My Notorious Life (22 page)

—What?

—They bleed to death. You saw how Miss Kinsley interfered with herself.
She is lucky she did not puncture her insides. You see them using anything. A corset stay. A turkey feather. A bit of bone.

—It’s not a murder?

Now my teacher rose trembling from her couch. She took up both my poor paws again and turned them over in her own. —You have small hands. You have a soft heart and a curious turn of mind. But you don’t know yet how it is with us. The female. You’ll learn. You’ll have your own trials. But if you are a midwife . . . and I think you will be, Annie . . . you won’t be afraid.

—What trials?

My teacher sagged, but when she lifted her gaze to me she smiled very lovely, even with her eyes shot red, her gaze on me was soft, and I did not forget it.

—Remember Annie love, said my teacher, —that the soul of a midwife is a broad soul and a gentle soul, and she delivers the greatest blessing the Lord bestows on us poor creatures. But, a midwife must also keep comfortable with the complexities. What I call the lesser evil. You will learn not to judge too harsh on others. If you don’t learn this, you’re not suited to the work.

The intricacy of sorrow and mercy on her face made me wish to cry. I waited for her to speak more, but she was done with that lesson, about Good and Evil and Complexity, and while I mulled her words many times in years to come, it was a long while before I known enough to understand for myself what she meant by it.

—Then will you help Miss Kinsley? I said.

—Someone else might but I cannot, said my teacher. —The child is quick.

*  *  *

Some weeks later, the
Police Gazette
reported that Mr. VanKirk, first assistant to the governor, was arrested, accused of the murder of a Miss Beatrice Kinsley, age 25, of Washington Square, who was found floating in the East River, dead of stab wounds. At the time of her death, the newspaper said, she was seven months with child.

The item gave me a feeling like a stranger’s hand was on my neck.

So far in my education I had learned that a baby will kill its own mother, that a father will turn out his daughter, that a schoolteacher is not a fit husband
for a genteel lady, and that life is worth living for love’s sake only. And now from Beatrice Kinsley I learned that to turn away a desperate woman was to imperil her life, because first, she might interfere with herself and die, and because, second, the father of an inconvenient infant might murder its mother and get away with it apparently. Mr. VanKirk was soon acquitted of charges and went on in later years to become Undersecretary of the Navy in Washington. The lesson of the murdered Beatrice floated through my nightmares forever after that, her yellow hair a seaweed.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, at Mrs. Evans’ elbow, my practical lessons carried on through that year, so that in addition to pining for my lost family, and brooding over the fate of Charlie my lost suitor, and traipsing about Broadway with my friend Greta, I became expert in the subterranean sanguinary aspects of feminine existence, assisting at all hours of the day and night, for no pay.

This education wore on me, so that one day, when the front doorbell rang for my mistress, I was fed up to the gullet. I found Mrs. E. asleep again on her daybed, her face pale and sweated. —Missus, it’s a lady caller again for you.

Mrs. Evans gave a wee hum and pulled at her blankets. Her vial of Serum was on the table. Just yesterday I’d mixed eight ounces of it (The-bane Opium extracted in wine, drops of nutmeg, saffron, ambergris). Now here it was, empty already.

—Missus?

—Go now and examine her, and then you’ll come and tell me what’s the matter. There’s a good girl, now.

Perhaps it was the number of stairs I ran that day or maybe it was that I was on the tear, but when she said I was good something evil came over me and I snapped at her.

—I ain’t a good girl. I’m a servant to you without no payment nor pocket money and I ain’t got but two dresses and not ever allowed to go nowhere. Greta next door gets five dollars the month and I get f*** all and yet now plus the chores, you say I am the Assistant, Examine Her Yourself. Well I don’t care if you send me back to Cherry Street for saying so but I am not your good girl nor no one’s.

Mrs. Evans sat up alarmed, with grains of sleep in her eyes.

—You only want me to clean up the bloody linen, I said. —It’s a CRIME is what it is.

I had meant the drudgery but she mistook my meaning. —Despite what the law says I don’t believe it is a crime, said Mrs. Evans, raving a little. —Not till the child is quick. Anyway, if there’s trouble, you just pay a bit here and there and they leave you alone.

