As he had been in the yellow fever epidemics, Cormac discovered he was immune. An immunity to yellow fever could be traced to African blood, to Kongo. Cholera was another matter. But as he roamed among the dead and dying, gathering facts that were written with haste and anger on foolscap but never appeared in the newspaper, or trying to comfort the afflicted with useless words, part of him longed to be taken by the cholera. If this was life, he did not want it. Until that summer, he had never thought such things. Now they came to him almost every day. Life, in this season, was about shit and death.
To keep from thinking, he wrote many stories for the Evening Post while Bryant and his most favored editor, William Leggett, gathered their families together across the Hudson in Hoboken and found shelter from the storm. At last, some stories made their way into the newspaper. Stories about water and corruption. Stories that told people where to go for help but offered no easy hope. Cormac hoped that a person who could read would tell ten persons who could not. He hoped thousands would demand water.
Cormac was ignorant of the causes of the cholera but knew that it wasn’t the Irish (blamed as the Jews were blamed for the Black Death) and knew it wasn’t something as vague as the miasma. Whatever it was, science would discover the cause. He was convinced that the cure would come from water, cold water.
Finally it ended. After nine terrifying weeks. And three thousand five hundred and twenty-six known deaths. The rich slowly returned, sending in their African or Irish servants as the advance patrols, like canaries into a coal mine. Bryant and Leggett returned too, and Cormac urged them to start a crusade in the Evening Post, demanding that the city obtain a big, strong, muscular supply of clean water. They nodded, they listened, they thanked him, they published a few polite editorials.
New York got no clean water.
The miasma returned with the people.
The cholera returned in 1833.
Shit and filth got worse.
The cholera returned in 1834.
All that dying passed through him again as he went home after sundown on his birthday, September 9, 1834. The flat was an oven. He opened the windows, removed his tie and shirt, pulled off his shoes. He sat in a chair, very still, gazing at his books and paintings, at the pots of color and the clean brushes. But his skin was crawling. The room filled with the stink of his feet and his armpits and his balls. He scratched at his skin, which felt as if millions of insects were crawling under the surface. He scratched at his hair. He dipped a cloth into the bowl of water and scrubbed his armpits, feet, and balls. The stench did not leave.
He heard a window breaking somewhere in the night and the barking of dogs and a woman wailing. Tomorrow’s murder. Dubious Jones had named herself, said Inspector Ford in time for the morning edition. Her true name was Mildred Vandeventer, and she was from Rochester. She was nineteen and had been a whore for four years. She was killed by a man named Collins, from Philadelphia, who went back to his boardinghouse on Pearl Street, wrote a note saying how much he loved her, and then hanged himself. Case closed.
But Cormac told himself, There’s no such thing as a closed case. Who will bury Dubious Jones? Why did she choose the name? And when they bury her as Mildred Vandeventer, who will tell her family how she died, and how she lived? She and Collins will be together forever now in the democracy of Potter’s Field. And at least they’re free of the miasma.
He was not.
He scratched and shook and rubbed his back against the wall. His body hair felt as if it were growing inward, follicles fed by the fertilizer of the shit-stained air. He pulled at the curtains. He yanked his hair. Then he dressed again and went into the night. Near Broadway he saw a woman come out of tavern with a basket of wilting geraniums. He bought four of them and a length of string and tied them to his face, the petals tight against his nose.
He walked toward the water, hoping for a breeze, one fresh zephyr of air. But then the smell of shit overwhelmed the flowers. He began to weep. He imagined leaping into the river and swimming away. An act of suicide. Motive: shit.
And instead turned right into Duane Street. His eyes searched the rooftops, looking for a water tower. There, he said. There. Up there. On the roof of the bordello near Chapel Street. There.
74.
She greeted him at the front door.
“Do come in,” she said. “I’m the Countess de Chardon.”
“Cormac O’Connor,” he said.
“I’ve seen you in town,” she said, “but never, alas, in this place.”
She was dressed as if married to one of the richest merchants in the city, with a swelling high-necked bodice that suggested (but did not display) full breasts, her waist impossibly tightened, and a dark maroon crescent-shaped bustle that rose airily behind her when she moved, hinting at layered crinolines and plump hidden cheeks and thighs. Her lustrous brown hair was piled in plaited coils held tight with a bone tiara. Diamond earrings glittered in her ears, matched by a diamond ring on each finger. Her skin was tawny in the shifting light of oil lamps, her cheeks lightly rouged, her full lips painted a muted crimson. They exchanged platitudes in French, hers polished, his as crude as any self-taught language. She closed the door behind him. She was certainly no ordinary madam of a bawdy house.
“Do have a drink, monsieur,” she said, reverting to English to help Cormac out of his clumsy French. As he passed, she gave off a scent of lavender. He told her he didn’t drink. She smiled in relief. She said she had a perfect young woman for him, just recently arrived only months before from the upstate town of Waterloo, and she made a small joke about the fate of Napoleon. “Do not,” she said, “be too daring.”
Cormac paused, and then said he’d much prefer a bath to anything else.
“Yes, it’s been a smothering day,” she said. “I’ll arrange a bath. Can you wait for…”
“I’ve learned to wait for everything,” he said.
She led him to a sitting room where mustached businessmen sat with some of the nine women who worked in the nine upstairs rooms. One young woman played Mozart badly on a stand-up piano. Gilt-framed paintings of ruined castles and the Roman Colosseum adorned the pale papered walls. The lights were muted here too. The men made bad jokes. The women giggled. Cormac sipped water. The countess returned and motioned with her head for him to follow her.