My Notorious Life (11 page)

—Yes? It was a woman who answered. She wore her faded yellow gauze of hair in a topknot, all stray wisps. Her eyes were muddy green shot with red, and she blinked at us as if she had just awakened from a lovely dream.

—We are here for the female’s doctor, I whispered.

The woman looked us up and down over the beak of her prominent nose. —I am no longer . . .

—My Mam’s sick, I said, fierce.

She stared hard at me. Her eyes went right down through mine all the way to the fibers and bones.

I gazed up at her. —Please, I said.

She put her hand over her mouth. —Oh my, she said, like she was surprised to suddenly recognize me. —All right now, lamb. You come in.

Inside, Mam sat heavily on a bench covered in patchy velvet. There would be stains. I was worried for the furniture. Mam leaned her head back against the peeling wallpaper and closed her eyes. Her breath stuttered over her ribs.

—I don’t suppose you can pay, the woman said as she left us. After a minute she came back with an old man who seemed to be a copy of her, only with a beard. They were short mild people, very white with round soft fingers. —This is Dr. Evans, said the woman.

—Let’s have a look, then, the doctor said. He knelt down in front of my mother and took her wrist in his hand, checked his watch and counted.
Then he lifted one of her eyelids with his thumb. She let out a whimper, small and awful.

—Come with us now, love, said the woman to Mam, clucking her tongue.

They requested me to wait where I was and took my mother down the dark hall into a room with a smoked glass door. They emerged now and then going up and down stairs whispering, carrying bowls and blankets. It grew dark. With my cheek on the soft upholstery I fell asleep in my coat and boots.

*  *  *

—Child. The topknot woman, Mrs. Evans, shook my shoulder. —You cannot stay here any longer this morning. You may go down to the kitchen if you like. Mrs. Browder will give you something for breakfast.

—What about my Mam?

—She is resting.

I crept down the stairs, and there in the murk of the kitchen was a white woman servant kneading dough. Her apron divided her into two lumps, one above, one below. This was Mrs. Browder. She had flour on her hands, a smudge on her nose. She hummed a tune but stopped when she saw me. —And who might you be, love?

—Axie Muldoon.

—Tch. You must be the child of the poor one-armed woman?

She knew my silence to mean yes.

—Poor love. Will I make you some tea? She put a kettle on the fire.

Her hair was brown, gone to gray in short, messy curls. The flesh of her face had settled into a pleasant expression that made her look as if someone had just told her a joke. —You’re a good girl to be looking after your mother then aren’t you? You must be all of ten years old?

—Thirteen, I said, piqued. —And I know a psalm of David.

—You’re a scrawny chicken then. Short as a picket in a pintsize fence. She felt my wrists like she was considering whether I was fat enough to eat, and then in front of me she placed a mug of tea and slices of bread and butter toasted. I ate with my arms curved desperate around my plate in case she might come and snatch it away before I was done. The bread had apple butter slathered on.

Browder watched as I ate the crumbs off my finger. —That’ll fatten you up, love. She gave me apple cut into slices. She gave me sweet prunes stewed in a bowl and a piece of shepherd’s pie. She gave me a hard bun. When I had eaten all of it, she put me to washing up bowls. All morning I helped her in the kitchen, and did not mind, for it kept me from dwelling on the fate of my mother. Still I chewed the inside of my lip till it bled. Mrs. Browder chatted away about her son Archie who fought for the Union Army at Bull Run where three thousands of our boys died.

—But he was not killed! she said brightly. —He was only shot. Shot in the elbow by a Reb, right here in the funny bone, though it was not no joke to Archie, as they cut the whole thing off! Same as your mother!

Mrs. Browder seemed to think this was a marvelous coincidence. —They’re both missing the right arm, can you believe it? They threw his in a pile six feet high! Full of legs and arms! Feet and hands! It’s true! Archie said he saw it. His own arm! Lying way over there, while he was lying here.

She talked on about severed arms and soldiers’ wounds while making many pats of dough, cutting butter into flour with two knives. We talked about amputees while she showed me how to roll out dough to make a chicken pie. Soon I, too, was dusted in flour.

—Look at you, she said, and brushed me off. —Poor youngster. Your poor mother.

Her expression was so full of sorrow for me now my own face crumpled under the weight of what I feared and I cried out, —Is she dead then?

—Why no, lamb. She’s lucky. The doctor don’t usually take them if they can’t pay. But Missus Evans seen you and she always cares for a little girl.

—Why’s that? Why does she?

Mrs. Browder hesitated. —She lost one, once, so she did.

—Can I see my Mam?

Mrs. Browder pointed me up the stairs. —Go on up three flights and you’ll find her in the back room. Third door down. Don’t wear her out.

I went up a set of plain dark stairs and found myself again at the bench where I slept. Up another staircase, this one carpeted in a faded pattern of roses. Down a corridor and up another creaky staircase, to a floor of plain rough boards, and four doors, all closed. I opened the first one. The room inside was big enough just for the one bed, where Mam lay, her face clouded and damp.

—Mam?

She opened her eyes and her smile was weak and sorry when she saw me. I sat on the lip of the mattress, and lay my head on her shoulder.

—You’ll forgive me, she said. —Will you?

—You didn’t do nothing wrong.

—I have. And I’ll pay the price.

I did not know what she meant about the price or which was the wrong thing she did that made her sorry: sending us away on the train or marrying Mr. Duffy or losing her arm in the mangle.

—I only wanted to get you away from Cherry Street, she said. —All of you.

—We’re out now, ain’t we?