Those words You Just Pay a Bit was another installment of my legal education. My financial education, however, was uppermost in my mind. —But sure it IS a crime that you don’t give me a new dress or a nickel or a penny. It’s slavery, sure it is.

She was silent, wiping the damp dew of her disease off her forehead. With some effort she got out of bed and traveled over to her dressing table. With a key she opened a small drawer there. I thought she might pull out a gun and shoot me. But instead she had a wad of money, which she flattened and fanned, then plucked out three bills, each worth ten dollars, and then handed them to me. —We intended to give you a settlement when you reached the age of twenty one, she said, pink with the strain of congratulating herself. —But if you would prefer to have part of it now, we don’t object.

I had never held even five dollars of my own, let alone thirty, and now here was Money. —Thank you, I said, awkward.

—You’re welcome. She made for her bed.

—Still there’s the lady caller to see you.

—All right, she sighed. Fighting dropsy, yawning and fumbling, she got ready to provide me another lesson.

*  *  *

With my thirty dollars safe in a pouch under my cot, I went along now on Mrs. Evans’ good days when she took me out to help her in the bedrooms of the city, where women labored and dropped their infants worse than rabbits, night and day. The Bible says in sorrow she shall bring forth children, but sorrow is a quiet humor and my apprenticeship was not quiet. I heard noises from girls like cats being killed. Worse. The battle of Gettysburg where boys was gored through by swords and felled by cannons was surely a match for the sounds of agony as came from these rooms of mothers laboring, and the slicks of blood was so equally sanguinary that you would expect Morrigan the fairy of war to land on dark crow’s wings by the side of every female in confinement. Before I reached the age of seventeen, I knew the rudiments of my trade just by watching and listening and placing my
hands where Mrs. Evans tutored me to place them. I reached in and helped along a breech boy to be born, his little red feet emerging and his chin stuck somewhere up the chimney so I worried would his head snap off. I seen mothers give birth drunk as sots and I seen them quaff the Sanative Serum like it was cider. I seen twins delivered, and an infant born with a caul, filmy as the skin off steamed milk, veiling the face. Its mother put that filament aside in a tobacco tin saying she would sell it to a sailor.

—A caul will save you from drowning, said Mrs. Evans.

She tutored me always. While I was helping out with the births I wasn’t yet allowed to assist her in the premature deliveries for the Obstruction, but she had me observe and listen to her narration as she scraped a blocked woman called Mrs. Torrington who had eight children already. I observed again as she deobstructed another broken-down nag Mrs. Selby who had seven boys. Neither one could afford another squalling child, and both of these ladies no matter how much My Teacher hurt them only thanked her in the end. It was my sorry task to empty the bowl and on one of these occasions I seen amidst the gore a pale delicate outline of a form such as what you see in the smashed egg of a sparrow, not bigger than a thumbnail.

—What’s wrong with you? cried Mrs. Evans when she seen my woeful face.

—It’s been killed.

—It was never alive, said she quite firmly, and dragged me home to her Bible where she pointed me out a lesson from King Solomon and said, —Ponder it.

If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in obscurity. It never sees the sun and it never knows anything; it is better off than he.

And she ordered me to go look in the street at the poor wee bundles of rags having their childhood in the alleyways of the Bend and ask myself what was meant by Charity and to read the verses of Ecclesiastes again, so I did:

Behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil that is done under the sun.

Under sun and moon both, Mrs. Evans schooled me about evil and good and the practicalities of administering them and all remedies in between. A few drops of opium will save the mother pain. Palpation of the belly will determine a breech presentation. A glassful of spirits will restart a stopped labor. If by feel you determine the head is rotated wrongly, coax the mother on her side and push with the hands to turn the child. If the face is presenting place one hand within and the other without, and push inside to tuck the chin, while outside pressing the head forward by a stroking motion across the belly. Small hands is a blessing. A steady hand is a blessing. A firm hand is a blessing. A warm heart is and so is a soft voice. Mrs. Evans had these all, whereas my heart was guarded and my voice was mostly silent. I watched and listened and did what I was told.

