with lubricious promise. We were the most exclusive whorehouse in town, and those of us who lived and worked in it took a certain amount of pride in the fact.
There were eight of us working girls living at Plum Street back then. In addition we had Simple Kitty greeting at the front of house, two more housemaids, two kitchen maids, a cook and a barman, a musical director, who played piano in the main parlour and organized musicians for the ballroom each night. There was also Carlos, the man-of-all-work. And overlooking us all with her beady eye and the tightest pocketbook in Colorado, there was Phoebe: once a working girl herself, now Madam to the most popular parlour house in Trinidad. Unlike me, she had learned early on how to keep hold of her money and get the hell out of the game.
Phoebe must have been among the wealthiest individuals in town, but there was never a time when she wasn’t on the lookout to be making more for herself. Any chance for another buck, Phoebe would be onto it. She’d developed a hundred sly ways to cheat the johns so that they wouldn’t feel it, or didn’t care. She used to cheat us girls too, charging interest on debts we’d run up here and there. In the early years, I hadn’t used to mind so much. I was grateful for such a comfortable place to live. But more recently my attitude had changed. After so many years on my back, splitting my earnings with Phoebe and having nothing whatsoever to show for them, I had been trying, at last, to get myself in hand. I had eased up on the laudanum. Eased up on the liquor too. And I was beginning to keep some of my money back.
One of the girls must have told Phoebe I was trying to get myself together, and she didn’t like it one bit. At thirty-seven years old, I wasn’t the youngest girl in the house, and maybe I wasn’t the prettiest either, but I knew what I was doing. I pulled in more than my fair share of business and Phoebe wasn’t ready to lose me.
The morning they shot Lippiatt she had presented me with an unpaid receipt from a dressmaker who’d been dead for two years. Maybe it was genuine – I had been drinking a lot two years before then, and the laudanum would have been playing its part. In any case, I had no way to check up on it. Even if I had, there wasn’t much I could have done about it. Phoebe held the town in her pocket. If she decided I owed her – well then, I owed her. For all its comforts and luxuries, Plum Street was a jail of sorts. Leaving it was never going to be a simple business …
As I sit here twenty years on, at my little desk overlooking the warm Pacific Ocean, it seems the greatest of miracles to me that I ever did.
But life at Plum Street had its compensations. For a few years I used to think that William Paxton was one of them. He owned a gun store in town, and a few others upstate, and from the frequency of his visits to see me, I assumed they made him a good living. He’d been my regular client since his wife was sick and dying, and he was a decent man: quiet, gentle and generous.
He used to talk to me about his wife when she was dying and, after that, when his grief had eased, about all sorts of things. Sex and music and … well, sex and music, mostly, which were our interests in common. Maybe a little bit about real estate and automobiles, too. In any case, we became friends. I told him something about my life before I came to Trinidad – not all of it true, of course. But I told him how I came from England, the child of two Christian missionaries, one long dead, the other long since returned to England – which was true. And I told him how, before circumstances changed, I used to travel the Western circuit with a group of popular musicians and stand before a full hall and sing and dance, and that once, long ago, I was quite a music hall sensation. Which was also true, so far as I recall.
He bought me a little, old-fashioned harpsichord – heaven knows how he found it – which I kept in my rooms (Phoebe said a piano would have made too much noise), and we used to sing together; or, more often, I would sing for him. I told him, as I told Inez, about how one fine day, when I was too old for this game, I wanted to open a little singing school, perhaps in Denver. He pinched me and laughed.
‘Don’t be absurd, Dora,’ he said, and I know he meant it kindly. ‘You’ll never be too old for this game. You’ll be adorable until the day you die.’
He used to tell me how much he cared for me. And I believe he did. Occasionally, when we were alone together, he used to mutter tender things; and I am convinced that in the last few weeks and months, before Lippiatt’s death seemed to change everything in our little town, his feelings for me were stronger than ever. He said to me, a month or so before Lippiatt died, that he was ‘missing the comfort of a wife’, and on another occasion, around the same time, I remember he said: ‘I want to behave to you as a gentleman should.’
Inevitably, perhaps, I played the words over until they meant what I wanted them to mean: something vast and precious. And I began to believe that he loved me and that I loved him.
Well, he came to see me in the week after Lippiatt’s death. The streets were still cluttered with angry delegates, and the sheriff’s men roamed among them, waving their guns. William sought me out at Plum Street in the midst of it, earlier in the day than was usual. If he had been anyone else, I might have kept him waiting. But William was different, and when I came down to the ballroom I greeted him warmly – too warmly. Beady Phoebe swept across the room and shot me a warning look. It was against house rules to form strong attachments. ‘For your own protection,’ she used to tell us. ‘I don’t want my girls getting their hearts all smashed up. Bad for business.’
‘No heart left to smash,’ I used to say.
But afterwards, I knew I should have listened. Our heads were side by side on the pillow … and I wince to remember the affection I felt as I looked across at him. He glanced at me, sheepish as hell, gave a tug on his moustache, which he never did before and, for the maddest moment, because he looked so terribly ill at ease, I was certain he would speak the words. He said:
‘Dora, I’ve been meaning to mention …’
‘Mention what, William?’
‘Only the fact is …’
‘Yes, William?’
‘Because I want to do right by you, Dora. Never doubt it.’
‘I never would doubt it, William.’
‘I probably would have been sunk without you, after Matty died.’ He laughed. ‘I tell myself you kept me sane. I believe you did.’
‘Nonsense. You kept yourself sane. I just …’ I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence, so I left it there.
‘Fact is, Dora …’
I stroked his face and kissed his shoulder. His shyness melted my heart! ‘The fact is, what,darling man?’ I said.
‘Fact is, I’ve met a girl in Denver.’
My heart gave a double beat of misery.
‘She’s the sweetest girl.’
‘A sweet girl?’ I repeated. ‘You have met a sweet girl in Denver?’
‘I’m sure you’d take to her.’
‘Oh. I am sure …’
‘I mean to say, if you ever met her.’ Idly, awkwardly, he stretched an arm across the bed to caress me. ‘She is the most lovely girl I ever met,’ he said, and as he spoke he continued to tweak and squeeze and massage. ‘And the beauty of it is, she’s young enough for a whole brood of children!’ He laughed. ‘Unlike you, Dora! You and I are as old as the hills.’
I
