Madam Read Online Free

like all the others. That was how she saw them all: trapped, secretly coming to her for escape from their wives, their families, their lives. But just because they looked like men didn’t mean they weren’t still little boys. How many of them weren’t still fascinated with the toy between their legs? And how many of them weren’t still searching for Mama’s acceptance? For a quarter of an hour, she’d play with that toy, entertain it, satisfy it. For a quarter of an hour, she would also be Mama. She would smile as if she fancied him just the way he was. She would make him the center of her world no matter if he had tattered clothes, dirty fingernails, or a lifetime of failures; no matter if he had a face only his real mother could love but perhaps didn’t.
    Mary sucked in her breath. She sat back on her calves and mustered up her most sultry voice. Then she purred to his loins, “You’re a good boy.”
    His eyes urgently reconnected with hers.
    “A good boy,” he breathed. He let out a quivering sigh, then murmured reassuringly to himself, “A very good boy.”
    Mary watched him, feeling the vulnerability of the moment. On both sides. Maybe, she supposed, it wasn’t so bad to trip up every once in a while, to be able to hold hope for another person and expect them to be the best way. Yes, she thought, allowing her face to soften, perhaps it was nice to know that Venus Alley hadn’t completely hardened her.
    Grabbing Mary’s hair, the john finished with a yelp that sounded like someone stepped on a dog’s tail. And then, lightning-fast, he jumped up. The intensity was so abruptly broken, it was as if it had never happened. With a quick swoop, he pulled up his pants and snapped his suspenders. Then he reached for his billfold. For a moment, he paused, fingering the bills.
    Mary tightened the drawstrings of her chippie, its fraying, thinned cotton just barely serving the purpose of covering her. Eagerly, she watched the man touch each bill, his lips silently moving as he counted. If he could just give me an extra dollar, she thought, please, just one extra dollar—we could eat well this whole week and put some coins aside for the baby.
    Refusing to look at her now, he asked, “How old’re you?”
    Mary brushed wisps of her long, dark hair behind her ear. “Nineteen,” she said.
    The man’s jaw tightened. Without removing any bills, he pocketed his billfold and turned to the door.
    “Mistah . . . ?” Mary started, taking a barefoot step toward him.
    He unfolded his hand, and some change tumbled from his palm onto the floor. The crib door smacked shut behind him.
    The coins spun on the floorboards before falling. Mary scanned where they landed—a quarter, two dimes, and a muddy coin she barely recognized. She crouched down and picked it up, inspecting both sides. A picayune? She traced her finger along its weathered surface. 1853.
    “Dastard!” she announced to the emptiness of her crib. Although she was too young to remember when picayunes were penny currency, she knew of the coin from her mama’s stories. Mama would tell of earning a picayune per trick, only that was back in the days of the Swamp, which was as close as any place could come to Devil’s territory.
    The Swamp was filled with outlaws and outcasts and, as Mama would say, folks so poor they didn’t even own a last name. It was only right that these most undesirable folks of New Orleans staked their claim on the most undesirable part of the bayou.
    But her mama wasn’t undesirable at all, not with her auburn hair and dimpled grin—no, her mama just had the unfortunate luck to be born to a penniless drunkard who drove his wife to madness. And so, with nowhere else to go, Mama landed herself in the Swamp, where she lived in a brothel in the mud, among clouds of gnats and mosquitoes and wandering gators and copperheads. Murders would tally nearly a dozen a week in the Swamp, and it was common knowledge that even the police were afraid to