My Notorious Life (50 page)

That you turned your back on me just now in the street is a cold fact I will always mourn. If ever you change your mind you know my door is forever open to you. If you would try me for a 2nd chance, meet me in the tea room at the Astor House tomorrow at 3:00, no one will recognize me at all, I promise. All’s I want is to see you again.

Love, your sister Axie

I folded the note, attached it to the package, and addressed it
Mrs. VanDerWeil.

—Please pass this to her when her husband is not about, I says, handing it over to the desk clerk.

—Never fear, says the clerk, —he is never about.

—I saw her with him just now. They made quite a pair.

—Oh, that was not—

—Not her husband? And who was it if I might trouble you to ask? Along with the question I forked over another twenty dollars.

—A businessman named Pickering, says my new friend. —He owns a fleet of merchant ships and has offices at Peck Slip.

—Thank you, I says, masking my astonishment, and left the premises.

My sister had a fellow on the side, it seemed.

*  *  *

Dutch did not meet me the next day at the Astor Hotel. She did not respond to my note. Four days later, for twenty dollars, the desk clerk at the Marble House reported that she had returned to Chicago.

T
he shock of my sister’s appearance and disappearance caused a strange lethargy in me. I lost my appetite. My nights was restless and troubled. For the first time in many years I began again to nurse my knuckles in my sleep. Even awake I troubled them. Dutch had shunned me. I had lost her again, worse than before, and reviewed our brief meeting, over and over, for a clue to what I might have said, what I could’ve done to convince her to stay with me. If only I’d lied.
Madame DeBeausacq? Never heard of her.
All the money in the world, all the tessellated marble and Prussian fire screens was not impressive enough for my sister. Her loss preoccupied me above all else. When my work was done in the evening I wrote her letters disguised as Mrs. Reardon and sent them to the Marble House with a request for forwarding service to Chicago.

One morning at the breakfast table when I was thus preoccupied and Annabelle was humming over her toast, Charlie was as usual immersed in the headlines, and this day there was one that struck him.

—Postal Inspector Comstock assaulted in City Hall Park, he read aloud.

—He’s that little round man, I said, —who crusades against smut peddlers and puts them in jail?

—Hmm, yes, said Charlie, reading with a worried expression.

—It wouldn’t surprise me if one of them booksellers walloped him.

—No. Listen. It was a Dr. Selden. An abortionist, it says here. Comstock
the Vice Crusader had him arrested on obscenity charges. So the doctor had a whack at him and Comstock was bloodied.

Charlie read out loud:

—“This is the first blood I have been called upon to shed for the right,” said Mr. Comstock. “My all if necessary, if only for my blessed Redeemer.”

—Mr. Comstock is a fox terrier of the Lord, I said.

Annabelle said, —Please can’t we have a little terrier dog of our own, Papa?

—Do not interrupt, youngster, I said. —Mind your manners.

—Certainly, my kitten, we’ll have a little dog, said her Papa, which sent her skipping from the table without finishing her egg.

—I was suggesting, I said, —that Mr. Comstock is a rat terrier of Christ.

But Charlie’s face was serious. —He says he is a weeder in God’s Garden.

—More like a weed.

—Listen, Charlie said, and read on:

Mr. Comstock has made the arrests of nine abortionists in New York City, and eight in Albany, but he has yet to capture the Great She-Villain DeBeausacq, who operates here with impunity. “Madame flaunts her nefarious avocation in the face of the world, and advertises openly,” Mr. Comstock said. “Moreover it has been thrown in my teeth repeatedly that while I break up weak and inconspicuous abortionists, and send the devils to prison, I either dare not arrest the most notorious of them all, or else I have been bribed. This cannot be tolerated.

We sat at the table in alarmed silence. I took the paper from Charlie and there was Comstock’s threat like a bullet with my name on it. —We’ll close the office, I said.

