Spider Dance (17 page)

“Not by much.” I coughed as she set down the first edition and a billow of yellow dust wafted up with a noxious ink and mold odor. “Who would have thought anything on earth would have competed with Mr. Wheems’s choice of cheap tobacco?”

Irene was too intent disinterring edition after edition to agree.

I made sure they stacked neatly, observing the narrow, old-fashioned columns and the paragraph-long headlines above the stories.

“Here it is. The nineteenth!”

The paper shook slightly in Irene’s hands as she laid it open on the pile of previous editions and began studying the double pages.

“The obituaries,” I suggested, “are always toward the back.”

“Who knows where they were then, and Mrs. Eliza Gilbert may have merited more prominent mention.”

“Irene, you always weave fairy tales around the simplest facts. This may be some mischief devised by Sherlock Holmes to keep you out of his way, which you have a habit of getting into.”

She stopped to regard me. “You believe that Sherlock Holmes can be mischievous?”

“Ah, no. Alas not. But he might be mischievous in a devious, obstructive sort of way. He must have been just that kind of boy.”

“And you have a habit, dear Nell, or imagining us all as recalcitrant children who have escaped your tender supervision.” She frowned and started paging backward. “The obituaries are on the last page of the first section, but no Eliza Gilbert is listed there. If only we could take this edition with us to study in decent light.”

“We can’t.”

“Actually, we can.” Irene lifted her hem while eyeing me significantly. “It could be gently rolled and put into a petticoat pocket.”

“That would be stealing, Irene.”

“It would be borrowing.”

“You plan to broach the Dragon Wheems again, coax him into taking down this same box, and surreptitiously returning the missing paper during a second visit?”

“That is a possibility. I could say I needed to check additional facts.”

“Adding lying to thievery.”

“I need this paper, Nell.”

“Not in
my
petticoat pocket.”

“Very well. It will go in mine. All I require is your silence.”

I looked at the ceiling, which unfortunately forced me to stare at one of those confounded electric lightbulbs of Mr. Edison. Progress was very wearing.

“Silence,” she repeated.

It was only one miserable newspaper, but it might be the only one from that date. “I will not return to this obnoxious place,” I said. “You will have to replace it on your own.”

“I will, Nell. In fact, I wish I
had
come here on my own.”

At that we both rustled back down the myriad aisles, reinstalling the looted box in its place, and then finally finding Mr. Wheems’s small station.

He stared at our hands, which could have been shoveling coal.

Irene smiled as if he were President Harrison. “We will tell Mr. Davis of your cheerful cooperation. I may have to look up one more thing at a later date, if I may.”

“You may, but if Mr. Davis don’t say it’s right, you mayn’t.”

Irene didn’t bother telling him that Mr. Davis had offered her carte blanche once he had seen Mr. Belmont’s letter. She would manage the return, I was sure, if she had to don her walking-out clothes and break into the place by night to do so.

Once we had regained the ground floor and then the street, she eyed the avenue up and down until she spied a tearoom.

“There! We can get a seat by the window and study this terrible smudged old print in daylight.”

And so we did. But rake the obituary listing up and down as many times as we liked, we never came across the names Eliza or Gilbert.

I speak of Jesuitical lies . . . It was said, also, that I tamed
wild horses, horsewhipped gendarmes, knocked flies with a pistol
ball of the bald heads of aldermen, fought duels . . .
and a multitude of other similar feats. Now, sir, do you
see the sly Jesuitical, infamous design of all this? It was
simply to unsex me–to deprive me of that high, noble,
chivalrous protection, which is so universally
accorded woman in this country
.
—
LETTER FROM LOLA MONTEZ TO THE
BOSTON DAILY EVENING TRANSCRIPT
,
1852

I’ve been called many names, some of them quite rude: strumpet, whore, Republican. At the time I evoke here, I was known as Marie, countess of Landsfeld. Ludwig’s advisors wore out his ears trying to stop him from bestowing a Bavarian title on me, but I won out. I had been winning out so roundly over the Jesuits and Ultramontanes that they resorted to every subterfuge to turn the people against me: slander and lies were their sword and pistol. I determined that nothing should drive me out of Bavaria, not names, not death itself.

The mob of six thousand assaulting my palace windows that night in Munich used most of the rude names granted
me, and then some. I appreciate invention in an opponent, even it if has six thousand throats.

