Satan's Circus Read online

  In fact, most educated people in New York had seen the young man’s face. He was newly famous, the author of a book that everyone who cared for literary fashion had devoured, lionized in the way that only the very latest writers can be, and certainly so well known that what seemed at first a small affair threatened to turn into a scandal. Charles Becker, who did not list reading among his pleasures, was one of the few people in Satan’s Circus who would not have recognized the distinctive features of his adversary and at least paused to consider whether it was worth the risk of tangling with him.

  The man’s name was Stephen Crane, and he was widely acclaimed as one of the finest writers in America. “Bohemian in the best sense,” according to the New York Journal, and by some way the most celebrated of Manhattan’s literary men-about-town, Crane—in the New York of 1896—possessed renown equal to that enjoyed by any politician or famous sportsman. The author, still only twenty-four, had been welcomed into the grandest mansions on Fifth Avenue and become acquainted with many of the city’s leading public servants, among them the commissioners of police. His doings were followed with interest in the daily papers. Should he choose to appear before the New York magistrates, testifying on behalf of a mere streetwalker, it would cause an undoubted sensation.

  It was not, in fact, unusual for Crane to be found slumming in Satan’s Circus. True, his shining reputation rested on his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, a frank account of the fear experienced by a soldier during his first taste of battle, which had enjoyed a stunning and complete success when it appeared in 1895. But Crane’s real interests lay elsewhere. His first book had been a sympathetic portrait of a New York prostitute, so bold and avant-garde that it had failed to find a publisher. His next was an equally unsparing analysis of alcoholism. His newspaper articles—the tremendous acclaim accorded to The Red Badge ensured that editors were keen to hire him—concerned themselves chiefly with the lives of New York’s most impoverished citizens, and as if that were not enough to shock the more genteel of his admirers, the fashionable young writer chose to live not in a well-heeled part of town but on a disreputable stretch of Sixth Avenue, where the poor were not simply a hobby; they were his neighbors. Crane’s fascination with the lives of bums, drug addicts, and prostitutes set him apart from almost all of his contemporaries, and though his articles sold papers, even the editors who commissioned him privately thought his pieces “queer.” Before long, the writer was dressing as a tramp to write an account of life in a downtown flophouse, and lining up half the night with beggars in a blizzard for a handout of food.

  Crane’s most recent foray into Satan’s Circus had been his most controversial yet. Returning from a trip out west, the novelist had turned in a highly informative article on New York’s numerous opium dens, going so far as to smoke the drug himself in order to inform his readers of its principal effects. His employer, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, was sufficiently encouraged by the ensuing furor to commission yet another selection of pieces. This time (the newspaper proudly announced) Crane’s canvas would be broader: nothing less than “a series on life in New York.” But the author was not ready to abandon his old stomping grounds just yet. “He chose,” the Journal added in trumpeting the serial, “the police courts as his first subject.”

  It was for this reason that Stephen Crane had begun the morning of September 14, 1896, at one of Manhattan’s busiest courts and spent the day examining the array of petty criminals and prostitutes, picked up by the police in the course of the previous evening, who were hauled one after another before an unsmiling magistrate. He was a talented observer, and the sheer mechanics of the process obsessed him—not least, he wrote, “the kaleidoscopic view of the characters who passed rapidly before the judicial gaze.” But there was still much Crane felt he did not understand. He needed to see how the men and women who had come before the bench lived their lives away from the court. It was vital, he concluded, to “study these victims of injustice in their own haunts.”

  That decision explained Crane’s appearance at Broadway Garden the next evening, his choice of dinner companions, and the enthusiasm with which he had made the acquaintance of Ruby Young. It also explained the writer’s perverse willingness to offer testimony on Young’s behalf the next day. A starring role before the magistrates, even as a witness, would certainly add interest to a newspaper account. But even the impetuous Crane had to acknowledge that there was a good deal of truth in what Sergeant McDermott had told him. Associating with a prostitute was scandalous in any circumstance. Appearing in court to defend one could scarcely fail to stain his reputation.

