Femme Fatale (11 page)

I refer to what is called an “Atlantic crossing.” It is accomplished by steamship, by a great seven-deck liner as large as a cathedral but far less anchored.

I cannot speak much about the experience, as I spent it confined to our cabin in the depths of
mal de mer
, which is a pretty French phrase for the most unspeakable, relentless nonfatal illness known to man, or woman, or child.

Irene, of course, was as at home on the swaying bosom of Mother Ocean as she was on the stablest stage in Christendom.

She returned frequently to my miserable bunk, both by day
and night, with hot broths and cold compresses, neither of which helped.

Often at night she sang to me, not so much words as lulling syllables, the best palliative for a wracked body and drifting mind. It was criminal, I thought hotly under that tuneful spell, how the King of Bohemia’s pursuit had forced Irene to accept the anonymity of presumed death and kept her from the concert stage for almost two years. Sometimes I believed I detected the wretched wailing of a violin behind her voice. Sometimes my heavy eyes saw the shadow of Sherlock Holmes looming behind her. At other times I fancied I saw a wildly white-haired old man sawing away like a Gypsy fiddler in Transylvania. The “maestro” became a malign figure I feared. Hadn’t his long-buried instrument resurrected Irene’s memories, bringing us both on this miserable journey into her past? Perhaps we would be dreadfully sorry for it. I know I was, already!

“Poor Nell! Darling Nell!” she would croon, then mutter to herself, “It is my fault! I should have considered the effect of an Atlantic crossing on one who has only sailed the Channel between England and the Continent.”

I was too weak to agree with her, or even flutter my eyelids in sign that I had heard. And then the soothing trills of her voice mesmerized me, bore me away on a tide of maternal memories . . . not of the dead mother I had never known, but of my own frail attempted lullabies when my schoolroom charges were ill and feverish. I was indeed fortunate to be as sick as a beached seal with a prima donna for a nursemaid.

Smoking was not permitted belowdecks, so even during the night Irene would desert me for a short while. And, often, when she thought me asleep, she paced as she was wont to do only when smoking and puzzling out a conundrum. Now, however, her thoughts rather than tobacco drove her fevered stalking, and she berated herself even more.

“This journey was folly. Folly! Nell is no better for it, but worse, and I . . . my past is checkered, to say the least, and will certainly shock Nell, even though I cannot remember the half of it! Why?
Why!
I can master the libretto of a four-hour score in a foreign language in no time! I am a nine-day’s wonder of a quick study.
Why
do I only have fleeting mental pictures of most of my childhood, with familiar but unnamed faces looking on? And something . . . something awful that I almost seem to recall but, maddeningly, cannot quite grasp. What is that mystery looming ever since I unearthed the violin and memories of the maestro! Everything before England is blurred, as through a misted window. Everything after is clear as crystal. Why!”

Her words passed over me like ocean waves, agitated at the onset, but soon drawing away into the shallows of my mind like some ebbing eiderdown quilt.

Later in the voyage, Irene brought back lively reports about that segment of the human race that is impervious to the act of bouncing endlessly in the deep vales and steep hills of saltwater. Somehow she expected that commentary on others’ seaboard amusements would cheer me up.

During the day she leaned over me, her expression unnaturally cheerful while she regaled me with tales of promenades on the ladies’ deck and her unauthorized excursion to the gentlemen’s billiard room, where she won a round and smoked a cigar—Irene would be Irene on Noah’s Ark, I swear!

I learned of rattan deck chairs and breezes so lively the women’s skirts hoisted like sails. (Our swift and modern steamship only flew a couple of pennants, she explained, and sported two black smokestacks billowing dark clouds.) Of deck-side games of shuffleboard and something called “bull,” which did not make me pine to be up and about.

She very considerately brought me no reports on the ship’s menu. And she emptied my slop pail with the dash of a milkmaid in an operetta performing an entirely quaint and graceful chore,
for which I was most grateful. I had never before considered that a gifted actress’s dissembling could be an act of charity.

“I have been asked to sing,” she told me once, greatly excited. I cannot say when, for there was no night or day for me in my floating bed of pain and disorientation. “At the Captain’s gala. He well remembers Buffalo Bill’s mind-reading act from a previous crossing. Imagine Buffalo Bill as a mind-reader. It is too amusing.”

I muttered something that was not amusing.

“Poor Nell!” She sat beside me glittering like the Diamond Horseshoe of an American opera house in her evening dress, passing a limp cold compress over my hellishly hot forehead. “Had I any idea that you were prone to seasickness I’d have never allowed you to come.”

I muttered something not translatable.

“Even toast and tea can’t answer. Well, at least you will land with a waist as narrow as Nellie Bly’s!”

On that note, she left me. And I felt much better about feeling so bad, as I had once heard the wasp-waisted Nellie Bly so ungrammatically put it in her bold American way, of which I was soon to see much more, unfortunately. . . .

What can I say about our being tugged into New York harbor like a large, dignified matron being dragged somewhere by a determined child?

In this case, Irene was the child, grown, and the mystery of her mother was tugging her back to the land of her birth, and me with her.

