Free Sex Wars by Marge Piercy

but little grace, screeching out some incomprehensible and repetitive lyrics. Anthony suddenly realized that they were exposing their most private parts. Blushing, he turned away to fix his gaze on the tabletop scarred with initials and phrases from a dozen penknives. Around him men were rising to their feet and cheering, pounding the tabletops with their tankards, whistling and clapping. So this was how Edward spent his Friday evenings. Anthony despaired of saving him. Edward was too far gone, he suspected, for any arguments, any pleas to reach him. Anthony stood and made his way out. Edward didn’t notice. He was banging on the tabletop with the worst of them, shouting like a wild beast.
    The air in the city was never pure, but compared to the stinking filth he had been breathing, it felt clean as a country brook. He drew deep breaths into his lungs, appreciating the breeze off the East River as he marched from the Bowery. It was too late for Edward. He had already succumbed. But there were thousands of Edwards, impressionable and innocent young boys crowding into the city as Edward and he himself had in order to better themselves—and better was not what happened. It took courage and a deep sense of what was right to stand against the ubiquitous sporting culture the city offered to young men—a tribal thing, appealing to their lowest passions but making it feel as if such activities were the only way for a man to become a man. He had seen the clerks passing around the sporting papers that featured reports on the “best” whorehouses and gambling hells. He longed to be a sword in the hands of the living God tosmite the corrupters. For a moment as he walked south, he felt weak and almost silly, swearing battle with everything around him. Then his resolve stiffened and he thrust back his shoulders. Edward was wrong about the way to be a man. He would go his own way, the right way, even if he lost the only friend he’d made in this wild and dangerous city.

FIVE
    V ICTORIA MET HER HUSBAND James’s train. It was the Vanderbilt line, New York Central, which she viewed as a good omen. Both her children arrived with him, Byron, her toothless idiot son, at fourteen unable even to speak, her daughter Zulu Maud, just turned seven. “I swear, you’ve grown in the three weeks since I saw you!”
    Zulu flushed with pride. Her braids hung halfway down her back. Neither of her children had inherited her looks, but she loved them. Byron was sweet, more like a pet than a son. Zulu was fiercely loyal to her mother and would do anything to please. Victoria embraced them; then Tennie went off in a cab with them while James and Victoria collected the luggage. “Did matters go well?” James asked, taking her arm. He carried a satchel while a porter brought along his trunks.
    “We’ve made a slight connection. What happens next depends on our interview with him tomorrow.” She held up her free hand with crossed fingers.
    “It must go well.” James frowned. “Did you remember everything we studied and agreed upon?”
    They ambled along slowly, for Colonel Blood had received half a dozen war wounds during the campaigns of the Civil War, one of them in his thigh. Preferring his skill to the dangerous mercies of the camp doctors, he had dug out the bullet with his own knife. He would always have a slight limp, but he carried himself with military bearing. She had met a number of men who styled themselves Colonel; Vanderbilt himself liked to be called Commodore. But James really had been a colonel, and a heroicone. He was an attractive man, with longish dark hair, regular features, a dark beard that left his finely modeled chin bare. He was tall and lean, dashing in spite of his limp.
    Before the war, he had been a conventional man in a conventional marriage with a conventionally respectable job. He was auditor of the city of St. Louis and held the presidency of a local railroad. He had married well and lived a prosperous bourgeois