her debts, if she’s lucky, but even if Alma’s hands were the fastest of all hands, she couldn’t make enough at the hosiery mill to keep the roof over their heads, to keep food on the table. She feels the inching of panic, her childhood a palpable feeling in her stomach. It’s all too familiar, this old house, the wind coming through the windows, the dark collecting in the rooms, the emptiness.
She goes to the sink, fills a bowl with water, rubbing a thin bar of soap into it, a fizzing lather. She puts the bowl in front of Delphine, then reaches up into the dip in the overhead lamp where her mother hid a small bottle of liquor. It swings afterward, setting the shadows to shift against the walls. She puts down three glasses and fills them up. She feels forceful, pumping, her heart a growling apparatus. She says, “We are alone in the world, can you feel it? And we need to get a plan.”
Alma sits at the table. Lettie climbs onto her lap. Irving pulls up a chair, too. Delphine looks around. She edges toward the bowl but doesn’t let her hand dip into the water.
“Where’s that husband of yours?” Delphine asks.
“He isn’t here, is he? Let it soak.”
Delphine raises her eyebrows, shifts in her seat, but stays quiet. She inches her hand into the bowl. The water wobbles, flushes pink. The table is gritty. A stingy breeze pushes through the room. This is what there is left, a boiled essence.
“What have we got?” Alma asks. “We have got to have something, some sort of something to help us make it through. We are in dire straits. Don’t you see it?” She stares at the two other women.
Delphine asks, “You mean some sort of talent? Some sort of ability?”
“I suppose.”
“I know what I do best,” she laughs. “This little trick on my back.” She pulls her shaky hand from the bowl, letting the bloody water drip down her arm a second. She stares at the gash. Two pincurls are now slack at her cheeks. Alma watches her, the idle cock of her head and the tremulous hand. She’s desperate, too. They all are. The room is cloying with desperation, a furtive pungence as common and rich as the smell of dirt. The walls breathe with lichen, the bread with mold. She can smell the respiring breadbox, her mother decaying in the bedroom, turning back into ash. Delphine laughs, a gruff snort. She says, “You should run a whorehouse, Alma. Everybody needs a whore. We never go out of fashion.”
It’s a lark, meant to shock, but Alma is beyond shock. She says, “Well, I suppose it’s a business like anything else. And I’ve got business sense.” She looks at Delphine squarely.
Delphine says, “Sex is a wonderful business.” She leans in. “Why would you do it for free?” She covers her mouth in mock embarrassment and glances at Lettie, who sits there wide-eyed on her mother’s lap. “Little pitchers have big ears.”
Alma shakes her head. “There’s two ways to grow up, knowing and not knowing. It’s better to know.” And that’s the truth. Her children need to grow up knowing about love and loss, sex and betrayal. She doesn’t want them to be caught off guard. What would they learn among whores? Practicality. She thinks of falling in love with Henry, of following him to Florida for a lousy trunk, how ignorant she was. She glances at Irving, silent and stiff, and down at Lettie, who’s taking it all in. It’s better for them, she thinks. The world is sinful. Passions run to ugliness. They should know. Their mother and father have suffered from it—incurables, maybe—and their grandmother is dead in the other room with her lover’s picture in her grip.
Roxy looks up at the lamp. She folds her long fingers together and puts them on the table, head bowed like someone about to start grace. Then she looks at Alma and says, “I have the ability to beat any man down.”
Delphine says, “I bet you do, girlie.”
Alma nods. “It’ll come in handy.”
Delphine talks about the girls around courthouse square, some of them married, fallen on hard times, with children at home. She thinks she can round up four or five nice ones, good girls, who would like a clean place—not to stay, just to do their business, out of the weather, out of dark cars on lonesome shoulders of country roads. “I myself am looking for a room to rent, having worn out a welcome with Sir Lee, but they just need a mattress when it starts to get dark. They’re good workers, never fall asleep on the job.”
Roxy talks about her brothers, her angry father, and how a house of women, of gentleness is where she would most want to be. “I’d be better in a house of women. I’m too tall, too ugly, too much a man to be around men,” she says.
