Astray (20 page)

It makes me shake to think of it. Not about my name so much as about Daddy. When I think of him now, I could just rip him to pieces.

I am quite an independent person. My friends and I go all over the city on the subway trains. I have been up the New York World Building, twenty-two stories high, and seen a moving picture at Koster and Bial’s. (It was a man sneezing, that’s all, but still.) Yet Daddy has always been able to cut me down to size and make me feel like a little idiot girl. When the cycle craze started and I longed for a machine of my own, he said I was too young, and even when I turned twenty-one and asked again, he said surely I wasn’t so immodest as to want to pedal around town in bloomers. Then
the other day I came down all ready for a party and Daddy made a very cutting remark about the neck of my bodice. I told him it was all the rage, but he said I might as well serve up my bosoms on a plate for the fellows. He made me go right upstairs and change my whole ensemble and I was late for the party. And to think that all this time, all these years—well, there’s no other way to put it, but Daddy had bosoms himself.

What kind of monster plays a trick that lasts a lifetime? What kind of woman decides to be a man?

These cards are so old they’ve gone yellow. “Best of wishes from all the boys to good old Murray Hall.” “With the compliments of State Senator Barney Martin to his old friend Murray Hall.” “Merry Christmas, dear Murray, from all your pals on the Committee.”

I never could stay awake when Daddy talked Tammany Hall. Who’d promised his vote in which ward, and which man could be trusted, and which other fellow would slit your throat as soon as look at you. How Daddy’d started out as a nobody fresh off the boat and now he was a professional bondsman, but best of all, he was rich in friends, and what else could a man rely on in this world?

There was that one time Daddy got wild at Skelly’s on Tenth Avenue and whipped a policeman in the street, ended up in the station house. But his buddies squared it in the right quarters, and he was home for breakfast. Momma had been worried near out of her mind. But the Democrats can fix anything in New York. Sometimes it takes a bribe or a riot or maybe even a body in the river, I’ve heard, but the job gets
done. You keep on the right side of the Tammany Hall men, Daddy used to say, you wear a permanent smile.

I wonder what they would say if they could see him now. If they lifted the sheet, as I cannot bear to do. I don’t need to lift it; after all, I know what I’d see. Like looking in some funhouse mirror.

When I went over to draw the curtains just now, I could hear those jackal reporters down below, shouting up at me. “Miss Hall, Miss Hall.” But I will not talk to them. They put words in a person’s mouth.

Yes! Here it is in my hand: “The Last Will and Testament.”

It doesn’t take long to read.

Well, I guess I needn’t worry about anyone marrying me for my money. Oh, Daddy. Was
any
of it true?

It’s not that I’m not grateful for the two hundred dollars, but where’s all the rest gone? What kind of deals did those friends of yours do? And I see that out of that sum I’m supposed to “cause to be erected a suitable headstone over the grave of Cecilia, the deceased wife of the testator.” That is a sweet thought, Daddy, but what would a “suitable headstone” for Momma say?
I Married a Woman, Lord Forgive Me
?

Momma will just have to move on over and make room; I surely can’t afford two headstones if I’m to feed myself this winter. I bet she knew. She was a sweet-looking woman, was Momma, even if she was twice Daddy’s size. Now there is a queer thought: I don’t expect a layperson can spot the difference between a man and a woman after a few years in the grave, when you get down to the plain bones.

Daddy was never seen around the Lower West Side without some class of female on his arm. Younger than me, sometimes; even the maids who came to our office looking for a job. He just couldn’t keep his hands off the opposite … I mean, girls. It saddened Momma so, she stopped speaking to Daddy years before she died.

But I’ve got to try to be merciful, I suppose. There’s nobody else left to forgive him. I guess he had simply got to be a man’s man, and a ladies’ man, and every kind of man, so no one would suspect he was no such thing. Doing his best to fit in, play the game, when in Rome, that sort of thing. I bet he was sick when he tasted his first cigar, but he kept right on. And he got so he could drink his weight in beer and stand up under it too. As if he’d found a book on being a man and was set on following it page by page.