  In his published account of events at Broadway Garden, certainly, Crane was careful to attribute only the noblest of motives to himself. He was, he implied, so chivalrous that Young’s profession was a mere irrelevance; the simple fact that a woman had been badly treated by a bullying policeman overrode consideration of her station. These protestations of nobility won over most of his admirers and were, inevitably, broadcast by the Journal, which stood squarely behind its man. But—as Sergeant McDermott had predicted—the youthful novelist’s true role in the Ruby Young affair struck other men as questionable. Staider newspapers than Hearst’s found Crane’s willingness to consort with prostitutes discreditable, no matter what his reasons, and several concluded that the writer’s motives were not as pure as he implied. Crane, the Boston Traveler went so far as to observe, had probably entered the entertainment district “on a genuine ‘lark’ and, when his companion was apprehended, invented the tale about searching for book material. That is the way it looks to a cold and unprejudiced world.” There were others who openly suspected that, far from being a victim of an overzealous cop, Crane had engineered the whole affair in order to provide himself with dramatic copy for an article and—not incidentally—the means with which to criticize a police force he believed to be oppressive and whose men he mistrusted and despised. In this interpretation Patrolman Becker, and not Ruby Young, was the true victim of entrapment.

  “The policeman flatly lied,” Crane protested in the Journal. But even among the writer’s friends there were many who thought that he should never have become involved in such a grubby fracas. “Go home,” a fellow reporter advised him as he left the Nineteenth Precinct building. “Your own participation in the affair doesn’t look very respectable. Go home.”

  Ruby Young was arraigned the next day.

  Jefferson Market Police Court, where Becker’s prisoner was brought shortly before noon, was a scowling Gothic monstrosity that loomed over a corner on Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue, its ornate redbrick facade making it look more like a place of worship than a court of law. “The windows,” Crane wrote in his own description of the place,

  were high and saintly, of the shape that is found in churches. From time to time a policeman at the door spoke sharply to some incoming person. “Take your hat off!” He displayed in his voice the horror of a priest when the sanctity of the chapel is defied or forgotten.

  The Market’s magistrates processed an endless parade of drunks, streetwalkers, delinquent saloonkeepers, and petty thieves with mechanical efficiency, devoting just a few minutes to each case. Most of the infractions they dealt with were minor and were punished with small fines. The more persistent offenders might receive sentences of a few days in the cells.

  By the time Young was called to the bar, the courthouse was crowded, as it was every day, with a throng of clerks, policemen, witnesses, and gawking spectators, many of whom had turned attendance at the Market into a sort of hobby. The latter were, Crane had once noted with a frisson of disgust, mere parasites who wore “an air of being in wait for a cry of anguish, some loud painful protestation that would bring the proper thrill to their jaded, world-weary nerves.” When, at the end of an earlier hearing, a young servant girl was sent to jail for theft and let out a howl of anguish, “the loungers, many of them, underwent a spasmodic movement as if they had been knived.”

  In ordin
ary circumstances Young’s hearing would soon have been over. Women picked up for soliciting in Satan’s Circus had almost no chance of mounting a defense, and the word of a policeman was always preferred to theirs. Still, Ruby had done what she could with her appearance. Despite her long night in the cells, the auburn hair that made her so recognizable had been pinned up and artfully arranged, and although she had slept in the clothes she had worn the previous night, one of the reporters in the courthouse wrote that she “certainly did not look dissipated and was very neatly and prettily dressed.” The girl sobbed violently, and not entirely for effect, as she was led forward, and stood before Magistrate Robert C. Cornell “flushed and downcast” while a charge of soliciting was read against her.

  Becker gave his evidence first. Clad now in his patrolman’s uniform, with its thick blue jacket and large shiny buttons fastened up to the neck, he seemed a much more imposing figure than he had in plainclothes hours earlier. He was strongly built, with a bulky body that was mostly muscle, large hands, broad shoulders, and an impressive chest. A billy club and a service-issue Colt revolver protruded from his belt, and he carried his tall white helmet tucked under one arm.

