My Notorious Life (59 page)

The talk of everybody. I did not care. It didn’t matter. The coroner’s jury had pronounced the death a suicide.
My
death. Madame was dead and so was Mrs. Jones. “The wages of sin is death,” said the
Times
editorial. Mr. Comstock’s only comment was “A bloody end to a bloody life.” He bragged that mine was the fifteenth suicide he had inspired.

I was bereft.

*  *  *

Under her alias, the Widow McGinty moved shortly into a room overlooking the Charles River. She sent word to Mr. Jones with the address. After that she kept quiet. Six months, he had said. She walked the streets of the Back Bay in her black mourning. She sat on the benches of the Common on brisk spring evenings, afraid and hunted, sure someone would recognize her and shout her old name. If she saw a policeman, she crossed the street. She did not speak to a soul. She read the New York papers. Among them, only the
Sun
had a whack at her tormentor Comstock and spoke the truth about him and Madame DeBeausacq:

Whatever she was Madame had her rights, and the man who cunningly led her into the commission of a misdemeanor acted an unmanly and ignoble part.

According to the
Times,
another of Madame’s defenders was a clergyman named Reverend Charles McCarthy, who preached a sermon that made Mrs. McGinty proud. She wished she’d have been there to hear it herself. She would’ve kissed him.

Madame was hunted down by miserable subterfuge, by cunning and heartless fabrications, by open and mean lying. Her so-called crime is one shared by many respectable physicians, even abetted by a Christian minister, who has defended his own conduct with sound moral reasoning, before the trustees of this church.

But such crumbs of understanding was small comfort, for Madame DeBeausacq had not been dead two weeks before rumors began to circulate that she was alive and well. Mrs. McGinty read the New York papers and saw a letter to the
Tribune
from a Mr. J. H. Jordan, who styled himself a carpenter, in which he claimed he had delivered a coffin to Madame’s house, for a patient who had died, and that it was this patient who was dead in the tub—while Madame lived on. And another letter writer, to the
Times,
said he’d seen Madame in her carriage, riding around the streets of Philadelphia.

Mrs. McGinty had no carriage, but the idea that Madame had been seen alive made her so frightened of detection she traveled nowhere without a veil. She wrote letters and mailed none of them. If she sent word to anyone she was sure it would be intercepted. A servant would discover the secret and betray her. She must wait. At night she took to her bed and gnawed the raw knuckles on the backs of her hands. Terrible recriminations plagued her dreams. She had broken the promise to her Mam. She had failed her sister. She had doubted her husband always, and despite his promises she doubted him now. Would he come, or would he not? He had said once he would not forgive her. He had said Trust Me. He was a good time Charlie and in bad times he shouted and drank whiskey and hated her. Sure he hated her now in the tempest she’d left behind. He would not come. He was not by her side to seduce her out of her fears with his winks and his trick of finding a sweet behind her ear. In his absence, Mrs. McGinty was left to banish the demons of suspicion and mistrust by herself. He will come, she muttered, he must. And as she repeated this idea to herself, she made a choice to believe it, for such hope was all she had now, buried like a talisman in the folds of her widow’s weeds.

It would take six months, wouldn’t it? That was the number he mentioned. Six months. In the light of day, it seemed a reasonable number. After all, to flee too fast would arouse suspicion. And her husband had at least six months of affairs to settle. He was talking to the police. He was organizing a funeral. He was burying her sister in a cold grave, ordering the headstone, having it carved with his wife’s name.

He was burying his wife.

He was lying to the servants. He was enlisting Greta to lie.

He was handling the coroner’s inquest. He was talking to lawyers.

He was lying to their daughter. Drying her tears. Burying his child’s mother.

He was selling the house. Organizing the accounts. Packing away the furniture.

Six months at least. But for Mrs. McGinty in the dark, six months was just the same as NEVER. How could Charlie forgive her? He had buried
his wife. At night, she pictured her husband as the Merry Widower, laughing into the eyes of Gigi, Lila, Sally, Joan. She imagined her daughter calling one of these frippettes Mother, bringing her violets on a spring day, and Mrs. McGinty’s heart lurched for all she had given up. She grew gray and quiet with grief and recriminations.

