My Notorious Life (43 page)

It was all a mistake. Manslaughter. Four to seven years. Charlie and his friends had misled me. Egged me on. Belittled the dangers. Mocked my enemies as fools. My worries was piffle, he said, as he dared me, and I hated him now for it even as I longed for his face at the bars of my coop.

Instead of Charlie arriving it was a matron with a plate of potatoes the color of cement. I did not eat. She came back and took away the plate.

—Is my lawyer here? Morrill? My husband? Will you let him up to see me?

—Hah, she said. The dishes rattled on her cart as she wheeled it off.

Later through the bars she handed in a garment of coarse hideous fabric. —You’ll wear this.

—I won’t, I says.

—You will. Or we’ll cuff you.

She went away and left the wretched article. I would not wear such a dress of c**p. I was a lady, Mrs. Charles G. Jones, not some dirty pigeon off a corner.

Time passed. It was a roar around me in the murk. Was it four o’clock yet? I wound my watch. Wound it again. When would they come? They didn’t. Only the matron, her eyes appearing suddenly like blackeye peas in the window slot. —Prisoner out of uniform! she cried, and in an instant she was in my cell with her keys brandished.

—You’ll put that on now, missus, or we’ll put it on for you. She was at my buttons. She had her hands on me.

—Get off, I says. —I’m a lady.

—Not in here you ain’t.

*  *  *

At night Mam’s ghost spoke to me.

Axie are my children safe?

No children are safe. No mothers are safe. No one is safe nowhere.

Did you find our Joe? Where is Dutchie?

Lost, same as you, Mam. Same as my Belle now. Who’ll sing her
shoul aroun
?

In my cell I nursed my knuckles, fiercely brooding. Annabelle slept without me in an apartment with the governess and I was full of fear and an ache like stopped air in the lungs. Home. It was all I wanted and here I was facing not just one year away, but Four to Seven. It was a betrayal of the worst order.

—Don’t cry now Mrs. Jones, said the rosy young prison guard Elsie Reilly when she brought my tray in the morning. —Don’t cry.

—I’m a mother, I says to her, so angry. —Ain’t you a mother yourself?

—God did not bless me and Mr. Reilly with a child, says she, sorrowful.

—I’ll tell you how to get one, I said, and beckoned her. She approached like I would cook her and eat her. But she put her ear at my cell door, and I whispered her the same lessons we had wrote down in the pamphlets, to count the days of her courses and three days after she finished to be with her husband for five nights lying for one hour afterwards with her hips braced up on a pillow. In addition she should take a raw egg white
and place it directly in the cunicle while her husband had his way, and tell him it was very important he should have no spirits at all for the best result.

—For good measure you’ll go over to 148 Liberty Street, I said, —to get a bottle of medicine from Dr. Desomieux. Take this note to him and there won’t be no charge.

Dear Charlie,
I wrote in it,
Give Mrs. Reilly some Elixir, and GET me OUT
.

—But why should I listen to you? said the little guard. —You’re the devil’s wife, ain’t you?

—What have you got to lose? I told her, grinning, and she went off to deliver the message.

*  *  *

When I had been three whole days in the Tombs, I looked out the hole of my cell one morning and saw the Head Matron Mrs. Maltby coming with two men carrying a trunk. One of them was Charlie at last. The spectacled fellow with him wearing his beard in the chin curtain fashion was Morrill. Hallelujah.

—Ten minutes, gentlemen, said the Matron, opening the door to my cage.

—Thirty, said Morrill, and he took out his wallet.

Maltby simpered as my lawyer counted the bills into her claw. —Thirty minutes then, she said, and instead of releasing me she departed with a clang of metal.

Charlie wiped his forehead and looked around him with a rabbity eye.

—Why aren’t we leaving? I cried.

—Mrs. Jones. Morrill cleared his throat. —Despite many rounds of entreaties, we have not been able to secure anyone to offer surety for your bail money.

—We have the cash to pay bail! And the property to guarantee it.

