My Notorious Life (41 page)

I was not the sinner but I trembled. —In the DOCK?

—It’s . . . yes . . . a small risk, Charlie said. —Prison. A small risk. Right?

He caught my eyes with his. It was the first time he admitted it. That I could go to jail. The frank intensity of his gaze, as he said Risk and Prison, and the cut of his jaw beneath the short boxed beard he wore, and how he whispered to me now still had a danger in it that nevertheless confounded me with a thrill in the blood. He liked a risk. He always had, and it seemed now, thanks to his daring me, I liked a risk too. I would ride on the roof of the train. Would I?

—You know that, Annie, right? It’s a slim danger. But it’s real.

We two pulled away to look at that danger like it was a zoo beast, mulling around it to see if it might attack us, and as we done this Charlie began to talk again, like he could cage the menace with his words. —Trust me. The list will keep them off. Dixon appears to think so, or why else would he mention the prominent and the wellborn?

Hmm. A list would save me? How? Why would the fact I’d assisted Mrs. Phillip Pennybacker, wife of the head of the NY Stock Exchange, to remove an obstruction in her passages after the birth of her fifth child, or that I had relieved Lily DeLisle, the mistress of Mr. Randolph A. Havemeyer, cousin to the Mayor, when she found herself in need of renovation, save me? Why would ANY of the intimate services I had provided to the ladies of Fifth Avenue ever save me? But Charlie said they would. He said my ladies would defend me. And also lawyers would. —Morrill says the statute is a puny featherweight that never will trap you. And if it did, he says the charges are easy to beat. Your fears are piffle, Charlie said.

—Piffle? Not hardly.

—Listen: Susan Applegate’s charges did not even come before a judge. And despite we offered MONEY to anyone with a complaint, not one woman has come forward. Not for a year.

—Charlie. Our child motherless. I can’t. It’s a year in jail.

—A year you won’t ever serve. He was confident as a peacock.

—For sure YOU won’t serve it. It’s not YOU they’re after.

He chewed that idea in his mind, nodding. —Right. But if you aren’t willing to entertain the slim chance of prison, then quit. It’s what they WANT you to do. Retire. They are after you to stop. Quit the practice.

—Quit? Now I was a bull and the newspaper slander was a red cape waved in my face. —It’s our livelihood! And what about the ladies? Who would mind their troubles if I quit? Mrs. Costello? She’s a butcher, I see when they come to me after she’s mauled them.

—Then you are the one for the job, Mrs. Jones. Charlie lifted my doubting phiz between his palms. —Only you can say when you’ve had enough.

—Right. Because it’s not you they’ll hang.

—Stop the dramatics. It’s not a hanging offense.

—Why’s it an offense at all? Maybe the law don’t like it, but it’s only a lesser evil.

—Exactly. And you ought to know this: Sacks and Arguimbeau and Owens, especially, believe you must stand firm. They are your steadfast admirers and agree you’re a great fighter.

—I do not want to be a fighter.

—But you’re in it anyway. Aren’t you?

I did not reply, but I seen he was right. I was in it. And he was in it with me. Thus the two of us after that chose to live alongside risk like frontiersmen do, with wolves roaming wild in the forest, keeping the children close and trusting providence.

—You’re safe, Charlie said, with more hope than evidence. —Mark my words.

I marked them, but I was not safe. Cordelia Purdy wrote me a letter:

Madame,

I must hasten to inform you that after leaving your premises a policeman followed me all the way home, and asked my purpose in visiting you. I told him it was a private matter. Still, he insisted on taking down my name and noting my address. I thought it best to warn you.

