The Virgin Cure Read online

  ALSO BY AMI MCKAY

  The Birth House

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2011 Ami McKay

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McKay, Ami, 1968–

  The virgin cure / Ami McKay.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37409-7

  1. New York (N.Y.)–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8625.K387V57 2011 C813.′6 C2011-901423-5

  Map by Erin Cooper

  Cover images: (moths, paper) Lisa Hubbard/botanica/getty images; (girl) Raisa Kanareva/dreamstime.com/

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  v3.1

  For Sarah Fonda Mackintosh—doctor, mother, rebel;

  and for my mother, who never let me forget that

  I came from such stuff.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Recall ages—One age is but a part—ages are but a part;

  Recall the angers, bickerings, delusions, superstitions, of the idea of caste,

  Recall the bloody cruelties and crimes.

  Anticipate the best women;

  I say an unnumbered new race of hardy and well-defined

  women are to spread through all These States,

  I say a girl fit for These States must be free, capable,

  dauntless, just the same as a boy.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Shrewdness, large capital, business enterprise, are all enlisted in the lawless stimulation of this mighty instinct of sex.

  —DR. ELIZABETH BLACKWELL,

  founder of the New York Infirmary

  for Indigent Women and Children

  PROLOGUE

  I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.

  My father ran off when I was three years old. He emptied the rent money out of the biscuit tin and took my mother’s only piece of silver—a tarnished sugar bowl she’d found in the rubble of a Third Avenue fire.

  “Don’t go …” Mama would call out in her sleep, begging and pulling at the blanket we shared as if it were the sleeve of my father’s coat. Lying next to her, I’d wish for morning and the hours when she’d go back to hating him. At least then her bitterness would be awake enough to keep her alive.

  She never held my hand in hers or let me kiss her cheeks. If I asked to sit on her lap, she’d pout and push me away and say, “When you were a baby, I held you until I thought my arms would fall off. Oh, Child, that should be enough.”

  I didn’t mind. I loved her.

  I loved the way she’d tie her silk scarf around her head and then bring the ends of it to trail down her neck. I loved how she’d grin, baring her teeth all the way up to the top of her gums when she looked at herself in the mirror, how she’d toss her shawl around her shoulders and run her fingers through the black fringe of it before setting her fortuneteller’s sign in the window for the day. The sign had a pretty, long-fingered hand painted right in the middle, with lines and arrows and words criss-crossing the palm. The Ring of Solomon, The Girdle of Venus. Head, heart, fate, fortune, life. Those were the first words I ever read.

  It was my father who gave me my name. Mama said it came to him at a place called Pear Tree Corner—“whispered by a tree so old it knew all the secrets of New York.” The apothecary who owned the storefront there told my father that he could ask the tree any question he liked and if he listened hard enough it would answer. My father believed him.

  “Call the child Moth,” the twisted tree had said, its branches bending low, leaves brushing against my father’s ear. Mama had been there too, round-faced and waddling with me inside her belly, but she didn’t hear it.

  “It was the strangest, most curious thing,” my father told her. “Like when a pretty girl first tells you she loves you. I swear to God.”

  Mama said she’d rather call me Ada, after Miss Ada St. Clair, the wealthiest lady she’d ever met, but my father wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t care that Miss St. Clair had a diamond ring for every finger and two pug dogs grunting and panting at her feet. He was sure that going against what the tree had said would bring bad luck.

  After he left us, Mama tried calling me Ada anyway, but it was too late. I only ever answered to Moth.

  “Where’s my papa?” I would ask. “Why isn’t he here?”

  “Wouldn’t I like to know. Maybe you should go and talk to the tree.”

  “What if I get lost?”

  “Well, if you do, be sure not to cry about it. There’s wild hogs that run through the city at night, and they’d like nothing better than to eat a scared little girl like you.”

  My father had thought to put coal in the stove before he walked out the door. Mama held onto that last bit of his kindness until it drove her mad. “Who does such a thing if they don’t mean to come back?” she’d mutter to herself each time she lifted the grate to clean out the ashes.

  She knew exactly what had happened to him, but it was so common and cruel she didn’t want to believe it.

  Miss Katie Adams, over on Mott Street, had caught my father’s eye. She was sixteen, childless and mean, with nothing to hold her back. Mrs. Riordan, who lived in the rear tenement, told Mama she’d seen them carrying on together in the alley on more than one occasion.

  “You’re a liar!” Mama screamed at her, but Mrs. Riordan just shook her head and said, “I’ve nothing to gain from lies.”

  Standing in front of the girl’s house, Mama yelled up at the windows, “Katie Adams, you whore, give me my husband back!”