*  *  *

In May, after many weeks of lonely obscurity, the date of her birthday arrived. Didn’t she deserve a present? She did. So Mrs. McGinty took herself to dine at the Hotel Vendome in the Back Bay. She ordered coffee and cake and took a seat along the red velvet banquette in the tearoom. It was a shock when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored wall. She was a black blot in widow’s weeds amidst the reds and gilt of the décor. A milk-skin of sadness filmed her blue eyes. She was no longer young, but a dame of thirty three. Her figure had got thick through the waistline since her arrival in Boston, for she was fond of the city’s famous cream pie, and liked extra molasses with her baked beans. What did it matter? She was alone. Her sister was dead. Her brother nowhere. Her husband and daughter gone from her. In the tearoom of the Ritz, she ordered another slice of cake.

In the Boston papers over the next weeks and months she read new headlines about Crusader Comstock busting booksellers as smut peddlers, jailing doctors and pharmacists. Why? just for writing instructions on how a woman might use certain medicines. It was now illegal to use the mails to send an anatomy textbook to a medical student. Miss Ida Craddock killed herself after Comstock caught her mailing a pamphlet.

*  *  *

At last, in late July, when the money she had raised from the sale of her jewelry had nearly run out, Mrs. McGinty dared to address another envelope to Mr. Charles G. Jones, at One East Fifty Second Street, New York City.

Dear Mr. Jones,

Greetings from Boston. Since I last seen you all is as can be expected with me. My recent loss plagues me with sorrow every
day, and my sleep is troubled. The doctor says this malady will be relieved whenever I am reunited with my loved ones, but as I do not know WHEN that will be, I am sorely TROUBLED. The money I have made from selling salt water taffy is nearly exhausted. Here in Boston the summer is mild and the Public Gardens are blooming. You would love to see the swan boats on the lagoon. They are paddlewheel contraptions shaped like white birds and a person can ride across the water on their backs. Perhaps one day soon you and your little daughter could visit. Tell her we will ride the swan boats and have cotton candy. Kiss her for me and give my best to your wife. It is my fervent wish to see you and your family very soon.

—Mrs. P. McGinty

Not two weeks later came a reply, a letter containing five hundred dollars in cash.

Dear Mrs. McGinty,

Thank you for your letter. Enclosed is the money you are owed. Thank you for sending the boxes of salt water taffy. Certainly we will visit when our affairs here are more settled, and we have completed the sale of our house, sometime after the summer.

Sincerely, Mr. Charles Jones

Mrs. McGinty, laboring under her alias, read the letter and hung on to the phrase “Certainly we will visit.” It was hardly an endearment. She knew Charles Jones was afraid to write down anything that might reveal her identity, or that the Notorious Madame X was yet alive. He did not want to betray her whereabouts. Still, poor Mrs. McG. feared he was rid of her, buying her off for $500. She wished for some little word that he loved her. That her daughter missed her. She was tormented by grief.

Still, alone in the wilderness of Boston, Mrs. McGinty came to see from a distance what Mrs. Jones could not see close up.

WITH him, she had thought he only cared for her because of money. WITHOUT him, she seen that it was the both of them together who made Madame DeBeausacq so rich and so Notorious.

It must be admitted that Madame had quite enjoyed being Notorious.

RESPLENDENT, they said she was. HANDSOME.

Now nobody noticed Mrs. McGinty wore little pearl-gray boots of kidskin or wrote down the details of her hat with its Spanish lace. It was not written anywhere that she took her cake at the Hotel Vendome. Nobody cared. She was not useful. Nobody knocked in the middle of the night to say Come Madame Quick Please Oh Hurry Please.

