The Remedy (13 page)
Of course Dizzom understands more after he first beholds Mimosina Dolcezza, not in the theater but in her own rooms, in a tender
deshabillé.
When Valentine hears his man announced, he calls him in directly, forgetting where he is, and with whom. Perhaps he wants Dizzom to share this—not merely the public woman, but the flushed, tousled angel he alone knows. And despite the impropriety, she seems to understand that with Dizzom nothing is to be hidden, for she smiles at him enchantingly from between the sheets, with no reproofs for the intrusion.
Valentine is oddly satisfied that Dizzom has now seen his treasure: He neglects at first to ask what confidential matters could have sent him in search of his master at the actress’s rooms. He watches his old friend with intense interest. On seeing the actress for the first time, Dizzom is visibly moved. He looks at her with glistening eyes. His expression suggests fear and abject devotion, all at once.
Dizzom too is almost distracted from the matter in hand, but after a moment he pulls his wits together and apologetically draws his master aside. He has matters to discuss that he judges unsuitable for the ears of such a lovely lady.
In whispers, Valentine is made to understand that Tom’s body has encountered troubles in Paris. Coffins have become so commonplace a vehicle for smugglers that—the greatest of ironies—Tom’s has been confiscated and opened up by the officers of the law. Now it reclines on a bench in a Parisian mortuary, awaiting fresh documents of release. Valentine shivers and turns away, his mind immediately filled with the sight of Mimosina Dolcezza, mercifully blotting out the image of Tom’s corpse peered at by Frenchy customs officers with no great show of compassion.
Dizzom leaves and Valentine stumbles back into the arms of the actress.
He shudders to think that only the merest chance has put her in a production bound for London, that only the frail thread of her theatrical ambitions, thrown randomly across Europe, has now tethered her here, for him to love her.
Her English has improved amazingly, though she still minces her participles in the most endearing fashion. In fact, it turns out that she already possessed much more than a rudimentary grasp, though she has never been in England before. When he asks her about it, she casts a veil over how she came to acquire her relative fluency.
“I met English people, you know, before you,
caw”
she says. “You are not a rare breed in this world, you Englishmen.”
It is just another miracle, he thinks, that she was able to restrain herself from talking so much at the beginning of their relationship, as if she guessed that in his sad state he had need of simple physical comforts. For by now of course he has told her, sketchily about Tom. He has spared her the details of the murder naturally; has implied a sad rather than a violent end. He has been baptized with the sweetly salt tears of her commiserations. She has held him while he cries, she has knelt over him, stroking the blistered ridges of his back that he has never allowed another woman to touch. She has rubbed aloes and oils into its dry excrescences and laid her cheek upon its old puckerings without any disgust and only with tenderness.
But tonight she will give him a moment of the purest horror.
This night, he undresses only her hair, laying the tresses about her shoulders. The mustard light of the candle has spiced her eyes so he can look nowhere else until she leaves the room, some time toward dawn. Then he lets down his shoulders, lassitude blooming like a branch of red blossom down his spine, and he’s dropping on the sag to crush the vivid tiredness out of his back.
It’s then that it impales him and he’s leaping up, too much winded by shock to scream.
“Eecch,” he wheezes, scraping its talons from his skin: A bat is hunched in the bed she’s just vacated, and it’s lying there quivering in a crook of the linen, misshapen, evil, with a taste for his flesh. He brandishes a candle, but the thing’s impervious to light, afraid of nothing. Now it flattens its fluttering, feigns death, to draw him closer, so it can fly at him and dip its mandibles in his neck. Why even now it’s cultivating the throbs for a richer feed, he’s read of such things. He feels more naked than the moon. He’s never been so naked and never needed his clothes so much.
What’s that smell?
Do bats smell? He perceives atoms of the inimitable perfume—white musk and apples—of Mimosina Dolcezza rising almost visibly from the disturbed sheets, a sweetness bursting out of the faint sweat of mildew.
Where is she?
In his panic it seems to him that his mistress has been transformed into this bat.
