My Notorious Life (27 page)

Well. Was this Charming Charlie, back again? —Gooseberry pudding?

—You’re Christmas and payday all in one, says he, all smiles. —FOUR dollars?! It’s brilliant, to sell these powders. Selling dust for four dollars in a day only?

—A desperate woman would pay anything to put herself to rights let me tell you.

—Exactly, he said, excited. —And let me tell you that with the proper salesmanship, you’ll have yourself a little business. Mrs. Jones’ Remedies for
Sale. And we’ll have to work fast to sell more of this DUST, Mrs. Jones if we’re going to make the rent this month.

—I don’t have the ingredients.

—But you do have four dollars. Off we go to the chemists, how about it?

—What about the rent?

—Oh right, he says. —A pity. I guess you’re not up for a gamble. You’d never take a risk. Not if there was a pot of gold sitting the other side of a deserted train track in the middle of the wild open prairie.

—Ha. A pot of coddle, more like.

—Chickenheart, he said, daring me on. —The rent is six.

That day I showed my husband how to mix the powders, and after that, when he wasn’t trolling for journey work at the print shops and newspapers of the city, Charlie mashed beetle wings or wrote me out neat labels
Mrs. Jones’ Lunar Remedy, $2.
He wrote instructions in flourishes of penmanship.
Mix with a half cup of water and swallow 1 scant teaspoon a day for six days.
He made a proper sign, telling me, —Yours looks like a child wrote it. He had to take over and boss me, saying, —See, Student here’s what you do. Thus I seen—saw—his superior education, wrote out also in the little newsprint ledger he showed off, writing Expenses over one column of figures and Income over another column. After six weeks, in a miracle, he explained, —We grossed ninety dollars and netted seventy five dollars. This sum he wrote in a new column called PROFIT. —Gross is the total, Student, while Net is what we caught for our dinner, he said, like a Schoolmaster, so I never felt so ignorant. And wasn’t the whole enterprise my idea in the first place? Still, we were in business. There was no more arguments now over money or dust, though I squirreled away a nest egg just for my own, rolled in a stocking. Things was patched up between us, just by the plaster of industry. Or was it the plaster of money?

On my worst nights, I suspected my husband stuck not to me, but to the profits of the enterprise we begun that day. What I didn’t know then was that to have a common venture was a good cement for Marriage, an institution held together by financial operations same as it was by operations of the boudoir. It was a lesson it took me years to learn, believing as I did so fiercely in the wild red sparkles of Love’s Sake Only.

*  *  *

Mrs. Jones’ Remedy was good as fairy dust, molded into tablets. Within a few months the stuff transformed Mrs. Jones herself like a sprinkle from the pixies. One day I was a pitiful trape in the square, a shawl around my head, a wet cardboard box in front of me with a solitary bottle displayed, and so forlorn you would think by the holes in my stockings I was scranning a handout. Not five months later, I had new stockings and a wooden pushcart. Charlie had bought it off an onion monger and fixed it up for me with a proper sign: Mrs. Jones Lunar Powder, $3, painted in Chinese red over the old lettering that read, Onions, 5 Cents.

—WHILE SUPPLIES LAST, I called, in my new bold voice. —Halloo there madam! LOWEST PRICE ON THE MARKET. The customers circled, approached quite furtive with their baskets.

—You don’t look old enough to be Mrs. Jones, they told me.

—She’s my gran, so she is.

—Give me a bottle then, dearie, and tell your Gran it better do the trick.

The coins landed softly in my jam jar of profit, and the bills that stuffed it looked green and minty through the glass.

*  *  *

One year and one THOUSAND DOLLARS later, I wrote the latest installment of news to Dutch:

Dear Lillian,

We have the most swell new apartments. Decorated throughout with draperies and such, in the fashionable Greenwich Street which is all the go. You should see the windows and especially the expensive harpsichord in our parlor it is lacquered black and painted with golden CHINOISERIE by which is meant Chinee painting.

Chinoiserie was all the rage, Charlie informed me, for he knew everything about the money class.

