My Notorious Life (34 page)

ANNOUNCED. MADAME DEBEAUSACQ, the French physician, has removed her offices from her residence at 160 Greenwich Street around the corner to 148 Liberty Street, where Ladies can purchase FEMALE PILLS. They are an infallible regulator of m****s, and combat violent and convulsive headaches, derangement of the stomach, gnawing in the side, burning in the chest, disturbed and feverish sleep, frightful dreams, languor, debility, deathly, sallow and inanimate complexion, want of appetite, in short, the utter prostration of the enjoyment or even endurance of life, engendering that depression of spirit that makes existence itself but a prolongation of suffering, and which, alas! not infrequently dooms the unhappy victim to the perpetration of suicide. Not to be used when p******* for the ingredients may act upon particular functions. Compounded and sold only by herself for the price of $4. To the poor, half price. To the very poor, nothing. Advice, gratis.

—Ad in the
Sun,
the
Herald,
and the
NY Times

As our fortunes increased, Greta took on the duties of receptionist and nurse at the new offices at Liberty Street, around the corner from
our Greenwich Street home. Liberty Street had rooms for lying-in, a proper Female Hospital. The outer waiting room where Greta sat we had appointed with a sofa and armchairs for the comfort of the patients, a carpet, a canary in a cage, and two framed prints, of a pair of swans. It was not a SUMPTUOUS PARLOR as the
Times
later described it, nor was it a GATEWAY TO THE CHARNEL HOUSE as the
Polyanthos
wrote. It was just an office such as you might see in any reputable enterprise, for I was now established as female physician to the finest ladies of Manhattan.

—Would you prefer the blue room, Greta asked when a lumbering mother came to spend her confinement, —or the yellow? It was Greta’s task to explain the blue room cost more, for it was larger, and had a window overlooking the street. When ladies called, Greta now kept track of the appointments and took payments by bank cheque or in cash. She sat at a French oak writing desk with fluted legs, where in her childish writing, like the scrawl of a halfwit, it must be said, she took down patients’ names if they would dare to divulge them. They arrived dressed anonymous in their veils, sometimes double veils, while some came with their aprons still on under their coats. Some were parlor maids and some was out-and-out lulus with the paint still on their faces. More and more they were elegant wives with jet buttons on their jackets and a barouche outside waiting. I was a midwife same as Mrs. Evans, though I sought a finer class of patient, the carriage trade now. They came with all manner of complaint from every ward between the Battery and Bleecker and beyond. From New Jersey. From up the Hudson in Dobbs Ferry or up the Sound in Norwalk. Some of these ladies were round and pink with the new life stirring in them, knitting cradle bonnets as they waited for my instructions about their forthcoming labor. They wished to inspect the new rooms upstairs, to interview Madame about her skills. But then there was others. These ones came early in the morning or after dark. They were tightlipped and nervous and glanced sidelong at each other, cats guarding a secret.

Though my husband said she was None Too Bright, Greta compared favorably with the best of these customers, as she was again a good-looking lady, known as the Widow Weiss, with the story that Willi’s father was a sea captain lost in a storm at Cape Fear. She was usually outfitted in the latest fashion, her hair glossy in dark finger waves or side curls such that I was
jealous of her stylish appearance and copied her. Many patients confused her at first for Madame DeBeausacq when she greeted them in the office. But Greta dismissed this idea with a German snort.

—I heffn’t the skills of der female physiologist. Madame is the midwife, und I am her assistant.

She was loyal to me as a cocker spaniel now for saving her off the corner and paying her a decent wage, always complimenting my skills to the women who came through the doors, telling them, —Ya, ya, you’re in good hands with Frau DeBeausacq, ya, she’s very knowledgeable, she’ll put you right in no time, missus, she can fix you up.

Despite what had happened to her in wretched alleys and the back rooms of saloons, Greta most of the time was cheerful, singing beer hall songs picked up at Scheutzen Park or Luchow’s or the
Lagerbier
palaces where she went with her suitors. But she was also prone to dark moods and fits of crying. One morning, her boy Willi had to trot around the corner from their apartment on Cortlandt Street, saying, —Auntie, please come for my
Mutter,
please come, and we two found poor Greta curled in her bed and had to pull her upright and splash her face in the bowl.

—I am zo ashamed, she wept to me later. —No man ever will marry me. My son is a b*****d. Promise please never to tell no one.

—I promise not to tell that you was once a hoor if you promise not to tell I was a ragpicker daughter of a one-armed washerwoman grown up to be an adviser on such things as can’t be discussed in polite company, such as ____. I whispered in her ear though what I said remains unmentionable in polite writing, yet me and Greta fell over laughing just to speak of it.

Wisecracks usually worked to make my friend revive, so she laughed like the same saucepot girl hanging the wash next door and was cheered enough to go off to our day’s work with the ladies of Gotham. With her German efficiency she kept the appointment times on a schedule, and the stack of gauze bandages cut neat, into squares of just the right size. She knew me, knew my ways, and I knew hers. As a nurse she was never subject to fits of emotion, always calm, good with swaddling up the newborns quick and snug. But despite her small hands she never could stand to get near the _____ (“monosyllable,” as we say) of a patient, not even to tell me how many fingers open was the laboring mother. You’d think, Once a hoor, never shy. But
Nein nein, nein,
she’d say, with a shudder, if ever I asked. And
so I stopped asking. We stationed her up at the north end of the patient, me at the south. We was partners. An old married couple. For their part, Annabelle and little Willi was good as brother and sister. Many an afternoon the two young rabbits took their naps and their tea together in the nursery of the new house we purchased in 1872, at 129 Liberty Street just down the block from the new office. All four floors of it we got for a sum I could have never dreamed only two years before, when we was all lodged together, we three Jones and Greta and Willi jumbled as odd socks in a basket.

