My Notorious Life (33 page)

—I won’t put Greta out, I told him, —if that’s what you’re thinking.

—Why’d I be thinking that?

—You said we wasn’t running a hospital.

—Is that what this is now?

—Maybe. She and Willi got nowhere to go.

—So let them stay, he said, with a shrug. —We’ll employ Greta to make tablets, so’s she won’t have to flag about, then.

And thus he undid me, for instead of a fight, Charlie employed my friend, and retrieved the children from her watch. He went down on the floor to play with them, saying he was a lion, and was hungry. —Some nice tasty children for my dinner! he roared, so they laughed. Charlie never mentioned nothing else about What Happened, and all was well again on Greenwich Street.

*  *  *

Now Greta had a bed in the nursery with Willi and Annabelle. Charlie didn’t appear to mind her there. The babies trundled around the premises like whelps vying for scraps and took naps side by side, their fat wee fingers laced. While Greta fussed at her boy and coddled him, Charlie roughed him about boxing and riding him horsie on his knee. Willi called him Uncle and called me his Auntie. Our place was jolly for a time, till Charlie was off again on another mission, he said, to deliver a batch of Madame DeBeausacq’s Elixir to Newark.

—It seems Madame is your excuse to wander, I accused him when he returned a week afterwards.

—You could say Madame is my mistress, he said, all smilinglike.

—You say such things deliberate to hurt me.

—But she is you and you are she. You’re my wife and my mistress both, Mrs. Jones.

I did not like his reply for it was too clever. Soon, off he went once more, this time to Brooklyn, claiming to conduct the business of Madame far
afield, while I conducted it right in the kitchen, toiling as usual. He was a man out in the wide world and I was tied by my apron strings to the laundry boil and the soup pot, simmering, me and the soup, both. But at least now I had an assistant.

—I’m glad for helping you, Greta said, while we went about making our tablets. I showed her how to pick the black grains of ergot off the heads of rye, and how to mill them to powder. I showed her how to measure the chalk of magnesia and roll the mixture into a round long pipe, and how to use the press to cut the pipe to pill size. She was a good worker. She filled the bottles with such German speed that within two months we doubled our sales, and she was glad for the small wage we paid her, and glad later on for the room we rented her on the floor below.

One morning as we worked she stopped, very sudden, the pill press in her hand. —Mit out you, I’d be eight months, she said. —Eight months and on der street. In winter.

—Eight months gone, you mean?

—Gone and dead. I was that close. She rested her hand on my arm. —Thank you, that’s all.

But it was not all. One day she came back from the market and with her she had a broken down nag of a diseased hoor called Cecile. Cecile’s nose was red as a bunion from the cold and her eyes had blood cracks in the white. One look I knew what she wanted. —No, I said to Greta.

—Axie, listen—

—No, I says.

Now my friend pulled me off a ways from her hapless companion who stood by the stove warming her hands. Small Annabelle studied the visitor boldly. —Hallo, hallo, Lady, hallo, my girl said to the hoor, and in turn the hoor patted her with a tear rolling down her cheek. —Lady cryin’, said Annabelle, and she was right. Lady was cryin’.

—She has nowhere, Greta said.

—I said no.

From over by the stove, the hoor Cecile watched me and Greta arguing about her fate. A hank of greasy hair hung down from under her bonnet. —Axie, Greta said, fierce.

—I’m not in the business! I brung you in and Willi. But not so the whole city could traipse through my door.

—She’ll die if you don’t, in winter, in the street. Greta spit the word, pronounced it
vinter
.

Cecile was shaky under her paint, her eyes skittish. —Madame, she said, —See Voo Play.

It was please in her language. See Voo Play. Greta put her arms around French Cecile and Cecile cried on Greta and at last the hoor looked me in the eye and again it was that look. A glaze of misery and helplessness. If you seen it you would help. Jesus himself had pity on the hoors, they was not called Magdalenes for no reason, and while I did not want to be any body’s savior, here she was asking me. Please. It was what she wanted.
If they ask you you must help them
.

—You’ll pay me then, I said in my last effort to discourage her. —Three dollars.

But the fee did not deter her. She paid me. I fixed her up. I said it was the last, but it wasn’t.

My husband said only one thing about it. —Perhaps you should have charged her five dollars? And not long after, there was Mrs. Tarkanian from downstairs knocking at the door at suppertime to borrow a saucepan, quite evidently in the family way. And Charlie says to her, —My wife here can help you, when your time comes. She’s a fine little midwife.

Mrs. T. glanced at the two children under my feet and smiled through the gaps in her teeth. I was accepted as her accoucheur then and there as Mrs. Evans said I would be, for I was a mother myself.

A month later, Mrs. Tarkanian had a breech presentation, and a terrible time of it, and yet I remembered to stand the mother upside down, and also how to move the infant with my hands to turn it, so my patient delivered a seven-pound boy headfirst and happy. After that his proud mother went around the neighborhood trumpeting about how I saved her, and thus I got up a little reputation as a midwife and soon it went around, too, that Mrs. Jones of Greenwich Street could help a girl in trouble.

W
hile women knocked at my door, while I did what I could for them and toiled at pulverizing the wings of Spanish flies for their medicine, while I attended their deliveries and changed the diapers of my little daughter, while I washed the linen and went to the market and fetched the coal and water, while I scrubbed the floors and sold bottles of Remedy and sang Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder—my Enemy was busy too, as a carpenter ant chewing passageways into the very walls of the house.

