The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (62 page)

Some nights I see Darcy walking through the enfilade of bedrooms, restlessly shuffling the
cartelle
from the
tombola notturna
, which she never once won. I can look right through the hole where her heart should be. Other times I wake with a vision of my beloved Enda filling my eyes with liquid regret. She is lying broken and burning at the bottom of the Pembroke Street stairs. Saverio knows what my tears recall, and he holds me until they are all spent.

I even glimpsed Annora once, rising like a mermaid out of the water, with her stringy hair hanging down, waving a hand wrinkled from washing a yoke-necked smock in the greenness of the Grand Canal. She smiled at me with her long teeth, and offered me a salt-encrusted penny, as if to say, ‘I told you it was true about your father.’

And then she slowly melted into the mist that rose forgivingly from the sweet soft water.

I don’t believe I’ll see her again.

They say that the Irish don’t understand irony, but in fact we’re teeming with it, like a head full of hair, like a head full of memories, like a moth in a mousetrap, like a sack of shame that empties itself into a book and finds itself redeemed.

For all I wished to put behind me, my book will keep the sodden earth of Harristown wet and the bodies in the Famine pits close to the surface, with only an inch of grass between us and death, only a long red curl between me and you.

One long red curl, partly inside me, partly outside.

Historical Notes

All the characters in this book are invented apart from the La Touche family, Marcel Grateau of the Marcel waves and Julia Pastrana. London, in 1857, was convulsed by the spectacle of Julia Pastrana, the ‘Baboon Lady’ or ‘the Missing Link’, who danced and sang on the stage. Her face was simian and hairy with extra sprouts of growth in the form of a moustache and a beard. Five years later, her embalmed body was displayed at Piccadilly’s Burlington Gallery.

‘Captain MacMorris’ is the name of Shakespeare’s only Irish character.

My sisters’ story has elements in common with that of the long-forgotten Seven Sutherland Sisters, who were once household names in America.

I would never have heard of the Seven Sutherland Sisters of Niagara County, New York State, if my friend Bill Helfand hadn’t mentioned them over lunch a couple of years ago. Bill, an eminent medical historian, has advised me for the last three novels. He had an inkling I’d be interested in seven hairy sisters who took to the stage to peddle a quack hair restorant, made a fortune, spent it eccentrically and fell into obscurity with the advent of bobbed hair.

The Sutherland girls were born in rural poverty. There was also a brother, Charles, born in 1865, and possibly two other sisters who died young. It is said that their father, Fletcher Sutherland, a preacher and politicker, was exceptionally well endowed with hair, and that their mother had prepared a home-made ointment for her daughters’ hair, the smell of which made them unpopular at school. But the girls’ singing voices were popular in church. Their father cultivated their stage career from their early childhood. The Sutherland Sisters joined Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth in 1883, with Charles working as a gatekeeper. Naomi married J. Henry Bailey, then employed in the dining tent, in 1885. By this time Fletcher, with Bailey’s help, was marketing a Seven Sutherland Sisters ‘Hair Grower’. The Seven Sutherland Sisters Corporation was based in New York. It all worked like a well-oiled machine: the circus made the sisters famous, helping their Hair Grower to earn $90,000 in its first year. Soon they added a Scalp Cleaner Comb and Colorators in eight shades.

The Sutherlands eventually made at least $3 million from their products, with 28,000 sales dealerships in the USA. Their best years were between 1886 and 1907, but they continued until 1917, with factories in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

They spent their fortune at a ruinous rate, especially on a grand Gothic mansion in Lockport, built in 1893 and fitted out with turrets, cupolas and chandeliers. The sisters were notorious for exercising on their bicycles on a circular cinder path in the garden, wearing nothing more than bathing suits. They owned at least seventeen cats and seven dogs, the latter arrayed in handsome handmade collars. One dog, Topsy, wore dresses of silk and cotton in the summer and wool or plush in the winter. Whenever travelling, the sisters sent fresh steaks to the dogs (which generally arrived already putrid). The cats dined on fresh liver. Expensive funerals were held for the pets. The sisters also commissioned a group portrait, and kept seven individual portraits mounted on easels.

But this lifestyle could not be maintained. They outspent their massive income, and the hair products lost popularity, leaving them destitute. The mansion was sold, with much Sutherland Sisters ephemera abandoned in the attic. Far from the days of the lavish pet funerals, sixteen of their cats were mass-chloroformed and buried in burlap sacks.