  When Miss Adams’ neighbours complained about all the noise Mama was making, my father came down to quiet her. He kissed her until she cried, but didn’t come home.

  “He’s gone for good,” Mrs. Riordan told Mama. “Your man was a first-time man, and that’s j
ust the kind of man who breaks a woman’s heart.”

  She meant he was only after the firsts of a girl—the first time she smiles at him, their first kiss, the first time he takes her to bed. There was nothing Mama could have done to keep him around. Her first times with him were gone.

  “God damn Katie Adams …” Mama would whisper under her breath whenever something went wrong.

  Hearing that girl’s name scared me more than when Mama said piss or shit or fuck right to my face.

  The day my father left was the day the newsboys called out in the streets, “Victory at Shiloh!” They shouted it from every corner as I stood on the stoop watching my father walk away. When he got to the curb, he tipped his hat to me and smiled. There was sugar trailing out of a hole in his pocket where he’d hidden Mama’s silver bowl. It was spilling to the ground at his feet.

  Some people have grand, important memories of the years when the war was on—like the moment a brother, or lover, or husband returned safe and sound, or the sight of President Lincoln’s funeral hearse being pulled up Broadway by all those beautiful black horses with plumes on their heads.

  “Victory at Shiloh!” and my father’s smile is all I’ve got.

  The rooms I shared with Mama were in the middle of a row of four-storey tenements called “the slaughter houses.” There were six of them altogether—three sitting side by side on the street with three more close behind on the back lots. If you lived there, there was every chance you’d die there too. People boiled to death in the summer and froze to death in the winter. They were killed by disease or starvation, by a neighbour’s anger, or by their own hand.

  Mothers went days without eating so they could afford food for their children. If there was any money left, they put ads in the Evening Star hoping to get their lost husbands back.

  They stood in the courtyards behind the buildings, pushing stones over the ribs of their washboards and sighing over the men they’d lost. Elbow to elbow they put their wash on the lines that stretched like cat’s cradles over that dark, narrow space.

  Our back court was especially unlucky, having only three sides instead of four. The main attractions were one leaky pump and the row of five privies that sat across from it. The walls and roof of the outhouses leaned on each other like drunken whores, all tipsy, weeping and foul. Only one of the stall doors would stay shut, while the other four dangled half off their hinges. The landlord’s man, Mr. Cowan, never bothered to fix them and he never bothered to take the trash away either, so all the things people didn’t have a use for anymore got piled up in the court. Rotten scraps, crippled footstools, broken bits of china, a thin, mewling cat with her hungry litter of kittens.

  The women gossiped and groused while waiting for their turn at the pump, hordes of flies and children crawling all around them. The smallest babes begged to get up to their mama’s teats while the older children made a game picking through boards and bricks, building bridges and stepping-stones over the streams of refuse that cut through the dirt. They’d spend all day that way as their mothers clanged doors open and shut on that little prison.

  Boys grew into guttersnipes, then pickpockets, then roughs. They roamed the streets living for rare, fist-sized chunks of coal from ash barrels or the sweet hiss of beans running from the burlap bags they wounded with their knives at Tompkins Market. They ran down ladies for handouts and swarmed gentlemen for watches and chains.

  Kid Yaller, Pie-Eater, Bag o’ Bones, Slobbery Tom, Four-Fingered Nick. Their names were made from body parts and scars, bragging rights and bad luck. Jack the Rake, Paper-Collar Jack, One-Lung Jack, Jack the Oyster, Crazy Jack. They cut their hair short and pinned the ragged ends of their sleeves to their shirts. They left nothing for the shopkeeper’s angry hand to grab hold of, nothing even a nit would desire.

  Girls sold matches and pins, then flowers and hot corn, and then themselves.

  By nine, ten, eleven years old, you could feel it coming, the empty-bellied life of your mother—always having to decide what to give up next, which trinket to sell, which dreams to forget.

  The most valuable thing a girl possessed was hidden between her legs, waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. It was never a question of yes or no. It was simply a matter of which man would have you first.

  There was a whole other city of us, on rooftops, beneath stair steps, behind hay bins, between crates of old shoes and apples. Rag pickers, hot-corn girls, thread pullers.

  We got by, living on pennies from a lady’s purse or nickels from men who paid us to let them look at our ankles or the backs of our necks for “just a little while longer.” Some of us were orphans, most of us might as well have been. “Dirty rags,” Mr. Alsop the fishmonger called us, as he stood there waiting with a long, thin stick, ready to crack our shins black. His stall was lined with barrels of salt herring—dried, chewy secrets with lonely little eyes.