As I labored all these years, oblivious, the pious young bachelor Tony Comstock was selling textiles not even twenty blocks away at the dry goods emporium Cochran & McLean, 464 Broadway, off Grand. One certainly hopes Crusader Comstock did not sin in his thoughts as he fondled the merchandise of ladies’ delicates, or observed the merry housewives handling the stockings made ready-to-wear. It seems that all his life, well before he persecuted me, Sin was on his mind like a hat. He was so distressed by his fellow clerks’ interest in girly pictures that he eventually founded himself a club called the Society for the Suppression of Vice. But even by 1868 he was already responsible for the destruction of his first bookseller: a fellow named Jakes. Poor Jakes was a good Christian man, a churchgoing taxpayer. Jakes’ error? He sold a picture postcard. What was the picture of? A statue, just. A famous naked statue from Rome. For that, Comstock had the poor cove arrested and hauled off to jail. My enemy ruined Jakes and began his rampage, to stamp out the smutty book business wherever he found it.

In those early days of my practice, the LAW pertaining to midwifery sat gathering cobwebs in a corner, a relic of the Forties. It said that anybody who would ADMINISTER a woman any drug or medicine, or EMPLOY an instrument with INTENT to produce a miscarriage of a quick child—unless it was necessary to save her life—would go to jail for a year or pay a fine. No right-minded trap or smirker of the courts could be bothered with it, as it could not be effectively enforced. Without a witness, Intent could not be proved, let alone a fact like Employ or Administer.

In the 70’s, My Enemy took matters into his own paws. He dreamed up new laws that later would catch me, but in them days, I and other female practitioners who assisted our afflicted sisters was still left alone by the brothers of the Judiciary.

Sitting here now in my elegant parlor amongst the potted lilies I have enjoyed reading a published history about what a righteous bunger My Enemy was. Were it not for his undoing me so long ago, I might extend a word of charity to him, knowing he was once a little tyke grieving for his mother, dead of childbirth, a grief we have in common. But thanks to the recent publication of his diaries we can confirm that Anthony Comstock, by his own admission, was not the paragon of virtue he pretended to be, just only an unctuous hypocrite and weevil. At age 19 he wrote:

Again tempted and found wanting. Sin, sin. Oh, how much peace and happiness is sacrificed on thy altar. I am the chief of sinners.

And on another day:

This morning was severely tempted by Satan and after some time in my own weakness I failed.

What sin he refers to we can only guess but the easy money would be on the sin of self-abuse. He was only a man wasn’t he? And yet, despite being the confessed Chief of Sinners, the whiskery Crusader was marching around telling others what to do, disgusted at ordinary habits. While serving the Union Army, young Tony spent his energy organizing church services.
Have been twitted several times today about being a Christian,
he wrote.
Heard some persons speaking against me. Will not join with them in sin and wickedness; though loose all of their friendship
.

In his righteousness, he refused to drink his Army ration of whiskey and delighted in pouring it on the ground in front of his comrades in arms. He scolded them for cursing. And no, he would never smoke, he wrote in his journal, not even to keep the mosquitoes off him in the swamps of the Confederacy.

The poor slub. For all his moralizing and sermonizing, he was teased and tormented. He was a lonely killjoy and wrote how everybody loathed him even then.

Seems to be a hatred by some of the boys, constantly falsifying, persecuting and trying to do me harm. Can I sacrifice Principle and conscience for Praise of Man? Never.

Still, he found a woman to love him, his little Maggie, a full ten years older than he was. Reports of tiny Mrs. Comstock said she was an eighty-two pound invalid, dressed always in black. And it must be said to his credit that for his own beloved, Tony had an uncommon tenderness. In his diary she was his Little Wifey, his Dear M., his Precious Little Wife. And as much as I may loathe the hideous man and blame him outsize for all my grief, I can say sincerely that the cove has my admiration for his devotion as a husband. He also has my sympathies for the loss of his baby girl Lillie, who died when she was not more than six months of age. His pain was not less just because he was a first class bunger. While I suspect he then adopted a child rather than risk carnality, the b*****d gets some respect for one reason: he rescued an orphan from a tenement in Brooklyn and named her Adele. While I do pity poor Adele for having to spend her life with a moralizing liar of an Inquisition for a father, what he done to save one child is more than I did for the thousands of misfortunates living on the corner. In my defense it must be pointed out that me and Charlie was at one time intending to adopt our own stray larrikin, but was rudely deterred by the hounding and endangerment of Mr. Comstock and his ILK. Such are the complexities of Good and Evil. My Enemy cared for this daughter Adele, who was feebleminded, with tender understanding, as he did NOT care for me or his other victims, for example the smalltown Brooklyn saloon keeper Chapman who he ruined in 1870. Why? for the simple reason he did not like that Chapman’s Saloon served a drop on Sunday. For this he tormented the barkeep in the courts and had him jailed till the poor man dropped dead in his cell of a heart attack. It was the first death Comstock would take credit for. I wish I could say mine was the last. It wasn’t.

We two, me and Comstock, was barreling toward each other, each one on a mission. It would be years before we would meet, and despite the fact My Enemy relocated for a while, far off to Summit, New Jersey, the infernal man got closer to me every day, his hot breath a prickle at the back of my neck.