—Well let’s see if that’s really necessary, Charlie said, and you could knock me over with an ostrich plume so surprised was I at his tone. He was back to his boostering fairweather self, smoothing my feathers with his theories of the law and prognostications of my safety. —See? he said. —The President himself—General Grant!—has pardoned the doctors who were convicted, and all the others had their cases thrown out.

—The president?

—It seems Ulysses S. liked the argument of the defense, said Charlie, reading.

The defense pointed out that there remains a legitimate use for the articles in question, the syringe and the curette, and unless INTENT to commit a crime can be proved, no conviction is possible.

—Moreover, Charlie said, —according to this account, these pardoned abortionists had not only a president, but a congressman, Mr. Tremain and a clergyman on their side. So. In my opinion—in light of Grant’s pardon, these laws cannot prevail.

—Just so you know, Charlie, before I’d go back to jail, I’d kill myself.

—I hope you won’t, he said, joking. —You know how I hate the sight of blood.

Then he grew serious. —You’ll be careful, right? Morrill says it’s prudent to keep certain medicines hidden in the wine cellar or somewheres unlikely. But I won’t let any rat terriers nor hounds of hell get to you. And if they do? We know the right people. Don’t we? We live on Fifth Avenue now. Mark my words. We’ll live out our days here, with wee grandchildren running around the garden with Whiskers the mouse.

He ran an imaginary mouse down my back till I shrieked and swatted at him over the toast. I was happy to believe him. It was in my nature to put my head in the sand, believing that Yes, the worst was bound to happen but what could I do about it? I had my household and my ladies to worry about. I failed to be properly haunted by Comstock. Three years had passed since my time at the Tombs without the traps bothering me. Within days of the newspaper article, we again forgot to beware about postal inspectors. We believed the press was otherwise bored of me. The law would not bother now I was at my fancy address. Didn’t I treat Fifth Avenue ladies every day? Comstock was a pompous tub of lard. I was protected by the List, by the Reticence and Decorum of my lady patients, and Comstock knew it. Despite all his brash talk, it seemed that the Vice Hunter was not much interested in medical practitioners such as myself. What really excited him, what really took up his attention in those years, was SMUT, and catching the peddlers of naughty postcards and dirty
books. This he did with the zeal of a shoat-hog for a bucket of warm mash.

He went after Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, who wrote in their “Weekly” about Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s affair with a married woman. Comstock deemed this obscene (their writing, not the affair) and had the poor sisters arrested. Their bail was set so high, at $80,000, that the beleaguered ladies lingered many weeks in the Ludlow Street Jail and went bankrupt, forced to pay $20,000 in costs. He ruined them and they was paupers afterwards.

Also, he ruined some cove called George Train, whose offense was to publish certain passages from the BIBLE, including the story of Jehovah commanding Hosea to marry a hoor, the one about King David guilty of adultery, and the passages about Amnon raping his sister. For this Mr. Train was charged with obscenity and thrown in the Tombs, his reputation, health and finances destroyed, all for publishing Bible verses.

I did not think,
If Bible is smut then none of us is safe
. I carried on. I had to. My doorbell rang day and night. I was not a lady of leisure but a working midwife—worried about my sister who fled, our lost brother Joseph, the new mothers in confinement calling me at all hours, and my girl growing into a young lady. I went about managing the household, the gardens and the stable boys, the sodden hysterical Greta and her loutish husband Sprunt, my daughter’s spelling tests and dancing lessons, our Saturday salons with the swells of New York Society, where Annabelle now sometimes performed so genteel on the Steinway, and Maggie served deviled eggs with caviar—while all that time Mr. Comstock was busy trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, like the song says.

