Chapter 31 #4
While I peeled potatoes for supper, Charlie and Flossy stood at the kitchen sink. They’d hauled a few cases of Mrs. Tartt’s bourbon up from the root cellar, and Flossy was pouring the full bottles into empty ones, about halfway up, and then Charlie was filling the rest up with water.
“I want plenty a water on that eel juice, Charles. Nothing worse than a drunk john,” Flossy said.
Eventually one bottle became two, three became six, and if a drink cost a dollar, Charlie would have turned a bottle of something that cost us nothing into a profit of seventeen dollars.
Those were some swell economics, especially considering there was something in the neighborhood of six dozen bottles of it.
Sort of took the shine off selling Co-Colas for a profit of fifteen cents each, but then again, every penny counted.
Charlie kept looking up at the kitchen clock. It was almost three now. “I’m calling Kleinkamp again,” she said and, on her way out, “That looks good, Es.”
I walked over to the table and peered over Esmeralda’s shoulder. “What is that?” I asked.
“It’s the menu,” she said. The mysterious wooden boxes we’d brought in from her car were open, full of tubes of paint and brushes and palettes, and facedown on the table was a large, heavy gold frame with brown paper on the back. In perfect black lettering, she’d painted:
Dance lessons, 30 minutes each
The Jitterbug $4.50
The Flossy $5.00
The Tango $9.00
The Foxtrot $15.00
It took me a second to understand what was what. Esmeralda was clearly the foxtrot girl, a Flossy was a Flossy, but why oh why did we have to be selling tangos?
“At night it’ll be the menu,” Esmeralda said, and then she turned the heavy frame over. “And during the day it’ll be this old man.” It was the dang portrait of Henry Tartt.
“No answer at Kleinkamp’s office,” Charlie said, coming back in. “Maybe he’s on his way.”
“He better be,” Flossy said. “I don’t like these gals well enough to share a disease with ’em.”
“That ain’t Kleinkamp,” Flossy said, peering out the sidelights around the front door.
“That broad ain’t even of the same century as Kleinkamp.
” At three thirty, Flossy and I watched a young brunette woman coming up our walk.
She carried a black canvas bag in one hand and a thick book in the other.
She walked quickly, with determination, checking around her like Meemaw did when she was going to sneak a drink of cherry bounce.
“Is it Kleinkamp?” Charlie asked, coming down the stairs.
“Does that look like Kleinkamp?” Flossy said. I told Charlie and Flossy to step back and let me handle it, in case she was one of Frances’s committee friends.
When I opened the door, the young woman was putting on a white coat over her dress.
She was lanky and thin and looked especially so in the too-big doctor’s coat.
Her short curly hair was unkempt and had mostly escaped from a silver barrette.
Large brown eyes behind a set of horn-rimmed glasses, no makeup on.
She picked up her book and left the bag at her feet.
“Hello, I’m Miss Cunningham, here in place of Dr. Kleinkamp. ”
Flossy pushed forward and said, “What is this? Where’s Kleinkamp?”
“The doctor wasn’t available, so I came instead.”
She didn’t even look as old as me. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face but her pale cheeks were pocked with scars and with all the zagging dark hair, she wasn’t attractive but did not seem one bit concerned about this.
Charlie leaned out and looked up and down the road. The young woman’s taxi was still out front. Charlie motioned her in and shut the door behind her.
“We didn’t ask for a nurse, we asked for a doctor,” Flossy said. “You got credentials?”
“No, but I work at Dr. Kleinkamp’s office two days a week and I’m a lab assistant over at the university, and I’ve worked at Oxford Hospital here in town for almost a year now.
” She made eye contact with each of us as she spoke.
She was officious and seemed determined—though to do what, test us all for gonorrhea?
“So since you was what, fifteen?” Flossy said.
“I’m twenty-two,” she said. “I’ll be attending medical school next year.”
“Well I prefer a doctor that’s already been medical schooled. Where’s Kleinkamp?”
“Dr. Kleinkamp—was indisposed, so I offered to take the appointment for him.” She pursed her lips, not red from lipstick but chapped like she chewed them. A worrier. “But he’s definitely not coming.”
“That’s a crock. I spoked to Methuselah myself yesterday, and he said he’d be here at one o’clock and he’s charging us a fin per girl which is a complete rip-off.”
Already I was thinking, and hoping, that without Kleinkamp maybe we couldn’t open the upstairs. We could operate a nice, regular dance club that sold root beers and waltz lessons.