It strikes me now that I do not even know where Daddy came from. He sometimes used to talk about making the crossing, but he never said from where, exactly. Daddy didn’t care to be interrupted with questions when he was telling a story. His tales made the crossing sound such a hoot: all the farmers down in steerage green as grass, and the fiddler carrying on regardless. He had an accent, but not like anyone else’s I’ve known. Could it have been Ireland he started out from? Or Scotland?

I wonder now if it was an adventure, at first, or an escape? Was he hiding from somebody, the first time he put on a cap and a pair of trousers, or did he just like the feel of them? Could he have guessed it would be for always?

Daddy never said much about his life from before he
crossed the ocean. Whatever I asked him, he claimed he couldn’t remember. He liked to say that if you looked back you’d turn to salt. What a curious phrase, “turn to salt.” Did he mean tears? He once said there was nothing set his teeth on edge more than an emigrant sniveling for home.

He doesn’t have a name now either, no more than me. I wonder what he was born. Mary Hall? Jane Hall? Or no kind of Hall at all?

I almost set to laughing when I think of calling Daddy by a girl’s name, and him in no position to stop me. Oh Lord, I could cry to think of him as a Nancy or Eliza.

I don’t even know how old he was when he arrived. I see him at the rail of the ship, heading past the Statue of Liberty, but his face is blank. What is he wearing? I wish I could be there, a foot away, looking at the skyline. Just for a moment. Just to ask why it’s so bad to be a woman.

I guess I could have been a better daughter. I used to get uppity with him when he would forget his key and haul on the bell when he crashed in at two in the morning, especially after Momma died. Daddy used to say I’d inherited his temper and Momma’s sulks together, but now it turns out my faults are all my own.

No wonder he drank. Doctor Gallagher says it was a cancer in the left breast. He says Daddy must have been sick for years and years and never said a word; the cancer had worked right through to the heart. It sounds like woodworm, I can’t help thinking, or like when the mice get into the cheese. What a ninny I was; I thought all those books on medicine Daddy collected were some sort of hobby. I saw
him take a spoonful from a bottle once but he said it was cod-liver oil. Five years of being eaten away, for fear of being found out.

The papers are all in one big heap now, and I’m so cold I had best go down to the kitchen. There’s nothing left to read. Only one last drawer that comes unstuck with a shudder, and there’s nothing in it but a bit of card at the back.

An old brown photograph: a girl with too many ringlets. One of his hussies from the early days? That goes on the top of the pile, facedown; I’ll toss the lot in the range after supper.

Unless.

It couldn’t be.

Daddy?

I turn the picture up, and all of a sudden it changes; I see past the ringlets, into the face. It looks like Daddy dressed up as a girl, for a game. Eyebrows drawn together; a faint smile.

I
have
got his nose.

Well, he looked better in trousers. But I will tuck the picture into my pocket. I did not know before today that you can hate and despise a person and still love him on the other side of all that.

He is still my daddy. Even if he is dead. And a woman.

Doctor Gallagher says “she,” now, when he remembers, and so do the reporters. But I won’t, not ever. Daddy wouldn’t like it.

Daddy’s Girl

According to the death certificate, Murray Hall died on January 16, 1901, and was born around 1831—so lived to be nearly seventy. But nothing about Hall is certain. Born perhaps Mary Anderson, or Mary or Elizabeth Hall, Murray Hall was said to have come from Ireland, Scotland, or New York’s Lower West Side. Hall’s first wife died, or disappeared; the second marriage ended in estrangement after about seven, or perhaps twenty, years. This jumble of facts and speculations comes from the
New York Times
(January 18 and 19 and March 20, 1901), the
New York Tribune
(January 18, 20, and 29 and March 20, 1901),
Munzey’s Magazine
(1901, including pictures), and
The Weekly Scotsman
(February 9, 1901).

Minnie (Imelda) Hall was only twenty-two when her famous father was posthumously exposed as female. One of the few things we know about Minnie is that she refused to talk to reporters. At the inquest she was prompted to refer to her father as “she,” but retorted, “I will never say she.”

