My Notorious Life (24 page)

—Married in blue, she said, —you will always be true.

Always true, yes, but I’d always feel a disappointment over the dress, for yellow was the color I coveted. Me and Greta, perusing the pages of
Godey’s Lady’s Book,
had seen a wedding dress described so prettily that the words imprinted on my memory.

 . . . a rich yellow brocaded silk, trimmed with three flounces carried up to the waist, so as to appear like three overskirts. The body is trimmed with a double berthe of Vandyke lace. The gloves are long, the hair arranged in what the French call English ringlets.

I wished even then for English ringlets and Vandyke lace. Later, I would have both, not to mention brocade silks and velvet capes. But that Wedding Day, thoughts of Parisian flounces were canceled by the sight of Charlie by the parlor window, his hair slicked down and his dark eyes fixed on me. I found it a chore to be serious. Likewise my Intended. When I came to stand next to him, he ratted his teeth over his bottom lip like we used to do as children imitating the ridiculous Dix. I laughed and the dipsomaniac Robinson placed our hands on the Bible and said to Charlie, —Will you promise to love honor and worship?

—I’d be a fool not to worship at the feet of Annie Muldoon. I will.

—Will you promise to love honor and obey? Robinson asked me.

—I will, I said, ignoring the word OBEY which would give me trouble later on.

Robinson uttered away about the power of God and the holy sanctity of this and that, but we were not paying attention. It was all we could do not to laugh or cry. There was no ring of pearls nor no spray of orange blossom. There was a wedding cake Mrs. Browder made, dark and full of brandy and mace, with lumps of candied citron throughout. We ate it and were through by eleven o’clock that morning. The whole affair lasted a half hour. I was Mrs. Jones now, with all that entailed.

*  *  *

I would pull the curtain of modesty around the marriage bed but we didn’t have no curtain. We didn’t have a bed. What we had was a poor room at a William Street boardinghouse rented for five dollars the month. We possessed a shakedown pallet, a broken table, a couple plates. Nothing else but the same argument over again.

—Please, he said.

—No, I said.

—We are married.

—I don’t care. I will not.

—Why?

I wept and carried on and turned my face to the wall. —I don’t want to be a mother only to die. I don’t want to bring an orphan into the world.

—What orphan? For Christ’s sake. You’re my wife.

—I don’t deny it.

—What do you want then?

—Not to suffer! Like the whole groaning parade of girls bleeding at Chatham Street.

A red flush formed in two round patches on Charlie’s white complexion. —Bleeding? It’s only Nature is it not?

—It’s only natural to wish to avoid it! I cried. —Just for example I don’t want to have a FISTULA.

—Fistula?

I wouldn’t never explain to him fistula is a tear in the soft parts of the female caused by childbirth so she leaks like a fishnet all the rest of her days. —It’s not for a man to know, I says.

He sat up in the bed and lit his tobacco, naked and blowing smoke at the ceiling. —But we’re married. A man has his desires. Don’t you love me at all?

—Who else would I love?

—Well then if that’s so, carry on in the manner of a WIFE.

He did not force me. God love him. He could have, but he didn’t. The poor man had a point.

—Christ Jesus Axie.

—Not yet. Just a little time longer to stay alive. Just to spare my life.

—Oh for f***’s sake.

We were married three months, and I did not give in. One morning as we spooned and wrestled in a torture of longing I stopped him again and he roared. —Jesus! You’re all peppery and ready the one minute and the next you’re cold as a dead mackerel, he cried. —We’re married, d*** you so OBEY like you vowed to do at the wedding.

—It will kill me like it killed my Mam.

—I’ll kill you first. He got up red-faced, pulled on his trousers.

—Charlie!