I have wrote to the Children’s Aid Society demanding to know the whereabouts of Joe. Won’t you get your Ambrose family to help us find him? if you get his address we will stop in
Philadelphia to fetch him on the way to Chicago to see you quite soon, dear little sister, and be reunited at last like Mam wished for us all to be.

The only lie was about the harpsichord. But the Greenwich Street apartment was true and so was our intention to look for Joseph in the City of Brotherly Love on the way to Chicago. The money jar was full and I was hellbent to round up the Muldoons at last. I mailed off the news to Dutch with our new address prominently featured. And this time, the reply was instant. Not at an interval of weeks, but by return mail.

Dear Ann,

It would not be an opportune time for a visit to Chicago, for the winters are cold and the lake frozen. In addition, Mother is in poor health and says we may not have visitors till the warm weather arrives. It would be best to wait until summer. Oh, don’t you love the summer? It is ever so warm and sunny.

Such tripe was never written by a girl before nor since. Ever so warm and sunny? Well of COURSE summer is sunny and warm. It is the SUMMER, you halfwit. After EIGHT years apart, why didn’t she write how thrilled she’d be to see me? Instead she wrote of Cousin Eliot. His mustache and his riding breeches.

He has a velvet waistcoat and patent leather dancing slippers. He is going to study business. He is very jolly, but such a terrible tease! He calls me Miss Lillian, and all manner of other names: Lilliputian, Silly Lily, and Mistress Sillypants.

Mistress Sillypants indeed. It was enough to make me lose my toast in a teacup.

Charlie said, —What do you expect? Sixteen years of age and corrupted by the Decadent Society. No wonder she writes nothing but c***!

I comforted myself by writing regular to Dear Mr. Brace at the Aid Society, asking did they know of Joseph Muldoon, taken to Philadelphia,
etc. A Mr. P. Claridge wrote back promising to communicate directly should he hear any news. So we had no choice but to wait for summer to rescue Dutch. As it turned out, we were to wait longer than that, through many events, small and large. The first of them was very large indeed, although it weighed just under six pounds, about the heft of a good joint of mutton.

A
t first it was only a cinder of fear. But then came the clues like steps leading down to a cellar. The taste of chalk at the back of my tongue. A sudden odor off things with no odor: stone, water, wood. One morning I woke queasy. In a panic over it. I knew the symptoms and remembered a night when our shield fell to pieces for we had wore it out and now I feared the consequence. What if I was ______? Please not. I was twenty one years of age and too young to die. I selected a bottle of my own Lunar Tablets and swallowed them down, waiting for my turns to arrive. I wished on the evening star. I soaked a rag in burberry oil and placed it on my forehead. I left a saucer of milk on the windowsill, as Mam advised to do, so the
sheehogues
would keep trouble off. But no god nor fairy heard my pleas this time. The medicine did not take. There was no change in my state. I was still sore in the chest, still sick in the a.m., grim in the evenings.

—I am on the nest, I blurted to Charlie one night in our bed.

He was reading a newspaper. He did not hear me or pretended he didn’t. —Hmm?

—Because of you, I am ______.

Now I had his full attention. —You’re not joking.

—Do I look like a clown to you?

—Sweet Jesus, no, you look like the mother of my son. It’s true then?

—It’s YOUR fault, I cried.

—I hope it’s not nobody else’s.

He was grinning. He could not stop himself. He took me in his arms proud like he won a game of skill, strutted with his feathers cocked up, a rook inflated with the news. I stayed stiff and turned away and picked at a piece of loose skin by my fingernail, pulled it off so the blood was bright in the lamplight.

—Aw Missus Jones.

—I’ll only die, is all. My mother did.

—Not of having you, she didn’t. He fitted me under his wing. —Chickenheart.

—It’s not you that has to have it, I cried.

—It’ll be fine, he said, for he was lately optimistical and full of plans. —Little Joneses all over the place. It’ll be swell.

