My Notorious Life (28 page)

Charlie did not like when I talked about our poverty nor Cherry Street or to be reminded of that train. He paced the room, stroked his whiskers. He was having a Great Thought, you could see it come over him. He took a pen from his vest and began writing in the small notebook he carried with him in case he might stumble upon the story that would get him printed in the pages of a newspaper. The man was possessed, I thought. As he worked, the pink tip of his tongue protruded between his lips, which reminded me, always, of something about to be born.

Something was, of course. His grand idea.

—Look at this, then, he said after five minutes. —An advertisement.

I took it and read what he wrote.

FEMALE PILLS. Mrs. Jones, renowned Female Physician, informs the ladies that her pills are an infallible regulator of m****s. They must not be used when p*******, as M*sc*****ge may result. Prepared and sold only by herself. $4 a bottle, including instructions. Inquiries and orders to 148 Greenwich Street, NY.

—Am I supposed to wear this on a sandwich board then? I asked, disgusted.

—There’s not no board that would fit a sandwich the likes of you.

At this I threw my shoe at him.

His brown eyes flashed with the love of his own joke, and some new feverish intent. He retrieved the
Herald
from the chair and turned to the end page. —We’ll put a notice here, he said, and pointed to the ads selling all kinds of remedies: HUNTER’S RED DROP for the effectual cure of v******l diseases. SAND’S REMEDY for Salt Rheum. JAYNE’S VERMIFUGE for Worms, Worms, Worms.

There were advertisements for every reason under heaven.

THE ORIGINAL MADAME R— tells everything, traces absent friends, causes speedy marriages, gives lucky numbers. Ladies, 50 cents; gentlemen, one dollar.

A RETIRED SWEDISH PHYSICIAN, OF FORTY YEARS’ practice, discovered, while in India, a sure remedy for consumption, bronchitis, colds, etc.

—Every one of them advertisements is by a European fancy type, I said. —A Swede and a German and also a Vandenburgh and a Portuguese. Who am I to advertise in that company? Nobody. I’m Mrs. Jones, just.

—Well so you will be MADAME Jones then, Charlie suggested. —The famous French female physician Madame Jones.

—Jones is about as French as a piece of laced mutton.

—Not many laces big enough to go around this mutton.

I flung my other shoe at his head.

—Madame Broussard? he tried. —Madame LeClerc? Madame DuBois? Madame DeBeausacq? He dreamed up Madames and wrote them on a list.

I pictured myself as a Paris lady. —What’s that one there? I pointed.

—DeBeausacq? You will be glad to know that Beau means beautiful.

—I’ll take that one then.

—Beautiful sack, he translated.

—Ha. Sack of misery, more like.

—Won’t be long now, he soothed me with tender ministrations and sips from his bottle of ale. He was altogether now a more attentive class of husband as my confinement grew closer. —It will all be fine, he said, which aggravated me, and I prickled at him and did not trust him and suspected he was only nice to me because I was going to die. He would miss my earnings, that was it.

—I am ready to burst, I whispered. —I’m a kernel of corn in a fire.

*  *  *

However, I was not corn but more like biscuit dough, rising in the oven of our sweltering August rooms. Climbing stairs required me to haul myself up by the banister. Pain stabbed at the small of my back while I walked or moved about our kitchen making bread. Sitting, lying, the child shifted in my belly. You could see it. A knee or foot or elbow protruded in a knob of flesh. It was a cat in a sack. It kept me up nights with dyspepsia and fear and the sensation of bubbles rising through my middle, fillips of air like the wee somebody was laughing, the sound turning to fizz within. Perhaps I would like the little squibben after all, its fingernails like tiny slivers of moon. But it was an outrage, the whole condition. The bloating and the thrombosis. The vomiting and swelling. The red chap of the cheeks and the ominous dark line that appeared on the belly like a carving mark.

We were cows. I was.

*  *  *

The summer slid into autumn, and as it did, envelopes slid into our mailbox common as leaves off trees, thanks to the many new advertisements Charlie placed in all the papers. While the mail did not bring the letter I craved from my sister, or any communication from Mr. Brace with news of Joe Muldoon, it did bring countless orders for Madame DeBeausacq’s Female Remedy, and inside the envelopes were folded bills, cheques and pieces of silver like miracles every day, along with letters to freeze the blood of any woman expecting a child, as they froze mine. For example.