My loyal Alemannia—young, brave, handsome fellows, my small army of student-soldiers and my self-appointed honor guard—stood inside with me, ready to defend me against all attackers. How many, I wonder, still live today?

For although the events that are burned into my brain occurred on another continent and more than a decade ago, they visit my dreams even now. Especially poor old Wiirtz, who was murdered so vilely.

I saw him dead before I quit that place I had once loved as nowhere else. To this day it is as if a photographer’s flash powder lit that scene. Only that convinced me to abandon my palace. Did I say that I saw him dead? More than that. I saw him after having been tortured to death by the damned, conniving Ultramontanes, his brutalized body left in my own elegant rooms! Who knows why, perhaps merely to freeze my notoriously temperamental Latin blood.

Now I am myself not dead but nearly so. I live in no palace now, but rented quarters in a humble area of a bustling city, on the sufferance of others. Once I ordered. Now I ask. I will not write “beg.” There is not much that I want now, after all.

I was once famous for the variety, fame, and number of my reputed lovers—Liszt, Dumas, princes petty and pettier. My most intimate companion now is the Cough, which visits often, but without warning. The Cough racks me so violently that my pen grows palsied on the paper, so I must stop. And my left side is crippled by a stroke. Yet I can lift a pen in my right hand and write between the Cough’s ceaseless spasms. I can’t hold a cigarette anymore.

I am told that I was the first woman to be photographed holding a cigarette. Why not? I was painted and photographed my whole life through. Until now I had hoped for a more distinguished record of achievement. I am also the first white woman to have been photographed with an Indian. I smile as I view that portrait from 1852. I was still handsome then, my face framed by dark curls above a sweet
round white collar. So demure, so dangerous. My left hand, still useful, was linked through Chief Light in the Clouds’s arm, although he stared ahead like a statue, his dark face framed by long black braids.

Always the opportunist, I first escaped what others determined should be my life by jumping the traces and running while barely in my teens: a fourteen-year-old girl pledged to a disgusting old man. I’d rather have been mistress to an unrespectable young man, and achieved that ambition several times in my life.

Chief Light in the Clouds knew nothing of my history or reputation, nor I of his. We met at a Philadelphia photography studio, he fresh from visiting the “Great White Father in Washington,” I fresh from adventures and disappointments in Europe.

We were both hopeful in that photograph, and both born to be betrayed long after it was taken.

Do people in their last days always digress? I feel as old as Lilith, but am not yet forty.

The room is cold. This winter season in a northern clime befits my decline: it is the autumn of 1860. Even as the sounds of rocks crashing through windows and chipping at stones echo in my memory, someone comes in and knocks the cot leg with the chamber pot. Consider it a triangle sounding in a funeral march.

Is that always the outcome of history? Once I made it. I broke hearts and made newspaper headlines and even toppled a kingdom, now . . . now I don’t have the strength to finish filling the space on this small page . . . to wield a pen, much less a whip or a pistol.

Lord God, I do fervently wish I could have a cigarette! One last cigarette before the firing squad. But the Cough, my constant companion now, says no.

Jealousy, the jaundice of the soul
.
—DRYDEN

Irene withdrew to a retiring room to install her illgotten gain in her petticoat pocket, which was easier to extract from than return to.

I sipped my tepid Earl Gray. Americans seemed afraid to make really good scalding hot tea. I gazed idly at the street. Sitting in a tearoom is one of the few places where a lady is free to stare at passersby. I found myself smiling to recall that a tearoom was where Irene and I first met, and she had resorted to thievery on that occasion also . . . slipping the remaining cakes and sandwiches on our tray into her capacious muff for later consumption.

Of course we had both been half-starving young spinsters then, Irene an aspiring opera singer, myself an unemployed governess, and then an unemployed drapery clerk.

The paper was a minor matter, and I was glad to see Irene pursuing her own past rather than the lurid murder she had stumbled onto just as Sherlock Holmes was consulting on the event.

I should be grateful that Irene was committing only petty theft now, instead of traipsing after Sherlock Holmes on a gruesome case as awful as the Ripper hunt.

I sipped more tea and blinked my eyes open as I recognized a hat passing on the opposite side of the avenue. Pink
Cochrane! How that girl flaunted her lavish-brimmed hats and her eighteen-inch waist!

The
New York World
was erecting an impossibly high building next to the
Herald
and the
Times
. . . twenty-six stories, I had read in the
Times
. The new owner, a Polish immigrant named Pulitzer, sought to bring the less regarded
World
into direct competition with the larger newspapers.