Four sisters never married. Isabella married twice, both times to men much younger than herself. Her first husband, twenty-seven years old to her forty when they wed, was Frederick H. Castlemaine, a colourful, cultivated morphine addict, and obsessed with guns. Castlemaine was said to shoot the heads of turtles basking on logs, the spokes out of the wheels of passing buggies, the bowls out of his hired men’s pipes. He died of a morphine overdose in 1896. Isabella built him a $10,000 mausoleum, which was ransacked by thieves hoping to sell the body back to the grieving wife for a ransom or in search of the jewels allegedly buried with Castlemaine. They failed. Isabella grieved passionately for Castlemaine, until, at forty-six, she married Alonzo Swain, aged thirty. Victoria Sutherland married a preacher’s son of eighteen when she was fifty. Only Naomi bore children – four of them.

The youngest Sutherland sister, Mary, died in the State Institution for the Insane in Buffalo in 1939. Grace Sutherland lived until 1946.

Each Sutherland sister had a single doll made in her image (and using her own combings) – but these dolls were not mass-manufactured for sale. Instead, they were used in window displays of Sutherland products. Victoria was offered $2,500 (sometimes reported as $1,500) for her hair by a drugstore owner or hairdresser, but instead sold a single strand to a jeweller for $25. The seven-foot strand was strung with a ten-carat diamond in the jeweller’s window.

The Sutherland archives – including five of the dolls – were destroyed by a fire in their former mansion in 1938, seven years after the remaining sisters – Grace and Mary – had been forced to move away. A film about their lives was proposed, but Dora Sutherland was killed by a car when three sisters went to Hollywood. A script has never surfaced. Ephemera from their products still exists, but little published matter, the most interesting of which is Clarence O. Lewis’s
The Seven Sutherland Sisters
, a 60-page pamphlet published by the Niagara County Historical Society.

The coldness of the trail might have been a gift for a novelist, leaving wide-open tracts for the imagination to work in. But the Sutherlands had left numerous advertising photographs and they still loomed larger than life. Their campaign of celebrity endorsement, rags, riches, rags was a parable. I decided I could draw on the dynamics of the Sunderlands’ medical history, but set my novel in Europe, in the context of contemporary Victorian writers’ and artists’ obsession with long hair.

There are other issues explored in this novel. The Sutherlands appear to have enjoyed fairly harmonious relations with one another and frequently chose to live together. They also had a brother. But I was interested in portraying a large set of sisters at war and peace among themselves – so I decided to create my own hairy family and to make them Irish – and much divided in nature and temperament – and to bring them to Venice for the denouement of the story. And yes, there is indeed also some reference to Henry James’s
The Aspern Papers
, in which the aged former lover of a celebrated romantic poet is stalked by an ambitious writer, for I also wanted to write a parable of one of the key moral debates of our own time: where does freedom of the press cross over into criminal intrusion, character assassination and simple venality at the expense of the prey?

There are other similarities between the Swineys and the Sutherlands. Like my Pertilly, Naomi Sutherland (who died in 1893) and Victoria (deceased 1902) were replaced by fake sisters. Naomi, like Oona, sang with a bass voice though her hair was brown. Both sets of sisters, Sutherland and Swiney, were born in grinding rural poverty and broke into the limelight with singing shows in which their hair was the star attraction. Newspapers claimed that the Sutherland Sisters were obliged to be vigilant against frequent attempts to steal their hair. Mary Sutherland, like Ida Swiney, suffered from mental health issues. There was also a rumour that Isabella Sutherland’s husband Frederick Castlemaine may have been in love with her sister Dora.

‘Swiney’ is a version of the more common name ‘Sweeney’. In some slang usages, it means an unsophisticated person. The story several times refers to a Swiney who threw a psalter in the sea and later went mad: this ancestor of my characters was the hero of a legend entitled
Buile Suibhne
or
The Madness of Sweeney
, which began to take form in the ninth century but appears to refer back to the time of the Battle of Moira in 637. The story reflects tensions between Christianity and earlier Celtic faiths. Suibhne or Sweeney was king of Dal Araidhe, now County Antrim and north County Down. Sweeney was enraged when he was informed that the sound of a bell told of eminent churchman Ronan Finn marking out the site of the church in his kingdom. His wife tried to hold him back but was left holding his cloak as he tore away, completely naked. And so he arrived to find Ronan singing from his psalter. Sweeney flung the precious psalter into a deep lake and was about to deal harshly with its owner when he was summoned to do his duty at the Battle of Moira.

