My Notorious Life (14 page)

—She could be your sister, Mrs. Browder said. —With that black hair.

—Not likely. Under my breath I muttered, —My sister is not no snoot with her snout in the air. I wished Dutch was here, nibbing beans with me now.

As I busied myself, Mrs. Browder gave me the hard stare. —You watch yourself around her. A girl like that is none too bright about the fellas.

—What about them?

She just raised her eyebrows. —You’ll find out. But let’s hope you don’t.

—What does any of it have to do with the Visitor?

—You Know Perfectly Well What I Mean. And no sneaking out the kitchen door after I’m gone home to Archie at night.

*  *  *

After she had gone home to Archie I went out the kitchen door anyways and sat on the back step in the summer evening, eating cherries and spitting out the pits, shelling walnuts and picking out the meats. What was the danger about being out the kitchen door? I did not ask. I only polished the brass, emptied the sloppers. I swept the floorboards, the carpets, the stoop. I watched and listened, picking up scraps of information like bits of trash dropped on the street.

The best room for this endeavor was the library, where there was wood figures shaped like the bones of a hand and a framed diploma on the wall proclaiming William Evans a certified physiologist. Books went up to the ceiling. They were covered in leather, each the size of a paving stone.

One day I stood on a ladder, dusting the porcelain head called Phrenology by L. N. Fowler. It was divvied up in blue lines like a map with names for all areas of the human phiz: one for Selfish Sentiments, others for Literary Faculties, Mastoid Process, Sense of the Terrific, Blandness, Justice and Wit, &c. I was pondering the section called Desire for Liquids, when Dr. Evans cleared his throat.

—My wife tells me you read well.

—As best I can. I didn’t tell him I favored Mrs. Browder’s weekly copy of the
Police Gazette,
as it was full of rapes and seductions, murders and cutthroats. The doctor frightened me with his aloof manner and his silence. He had round wire glasses on a round face that he massaged while he shuffled his papers. There was a wart on his eyelid.

—I’d impose upon you, he said, —to apply my wife’s alphabetizing system to this section of medical books here, by title. He pointed to a vast column behind his desk.

—Yes sir, I’ll do my best.

He nodded and petted his beard, thick and white with some dark sprouts left in it. He cleared his throat again and pointed to the shelf behind him. —Many say it is not fit for a young girl to read these here. The female mind
is too feeble to handle such complex ideas, and she is liable to suffer all manner of disorders—even death—if she attempts to wrestle with such books. I trust you will not attempt them.

—No sir.

—My wife has seen no need for such things.

But I knew this wasn’t true for I’d seen Mrs. Evans in his library consulting the very section he said might kill me. —Stick to the lighter fare, he says.

—Thank you. I had a real reason to be grateful, for that day the doctor steered me and my feeble faculties straight to the useful information.

After that, when he was out on his rounds, I perused what he warned me against. My favorite was The Diseases of Women, by Dr. Benjamin S. Gunning. It was a fat green book with headings in gibberish such as Pruntis Pudendl, and Double Encysted Ovarian Dropsy. Here, perhaps, I could learn the secret of what killed my Mam. I drew it down and inspected it from my perch on the ladder.

The first heading was of a case entitled A Married Pregnant Female, Aged Twenty Two Years, with the Milk Leg. Milk leg. What could it be? I read how it was a horrible swelling of pregnancy occasioned by a deposit of mother’s milk in the affected limb. Turning the pages, I read dumbfounded of Vicarious M*ns****tion in a Young Woman, Aged Nineteen Years, Abscess of the V*lv* in a Mother, Aged Twenty Seven, and Suppression of the M*ns*s in an Unmarried Girl, Aged Twenty Years.

All the days and months of my service at the Evans home, the library served as my schoolroom, and my head filled with lurid details of anatomy, of afflictions and the procedures to cure them, lancings and explorations and cuttings so grim that they made me cry out in my sleep. One day at last, under Hemorrhagic Fever in a Mother, Aged Thirty Two, I found what I wanted to know:

If portions of the afterbirth be obstinately retained . . . the patient is in great danger, and sinks under disease with frequent small pulse, and burning of the hands and feet, or is carried off suddenly by an attack of profuse perspirations, putrid fever, or . . . hemorrhage.

