My Notorious Life (61 page)

—Oh Dutchie, I tell her, —you are a beautiful Dutch, so you are.

It gives me a pang to hear the name, to say it. Even at five years of age, the child is the copy of my departed sister. When she sings at the piano in her sweet voice, I am reminded of what I lost, and how it was kept from us, and I dwell upon the promise I made to Mam, and the men who thwarted it with their laws and intrusions and bearded certainties. I brood over every one of my enemies. I do not forgive them. I don’t forget. I write this now for Dutchie cold under the ground, no tombstone in her name, her child unborn. If she had not been trapped by secrets, so conflicted by shame, she might be here in this room with us, where I scribble peacefully in a corner, where our brother Joseph tosses cards at the table with my husband Charlie (who has got fat off English cream), where the sweet lovely children play on the Brussels carpet, happy cousins, pretending the flowery patterns are their gardens. Sunlight crashes through the windows, fracturing off the droplets of crystal in the chandelier above their heads, so that the sparkles look to be sylphs and
sheehogues
flitting among the paisleys, having a bonfire. I must remember to leave out a saucer of milk for them on the windowsill, to ward off mischief.

THE END

My Notorious Life
is a work of fiction. It is based partly on the life and death of Ann Trow Lohman (1811–78), also known as Madame Restell, who practiced as a “female physician” in New York City for roughly forty years. For the purposes of this story, I have appropriated from Lohman’s life and times some facts, dialogue, trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, advertisements, and events, but have otherwise invented the life of the novel’s protagonist. While I have attempted to maintain accuracy in terms of the general history and customs of the period, and while real historical texts and figures such as C. L. Brace and Anthony Comstock do appear here, I have invented scenes, dialogue, and circumstance and have also reconfigured events and changed some chronology, when such changes suited the story.

I
am indebted to dear and expert friends Roberta Baker, Amy Wilentz, and Nick Goldberg for their multiple close readings, editorial wisdom, encouragement, and jokes in the margins.

For support in perseverance, great thanks are due to the late Wendy Weil, and to Anne Edelstein, Diane McWhorter, Carroll Bogert, Tia Powell, Barbara Jones, Robert Lipsyte, Alexander Papachristou, Anne Detjen, Sally Cook, Anthony Weller, Erica Schultz, Susan Lehman, Bobbie Smith, Teresa Mason Corrigan, and Rita Grant Buckley.

Thanks also to the English Department and administration at Bard High School Early College, and to my extraordinary students there, for all they’ve taught me.

For technical expertise and inspiration by example, I am grateful to Dr. Joan Berman and Dr. Jean Chin, obstetrician-gynecologists of courage, warmth, and integrity.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Sarah Burnes, and her colleagues at the Gernert Company, especially Logan Garrison and Rebecca Gardner.

Heartfelt thanks to my excellent editor, Alexis Gargagliano, for her expertise, enthusiasm, wisdom, and support. Great helpings of appreciation to Nan Graham, and also Kara Watson, Kelsey Smith, Dan Cuddy, David TerAvanesyan, Tal Goretsky, Katie Monaghan, Sophie Vershbow, and the entire marvelous team at Scribner.

Thanks, too, to Helen Garnons-Williams, and Bloomsbury, UK.

I could not have written
My Notorious Life
without the information, images, maps, recipes, advertisements, and ideas I found in newspaper
archives and many books, especially a biography of Ann Trow Lohman,
The Wickedest Woman in New York
, by Clifford Browder (1988), and
The Wonderful Trial of Caroline Lohman,
a pamphlet published by the
Police Gazette
in 1847, which sold for six cents a copy. Other invaluable works include
Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed,
by Stephen O’Conner (2001),
The Dangerous Classes of New York,
by Charles Loring Brace (1880),
How the Other Half Lives,
by Jacob Riis (1890),
Lights and Shadows of New York Life,
by James McCabe (1872),
Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord,
by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech (1927), and
Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of Women and Children,
by Gunning S. Bedford, M.D. (1856). Thanks to the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University for a copy of
A Female Physician to the Ladies of the United States: Being a Familiar and Practical Treatise of Matters of Utmost Importance Peculiar to Women,
by Mrs. W. H. Maxwell (1860). Thanks to Jim Logan at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York, for attempts to read the weathered inscription on Ann Lohman’s grave.

My family sustains me, and I am overwhelmingly grateful to my beloved parents: my mother, Joan Manning, an artist who made me a writer; and my father, Jim Manning, who taught me not to quit. Thanks to Richard Dunne and Patricia Dunne, for encouragement and inspired knowledge of the Irish diaspora. To Rob Manning, Jim Manning, Kim Crowther Manning, Wendy Dunne DiChristina, Mike DiChristina, and Robert R. Morris—thanks, thanks, thanks. And thanks to Gertie M. Dunne and Moon E. Dunne, who walked me regularly.

And to my three miraculous children, Carey, Oliver, and Eliza Dunne, and to my adored husband, Carey Dunne, all my love.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Whitegirl

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2013 by Kate Manning
All rights reserved.

For permissions information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Scribner
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First Scribner hardcover edition September 2013

SCRIBNER
and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

Jacket Design by David Ter-Avanesyan and Alex Merto

Jacket Photographs: Hat Feathers: Vintage Images / Alamy; Woman: Dorling K Indersley; Newspaper courtesy of the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012031031

ISBN: 978-1451698060
ISBN: 978-1451698084 (ebook)

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.