Dear Mrs. Debosack, I have ben Married 7 yrs. and have All redy had 4 live children with 2 in the Grave. My last child is 9 mos. I had no doctor for 2 hours after she was born and I layed
on the floor and nearly got Blood poison and am still suffering from Milk Leg ever sinse. I am All most Broken down Aged 25. Please have you a Prevention? —Mrs. Sophie Peck, Erie, Penn.

Dear Madame, While I love my six children there is no joy in living. I am only twenty-eight and am penned up till I can’t have half an hour to myself. I am almost a prisoner. Please, please help poor people like us. It is so hard in the winter time with so much coal to buy and winter clothing. If we have any more I don’t know what we will do. —Mrs. Arlen Livermore, Flemington, N.J.

Dear Mme. DeB., I have the fear of pregnancy on my mind all the time. If I try to stay away from my husband, he is terrible mean to me and says awful things. He doesn’t think what I have suffered having my babies and what a terrible worry it is when they are sick and how hard it is to make over old clothing and I don’t know what else. I could go on with my troubles and fill a book, but here is three dollars for your tablets it is my last money. For God’s sake please help me, so I need not have any more as I have heart trouble and I would rather to be here and raise these four, than to have more and probably die. —Mrs. A. P. Kelly, Troy, NY

I sent out orders of tablets, and out of charity returned to the poorest ones, such as Mrs. Kelly, their three dollars along with their medicine, for who could take a mother’s last money? But even with such small acts of philanthropy, our income grew daily. Thanks to the advertisements, I no longer went to the street with my cart but instead stayed inside our rooms working away. I was a factory, not just of wee Jones’ bones and sinews, but of powders and pills. Charlie lettered the labels and brought them to his printer friend Harold at the
Herald
to set in type. Herald Harold as we called him did not charge for the printing but asked instead for a bottle of Mrs. Jones powders for his wife (he said). With spruce gum I stuck the labels on the brown glass, my hands and hair sticky. For hours, with a folded paper as a funnel, I counted out thirty tablets per bottle and stoppered them down. I
waddled off to the post office to mail out parcels wrapped in string to my poor ladies, the most of which seemed to be married, mothers already, anxious to prevent another confinement. They was all of them desperate. Our profit now was steady and immediate.

—Pinch me, I’m dreaming, I says to Charlie. He pinched me and we laughed, running our hands through coins like they was common dry peas. Our fortunes were shifted overnight, such that some two hundred dollars a day poured into our pockets. We was getting along now like the best of friends. With money in the bank, Charlie was jovial, his temper gone away same as the old mattress we burnt to replace with a feather one. How bittersweet, I thought, that I might die in my own soft bed, with a husband at my side and cash in my pocket, and not like I had long expected, on the pavement alone with a gnawed bone between my teeth. My time would be soon upon me.

I
t was like a belt or a clench tightening from the back around to the front. I was dreaming. The covers of my bed were twisted in the dark. Was this it, then? No, it was nothing. False pains. I slept and woke again. The belt tightened and cinched. I stirred and sat up and still the muscles across my midsection were rigid then flexing.

Charlie woke. —What is it?

I did not need to tell him. He knew. He got his pants on. His shoes. —I’ll fetch Dr. Vachon, he said, and that started up our running argument.

—No! Get Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Vachon’s a peacock, I won’t have him.

—He’s a man of science.

—He’s a man of snails and garlic. I won’t have any man. Not of science or anywhere, not even France.

Dr. Vachon was an old beast with hairs grown out of the sockets of his ears. I didn’t want him near me with his notions about
accouchement,
and his foreign savage practice of using a forceps tool to pull a child out by the head. He had the nerve to lord it over ME who had previous assisted a midwife at thirty births. But Charlie was all for anything mechanical or scientific and did not care that these metal contraptions was a terrible invention that ripped the ears off infants and left their heads in the shape of strange fruits, according to my teacher, Mrs. Evans. Worse, she said, they tore the parts of a woman and left her in such a condition as to prevent any future living with the husband, since her injuries were a bar to marital relations.
Charlie was half-persuaded by this last threat, but told me to stop my silly Irish balderdash.