What a busy shore that was! Steamships and smaller vessels thronged the harbor, old-fashioned ships with gleaming ranks of sails like seagull wings and flat, ugly ferries conveying immigrants to Ellis Island. All were drifting by the towering figure France had
sent America only a few years ago. The Statue of Liberty stood on a pedestal almost as looming as she was, with her sculpted metal robes like a giant curtain opening on Manhattan Island and her torch lifted high. It stood taller than one of the ancient world’s Seven Wonders, the male figure of the Colossus of Rhodes. Somehow the gigantic female figure seemed to suit this upstart nation, and it had been commissioned to honor the United States surviving its bitter Civil War.

The scenery beyond the statue loomed as large as Lady Liberty herself did. Buildings did not unfurl in five-story rank and file, but shot up unexpectedly, some perhaps ten or even twelve stories high.

Such metropolitan hubris was unknown to me.

Still green of complexion, I leaned against the deck rail, inhaling air composed of smoke and seagulls and salt and oil.

At least I was standing, now that the Atlantic waves had dwindled into the ripplings of a protected bay and series of inlets.

“The New World,” I said.

“The Old World, to me,” Irene answered. “I had hoped to put it behind me forever once.”

The only things we put behind us now were everything we knew and valued, as we tended to the tasks of getting ourselves and our luggage ashore and to our hotel.

Seagulls shrieked over our heads during the long process of debarking so many hundreds of people. The scent of salt and fish was as overbearing as the press of passengers eager to be on land. I almost became seasick again on the long, canted gangplank.

Luckily, we traveled with one trunk each, a record for Irene, and small ones, too, dictated by the White Star Line to no more than three feet long and a foot or so deep. After two hours we were reunited with the proper trunks and found a four-wheeler waiting at the pier to take us to the Astor House hotel, which Pink had recommended.

This hostelry was not far from the harbor, lying across Broadway
from a fine, green park at Barclay Street. It was a four-square, five-story building and remarkable for being an entire fifty-some years old, Irene told me, imagine that. There are peddlers’ carts in London older than this!

It was a relief to register in the echoing reception rooms and, after a disquieting ride in an elevator, find ourselves and our trunks installed in a decent enough suite of rooms. Godfrey had insisted that we travel in comfort, and had wired ahead so that American funds should be available to us. Clearly his work on the international front had made him only more thoughtful, able, and useful than ever.

Yet accomplishing all these duties of arrival in a another land ended in no welcome respite, I knew, for Irene had already arranged by telegram to dine with Pink Cochrane this very evening.

If I did manage to swallow a few bites of supper by the evening, I doubted that I could swallow anything our American acquaintance had to offer.

6.

Motherland

My age is 14 years. I live with my mother. I was present
when mother was married to J. J. Ford. . . . The first time I
seen Ford take hold of mother in an angry manner,
he attempted to choke her
.

—DIVORCE COURT TESTIMONY OF PINKEY E. J. COCHRANE, 1879

“Now, what is this nonsense about my mother?” Irene asked directly after dinner.

“I do not deal in ‘nonsense,’ ” Pink responded indignantly.

Irene smiled at this forceful reaction. “I only mean that I do not have a mother. I have never been known to have a mother. Thus I am mightily curious exactly whom you are going to produce for this role.”

“So you’ve come all the way across the Atlantic to tell me I’ve got a cold story?”

I could not resist joining the conversation, now that I could sit upright and nibble at food again. “Oh, you have some story, no doubt, Pink. You ‘daredevil girl reporters’ are always up to something.”

“I did nothing to find this story,” Pink replied as hotly as I had hoped. “It came to me, as the best ones always do. It’s knowing what’s smart to follow up on that counts in the newspaper business.”

“And it is a . . . business,” Irene noted with a mere jot of British snobbery, which I, as a Briton, could appreciate and applaud. “What right does your ‘business’ have in meddling in my personal affairs?”

“Because you are news, that’s why. Local girl makes good; just as I have.”

“Local?” Irene’s tone dripped disbelief.

“New Jersey is pretty close to New York City.”

“I have never denied that I was born in New Jersey.”

“But that’s just it. You weren’t.”

“I ought to know.”

“Really? You were a bit young at the time.”

At this point it was a match. It struck me that young Pink was holding forth with the same irritating prescience that Mr. Sherlock Holmes employed all too often. Know-it-alls, both of them, though as different from each other as peas from potatoes.

Irene and I, being far from home and our clothing wardrobes, were neatly attired in shirtwaists and skirts and short jackets. Pink, on her own ground, dressed far more grandly. She seemed to indulge in wide-brimmed hats as sweeping as a musketeer’s, with silk and velvet flowers nestled along one side instead of the extravagant plume called a panache, which represented the cavalier’s honor. I doubted that Miss Pink would wear her honor on her hat, or her heart on her sleeve, for all her admirable reporting of society’s wrongs had been done in feigned guise, like a thief or an inquiry agent. I doubted she would ever don men’s garb again, as Irene had done in her Pinkerton days and even did today, despite the Paris outing we three had made last spring so scandalously attired.