*  *  *

In my exile and loneliness, I saw that perhaps I had mistook Charlie Jones. All the years I had been longing for my family of Muldoons, searching for my brother and sister, listening to tales of dastardly double-dealing men, I thought Charlie dangerous, of the type Mrs. Dix and other women had warned me against. He could be furious, yes. He had hit me once. Yelled often. His whereabouts frequently was a mystery. But he came home eventually, didn’t he? So far he did. It seems I had forgot he was just a plain orphan all along like myself, and orphans only ever want the one thing which is Home. Now I saw. He was Home to me. If only I was Home to him. Was I?

*  *  *

For six months Mr. Jones and Mrs. McGinty corresponded occasionally in a strictly businesslike manner, till at last, in September, came a letter about a “visit,” and Mrs. McGinty took the streetcar along Commonwealth Avenue to Park Place Station to meet the train arriving from New York. The wind whipped bits of paper into eddies at the corners of buildings and it was not the
sheehogues
at play, not at all, she thought, but trouble stirred up. The sky was like porridge, lumpen and dull, with a yellow tinge that said a storm was coming. Mrs. McGinty carried an umbrella, which served to give her anxious hands something to hold.

The New York train arrived clanging in a hiss and shower of soot. Mrs. McGinty trembled, all nerves. The squeal of iron was so sharp it hurt her teeth. Crowds of people began to spill out of the passenger cars and onto the platform. In their dark suits and long dark traveling dresses, they streamed toward the little island of Mrs. McGinty in her cap, her common cloak.

And then there they were, her family, Charlie with his shifty dark eyes
and his bent smile, his arms soon around her, right out in public, and Annabelle, taller and a little gawkish now, with her face contorted in disbelief. She had only just been told, on the train ride North, the surprise person she would find on the platform.

—Mrs. McGinty, said Charlie.

—Mama? said Annabelle with the color drained from her face. —Is it you?

*  *  *

So lost was I in their long embrace so intoxicated with the smell of my daughter’s hair and the stab of longing caused by the softness of my husband’s whiskers against my cheek that I didn’t notice a pale young man standing behind Charlie, holding his hat, smoothing the wiry tufts of his red hair.

—Ann, said Charlie, after a long moment, —I have brought someone else for you.

The stranger stepped forward, a queer look on his face, shy and hopeful. He held out his hand. —I’m Joseph. Joseph Trow.

How d’ye do? I began to say, when all of a sudden I known who it was.

—Our Joe, I said, faint. —Is it?

M
y brother is not a tall man. He is unlike me and Dutch, with his bricky hair and the sand of freckles across his nose. He is narrow in the shoulders and waist, and when he smiles, a small fat boy so familiar comes toddling out from the corners of his eyes to greet you, a devil of mischief already loose, even before he says, —So this is my sister with the Ax in her name.

And he holds his arms out like he’s known you all his life.

But he didn’t remember any of it. Not the train. Not how he slept on me like I was his own personal mattress. Not the smell of horehound on Mrs. Trow’s breath, or how she lured him with her brown candies. Not how he once called us AxieDutch or held his fat arms out for us or wailed for us when we were out of sight and wouldn’t tolerate anyone but me to sing him to sleep or how I loved him. He did not remember the song Kathleen Mavourneen. He did not remember Mam.

It would’ve broke my heart that he forgot but now I seen it was a blessing. No memories like mine to gnaw his knuckles at night with sharp teeth. No secret like Dutch had had to conceal under the stockings in her dresser. Life for Joe Trow was clover, a credit to Mr. C. L. Brace and his theory of fresh air. Joe grew up strong in a pretty town called Brandywine, Pennsylvania, after Mr. and Mrs. Trow left the settler’s life in Illinois and returned back East to run the family dairy. Joe was—they told him—their natural son, and they fed him milk and molasses. They taught him to play a fiddle
and how to birth a calf. He had a coonhound named Nuisance and that was as close as trouble ever got to Joe. He’d been to school through the twelfth grade, knew geography and the names of all the Kings of Europe, if not the Kings of Lurg. He had woke up one morning and announced he would go to New York to seek his fortune, when Mr. and Mrs. Trow made a surprise announcement of their own: