My Notorious Life (29 page)

Light smudged the edges of the city outside the window. The outline of rooftops was lit behind by sunrise, so that in the pinkest part of the
morning, I lay myself down. The waves came now with no break between them, and the fist, that fist, twisted, pushed out through a great burn opening the bones.

Charlie crashed into the room. He was winded. Dark smudges of sweat stained his shirt. He got down on the floor where I labored.

—Axie! I can’t find anyone.

—Get away from me.

—Don’t die. Don’t leave me.

—Get AWAY.

He went across the room reeling, saying some mess about how he went all the way uptown and he couldn’t find Vachon for hours and then he went over to Canal for Mrs. O’Shaughnessy but she was gone with another laboring mother. —So sorry, he said, fretting at me, he was exhausted, he was so worried for me, he was beside himself, begging, —Please don’t die, my darling wife, and—SHUT UP, I says to him—SHUT YOUR GOB, and then paid him no more attention as I was sunk down so far inside my own linings bearing down in the waves. Mrs. Evans voice played in my head:

Don’t push.

YES.

Not yet.

YES.

Not yet you’ll tear.

The pains were waves of whitecaps on the top of whitecaps. Still my child was not fished out from the terrible sea of me.

Push NOW.

I did. I bore down. It was for nothing. If this was torture to make it stop I would give in, reveal any secret, betray the names of all my loved ones, where they were hiding. —It hurts, I cried like we all cry all us cursed mothers giving birth to the human race.

Axie now PUSH.

I pushed another last time. And another. Each time was the last. Every fiber pushed. In my neck I pushed and my eyelids and my teeth, down through the marrow of my bones. I shrieked. Death would kill me this way, exposed. Used up. Freezing with sweat.

Push. There love. There. There’s the wee head born.

Mother of God I was convulsed. Legs in tremors, so cold my arms quavered. Shaking like a ribbon in wind.

When you feel it again bear down one last time.

There. That’s it.

And all in a great slithering slip of mess I delivered my daughter alive. It was the first of October 1869. I was twenty-two years of age.

*  *  *

Charlie stayed over on the wall, a skittish dog. It was the quiet that brought him over and the whimpering of the warm girl on my chest. He crept up to where we lay.

—Oh sweet Jesus, he said, looking down at us. He was shaky. His eyes were eggs of fear.

—Use these scissors, now, I said.

—I can’t do it.

—You could if you had the baubles you was born with, I said, faint, and cursed him.

He followed my instructions, sick with the task of tying the cord. Cutting it, he nearly fainted. When he was done he sat back on his heels, his head down, swaying so it seemed he might keel over.

—I thought I’d lose you. I never seen such blood all over. Like a murder. He swallowed. Nerves blotched the flushed skin of his cheeks with white patches. I seen how he was out of his wits with fear and was that love? He thought I might die, that the child might, too. It was there like terror on him, same as it was on me. He pulled the flesh around his lips and huffed air out of his mouth in big sighs.

—Stop, I said. —Look at her.

Our girl gazed up like she already knew the secrets buried in the salt mines of our heart. Charlie looked down at her and looked at me so tender and his eyes were bright with words he could not say, his tongue tied for once in his life. He put out one finger only and touched her cheek like it might burn him, and then he cupped his palm around the perfect orb of her head.

—Well hello little itty bitty bean, he said at last.

*  *  *

On her birth certificate proudly filed at City Hall our daughter was named Annabelle Gwendolyn Felicity Jones. —Belle is French for beautiful, her father said, and we chose it so our daughter would have a bell and not an ax in her name.

We inspected the kernels of her toes and admired the serene waters of her gaze. She weighed not more than a sack of dry peas and her head was a round peach under the palm of her father’s hand. We gazed at her by the dark of the fire and the light of the window, and despite evidence that she was wrinkled and slit-eyed with the rumpled phiz of an old man, we pronounced her the Baby of the World. By the time she was six weeks of age she was round and pink, but bad with the colic. She carried on crying with a sound like the screech of train wheels on a steel rail. I picked her up and put her over the hard bone of my shoulder, patted her back.

—Hush hush now, I said.

While I had seen babies born, I did not have an inkling of what to do with one after it arrived, and I wished for my Mam so that she might tell me. The poor infant screeched, I suckled her. She screeched, I burped the wind out of her. She screeched, Toura loura, I sang. Daddy will buy you a mockingbird. But no portion of singing or cooing would shut her tiny yap. I nursed her. She sucked the life out of me, down to the roots. Taking her own life right out from me even as I loved her. She was a leech. A barnacle. I made her of my bones and my blood and my milk. I would die for her. I would drink boiling whale oil straight from the lamp if necessary to save her. Standing in the kitchen I suckled. Sitting exhausted I suckled. Lying asleep I suckled. For months she hiccuped and shuddered, fretted her face into folds like a crumbled ball of paper.

—Shush sweet baby, I said, so tired, and mixed her gripe water with whiskey and dill weed, but it did no good, so I seen now why lullabies was all about cradles falling from trees, oh dear, when the wind blows, down will come baby, whoops too bad, but at least it’s quiet. I seen why the ladies wrote me letters of their despair and said Please Help I Have Enough Babies, and also why some mothers threw their infants out the window, or left them for the nuns. But luckily I did neither of these, and after some months found I was born to be a mother, tacked down by a warm lump of girl so peaceful across my chest, her breath sweet with milk, even as I was her prisoner. In this time, I learned for myself as my teacher predicted, how
it is these two extremes—that we are transported by love and jailed by it—that are ever impossible for mothers to reconcile.

