Femme Fatale (45 page)

“She has retired from performing, I heard,” Irene whispered back at me as we twined our way upward single file. “I don’t know why, but certainly her funds are limited. I understand the current performers take up a collection for her needs from time to time, for she cannot convert to ordinary work. Like poor Phoebe, the very condition that made her an object of curiosity and pity and employment when she was young may prevent her from supporting herself now that she is older.”

I felt in my coatdress pocket for my small leather coin purse, wondering what I could contribute. I was used to feeding the pigs from my early youth, but not a pig-faced woman, and couldn’t think of a delicate way to do it.

I huffed out one breath after another for four tall stories, much missing our charming cottage in Neuilly, which featured only one staircase, and that one straight up. It seemed odd to think of Godfrey occupying our country home alone.

We were forced to stop several steps shy of the single door that ended the stairs. Irene rapped on the door’s lower half, several times, and then it opened perhaps a foot wide.

I expected an occupant, but no one filled the interstice, or appeared not to until I looked down.

Another dwarf!

I was beginning to feel like Snow White.

Irene began chattering with this stunted figure until it became clear to me that this was not the Pig Lady, but a mere child. Once I realized that this was a species familiar to me, above all of Irene’s exotic former associates, I leapt to the fore in both conversation and position.

“Well, my dear,” I said, brushing past Irene. “I know we are
strangers and may seem rather frightening, but we are quite harmless and need only to meet the lady of the house.”

I was interested to see in such close, though dim, quarters that the small figure was indeed a “child” of four or five, not a dwarf at all.

My firm but friendly way with children once again produced results. Her already wide eyes grew as large as lace doilies. “Mama’s working,” she said.

“She is not here?” Irene asked from behind me with a sad wrench in her voice.

I realized how very important this quest had become for her, and bent to take the child’s tiny fingers in my own. They curled around my first joints in a most engaging and trusting way.

“We need only a few moments with your mama,” I said in a conspiratory whisper, “and my friend is a famous opera singer who may have work for her.”

“Oh!” The child eyed Irene, who was still a suppliant several steps below us. She frowned and stared. “She looks like the lady in the picture above my bed. Mama said she was my guardian angel.”

I smiled on such childish faith. Doubtless her mama had pinned some madonna of the advertising world above the little girl’s cot. If Irene’s visage served as a calling card with this tiny gatekeeper, I was not about to argue.

As the child pulled the door wide I stepped inside, Irene practically climbing my skirt hems as well as the last steep stairs to enter this aerie.

I turned back to shut the door behind her and almost teetered on the threshold, so steep were the stairs leading below. I turned with trepidation, realizing that the Pig Lady and this delightful child were living in straitened circumstances.

The room we stood in was dim, but the little girl tripped through its shadowy geography as ably as a mountain goat. An inner room had a window that overlooked the street, and at that
uncurtained window sat a figure on a low stool. In her lap lay piece sewing work, a man’s shirt, or an apron, perhaps. White at least, and made of coarse material from which the brutal square of daylight picked out every heavy thread.

The shock of such broad daylight made a silhouette of the sitter’s figure. The curve of the head blossomed into a shapeless funnel. The profile was so inhuman that I clasped the child’s small hand again, more for my own sake than hers. She was used to this place and this person.

“Anna,” Irene said softly.

The oversized head lifted from the work in its lap.

“See!” the child exclaimed, wresting free of my hand to cavort toward the wall. The daylight fell on a small cot . . . and the unframed print that was nailed above it. Not a print, but a playbill (I had seen enough lately), and I recognized the subject with a start: Merlinda the Mermaid.

Somehow this tiny child had recognized Irene, a decade later and with her flowing sea-drifting locks pinned up under a hat.

“Anna,” Irene repeated, softly.

The face turned toward us, and I flinched.

But I saw only the odd half-moon that surrounded it like a dark halo, some sort of bonnet or hood. Something within that vague circumference spoke.

“No one calls me by that name anymore.”

Her voice was low, and mellow, and not at all hoggish.

“You said I couldn’t,” the child trilled. “That I must call my elders ‘Mister’ and “Missus’ and ‘Miss.’ And you ‘Mama.’ ”

The woman didn’t answer her, so I caught the child’s hand and lifted her up until she perched on one arm, a mite of perhaps thirty pounds. “I am a ‘Miss,’ ” I explained. “And my friend is a ‘Missus.’ ”

“Is not! She’s a Mermaid.”

“Not recently. Now she is Missus Norton.”

“ ‘Missus Norton?’ ” The woman at the window’s voice smiled
in the shadows. “You went away to seek your singing fortune, little Rena, and have returned a married lady, is that true?”

“Well,” Irene said, moving cautiously toward the window, “I have done some singing, that is true. And I’ve found some fortune. And I am a Missus.”

The Pig Lady’s hands lifted from her lap, thimble on one, needle in the other, and she clapped her palms in approval. “I am so glad to hear what became of you. Once you began to study music so seriously, you were soon lost to us.”

“It was unbelievably demanding.”

“All gifts are. Are you well?”

“Very.”

“And your friend who has such a way with my daughter?”

I couldn’t help blushing in the dark.

“Miss Huxleigh. A stalwart soul. I have been living, and working, in England, and most recently France.”

The woman’s sigh pushed her dark breast up and down against the bright window like a bellows.

I grew impatient, worried. This was like conversing with a silhouette, a cutout of black paper against white window. What was so horrific about the Pig Lady’s face that it remained such a mystery? At first I didn’t want to know, but now I did, burningly.

I began to understand what had attracted Eve to apples.

Irene had found another small stool and sat down upon it, despite the discomfort. I think it was the child’s seat and I asked her, “What are you called?”

