Belle Cora: A Novel (5 page)

One of my earliest memories is of the time my mother lost me on the docks; she used to make a story of this episode, stuffed with morally fortifying lessons, like all her stories, so that I remember some of it from her point of view. She left my brother Lewis in the care of the hired girl and took me to Pearl Street. It was an ambitious journey: for months, the most she had been able to manage was a trembling descent of the stairs and a brief constitutional in the park across the street, with frequent rests. Now she was feeling better, glad to be out again, strong again—maybe
all
better, cured by some miracle?—and she walked, testing herself, one step and then another, with a fierce secret joy, gripping my hand, all the way to the docks.

Since it was so long ago, I must explain that she was misbehaving—women of her class were not supposed to go to the waterfront, certainly not on foot—but my mother wished to investigate a dry-goods store known for its quality and reasonable prices. She did it with the pretext of visiting my father at his place of business. (As she explained later, she
overreached herself
, stepping out of her
sphere
, and she was punished for it.) We bought hot roasted peanuts from a pushcart. While she was talking to a clerk, I wandered out of the store and crossed the street to watch some children of the poor who lay facedown on the edge of the dock. They were holding a yard of cheap cloth beneath the water. I remember that the reflections of pilings, ropes, and masts wriggled like worms, with the children’s faces seemingly contained in the cloth. Abruptly the picture disintegrated; the boys’ arms were webbed with the river’s slime, the cloth dripped, tiny fish writhed. I turned to speak to my mother; she wasn’t there. I didn’t know which of those many doors I’d come out of and had no idea how to find it.

To my left were the wooden ships, a bewildering thicket of masts, with vines of ropes and leaves of reefed sail, pigeons sitting on the yardarms, bowsprits drawing undulating lines of shadow on the cobblestones. To my right were three- and four-story buildings, many signs, doors and awnings—horses, wagons, dogs fighting over shreds of offal, men pushing wheelbarrows, heaving casks, spitting in doorways. I ran through all that in elemental terror, shouting “Mama! Mama!” until, with a sudden pressure beneath my arms, a man with brown teeth and rum breath, in a coarse-woven dirty shirt and pants with suspenders picked me up. He held me high, walking, while I kicked at his head. “Who
lost a babe? Lost! One babe!” A little later: “What am I bid for this fine babe?”

“That’s my child! Thank heavens—oh, thank you, thank you,” cried my mother, who moments before had been picturing my body fished lifeless out of the water, and I was handed down to her so quickly it was almost falling. Her grip, much weaker than the rough man’s, was tighter than usual for her. I could hear her quick heartbeat and wheezes—she had been running—and I did not feel entirely out of danger yet. I sensed her fear of this man, the kind of man our family considered a good object for home missionary work. When other prosperous merchants were rewarding themselves with a convivial midday libation or the comforts of home, my grandfather, accompanied by my father or one of his clerks, was busy spreading the word of God, as they believed all serious Christians should do, whatever their regular professions. In combed black hats and immaculate somber suits, they patrolled the waterfront, distributing Bibles—gripping calloused hands, saying, “Take this, sir, and may God bless you,” while peering into the eyes of sailors and dockers unaccountably not reached by the Gospel after eighteen hundred years.

The next part I remember is walking up a flight of wooden stairs to the second floor of my father’s workplace, which was lit partly by gaslight and partly by slanting shafts of sun from the big windows. Junior clerks sat on high stools before inclined desks, scratching out lists and letters, while my father watched from a high platform that afforded him a godlike view of their labors. When he greeted my mother, the more astute clerks removed their short-brimmed high black hats, and the others followed the example. He took me from my mother, kissed me, handed me back. He said that he was happy that she was feeling stronger, what a surprise, and she must never do it again, and then he turned to one of the clerks and told him to stop what he was doing to take us home in a company wagon.

