Do what you must

Like it or not, sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. What Alma decides she has to do in her West Virginia town in 1924 is open a brothel. Julianna Baggott tells us the story, based on her own grandmother's experiences, in her profound 2003 novel The Madam.

When the novel opens, Alma and Henry, her husband, operate a boarding house for show people. Her tenants include an aged bear, part of an act. She also has three kids. She makes extra money working in a hosiery factory.

Then Henry stupidly buys a trunk found in a shipwreck off the Florida coast, believing it contains treasure. He and Alma leave the children behind — Irving to mind the house (now empty of tenants) and Lettie and Willard at a Catholic orphanage — and head for Florida. The trunk's contents are worthless, of course, and Henry, broken by the disappointment, sends Alma back alone.

She has already quit her job, which didn't pay much anyway, and the boarding house won't support her family, so Alma turns it into a brothel to pay her bills. Prostitution always remains only a prominent background for this story, which has more to do with Alma and her family, as well as a few other major characters. Dimwitted Willard remains in the orphanage, where the rigid routine suits him. Sensitive Irving is soon old enough to start trying to find his own way in the world. Lettie avoids becoming a prostitute, yet her teen romance with an abusive policeman makes the life of a prostitute seem almost idyllic.

By the novel's end, Alma discovers there is something else, even more disagreeable than opening a whorehouse, that she must do for the good of her family.

This story about making difficult choices is powerful stuff that probably generated some interesting book club discussions when the novel was new.