After a day and a night an otter raised the psalter from the water and carried it to Ronan, who then cursed Sweeney to wander Ireland insane and naked, and to be killed by a spear. As the armies gathered, Sweeney again encountered Ronan; this time the intemperate king killed one of his psalmists and struck the cleric’s own holy bell with his spear. Ronan uttered his second curse, condemning Sweeney to live bird-brained in the trees, terrified by any noise, mistrustful of all, even those whom he loved. And Sweeney exploded into a madness that had him floating all over Ireland and eventually taking up residence at Glen Bolcain where the insane congregated, eating cresses. He lamented his loneliness, the absence of music and a woman’s touch. He took to wandering for another seven years. After periods of sanity, he took again to the air, and crossed to the land of the Britons where he met the royal lunatic Alan, and they became friends until Alan drowned himself. Sweeney returned to his wanderings, finishing at Moling, where Ronan’s first curse was fulfilled when Sweeney was speared by a jealous husband.

This story has in modern times been adapted by Seamus Heaney (
Swiney Astray
) and Flann O’Brien (
At Swim-Two-Birds
).

The natural selection theory of long hair in women was posed by Dr Beddoe, quoted by Daniel John Cunningham in a pamphlet published in 1885. Dr Cunningham himself observed the statistical matrimonial preference for women with brown hair. (His statistics, mysteriously, list three ‘social states’ for women: Married, Single and Doubtful.)

The poems declaimed by Oona in Chapter 21 are as follows:

As Belinda in Alexander Pope’s
The Rape of the Lock
:

Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains,

And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains .
. .

Fair tresses Man’s imperial Race insnare

And Beauty draws us with a single Hair
.

(Canto 2, lines 23 – 28)

As Milton’s Eve in
Paradise Lost:

Shee as a vail down to the slender waste

Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Dishevel’d, but in wanton ringlets wav’d

As the Vine curles her tendrils .
. .

She would also have been forced to writhe her way through Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic incarnation of Lilith – in ‘Eden Bower’ – as a rippling Godiva of a serpent-woman, the fairest snake in Eden before she became Adam’s first human wife. This was first published in Rossetti’s
Poems
, 1870:

 
       
 Not a drop of her blood was human

But she was formed like a soft sweet woman.

The contemporary scholar Galia Ofek divides Victorian depictions of long-haired women into two types: golden-tressed Rapunzels and angels who were sexually innocent and decorous and needed saving; and Medusas, women who had already fallen into sin, were knowing and dangerous and out of control, but who were also in their way victims of representational codification inscribed in their dark hair.

James Frazer devoted many pages to hair in
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(1890). He recorded the widespread belief in the sympathetic magic invested in hair (and nail clippings). Hair was sacred to the spirit of the head and was to be molested at peril. It was a matter of anxiety when it was cut. ‘The chief of the Namosi in Fiji always ate a man by way of precaution when his hair was cut,’ wrote Frazer, who also recorded that among the Toradjas a child whose head was shaved to rid it of vermin was always required to keep a lock on the crown as a refuge for the head’s separate soul. He wrote that men who have taken a vow of vengeance may keep their hair uncut till they have fulfilled their vow. Some ancient German tribes would not allow their young warriors to trim their hair or beards until they had slain an enemy. Hair clippings were often protected. The Huzuls of the Carpathians feared that if mice were allowed to make nests of human hair then the donor would become cretinous or plagued by headaches. In Swabia, cut hair had to be hidden in a place where neither sun nor moon could shine on it. Some African tribes buried hair to stop it from falling into the hands of witches. In the Tyrol, some people burned it lest witches used it to raise tempests. Armenians hide their hair in the cracks of church walls, the pillars of houses or in a hollow tree because all severed portions of themselves will be required for reassembly upon resurrection. The Incas of Peru also believed in keeping cut nails and hair handy for that event; additionally, they were careful to spit in one place. Hair should be combed strictly inside the house, according to some cultures, as cutting and combing were thought to bring on thunder and lightning. In the Scottish Highlands no girl might comb her hair at night if she had a brother at sea. It was a traditional belief of the Irish village that, as Annora claims, the hairs on our heads were all numbered by the Almighty, who would expect us to account for each one on the Day of Judgement. Village women would wind hair into the thatch of their cottages for safe storage until then.