The soapy water deepens to a rusty red. Alma rinses and refills the bowl. They throw back their shots and pass the bottle. It eases Delphine some. Her face loosens. Irving pokes around in the kitchen, opens the ice box, and the room is filled with the sourness of old milk. He finds a few pieces of bread and another bin of fruit, cuts out the bad spots with a knife, and makes a little plate for everyone to pick from. Lettie falls asleep, her moist cheek against Alma’s chest. The evening is like this, the stifled breeze, the lilting curtains, the wizened food and searing liquor. And it starts to come clear to Alma that she doesn’t have to go back to Mrs. Bass, the factory’s thunderous clatter. She is a different kind of woman, not just bare-legged and without a man. She is capable of living outside of things. She will never be a typical woman in a housedress, or even a good factory worker. And she will never be poor. Her children will never know to fear the rise of hunger, the feeling of being dazed like smoke-drunk bees to be taken from a dead tree. Her children will be plump on meat because she’s more like the Mule-Faced Woman, more like the nun, living apart from the world, just enough—not like her stubborn mother. She realizes she may no longer be the nigger-lover’s daughter, now that her mother is dead, but that it was a gift to be that girl, now grown into this ripe body, and her mother did give her that, an angry defiance. She was a strong woman, and
Alma will be even stronger. She hears herself thinking, What would Henry think? And she likes it. A spitefulness. He may think that he’s going to become rich and return in a gold car, but she will not need him. She will raise her children alone, fiercely.
Alma lets Roxy drive Delphine into town. It’s nearly morning, but Delphine is antsy for something to help her sleep. She’s a fiend of some sort, and Alma thinks it’s a shame, her being so young. Alma doesn’t know where you’d get something like opium or heroine or morphine, but she’s sure there are places, and she allows the two of them to go off to find it. Lettie is asleep on the sofa and Irving is stretched out on the rag rug. Alma stands in her mother’s bedroom. When the sun from the window slips in, she watches it light her mother’s dead body, the brass buttons of her wool coat aglow. A whorehouse, is it so different from the hosiery mill? The on and off and on and off of stockings? Is it so different from running a boardinghouse of show people and their old bear? Is it so different from growing a crop? Except that its harvest relies on something more dependable than sun and rain: lust, weakness. The world has a generous, unending supply.
Part Two
1
Lettie still sleeps with her mother, who’s grown bigger but not softer or more rounded. Her hip, in fact, juts up in the bed when she lies on her side, like a giant, squared, fleshy box. This was once the room her parents shared, and she can always feel that past in it even though Lettie can hardly remember her father, just his large swaying presence. She remembers him the same way she remembers Realdo, Mr. Bucci’s bear, this large, furry, giant-toothed creature, something she was equally in love with and afraid of. In fact her father and the bear are more strongly linked in her memory than her father and mother. Most likely because the bear died just before her father left, and so they seemed to share death—in the way that it equals disappearance, at least. Now her mother sits at her small desk, counting money, a solitary figure, always bent like this to her coins and bills, this constant sorting and stacking. But even with her back turned, Lettie feels the heat of her mother’s attention. Cloying, damp, Lettie feels soaked in it.
She is fifteen. She sits up in bed, wanting to tell her mother that she should have her own room. But it’s a tired discussion. She knows full well what the answer will be, a matter of cost. From behind each of the bedroom doors at night, she can hear the ching, ching, ching of bedsprings. Her mother hears money in it, and if it weren’t fat her mother’s body was holding onto, Lettie is sure that she would weigh herself down with coins and bills. Lettie wouldn’t be surprised if her mother kept money strapped to her body in some hidden spot. She knows her mother is afraid without it, that she gets skittish when the rooms are empty because the girls have headed to Sugar Hill in Wheeling at convention time. The Italians who’ve crowded the valley just down the road, and the miners, and a few men from town—a stray banker, an odd widower—she treats them all like old friends when they’re here, when she’s in the mood to go downstairs and shake hands and smile. She needs to make sure they’re all happy. If one of them complains in winter that the house is drafty, she’ll crank open the register with a yank on the pulley to open the damper and flood the house with heat—something she’d never do for Lettie or for any of the girls. Put on a sweater, she’d say. Lettie isn’t allowed to go downstairs once it’s dusk and the men straggle in. She has to stay in her room. But she can hear her mother’s voice, false with camaraderie, ebullient, punctuated by loud ha-ha-ha’s, as if she thought any of it was the least bit funny.
