Spider Dance (26 page)

Our first feelings always remain our last memories
.
—LOLA MONTEZ

How could I have dreamed that the hunt for Lola Montez among this landslide of paper would prove to be the most enjoyable time Irene and I spent in New York? Perhaps it only seems so in retrospect because of the cataclysmic events that came later.

But for this period—the lull before the storm—the intimidating telephone became our newest ally as we ordered first dinner, then breakfast and lunch, picnicking among a sea of books strewing the carpeting, the chair seats, the tabletop.

There was no help for it but to lounge on the rugs in our dressing gowns like schoolroom girls, each consuming cakes and fruit and wine and sarsaparilla (a nonliquorous soda I was becoming quite fond of) along with great dollops of the impossible life of an impossible woman.

Irene, I’m happy to say, was always the first to quote aloud some unflattering bit, to the extent that despite myself I found it necessary to soften the damning picture that was assuming almost sentient life in our midst.

I was the readiest, however, to cast the first and most damning stone.

“Look here! She was
Irish
, Irene, not Spanish at all.”

“Irish? Then she need not apply for the position of my mother.” Irene made a face disavowing her previous words.
“I’m sorry, Nell, but I find the Irish a delightful and gritty people. That is no mark against her in my book. You’ll have to search further.”

“Aha! I have the source of the tombstone name; She was born Elizabeth Rosana Gilbert, but her mother always called her Eliza.”

“That’s odd. Why should she put that diminutive on her tombstone? This book says she hated her mother for planning to marry her off at age fourteen to a sixty-four-year-old major general who just happened to be her mother’s husband’s commanding officer. I’m afraid I’m solidly on young Eliza’s side here. Her own mama was ‘selling’ her into marriage with her stepfather’s superior officer.”

“Such a marriage would have had assured Eliza status and security.”

“Nell! Fourteen and sixty-four? Have you any notion what an unthinkable age difference that is? A child of fourteen—granted, a pretty, precocious child—to a man . . .” figures had never been Irene’s strong point, so she counted on her fingers “. . . ten, twenty, thirty, forty . . . goodness,
fifty
years her senior? She would remain in her teens while he crept toward seventy! Most unnatural!”

“I suppose so,” I said, but I was really as shocked as Irene by the notion of a girl so young wedding a man so old. “That is why she ran away with the young soldier.”

“Even he was almost thirty, twice her age.”

“She could not have married a fourteen-year-old!”

“Not unless she’d lived in the Middle Ages when noble children were betrothed from birth. You may not see the peril in such great age differences, but trust me, Nell, superior experience conveys power, and it is never good when a man has that much more knowledge and power than a woman.”

“But don’t they all?” I asked, thinking of Quentin, who was ever so much more worldly than myself, if not that much older, surely. Just how old
was
Quentin? I would have to find out.

“Amen,” Irene said, “or at least that’s the way too many of them would like to keep it.”

“You sound like a suffragist.”

“Not I. I have not half the courage.”

“You? You are the bravest woman I have ever seen.”

Her head shook. “I might contemplate a hunger strike in the right cause, but I could never face the force-feeding: that awful metal apparatus jammed down one’s throat, the delicate tissues ripped and abraded raw, the vocal cords stretched . . . no, no, I could never do it.”

“That is because safeguarding your throat has been a professional necessity since before you were twenty, although smoking those foul cigars and cigarettes certainly can’t be good for it. In other matters, I am sure you would match a suffragist for nerve. Even Sherlock Holmes thinks you a wonder of audacity.”

“He thinks I’m . . . audacious?” She sounded much too flattered for her own good. “How do you know, Nell?”

Oh, dear. I knew because I had peered into one of Dr. Watson’s unpublished stories about his friend. This I could not admit, so I merely said, “Oh, he may have expressed some such sentiment when we were searching the dungeons for Godfrey and Bram Stoker.”

“You found time
then
to pause to discuss my character?”

“Well, no, matters were rather . . . grave. Oh, I don’t know, Irene. I probably just dreamed it. Look! I have found reference to Lola’s marital quandary in her autobiography: ‘So in flying from that marriage with ghastly and gouty old age, the child lost her mother, and gained what proved to be only the outside shell of a husband, who had neither a brain which she could respect, nor a heart which it was possible for her to love. Runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash-up.’”

“She obviously wrote that passage from the other end of the telescope,” Irene noted, “when that youthful act was seen small and wee from the vantage of middle age.”

Irene was less interested in Lola’s youthful escapades and
more in her theatrical reputation. She was reading raptly again. “This is more like it. This is the creature I recall hearing about. Listen to this review of her appearance on the Paris Opera stage, the foremost theater in France:

“‘Mile. Lola Montez is a very beautiful person, who is endowed with a lovely figure and the most beautiful eyes in the world. . . . Unfortunately . . . Mlle. Lola Montez doesn’t know how to dance; she doesn’t know the first elements of choreography. Her figure and her eyes which she paraded before the auditorium with martial assurance did not disarm the spectators, who welcomed her with indulgence at her first dance, but who at her second hissed her with such vehemence that it determined the withdrawal of her name from the bills.’”

