My Notorious Life (60 page)

—You were born in New York, said Mrs. T. —And so were your two sisters.

And that’s how it was that Joe was twenty years of age when he set out to find me, and two years later, he did.

—I always felt there was a secret, he said. —At last I know it.

*  *  *

A secret is a dangerous article. While I have kept many for others, I mistakenly believed I did not have a secret of my own. A secret is what will make you exposed to ruin and perhaps for that reason I did not excavate what was buried so deep amongst the shells and husks and peelings of my constitution. Hid like that, an old onion sprouting and decaying in the cellar, my secret threatened to rot me from the inside. I did not confess it even to myself, how I loved him. Yet when at last after so long apart my husband Charlie greeted me at the Park Place Station, his face puckered and a tear in his eye, my secret flowered up. To my own shock out it came.

—I do love you, I blurted very soft. But I might as well have said to him,
You do love me.
Because at last through my own mistrusting orphan eyes I seen that he did. It was there in his face and it was there in the fact of him standing on the platform. He did not let me down. After all these years, I seen love was not only a poem of wild red sparkles. It was Charlie in his rumpled suit, his hair gone salty at the sides, holding the hand of our girl, and bringing my lost brother to me.

—What do you think I have in here? he whispered in my ear, patting his trouser pocket rather suggestive as our little family proceeded from the train station.

—Mr. Jones! I said, pretending shock, and he stopped my mouth with his own.

—It’s not Mr. Jones it’s Mr. _____ now, says he, and then from beneath my shawl with a flourish he withdrew a pamphlet about a White Star sailing
steamer, bound for Liverpool, three days hence. —We’ll have ourselves a stateroom, Missus. He winked, waving a fan of tickets at me.

—Liverpool? I said, counting six tickets altogether.

—Then on from there to London.

—Who’s the other three tickets for besides us?

—Joe’s coming with us, for starters. And Greta’s invited, with her son.

The news was a poultice to heal my scarry heart. We were off all together. Me and Charlie with our girl, and our longlost Joe who stood with me now, and Greta who stood with me for years and had stood up for me at the coroner’s inquest, Charlie said.

—You should’ve seen our Greta, he told me. —She wept up and down at those inspectors and carried on over her dear employer, Mrs. Jones, dead of suicide, and telling all the assembled how Mr. Comstock drove you to it with his sneakery, how you talked of suicide for he filled you with such despair you wished to die.

—He did fill me with despair. He still does.

That terrible morning, Charlie said, Greta had scuttled Cordelia Purdy down the backstairs and off to Trenton with a purse of gold and promise of more, to buy her silence. Dear Greta the companion of my youth had stood at the grave in Sleepy Hollow weeping my name and come home to Annabelle to comfort our girl these long months, telling her
Liebchen
you will see your mother again, your father promised and would not deceive you.

Within twenty four hours, Greta my true friend and her boy Willi also arrived in Boston, and while we waited for our departure we all stayed several nights in the bosom of luxury at the Hotel Vendome in the Back Bay. The place was lit through with electric lamps, and Charlie and me flicked the lights off and on like we were puppeteers over a troop of fireflies. Greta said she had never slept on such linens, and Willi and Annabelle ran along the hallways and went up and down the vertical railway lift between the floors. Joe went out exploring Boston, for he announced it was full of history, and he had a passion for all things historical. —I’m going out to see the town they call the Cradle of Liberty, he said, heading for the door.

—If you find it, bring it back here, for perhaps we’ll need it. A midwife is always needing a cradle.

But Joe came back from exploring and declared Boston was only half
a city. —It doesn’t even have an elevated railway, he said, —and New York has more than one. He couldn’t wait to get to London to see the Paddington Station and the London underground. My brother, it seemed, had a tedious fondness for trains that I did not share (between him and me, that much hadn’t changed), but I smiled at his excitement as he discussed the wonders of steam locomotives and subway tunnels. He was our same Joe, wasn’t he? And wouldn’t he have had a great deal to discuss with our sister Dutch? seeing as how she’d lived so long with railroad magnates. But they wouldn’t have that talk, now, or any.