NEW MARKET, ONTARIO

1967

WHAT REMAINS

S
he hasn’t asked for me in two months. I check with her nurses, though it’s a little humiliating. “Has Miss Loring by any chance asked for me?” I say. Lightly, as if it doesn’t matter either way.

That’s what they call her: Miss Loring, or sometimes Frances. She’s not Queenie to anyone but me.

I wheeled myself into her room today. She was lying there like a beached whale ready for the ax. “Queenie,” I said, “it’s me. It’s Florence.” Which sounded absurd, as I’ve never had to tell her who I am before, she always knew. What a pass we’ve come to, if I need to introduce myself! Like that line in the Bible:
The people who walk in darkness.
Brains rot like fruit in the end. I don’t pity her for going senile. It’s worse being a witness.

I try to keep a grip on the numbers, myself. The nurses start to worry if you get the numbers wrong. It’s 1967 and I’m eighty-five years old. I should by rights be dead. Queenie’s not even eighty. I ought to have gone first. It shouldn’t be like this.

I always thought it would be all right so long as we ended
up in the same place. She collapsed just before our final exhibition, and I fell sick a week later, and when we were both moved to this Home just north of Toronto, I thought, Well, at least we’ll be together. No need to fuss with cooking or shovel our own snow anymore; we’ll get to talk all day if we want.

But there’s more than one kind of distance that can come between people. This is our third year here. Her door says Miss F. Loring, mine says Miss F. Wyle, and they might as well be a thousand miles apart, instead of a fifty-foot corridor. Since Queenie’s last attack, her eyes barely move when I wheel into her room, and she doesn’t seem to recognize my name.

What’s important, I suppose, is for me to keep remembering. What matters is to hold on to what’s left.

Each one must go alone down the dark valley.

I wrote that poem a long time ago, before I knew what I was talking about.

My father used to say man was the only creature capable of sleeping on his back, so that was how we should sleep. To mark the difference, you see; to show that we were a Higher Form. I did try; I started every night flat on my back, but it hurt my bones and I couldn’t breathe. My father would come to wake me in the morning and find me curled up on my side and shake me awake. “Florence,” he’d roar, “you look like an animal!”

When I was six I found a rooster with a broken leg. I fixed him just fine, mostly because my father said I’d never manage it. It was animals that turned me toward art. I saw a bird, and
then a picture of a bird, and it all came together. If I couldn’t be a bird, then at least I could make one. Once a cat of ours died, and I asked if God had taken her to heaven, and my father said there was no room for animals in heaven. That’s the day I stopped believing in God. Rosa Bonheur, the French sculptor, believed in metempsychosis, which means that human souls migrate into either human or animal forms. She lived with her friend and a whole ark of animals and painted them. I suppose it seemed to her that we’re all just creatures in the end.

Mind you, I’d shoot a dog if it got as crazy as Queenie.

Sixty years this month since we met in that Clay Modeling class in Chicago. She was big and I was small. She was beautiful and I was not. Her family adored her and mine didn’t care for me. She grew up in Geneva, Switzerland; I came from Waverly, Illinois. She thought she liked men and I thought I hated them. She had faith in politics and I wrote poems about trees. She worked in spurts; I did a little every day. All we had in common was a taste for clay.

Today her hands lie on the sheet like withered bananas. I remember a time when they were swift and sure and tireless. Like the Skeena River in full flood, that time I went to the Indian village to model the old totem poles. When was that? Back in the twenties sometime? Damn it. Gone.

That’s us these days, a couple of old totem poles. Tilting at mad angles, silvery as ash, fading into the forest.

At the Art Institute in Chicago, the master used to pinch all us girls on the bottom. He called it the
droit de maître.
Queenie didn’t much mind. I slapped his hand away and
called him a damn fool. Later he spread a rumor we were a couple of Sapphists.

There was another thing Queenie used to say:
You can’t go through life worrying about what people think of you.

Some days she’s got more of a grip than others. She still doesn’t ask for me, but when I go into her room she sometimes seems to know who I am.

I tell her uplifting stories. “Remember Adelaide Johnson, Queenie?”

A flicker of the eyes.

“She was barely twenty when she fell down that elevator shaft in the Chicago Music Hall. Did it stop her?”