  As he came striding into court, Becker looked like a policeman, too. He had a broad, regular face, with brown eyes set a little wide, and was, one reporter noted, “dark in hair and skin. His nose is big and straight, jutting out uncompromisingly over a long upper lip, a mouth like the cut of a knife, and a chin that sticks out squarely at the end of a jaw that looks like a granite block.” The whole effect was set off by a thick, bristling mustache of the sort then favored by members of the force. Becker kept his neatly trimmed, so that it did not droop down around the corners of his mouth as the mustaches worn by older officers generally did, and his hair was short and closely cropped. His military bearing and impressive looks struck many of the spectators in the court, and though his speech and manner were evidently less assured—“he talks like a man who might have had an education in the public school,” another reporter sneered—he delivered his statement in a clipped and practiced tone that brooked little argument.

  “What have you got to say to this charge, young woman?” Cornell asked the girl when he was done.

  Ruby had listened to Becker’s account with slowly mounting anger. Now she attempted to defend herself. “The charge is false,” she wailed through squalls of tears. The girl denied emphatically that she had talked to any man outside Broadway Garden; Becker, she swore, could not possibly have seen anything inappropriate. The patrolman had invented the charge because he had a grudge against her.

  Allegations of police corruption of this sort were heard each day at the police court, and just as frequently dismissed; they were, after all, almost the only defense open to women caught touting for business on the streets. But the story that Ruby Young now told was so unexpected that it raised a shout of laughter in the room.

  “The charge is founded,” the girl explained, “upon the desire of this policeman to assist a couple of brother officers in gratifying a spite they have against me.” Becker, Young continued, her voice hardening in indignation, had charged her with soliciting as a result of an incident that had occurred about a month earlier, when a certain Patrolman Rosenberg—also of the Nineteenth Precinct, and like Becker in plainclothes—had accosted her at midnight. The girl, misled by the shadows and the policeman’s swarthy skin, had made a fatal mistake: thinking that Rosenberg was a black man trying to pick her up, she had abused him and chased him off. “I told him to go about his business,” she added to suppressed amusement, “adding that I wanted nothing to do with negroes.” Rosenberg, incensed, detained her on the spot, and when the story had emerged at the courthouse the next day, the patrolman was so humiliated by the titters running round the court that he had sworn revenge and told Ruby that he would henceforth arrest her on sight. The girl had been locked up each time she had set foot in Satan’s Circus since.

  Young’s story gave even Magistrate Cornell pause. “Is there any doubt in this case, Officer?” he queried, turning back to Becker.

  The policeman kept his head. “None at all,” he returned airily. “She is an old hand and always lies about it.”

  Cornell returned his gaze to the girl standing at the bar and pondered for a moment. “You do not deny you frequent the Tenderloin, do you?” he inquired.

  Ruby started to reply, then hesitated. “There would be no use in making such a denial,” she murmured at last.

  That settled matters for Cornell. No respectable woman, after all, would be found walking through the vice district alone, and he was about to issue Young with a fine when there was a sudden commotion on the public benches. Magistrate, court officers, and spectators all swung around to find the source of the disturbance. “The interruption,” the New York Sun’s reporter noted, “came from a slender young man of medium height with tawny hair parted in the middle and falling in great masses over his temples.” He had jumped to his feet and was attempting to identify himself. Stephen Crane had kept his promise to attend the hearing.

  Crane had arrived in court several hours earlier, avoiding any fuss. He had kept his peace while he heard the evidence against his casual acquaintance. Now that he could see that Young was adjudged guilty, though, he could no longer remain silent. “Just a word, Your Honor,” the writer called to Magistrate Cornell. “I know this girl to be innocent.” In the shocked silence that followed, Ruby (Crane himself would write) “in uncomprehending wonder gazed at him. She could hardly understand how it was that he dared to defend her.”

