Thirteen

MRS. DIGGES INSTRUCTED Frieda not to "void" herself, since doing so might thwart the doctor's findings. The holding of her water all these hours since waking up, joined with fear, has turned her bladder into a bomb.

She sits in a chair outside the treatment room door, waiting for Flossie to come out. A shelf holds teetering stacks of leaflets: "The Soldier, Uncle Sam, and You"; "The Nation's Call to Young Girls." Queasy, she picks up a leaflet and reads. The need to pee goads her thumping heart.

DO YOUR BIT TO KEEP HIM FIT

Women have believed that:

• They should know little of sex matters—and never discuss them.

• A young man's "wild oats" should be forgiven; a woman's, never.

Women know today that:

• There is danger to themselves and to their children in irregular sexual relations because of the probability of venereal infection.

• They are responsible for their acts not only to themselves, but to their community, their country, and their future; and that "desire" is a fatal excuse.

• Social and industrial inefficiency result from the selfish indulgence of an appetite. We scorn the glutton; we are beginning to exercise social control over the alcoholic; we must now control venereal diseases.

Women's duty is to:

• Refuse to be ignorant and to raise their moral standards.

• Believe that men and boys with whom they associate can and will lead clean lives.

• Help their communities to close evil resorts and to organize in stamping out disease and delinquency, thereby aiding the government in saving our country from the gravest menace.

Scanning through the words leaves Frieda feeling scummy. The leaflet sounds like Mama (if Mama could speak good English): desire kills, appetite is evil. Mrs. Sprague, too, thinks Frieda, and now Mrs. Digges ... all these people, cinched up tight, terrified of wanting. Were they born that way, or have all of them sustained some awful blow that changed them into quavering prigs? (Waiting for you, Shaynah, if you ever change your mind. Waiting with all my love—Leo.) What if the Home—being here—is the blow that will change Frieda? Get me out, oh get me out, she prays.

Flossie scuffs from the treatment room: pale, her sass drained.

"Next," comes a voice from inside.

"How...?" Frieda starts to ask, but Flossie bows her head.

Frieda weakly rises, feels faint, sits back down. Her throat balks at a rising up of acid.

"Next!"

She tries again and this time stands.

"Come in," says a man in a shabby white smock, the cuffs of which appear freshly spattered. Greeting her, he doesn't bother looking at her face—just her trunk, as if assessing livestock. "This shouldn't take long. I'm Dr. Slocum."

The bags beneath his eyes are the color of liverwurst. Big ears, a bald pate that scatters light. Frieda suffers another surge of acid.

"Boldt's table, as usual. Dorsal position."

He addresses a man Frieda didn't note until now, standing, like a butler, to the side.

"Stirrups?"

The doctor nods. "Yes, of course. I'll be right back." At the door he adds, "Oh—and this is Miller. Medical student from the Boston University. His practicum."

Frieda and the student are left alone.

The room is too cold. Her fingers shake.

Backed against the wall, as if facing a firing squad, Miller says, "Could you please loosen your clothing? Corset, waistband—anything constrictive."

It sounds as if he's reading from a textbook. Can't he see she wears nothing but her denim frock? She stands there. She can't calm her fingers.

"On the table, then?" He points to a white contraption with metal bracing and a smudgy glass top. "You ... you don't have to remove ... we'll make arrangements."

The suggestion of apology allows her to obey. Tremulous, she scoots onto the table.

Miller's left eye wavers on the verge of being crossed, which gives him an air of inquisitive concentration. He reminds her of someone—his strickenness, his absorption—but she can't put her thumb on just whom.

"Lie back, that's right. Knees up high." He covers her with a flimsy cotton sheet. "And the frock." He pushes the fabric above her waist.

Glass against bare skin, shocking chill. She fears she'll stick to the sting of it, as to ice.

Miller guides her left heel, then her right, into the stirrups, and turns a crank to force her feet apart. She's open. She's a hole. A running sore.

With a squeaky snap of rubber, Dr. Slocum walks back in, pulling two gray gloves onto his hands. (The rubber's smell: powdery, neutered.) He peers between her legs, and says, "Wider."

Fumbling, the medical student readjusts the stirrups. He, too, snaps on a pair of gloves.

"Typically," says the doctor, looking absently at Miller, "you'd obtain a patient history before beginning. But the girls here tend to be unforthcoming."

Above her knees, Frieda catches a glimpse of the doctor's nose: bulbous, riddled with burst vessels.

"And," he adds, "we can fairly well surmise the story, can't we? Especially with a girl of this one's race."

Miller's left eye quivers. He says, "Sir?"

"She's a Jewess, if I'm not mistaken, no?"

"Yes, sir. I believe so, sir. She is."

"Well, it's the Jew traders—the Jews and Italians—who run the rings. And the girls they traffic are most often their own."

Miller mumbles, "I ... Do you know I'm Jewish, too?"

"That so? Name like Miller? Wouldn't have thought." In his voice, not a note of discomposure. "Didn't you tell me you were from the Middle West?"

