Spider Dance (35 page)

“Quick!” Irene began pulling the chipped bricks back into a pile. “We must restore this wall to its earlier semblance. At least the wardrobe hides it. It’s a miracle that Father Hawks didn’t find this, for clearly this is what he sought here. Lola has left this for us.”

“For you.”

She paused to regard me with utter seriousness. “I do believe se. For me.”

It took nearly half an hour by my lapel watch to jam the crumbled mortar and brick back into some imitation of a wall.

We pushed the wardrobe over the fireplace again, grunting like longshoremen.

Irene hiked her petticoat up at the waist by a foot, expecting the weighty parcel in it to inexorably draw it back down as we made our way home.

At the door she turned to regard the room one last time.

Again I sensed that strange presence and absence, both one and the same thing, with which Irene communed.

Then we shut the door and bustled down the hall to the parlor, where our hostess was waiting. Oddly, she never noted our disheveled appearance, or if she did, she may have attributed it to religious ecstasy. These Roman Catholics are an emotional lot.

“And—?” she asked, breathless.

“You are wise,” said Irene, “to reserve the room for higher purposes. I’ll tell the bishop of your cooperation. And I’m sure Father Hawks, when he is communicating again, will be most grateful.”

The landlady’s generously hopeful smile faded toward the end of Irene’s comment into confusion.

“Father Hawks?” she asked. “Who is Father Hawks?”

In the street outside, Irene took my elbow in a death grip.

I spoke like a doll with a button that makes it cry. “The ‘good father.’ If that wasn’t Father Hawks, Irene, who on earth was it?”

“I don’t know. Possibly no one Episcopal, or Anglican, after all.” Irene gazed at the teeming street, seeing nothing. “And most probably, no one up to any good at all,” she added.

She came back to London and made her debut at her
Majesty’s Theatre. When news of this event reached her
mother she put on mourning as though her child was dead,
and sent out to all her friends the customary funeral letters
.
—
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
, LOLA MONTEZ

She had named me after herself: Eliza. I often had cause in later years to wonder why.

Now that she has come all the way to New York City to see me as I lie ill in this autumn of 1860, I have to wonder why a woman who as good as disowned me should wish to claim me at what most likely is the end of my life, though not hers.

Call me cynical, but I think she wonders how much money and jewels I have to leave her.

My humble surroundings will certainly disabuse her of any ambitions in that direction, and I could not be happier about that.

What will she say for herself when there is nothing to be gained? That should be interesting!

How sad that I don’t expect her to bring me anything but an open palm. Father Hawks would chide me for lack of charity, but I cannot forgive the woman whose cold heart set me on the wayward path of my life. Whatever they may say of me, no one can deny that I was charitable to others, and that my feelings ran as deep and open as the great Mississippi River.

I dread seeing her again. Or, rather, I dread her seeing me in this state. I wish my left arm could still lift a castanet, that I did not need to use my right to wipe the drool from my stroke-slack mouth.

She comes at last when I am truly humbled. I suppose it’s a good exercise for the spirit, even if I can’t bring myself to forgive her, no, not even after all these years. . . .

Some things are expected of a mother, and she gave me none of them but only grief.

She was considered a beauty and married a soldier. When he died, she married a soldier of higher rank. By then I had been born, Mr. Gilbert’s only daughter. We were living in India at the time of his death.

How a little child could learn from India, and how I loved it! In India I began what would become my legendary mastery of foreign language and horses. Horses have their own mute dialect and I rode them with abandon at an early age, safer on those broad, jolting backs dark with sweat than I have ever found myself on Mother Earth.

My mother packed me off to England twice, both against my will. Once I was but seven, a half-orphan, and hardly understood
why I should be wrested from all I loved to be cared for, or not, by strangers in that damp, chilly land that never called to me.

My stepfather, Colonel Craigie, had some care of me, more than she. I sensed that even then.

When I returned to India I had been well-served by an education most girls of my day never had, but was no more welcome to my mother. She was quite the belle of Delhi by then, and I was on the brink of womanhood. Already people praised my white skin, my deep blue eyes, and curling black hair, but even more, my poise and wit.

In no time we were bound for England again, all three.

I have confessed to Father Hawks, along with the more notorious of my sins, my lack of feelings for my mother, and why.

Her desire to be rid of me when I was seven, and my helplessness to prevent her from tearing me from everything I loved, perhaps made me willful.

She brought me back to England herself the second time, and she still desired to be rid of me, but in a new way. I was a pawn for her ambition for her new husband, which was at bottom ambition for herself. Like all women of her time, she lived to rule through others.

She wanted to trade me in marriage to my stepfather’s commanding officer, a man past sixty when I was not yet fifteen. I used to lie abed at night and count the decades between myself and this old man: twenty-five made one; thirty-five two, forty-five three, fifty-five four, sixty-something, almost five. Almost fifty years. One might as well have told me to wed the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh!

Can anyone imagine how a spirited child, one reared in the exotic freedoms of India, would have regarded such a cold marital bargain? How my flesh and imagination both shriveled at the very thought?

So when Lieutenant James informed me of this master plan, an elopement with a handsome, thirty-year-old lieutenant seemed the only answer. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.

What did I know at fourteen, except that I wouldn’t be sold by anyone, even my own mother.

Later, when I understood the range of feminine powers, I realized why I had been destined to be shuffled off to an old man’s boudoir. My mother did not need a blooming rose of youth in her own garden.

Now that I no longer bloom, but wilt like damp tobacco leaves, it’s safe for her to approach me again and feel superior. Everything I had is wasted, including my body, if not quite my mind.

[Mrs. Eliza Craigie was] a cold, passionless woman, who greeted
and said adieu to her daughter, much as she might have made a
fashionable call. She was greatly disappointed at finding Eliza
without worldly wealth and visited her only twice, if I remember
correctly, during her stay of two or three weeks
.
—A WITNESS