When we were halfway down the steps, my mother apologized to the clerk and said that she must stop to rest. She sat down on the steps. I sat beside her. The clerk stood behind us, thinking God knows what. She coughed: a familiar sound. Whenever I played at being a mama, at a certain point I would interrupt my pretended chore to rest, saying, “Mercy.” I would cough, with a reflective, listening, diagnostic expression, as if the
cough contained a message, and put a hand on my chest or side. Then, grinding my teeth and wincing, I’d get up and return to my imaginary work.

Often I would tell my dolls to hurry up and learn to be good, since I would not always be there to teach them.

LATER IN LIFE, WHENEVER I TALKED
about my mother I would begin to sob. There wouldn’t be any buildup—nothing at all—then the tears. Those who knew me as a hard woman would find it distasteful. Who could blame them? How could they understand?

She had fine flaxen hair, which she kept in a severe bun under a plain bonnet. She was small and, in my early memories, pretty, with a graceful figure. (Not later; the progress of the illness made her delicate beauty shrivel.) Her nose was straight and thin; her eyes were long-lashed and bright, her lips bow-shaped; her chin was small. Her complexion was pale, except when she was feverish, at which times the black-and-white hues of her clothing contrasted with a hectic, ruddy, deceptively healthy-looking glow.

Slicing apples, sewing, polishing the candlesticks, or trimming the lamps (four duties she said were permissible for ladies), she would remark, “The Lord may take me early. Then I will be sorry not to be here with you and your brothers, but, on the other hand, I will be very glad to again see my own mother and my grandfather and my aunt”—all dead of consumption—“and of course I expect to meet you in your time. That is why you must do your duty and love God.”

We believed that completely and literally. We would be reunited in heaven. That was our plan, as practical to us as “Let’s meet at sundown in front of the clock tower.”

Growing tired, she would rest, while I went on sewing or polishing. She’d tell me how helpful I was—what would she do without me? She would cough, intending it to be a small, cautious throat-clearing cough. The cough would have bigger ideas and go on and on, while she ran to a pail, and she would spit and study her sputum. Was it white or yellow or green? Or red—the most feared color.

In retrospect—now that “consumption” is “tuberculosis” and the diligent Dr. Koch has traced it to a microscopic bacillus—it is clear that
insufficient efforts were made to save my mother’s life. Even based on the knowledge then available to physicians, everything possible was not done. It never was when the sufferer was a woman. Male consumptives made survival their life’s work. They went on long sea voyages. They traveled to better climes. They changed careers, shunned brain work, and sought to restore their health with vigorous labor out of doors. These measures were considered impractical for women. How could they change careers, when motherhood was their true occupation, without which their lives were empty? How could a sick woman contend with the thousand inconveniences of travel, or bear to be separated from dear friends and relations? Women were too good to do the selfish things that might have preserved them, so they weren’t told to. Only seldom did doctors even advise a consumptive woman to refrain from childbearing, although they knew that each pregnancy would shorten her life.

My mother believed ardently in what was then considered to be the modern view of woman’s nature—it was a relatively new idea, that women were finer than men—and if any doctor had suggested that she ought to leave her family or avoid childbirth she would have found another doctor. She had five of us: Robert, Edward, Frank, me, and, last of all, Lewis. She was found to be in the second stage of consumption soon after Edward, and each subsequent birth resulted in a permanent worsening of her condition.

Within these limits, it was her duty to improve. On Dr. Boyle’s advice, she ate bland foods: wheat breads, apples, boiled rice, boiled beef. She took opium to relieve the pain and to reduce the severity of her coughs. She took calomel to relieve the constipation caused by the opium. When she was well enough, she walked or went riding. She relieved her swellings with blisters and poultices, which she became expert at preparing for anyone who wanted them, and she bled herself with leeches, the descendants of a little family of them imported from Europe, which she bred and raised at home. The leeches mated and bore their young in pond water that she kept in a porcelain tub in her bedroom. Her blood was their only food.

She belonged to a sewing circle consisting of pious Congregationalist women with consumption, whom she had come to know at church or through the recommendation of her doctors. She went to their houses;
they came to ours. Before I was seven, I attended the funerals of three of these ladies. They had sat facing each other, plying their needles, trading medical details they had learned as dutiful invalids. One by one they were put in boxes, stored in the ground, and replaced by others in earlier phases of the process.