—You’d believe anything, he said. —That a caul will save a drowning man, or that the touch of a seventh son will cure the bite of a mad dog.

—It’s true, says I. —Mam always said.

But his French Vachon had scientific theories. Delivery and parturition, as he called it, was a disease, he said, a
maladie
to be relieved by doctors.

—Hooey, I told him. —A delivery is a function of nature. Mrs. Evans says what’s best is to find a female midwife who’s schooled about it.

But Mrs. Evans had died. Mrs. Watkins of Lispenard Street was known as a charlatan and Mrs. Costello was worse. That left Dr. Vachon or Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, and between them, I’d rather have an Irish washerwoman such as she was with her nine children than an entire hospital of Vachons, but that didn’t matter to Charlie. We argued over it even as I clutched my middle and he spouted his theories.

—It’s the French and the scientists who’s the experts. I’ll get Vachon.

—I do not want that poodle here, and if you bring him I’ll pelt him good with fish heads. But Charlie went off clattering down the stairs, leaving me to stew, hoping he would not come back with some Monsieur of a medical man and afraid he would not come back at all, leaving me to die alone. In the dark I went to my dressing table and put a drop of lavender water on the hard bone behind my ear to ease pains. I dipped a napkin in warm milk and applied it to myself down below for it was said milk would ward off scrofulous diseases. I made a tea of raspberry leaves and drank it to hurry labor. And last, I went to the window and put a saucer of cream on the sill there, to keep the
sheehogues
out of mischief.

*  *  *

Pain came, then left, but it was not the worst pain. Not yet. I lit the lamp. I hummed a tuneless hum of nerves. I spread a rubber sheet on the bed. I placed a pillow down. I arranged the string and the knife nearby. For distraction, I made pills, mashing the ingredients together with the water, molding tablets, seized regularly with constriction. I stopped till it passed. Grit my teeth. I brushed my hair. I boiled water and made a pennyroyal tea. I drank it. I took a dosage of castor oil, as Mrs. Evans instructed, to clear the b*w*ls. My palms was clammy with dread. Charlie did not come.
I opened all the windows to let in the dawn smell of the river. Outside now was the sound of crows, of pigeons hooting, the rattle of bottles off the milk wagon. A drover lifted paving blocks off a flat cart. —Motherf***, he said, and heaved. These are the sounds that will greet new baby Jones and accompany my death, I thought, the grunts of ratty birds and clanking jugs, the curses of laborers lifting heavy loads.

Where was Charlie? Sure he had gone all the way to Twenty Third Street to fetch the poodle. But even walking there and back didn’t take one hour. Likely Vachon was lost and Charlie set out after him. Ridiculous. To go off searching for quackery. Why did he not come?

A boulder was at my center. The weight of it pressed through me and broke the sac of waters in a flood as I stood at the window. I remembered how the steam rose around my mother’s legs years ago in the cold of Cherry Street, her life leaking out. The floor below me was drenched that way, my skirts were. I got on my knees with a dishcloth and blotted the floor, while the belly hung under me heavy and solid, a hive dangling from a thin branch, filled with stings and danger.
Oh honey,
I thought to my child in there. The pains came in steady turns. The belt tightened and stopped my breath down where I was on my knees and hands. The pain was liquid, the sick deep pulling of a terrible undertow.

Charlie. Where was he? How much time passed I couldn’t track. Five hours. Six. I swallowed ergot. It will bring on the hard labor, Mrs. Evans said, her voice in my ear like she was there in the room. Just swallow this down dear. Needles stitched me a lining, a sick fur of pain sewed right to the canvas of me, so I was seeping, torn at the seams. Then it came hard and regular, crashed in waves now that lasted, crested, lasted, peaked, crashed. I was swept under. Crawled to the bed. Got in it. Climbed out. I clawed the mattress. Bit the sheet. Where was Charlie? Whether he came or not I was alone. Just a vessel like Mrs. Evans said. This pain. Oh honey. It hurt. I chewed the flesh of my own arm, while something within turned and ground twisting like a fist pulping an orange. I drank a glass of whiskey. Vomited. I drank another to blunt the edge. Where was Charlie? I hated him, terrified.