—This particular judge, Merritt, won’t allow you to use your own property, Morrill said.

—We found Mr. Stratton and Mr. Polhemus, said Charlie, —but the judge rejected both on the grounds their land was not sufficient for so serious a case.

—So serious a case that I am charged with MANSLAUGHTER and face seven years. Not one, but SEVEN.

—My darling—

—You was WRONG. You said they would never charge me. You said if they did it would be only a Misdemeanor—

—Mrs. Jones, said Morrill, —we will have the charges reduced if not dismissed outright. For now we must get you bailed out.

—Have we no friends? I cried. Apparently, my husband and my patients and all of them parlor talkers had set me up for a battlefield hero, then left me like they was the cavalry in retreat.

—Our friends don’t have that caliber of money, Charlie said. —People who do have it, they don’t want the notoriety.

—God forbid their good name should be linked to mine, I roared. —God forbid that they should remember how Madame helped them in a desperate hour and God forbid they should help me in mine.

—Now, calmly, calmly, Mrs. Jones, said Morrill. —We’ll find a surety.

—Calmly, calmly, yourself! Cool your own heels in this boghole, see how YOU like it.

—Judge Merritt rejected six bondsmen so far, Morrill said. —He has it in for you.

—At least the warden’s friendly, said Charlie. —We brought you some comforts of home. Now he opened the trunk and removed a blanket. It was made of Kashmir wool, the color of a mourning dove and as soft. He placed it around my shoulders and kissed my cheek. Mr. Morrill turned away out of decorum. —Hush, wife. Hush, my love.

—I do not effing wish to hush. I wish to go home.

My husband did not reply, but took from the trunk silk sheets and a feather pillow, dresses and stockings, a robe and slippers, a bottle of claret and a selection of novels, tins of biscuits and dried fruit. Licorice. A lap desk and writing materials. Stores for a voyage. A rap came on the cell door and there stood a burly cove wearing overalls, carrying a crate. After Charlie paid him he broke apart the slats and revealed: a mattress.

—Stuffed with goose feathers, Charlie said, —from Gramercy Farm geese.

—Will I be here a month then? I cried.

—Best be prepared, said Morrill, blustering through the obstacles in his
throat. —Judge Merritt is pigheaded in his resolve. The trial date is, ehm, set for, ehm, July.

—July? It is March!

Morrill now fixed me with a steady look and spoke in noble tones. —I will defend you, lady, with all of my energies, as an advocate and friend in the hour of your misfortune. We’ll find a surety within the week. Trust me.

I did not bother to reply with my motto.

In the end, it was not our noble Morrill who betrayed my trust but Mighty Judge Merritt, who soon made it plain he would hold me in the Tombs until the date of my trial.

—Her crime, he told Morrill, —is one of deep moral turpitude. She poses such a danger to humanity and such a flight risk, with her ill-gotten gains, that you are hard-pressed to find a guarantor acceptable to this court.

And for five long months no guarantor was found good enough to please The Grand High Lord Merritt of the New York Criminal Court, and while he preened his side-whiskers, I festered innocent in my cubicle, pondering what turpitude could I be guilty of worse than keeping a mother locked away from her child for no good reason.

A Scandal

Mme. DeBeausacq continues to live the high life in the Halls of Justice. Her cell is a gilded playground, with a feather bed and silk sheets. She dines on capon and squab, playing at whist with visitors. It is said by reputable witnesses that she never goes to church and takes her meals with the Keeper of the Women’s Prison. Moreover, it is well known that when her husband visits her, she adjourns to the Keeper’s quarters, where they remain for three to four hours at a stretch. What travesty of justice is this! to see this vilest of criminals spending her imprisonment rather like a lady in peaceful retirement than a convict. Is the Prison merely a means of emboldening a criminal in the pollution of her own sex? Thus the murderer of innocents will be sent forth into society with a charter from the officers of justice!