“Dr. Kleinkamp was charging you five dollars a panel?” Miss Cunningham said.
“I know, toots, but Kleinkamp’s the only game in town.”
“Look, Dr. Kleinkamp’s taught me a lot, I’m lucky to work with him, but he’s almost ninety, he can hardly see anymore. Honestly, you’d probably do just as well going to Old Miss Rondo on the square.”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Flossy said. “But I still ain’t copacetic with some girlie doctoring me. Just ’cause you got a white coat on don’t make it so.”
Miss Cunningham pushed her shoulders back and the coat seemed to fit her better now. “You do realize those tests he’s doing can’t possibly be accurate.”
Flossy backed her chin up. “Says who?”
Again she paused, I guess considering whether she should rat on her boss, but couldn’t help herself.
“He drives those blood samples almost an hour and a half in a hot car all the way to Holly Springs. You have to test immediately after you draw blood or the culture will spoil. Not to mention he conducts his tests in his hot, dirty kitchen. I don’t know what they were teaching back in 1850, but I learned that in Lab 101. ”
“What are you saying? That I could have something? You think I got something?” For some reason, Flossy looked at me. I shrugged: I hope not.
“I’m saying …” Miss Cunningham held in a breath.
And then the floodgates opened. “I’m saying these doctors don’t care about women—and certainly not women like you!
They look at you and think you’re not even worth the test. They think if you’re carrying something, then it must be your fault and you deserve it for being what you are.
Their only concern, if they even have any, is that you might give it to some poor, unsuspecting, innocent man. ”
I didn’t quite know what to think of this woman.
This wasn’t the time to be preached at about the ills of being a prostitute.
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she really understood what this place was, but if Kleinkamp serviced Priscilla’s and she worked for him, she probably knew a telephone call to test five women for gonorrhea and syphilis wasn’t an invitation to a birthday party.
“What do you think we should do, Miss Cunningham?” Charlie said. “About our … situation?”
Miss Cunningham didn’t miss a beat. “When’s the next customer coming?”
Charlie crossed her hands carefully in front of her and said, “Tomorrow night. It’s our first night open. I hope you understand, Miss Cunningham, this needs to be discreet.”
Miss Cunningham switched the thick book to the other arm.
“Call me Virginia, please.” She put out her hand and Charlie shook it, though tentatively.
“What I came to tell you is that I can do these tests for you. I’ve done hundreds of them—the physical exams to check for lesions, I know how to run the blood tests for gonorrhea, chancroid, and syphilis.
Just come down to Oxford Hospital and I can do them for you there. ”
Charlie was shaking her head and I was too—Oxford Hospital was where Dr. Pittman worked—but Flossy got to it first. “Oh, no, I ain’t going to no hospital.
You know what spreads faster than syph, missy?
Word around town we got it. Somebody spots a sporting girl making trips to a hospital, and poof.
Customers gone and it don’t stop there neither.
Next come the cops, and I might not look smart, but I know my rights, meaning if we get reported for diseases, we ain’t got no rights.
They come in here and round us up like cattle and dump us in a internment camp for dirty, diseased women. ”
This Virginia Cunningham, who’d seemed so confident, looked very young right then.
Maybe too young and too inexperienced to be involved in this business, which wasn’t any of my business either, but I was making it so because I was, well, me.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. I didn’t think of that,” she said.
“Well now ya know. Charlie, I’m calling Kleinkamp—”
“You can call him, but he won’t come,” Virginia said. “I saw him just a few hours ago.”
“Well what’d he say?” Flossy said. “He had to have a reason.”
“He said he was too tired and it’s not worth the risk.” Virginia sighed like it made her weary too. Women like these weren’t worth the risk is what I was pretty sure she meant. “They’re cracking down on this kind of thing, the Anti-Vice Leaguers, the sheriff.”
With a chill, I looked at Charlie but I kept my mouth shut. This was exactly what she’d told me this morning not to bring up. Beside her, Flossy waved her hand. “Forget that old dick, we’ll just—you know what, we’ll go to Memphis, find a doc up there. It’ll cost a arm and a leg but—”
“You have an electric icebox here?” Virginia asked.
She looked up at the high ceiling, over at the sitting room with strangely little furniture, not sure what to make of this place.
Charlie nodded. “They’ve made these tests much simpler than they used to be, thanks to all the men who came home from the war with diseases …
if Kleinkamp can test in his dirty kitchen, I don’t see why I can’t do them in yours. ”