*  *  *

On September 19th, our little troop of emigrants went down to the Mystic Wharves of Boston and presented our papers under the name Mr. & Mrs. _______ which was imprinted on the passenger lists, along with the names of my brother Joseph Trow, and Greta ______ and her son Willi. Our collected trunks and luggage was only clothing, and a few selected books and curios. On the morning of the following day, we sailed for Liverpool, England, in three separate staterooms, with stewardesses to attend us and music in the dining room nightly.

Out on the deck, after we had our sea legs, Belle flew a little kite off the side of the ship, her hair a flag in the wind. —Come here, you wee nelligan, I told her, —and let me comb your raggedy urchin hair.

—I am not a nurchin! she cried, and flung her arms around my neck and kissed me and declared for the hundredth time that she would never let me go away again ever, and I promised I would not, nor even let her out of my sight, and I did not for a long time after that. As the ship forged and steamed ahead over the waves, fire in its belly and wind in its sails, the family of us, mother and daughter, father and uncle, Greta and Willi, strolled up and down, fed crumbs to seabirds, breathed the salt air like it was a cure we were taking. We sat in the deck chairs wrapped in blankets, we played Whist and Charades and Twenty Questions with the other passengers. We were missing only our sister, our Dutchess. Eleven days after we left her sad lonely bones back in the United States of America we landed in Liverpool, and from there we made our way to London in a couple of hired carriages.

Money was not an object, Charlie had explained. He sold our house for three hundred fifty thousand dollars, and liquidated the assets of Madame
DeBeausacq, valued at one MILLION dollars, such that when we got to London we was able to set up housekeeping in fancy St. ______ and later stake Joe to his own place and set him up in business as manufacturers of patent medicines, and send Belle to the Girls Academy where she quickly learned to speak very British, and to wear tortoiseshell combs in her hair. She went to symphonies with her friend Clarissa and to see Gilbert & Sullivan’s performance of
H.M.S. Pinafore
on the London stage, and dance the waltz. Altogether she was not a nurchin at all, as she used to say so charmingly, not a nurchin like her father and mother was, called Street Arab and Guttersnipe and Little Wanderer. She was a lady, pure and refined, with a grand piano in her parlor and a closet full of silks.

*  *  *

These days, years into the new century, Joe has become an expert at pharmaceuticals, and the business of mixing various remedies provides him and his family a good living. He lives not two doors away from me and Charlie here in London, on an excellent street which cannot be named. My enemies would hunt me down and smite me if they knew that I’m not dead under the pines in Sleepy Hollow. My hope is to torment them with these memoirs of my notorious life to let them know I have lived refined and happy across the sea. While the English law similarly claims certain of my ministrations is a CRIME, there’s no shortage of English ladies who need my assistance, of the highest class. But I don’t make the mistake of treating the fancy ones and worry instead over the poor, preventing orphans where I might, and tending the mothers. The
Times
of London has put the number of “public women” as they are called here at eight thousand six hundred, and the number of brothels at two thousand three hundred. I move quietly among them in my woolen cloak, my clean apron, undetected. I do not advertise and invite no patients to my home. Despite my experience as a hunted woman, I operate without fear of discovery, for the authorities seem as indifferent to the wretched of London as they was to the wretched of New York. For a small fee, or none, I treat the females’ disease and obstructions. I give them pills and preventatives and procedures and never fail to give thanks for the new mercy of ETHER, which is freely available in these modern times. I have a traveling ether apparatus and mask to fit over my ladies’ faces. It’s a lullaby. It’s a marvel. It’s a blessing. They call me Mother ______.

Whenever I am out on such an errand, my carriage waits anonymous on a nearby corner. When I return, the footman dismounts to hold the door, assists me up the step. Inside, I draw the carriage curtains and while we trot away from the East End or Piccadilly, I exchange my plain garments for finer ones. A shirtwaist of velvet with lace at the collar, skirts of watered silk. I arrive home at _____ Street perfumed and bedecked with pearls, no different than if I’d gone for tea at Buckingham Palace. The parlormaid in her black uniform takes my cape at the door. If it is after lunch, the butler brings me tea in the drawing room, where I look out over the park and wait to spot my little nephew and niece, Nicholas and Eugenia Trow. They are often out with their governess, or their silly mother Winifred, the English girl from Gloucester my brother married some years ago. Winifred knows everything about roses and peonies, and we both enjoy discussing the protocols of the Royal Family, the line of succession to the throne, and which Earl is the b*****d child of which Duke.

