My Notorious Life (26 page)

—A year ago Mrs. Evans promised me back wages to be paid when I left her service, I told the doctor. —She promised my mother as Mam lay dying.

—Wages? he said, very mild. —Mrs. Evans was not in her right mind.

—Her mind was right enough for her to deliver Mrs. Devine’s baby not two weeks before, and it was right enough for her to play her Sunday game of whist just last week, and it was right enough for her to promise me wages when I left her service.

He blinked like a turtle. —I’m afraid there isn’t any money. It’s all taken in debt. He handed me twenty dollars and my notice.

The old gargoyle was a gambler, it turned out. His outings on so-called medical emergencies was in fact emergencies at the horse track at Jerome Park, where he dispensed bets instead of medicines. Mrs. Browder found out the facts after he shorted her pay, too, by four months.

—It’s not right, she said. —We’ll have ours yet, won’t we Annie?

Packing up the trunks and crates of the household, we wasted no time helping ourselves. Into my gunnysacks went a bushel of apples and twelve jars of jam. A leg of mutton and half the potatoes from the potato hole. Also a frying pan, a sieve, and a good portion of Mrs. Evans’ dresses, shawls and whatnot. The remainder of my inheritance came from upstairs: sixteen bedsheets with shadows of old blood faded in brown watermarks, four blankets, a sugar tin, and a slopper. From the library I took Arabian Nights and Dr. Gunning’s Diseases of Women. From the clinic, I took Itch Powder, aloes to make a salve, and three bottles of Lunar Tablets for the Regulation of Female Physiology, as well as a bundle of medical tools, Mrs. Evans’ syringe bulb and hot water bottle, all wrapped in a dishcloth. Out of spite, I pocketed the doctor’s little book of medicinal formulas.

—What are these recipes? Charlie asked when he saw it later. —Are you going to poison me?

—Only rubbish, I told him, and soon had it hid in the cupboard.

*  *  *

Now I got up in the mornings and went out to find employment. I could sew a pleat and black a stove and rinse clothes with bluing. I could corn beef and make pudding from a piece of calf rennet soaked in a bottle of wine. I could say the psalm of David. And just by a hand on the abdomen, I could find the fundus of a woman three months gone or seven and could bind the chest of a nursing woman so her milk would dry. Armed thus only with knowledge, I knocked on doors. I went up and down Washington Square and all the way to Gramercy Park. For weeks, every door that opened had a maid or a shopgirl already behind it and none of them was eager for replacement.

At home in our bleak room I sulked over the scanty stew pot.

—We’re doomed to live in the coal scuttle always, I said one night to Charlie, while he lay next to me, his hand on my right b*s*m, and his leg, so heavy-boned and furred, lay over my flanks. —We’re poor now as we was the day we met.

—This right here is free, he said, and kissed me. —All you want, for no money. So saying, he helped himself. —If we could sell this, we’d be kings.

—Are you suggesting me, your own wife, to go out for work as a hoor for hire?

—Never. All’s I’m saying, Mrs. Jones, is, I’d buy whatever you have to sell.

—If I had a scrap to sell I’d sell it.

—Sell them books that you filched from the doctor.

—After I sell them, and spend the dollar, I am poor all over again.

—Sell something else then, he said. —But not this.

And we carried on helping ourselves to free servings. There was red wild sparkles amid the gray garlicked murk of a windowless boardinghouse room. But also, there was bad nights when he didn’t come home, and hot arguments over money, over the cost of his ale. Every day was a lesson in how love was a slippery fish between two anglers without no nets to catch it. Neither me nor Charles G. Jones ever had a working nuptial example to go by, so we proceeded by hook and by crook. Our money troubles was enough to turn us toward the second option, stealing apples off the cart, just to eat.

*  *  *

What could I sell? Matches? Muffins? I did not have the money for sulfur nor butter. I did not have tins or an oven. I had ten dollars left of the twenty that Dr. Evans had paid me squirreled secretly in the empty biscuit tin. One morning when my husband went off to his inky labors in Printing House Square, I went to the cupboard with the flicker of an Idea. Here was the notebook I lifted from Dr. Evans, stuffed with paper scraps in ink that had gone brown. Was there a recipe for me? The first page was a formula for Healing Remedy, Good for Man or Beast. The next page was the Spavin Cure for Human Flesh. There was Catarrhal Powder, followed by Lazy Liver Pills, Blood Cure, and there, just after that, was the one that had caught my imagination:

LUNAR PILLS (for Relief of Suppression of Catamenia):
Make a powder of ergot and Spanish fly. Make a milk of magnesia.