And his eyes do not once leave the brute as he backsteps to the too-close wall, where, espaliered, he prays for her to come back, and he prays for her not to come back and find him jellied by a bat, though surely of a rare and spiteful species, and the minutes pass and the decades of minutes and still the thing plays dead, garnering its venom, and still he’s stricken to a standstill, only his heart skittering like a nutmeg grater, the guttering candle gouting down his wrists, binding his hairs to the skin that fear has plucked to goose. Then she sweeps back into the room, luminous, fresh, dressed for the world.
And picks up her black feathered hairpin and pushes it back into her soft, feathery hair.
And Valentine promptly puts his conscience upon the rack: How has he contrived to think so badly of this divine woman? The brutality of Tom’s death has infected his ability to enjoy innocence. No, his whole life has contaminated the way he has lived until now.
This moment is the turning point, this woman the pivot. He wants to renovate his life so that she fits inside it. He loves this life of his—it’s just that he now wants more than he has had before.
Take powder’d Chocolate 2 ounces; juice of ground Kermes strain’d half an ounce; Ambergris (ground with a little loaf Sugar) 8 grains; Oil of Cinnamon 1 drop; Oil of Nutmeg 2 drops; Syrup of Balsam 2 ounce; or as much as needs to give it a due consistency, mix.
It nourishes and strengthens, repairs the wasted Flesh, recruits lost Spirits, and brings assistance in pining Consumptions. But I have sometimes observ’d it sit too heavy upon weak Stomachs.
Let half an ounce be taken at 8 in the Morning, and at 4 in the Afternoon, drinking after it Asses’ Milk.
“Why do you leave me now?”
“I have promised my ward an outing”
“Your ward? What is this thing?”
“The daughter of my friend.”
“Why must you do this thing then?”
“She is the daughter of my friend. My friend who died.”
Mimosina Dolcezza looks chastened and holds his hand tight, murmuring endearments. “I had no conception,” she says again and again. After a while she looks up and asks, “But where is the mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the mother of this child? The wife of your best friend in the world?”
“He never said.”
She stares at him and he clearly reads her thoughts:
Englishmen! Barbarians!
And who can blame her?
Yet nor can he bring himself to blame Tom, who had simply arrived one day with the babe in his arms. “Look what I got myself!” he said, and that was all his explanation. The red-haired baby looked like a jointed doll, dressed in an extravagant costume, and with Tom’s face so bemused as to be foolish, he himself looked like an overgrown child. He was trailed by a little Blackfriars nurse, but it was Tom who inserted the feeding horn when the child started fussing, first checking the tiny sponge at its tip and testing the temperature of the milk with an expert finger. The child drained the horn in a scant second and was soon squalling for more.
All Tom would say in explanation of the infant was that he had begot her in “Doctor” Graham’s Temple of Health and Hymen in Adelphi Terrace, and had done so indeed upon Graham’s Grand Magnetico-Electric Celestial Bed. At this Valentine had laughed heartily. Graham is a prince among quacks and his bed promises to guarantee both stupendous pleasure and fertility. Graham charges a five-shilling entrance fee merely to see the Celestial Bed, which measures twelve feet by nine feet and is surrounded by twenty-eight pillars of “crystal.” It is claimed that this masterpiece is modelled on the bed of the favorite Sultana in the Seraglio of the Grand Turk. According to handbills distributed by Graham, the bed’s “super-celestial dome” contains “oderiferous, balmy and aetherial spices, odors, and essences,” and is “coated on the underside with mirrors so disposed as to reflect the various charms and attitudes of the happy couple….” Their exertions bring forth music in a sympathetic rhythm and volume. The bed’s mattress is stuffed with the tails of English stallions (“renowned for their sexual vigour”) and below it are fifteen hundredweight of magnets “continually pouring forth in an ever-flowing circle powerful tides of the magnetic effluvium;” all this to stimulate the ovum in the act of generation.
Tom wasn’t saying any more, having obtained the belly-laugh he wanted. Valentine Greatrakes had refrained from further inquiries. There were no shortages of willing females with a soft spot for Tom.
Making hard love to ladies all over the place he was, and always saying, “It’s a mean mouse that has but one hole to go to.”
