My Notorious Life (20 page)

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Men have war to bring them their sorrows and pain, Mrs. Browder had said, and we females have our own physiology.

But I seen the females had war, too, oh yes we did. It was a hard lesson that came home to me every which way then, that it was us who was doubly grieved, by war and anatomy, both. Everywhere you turned in that year you saw the widowed wives in their weeds, and mothers following flag-wrapped caskets. At our door we got the mothers left alone with one too many fatherless runts who could not afford another. We got girls whose Johnny was gone for a soldier and now they were carrying his parting gift. Because of the war, Mrs. Browder whispered, there was many more such misfortunates. So now was I among them? Mrs. Evans relieved several of these afflicted but offered few lessons, saying I could not assist the premature deliveries, as she called them, till I had a child myself. Should I myself now go to Mrs. Evans and ask would she fix me up? Could I take a long spoon or a crochet hook or some such and fix myself? I could not face neither idea no ways, but I seen with new eyes then, for my OWN shoes was the shoes of a desperate girl, and I known I for sure was not a hoor and so what if I was? It was only half my fault yet I carried all the blame. If Mrs.
Evans did fix me it would be a mercy. Oh my teacher. She came to seem an angel then in my eyes, saving girls from doom. All those weeks I turned in my cot with thoughts of tragedy and shame. What would my sister and brother think of the state I was in (if I was in it)? Surely the Evans would not like me as an assistant in such a condition. Or afterwards. They’d throw me out and I’d throw myself off the Battery rather than have a child in the streets or die of having it like my poor Mam so it would be left an orphan. There was too many orphans already and I did not wish to be an orphan’s dead mother. All night I gnawed my knuckles till they bled. If I ever saw Charles G. Jones again, I would throttle him. I would claw his eyes. Where was he, why had he left me? And why did my courses not return?

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After another week of torment, I made my way out of the kitchen and up the creaking stairs in the small hours of the night, across the hall to the clinic. In the cabinet so orderly and alphabetized, behind the lobelia drops, and between the pills for Lazy Liver and the Laudanum tincture, was a small bottle marked Lunar Tablets, “for the relief of Female Obstruction.” In the prescription book, in Mrs. Evans shivered writing, I read how Lunar Tablets was a remedy for all manner of womanly affliction, “esp. to loosen the constriction or blockage of the womb and to restore the nervous system to its lunar rhythms.”

I pocketed the bottle and later in the kitchen I swallowed the tablets down. In the morning I awaited the red flag of desired results, but none was evident. Only a dizziness, a disturbance of the lower regions, cramps and pain, headache and sweats. They was terrible symptoms and I would be glad to endure them if only they included the one I longed for. But I suffered with no relief. Next, in a secretive search of the library I turned to Dr. Gunning’s book, Diseases of Women, and there I found an article on Suppression of the Menses.

Cold, perhaps, is the most common of all the causes of suppression. Young girls subject themselves to serious illness, by placing their feet in cold water while their menses are upon them, and many a fair creature, whose morning of life was
serene and beautiful, has found an early grave through this rash and thoughtless act!

But it was not my feet nor where I had placed them that concerned me.

Prognosis: Serious, if not fatal consequences may result from continued suppression, especially in a plethoric habit of body.

Fatal, it said. I would die. Surely my habits was plethoric. I’d follow Mam to an early grave. But then as I read the words over, I saw that Dr. Gunning did not possess the sense of a codfish. If a woman’s turns was suppressed each time she put her feet in cold water, there’d be an epidemic of fishwives complaint. Viz, I hadn’t been near a cold foot bath in many weeks, yet my turns were suppressed worse than a sneeze in church. Still, in case Gunning was right, I noted his remedies with confusion:

For the Relief of Suppression: The diet should be strictly vegetable, and the patient should take a styptic footbath of warm water, cayenne pepper, and mustard. Failing relief, blood must be abstracted from the arm.

A footbath. Did the doctor not say that bathing the feet had CAUSED the suppression in the first place? It made as much sense as a herring. But such was my mission to restart the Catamenial Discharge that late that evening after a vegetable dinner of cabbage and roots, in secret I filled a tub with warm water, cayenne, and mustard, et cetera, and according to his prescription, bathed my feet in the mixture. This did nothing more than make me smell like a ham.

In an excess of panic, I downed another bottle of Lunar Tablets. For two mornings I had a loathing at my food, and a furred tongue, and felt twinges in the lower extremities and fits of languor, but no Restoration. Thus I had no choice but to follow the more drastic of Dr. Gunning’s remedies. To take blood from the ARM seemed to me to be the height of ignorance, when the obstruction lay elsewheres. But it was the last hope, and I steeled myself.

When Mrs. Browder had gone to the fishmonger’s, I took the paring knife and rolled up my sleeve. With the knife I struck and cut down a nick into the white underbelly of the wrist. I cursed Oh MotherF***, and blood welled up and dripped and I caught it in a teacup. I wished every trace of Charles G. Jones would drain out along with the blood from that soft place on my arm, which he had kissed so tenderly.

When only a meager teaspoon had seeped from me, there was commotion at the door. It was Mrs. Browder. —Annie Muldoon! she cried. I hid the bloody teacup under a mixing bowl and looked for a dishrag to clamp on the wound. But Mrs. B. came barreling into the kitchen with a basket of cabbages on her hip, and important news on the tip of her tongue. When she saw the gore on my arm she stopped cold, horror on her face.