With my secret stash of money I went through the hot streets to Hegemann’s Pharmacy in Chatham Square. I bought beetle wings, magnesia powder, and the rusty fungused heads of rye stalks that was called ergot. In agony over the expense, I purchased three glass medicine bottles with cork stoppers. All this cost three dollars, a fortune I didn’t have. All along Vesey Street I kicked myself over my spent money, gone on a gamble.

At home, I did the recipe.
Add a dram of ergot and a minim only of the Spanish Fly
. With the flat of a spoon, I crushed the emerald wings of dark beetles, loosened the ergot fungus off the stalks of rye and mashed it, wetted the white magnesia dust with water. My efforts left me a chalky paste on a plate. Without a pill tile I used a knife to shape my efforts into tablets, the way I done it so many times on Chatham Street. But there was no binding syrup such as we had at Evanses to use for the excipient so the mess only fell off the mixing fork. The whole effort was a mash of ruin, dried to a powder. A waste of money and now what? We was broke six ways till payday, and when was that?

In tears, I funneled my failed gamble into the bottles and stoppered up the necks. I stumped about the stove, chopping cabbage, boiling tea, flinging pots. I was Axie the Dread cursing and cooking. I burned the bread. It was our last bit till hell froze over.

When Charlie came in he was cocked off gin. He sniffed the burnt air and ranted away at the loss of his dinner. —What the devil? he cried. —Do we have bread to BURN? Are we MADE of bread?

—F. off. Are we made of HOOCH? What’s the matter with you?

—Nothing you can’t fix, he says, his rough beard at my cheek, his dragon’s breath of liquor.

I shrugged him off me, disgusted. —Get away. Leave me be.

—I WILL leave you, he snorted. —Then you could burn the toast whenever you please. You’ll be well rid of me, eh? He stood holding the table’s edge, swaying soused on his pins and staring at the mess I made, of powder and pill bottles, rye stalks and beetle wings. —And what’s all this DUST? Is it dinner?

—It’s meant to be sold as medicinal tablets, to relieve the female complaint, to loosen an obstruction of the female hmm-hmmm-hmmm.

—Whose obstruction? he said, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

—Not mine. And sure it’s only a waste of three dollars now.

—You spent MONEY for this mess? he roared. —It’s a fortune!

—It was YOU put the notion in my head, to sell it!

—Dust? You would sell DUST? Have you lost your mind?

—It was supposed to be TABLETS. What do you know about it?

—Where’d you get it, eh? Who gave you three dollars?

—I HAD it.

—Oh ho she says, she HAD it. And where would MRS. Jones get it? What did you sell, then, to get the money for your DUST?

He came and got me by the collar and wrenched me very vicious but I twisted away so he chased me. We circled with the table between us, yelping. I made for the doorway.

—Mrs. Jones, he roared, and charged so I was maneuvered into a corner.

—Don’t come near me, I said with my back against the wall. His arms was a fork to pin me there.

—Where did you get three dollars?

—From Dr. Evans. It was MINE.

—Oh ho. What else are you hiding then? Ya dirty shake.

—Don’t come near me. Get away.

—Oh get away, he mimicked. —Oh keep away Charlie. His voice as he copied me was a high whine that slid fast down to menace. —You prefer a man who’ll pay you. Is that it Mrs. Jones? You’d rather a paying customer than a poor wretched printer without a nickel, without a proper pair of boots, without a pot to p*** in.

—P*** out the window for all I care! I shouted. —P*** off.

And he stopped right there, breathing thick and reeling. —Oh is that what you want? Then have it.

In a swift jerk he lifted the table by the edge. Flipped it. —Goodbye then, Mrs. Jones, my husband said, and left our poor room.

—Good riddance, I cried. But just as I slammed the door behind him, he came bursting back only to fall out cold on the bed, his mouth slack and stains on his shirt. I looked at him snoring there and hated him too thoroughly even to cry over any of it.

That night in the dark while he snored I brooded with the thudding of the neighbors’ boots above me mixed up with the mew of cats in heat and pigeons gargling on the sill. This racket was my only lullaby, for even married it appeared I was alone without no love or resources. Money was the one sure thing, wasn’t it? Even if I’d prefer a warm nest of relatives, at least Money did not go off elsewheres in the night drinking hops and gin and coming home to fondle a woman and call her names only to pass out.