The romance that had generated the baby must have ended badly. Tom’s affairs often concluded in sore ways. While he had always to have a woman in mind, and at his disposal, Tom never desired a settled life. The women took it hard. Tom had no patience with tears and feminine laments. A weeping female inspired less compassion in him than an arthritic pickpocket. Valentine had several times occasion to reproach his friend with instances of heartlessness. Whatever had produced this child there was no doubt some of Tom’s usual devilment in it. Tom’s pleasures were inclined to cost someone else dearly.
But in the way of these things between them, Valentine refrained from asking more about the child, though Tom occasionally recounted, with a chuckle, precocious words reported by her nurse and later by the mistress of the highly respectable boarding school where he had placed her, and also, with guffaws, prodigious feats of appetite by the little girl. Tom never thought to ask the child to live with him, and his contact with her dwindled sharply as she grew portlier and less pretty. But the child was tenacious: Tom could not altogether shrug her off. He was summoned to the boarding school on various pretexts, always returning with a defiant expression, similar to the one he wore after a final confrontation with a staled mistress. It was clear that he wished he had never claimed the child; it was also clear that he did not hide this fact from her.
Another girl would have been crushed, but, far from shrinking, young Pevenche transformed her hurt into an outward display of supreme self-confidence. Just like her father, she learned to show no vulnerability, except tactically. On rare occasions Tom had brought little Pevenche—well, large Pevenche to tell the truth—to the depository, where she astounded all with her voluminous chatter and discomforted everyone with her shameless curiosity. Dizzom was plainly terrified by the huge child, who peered at him and repeatedly asked him to unscrew his back teeth and show her his treasures concealed in there. If he demurred there was a rare flash of temper from Tom, a side of him seldom displayed at the depository though it was sent out to work on the streets, of course, as necessary.
Once Pevenche tore the gauze top from ajar of living butterflies and stuffed one inside her mouth, biting it in half.
“Why did you do that, dear heart?” Valentine asked, shocked to his core.
“It’s so pretty,” she said, “but nasty, I’m afraid.”
She spat the rejected wing on the floor and demanded something quick and sweet to take the taste away. Tom joked, “What an esophagus! That girl will swallow anything. She’d eat a rat whole if it had cinnamon and sugar on it.” He tapped her large head, and not gently: “Few intellectual symptoms in our Baby P. But full of big-girl appetites. Gunning with them, too.” The girl flinched away from her father, but said nothing.
The blistering, shameful thought had even crossed Valentine’s mind that Tom had intended to raise the girl and set her up in a bawdy-house, that this motive lay dark and dormant beneath his taking up a female bastard, not a male one, to nurture. (He certainly must have had a choice of offspring.) Too often for comfort, Tom joked about moving the business of the depository in the direction of the Venus Sports, always stressing that the pleasurable company must be of known provenance and juvenility. Valentine had firmly discouraged Tom from such thoughts, but they continued to cross his own mind whenever he saw Pevenche, for Tom cruelly incited the child to dress with a vulgar ostentation that ill befitted her ungainly shape. The nastier the color combinations, the more lamentable Pevenche’s outfits, the more Tom applauded them. And the larger she grew, the more he encouraged her in a ridiculous pretence of juvenility. If “Baby P” saw that the joke was against her, she still chose to play it for laughs. It sometimes seemed to Valentine that it would have been better for Pevenche if her father had not snatched her away from a mother whose influence she sadly and demonstrably lacked, and who must have surely been heartsore all these years for the loss of her baby.
Tom’s fathering was no way at all to put the manners on the girl.
Now Valentine says aloud to Mimosina Dolcezza, “We never knew where the child came from. My friend did not encourage us to inquire.”
“How strange are you English. So this ward is still just a child, then?”
“Yes,” says Valentine, and the actress appears to lose interest in this scrap.
It is not strictly true. Pevenche might more properly be called a young lady these days. She must be at least twelve, is it? He cannot remember and he cannot guess from looking at her. He has no talent for placing an age on a woman. Moreover, his experience of girls has never brought him in contact with one so
well-nourished
as Pevenche. But he does not wish to talk about her age with Mimosina Dolcezza. Pevenche’s maturity makes him feel old, and somewhat encumbered.