“Edith,” she said in the very dignified way that the name deserved.

“What a delightful name.” I sank with her onto the cot. “I am Penelope.”

“Penelope! I’ve never heard anything so silly!”

“Perhaps I am a silly person,” I suggested.

She grasped my thumb and leaned close. “I think you are! But I’m silly too. Sometimes it takes two to be silly.”

And time, I thought. Silliness takes time, which is why adults so seldom enjoy it. I couldn’t help wondering how often her mother had time to be silly. Or how often she had heard people jeering at her mother.

“Anna,” Irene said, “I’ve come back because there’s disturbing news. Sophie and Salamandra are dead.”

The shrouded head bowed, as if struck.

Irene spoke on. “A reporter for the
World
is determined to expose me, embarrass me, for my humble beginnings.”

The woman at the window laughed.

“This news cheers you?” Irene asked.

“Only in that no one would wish to expose your ‘humble beginnings’ unless you had a more elevated present. I am so relieved, little Rena! In some ways you were the child I thought I could never have, back then, when I was young and foolish and so. . . flawed.”

“The young are always flawed,” Irene said quickly.

“I more than most. When you are known as the ‘Pig Lady’ from a very early age, you expect nothing of life but swill and a quick trip to the butcher. I had both.”

“I’m so sorry! It’s the strangest thing. My memories of my childhood years are vague and intermittent—”

“Not so strange.” The silhouette of the Pig Lady leaned nearer to us even as her voice became hoarse and fainter. “You came to us by dark of night, not yet the age of my Edith. Bundled up from head to foot, as if the sheriffs were after you.”

“From the West? I came from the West?”

“I don’t know. Here in New Jersey, the World is East across the river: New York.” The strangely shaped head turned toward me. “Miss, can you take Edith to the stairs, play some game with her. Little pitchers have . . .”

“Of course,” I said, feeling no umbrage at being left out, as I too often could. Edith was a charming child, and I welcomed her wiggling weight on my lap. It had been so long.

Although I was madly curious to hear the Pig Lady’s story, I knew . . . hoped . . . that Irene would later tell me every last detail.

In the meantime, I had a serious game of patty-cakes to play against a very skilled opponent.

The door above Edith and me suddenly cracked open. The child leaped up, crying “Mama,” and vanished within. I was slower to rise, my heavy skirts and stiff corset, and my greater years, making impromptu moments hard to come by . . . except when I had been unconventionally clothed in recent captivity.

Now Irene’s silhouette stood in bold relief against an interior rather than an exterior brightness.

I realized a lamp was lit, and that if I returned to the chamber I could solve the puzzle of the Pig Lady’s features. I realized that I didn’t wish to.

Irene came down the four or five steps that brought her back to my level.

“Poor Nell. Are you stiff?”

“Somewhat.”

“A charming child.”

“So children often are, before the world grabs them by the nape of the neck and shakes. That poor woman? What can she earn?”

“A pittance. A pity.” Irene looked askance, as if she couldn’t quite bear to be in the here and now.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked.

“Learn? More than I wanted to.” She began walking down the steep stairs ahead of me, one ungloved hand grazing the dingy wall.

I followed her as fast as I could in the unlit dark.

It was madness to descend without a candle. I recalled the faint light within the rooms above, thrown by one candle, I
guessed. Hence we would make do with none, even if we broke our necks over it.

In this mood, I walked into an impediment on the stairs I could barely see, solid and soft as a big sack of flour.

I moved aside and stopped until my eyes could make out the variances of shadow all around me.

My impediment was Irene! She had unexpectedly sat down and was crouched like a clot of darkness on the stairs.

I, like the spider of nursery rhyme, sat down beside her.

Was she weeping? I could not move or speak a word, for I had never seen, or heard rather, her weep.

Certainly she had never heard or seen me weep.

That was much to be recommended in a long-term associate.

Of course I didn’t know what to say, and, what is worse, risked joining her in her maudlin occupation if I spoke at all.

So we sat side by side in the dark, and ignored each other.

I had more to ignore, such as sighs from the dark. Finally, I withdrew the clean linen handkerchief I carried at all times from my skirt pocket and tucked it into the general area of her hands.

She thrust it back at me, as if insulted. Perhaps I had misjudged the depth of her despair, but despair she did.

“Their situation,” I finally said, “is quite desperate.”

“Oh, desperate can be cured,” she answered bitterly from the dark. “I can cure desperate, if they will let me. I cannot cure memory, Nell. And . . . I once was that innocent child. I thought all these exotic grown-ups around me were the sun and the moon. That they could do no wrong, suffer no wrong, feel no hurt. And if they could do and not do all this, surely I could also. They gave me my sense of self and survival, which is the greatest gift to be given. And now they pay for it! Because of me.”

“Pay! How?”

“I was the mystery child imported into their midst twenty-eight years ago. They accepted me without question, and even let me go ten years ago, with good wishes and no awkward questions.
Now I return, and all my questions are awkward, and the answers are . . . lethal.”

“Goodness! Were you really that important? A mere chit of a child?”

There was a shocked silence. Her voice came meek and mild from the growing blackness. “I am not the centerpiece of this story, this mystery, Nell. I know that. But, somehow, I am the
pretext
. I cannot allow once-dear lives to end in pain and chaos.”

“No, of course not,” I said. “Nor can I allow us to linger a moment longer in this dark stairwell. We shall have to make our way down like the blind, as it is, and I shudder to think what has attached itself to our skirts.”

I pulled and prodded her like a reluctant child until she was upright again.

“It is not only their sad state that is lamentable,” Irene said, her voice still low and thready. “I have finally learned the name of the woman who came to visit us children in the theater and boarding houses. It is the infamous Madame Restell, and I very much dread what that may mean.”