9
“HELLO,” DESSA SAID, half to cover her surprise and half because she had no idea what else to say. At the kitchen table, eating the very sandwich Dessa had planned to assemble for herself, was a woman still garbed in jacket and hat. A hat without a red flower. Cheese and a slice of tomato peeked out between two slices of bread left over from yesterday’s baking.
“You the gal who runs this place?” The woman spoke with her mouth half-full, swiping her chin before taking a drink from the cup in front of her.
Dessa approached the table, seeing upon a closer look that the woman was perhaps twice her age. Although her hair was unkempt and the tight-fitting, low-cut jacket over her equally low-cut dress was somewhat rumpled, her fingernails were clean and her skin marred only by the fine lines of age.
“Yes, I’m Dessa Caldwell.” She smiled. All she’d needed to do was leave the house and someone was finally seeking her! “Welcome to Pierson House.”
The woman smiled, but it was crooked in a way that might have had something to do with the food still in her mouth. “I heard you’re willing to take in women in trouble.”
Dessa felt her eyes widen. “Are you . . . in trouble?”
The other woman laughed so loudly Dessa winced. The laugh went on, long and hearty, so that the woman had to set her sandwich on the napkin in front of her and hold her side as if it would burst if she didn’t.
At last she drew in a long breath, exhausted by mirth. “Any monthly irregularities in me is due to age, girlie, and not any contribution from the male persuasion.” Then she frowned as quickly as the laughter had erupted a moment ago. “Though I did have a baby once. A long time ago.” She studied Dessa with a tilt of her head, eyes narrowing to reveal new wrinkles. “Would’ve been about your age by now, I guess. Twenty years?”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“Hmm. That old and no husband? You the sportin’ kind yourself, girlie?”
Dessa shook her head, approaching the bread and other items the woman had left out on the end of the table. She’d just as soon join her as have the woman eating in front of her. Taking a plate from the nearby cabinet, she returned to the table to assemble her own sandwich.
There was a single slice of tomato left, but before Dessa could add it to her cheese and bread, the woman grabbed it. She ate it in one quick bite, smiling afterward without a trace of compunction.
Dessa lifted a brow but said nothing, settling for the cheese and bread alone. “How did you hear about Pierson House, Miss . . . ?”
“You can call me Belva. It’s what everybody calls me here in the city.”
Dessa wondered if Belva kept her identity a secret to protect a family somewhere, or to keep anyone she once knew from finding out how she earned money. Or was it more personal than that? Sophie had once mused to Dessa that some women might hide their names to protect that secret part of themselves they never wished to sell.
“Did you find one of my applications?” Dessa poured herself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher Belva had taken from the icebox. “I’ve left them in the kitchens of every house that would let me, but I’m afraid they weren’t very well circulated or I’d have had more response by now.”
Belva laughed again, though this time it seemed more with derision than amusement. “I heard about them applications. You think any of them you sprinkled here and there actually got passed to the people you want? You know what would happen to a girl who tried to get away from one of them houses, let alone take someone else with her?”
“I see the girls on the street all the time. They seem free to do as they please.” Sophie had once told her about some foreign women, mainly Chinese, who had been brought in for the Chinese men working on the railroad. Slaves, so it was rumored. But that didn’t happen in other areas as far as Dessa knew. “Aren’t they free?”
Belva pushed away her napkin, now empty of her own sandwich, then leaned back in her chair as if to find a fuller picture of Dessa. “Is anyone? Free, I mean?”
Dessa offered a quick, silent, barely noticeable prayer of thanksgiving for the food before biting into her sandwich. Then she allowed another moment of silence rather than acknowledging the question she doubted Belva thought answerable anyway.
The journal Sophie had left behind, one chronicling information she’d gathered from other institutions that helped fallen women, said that the older the woman, the less likely she was to reform. Dessa didn’t know if that was true, or true in every case, but somehow because of that, she’d never expected someone older than herself to seek her help. Was this a person Dessa could help?
She pushed away her doubt. Belva was here, wasn’t she? That meant she must want to try what Pierson House had to offer, and Dessa wasn’t about to refuse anyone.
Besides, it might be that Belva could help Dessa as much as the other way around.
“How do I reach more women, then?”
Belva looked surprised by the question. “You want my help? Ha.” But even as she revealed her surprise, she hung one arm on the back of her chair and folded her hands like a swing. She leaned closer, and the ruffle of her bodice fell onto the soiled napkin on the table. “This is what you do, girlie. You pack up and leave. Ain’t nobody gonna come here; you may as well know it right now.”
“You came. Aren’t you here to stay?”
Belva laughed again.
Dessa placed her sandwich on her plate. “But why not? Why would women rather end their sporting career by poisoning themselves with a dime of morphine or throwing themselves from the fifth-floor staircase at the Windsor than come here?”
“At least either one of those is permanent.” Her words, harshly spoken, were followed by a lift of her brows and a look around the kitchen. “Say, you got anything to drink? Other than that horrid lemony stuff? Like wine? Or better yet, whiskey?”
Dessa shook her head.
Belva huffed. “That’s the first thing you ought to do, then. Get something here they want. Strong drink, for one.”
“I have good food,” Dessa said. “Did you like the bread?”
Belva dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “Look, I like you, kid. You remind me of what my own daughter might have looked like, if she’d lived a minute past birth.” Her brows drew together so quickly that the expression of sadness seemed almost unexpected to Belva herself. “It was just as well, I guess. I couldn’ta given her anything but heartache and shame.”
“But that’s just it, Belva,” Dessa said. “Wouldn’t it be better to get away from a lifestyle that makes you feel that way?”
Another disgusted pfff came from her lips. “Listen, them girls don’t want to come to a place that’ll only remind them of the shame. ’Specially the ones who are settled into the choices they made. I know what you do-gooders do best, and that’s dole out the judgment. We ain’t no frail sisters nor fallen angels, because we ain’t frail and we certainly weren’t never any angels.”
“But I don’t want to ‘dole out the judgment,’ as you say. Who am I to do that? My father died in the war without knowing I was on the way. My mother died the day I was born. My brother was three and we were sent to an asylum. Do you know who gave us the only love we ever knew in that place? Women just like you, Belva. Until the officials sent us away to work. I haven’t any judgment against you, because I might just as well have had to earn my living the same way.”
Dessa stopped her story far before it was finished, but even that much was more than she’d told anyone since coming to Denver, even Mariadela. Somehow thinking of it reminded her of a lingering cloud she found easy to ignore only when working her hardest. Memories of the day she’d turned twelve and learned her brother had been killed in an accident were darkest of all. Fallen from a hayloft, which shouldn’t have killed anyone, except somehow he’d landed so that his neck had been broken. That was the last day she’d ever dreamed of reuniting with him when they were grown, to live like a real family did.
Maybe Dessa ought to have known from that day on that she hadn’t been destined for family life. Her own mistake, not many years later, had closed that option for her.
Belva stood. “I gotta go.” She looked away, perhaps unwilling to see the tears stinging Dessa’s eyes. “Thanks for the vittles.”
Then she left the kitchen and walked to the door in the parlor.
Dessa ran as far as the dining room. “But . . . are you sure you don’t want to stay?” she called after Belva. “You’re more than welcome! Always!”
Belva didn’t even turn back as she walked out the door, leaving Dessa alone with only an urge to cry.