It was what killed Mam. Was it? Hemorrhage, Mrs. Evans said. Putrid fever. Why? What could have saved her? I persisted searching through the rest of the book, and its neighbors on shelves above.

—Go along now and read, Axie, love, said Mrs. Browder. —I can live without you for a minute.

In truth, Mrs. B. was glad for a chance to nip at the bottle unobserved. She thought I didn’t know, but she kept her tot of whiskey beneath the sink. While she had her drop, I climbed the ladder in the library. Another day I found a book called Advice to a Wife, where I read with alarm and fascination such items as I found on page 224:

 . . . after a confinement, the breasts are apt to become very painful and distended. If such be the case, it might be necessary . . . to have them drawn daily by a woman who is usually called either a breast-drawer, or in vulgar parlance, a suckpap. A clean, sober, respectable woman ought to be selected. Some mothers object to suckpaps; they dislike having a strange woman sucking their nipples, and well they might. My fair reader may, by using a nice little invention, dispense with a suckpap, and with ease draw her own bosoms. The name of the invention is “Maw’s Breast Glass with Elastic Tube for Self Use.” It is a valuable contrivance, and deserves to be extensively known.

As I read this enthralled one afternoon Mrs. Evans, my employer, caught me descending the rungs with the book open to this passage, my jaw dropped in amazement and horror. A suckpap!

—Annie?

I snapped the book shut. —Sorry Missus.

—What is it you’ve got there?

She took the volume from my reluctant hands and when she saw what it was, a curious smile came over her face. —Well. You must have
very
many questions now.

I blushed deeply. —I do, missus.

She looked at me expectantly. —Well?

—What is fistula? Also: what is Ovarian Dropsy?

Her pale eyebrows arched in surprise. She looked at me strangely now. —You remind me of someone.

—Who?

—My daughter, she said, and flicked her eyes away, like they were burned.

—I’m sorry, missus, I’m sorry for your loss.

She closed her eyes, then took something from a cabinet under the doctor’s desk, a small bottle. She pocketed it and left the library.

—What did she die of, the daughter? I asked Mrs. Browder, who was trimming shinbones for soup.

She stopped with the cleaver in her hand. —A fever, she said, finally. —She died of choleric fever.

Now Mrs. Browder threw the bones in the pot, so water splashed up. She pretended it had splashed in her eyes, and she wiped at them with her apron. —It was enough to break your heart. It broke her mother’s. You’re like her, just like Celia, always nosing with your questions. It’s why Missus took a shine to you.

*  *  *

She’d took more than a shine, it seemed, for one night soon afterwards Mrs. Evans woke me in the dark and brung me nervous and hurrying with her through the streets, following a man called Doggett who strode urgently ahead, our lanterns swinging so pendulums of shadow traveled along with us and cast our own shapes distorted against the sides of dark buildings. When we arrived up many stairs Doggett’s wife Eva was laboring on the bed. —She has the grinding pains, the husband said, fearful. He retreated off aways, whereas I was told to stay.

—There now, mother, said Mrs. Evans. —Annie and I have come and all will be well. The woman appeared not to hear us but Mrs. Evans set about making arrangements. She clipped her fingernails with a small scissor and greased her right hand with a portion of lard all the while talking calmly to me and to the patient. —Here now lie on your side easy Mrs. Doggett, soon it will be all over, shush now dearie, you’ll have another pretty baby to love. Here’s a sheet I’m tying to your bedposts, like so, and you will pull against it with the pains if you like. And Annie come stand
here, please do, don’t be nervous, and sponge her poor head. That’s right, dear, that’s it, push, and push very good and we’ll just see here how we’re getting on.

Now she put her hand beneath Mrs. Doggett’s skirt. It was a mortification when she ordered me to watch and talked away in a singsong, one that I heard later, in so many lessons that I can remember it now like she was still here.

