My Notorious Life (47 page)

—All right, I told her, very heavy. —Come round to 148 Liberty Street tomorrow.

—Oh thank you, Madame, said she, but burst out in a fresh spasm of wailing. —It is a terrible thing I choose. Wicked. And yet I am resolved on it Madame.

—Perhaps not wicked. But terrible? Yes. Yes. Though maybe less so than other roads you could travel. I don’t know. It’s not for me to say.

We two sat reflecting miserably on wickedness and travel and the road we had agreed upon. Thoughts of Risk and Danger began to prick at me again so fast. Worry over what Charlie would say. Guilt over my daughter.

—Strange, said Mrs. Parkhurst, —I am sad and frightened, yet resolved and grateful, to know that you might relieve me. It is a contradiction I cannot reconcile.

—I know such contradiction as you describe and feel it even now.

She thought on this for a moment and wept afresh. —Bless you, Madame, for your bravery.

She paid me one thousand dollars in cash.

I was not brave. No. I was a sucker for a crying woman. Also the money did not hurt. I was still an urchin who once scranned for orts and rags. A thousand dollars was always a fortune to me. Who knows but I might need it? For their part, the ladies needed a midwife. And that was me. My services was mine to offer or not and I offered them. Yes I was asking for trouble. Yes I was afraid the law would snatch and swallow me away from my child, my house, my husband. He said if I was caught he would not forgive me. But now I seen with alarm that I could not forgive myself, not if I slammed a door in the face of a lady who needed my skills. It was a complexity, and I did not know how to live with it exactly.

*  *  *

—Madame has not retired, I hear, said Charlie, with a cold face, when I returned from the office next day after relieving Mrs. Parkhurst.

—No. I have not.

—What if I forbid you? A wife obeys her husband. I could stop you.

—You won’t stop me. I know you, Charlie, and you won’t.

—So you take the risk? Because if you do, you force us to take it with you, don’t you?

*  *  *

I would take the risk, I told the fine ladies of Gotham, but they would pay me for doing so. More than ever I did not apologize for the money I earned. The rich patients I charged a steep price. The poor ones I treated for nothing. Advice I doled out to everybody
gratis
. Money, it seemed, had proved an indemnity against the forces of Gunning and Tallmadge and that barnacle Merritt. More of it, I reasoned, might offer me the protection I required and might provide a cushion of comfort to my daughter if she was forced to cope without me. I was cautious. The practice was conducted by word of mouth. Consultation was the only service I advertised anymore, so even though ladies still came to me for every necessity, I avoided attention. The fat envelopes of cash, and the occasional fruitcake slipped to our local Officers of the Law did not hurt our cause. For one reason or another, it seemed the press boys had moved on. The traps had gave up.

*  *  *

Within a year of my release, we again had an income of ten thousand a week, from our various efforts. There was medicines sold in eight cities from Boston to Baltimore, Portland to Pittsburgh. (And these we did advertise again after a time, but only as “Female Medicine.”) Charlie’s pamphlets of medical advice was so popular, he hired a new assistant, to print and mail them. This aspect of our enterprise made a sweet profit with little more effort than it took to glue a stamp. My husband, it seemed, liked the profits more than he disliked the risk. He had proved himself a moneyman, and his return on investments piled up in the bank, alongside all the earnings from Madame DeBeausacq’s Female Hospital and midwifery practice. And just as the Newspapers had dropped the subject of her practices, so we had dropped the subject of her retirement.

*  *  *

Now on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Fifty Second Street, the Jones’ new palace rose at a good clip. We drove uptown on the weekends to see the land cleared and the foundation set, a skeleton of beams rising. Charlie liked to discuss the particulars of the architecture, especially the stables, but I preferred to occupy myself with the decoration of the interior, all fancy curtains and mosaics and upholstery.

By way of assistance, I engaged the services of Mrs. Candace Wheeler,
who had founded the Decorative Arts Society with Mr. Louis Tiffany. She advised the owners of the finest palaces in the city on all aspects of domestic decoration.

—Anyone can arrange her home in a tasteful, elegant manner, given the right materials, said she.