In a fury he stormed out of the place. The ceiling swam overhead through a gauze of tears. He would kill me or leave me. It was unfair, this bargain. What he wanted. What I didn’t. Before we had wanted the same thing, to not be orphans no more. To not be cast friendless upon the earth. And now we were not friendless or cast out. We were married. Charlie had his journeyman job at the
Herald
and I had only the one block to walk to the Evans where my cot was no longer by the stove but folded away upstairs. I had my jar of money and promise of more in three years when I turned twenty one. There wasn’t nothing in our way but for this business of c**j*g*l relations and how they might put me in my grave. At last I dressed and went heavyhearted around the corner to Chatham Street.

Mrs. Browder was sweating in the kitchen over a joint of mutton. —You’re late.

I hung my coat on the peg.

—What’s the matter?

—Never mind, I said.

—Young lovers’ troubles, is it?

—He’s always after me.

—It’s your duty as a wife, love.

—Then I won’t be a wife.

—Good luck to you then, she said. —What else will you be?

What was there to be but a wife or a servant? It was all the same. And where was the wild red sparkles and love’s sake only and the beauty of the wild ungoverned heart? Mrs. Browder gave me a little white pamphlet called Advice to a Wife and pointed out where the author Mr. Chevasse wrote his main counsel:

As soon as a lady marries, the romantic nonsense of school-girls will rapidly vanish, and the stern realities of life will take their place, and she will then know, and sometimes to her grievous cost, that a useful wife will be thought much more of than either an ornamental or a learned one.

Well no doubt I was useful but it was the part about the grievous cost that had me in a stew. I slammed the kettle and carried breakfast upstairs to Phoebe, a big lump of a patient who rested indisposed on the fourth floor. She was large and puffed, her child a week past due. It would kill me to be in her place. Her ankles was the size of birch stumps and I knew she had the milk leg for sure. I brooded the whole day. Toward evening, when I had taken the linen in off the line, and wrapped the scraps of dinner in a dishcloth for our supper, I headed with it home to our room to face my husband, if only he was there.

He was not. There was the brown watermark on the wall from a leak upstairs. There was the hole in the plaster in the shape of a bird head. In the dirty light our two plates sat on the table waiting, one of them chipped. In the air shaft pigeons rutted with guttural noises, half obscene. Overhead the ceiling creaked with the boots of the upstairs neighbors. The reek of cabbage leaked through the cracks. Charlie’s extra shirt was hung on the knob, and I put it on, smelling his tobacco and ink. I waited there wearing it, but he did not come. I did not touch my supper. I crawled to the corner and lay down where we had slept these last married weeks wound around each other, coiled as springs, but now I was a straight line again alone.

*  *  *

For six days, there was no sign of him. No word. —He’s a bounder, then, said Mrs. Browder. —Once a man of the streets, always a man of the streets.

And she was right. Was she? Charlie for years before we married had spent his time in saloons and bookstores, talking politics, singing McGinty, having his drop. This was a husband who loved to hear himself talk, jawing over a pint foaming with his opinions. It appeared I had no choice but to change my ways, if I wanted him to change his.

Toward morning of the seventh night, Charlie returned. His key rattled
in the lock. He cursed and stumbled while he unlaced his boots. His breathing was loud, slow and heavy, through the mouth.

—Mrs. Jones? he cried. —Are you my WIFE?

—Yes.

—In name or in fact?

—In fact and name both, I said, so quiet.

—Well, then, said he, thickly breathing. —I have something for you. See what I have Mrs. Jones? He sat on the edge of our poor mattress and leaned over me. The smell off his clothes was pure whiskey. —A present. He reached down to his trousers.

Here it comes now. I quaked and steeled myself, but then with his other hand from behind my ear he withdrew a sealed wax paper packet the size of a silver dollar and pressed it to my palm.

—What is that?

—French letter, he said, weaving where he sat.

—We don’t know nobody in France.

—It’s not a letter at all. It’s a shield.

The waxy paper crinkled and I was afraid to see the thing he unraveled. He did not explain its purpose. He didn’t have to. It was plain right away. It was a comical sleeve made from sausage casing, with drawstrings.