Just this morning, Charlie brought me a collection of newspapers he’d gotten from a seller in the Strand, the
Herald
and the
Times
of New York, where Comstockery flourishes like an infection of yeasts. The Roundsman of the Lord has been busy smiting vice wherever he sees it. His list of victims is long. Poor Margaret Sanger arrested for the crime of printing an article called “What Every Girl Should Know”; the Colgate company persecuted for its advertisement of the Preventative Powers of Vaseline; two thousand pounds of so-called smut confiscated and burned; the production of Mr. George Bernard Shaw’s
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
on Broadway nearly shut down for being a dirty play. The very silliest news is the story of how Mr. Comstock got his red-flanneled underdrawers in a twist over the Art Students League. It seems the artists’ brochure featured charcoal studies of nudes—an offense to our Anthony’s prudish sensibilities. The
Herald
reported that Comstock had arrested the League’s desk clerk, a Miss Robinson, age nineteen, for distributing this OBSCENE material. So hysterical did poor Miss Robinson become at her court appearance, so faint with palpitations, that a doctor had to be summoned.

How exciting it must be for our Tony, arresting delicate young female clerks. How proudly he must puff his feathers, boasting of such conquests.

By way of retort, one of the clever art students published cartoons of Mr. Comstock modeling naked for a drawing class, wearing only a top hat
above ample hams. Another young genius wrote a sonnet about him, calling him “a sexless clown.” Still another, my favorite, suggested that he be boiled in oil. Where they would find a pot big enough, I do not know.

I am even more uncharitable than those students. For me, fate would be sweetest if My Enemy found himself penniless and pregnant, made to endure a confinement and bear his child, and bring it out in the world in suffering agony just as ladies do. Perhaps it would not be too much to ask that he could have a fistula. But as this is but a pipe dream, I take my revenge where I find it, out in my carriage, driving through the park in the sunlight, in my new diamond earrings, in front of all London society. From time to time, in the New York papers, they print another rumor that I’ve been spotted in Boston or Paris, and that it wasn’t me dead in the tub that April morning. April fool, you might say.

But it is no joke at all. Not when I think of who she was, and how I did not get to know her, and I curse the forces that made her life so intolerable she had to end it.

I am at wits’ end,
she wrote in her diary.
I’d rather die.

Please God take my soul and forgive me my sins.

She wrote that, but I might have written it too, for the sin of not saving her.

In the afternoon, I sip my glass of tea, or take a little bit of sherry with my pound cake, and hope that today my friend Greta will take herself away from minding her grandsons, Willi’s two
bratwursts,
as we call them, and come for a game of whist, or that I will see my darling darling Annabelle driving up in her equipage, to bring her children for a visit. There are four of them, all delivered by me their Gran. I spoil them with sugar lumps, like they were ponies. The littlest sits on my lap and calls me Grandmother. If they are very good I let them try on my jewelry and give them the clear glass marbles in the china bowl to play with. Annabelle chastises me, for she thinks the baby will choke on one. —You swallowed a penny when you were that size, I tell her, —and it turned out eventually, in the _____.

Annabelle does not like me to refer to such coarse matters. She is a proper English Rose, married to Henry Summers, a handsome barrister. While he looks like a prancing nincompoop in his long white wig, and it surprises me to have a member of that high class profession in my own family, it is certainly convenient. Besides being an excellent lawyer, Henry
is a good papa to young Joseph, Cecilia, Andrew, and little Lillian, who everybody calls Dutchess, or Dutchie sometimes.

—Dutchie come and sit on your Grandmother’s lap, there’s a good girl, I say, and she clambers up and puts her arms around my neck, or takes my two cheeks between her miniature paws and says, —Ooh Grandmother you are a beautiful granny.