The right materials indeed. On a Thursday we went to Duveen’s Imports and spent $11,000 on European
objets
and furnishing: tables and chairs, also vases, statuary, paintings, candelabra and assorted curios such as a fire screen of Berlin work done in beads, a bust of our nation’s first President, George Washington, and one of Benjamin Franklin, a favorite of Charlie’s for his writings on The Way to Wealth, and his invention of the lightning rod.

—I hope you will not be a lightning rod anymore yourself, my dear, said Charlie to me, as we surveyed our new decorations. —For the sake of us all.

—I hope so, too, I says, and he smiled and winked at me. He was Fair Weather Charlie again, flush with profits and safe with wife and child under the roof. The Tombs was an old bad dream. The newspapers had turned their attention to other scandals: the murder of Sarah Crane, a hoor of Prince Street, the scandal of Joseph Potts, a bookseller whose shop offered such smutty titles as
The Lustful Turk
.

I paid little attention to the headlines but went instead with the whole family to A. T. Stewart’s on a Saturday, to purchase my heart’s desire. There, in the lighting department, Annabelle twirled beneath crystal and colored glass. Before we walked out we had ordered the largest custom-designed light fixture ever sold in New York City: the Swarovski King chandelier, all the way from Austria, made with arm-to-arm crystal festoons and crosscut bobeches with almond accents dangling. If I could, I’d’ve run the glassy drops through my fingers like water. My chandelier.

—I wish I could eat it, said Belle, —it’s rock sugar candy.

Belle and me went to buy fabric and trim for dresses, India and Swiss Muslin, cambric and batiste, pique and Irish silk poplin and all different laces, bullion and sarcenet ribbon, llama fringe and steel fringe, cords and tassels. We ordered fancy combs, and stockings, an ermine fur muff for Annabelle, and a stole of marabout feathers.

—Oh, Mother, said Annabelle, —I would like to wear the feathers to my school.

—And how, mistress, would Mrs. Priscilla Lyle react to such a costume?

—I don’t mind what she says. It’s the girls who will wish they had one, too.

—But they don’t! We was both gleeful over it.

The fact is, we Joneses was good or better than any of them swells now and had the trappings to prove it. Half the pupils of the Lyle School for Young Ladies was jealous of my daughter, a child of orphan train riders. Mrs. Lyle herself had brought me aside upon my reappearance and whispered, —You must know our hearts were with you during your travails.

Still, at her school, there were certain Silks and Velvets who would not stoop to speak to me. Despite fancy Mrs. Parkhurst’s recent bloody adventures in my clinic, she was frosty to me in public, a hypocrite LAPDOG. Others slighted me same as if I was a common bogtrotter. Mrs. Caroline Van Zandt and Mrs. Eleanor Gibson seen me in the morning, escorting Annabelle to the door, and when I smiled at them and said Good Day, the pair of them only grimaced and smirked. They were a couple of vain old ewes. You could see the coal tar at the roots of their hair where they blacked the gray.

Despite these snubs I befriended other ladies of the best class, such as Mrs. Sybil Gaskins and Mrs. Dorothea Becker, who secured me invitations to the grand balls of uptown and down. We three enjoyed a companionable stroll along the fashionable avenues and traded invitations to luncheon or to dinner with our husbands in the evening. Mr. Becker liked to play whist. Although Charlie said he was a snooze, Mr. Wickenden was knowledgeable about gardens (his father was gardener to the Vanderbilts). It was Matthew Wickenden who advised me on the plantings for our new Fifth Avenue house, and his wife Serena was my favorite, for she had been known to smoke cigars with the men. She taught me to suck the smoke just into the mouth without inhaling very deep, and I ENJOYED to do it—not the taste or the smell like poison but only the shocked expression on the faces of the men when they saw me puffing. It was a barnyard collection of New Yorkers we had in our parlor, theosophicals and Liberal Leaguers, phrenologists and psychics, and our old friends the Owens and the rest of that philosopher group from our Liberty Street parlor.

*  *  *

At last in April of 1878, came moving day. We drove up Fifth Avenue in our new barouche. The top was open to the sky, the better to display us as we arrived at One East Fifty Second Street, grand entrance on Fifth. This was the Palace of Jones, where the wide front steps rose up off the Avenue to full double doors under an entryway that was vaulted and arched like the gates of a kingdom. We got down from the carriage with the help of Devlin our new footman in full livery, who held his gloved hand to me. I picked up my skirts, to show Annabelle, eight years of age now, how a lady dismounted. She followed me, and her father came round to give us each an arm.

