Living My Life - Emma Goldman [114]
My precious “baby” brother, tall and handsome, was at the dock to greet me. He was considerably surprised to see me return with a body-guard of two. We went immediately to a pawnshop to hock my clam-shell watch, for which I received ten whole dollars, enough to pay for a week’s rent in a Clinton Street room and treat the company to dinner.
CHAPTER XXIII
[...] The most urgent necessity on my arrival in America was to secure employment. I had left my visiting-card with several of my medical friends, but weeks passed and not a single call came. [ ... ]
At last on Christmas Eve Dr. Hoffmann sent for me. “The patient is a morphine addict,” he informed me, “a very difficult and trying case. The night nurse had to be given a week off; she could not stand the strain. You have been called to substitute for a week.” The prospect was not enticing, but I needed work.
It was almost midnight when I arrived with the doctor at the patient’s house. In a large room on the second floor a woman was lying half dressed on the bed, in a stupor. Her face, framed in a mass of black hair, was white and she was breathing heavily. Looking about, I noticed on the wall the portrait of a heavy man peering at me out of small, hard eyes. I recognized the likeness as that of a person I had seen before, but I could not recollect where or under what circumstances. Dr. Hoffmann began giving me directions. The patient’s name was Mrs. Spenser, he said. [ ... ]
At the end of the third week Mrs. Spenser was able to go downstairs to her parlour. In the process of putting the sick-room in order I came across peculiar slips of paper marked: “Jeannette, 20 times; Marion, 16; Henriette, 12.” There were about forty names of women, each checked off by a number. What a strange record! I thought. When about to join my patient in the sitting-room, I was arrested by a voice that I recognized as that of Mrs. Spenser’s visitor. “MacIntyre was at the house again last night,” I heard her say, “but none of the girls wanted him. Jeannette said she preferred twenty others to that filthy creature.” Mrs. Spenser must have heard my step, for the conversation suddenly broke off, and she called through the door, “Is that you, Miss Goldman? Please come in.” As I entered, the tea-tray I carried crashed to the ground, and I stood staring at a man sitting next to my patient on the sofa. It was the original of the portrait and I immediately recognized him as the detective-sergeant who had been instrumental in sending me to the penitentiary in 1893.
The slips of paper, the report I had just overheard—I understood it all in a flash. Spenser was the keeper of a “house,” and the detective her paramour. I fled to the second storey, filled with the one idea of getting out and away from the house. Hastening downstairs with my suit-case, I saw Mrs. Spenser at the bottom of the stairs, hardly able to stand, her hands nervously gripping the banister. I realized that I could not leave her in that state; I was responsible to Dr. Hoffmann, for whom I must wait. I led Mrs. Spenser to her room and put her to bed.
She burst into hysterical sobbing, begging me not to go away and assuring me that I should never have to see the man again; she would even have his portrait removed. She admitted being the keeper of a house. “I dreaded to have you find it out,” she said, “but I did think that Emma Goldman, the anarchist, would not condemn me for being a cog in a machine I did not create.” Prostitution was not of her making, she argued; and since it existed, it did not matter who was “in charge.” If not she, it would be someone else. She did not think keeping girls was any worse than underpaying them in factories; at least she