—Just now there’s the crowning and it’s the worst bit you’re nearly there so Annie help her to raise her leg yes yes just rest it up like that don’t be timid now. Why, don’t tremble, Annie it’s nothing to fear at all, that’s right. Shush love, poor missus. I will just work here a little, very gentle, so you don’t tear, love, you wouldn’t want that, no. Annie see here now with the lantern, stop your quaking.

Mrs. Doggett yelled and pulled at the sheets tied to the bedposts and my teacher pulled me to look in the lamplight so I saw the horror of the parts so livid and bulging out with a patch of the child’s hair visible, blood in the strands. I trembled, sure that I would see more death but instead I saw a miraculous machine.

—Hold the light, that’s it, you will see how we help her to stretch the portal very gentle like this, see here Annie, the light. Now another push Mrs. Doggett very good almost done. And Annie, what we must do at this stage is place the right hand steady and firm against the fundament here below the birthplace and hold it there like this, as I do, to prevent a rupture, that’s right just see how we do, firm and steady, yes, you don’t want to hurry it, Annie, no no, nature has designed a good way. There’s the dear little face at last, here it is, now you are through the worst of it, missus, such a lovely baby. And now, Annie, we must feel around the little neck with great care, because if the navel string is caught you would endeavor to slip it over the child’s head to avoid a tragedy. We don’t want anybody to strangle now, right? But that’s it, here we are all clear, and a few more pushes Missus. And of course, never never pull the child from the mother but allow the forces of labor to deliver the dear baby naturally. One more push. Thanks be to God you have a little girl, Mrs. Doggett. Wonderful. That’s right Annie hold her like this.

Mrs. Doggett’s child was bloody in my hands, and too terribly quiet it seemed, but Mrs. Evans massaged the miniature poitrine and breathed
her own breath into the little girl’s lungs and turned her over and upside down until there was a wee cry. I myself did not say anything at all, for I was dumbfounded at the awful miracles I seen, and most of all at how Mrs. Doggett sat up not long afterwards smiling, and how the baby’s lungs were powerful and full of air and it suckled away first thing. Alive. They both was. It appeared to me then that Mrs. Evans performed wonders. She possessed secrets and special powers. I wished to learn them for myself.

—Shall you clean her up, Annie? asked Mrs. E., handing me the wondrous live infant.

—Yes ma’am, I said, eager now, and thus began my long apprenticeship to Mrs. Evans of Chatham Street. I was fourteen years of age.

D
espite my promotion and regular servings of bread and jam, after more than a year in the Evans establishment, my heart was still in a sorry state of disrepair. At night my head was filled with dark matter, longings, the words of letters. They was prayers I wrote all day in my head.
Dear Dutch, Dear Joe. Hallowed be thy names. Do you still remember me your sister Axie who cared for you and raised you. She (our mother) is dead I tried to save her. Maybe she got some peace. I do not know what happened rather I do, but can’t say not in a letter it is not right or decent. It was the stupidity of her assistant. We had a little sister God love her she is gone too so she is.

One morning I pilfered some paper from Mrs. Evans’s desk and wrote a selection of lines to Dutch before anyone in the household awoke. I put them folded in the crevices of my cot. At night I wrote more.

I work as a housemaid for a doctor and his wife they are very kind. Mrs Browder has got me new stockings and other things such as boots a cap and apron. The doctor has a wart on his eyelid his wife has a top not. I have been let to read some books in their library Dutch it has a ladder to the ceiling you would like Arabian nights so you would I read it every page.

As I wrote I imagined my sister crying at the words of my letter, pulling a spring of her corkscrewed hair so it recoiled like her shock at my news,
that Mam was dead. Our Mother who named her Dutchess. As I wrote I pictured how my sister would race with my letter through the cold marble halls of the Illinois house to her false Ambrose family. She would stamp her little foot wearing its kidskin boot and demand to go to New York, to find me, and her true family. I wrote her pages of sentences and news.