—Queen Ann, your majesty, he said, quite formal. —Princess Annabelle.

He escorted us up the grand stairway while passersby gawped. Inside I was gawping myself. Here was our home, a palace. Who cared that the
Times
called it the domicile of a “rough woman” who “mangles her speech with ain’ts”? Who cared they called it “monstrous, in an extravagantly rich and vulgar style”? No more did they like my choice of window shades which they called “tasteless floral monstrosities.” —When they write that, Charlie said, you know it’s only jealousy oozing out their pens. Truth, what they didn’t like was the office down the basement entrance, its discreet plaque advertising only Female Physician.

The great front hall inside was done up with floors of marble in a mosaic pattern called tessellated. The main staircase ascended up a curve, with the polished mahogany banister gleaming dark as a ribbon of chocolate. In the entryway Charlie puffed his chest and his cigar.

Annabelle clapped and twirled so her skirts flared out. —I LIKE this home, said our girl, and went sliding on the polished marble in her stockings.

Home. It was true and not a delusion. There was my lifesize reflection in the walls of gilt-edge mirrors: Mrs. Charles Jones, a woman thirty one years of age, plain featured but fine figured, in a dress of a cobalt blue stripe alternating with a deep blue floral. The Ladies Book pronounced this style among the richest materials for street dress, and there it was on
me, a LADY if ever one lived and breathed. In a trick to the eye, my image reflected in the mirror behind it, and thus it repeated in both directions, back and front, coming and going, in ever smaller reproductions, so there were thousands of me, into the distant past and on to eternity.

I ascended the stairs, where in addition to the family quarters, there was two apartments which served as places for quality ladies to rest during their confinements, but which belonged in my mind as a place where my sister and brother might still come to roost. Maybe the Police detective or the Psychic Investigator we had hired might find Joe. Maybe Dutchie would write me again. The Post Office had strict instructions to forward mail to our new place. The Childrens Aid Society was on notice that any word from Lillian Ambrose VanDerWeil, or Joseph Muldoon or Trow should be sent to me right off.
Joe,
I wrote, in care of the Society,
You might like to watch the carriages race in Central Park I know you would.
I was sure I knew this about him even though he was no longer the baby boy I remembered.
Dutch,
I wrote, in a letter I did not send,
You and your Eliot would be welcome to stay here on Fifth Avenue with us in your own private apartments.

*  *  *

Every weekend now, we Joneses traveled out, trotting up and down the Avenue in the landau or the barouche with two or four of the most brilliant horses in our stable, two bays, a gray, and a chestnut, their harnesses of German silver. The whole of Society was out riding the boulevards, wearing carriage cloaks in magenta and gold, fuchsia and chartreuse. We paraded in the sunlight through the drives of the new Central Park and nodded at the gentry along the boulevards. Neither Charlie nor Annabelle cared as much as I did for this pastime. At every chance, I went out bareheaded under the blue sky with teardrop diamonds on my earlobes, the better to catch the light. The ladies looked at me so envious, and the gentlemen tipped their hats.

Except when they didn’t.

Sometimes they stared quite baldly at me with hostile eyes, and regularly some female would lower her veil at the sight of me like I was a species of maggot. For a week that year, the outraged pages of the newspapers scraped together a picayune new scandal to pin on my name. Wrote the
Tribune
:

The shock of seeing such a dangerous individual as Madame X (whose name we cannot utter) out riding in our midst, bedecked and flaunting expensive millinery, is apparently not enough to bring the law upon her. She has the audacity to drive her flashing carriage down the boulevards, and we cannot help but think that we, as a society, are making a retrograde movement in morality.

This editorial appeared in Mr. Greeley’s paper in August of 1878. Was I sorry? No. For what? riding out in public? F. them all. Reckless, I wrote back with a piece of my mind.

It is, really, too monstrous that such silly epistles should have found room in your paper. Can we not drive in public with two or four horses without spiteful comments published in respectable papers? I would leave it to every impartial, liberal, high-minded person, to decide whether these uncalled-for attacks partake not of the full spirit of persecution, if not of even worse motives?