In the early morning while Charlie slept it off I examined my sorry bottles of dust. In my terrible hand I wrote MRS. JONES LUNAR POWDER on a label for each one, determined to sell the stuff no matter what. Ladies would not care if it was loose powder or tablets, as long as it did as promised. I trusted it did. The same ingredients had worked for me, or so I thought, and I wouldn’t deceive a girl in trouble no more than I would rob an innocent child of milk.

*  *  *

Lower Broadway by City Hall Park was where vendors of every description went with their flotsam for sale, their bootlaces and buttons, their trays of meat patties, their whalebone needles and tortoise shell combs. There was nothing you couldn’t buy: songbirds in a cage, clam liquor and beeswax, a nosegay of pinks sold by a dirtyface girl, such as I was not long ago and might be soon again.

That day the clouds ahead were dark as eggplant, but the sun lit them from beneath so they were tinged with gold, looming and purple. Such weather seemed a bad sign as I settled down on the sidewalk of Chambers Street and arranged my pathetic wares in the lid of a discarded pasteboard
box plucked from the trash. On the front was propped an advertisement, hand-lettered by me.

Mrs. Jones’ Female Lunar Powder, Cures What Ails a Lady. *Not to be taken during p*******y, as M*sc*****ge may result.
$3
$2 Only While Supplies Last

I began to call out in my timid cheep. —Mrs. Jones’ Lunar Powder, I whispered. —Only three bottles left. Cures what ails you. This way, ladies.

In five short hours by a miracle I had sold my stock. One swank princess in a velvet cloak bought two bottles and the other was bought by a molting brood hen of a woman toting four grimy children. —If I have another it’ll be the last of me, said she. And just like that I had six dollars for five hours’ work. Six dollars. It was a fortune. Running home I spent it eighty ways a minute. And there in our room was hangdog Charlie, sitting up with his tail between his legs.

—Why do you look so pleased with yourself? said he.

—Ha! I told him why, full of triumph and spite. —FOUR dollars!

—Four dollars for a pile of dust, he said, wary. —Will wonders never cease?

—It was not DUST. It was medicine. It brings on the turns.

—And how would you know, Mrs. Jones?

—I tried it myself when you was locked in the Tombs. I’d have tried anything then and I did. Look here.

For the first time I told him the true reason for the pale scar on my wrist where the kitchen knife cut. —I stabbed myself to be rid of it, I cried, and my husband, pretty sober now, traced his inky fingernail along the line. He sat with his head hung, shamed, rubbing the cords of his neck.

—You should be SORRY for the torment of it, I said, —and SORRY for what you done to me yesterday night, and for what you called me, and how you ran off and left me here alone. And I don’t never want to be alone. Not EVER.

He did not look at me, but picked very guilty at the threads of the coverlet. After a time sighing and rubbing at his eyes he got himself up heavily
and put his arms through his braces, tucking in his shirt. He came over behind my back and leaned against me, pressing his forehead against the bone of my skull. I stood still. He turned me and nested me in his arms, and I allowed it. After a while like that the heat of him thawed my furious shoulders down. We stood holding on awhile, afraid to move, like we was made of wax and had melted that way.

—I am a sorry son of a knacker, says he.

With his chin resting on the top of my head, he confessed his trouble. —I’ve had no printer’s work at the
Herald,
nor anywhere, not for three weeks. I spent the rent money.

Our poverty put him out of his mind with worry and trouble, he said. So yesterday he’d had a pint for the nerves. Then another pint for bravery. Then another several. —All to muster the wherewithal to come home and tell you the news. That we’re broke as beggars.

—You called me a dirty shake.

—It was the whiskey called you that.

—It was your lips that drank it, and said it.

—A man will drink his lush, and a man will have his suspicions. Why did you hide three dollars from me?

—Have you never hid a thing from me?

He did not answer.

—I won’t be without money, I said.

—Are you hiding more money then? he asked, very mild.

—I told you, I got four dollars. I stared defiant at him. I would have my secrets as a hedge against his, that he spent the rent or whatever else.

He looked at me, shook his head and whistled long like I was some fancy girl on the street. —My, my, my. Four dollars just like that. You’re quite the gooseberry pudding, Mrs. Jones.