No, Lettie has to stay away, held by the stern eye of her mothers love. It wasn’t always this way. She remembers her mother before her parents left for Florida, her mother’s love hazy, a thinly stretched blanket. But afterward, without their father, her love tightened. It bore down on Lettie and Irving; even Willard, living at the orphanage, was fixed in her intense attention, as if their father had been siphoning off more love than was his share and without him, there was finally enough for her children, or, perhaps, she was making up for the lack of a father. Lettie knew that her mother barely remembered her own father. And yet her love was the kind that a stranger might not recognize right off. There was a curtness to Alma, but the children could feel it, the fixedness underneath, and to anyone who knew them, it was plain, a festering kind of love that ripens sickly from a deep, infuriate sore.
Lettie doesn’t despise the men who come to her mother’s house. In fact, sometimes she pretends her father is among them. She listens to the hoot and clomp, the deep bass voices, and chooses one to latch on to and follow. Fathers have become strange to her. She’s seen them in town, Sunday-dressed, leading stiff processions into churchyards, their furred necks shaven to a bright pink. But she sees them here, too, where they come to crow and fuck. They’re big, loud. They wipe their wet hands on their backsides and rattle up spit from deep in their chests, bearlike; they moan sometimes in such a way from the bedrooms that she thinks it is Mr. Bucci’s bear, revived. Sometimes she pretends that the men downstairs are a houseful of fathers just for her, joyful, rowdy, all clamoring to see their little girl—how could they have strayed and stayed away so long? She turns their desire, the real palpable lust that rises darkly in the house, a lusty ulcer, feverish and inflamed, into some kind of paternal love. She has created the notion that her mother doesn’t run a whorehouse but an orphanage for wayward fathers. This is when she hates her mother for not letting her downstairs to claim her father from the abundant choices.
It isn’t as if she doesn’t know the workings of the house—two dollars for straight sex, five dollars for oral sex, and for the Mr. Pansies, the old men who want to French-kiss and sample the girls by taste, it’s six dollars, because the girls hate it. They say it ruins them for their dates with their boyfriends later on. She’s heard of the man who paid extra to have tomatoes thrown at his bare rump. Her mother takes half of all of it, but the girls make double here what they do on the streets, so it isn’t terribly unfair. Delphine costs more—she knows that, too—because she’s the queen. She doesn’t go downstairs to circulate among the men, looking for a date. They come to her. Lettie knows by now the workings of the girls’ vinegar-and-water douches, tinged red from droplets of iodine, that Dr. Sevras says will ward off the cancers. She knows when a girl drinks water clouded with baking soda that she’s got a problem with having to pee all the time, and that a thin cloth doused with witch hazel can take the sting out if a girl is raw from sex. Once one of the men had a boil in a sensitive spot, and a girl told Lettie how she fixed it up with a rubbing of Snake Oil and pressing of a salt meat square.
Lettie knows about the liquor, too. She goes to the drugstore and buys fifteen cents’ worth of Dr Pepper syrup in a cup, so that her mother can taint the cheap white whiskey to make it look charred, charging twenty-five cents instead of fifteen. Lettie knows how to shake a jar of moonshine and count how long the beads float to test its quality. There’s no way to keep it all from her.
Just earlier today, for example, two of the younger girls peeked in on her. They’d just gotten in from a trip to the pictures with a man named Kirby Dent, whom they both are crazy for. “Which one does he like best?” Lettie asked them. And one of the girls piped up quick, “This one,” she said, cupping her left titty, and they all laughed, Lettie, too. It made her feel a part of things. Her mother would have shushed and shooed them if she’d been nearby.
Sometimes Lettie thinks her mother would prefer her to live forever in this room, to turn into a woman like Roxy and Delphine who love other women and never have a normal life. But Lettie is aware of that other normal world. On her way to the drugstore for syrup, for example, she passes the Kit Cat Hat Shop on High Street, and she pauses at the glass front to watch the women bustle. She’s aware of the door you can push open that jangles a little bell, and when you leave, you’re swinging a hatbox on your arm. It is a world that goes on right alongside this one without ever touching it. She would like that, a hatbox swinging on her arm. She would like to meet a
man who’s never heard of whores and thinks of love as starched linens and clockwork, pure and clean, that love is a wedding day and a house to move into. But she doesn’t live in that world. She doesn’t even know people who do. When everyone finally goes home at night—the drunken men and her mother’s girls toting their satchels, the house is quiet, just the four of them—Roxy, Delphine, Lettie, and her mother. Lettie pretends that it’s a normal house, quiet by the side of the road. Who would look twice at it? She finds herself wishing for a simple mother, detached and happy. One who takes her to town to buy hats, for example, who would gasp at the mention of prostitution, the kind who wears tight fixed buns and belongs to some sort of gardening club.