City of Promise Read Free Page A

the way you cooked up there’s never been a doubt in my mind that she spread her legs for one of the gentry. Someone from the first-class cabins on the upper decks most likely. Not,” she invariably added, “that Brigid shared my ability to discern quality. She was simply, on that occasion, lucky.”
    Mollie thought it a strange kind of luck, but she never said so. As for her own good fortune, Mollie reckoned it had little to do with her nameless father. It was the fact that Eileen Brannigan had assumed responsibility for the child who was a niece by marriage, not even her own flesh and blood, that first kept Mollie alive, then spared her the horror of growing up in some depraved Five Points rat-infested hovel with the rest of the drunken, brawling, dirt-poor Irish who poured into the city looking for a dream and finding a nightmare.
    Eileen released her hold on her niece’s chin. “Put a fresh log on thefire, Mollie, while I pour us another cup of tea. Then we’ll get down to business.”
    The pleats of the pink petticoat that showed beneath Mollie’s rose-colored taffeta day dress made a soft rustling sound when she moved, and when she added the log her aunt had requested the fire roared up and filled the room with the rich scent of applewood. Eileen Brannigan would burn nothing cheaper. “Applewood,” she said, “is quality. And for all everyone’s busy switching to heat provided by a coal furnace in the cellar, such a thing will never bring the comfort of a fire.”
    Which was not to say that Eileen Brannigan was profligate. She paid rigorous attention to every penny spent or earned, and relied on her niece to record both. The girl’s ability to do quick and perfect mathematics, frequently in her head, had been manifest by the time she was eleven. Eileen promptly put her niece in charge of the financial records. Good bookkeeping, she said, was the very foundation of good business. One reason, Eileen maintained, she owned this elegant three-story brownstone on the corner of University Place and Eleventh Street.
    Which, by cleverness and will, and what she called her instinct for quality, she had turned into the best whorehouse in the city.
    Eileen never bothered to say parlor house, much less brothel. Quality, according to her, had no need to hide behind euphemisms. Her competition—in as far as she conceded she had any—was simply not in the same league. There were other houses in respectable residential areas, a great many of them, and many that like Mrs. Brannigan’s catered to the finest sorts of gentleman. The so-called Seven Sisters on West Twenty-Fifth Street—threaded between fashionable houses like jewels in a necklace—sent engraved invitations to famous men whose arrival in the city was announced in the press. Their callers were required to wear evening dress, and the ladies who received them were gowned and bejeweled as grandly as any woman in the city. Eileen aspired to nothing so formal. Ostentatious, she called it. What set Brannigan’s apart was that it was truly a home from home.
    The most influential and the wealthiest men of New York City came to Mrs. Brannigan’s not simply because they required a place to put their peckers. Though Lord knows such men needed a bit of relief from the cares that weighed so heavily these days, what with the war raging and fortunes to be made if one danced to the right tune. The high-stakes game such men played demanded at the very least relief from the weight between their legs and the burdens on their backs. Eileen was the first to say so. And given that their wives were frequently confined for many months awaiting the birth of a child, or sequestered for many more after the ordeal ended, likely as not they couldn’t get what they needed at home. They could, however, find it on pretty much any city block, and for a tenth the price Eileen Brannigan charged. Even houses deemed expensive, where they offered a variety of experiences—small boys, or women