“How humiliating!” said I, who could no more imagine appearing on a stage than flying. “I could never have set toe to board again after such a publicly reported failure. Of course, the French are notoriously particular. What was this dance that they found so scandalous?”

“Something Lola made up, like much of her life history,” Irene replied, paging through our collection of books with eager fingers. “Unbelievable gall. What a glorious fraud! What verve. What nerve! Listen to this, Nell: Before her debut as a dancer, she encountered no less a personage than the earl of Malmesbury on the train from Southampton to London. She represented herself as the widow of a Spanish Republican who had attempted to overthrow Queen Isabella the Second and had been promptly shot.”

“Why should she want to pose as a traitor’s wife?”

“Because all London was swooning over the young rebel who’d refused to flee to save his life. Lola claimed to be his penniless widow and ended up selling Spanish veils and fans at a benefit concert arranged for her at the earl’s home. It was the earl who introduced Lola to the impresario of Her Majesty’s Theater in London, where she would debut her Spider Dance, and the impresario, Lumley, who then introduced Lola to the London journalist who would serve as her herald.”

“You’re saying that because of the mere chance of sharing a train ride with an earl, Lola became the toast of London?”

“‘Mere chance’ is but Act One in the game of life, Nell. It’s what the enterprising spirit does with ‘mere chance’ that makes all the difference. It was ‘mere chance’ that we met on a London street, after all, and look what has come of that.”

Luckily, Irene rushed on without giving me opportunity to answer.

“Do you realize that Lola was doing all this forty years ago! That she was indeed a political force? She didn’t have to aspire to any intellectual life at all, but she was highly informed for a woman of her time. As for her dancing, it’s clear she was judged against the tradition of ballet, when flamenco is a dance of the people. No wonder the critics didn’t know what to make of her, so they tried to make a joke of her.

“Listen to this article describing how Lola was to ‘introduce for the first time the Spanish dance to the English public.’”

“
This
member of the ‘the English public’ sees no need to be introduced to the Spanish dance at all.”

Irene, however, had become so caught up in the report of Lola’s debut that she leaped up and began to act out the words as she read them.

“‘The French
danseuse
,”’ she declared, taking on the ripe voice of Sarah Bernhardt, “‘executes her
pas
with ze feet, ze legs, and ze hips alone.’”

“That already strikes me as a great deal more than is decent.”

Irene was undeterred by my Greek chorus of objections, as ever.

“‘The Spaniard dances with the body, the lips, the eyes, the head, the neck, and with . . . the heart. Her dance is the history of a passion . . . “Lolah Montes” is a purely Spanish dancer. In person she is truly the Spanish woman—in style, she is emphatically the Spanish dancer. . . . The variety of passion which the Spider Dance embodies—the languor, the
abandon, the love, the pride, the scorn—one of the steps which is called
death to the tarantula
and is a favorite
pas
of the country, is the very poetry of avenging contempt—it cannot be surpassed. The head lifted and thrown back, the flashing eye, the fierce and protruded foot which crushes the insect, make a subject for the painter which would scarcely be easy to forget.’”

Irene, having evoked all these motions and emotions, awaited my reaction. Or possibly my applause, although she should have known better.

“A person making those same movements in Shropshire would be judged as having fits and sent to a madhouse for life.”

“Exactly why Shropshire doesn’t have Her Majesty’s Theater in its environs. But you miss the point, Nell. Lola was as Spanish as your left foot! It was all . . . a glorious fraud. Here’s the prestigious London
Times:
‘grateful at last to have seen a Spanish dance by a Spaniard, executed after the Spanish fashion.’”

“I don’t see that England had or has any need for either French
danseuses
or Spanish dancers.”

“Or Irish frauds?” Irene asked impishly. “I may be an Irish fraud myself.”

This quieted me. Irene was coming to relish rather than deplore the adventures of Lola Montez. I tried to compare the audacious young woman who had passed herself off as a Spanish heroine to the penniless young woman on her own who created scandal everywhere she went, yet had always spent freely for the good of others less fortunate, and had ended her days in the bosom of the Church (even if it was Episcopal; at least it was not Catholic!).

“And . . . Lola had always claimed that the Jesuits had slandered and persecuted her. I’m sure the Jesuits would have slandered and persecuted me, had they been aware of my existence, or I of theirs.”

So. What was I to make of Lola, really? She had begun to matter to Irene. From the accounts of Lola’s final illness, a
certain Father Hawks had been deeply moved by her conversion in her last years.

What was I to make of her that she hadn’t made of herself? I didn’t know. I was used to knowing exactly what I thought about everything, but Lola Montez had defeated me. She had crushed my inborn certainty under the drumming of her flashing feet, and, through the veil of the decades, had fixed her stunning blue eyes on my heart and head, daring me to dismiss her at my own peril.