T
he day after the newspaper published Dixon’s call to put me in the Dock, I was walking my daughter home from school, the two of us holding hands. Little Annabelle skipped and practiced her letters on the street signs. “Barber Shop,” she recited proudly, “Hair tonic for gentlemen,” “Shoe shine five cents.” Only six years old and reading like a professional. Already she had the makings of the fine cosmopolitan woman she would surely become, delicate-boned and charming. We had already taken her to hear the Magic Flute opera at the Philharmonic Society and she declared she would sing like Ida Rosburgh. We took her to see Roman statues at the new Metropolitan Museum and she declared she would like to go to Rome. We dined with her at Delmonico’s and she announced she would eat Charlotte Russe every day. My own dreams saw her whirling in cotillions and famed for her charm and beauty. She would have entry into the finest parlors, draw suitors from the upper ranks, live in a grand house on the avenue.

Now as she skipped along we seen a man tacking a notice to a Cortlandt Street storefront and mistook him for a common advertiser. He was clean-shaven and tall with a great black head of hair swept into a pompadour, pointy in the nose and chin. Annabelle brought me over to see what his notice said, and he scuttled away to tack another to a lamppost. I hoisted my girl up to practice her reading on his sign but I hadn’t got three lines in before I put her down again in alarm:

Citizens! A Public Protest!

For the Enforcement of Law

Against Madame DeBeausacq of Liberty Street

A committee in formation to force her removal!

Assemble at Cortlandt Street

Tuesday, February 8, 1876

At 10 o’clock in the morning

—What is it Mam? my daughter asked as I tore the sign down from its post.

—Nothing, child, I said, and took her hand. —A committee.

—Committee, C.O.M.I.—

—Two ems, I said, cold and wooden. —Two ems, two tees, and two e’s.

Annabelle skipped along singing and spelling. Several of the neighbors saw us and could not help but smile at the picture we made, swinging our hands. Did they recognize the picture of the wickedest woman in the city skipping past? Did they know a committee was forming to force my removal? Maybe they did know. Sure they did. Maybe these neighbors was the ones who later assembled, as the sign directed, and joined the mob that assailed me.

*  *  *

The next morning I delivered Annabelle to school. Mrs. Lyle praised my daughter for her posture and deportment, unawares that Mrs. Ann Jones sitting across from her was a Bat and Demon. —Although she should learn better not to fidget, Annabelle Gwendolyn is a refined child, said Mrs. Lyle, —and pure of heart.

I wore this praise of REFINED and PURE like a red feather in my hat and started home full of pride, humming that old song I learnt on the orphan train,
O children, dear children, happy, young, and pure . . .
as I often did. But still the winter sky seemed weighted, with snow, or something worse. At home I found Maggie McGrath filling the lamps with oil and Rebecca the cook making bread. Nelly the governess had gone off to a milliner’s, and Charlie was already gone to Yorkville, to see to Madame DeBeausacq’s agent Mrs. Prem, who owed us a sum of money. I was just
preparing to meet Greta at the office down the street for the morning’s appointments when I heard a noise outside, growing louder. Shouts and the beating of pots. The clang of a cowbell and the hum of rabid voices. I ran outside, but when I seen what was brewing I ran in again.

It was not a committee. It was a mob, raging down Liberty from the direction of Cortlandt, a swarm of roaches pouring from the cracks between paving stones.

—Maggie! I cried. —Rebecca!

Slam the door. Slide the bolt. Close the shades. Maggie and Rebecca hid in the pantry. Upstairs, through a crack in the shutters, I looked down at the street. A furious rabble seethed below, a crowd in front of my house. Women with bonnets and market baskets. Vagrant children with sticks, their tongues out, fingers in their ears, jeering. Men brandishing fists and brooms.

—A hag lives among us!

—Throw her to the dogs.

—Where’s Susan Applegate’s child?

—Revenge for Mary Rogers!

—Haul her out! Drag her out!

They seethed below me, their faces lifted like pale pocked moons to the windows looking for a glimpse of scandal, until they turned in a mass toward the sound of boots marching. It was a cohort of policemen coming up Liberty Street. Their leader was a large beast of a man, some three hundred pounds. I recognized the Chief of Police himself, George Matsell. Apparently it was not enough for him to crucify me in the pages of his
Gazette,
now he was here to crucify me in person, an editor in a cop’s uniform, wielding his stick. Sure, he’d have his story tomorrow, for hadn’t he stirred it up himself?

