Sin and the Second City is assiduously researched. And it is well put together, mixing brief and longer chapters rather than striving for a more arbitrary format. But Abbott has to narrate and debunk, and her task is complicated. She had to wade through mountains of tabloid coverage about young women forced into prostitution; one such case, about a woman named Mona Marshall, whose story did not stand up to close scrutiny, generated about a half-million pages of newspaper attention. It's no small matter to sift the facts from the hyperbole.
Abbott also had to contend with the mixed blessing of Minna Everleigh's mythmaking. Minna's stories, many spoon-fed to a writer named Charles Washburn for Come Into My Parlor, a book Abbott cites frequently, have a theatricality that wards off any candor. Some even border on vaudeville. "Come, I'll show you where a man put his hand last night," Minna supposedly told a handyman when the brothel's Gold Room was damaged. "If it's all the same to you," came the rejoinder, "I'd rather have a glass of beer."
Sin and the Second City winds up requiring greater intimacy than Abbott can deliver. It's hardly surprising that a book about prostitution has a basic remoteness; after all, Abbott has no firsthand sources and is dealing with characters who dissembled and exaggerated to earn their living. And the Everleighs prove especially resistant to scrutiny. They both reduced their real ages by 12 years, and part of their early history remains mysterious. Ada was signing holiday greeting cards with Minna's name in December 1948, three months after her sister had died.
This book cannot fathom the sisters, but it has a sadder kind of candor. One report on turn-of-the-century prostitution finds a young woman who says, "I ain't ashamed of what I did," even though she began selling herself as a 7-year-old. Since her mother was also a prostitute, she equates herself with a boy whose father runs a grocery. "He helps him in the store," says this speaker, whose story is echoed endlessly in Abbott's ultimately grim story. "He helps him in the store. Well, my mother didn't sell groceries."
RSS