What I did not bargain on was his terrible swift sword, the underhanded tactics of this Worst Enemy. He was a SNEAK. He assumed aliases. He used purloined stationery of the US Treasury for his schemes. He used false addresses. He lied. He made citizen’s arrests whenever he felt like it. He sometimes pretended to be a woman! and wrote letters calling himself “Anna Ray,” of Washington DC, and “Ella Bender,” of Squan Village, New Jersey, and “Mrs. Semler,” from Chicago, just to entrap his victims. He was a cheat and swindler more suited to be a poodle dog clipped in the lion fashion than a CRUSADER. I wonder did he picture himself in a flowered calico as he penned his lies? Did he flutter his eyelashes like Nanette as he
wrote his flattering deceitful letters to his victims, poor Dr. E. B. Foote for example? This Foote was a respected Christian physician and author. Comstock, masquerading as Mrs. Semler, penned several notes to entrap him.

Dear Dr. Foote, I’m a steadfast admirer of your books, “Plain Home Talk,” and “Medical Common Sense.” Would you be so kind, dear sir, as to send them to me?

Foote’s books were only medical advice to families, on subjects such as Prevention of Conception. But for sending these works, under the Comstock Law, the good Doctor was arrested. Jailed. Fined. Shamed. Ruined to the tune of $25,000. His family lived after that impoverished.

Comstock was mean as any river thief or member of the Roach Guards, and it was rumored (with great interest to the Freudians now, as I write this in the new century) that he carried a rubber snake in his pocket which he used to scare children, but mostly it was his ceremonial Post Office badge and not the snake that he liked to whip from his trousers, shouting Arrest! His poor victims rotted months at a time behind bars, their health declining, their families falling apart, their reputations destroyed.

Over these years, ignoring me, Mr. Comstock seized THIRTY THOUSAND pounds of so-called obscene material. What did he do with so much lewdity? Me and Charlie began to joke that old Tony sat around the fire at night with dirty pictures tucked between the pages of his Bible, reading smut with his red flannel underdrawers aflame. We two had got very cavalier. —He’d rather ogle bare naked ladies, said Charlie, —than come after you, Axie. A raid on Madame doesn’t come with a new set of naughty cards.

It seemed he was right. Despite his bragging Comstock did not come after me. Another year passed and there was not a word out of him.

*  *  *

Nor was there word from my sister. If I was haunted by anyone, it wasn’t Comstock at all but Dutch. It had been thirteen months plus one week since she fled my parlor. Where was she? Wherever she was, she was ashamed of me. The luxuries of my home hadn’t mattered a bit to her. For sure she thought I was beneath her. And yet, was she happy? She was not. It
had showed on her like a fever. Her husband was cruel. She wanted a child. She had a lover. She had secrets she could never tell. I was one of them, a secret shame. If anyone knew the Evil Madame DeBeausacq was her sister, she’d die of disgrace. I believed with great grief that I’d seen the last of her.

*  *  *

But then, in the coldest week of February 1880, just after breakfast, I heard the bell ring, and Rebecca arguing downstairs. I dismissed the commotion as the usual dramatics from the household staff, till Maggie came to tell me that, waiting for me in the conservatory was a Mrs. Lillian Reardon. My sister.

I ran downstairs to her, flung open the door. —Dutch! I cried.

She stood very still, her eyes vague, and downcast.

—Sorry, so sorry, I meant Lily, I said, all in a fluster of emotion and correcting myself. —Oh I am so glad to see you, my darling sister—pardon me, I meant
friend
of my school days, you’ve come back.

Still she met me stiffly, could not meet my eye.

—I thought you’d never come here again, said I.

—Circumstances change, she said, stammering, —I—

—Are you all right?

She gave a panicked smile and twisted the diamond wedding ring she wore on her left hand, as if the finger itself had come unscrewed.

—You’re shivering, I said.

—Am I?

In the parlor, Maggie brought us tea.

—Tell no one that I am here, Dutch whispered, when Maggie had gone. —Please, Ann. Do you trust your staff? Are they discreet?

—My staff is very good at keeping secrets. I pay them well for exactly that reason.

—Your housemaid—

—Maggie?

—She saw my calling card that day years ago. She knows the name VanDerWeil.