“Yeah, what if it goes all wrong?” said Jennie.
“What could go wrong?” I asked.
“Everything!” said Gladys. “You won’t know what you’re doing, and you could look like a dummy! And if it hurts, you don’t want to find yourself blubbering in the arms of some guy you like!”
Now, this was the direct opposite of everything I’d been taught about sex thus far in life. My school friends and I had always been given to understand that a man would prefer it if we were virgins. We had also been instructed to save the flower of our girlhood for somebody whom we not only liked, but loved. The ideal scenario—the aspiration which we’d all been raised to embrace—was that you were supposed to have sex with only one person in your entire life, and that person should be your husband, whom you met at an Emma Willard school prom.
But I had been misinformed! These girls thought otherwise, and they knew things. Moreover, I now felt a sudden sting of anxiety about how old I was! For heaven’s sake, I was nineteen already; what had I been doing with my time? And I’d been in New York already for two entire weeks. What was I waiting for?
“Is that hard to do?” I asked. “I mean, for the first time?”
“Oh, God no, Vivvie, don’t be dense,” said Gladys. “It’s the easiest thing there ever was. In fact, you don’t have to do anything. The man will do it for you. But you must get started, at least.”
“Yes, she must get started,” said Jennie definitively.
But Celia was looking at me with an expression of concern.
“Do you want to stay a virgin, Vivvie?” she asked, fixing me with that unsettlingly beautiful gaze of hers. And while she might as well have been asking, “Do you want to stay an ignorant child, seen as pitiable by this gathering of mature and worldly women?” the intention behind the question was sweet. I think she was looking out for me—making sure I wasn’t being pushed.
But the truth was, quite suddenly I did not want to be a virgin anymore. Not even for another day.
“No,” I said. “I want to get started.”
“We’d be only too glad to help, dear,” said Jennie.
“Are you on your monthlies right now? Gladys asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then we can get started right away. Who do we know . . . ?” Gladys pondered.
“It needs to be someone nice,” said Jennie. “Someone considerate.”
“A real gentleman,” said Gladys.
“Not some lunkhead,” said Jennie.
“Someone who’ll take precautions,” Gladys said.
“Not someone who’ll get rough with her,” said Jennie.
Celia said, “I know who.”
And that’s how their plan took shape.
—
Dr. Harold Kellogg lived in an elegant town house just off Gramercy Park. His wife was out of town, because it was a Saturday. (Mrs. Kellogg took the train to Danbury every Saturday, to visit her mother in the country.) And so the appointment for my deflowering was set at the exceedingly unromantic hour of ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.
Dr. and Mrs. Kellogg were respected members of the community. They were the sorts of people my parents knew. This is part of the reason Celia thought he might be good for me—because we came from the same social class. The Kelloggs had two sons at Columbia University who were both studying medicine. Dr. Kellogg was a member of the Metropolitan Club. In his free time, he enjoyed bird-watching, collecting stamps, and having sex with showgirls.
But Dr. Kellogg was discreet about his liaisons. A man of his reputation could not afford to be seen about town with a young woman whose physical composition made her look like the figurehead of a sailing ship (it would be noticed), so the showgirls visited him at his town house—and always on Saturday mornings, when his wife was gone. He would let them in through the service entrance, offer them champagne, and entertain them in the privacy of his guest room. Dr. Kellogg gave the girls money for their time and trouble, and then sent them on their way. It all had to be over by lunchtime, because he saw patients in the afternoon.
All the showgirls at the Lily knew Dr. Kellogg. They rotated visits to him, depending on who was least hungover on a Saturday morning, or who was “down to buttons” and needed a bit of pocket money for the week.
When the girls told me the financial details of this arrangement, I said in shock, “Do you mean to tell me that Dr. Kellogg pays you for sex?”
Gladys looked at me with disbelief: “Well, what’d you think, Vivvie? That we pay him?”
—
Now, Angela, listen: I understand that there is a word for women who offer sexual favors to gentlemen in exchange for money. In fact, there are many words for this. But none of the showgirls with whom I associated in New York City in 1940 described themselves in that manner—not even as they were actively taking money from gentlemen in exchange for sexual favors. They couldn’t possibly be prostitutes; they were showgirls. They had quite a lot of pride in that designation, having worked hard to achieve it, and it’s the only title they would answer to. But the situation was simply this: showgirls did not earn a great deal of money, you see, and everyone has to get by in this world somehow (shoes are expensive!), and so these girls had developed a system of alternative arrangements for earning a bit of extra cash on the side. The Dr. Kelloggs of the world were part of that system.
Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure that Dr. Kellogg himself regarded these young women as prostitutes. He more likely called them his “girlfriends”—an aspirational, if somewhat delusional, designation which surely would have made him feel better about himself, too.
In other words, despite all evidence that sex was being exchanged for money (and sex was being exchanged for money, make no mistake about it) nobody here was engaging in prostitution. This was merely an alternative arrangement that suited everyone involved. You know: from each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs.
I’m so glad we were able to clear that up, Angela.
I certainly wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.
—
Now, Vivvie, what you have to understand is that he’s boring,” said Jennie. “If you get bored, don’t go thinking this is always how it feels to fool around.”
“But he’s a doctor,” said Celia. “He’ll do right for our Vivvie. That’s what matters this time.”
(Our Vivvie! Were there ever more heartwarming words? I was their Vivvie!)
It was now Saturday morning, and the four of us were sitting at a cheap diner on Third Avenue and Eighteenth Street, beneath the shadow of the el, waiting for it to be ten o’clock. The girls had already showed me Dr. Kellogg’s town house and the back entrance I was to use, which was just around the corner. Now we were drinking coffee and eating pancakes while the girls gave me excited last-minute instructions. It was awfully early in the day—on a weekend, no less—for three showgirls to be wide awake and lively, but none of them had wanted to miss this.
“He’s going to use a safety, Vivvie,” Gladys said. “He always does, so you don’t need to worry.”
“It doesn’t feel as good with a safety,” Jennie said, “but you’ll need it.”
I’d never heard the term “safety” before, but I guessed from context that it was probably a sheath, or a rubber—a device I’d learned about in my Hygiene seminar at Vassar. (I’d even handled one, which had been passed from girl to girl like a limp, dissected toad.) If it meant something else, I supposed I would find out soon enough, but I wasn’t about to ask.