—For YOU it will, I said, miserable. It made no difference knowing that all the time I’d assisted Mrs. Evans I’d only seen one woman die, and of eclampsia, which was not common. What was a baby but a ship built in a bottle? You couldn’t get it out without breaking the glass. I was narrow-hipped and small-boned and my mother’s daughter. I would die.

—One out of a hundred mothers died in childbed just in the last year of 1868, I told him. —I read it in the
Police Gazette
. It’s carnage, so it is.

—Well the
Gazette
never met Axie Jones, did it now? He tucked me down tenderly as a nestling.

In the morning, Charlie hummed and patted me on the rump, a new kind of smile on his lips. I went around pinched and gray, full of doom. —You look like yesterday’s fish, Charlie said.

—In seven months I’ll be dead as haddock on Friday.

—You’re not going nowheres, Mrs. Jones. That wee Master Jones in the oven there is just the first of the rest of the Great Joneses of Greenwich Street. Of FIFTH AVENUE. We’ll have a house on Washington Square with a room for each little Jonesie. Money in the bank and horses in the stables.

—Ha! I brushed him off. But from under my pillow, I listened.

—You WON’T die. These ladies with nursemaids and carriages, such as you, Mrs. Jones, they don’t die.

—I seen Mrs. Kissling die right in her husband’s arms. And he was a banker.

Charlie sobered a little so I thought he might miss me if I departed this life, but then he gathered steam, talking himself into his own argument like he could issue a decree. —You can’t die, Mrs. Jones. It’s the lower orders that go to the grave, whereas the better classes with the three rooms, such as YOU, the ones with the plumbing and gaslight right in the hallway, such as you: they don’t die. They’ve got doctors. Medicines. Elixirs. Doodads. All the finest remedies and SCIENCE. Likewise, so do you. You’re not living in Cherry Street now, do you hear me? Or ever again.

It would be nice to believe the picture, what he said. The family with stables and bank accounts. The elixirs and the pomades and the doodads. It was all I wanted but I didn’t trust it was real. None of it. —Not possible, I said.

—You wouldn’t trust the sun to shine or the moon to rise, said my husband.

But why should I? Just because we had some coins in the jar to call our own? To me trouble was regular. Everything else was only temporary.

*  *  *

Strangely, as my form grew misshapen and enormous, my dread and fear shrunk down. Maybe it was Charlie’s persuasion, his confident talk of science. More likely it was something else: the child was quick. Lying down, dozing, I felt the hard thump like a heart, low in the abdomen. I lay in the darkness of the early morning, five months gone, with Charlie asleep beside me, and put my hand to the spot low down by the hip where I felt it. There. And there again. A flutter. Not bigger than a hiccup. I smiled in the darkness. So this is what is meant by quick, I thought. Alive. It’s come alive. My own heart beating somewheres else in my body.

Hello, I said in the dark, but not out loud, and began to allow myself a dream of a girl with eyes dark as huckleberries looking up. I would be a mother. Would I? Already wee Jones had a sense of humor. I pushed my belly, then came a push back. We made a game of it. Push. Thump. —Feel here, I said, smiling, and took my husband’s hand. He circled the round hard lump through the wall of my middle.

—What the hell is that?

—Kicks.

—Mother of God. It’s a boy no question.

*  *  *

My stomach was so large now it could have its own moon. Sitting at my cart with my bottles displayed alongside the big round of it was not a good advertisement for the regulation of anything, esp. the female physiology. Nobody bought my wares. On a Friday in July I lumbered home and sat on the bed with my feet straight out in front of me. They was swollen sore and cracking, ruts in the heels like dried mud. Mr. Jones came home and found his wife was a beetle pinned under the weight of her own Self.

—How many sold today? he asked.

—Not one. At this rate we’ll be on Cherry Street again in a wink.

—Quit that talk.

—What use is it hauling the cart all the way to City Hall, I cried, —just to sit there broiling for not one green dollar? I’m fat as a tick and all the housemaids turn up their noses like they’ve no use for tablets. Not a penny in the jar all week. It’s hello Cherry Street for us again. The Childrens Aid will send Mr. Brace after us and that pooka will put the child on the train to Illinois.