My Notorious Life (25 page)

Dear Axie,

Mother and Father held a winter ball in Chicago! I know you would like to hear about it, for any girl, no matter her circumstance, loves to discuss fine things. My gown was a rose-colored glacé silk, with shoes to match. My cousins the VanDerWeils attended. The middle one, Clara, is a dear sister to me, so pretty and fashionable. Her older brother, Eliot, is going to Cambridge for university in the fall. He wears a gold pocket watch from the V&W Chicago Rail Co. (His grandfather is the founder.) I was allowed to stay for the dancing.

For my birthday, Mother and Father gave me a silver locket, engraved with the name LILLIAN in the prettiest filigree. I do like to be called Lillian. Mother says it’s a name of a woman of grace and beauty. I pray every day that the glory of the Lord is with you, and enclose for you His good Word. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Sincerely, Lillian Ambrose

Her words was light and frilly but they punctured me like hatpins. The Winter Ball and the silver locket. LIKE A SISTER TO ME. My craw was choked with insult and jealousy.
Blessed are the poor in spirit
. Ha. She thought I was only a guttersnipe. Her letter left me mad and smoking as lamp oil smuts.

—What is it now? said Mrs. Browder when she heard me cursing and slamming.

For an answer I emptied the coal scuttle in one toss. It raised an evil dust cloud near the clean white washing.

—You’re a terror, she cried.

—I’m worse than that. I handed her the letter.

Mrs. Browder read it, her eyes drooling along the parts about the ball, the French silk, the silver locket. —Oh my drawers. Your sister lives in fancy circumstance.

—My sister lives in a fancy lie is what. And her name ain’t Lillian.

—Well, love, I’m sure you’re glad to have news of her at least.

I wrote my sister back in short order.

Dutchie: What do you mean you are called Lillian? What kind of a name is that DUTCH? And DUTCH do not even speak to me of somebody named CLARA who is not your sister. And here is a reminder who is: ME. Also don’t send me no more high and mighty lines about how I am poor and blessed in spirit while YOU are blessed in lockets and balls. And if you are so fancy you should hire a detective to find our Joe, you should get BLOODHOUNDS.

Your SISTER, Axie

I tossed that letter in the fire. If I knew my sister and I did, she would pout. She’d say I was bossy. At last, with terrible effort, I wrote again, mealy mouthed and simpering.

Dearest Dutch, (Lillian)

Thank you for your news. How marvelous that you all have so much fun in Chicago at the balls &c. As for me, I have married a dashing gentleman, Mr. Charles G. Jones, Esq. He
has a pocket watch too! he is a writer for the Herald and his grandfather is a founder, also. Me and Charlie have a grand apartment in Gramercy. One of our favorite pastimes is strolling along the river on Sunday mornings and after church we take outings in the carriage to Connecticut in the heat of the summer, and just adore to see the opera in the fall. Oh dear Lillian if you might please devote some effort to finding our own Joseph Muldoon aged 8 years now. Like you said before, he is adopted by people called Trow who moved to Philadelphia surely you might find him so we might one day have a reunion, all three of us.

Love,

Your sister, Ann

If she would be Lillian to me I would be Ann to her. I mailed the packet of lies off to her in a blue mood, and not two weeks later, another letter arrived.

Dear Ann,

Congratulations on the happy news of your marriage. I do wish you would write me everything about your wedding. I adore weddings! Did you have a honeymoon trip? You must write me all about it, and about Charles. However did you meet him? Mother says that the Herald is a respected newspaper in New York. She sends her good wishes and congratulations to the happy newlyweds.

As for me, I have been busy with plans for our summer visit to the lake, where we have the most marvelous lawn parties, and go bathing and sailing in our little skimmer. Cousin Clara will be there, along with her brother Eliot. Clara has a darling new dress of white piqué. Mother says she will have several white dresses made for me, too, one of Swiss muslin, with a double skirt, a ribbon of pink satin through the hems, and Greek sleeves. Have you any dresses with Greek sleeves? I do adore them. I must go now to study être in the subjunctive tense. Quelle horreur. Que je déteste les verbes français!

—Lillian

P.S. I am so sorry to report we have no idea of the whereabouts of Joseph Muldoon, but I will ask my Papa what he might discover.

My sister’s words made green ribbons of jealousy run along the hems of my bad temper.

—Don’t trouble yourself over it, Mrs. Jones, said my new husband.

—How would I stop troubling myself if I wanted to?

—We’ll go to Chicago and find them.

—You said that before.

—One day we’ll show up at the Ambrose lawn party in our yachting costumes.

—And our little French muslins.

—And our little French letters, he said, his lips on my neck.

I swatted him. —Stop now.

—Say stop in French and I will.

—F*****g stop.

—No, he said, and I was grateful for his persistence for he distracted me from the sorrows and preoccupations of the past. When I recovered from his ministrations, Charlie helped me write my sister back.

Dear Lily,

Last evening was unforgettably divine, for I danced the German at Mrs. Cropsey’s party on Fifth Avenue. I can assure you darling Dutch, there is no more popular dance in all of New York. Oh how I wish you and Joe could visit us here! We would have a grand time.

Me and Charlie wrote to Dutch regularly now, long, lying accounts of our rich and opulent life. We matched her lawn parties line by line with charades and possessions.

 . . . We have purchased a splendid pair of sorrels, such handsome horses, don’t you agree? The carriage Charles selected has fine upholstered leather, and the curtains are made of damask. . . .