  Cornell, who knew the writer slightly, gestured his assent, and Crane rattled off a hurried, nervous summary of events at Broadway Garden, insisting that he had kept the redhead constantly in sight as he left the premises—a dubious proposition, as it happened, since he had certainly turned his back on her in order to take her friend the chorus girl to her streetcar stop. But the novelist’s name and fame lent added weight to his testimony, and so cast doubt on Becker’s word. The statement was certainly enough for Magistrate Cornell. He ordered that Ruby be discharged forthwith.

  “But, Your Honor,” Young stammered as she stepped down, “I will be arrested on sight the next time I show my face in the precinct.”

  “I will look out for that,” Cornell assured her. Perhaps fearing that the magistrate would change his mind, the girl hurried from the court, vanishing into the lunchtime crowds that rushed along Tenth Street. Crane followed after her more slowly, a magnet for the dozen court reporters who surrounded him on the steps outside.

  “I well knew I was risking a reputation that I have worked hard to build,” the writer told them all with calculated modesty.

  But she was a woman and unjustly accused, and I did what was my duty as a man. I realized that if [I] should stand tamely by, in such a case, our wives and sisters would be at the mercy of any ruffian who disgraces the uniform…. The arrest was an outrage, and I’d do the same thing again if I had to, even if I lost any little reputation I may have and strived to get. If the girl will have the officer prosecuted for perjury, I will gladly support her.

  The reporters wrote down this whole speech, scribbling away in shorthand to transcribe it all. As they did so, a tall man jogged down the steps behind Crane’s back, twisting to glare at the triumphant novelist as he passed. It was Charley Becker, angry and humiliated, leaving the courthouse with his sworn testimony ignored and his honor cast in doubt. The patrolman shot a second glance at Crane as he went past: a look of malevolence and hatred. Perhaps fortunately, his accuser failed to notice it.

  Becker gave his side of the story later that same day to a reporter from the Journal who tracked him down on his usual beat, patrolling Broadway between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-ninth streets. Predictably enough, it differed considerably from Stephen Crane’s.

  “I arrested the woman because of what I, myself, saw,” the policeman said. “If Mr. Crane says I took her away from a party of persons with whom she was conversing, he is m
istaken. To do such a thing would be simply suicidal for a man in my position. I am in this business not for glory, but to earn my living honestly. I wish to retain my position and, if possible, to get ahead.”

  It was only half the truth, of course. If Becker had not despised Ruby Young before he arrested her—and, given her charges against Rosenberg and the well-known clannishness of the police, he probably had—he had good reason to do so now. The next time he encountered the girl along his beat, at three in the morning on October 4, he walked up behind her, seized her by the throat, kicked her, and threw her to the ground. A crowd of passersby intervened before he could inflict real damage. A few days later, the little redhead was attacked again, this time by another prostitute. Ruby’s assailant, a handsome-looking, hard-faced Irish girl known throughout the Tenderloin as “Big Chicago May,” struck her a fierce blow on the head, and “a lively fight ensued.” May, it would emerge, was a close friend of Becker’s.

  Such continued ill treatment proved counterproductive, for it merely steeled Young’s resolve. As New York slid toward bitter autumn, she thought with increasing frequency of Crane, of how he had stepped forward to defend her at Jefferson Market, and of the promise he had made outside the court: “If the girl will have the officer prosecuted for perjury, I will gladly support her.” As it happened, the novelist himself had decided not to press charges of his own against the police and had also rebuffed an invitation from Chief Peter Conlin, the ranking officer of the department, to give a longer statement regarding the whole affair. Probably Crane’s sudden reticence owed something to the warnings he was now receiving from the Nineteenth Precinct, not least the suggestion that he himself could well face prosecution for immoral living if he continued to pursue his case. But Ruby had little left to lose. Three weeks after the incident at Broadway Garden, she went into the police headquarters on Mulberry Street and pressed formal charges against Becker and a second officer from the same precinct, alleging that both men had been consistently harassing her.