I read this B. and S. from the
Police Gazette
with my teeth grit, for the silk of my prison sheets was no defense from the tang of mold nor the teeth of vermin. The roasted capon Charlie had delivered to me weekly from the Beverly Inn on a tray covered with a white cloth could not hide the twin odors of dung and despair in that dark place or patch the holes of anger
in my system. No feather pillow held in my arms was a substitute for my daughter who belonged there. No words in a letter would stand in for her voice.
Mama,
she wrote to me in a child’s print,
Father says you are away helping poor misfortunate ladies but I wish you were NOT and would get home now we could sew our little samplers and make toffee apples I know how Rebecca showed me
. I wept when I read it, adding more misery to the din around me. It was a relentless symphony of wailing and catcalls. Mother of God, what did the Powers want of me? An apology?

—Stop them advertisements at the least, I said to Charlie. —They only bring more attention. Let them pick on Mrs. Costello or Mrs. Bird and not me.

He had come that morning to deliver me the newspapers, letters from my lawyer, from our friends, the Owens, and another from Belle, with a crayon drawing. That it featured a bird in a cage pierced me like a butcher’s hook. Her father said she cried for me at night. —But I soon have her singing McGinty, he said, —so she’s cheerful as a bluebird in the daylight.

—Aren’t you clever? I said, very acid. —Apparently she don’t need a mother.

—I didn’t say that. I’m doing my d***dest to keep her happy, and the rest of them. The whole household’s in a shambles.

—Oh the tragedy of Mr. Jones. The hardship and the sacrifice.

It was rough days for me and Charlie. My real enemies was not at hand, so the choice was to blame my own stupidity for trusting Charlie, or to blame Himself. I chose him. —You said they’d NEVER arrest me.

—Christ! my husband said. —Why don’t you blame Morrill for a change? It was him who advised us on the law.

Now when Charlie visited and sat on my prison bed eating bread and cheese, crumbs in his mustache, I seethed in jealousy of his freedoms and imagined him up to all manner of tricks, sure he was motivated by finance and selfish designs. We bickered and sniped as we had not since the days when we had no money nor French letters nor funny little daughter to calm the matrimonial tempests. —Pull the ads, I said.

—For what reason? No law against ads. We’ll lose half the business.

—It’s all just business with you then, is it?

—You know it isn’t. It’s well more than that. He rummaged very weary
in his pockets and came up with a page he had scribbled. —Look here. He showed me the letter of response he had written, to the
Gazette
’s outrage. He meant me to publish it in self-defense, under my name:

Gentlemen of the press:

Ladies die every day in ordinary childbirth and are cast out on the streets destitute, and in shame, when they are the forced VICTIMS of men’s debauchery, depravity, and rape. Moreover, while the MEN are not prosecuted for their part, it is the LADIES who suffer in jail WITHOUT FAMILY, merely on suspicion (trumped up!) of trying to come to the aid of the desperate.

Sincerely,

Madame J. A. DeBeausacq

—I don’t wish to sign this. Or publish it.

—Defend yourself, Mrs. Jones. These are your own words.

—YOU wrote them, Charlie. It’s YOU who cares for politics. You enjoy to use me for twitting your old enemies at the
Herald
and showing off to your philosopher friends.

He rolled his eyes. —The letter’s only what you told me many times yourself, Madame DeBeausacq.

—So? I don’t want to be Madame DeBeausacq no more, I said, and felt the truth of it, the burden she was to me, with her French ways, her bloody trade, the laundry pile of terrible linens and the sodden handkerchiefs of weeping women. —I’m retired.

—Really? Are you serious?

—Yes. And I was. Or thought I was. —I’m done.

—I never thought you’d say that. Charlie slumped, seeming quite stunned, and for a moment in the midst of my self-pity I seen the rumple of his suit. The black of his hair was salted with gray. Scallops of darkness hung under his eyes. —Perhaps you’re right. At least retire a certain aspect of the business.

—And which aspect would that be?

—The unsavory one. The one in question.