Page 28 of If Looks Could Kill
Freyda watched us like a spectator at a lawn tennis match. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve just described almost every single girl our age on the Lower East Side.”
I spotted Purse Laurier weaving his way through street traffic toward us.
“You’ll see me soon.” Freyda trotted down the stone steps. “Don’t forget, you owe me an interview. A big piece. Human angle. Photographs of your rosy cheeks and pure souls. A day in the life. I’ve got a better name for it now: ‘Salvation on the Bowery: ToHellelujah and Back.’ Editors love a little wordplay in the headline. Though they might balk at the cussing.” And she was gone.
“That headline could use some work,” Pearl called after her, a good deal louder than she would’ve done if she’d known her Lancelot was within earshot.
“Miss Davenport,” he said, doffing his officer’s cap and flashing her a toothy gleam.
She turned scarlet. “Mr. Laurier. How pleasant to see you.”
Which just goes to show you, there’s no accounting for taste.
East LondonJack’s First Arrest(Monday, October 1, 1888)
They arrest him the next day, on suspicion of being himself. The secret killer. They’re rounding up all sorts.
They let him go for lack of evidence. He laughs all the way home. Except… why?
The source of their suspicion, they never explicitly say.
Something about him being an American doctor.
He’s no doctor, but that’s no help. He’s done so well at marketing himself as a physician that all of London, Manchester, and Birmingham, not to mention the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and a growing swath of its interior, believe him to be one.
Still, his arrest is an accident of circumstance. A coincidence, if an uncomfortable one.
Had he been unwise, leaving his laundry with his laundress landlady this morning? There was some blood. But that’s an unrelated matter. In so wide a dragnet as the police are drawing, anyone might be caught. In the absence of evidence, he will always wriggle free.
But that shirt…
Best to lie low for a time. Take a trip out into the country for a spell. Let the city cool off after the furor over two killings in one night. Best not to return to that flat.
Soon he’ll be back and can resume the hunt once more.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, ManhattanTabitha—Soup, Soap, and Salvation(October 1888)
October dawned with golden days and bright blue skies, but we female Salvation Army soldiers were too busy to notice. That was fine with me. I’d rather be busy than follow Pearl around from saloon to saloon.
Whatever their philosophical arguments against it, the women of the Bowery Army corps attacked the new initiative like it was the devil himself. And, give her credit, no one attacked it with more zeal than Captain Jessop. While the wider city around us clamored with the strife and tumult of a presidential election, and while the Bowery frothed with its usual influx of seekers of recreational vice, we did our best to assist its poorest citizens by soaping and souping them.
To clarify: not hands-on soaping. Here is what Soup, Soap, and Salvation looked like.
Each morning, we joined the other female soldiers in the corps kitchen, donned aprons, and prepared soup. We peeled and chopped bushels of carrots, potatoes, and onions while on the stoves, in six great fifty-gallon vats like witches’ cauldrons, we boiled scores of plucked chickens. We shredded the meat and returned it to the pots of broth, to which we added sacks ofdried beans. The carrots and potatoes. The eye-burning onions. The controversial barley. A generous scoop each of salt and pepper. Then we let it simmer for hours. It looked too thin and heartless to ever become soup until, magically, it did.
There’s so little you can do to actually rescue anybody, I find. I felt so impotent most of the time. So unsure of how to do any good in a city full of need. But this hearty soup, I knew, would feed hungry bodies. A good, homely meal, the only one they’d have all day, possibly all week, would bring some comfort. Help them sleep. Give them hope for tomorrow.
Next, the soap.
Soap, like soup, is practical. Pearl and I assisted with the bathing stations for women and girls. We filled up the heating stove with coal so the bathers wouldn’t freeze while they washed. We didn’t wash actual bodies, thank goodness, nor even see them indisposed, as they were behind curtains, but we filled the tubs with warm water, helping out a bit with a hot teakettle when needed. We laid out scratchy towels and scrubbing cloths and little curls of brown soap we’d sliced off large bricks of it.
Lieutenant Amanda Dillinger collected the bathers’ dirty clothes and brought them to us. We soaked and sudsed and scrubbed the clothes, then draped them over clotheslines. We gave them clothes to wear while they waited for theirs to dry. These were donated used clothes, washed and mended by women in our recovery program. Lieutenant Dillinger let them keep their new outfit along with their original. They came with one dirty outfit and left with two clean ones, one still damp.
So that’s the soap. Soap and soup. Some days, instead of the bathing stations, we went to the Foundling Asylum and helped rock and feed the babies, which I enjoyed, except when the funk of diaper odor wafted off them. There the need for soap was even more urgent.
By this point each day, it was time to hit the streets, canvassing saloons, singing songs, sellingWar Crys, and begging people to come to ourmeetings and be saved. Then, thoroughly downtrodden by defeat, we’d head over to the Five Points Mission School, where we taught night classes in spelling and reading for children who had spent the day selling newspapers on the streets or hunched over needle and thread or cigar-rolling racks in sweatshops inside their tenement homes. The poor little urchins fell asleep slumped over their desks. They couldn’t help it. They were plumb exhausted from a sixteen-hour day of work.
Last came the part of the day I liked least, the part that lit up Pearl like a Christmas tree.
