Pete Hamill - Forever

He heard a window breaking somewhere in the night and the barking of dogs and a woman wailing. Tomorrow’s murder. Dubious Jones had named herself, said Inspector Ford in time for the morning edition. Her true name was Mildred Vandeventer, and she was from Rochester. She was nineteen and had been a whore for four years. She was killed by a man named Collins, from Philadelphia, who went back to his boardinghouse on Pearl Street, wrote a note saying how much he loved her, and then hanged himself. Case closed.

But Cormac told himself, There’s no such thing as a closed case. Who will bury Dubious Jones? Why did she choose the name? And when they bury her as Mildred Vandeventer, who will tell her family how she died, and how she lived? She and Collins will be together forever now in the democracy of Potter’s Field. And at least they’re free of the miasma.

He was not.

He scratched and shook and rubbed his back against the wall. His body hair felt as if it were growing inward, follicles fed by the fertilizer of the shit-stained air. He pulled at the curtains. He yanked his hair. Then he dressed again and went into the night. Near Broadway he saw a woman come out of tavern with a basket of wilting geraniums. He bought four of them and a length of string and tied them to his face, the petals tight against his nose.

He walked toward the water, hoping for a breeze, one fresh zephyr of air. But then the smell of shit overwhelmed the flowers. He began to weep. He imagined leaping into the river and swimming away. An act of suicide. Motive: shit.

And instead turned right into Duane Street. His eyes searched the rooftops, looking for a water tower. There, he said. There. Up there. On the roof of the bordello near Chapel Street. There.

She greeted him at the front door.

“Do come in,” she said. “I’m the Countess de Chardon.”

“Cormac O’Connor,” he said.

“I’ve seen you in town,” she said, “but never, alas, in this place.”

She was dressed as if married to one of the richest merchants in the city, with a swelling high-necked bodice that suggested (but did not display) full breasts, her waist impossibly tightened, and a dark maroon crescent-shaped bustle that rose airily behind her when she moved, hinting at layered crinolines and plump hidden cheeks and thighs. Her lustrous brown hair was piled in plaited coils held tight with a bone tiara. Diamond earrings glittered in her ears, matched by a diamond ring on each finger. Her skin was tawny in the shifting light of oil lamps, her cheeks lightly rouged, her full lips painted a muted crimson. They exchanged platitudes in French, hers polished, his as crude as any self-taught language. She closed the door behind him. She was certainly no ordinary madam of a bawdy house.

“Do have a drink, monsieur,” she said, reverting to English to help Cormac out of his clumsy French. As he passed, she gave off a scent of lavender. He told her he didn’t drink. She smiled in relief. She said she had a perfect young woman for him, just recently arrived only months before from the upstate town of Waterloo, and she made a small joke about the fate of Napoleon. “Do not,” she said, “be too daring.”

Cormac paused, and then said he’d much prefer a bath to anything else.

“Yes, it’s been a smothering day,” she said. “I’ll arrange a bath. Can you wait for…”

“I’ve learned to wait for everything,” he said.

She led him to a sitting room where mustached businessmen sat with some of the nine women who worked in the nine upstairs rooms. One young woman played Mozart badly on a stand-up piano. Gilt-framed paintings of ruined castles and the Roman Colosseum adorned the pale papered walls. The lights were muted here too. The men made bad jokes. The women giggled. Cormac sipped water. The countess returned and motioned with her head for him to follow her.

She led him up a back stairway to her suite on the top floor. The music ended when she closed the perfectly carpentered door, and Cormac relaxed. Thick drapes warded off the city, and the smell of shit was replaced by the scent of lavender. The main room of the suite was dominated by a four-poster bed, high off the floor, covered in bridal white, trimmed with purple, and plump with silken cushions. The walls were covered with patterned red plush. The countess pointed out three small landscapes by Asher B. Durand, who was the best American painter so far, she said, and would surely produce even more impressive work. “He needs to paint some human beings,” she said. “If he can.” A tall glass-fronted bookcase was crammed with books in democratic disarray, the sign of a true reader. She was enthusiastic about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (“Only a woman could have written such a book”) and was reading George Sand’s Indiana, which had arrived from France just before the epidemic struck. She loved Boccaccio too, she said, opening the case to bring out a worn volume in French, delighted that Cormac could name four of the seven traveling women: Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, and Emilia.

“They all work here,” she said in an excited voice, “or at least that is what I’ve named them. For everybody in New York must have a public name that is not their own. I’m waiting for the remaining three to arrive on my doorstep, women of the life who can also tell tales: Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa.”

As she riffled the pages of the book, Cormac noticed that the nails on her slim fingers were long and painted white. Except for the nail on her right forefinger. That nail was severely trimmed.

She casually opened a side door, and in the light of a candle he saw the bathtub. Seven feet long, up on golden lion’s feet, with a drain leading somewhere, and a tap that she explained was attached to an immense tank on the roof. The tub was porcelain, the taps and soap dish gold.

“Would you like your bath now?” she said.

“Yes. I’d like that very much.”

She smiled in an enigmatic way and then pulled a cord. A tall white-haired African man came in and she told him to prepare coffee and the bath. He nodded and slipped away. The countess and Cormac sat near a bay window in facing chairs, and when she heard that he was a newspaperman, a journalist, she asked what he thought about Lord Byron and Coleridge and her own favorite, Shelley, whose death was such an abomination. He gave glib answers. The African came in with coffee on a silver plate and then retreated to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. She asked Cormac about William Cullen Bryant.

“His poetry is dreadful, no?”

“Yes.”

“I have one of his books here,” she said, shaking her head slowly. And then laughed out loud and squeezed his hand.

“Let’s wash him out of our hair,” she murmured.

And led him to the bath. The clear, scented water was heated elsewhere and kept hot by a tray of coals beneath the steel-bottomed porcelain tub. The countess opened his shirt. He opened her bodice, with its eyelets and hooks. She then backed away while he completed his undressing. He hung his trousers on a peg. Then she was back, wearing a thin white gown.

“Get in,” she said.

He slipped into the healing water. The gown fell. She stepped in behind him, uttering a small squeal at the hot water, then squatted and wrapped her hands around his chest. Fingers caressed the ridge of dead flesh on his shoulder.

“I love a man with a scar,” she said. “He’s lived at least some small life.”

In the months that followed, the bath was always the prelude. By day, he worked at the Evening Post . He went home now to the Countess de Chardon, where he lived in a small room down the hall from her suite. She had insisted that he give up his flat, and the promise of water and the scent of lavender convinced him she was right. He paid off his rent and arrived back on Duane Street with his books and clothes and the traveling bag filled with his father’s letter, his mother’s earrings, and the sword.