All of these doomed women had children whom they were anxious to infuse with a full course of moral instruction in the little time that might remain. Every incident was an occasion for a lesson about piety, work, or self-effacement. Never take the best chair when someone older is present, or speak of hating things or people, or say you do not love what is given to you. Never leave chairs out of place.

For my mother’s children, there was special advice on the art of being a guest. She had been only four years old herself when her own mother died. Her father had been unequal to the task of caring for her and her sister Agatha, and from an early age she had become—as she put it—a “wanderer” and a “pilgrim” in the houses of relations. She had learned to be neat, quiet, obedient, and useful. We must learn how to be like that, too.

Perhaps she and my father had decided that he wouldn’t keep us after she died. In any event, we weren’t merely told that acting in certain ways was wrong—we were told that it would not be tolerated by people less indulgent than our parents. She was forever teaching us how to act during long visits, so far wholly imaginary, at the houses of friends and relatives. “Try every day to cause them as little trouble as possible.”

Would we wear well on long acquaintance? Naturally, she worried. We were lovable, yes, but each of us had endearing imperfections that, in her considered judgment, would not travel well.

Robert, six years my senior, found it hard to occupy a chair in a manner befitting a descendant of the Puritans. His knees would climb to his chest, or one leg would behave itself while the other leg was flung out; at the table it was always “Robert, sit up,” and his posture was at its worst when he was reading, as he did every spare moment, articles about the Crusades, the habits of the pelican, the use of flying buttresses in cathedrals, the methods of snake charmers, Swedish forest fires, etc., in
The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
, and accounts of murders and steamship disasters in the
Sun
and the
Courier.
My grandfather had given him a complete thirty-six-volume translation of Buffon’s
Natural History
, used but in good condition, which he read with his head on the floor and his feet on the wall.

In a letter to Robert—to be opened after her death—my mother wrote: “As you grow I know you will learn how disrespectful your strange postures seem to your elders.”

There was a letter like that for each of us, our mother speaking as if from the grave so that we would remember her, get a lump in our throats, and resolve to be better people. In Edward’s she hopes he will learn not to tear out of the house without a goodbye, and to study harder and not tease me. In her letter to Frank she recommends that he seek vigorous outdoor work in a better clime. Frank was born with a large black birthmark directly over his heart, like a target placed there for the convenience of the Angel of Death. He was small for his age, and we used to say he could not watch the rain through a shut window without getting a fever, and wherever he is I hope he will forgive me for saying that he wet the bed occasionally until he was eight. He, too, liked to read. He liked the sea tales of Captain Marryat.

Writing to Lewis, who could not yet read, posed special problems which are reflected in her confusing advice to him. Sometimes she is writing to a little boy who loves to climb things and to look at pictures; sometimes she is addressing a young man who must be told to shun gambling hells and theaters. Lewis came too late for her really to know him. She knew only that he was beyond her control. From the moment he was able to crawl, he was busy damaging property and risking his life. It was more than she could do to keep him out of cabinets and flour bins, to keep his hand out of jars, to keep him from tossing fruit, stones, and plates from second-story windows to learn whether they would bounce, splash, or shatter. Curious and lawless, he was bitten by dogs, scratched by cats, nearly trampled by horses, had the same hand run over by another boy’s hand truck and cut by an apple corer, had a bookshelf topple onto him, was burned by a hot pan, and was trapped in a trunk for three hours. By the age of four, he was covered from head to toe with tiny scars.

Since my mother could not contain Lewis, by the time he was three I took on this chore for her—watching him, teaching him, scolding him, kissing his boo-boos, making him wash his face and brush his hair every
day and say his prayers each evening; punishing him—at my own discretion, which went unquestioned—by applying a stick to his bottom with all my puny might; and in the middle of the night I pulled him out of my mother and father’s bed and back into mine. When I assumed these responsibilities, I was just a little girl imitating her mother; I went on because she couldn’t and I was applauded for it and it made me feel important.