—I wanted you somewhere better, she whispered, so faint it was the scratch of a mouse in the walls. —Somewhere nice. Clean. The fresh air and milk in a jug. A house. Like where Dutchie is. Like Joe has. All the trimmin’s.

She tried to fix a smile on me. She tried to adore me with her eyes, I seen it. But it was too much for her and in a while she dozed off. Through the window, the clatter of wagon wheels on the paving blocks floated up from the street, mixed with the cries of the costermongers and river haulers and the soft burr of my mother’s snoring. I saw a pigeon land on the roof across the way. He was puffed up and rutting after a lady, pecking her. She flew off and he flew after. A spider dangled from a silver thread down the window sash. The sun made a patch of white on the wall. I rested my cheek on my mother’s chest and listened to her heart. I stayed like that a long while, I do not know how long. It began to get dark.

—You’ll be a good girl now, Mam said, all of a sudden, her voice from far away.

—I will.

—I know you will.

A black mold of fear grew in my lungs. Her breathing was stilted over her ribs, as if taking in air and expelling it was more taxing than it was worth. I studied her, a prayer in my mouth.

—You’ll find Joe and Dutch again, she said. —Promise.

I promised.

Mrs. Browder came with soup for us, but Mam wouldn’t eat it. She
wouldn’t sit up. In a while, Mrs. Browder brought blankets and said I should stay with my mother through the night. I bunked down on the narrow alley of floor by her bed.

*  *  *

In the morning Mam’s breathing woke me, cracked and harsh like metal scraping. Air gurgled wet in her throat.

—Mam, don’t do that.

But she did. Long spaces between each rattled breath. The rattle was an alarm to me. It wasn’t like no sound I knew. Her one hand of fingers picked at the covers like she was grasping at lint, at threads, picking, picking. She dragged air into her lungs with the sound of a heavy weight dragging on gravel. I leaned away from her. —Please Mam.

She did not hear me.

—Axie, she said one time, my name only air through her lips. —You’ll find them. And then after another long while, she didn’t draw more breath, and made no sound.

—Mam?

Her skin was gray and tight over the bones of her face. A strand of spittle, like a white cobweb, was dried by her lips. I lay my head on her shoulder and stayed with her, whispering her name. —Please will you wake now? I said. —Please. She did not move, not even to breathe. The morning sun slanted hard daggers of light into the room. Mam was still, her eyelids blue like the sheen inside a mussel shell.

*  *  *

Mrs. Browder came upstairs at last.

—There you are Axie, she sang, and then stopped in her tracks. —Oh poor dear, she said, her hand over her mouth. She came to the bed, placed her hand on my mother’s brow, and put her arms around me. —Ah Jesus, poor love. Poor poor lovey.

I twisted away from her. I clung on my mother. —Mam wake up. You have to wake now. I recoiled back at the cold of her. How limp her hand was and how it fell when I dropped it, like a block of wood.

Mrs. Browder murmured soft words to me. —The childbed fever. She’s in God’s arms now.

—Mam.

—Come along, poor love.

I went in a stupor with Mrs. Browder down the hallways of the house and we met Mrs. Evans on the landing. I hid my face in the crook of my elbow to avoid her gaze, and then I felt her arms around me.

—Shh and there now, love, Mrs. Evans said, —it’s all right. Your mother asked would we keep you on here. And so we shall.

She looked at me with a terrible soft expression in her eyes, so I saw myself in them, the skin patchy with spots and the white wrists sticking out from the sleeves of my dress, an orphan.

U
nknown to me, My Enemy Comstock, meanwhile, was in a different order of life altogether, a fussbudget lad growing plump on pie and milk in the bosky dells and stony fields of New Canaan, Connecticut. His muttonchop whiskers was then still dormant under the skin of his smug expression as he pursued his hobby: writing in his diary about how he trapped wee soft bunnies and happy squirrels by crushing them under stones. He still had hair in those youthful days and had not yet acquired the bald pate or rotund shape of an inflated hog’s bladder that was his in later life. Still, photographs of the young Tony Comstock reveal that his slack jaw and dull mean eyes were in place from the time he was in knee pants.

It has been propositioned to me by intelligent freethinkers and kind-hearted gentlefolks that no soul is pure evil and while I accept that My Enemy was a dutiful son, a doting husband, a loving papa, I can think of him only as a cabbage-hearted weevil and MONSTER for what he done to me and other good citizens too many to count.

He was just three years older than myself, and though we grew through the same times, we was worlds apart. While I was picking the ash barrels of Washington Square for scraps of gristle, My Enemy romped around his Papa’s 160 acres of pasture, dawdled in the family sawmills where money grew like chestnuts on the bushes. He feasted on ice cream in the parlors of church ladies and went forth on outings to the shore at Roton Point in Norwalk, where (he told his dear diary) he chastised some sailors for
looking under ladies’ dresses. Even then he was a prig, with his chin weak and hands folded in his lap. Every Sunday of his boyhood My Enemy sat through four Congregationalist sermons about hellfire and damnation (so that he would know how to inflict these on me) and went to sleep each night fearing the hot breath of Satan. On weekdays he collected stamps and tried (without success) to avoid impure thoughts. He prayed and whetted the knife blades of his righteousness, all the better to smite me and the likes of me, while listening to Bible stories at the knee of his adored mother. Poor Mother Comstock! She had ten children before she died from birthing the last one. Surely she turned in her grave to see the fat poltroon her little Tony became, how he waddled along, huffing like a locomotive and bragging about how he had driven fifteen people to SUICIDE—including MYSELF, his greatest conquest—as if he had attained some esteemed heights of accomplishment.