—Annie! she shrieked and rushed to my side. —What have you done, love?

—I cut myself, peeling the potatoes.

—Don’t lie, don’t lie to Mrs. B., she says, and clamped her fist around my elbow. —It’s a terrible sin what you’ve done! You mustn’t never think of harming yourself.

—I wouldn’t.

—You’ve been in a black mood of despair.

—I haven’t.

She held my arm fiercely with her meaty hands, pressing a cloth to the cut, and stared me down with tender concern. My eyes welled over. —I’m perfectly well.

—You’re not _____? Are you?

—No! Sure you don’t think—

—I won’t say what I think. But there’s no reason to harm yourself.

—I haven’t harmed myself.

—You wouldn’t be the first. Don’t deny you are pining after that printer.

—I’m pining after my sister and my brother who I’ve not seen in three years.

Strangely, Mrs. Browder smiled now so she broke out in wrinkles. —Is that all? She searched her pockets. —What do you think this is? You’ll never guess.

—A crystal chandelier.

—No, you great lump.

With ceremony, she now handed me an envelope with AMBROSE printed on the return address, Rockford, Illinois. —Your sister at last, Mrs. B. said in triumph.

The letter rattled in my trembling hands as I lapped at the pious hooey my sister had wrote.

Dear Axie,

I was pleased to get your (very many!) letters. I am terribly sorry about your mother. Mother says that she is in heaven now and we must all try to be thankful she has found peace at last. I go to school in the sixth grade. We are learning psalms. I wrote one out for you. Number 105. They say Joe is well but I have not seen him in a long while. They say he has moved to Philadelphia. Thank you for writing to me,

Lillian Ambrose (Dutch)

Mrs. Browder’s face was greedy with expectation. —Well?

I stood reading the letter over, turning it by the kitchen stove as if the heat might reveal in lemon juice my sister’s true nature and longing for me, which was nowhere evident in her script. She wrote
your mother
as if my Mother was not hers as well. She called herself Lillian Ambrose which bore no mention of Muldoon. She had not called me Sister, nor signed herself Sister or sent her affection. After three years, she had written one infernal psalm by hand but said not a word about whether she thought of me even once.

—Joe has gone to Philadelphia, I said to Mrs. B.

—The City of Brotherly Love, she said helpfully.

—My sister did not give me no address for him. In a stupor I handed Mrs. Browder the letter to read for herself.

—This is good news, she said, reading it, —don’t you worry. She’s alive and well and so’s your brother. Write to her again.

So when I was somewhat recovered I took a pencil in my fierce grip and wrote:

Most beloved SISTER, Dutch MULDOON,

Why have you sent me no news but only a psalm? Please send another letter, expecially with word of our Joe. It was our mother’s dying wish for me to get you and him and be all three of us together again as a family. Do not forget the songs our mother sang Whiskey in the Jar and Carrigfergus. Do not forget you are a Muldoon AND my sister. Do not forget to write back. Especially do not forget me.

LOVE from Your SISTER

Axie (Ann) Muldoon

—There now, Mrs. Browder said. —You’ll post that in the morning. Don’t you feel better?

But I did not feel better. I felt worse. My cut arm throbbed as if my heart beat there and might leap fishlike out of the wound and land on the table gasping. The letter and my Suppressed Catamenial state and my jilting by Charlie Jones that b*****d rankled me worse than devils. None of the remedies I had tried so far would fix what ailed me.

C
ontrary to what the lying weevils and scandalmongers of the New York press might have written about me, my great good fortune in life has not been piles of money or property. It’s not these pearls at my throat, this lace at my cuff, this china or silver plate here at the sideboard. My great fortune has been the second chance. The last minute rescue from disaster. And so it was in those days many years ago, on Chatham Street, when all signs and events of my young turbulent life seemed to point toward further misery and ruin, abandonment and destitution. But amnesty appeared in strange forms. First the letter arrived from my long lost sister Dutch. Second my FRIEND returned. And third, I received some news from the
Herald
but not off its pages.

I never will know for sure whether it was the mustard footbath or the Lunar Tablets, the scant spoon of blood that dripped from my arm, or the tears I cried in my cot at night, but by some intervention, divine or not, my courses was set to rights, as it sometimes happens with young girls in the throes of dramatic emotion. It seemed I was not p*******. I was not only saved but now newly resolved, as there is nothing like a near calamity to harden the will and shore up the walls of the fortress of so-called Feminine Virtue. Never again, I swore. Never again. From that day forth, no body would tempt me. Not pretty words or a chain of silver. Not Charles G. Jones or any man.

Except. Lust was a weed, a nightshade vine, a nettle, impossible to uproot
as the mugwort I pulled in the fields of Illinois, so while in the daylight I was a flower of virtuous resolution, at night I was motherless in a cold kitchen, starved for the warm arms of a sweetheart and pretty words of approval. Worst, was the thought of ( . . .), that grappling which had occurred between me and Charlie, so that in the dark carnal pictures swam behind my closed eyelids till I was swooned in longing. I took the silver chain off my neck in a fit of disgust but then put it back on. I hated Charlie with a concentrated fury, then craved in depraved longing to have him, such that my own physiology was a torment to me. I traced his initials in flour dust, then erased them. He did not knock. He did not send me a note. He disappeared in a mystery. Was he drafted? dead? I was abandoned again.