Now on Liberty Street it was plain we was arrived. Nobody common could live in such a building. Built in the Federal style with protuberant dormer windows up on the gabled roof and black painted shutters, our home had a respectable appearance. You might say if the house was human, it would be a burgher from the Metropolitan Club, an upright pocketwatch gentleman type with a generous stomach under his cummerbund. Up the stoop you went to the front door, which featured a big American eagle knocker of brass kept polished by Margaret McGrath the parlormaid called Maggie, who I had helped some years before when her dear mother brought her to me: the girl had got in the family way with a longshoreman she said, and would I help her please? Since the longshoreman was long offshore, and Maggie could not return to her father’s house without the risk of his murdering her, she had never left my establishment from the day I met her, and now each time I smelled lemon polish on the gas lamps and linseed oil on the moldings I rejoiced it was not me who done the polishing.

The swish of my skirts was a whisper of refinement over the parquet in the vestibule, where I removed my bonnet and glanced to the front parlor, so distinguished with brocade upholstered sofas and lace antimacassars on the backs of tufted armchairs in crimson Genoa velvet. No street rat or kitchen drab like I once was could ever hope to be crossing the wide mirrored landing where I saw myself framed in gilt, twenty six years of age, and mistress of the house. It startled me every time, to confront Mrs. Ann M. Jones reflected like a member of the gentility. Whenever I found myself alone on the landing I had to admire the figure cut there.
Hello, and how do you do, Mrs. Jones?
I said to myself.
Fine thank you, yes indeed, a pleasant good day to you too, you codfish Axie, don’t get too fond of it.

In truth I didn’t trust the mirror at Liberty Street to hold this swell picture of me very long. Ever suspicious of good fortune, I was always
after thinking some fever of consumption would come in the night to steal my breath. Despite that certain procedures was going on against the law, behind closed doors, all over town, and nobody was ever arrested for it, it was sure as sin if Somebody was caught, it would be myself. But meanwhile fortune had smiled on me, so why shouldn’t I smile back at my gilt mirror and my French doors? Through them was the library. The backstairs led down to the kitchen. Upstairs were rooms for Maggie and the cook Rebecca—another of my former patients—who shared quarters on the fourth floor. On the third level was the nursery with a doll’s house and a chalkboard, where my daughter Miss Belle Jones played her spinet and did her letters with the nursemaid, Sallie, likewise once a patient of mine. Down the gaslit passage was the bedroom for me and Charlie with damask at the windows, a carved oak mantel over the fireplace, and the bed that featured a rosewood headboard so royal with crests and crockets, cornices and cusps and finials.

Queen Jones, Charlie called me, when I sat there on the pillows regal in my nightdress, and he came burrowing under the feathered counterpane where we played at Your Majesty and Your Highness and enacted the Royal Protocols of Jones (a sleeve is removed first to reveal the white shoulder of Mrs. Jones, and another sleeve to reveal the hard egg of muscle at the biceps of Mr. Jones, whereupon custom, not to mention the chemicals of passion, demands the rest be removed in haste). On these nights Charlie was to me a flame inside the glass globe of a streetlamp, burning all doubts of him in a puff of smoke, so sometimes in the daylight going about my routine in the clinic or offices I would double over practically in a cramp of soreness and memory, recalling how he had feathered me and tarred me with his kisses and sweet words. I was in a swoon till he went off overnight somewheres and my jealousies took over again.

We did not have more children. We had abandoned any methods, French or otherwise, of prevention, yet every month the red banner of our disappointment appeared and despite the quantities of black cohosh root and teas of raspberry leaf I swallowed, despite a sticky remedy performed regularly with egg white, and charms uttered for the
sheehogues
and prayers to God on my knees, salt thrown over my shoulder against bad luck, I remained barren as the sea stretching out from the Battery on a frosty morning.

Each time I suffered the turns I was doubled up with pain and could
find no remedy for it. My condition was called unpronounceable in the medical book of Dr. Gunning and when I read about it I was disgusted at the cause and dismayed by the treatment:

Dysmenorrhoea consists in the exudation of coagulable lymph coating the cavity of the u****s and thrown from the cavity in fragments, hence the extreme pain so characteristic of the malady. The treatment consists of the local abstraction of blood from over the sacrum every two weeks, together with free purgation and vegetable diet.

The esteemed author Dr. Gunning was down in the papers as the most famous medical man of the century so I did what he said and Greta, bless her, bled me from over the lower backbone as recommended though she complained more than I did, the cat. I followed the grim vegetable diet as recommended and purged myself, &c. yet still my turns invariably sent me to bed sick with headache, cramps, nausea. I had no more children. My child Belle had no sister nor brother as I had none now either. I was in despair over finding Joe or seeing Dutch, who had sailed away and never wrote more. Not even her false mother Mrs. A. bothered to correspond. Why? No doubt she had discovered that Dutchie knew about her lies. My sister’s origins as a Papist Orphan Guttersnipe was exposed, and she was thus disowned by her husband. I worried Dutch was angry with me for somehow I had exposed her. As for Joe, No Other Information Is Available, said a Mr. J. Morrow of the Childrens Aid Society who wrote to me,
Dear Mrs. Jones, more than two thousand children emigrated west from New York in that year of 1860 alone. We do not have the field agents to keep track of them all.
He and the Aid Society then stopped answering my letters hectoring them about my siblings.

The size of my longing for a safe big family with our youngsters playing by the hearth and the cousins and the uncles and aunts all around was measured by the holes in the circle around me and Charlie, with our Belle in the middle. She entertained us with her chatter and her stories. At four years of age, she had a dear lisping way of speaking, and an imaginary brother named Cocoa.