I staunched the urge to laugh. —Where’d you get it?

—Off a hoor in the Bowery, he said, like it was funny.

I recoiled away from him. —Don’t come near me, you scut. You’re a cheater and a lout off the street and the nuns never taught you no morals and I should’ve listened to Mrs. Dix when she warned me against you. I faced the wall.

—Now, Mrs. Jones, I was joking with you. In truth I got it off a cove named Owens. He calls himself a freethinker. Belongs to a society over at T. W. Strong’s bookshop on Nassau Street where I found him the other night with a bunch of abolitionists and Hungarian Laszlos and Tammany shoulder-hitters, and these past few days I cooped down with him hanging around the bookshop and listening to them Professors all wag their beards on an assortment of anarchical plots and radical notions. The Rights of Man. The stupidities of priestcraft. The beauty of Free Thought. The Beauty of Free Love! You’d have been happy to hear they was all for the latter.

—Free Love? I cried. —For sure it’s not free at all.

I was not listening to his excuses. The lie that he slept at a bookstore? Not likely. And I did not like the sound of Free Love. I did not like the sound of Rights of Men.

—Since when does a person need a freethinkers society? I said. —Any fool can think for nothing.

—Not true, he said, up on his soapbox now. —How many fools line up to genuflect without question before the altar of church prattle, with no more proof of truth than a sorcerer?

—You’ll go straight to hell if you talk like that.

—No more than you will, Mrs. Jones. Opinions ought to be based in scientific fact and logic, not just because some set of whiskers says it, or because it’s tradition, or church order. You see? The freethinker’s philosophy.

To me it sounded like a philosophy of carrying on with miscreants and cancan girls and hot corn sellers with a trade up Cupid’s Alley on the side. I had married a faithless lout. Had I? At the moment it seemed yes. I did not trust him.

Seeing the woe and suspicion on my sorry phiz, Charlie began to swear to me his loyalty. —Quit your doubting, Mrs. Doubting Thomasina. Why would I go with the professional trapes off the street? They’ve got the Venus-curse all of them and there’s not one that won’t just as soon rob you as sit down with the queen for a cup of tea.

—How do you know that then, if not from experience? I cried.

—I never was a saint, he said, shrugging. —I lived off my wits and the kindness of strangers. Some of the strangers in the past were ladies, I won’t deny it.

I glared at Charlie, but he did not apologize nor hang his head. He only stared at me straight on, his tongue working under his lip.

—Those days are long gone now I promise you. I’m a married man.

—Ha. You just was gone from home six days.

—You’re my wife. You’ll believe me or leave me, take your pick.

The fix in his eye was steady as a lantern on a windless night. I tried to look away but he took my chin in his hand and held it the way you hold the muzzle of a creature you would tame. We sat on the bed in the lamplight till all our turmoil was stilled down. Our breath was matched now and
changed in its rhythms and our eyes dropped to the strange article still on the bed between us.

—You have to trust me, he said, and rested his hand so gentle on my cheek and worked his fingers up and through the thicket of my hair till I forgot my own motto was Never Trust a Man Who Says Trust Me, for I was weak as the thin pale ribbon of my nightdress as he unlaced it, and he kissed me while he unwrapped the French article like it was Christmas and he was offering me diamonds.

—Does it work? I said.

—It does.

—You swear?

—I swear.

We still did not have a curtain, but at least we had a shield, and we employed it then with all manner of language, none of it French.

Mrs. Browder smiled when she caught me whistling over the washtub. —So you’re a wife after all.

—What else could I be?

—A mother. It won’t be long now.

I did not tell her about the letters from France.

T
he letter from Illinois, however, was another matter. It arrived one afternoon like a late wedding present when I was sweeping the fireplace grates at the Doctor’s house, my hands black with ash. The bell rang in front. —F. and S., I said, and answered the door to the postman, who handed over an envelope addressed to me.