—You will see mothers die of prolapse where the u****s falls right out, Mrs. Evans said. —You will see them die when the child is stuck in the canal. Mothers will die of fever and they will die of hemorrhage. Their soft parts will rip and tear. They will die just of exhaustion. And remember, she said, —till you have a child of your own, no woman will accept you for a midwife alone.

I went along to thirty births. Sixteen boys and fourteen girls. The mothers moaned and carried on but when they were through most of them smiled and looked down at their raw new infants with wet eyes glinting. —It’s a beautiful gift of God, Mrs. Evans said, her own eyes crinkled with wonder. —Such a wonder.

And it was. As disgusting as the Blessed Event seemed to me at first, I soon was dumbstruck at the power and workings of the female machine and never got tired of the drama and the miracle, even when I seen Mrs. Kissling die in her husband’s arms, her newborn wailing, not even when I seen a mongoloid. I saw all manner of effluvia manufactured by the feminine
anatomy, including blood, the Liquor amnii, p*** and s***, vernix and vomit. Plus all manner of womanly afflictions, swellings, growths, lacerations, fistula, bruises and the burns of a cigar. But the worst I ever seen was left on the doorstep.

*  *  *

I heard the bell and looked out, early on a Friday morning just as the sun rose. On the stoop was a plain woman in a dark bonnet carrying a cloth satchel. I went to answer the door. But when I opened it, I saw her hurrying away in the crowd. —Missus! I called out, but she did not turn. She had left her satchel behind.

As I began to chase her with it, I heard a sound, like a mew, and thought for a second she had dropped off her cat. But it was clear soon enough what had been left. Inside the bag was a runt no bigger than a teardrop on a rose petal. He lay wide-eyed, kicking his matchsticks under a blanket. I lifted him out and up to my shoulder.

—What the devil, mister? I said, soft, and carried him in. A note was pinned to his shirt. It said, Please take care of him for I cannot. His name is Johnny.

—Oh poor Johnny, I whispered in the oyster shell of his little ear. I brought him down to the kitchen to Mrs. Browder, all agitated. —Look what’s left on our stoop.

—What next? she said, up to her elbows in suds. But when she seen Johnny, she cooed and let him suck on her finger, clucking her tongue. —What’ll we do with him?

—We’ll keep him, says I, and made a nest for him in a drawer. But he was hungry, the bugger, and we had no way to feed him. His shrieks was pitiful. I gave him a rag soaked in sugar water to suck but it angered him. I fed him cow’s milk from a spoon, but it only choked him. He coughed and gagged on his own tongue and did not stop his cries.

Mrs. Evans heard the noise, and when she came down the stairs and seen the baby, she picked him up and tendered him on her shoulder, and I thought we’d keep him then. But, no, she said, since none of us was a wet nurse, the Sisters of Mercy on Twelfth Street was the only choice to save him, as they kept wet nurses at hand. —We’re not an orphanage. You’ll have to bring him, Annie.

—He’ll only die there, I said, stubborn. —I won’t turn him over.

—I’ll bring him then, said Mrs. Browder, —if you won’t. She picked him up and put him back in the satchel with his mother’s note and his blanket. —Let’s go Johnny, now, off with you to find some milk. She started out the door with him, waddling. On her weak legs, she would not even get to Bowery let alone Twelfth Street.

—All right then, I said. —I’ll bring him.

Mrs. Browder handed off the satchel. —There’s a basket in front of the hospital. You’ll put him in, and ring the bell. They send the orphans out to nice families.

—They send them out on trains is what they do, I said. —If they live.

Their likely death was a fact known to me because news about orphans was my special interest. Everything to do with them I read with zeal. The
Police Gazette
that year wrote that ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY FIVE babies was left in six months with the Sisters of Mercy, and none but eight survived. It made no sense to have so many orphans and no one to feed them. Still, without a better plan and full of misgivings, I took Johnny and set out, straight up through Washington Square to Fifth Avenue and across a mile of blocks, hoping I would turn and find his mother chasing after me.