*  *  *

Even while I toiled nursing and tending my sweet infant, Madame DeBeausacq did not rest. Every day now on the back pages of the
Herald
and the
Times,
Madame’s advertisement appeared, a small gray box of type in the corner. While it was officially a misdemeanor under the statutes of New York since 1846 to administer a substance designed to produce a miscarriage, so what? This was not a law the authorities of 1869 bothered to enforce, for how would they prove anything? Certainly it was legal to advertise a Lunar Remedy for Relief of Obstruction, for not all obstructions was due to the Delicate Condition. It was a thrill to see our notice among the many hundred others in the paper.

Madame DeBeausacq, it said, Renowned Female Physician.

She was me. She was Axie Muldoon Jones and she was famous just by Charlie printing the word RENOWNED. Envelopes arrived through the mail slot full of money. Just on medicines alone we sometimes had fifty orders a week, at an average three dollars each which was six hundred a MONTH. At that rate we might some day be making more than seven thousand a year, Charlie said, and while I couldn’t hardly believe him, the numbers were the carrot that kept the stick of hard work at our backs, filling the orders for Lunar Remedy till all hours of the night.
Please Madame advise if your remedy is a good preventative?

There was no law against Prevention at all and we began to sell preventatives, too, female syringes, newfangled rubber pessaries, and French letters. We did not hear complaints, not one, despite the nauseating effects of the cantharides and the tansy oil in our medicines. Everybody knew the tablets we sold was not fail-safe. But, they offered the best chance of success short of an Interference. Especially now with my wee daughter gurgling on my shoulder, Interference was nothing I wished to be part of.

Our money jar filled up and overflowed. On a Friday evening, Charlie came home from delivering a lot of orders to the post office and asked for it off the shelf, the glass green with cash. We two poured it out between us on the table and counted. Little Belle laughed at the sparkle and clink and reached her tiny hands out, grabbing.

—She likes it, Charlie said, and propped her up next to the pile of money.

The baby hummed, sucking something like it was a peppermint. I fished my finger between her four milk teeth and retrieved a silver dollar.

—Give me that, ya wee thief, I said. She howled in rage.

—She likes the taste of silver, Charlie said.

—So do I. And that made three of us.

Late into the night we stacked the change, flattened the bills into piles, entered numbers into a ledger. Our dreams was dressed in silk and velvet now, not shoddy nor mungo no more. We had money to travel to Chicago in style, and I felt sure that when my sister got a look at the French lace at my sleeves, she would sit me up beside her on the leather of her carriage perch, and we’d ride out with harness bells ringing, and velvet around our shoulders to find our Joe. It was bound to happen now.

But on a September morning in 1871, the postman brought me a letter that squelched that plan. It was a packet of news from Dutch, and it was not her usual list of parties and fashions, but tiny pages torn from a pocket diary, written over the years in miniature handwriting, in the haste and despair of a kidnapped prisoner, pressed into an envelope.

February the twelfth, 1868

My Darling sister Axie,

I have just made the most terrible—wonderful discovery. While sitting at Mother’s dressing table, I saw some torn bits of a letter in the wastebasket, and peering at it I noticed a scrap with what appeared to be your name. Mother was not around, so with a pounding heart I gathered up the bits of paper and put them in my pocket.

Imagine my shock to find when I assembled the pieces that they constituted a letter from you.

Oh Axie! I am sorry I have not written to you in all this time but you must understand my terrible reasons: I was told you were dead. I know no other way to say it.

From just after we parted until now I have gone about my life believing that you were in heaven with our Mam, and the discovery of such deception confounds me no end. Still (if only for myself) I will try to explain Mother’s conduct and tell you as much as I can of what has happened to me since last we saw each other.

You see, I have no address for you. There was no envelope to be found, and I have searched in vain for it. I am beyond distress, for even as I write I see no way to get word to you. I scarcely believe you are real. It’s as if I have been touched by a ghost. As if I write to a ghost.

March, 1868

I resume, again in haste. It is only safe to write in this diary when there is no one about. It would be terrible if anyone found it, or discovered that I know the wonderful secret, that my sister is alive! but I cannot stop thinking of you, and am determined to write this chronicle in hopes you will one day read it.

It pains me to think how Mother has deceived you, writing you news of me and pretending that I was the author of the letters you apparently received. Since my discovery of your letter I have tried to understand why she might do this. From listening to the servants talk, I know that many years ago, in Rockford, Mother lost a child, a girl who would be around the same age and appearance as myself. I believe that as far as she is concerned, I am that child.

Please do not get the wrong idea about Mother. She is a lovely lady, but very delicate in health. I have seen her faint dead away at the slightest suggestion of pain, or the least idea of strife. Everybody knows not to upset her, for she turns terribly pale, and has miserable headaches and tempestuous outbursts. Oh nobody loves me! she cries until we calm her.

So, on strict orders, I have never been allowed to talk about you, or Joe, or Mam, or New York, not to anybody. Father says do not make Mother upset, so all these years I have tried to heed their wishes. Mother says she cannot be happy unless I am her own daughter, Lily Ambrose, and so I have been, dutifully. I must say that it was easier to do this before, when I believed you to be in Heaven. But now, I am overcome so profoundly by this evidence of you I hardly know where to turn except to this little diary.

That first summer—eight years ago! every day I asked when I could see you and our brother. Whenever I asked Mother became very sad and had to lie down on her couch.

Let’s not talk about that, she said. One day, in town, she told me to wave goodbye to the train pulling out. Then, as it left, Mother said, Do you know that your sister, Annie, was on the
train? She said you were going back to New York, to take care of our mother.