  In summer we slept sideways on fire escapes. In winter we fought rats and beggars for filthy stable corners.

  We came from rear tenements and cellar floors, from poverty and pride. All sneak and steal, hush and flight, those of us who lived past thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, those of us who managed to make any luck for ourselves at all—we became New York.

  Mama sold me the summer I turned twelve.

  Everything stuck like corn silk that season—my dress to the small of my back, the catcalls of the bootblack boys, the debts Mama owed every man with a “Mister” in front of his name for five blocks around. There were riots just after the strawberries, and people went mad from the heat all June, July and August. Miss Lydia Worth, the seamstress next door, got sliced across the face with a knife by Mr. Striech, the butcher, just because she refused to marry him. The woman who lived above Mama and me, Mrs. Glendenning, hid her baby away in a stove-pipe when it died because she didn’t know what else to do with it. I listened at our door when the police came to take her away. She’d only been able to afford swill milk and she was sure it was the milk that had killed her child. She wailed and sobbed, her cries of sadness filling the dark of the stairwell like the howls of a dying dog.

  In the evenings, when it was too hot to sit inside, I’d leave Chrystie Street and walk up Second Avenue. Moving between pushcarts and passersby, I’d get as far away from Mama and our rooms as I dared. The journey was safe enough, even for a girl, alone, as long as I paid attention to the alleys and corners. Crossing Houston my heart would twist, not because there was any danger to it or Mama forbid me to go there, but because reaching the other side of the street always made me feel as if I were headed more towards home than away from it.

  Peering through windows, I’d gaze into people’s gaslit homes, keeping track of all the things I wanted for myself. Number 110 Second Avenue held a handsome gentleman, resting his arm on a mantel, mouth rounding into a satisfied O each time he puffed on his cigar. In the parlour of number 114, three little boys were sprawled out on their bellies across a flowery rug, rolling marbles in the channels of petals and leaves. At number 116, two lovers were sitting together on a settee, their elbows barely touching. A thin-lipped woman lorded over them, her arms crossed in front of her chest as if to say, Don’t you dare. Glowing, moving pictures of ease, they made me want to lick my lips, my longing burning the sides of my tongue like I’d been lucky enough to have too much sugar.

  Businessmen paraded by me in fitted, neat suits, their shoes perfectly black. Street vendors pushed and pulled their carts, the wares still looking orderly and fresh, even at the end of the day. The pigeon man came blowing a bosun’s whistle, carrying braces of birds across his back. Shopkeepers cranked up their awnings and swept off their stoops, forcing clouds of dust to fly up around their feet. They scowled as the dirt settled back down into the cracks between the cobblestones, staring after it as if it ought to be ashamed for coming too near their door. If it weren’t for Mrs. Riordan once telling me you had to cross the East River to get there, I would have sworn I’d walked all the way to the beautiful place
she called Brooklyn.

  At the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue was a grand house on a large plot, rising five storeys above the street. Although the other houses surrounding it had been divvied up into a’s and b’s to accommodate the growing number of merchants who were setting up shops in the area, this house, with its blood-red brick and white marble trim, belonged to just one person, Miss Alice Keteltas.

  Quite particular about the house and the gardens that surrounded it, Miss Keteltas had placed several notices on the lawn to keep strangers at bay.

  Miss Keteltas generously donated her peacocks to the Central Park Menagerie two months after she acquired them. This practice was quite common with ladies who mistakenly wished for peacocks, or forty-two white swans, or perhaps a bear cub, or three sweet-faced monkeys. Thus, a zoo was born, to save the fine ladies of New York from their misguided game keeping and guilt.

  Be advised, I am not dead and this house is not for sale. —signed, Miss Alice Keteltas.

  All visitors without an appointment (good-intentioned clergy included) shall be turned away. —signed, Miss Alice Keteltas.

  Curiosity seekers shall be met with suspicion and a stick. —signed, Miss Alice Keteltas.

  Please, don’t feed the peacocks. —signed, Miss Alice Keteltas.

  Although the peacocks were long gone, the tall iron fence that had been erected around the gardens to keep the birds from escaping still remained. Menacing black spikes ran along the top and bottom of it, bayonets against the wild impulses of rioters, boys and dogs.

  I liked to run my hand along the fence as I walked past, my fingers slapping the pickets just hard enough to make the metal hum. If I took hold of one of the posts while it was still singing, a delicious tickle would come between my lips, like paper over the teeth of a comb, or a whistle made from a blade of grass. I liked to think that this set the house to buzzing as well and that Miss Keteltas was somewhere inside, sitting at the dining room table or even reclining on her bed, suffering pleasant tremors of laughter without knowing why.