"Yes, sir. Not far from Kansas City."

"Kansas? Didn't know they had Jews there. Well, be that as it may, let's get to business. Visual exam, smears, draw blood for the Wassermann. If you will now, Miller, aim that light."

Frieda flinches, tries to shut her legs; the cold stirrups clamp her heels in place. What will the doctor see? What will Miller? ("Guts, that's what. The parts you throw away.") She stares up at the ceiling, its pattern of pressed tin: a jumble of infinitely joined vines.

"Note all this clitoral irritation," says the doctor. "Habitual self-abuse, it seems clear. We see evidence of delinquency here ... and also here. The hymen is predictably destroyed. By this trauma—see it?—we can estimate the latest indiscretion. Less than forty-eight hours ago, I'd venture."

The vines could be ivy, maybe grape. Each curling stem joins with another, with another ... impossibly, as plants might grow in heaven. She smells the lush green blast of such a place.

"...the difference from a common leukorrhea?"

"Difficult, yes, admittedly," says the doctor. "The inflammation is strong presumptive evidence. More so if the canal is patulous."

"And could this chancre here have been syphilitic?"

"We'll see when the Wassermann is done. Feel the glands here at the groin—see how hard? I'm guessing yes."

Glove against her ankle. Whisk of skin.

Clamminess: Did they wet her? Did she leak?

"...and swab up some of this gleety discharge," Dr. Slocum is saying. "So if you'll label those glass slides. Numbers one and two, 'vulva'; three and four, 'urethra'; five and six, 'glands of Skene'—"

A telephone bell overpowers his voice.

"Oh, of all times! Could you answer that, Miller? I'll get the alcohol flame lit."

Frieda's muscles clench. She shuts her eyes.

She listens to the hurry of Miller's footsteps in the hall, an overeager greeting, a brief pause. "I'm sorry, no, he's with a patient now.... Oh, yes, ma'am. Right away, Mrs. Slocum."

Then it's the doctor's departing footsteps, and his voice, airy and stiff, like beaten egg whites: "It's wartime, darling. These things are hard to come by.... You really can't make do with molasses?...Oh, don't fret me to death! I'll try my best to find some."

Frieda opens her eyes to see Miller, standing tall, but peeking down between her knees with a look of squeamish thrill. She remembers now the boy he makes her think of—in shul, when she was twelve, Morris Berman. The morning of Morris's bar mitzvah. A wispy kid, not more than four feet ten and ninety pounds, his arms shook when he went to lift the Torah. Raising it, he saw her, and she held his gaze and smiled, and suddenly his forearms turned to steel. As I hold this, now, he seemed to say, I could hold you. We'd grow old together, hand in hand. She lifted her arms, too, as if to hug him across space, hugging the future that lay before them both.

"I do, too, darling," comes Dr. Slocum's voice. "All right, then. Soon as I can. So long."

Who would want to grow old with Frieda anymore? Not Morris Berman. Not Miller—who looks up now and sees that Frieda's caught him. He inhales with inscrutable vehemence: ashamed of himself, or of her, maybe both. "I beg," he starts to say just as the doctor strides back in, laughing about his wife's endearing spoiledness.

"Won't settle for less than perfect, that one. Which I guess must speak fairly well of me!" Dr. Slocum chortles overloudly. "Now, where were we? Ah, yes, the smears. Miller, take one of those applicators and sterilize it in the flame. Ten, fifteen seconds does the trick. Good, then the cotton. And in we go..."

The steel swab penetrates. Frieda stares up: vines upon vines, an endless knot.

She finds the girls working hard at hospital gowns again, the cloth cut from pigeon blue bolts. The clatter of stitching needles sounds like rodents running wild. Bobbins whiz, treadles clack and hum.

The workshop must have been the bordello's poshest suite. The wallpaper—repeated images of mating birds and bees—is yellow with smoke stains toward the ceiling. On a chandelier, glitz competes with dust. Frieda takes the Singer next to Yetta's.

"Hope it wasn't too bad?" Yetta offers.

Frieda can't quite find the voice to answer.

"Gets easier," Yetta says. "First time's worst."

The other patients gabble as they pin and hem and stitch, like gossips at a country quilting bee. Melba, with her booming voice, thick-lipped Angelina—each of them has lain on that glass table. How do they still smile and not scream?

Yesterday, during Frieda's initial session in the shop, it was Yetta who approached and sat with her. Before Frieda could start on the hospital gowns, said Yetta, first she had to sew her uniforms (one to wear, a spare for being laundered). Yetta found the right-sized pattern, helped her mark the denim, then hovered like a jumpy mother hen.

"Okay," Frieda said to her cumbersome instructions. "All right, yes. I think I understand." She could stitch a dress like this with shut eyes.

Meantime, Yetta unspooled her life's story (thank God she spoke to Frieda now in English). Raised in Manhattan, just east of Union Square; fled north at eighteen (six years ago). Father was a pettifogging shoe-factory boss. Or had been. Could be dead, for all she knew.

