Page 22 of If Looks Could Kill
“When she arrived, she seemed so innocent… and hopeful,” I floundered. “We feel we missed an opportunity to… recognize what was going on and warn her.”
The Girl Reporter frowned. “You’re not God. What were you supposed to do?”
“We’re not saying it makes sense,” I said. “And we know she’s just one girl.” I swallowed. “But so is Pearl. And so am I. And that’s enough.”
Freyda studied our faces. I met her gaze, but Pearl’s emotion, I think, held more weight.
“So will you help us?” I asked Freyda. “We’ll let you write your article.”
She pursed her lips and thought a moment, then thrust out her hand. “All right, Miss Tabitha, you drive a hard bargain. I’m in. When do we start?”
“Not right now,” Pearl said. “We’ve got to get back and change for evening knee drill.”
Freyda turned to me. “Translation?”
“Prayer meeting.”
She nodded. “I figured. When can you come prowling around with me?”
I sighed. “Almost never,” I told her. “We work all day, and most evenings. This little pocket of time, on Sunday afternoon before prayer meeting, is just about the only time we get to do whatever we choose.”
Freyda nodded, then handed me her notebook and pencil. “Tell you what,” she said, “write down the address where I can find you, all right?” She grinned. “Some other day, when it’s not prayer meeting time.”
“I should warn you,” I told her, “we hold prayer meetings about every half hour.”
“Hoo-ey,” Freyda said, “you sure know how to make hunting a prostitute in a brothel sound like the more enjoyable option.” She paused, as if struck with creative inspiration. “We should give ourselves a name.” She stretched her hand across her vision as if reading a gigantic newspaper headline. “The Sunday Salvation Squad.” She winked. “Only I’m not in it for the type of salvation you girls peddle, see? I’m using it as a double intendry.”
Pearl looked perplexed. “A double what?”
“A doubleentendre,” I explained, courtesy of high school French. “A double meaning.”
“Right, one of them,” said Freyda. “How d’you like the nickname?”
“It’s a pip.” I tried to keep a straight face.
Freyda seemed pleased. “Say, where do you work?”
“Steve Brodie’s saloon,” I told her. “When you get there, just look down.”
“Steve Brodie’s saloon?” she repeated. “That don’t make sense.”
“Very little of what we do does,” I said.
Tabitha—Reassignment(Wednesday, September 19, 1888)
On Wednesday of that week, Commander Maud Ballington Booth visited our Bowery base camp with a new vision for us.
“How can the good word of the gospel save people’s souls,” the young Mrs. Booth asked, in her cultured British accent, bouncing her bonny baby boy on her hip, “if they can’t hear the Spirit over their growling bellies? How shall they pray while their skin crawls with filth?”
We sat on unsteady chairs in Steve Brodie’s saloon basement while Commander Booth stood to address us. In number, we were a dozen women, more or less, ranging from eighteen (Pearl and me) to nearly sixty years of age. In Mrs. Booth’s honor, we’d served up what we hoped was a proper English tea, complete with little sandwiches and a poppyseed cake.
“In the work of salvation,” Mrs. Booth said earnestly, “we race not only against the devil, but against Father Time. These precious souls—their lives are dangerous; their sins, unhealthy. Once they die, their season of repentance has ended. If we hold body and soul together longer, we buy them time to find the Lord. We must tend to them all—the young, the old, the sick.”
“But how?” I asked.
Mrs. Booth handed me her baby, Charlie, who had been chewing upon the insignias of rank on her uniform. Charlie was a stout little fellow of about nine months. He got to work ingesting my hat ribbon until I twitched it out of his sticky fingers.
“I have a new motto for our work, sisters,” Mrs. Booth said, reddening with a shy smile. “I think we might call our initiative ‘Soup, Soap, and Salvation.’?”