 . . . Charles is just home from a reception at The Century Club, where he dined with Mr. Astor and Mr. A. T. Stewart, who inquired of an article Charles wrote on the Reconstruction effort. Mr. Astor was of the mind it was as fine an editorial as he’d ever seen. . . .

Charlie provided the details and the sentences. His handwriting was all flourishes and fancy legs on the downstrokes. He knew everything. Which clubs to mention. Which parties was the flash. He was a walking newspaper, with the ink on his hands to prove it. But he wasn’t yet a writer at any journal, only a typesetter, and a journeyman at that, working when they called him, once or twice in a week, for a wage of twenty two cents an hour. His exposé of the Tombs had gone straight to nowhere. Some Editors, those pompous bloviators, had read it and said, Who cares about prisoners? It is not a story for our readers. Two weeks later, the
Herald
ran An Exposé of the Tombs under another writer’s name, and more than half the words was stolen from the pen of Charles G. Jones.

So Charlie remained a printer. His earnings was never more than two dollars in a day. Still, he wrote away. He’d show them, he said. He’d make them sorry. He’d have his own name in type yet. He frequented bookstores and the inky haunts and drinking establishments of poets and rebels. He came home talking of Reason and Romance and Stoicism and Moral Physiology. The only comfort against my jealous suspicions was the idea that hoors did not talk such high talk, so perhaps he was truthful when he claimed he was up all the night arguing with Philosophers or flattering editors. For sure it seemed he was always writing. Our room was full of his papers, scrawls on scraps. He practiced on anything, on those letters to Dutch.

—Tell her we dined on squab and truffles, I told him, and gave him the menus of our banquets and all my dreams of dresses straight out of the Ladies’ Book. —Say I worn a stole of marabou feathers and patent dancing slippers.

—Wore, Student, said my husband, —not worn. Speak like the gentry.

He was ever after trying to make me over into nobility and led me to believe he thought me Thick and caused me shame at my improper grammar, even as we enjoyed to write out together an uppercrust life for ourselves and send it off to Chicago.

Every three or four weeks Dutch wrote me back, pages of detail: about her governess, French lessons, wardrobe, social life, and them infernal cousins. Clara this. Clara that. Clara Clara Clara. The older one, Eliot, showed up, too. Oh, he was a dashing devil, that Eliot VanDerWeil, swashbuckling around with his mustache and his opinions, on the war, on railroad tariffs.
Eliot says young ladies ought to be in bed by nine p.m.!

My sister in her writing seemed years older than thirteen. How I missed her.

The concoction of Big City stories that me and Charlie sent off to Dutch could not amend the worst fact: that Dutch’s letters was pure truth and mine were lies. Envy grew soft and corrosive on my heart like mold on cheese. Now while I toiled away as a maid and midwife’s apprentice, I coveted the life of a Chicago Belle. I longed for my sister Dutch and not this Lily. I hated Cousin Clara. I wanted Joe, to know where he was. He would be a wiry boy of eight years old in knee pants, hair the color of a brick New York building, like the one where he was born and belonged. He never had heard his name Muldoon or the word Carrickfergus nor the truth of how he was the descendant of the Kings of Lurg. I pined to see his dear face. Would I even recognize him? Joe and my sister was a preoccupation of mine such that my husband took to making wild promises to coax a smile out of me.

—We’ll go and fetch them, Charlie whispered, and wound a curl of my hair around his fingers. —Dutch and Joe both.

—When will that be?

—Soon as we save up the train fare.

But it was all we could do to pay the rent. We scrimped along on Charlie’s spotty journeyman wages, for two days one week, three the next, barely enough, and lived for the date two years hence when I finished out my service to the Evans at age twenty one, and would receive the rest of the money Mrs. E. had promised me. A thousand dollars we calculated. —
When you get your wages, darlin’,
Charlie sang,
—we’ll have pie and pork, yes we will
. When you get your wages.

But I did not get wages. I did not get pie nor pork. Just a handful of tablets and a book of recipes. In the insult of it, what I failed to understand was, these items was as good an inheritance as a trunkful of Barbary Coast doubloons.

I
n the spring of 1866, when I was nineteen years of age, my teacher, Mrs. Evans, died in her sleep. God took her, said Mrs. B., but we both known it was more likely the vial of Sanative Serum on her nightstand that did it. Dr. Evans summoned me after the funeral to say that my services was no longer required. He sold the Chatham Street house to a carpet merchant and prepared to go lodge with his sister Mrs. Fenton in Yorkville, where I hoped a beer wagon from the Ruppert Breweries on Third Ave. would run him over for the manner in which he let me and Mrs. Browder go without so much as a paper of pins or a thank you. I stood before him in the library where he took off his spectacles to rub his eyes.

—Doctor, though, what about my wages? I demanded him.

—For these five years you have had room and board with us, the old unicorn told me. —You’ve learned housekeeping from Mrs. Browder.

—Skills such as every girl has, I said, —and none of them worth cash money.

—You are a married woman now. You live with your husband.

My husband was beside the point, as his wages was barely enough to cover the rent on a Vesey Street room the size of a tea towel. The roof leaked. There was rats in the walls. The privy was down the stairs out in the courtyard. A family of Gypsies was next door squabbling at all hours of the day and night. The smell of their dark spices drifted through the cracks
and clung to the hair. I wanted to get out. I wanted another dress besides this one. I wanted to eat squab at Delmonico’s and go to Niblo’s theatre for shows and take the train at last to Philly and Chicago to fetch my lost Muldoons.