Frieda, during the monologue, stitched a flawless seam. Yetta finally saw, stopped her story. "Look at you! You don't need sewing tips."

Frieda shrugged. "The work I did, back home."

"In Boston? Were you Local 253?"

"What?"

"Come on! Garment workers' union."

"No. It was just me and my mother."

Yetta's face sharpened up with angles. She had quarrelsome features; a man's wide, blunt nose. "And that's the problem," she said, as if resuming an old argument. "All these girls working on their own, for less than peanuts, 'cause they need this dollar, this one, the next. And they can't stop to think a minute forward. You try to organize, but so many of the girls"—her gaze swept around the sewing shop—"so many just can't seem to be bothered."

"Unionize prostitutes?" said Frieda.

"Is that what—you think that's what I am?"

"You're here. Here with all the other girls."

Through clenched teeth, Yetta asked was she a whore?

"No," said Frieda. "Told them ten times: no."

"All right, then," she said. "Exactly. So."

Yetta, brushing strands of wild hair behind her ears, told her tale of landing at the Home: how she'd worked as a captain in the WTUL, urging wage hikes for switchboard operators; how she'd been arrested once for what the cops called "agitating" and was sure she got put on someone's list. They'd caught her out at night. She'd been framed. "Still not sure exactly how they gave me it," she confessed. "Towels? Infected towels, that's my guess."

Framed? Frieda deemed the girl a phony. A phony, or just mad with man-hatred.

But now, still atremble from the doctor's rubber touch, from the daze-inducing shame of being probed, Frieda is more credulous, forgiving. Her own story, to a stranger, must sound equally farfetched; who'd believe that what got her here—her legs cranked wide, exposed—that what got her to this heinous place was love?

If Felix knew, if he saw her in those stirrups—a running sore—would he ever want Frieda's love again?

"You said it gets easier?" she says to Yetta lowly.

"Sure," Yetta says. "A bit each time."

"I don't want it to. I don't ever want to think this isn't awful."

Yetta nods. "Good girl. That's the way to think. Remember, though, you're probably going to be here quite a while. So you can't spend every second fighting. You've got to pick your moments, then let loose."

Frieda asks how long. How long can they detain her?

"Depends. Whenever the doc says you're cured. For the syph, if you've got it, it's whenever the blood test's negative. For the clap, four clear slides, a week apart."

"A month? They'll hold me here a month?"

"Four weeks from when they start checking, which could be two months, or three. That's what I meant—you've got to pick your moments."

Frieda looks around again at the patients, who still gossip ("Kissed her where?" "You heard me, girl, you heard"), like the Home is fine enough a place to be. Like life hasn't stopped. Like this is life.

Only skittish Jo sits quietly on her own, working at a sleeve, removing pins. Forgoing the tomato-shaped pincushion on her table, she stores each needle in her palm: the bulge of pale meat below her thumb.

"That Jo!" says Yetta, who must have followed Frieda's stare. "Just won't stop hurting herself."

From the looks of her, though, Jo's jabbing doesn't hurt: each prick evokes the small twitch of a grin. Maybe, Frieda thinks (with a kindred sort of longing), such localized pain is a relief. She asks Yetta, "Why's her head like that?"

"Uch! When they brought her in, the lice were so bad, all that they could do for her was shave it. Still scratches, though—scratches like the itch is in her brain."

"What happened, do you know?" Frieda asks.

Yetta pauses, wraps a piece of string around her thumb. Above the string, the skin goes puffy, red. "Jo won't talk. She never talks about it. But the word is, she was drugged—in her drink—at a dance hall, and captured by, you know, a white slaver."

Frieda's heard stories, seen films of such things. But she's never met an actual white slave. "Jo?" she says. "Jo was ... was forced?"

"Woke up in a brothel, where they raped her, made her work. I don't even know how she got out. When the committee found her, she was living on the street."

"God," Frieda says. "How horrible." So far, Jo's the patient that Frieda's felt most drawn to; she's sensed that they are somehow most alike. Now she sees that maybe what attracts her isn't kinship, but contrast: Jo's much worse off than she. (Frieda chose her path. Chose Felix.) "And at her age?" she adds. "So horrible."

Yetta smiles a skintight, toothless smile. "How old do you think she is, Frieda?"

Jo's waifish form. Her baby face. "Couldn't be more than fourteen? Fifteen?"

"Nineteen, Frieda. You're the youngest here."

"Which we hope gives you the greatest chance of saving!" It's the matron, who's snuck up on them, eavesdropping. "And I know you're both game to get acquainted," she goes on, "but there's time for yabbering and time for work."

"We've been working," Yetta insists, "all along."

Mrs. Digges rolls her beady eyes. "Oh, Yetta—always such a crank! I wish you might just sweeten up your temper."

Yetta falls silent as she starts to wind her bobbin. Her whole body seems to form a fist.

Is that how Frieda looks, too, the next afternoon, when Mrs. Digges pulls her aside and gives the news? "Wanted to tell you right away," the matron says gently. "Your Wassermann test's back. It's positive."