Matsell lumbered through the crowd to my door. His troops followed by the dozens. In the drab light their brass buttons had the glint of menace. Their boots was hard and loud as the rattle of swords on the pavement, and danger fogged the air along with their white breath in the cold. Matsell blew a whistle and twenty traps in dark blue lined up across the front of my house while the rabble screamed.

—Murderess! Deathmonger!

Somebody tossed something hard, a clod of mud or a bottle. It cracked
against the window. They hurled whatever came to hand. Pebbles, chestnuts, oyster shells, apple cores, chunks of horse dung frozen to ice.

—This house is built on babies’ skulls.

—A thousand children murdered in this house!

These people to me was ignorant lumps of coal. If all the tears shed on my shoulder would rain down on their cretinous heads they still wouldn’t know a skerrick of what I knew, not the truth nor the doubts or the gore or the mercy or the thanks I got every livelong day. They craned their necks up at the house to see me. Neighbors who on other days whistled and swept the sidewalk, waved hello and tipped their hats, now threw open their windows, shouted, shook their fists, and cursed me for the devil.

—Murderess! Sinner!

—Haul her out and hang the hag.

The police formed a hedge of blue coats around my house as the rabble began a chant, their voices hard as bricks.

—Haul her out, haul her out. String her up, string her up.

Their white eyes was cracked red with rage. Their open gobs slobbered and foamed at the lips. The world’s people was against me until they wasn’t. Till they needed me. Then it was Oh Help Me, Madame. They was my neighbors and good citizens. Why did they hate me so?

Now somebody rolled a hogshead barrel in front of my parlor window. A hairy pompadour with a pointy chin climbed up top of it. Oh look! it was the very same COCKROACH who had posted the notices in Cortlandt Street the day before.

—Dixon! cried the rabble. —Dixon, Dixon.

Dixon? So. The whole thing was a staged play. I seen it with my own eyes. It was Dixon who posted the notices, who gathered the crowd, stirred them to a foaming frenzy. He was selling papers. He was a showman. He was not there to sing Zip Coon, nossirree, he was there to make speeches.

—Ladies and Gentlemen, Dixon says, holding his finger aloft, —I beseech you to remove this Blight from our midst! I refer to Madame DeBeausacq, the murderer and female fraud whose gold and riches are made off the bones of the innocent!

—Hang the woman!

—If Madame won’t remove herself from the neighborhood, Dixon continued, —why, let the people take the matter in hand, let them storm the door, and haul her out!

At this a roar came from the maw of the crowd, and it rushed forward toward the line of police. This incitement to lynch me was too much for Matsell, for although I’m sure he in fact wished to see me strung from the locust tree out front, he was after all charged with keeping the peace.

—Disperse, now disperse, cried the Editor in his Police uniform. —Break it up, now. He was a haunch of meat on my stoop, smacking a billy club onto the flat of his palm. The mob heckled and cackled but they did not attack. They milled about threatening, so I was more than frantic over how would I escape? How would I fetch my daughter from school? How would I get a message to Charlie or Greta or Morrill the lawyer? Later I was relieved to learn that down the block at the office Greta had heard the rioters at the other end of Liberty Street and had shuttered the place, then gone to fetch Annabelle. My daughter stayed that night with Greta, playing with Willi, ignorant of the crisis at home.

—Murderess! Foul Murderess! the hecklers shouted, till at last, as the afternoon darkened, most of them scuttled away, back to the cracks and crevices where they would feed off garbage and gossip. By evening it was only a few of them about, muttering, sorry to miss the hanging. And then it was only the men in uniform outside.

—It’s just the police anymore, said Maggie, still scared.

Hang me for a fool. The moment she said that—it was just the police—was the moment I recognized the red face of real danger. The traps were not there to protect me. Danger was the dumb hand of the dumb law and now here it was rapping at my door.