The Virgin Cure

by Ami McKay

  I broke down, as visions of Mama’s sad, waterlogged body came to my mind. I’d been trying to forget her, wishing my memories away bit by bit, and now she was gone, almost as if I’d meant for her to die. All the love I’d had for her came back to me now, hand in hand with the sorrow of her sending me away. There could be no forgiveness between us and no goodbye.

  Lachrymatories, or tear-catchers, were worn by brides during the war. The women were to fill the bottles with their tears as a sign of devotion to their husbands while they were away. Many men never returned from battle, and thus their wives were left to pour their tears of loneliness on their husbands’ graves.

  Today the practice of tear catching is more widespread, and is performed during periods of celebration as well as mourning. There has even been one account of a woman carrying her tears to dispel her love for an unattainable man.

  Reaching into her pocket, Mrs. Riordan brought out a balled-up handkerchief and laid it in her lap. She pulled at the corners of the cloth to reveal a small silver spoon and an oblong bottle the length of her finger, a chain attached to its neck. “Catch as many tears as you can this wretched night, and spoon them into the bottle, like this,” she said, showing me how. “Stopper the bottle when you’re through. As the days go by your tears will disappear along with your sorrow. Then you’ll know your mourning’s done.”

  Handing the spoon and bottle to me she said, “These were mine when my Johnny died.”

  “I can’t accept them,” I told her, trying to give the tear-catcher back.

  “You must,” she insisted. “I won’t be happy until you do.”

  Putting the bottle and spoon aside, I thanked her for her kindness. I’d missed her gummy smile and comforting presence. I only wished she’d found me for a happier reason.

  “There’s something more I need to tell you,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper. “I have it on good authority that her eyes was open when they found her.”

  She knew as well as I did that a corpse with open eyes was the sign of a curse. It meant the person’s soul was not at peace when they died and that they intended to haunt family and friends until they found another soul to drag down with them to the grave.

  I’d sung the song of Mary O’Day enough times to know that a daughter was usually an unsettled mother ghost’s first choice for haunting.

  Mary O’Day got carried away

  The day her mother died

  For you see, she couldn’t flee

  Her Mama’s open eyes!

  “Here,” Mrs. Riordan said, bringing out another gift. “I took the liberty of properly stuffing your poppet.”

  “Thank you,” I said, clutching Miss Sweet to my chest.

  Mrs. Riordan stayed with me the rest of the night, holding me in her arms while I rocked the doll in mine.

  In the morning, Miss Everett had Mrs. Coyne fill a basket from the pantry and even called for a carriage so Mrs. Riordan didn’t have to walk back to Chrystie Street. The gracious way she treated the old woman, a complete stranger to her, meant more to me than I could say.

  “Get some rest,” Mrs. Riordan advised, giving me a last hug. “You’ve had a long night, and there will be more to come. Don’t lose faith. Eventually your mama’s spirit will tire. Then she’ll slip away to wherever God sees fit to put her.”

  After she’d gone, Miss Everett took me by the hand and led me to my bed. She told Alice and Mae, who were already awake, to get dressed quietly and leave me alone to rest.

  I spent most of the morning crying in sadness, anger and confusion. Exhausted at last, I fell into a dream, grief conjuring Mama to my side.

  Her ghost stood at the foot of my bed wearing nothing but a pair of pantaloons and an old, frayed corset. She had oyster shells tangled in her hair, and several of Mr. Hetherington’s goldfish flopped about her feet, gasping for air. Dirty water flowed from between her fingers, then turned to blood as it pooled on the floor. Her mouth was dark with death.

  “Did you know I loved you, Mama?” I asked her ghost while clutching the blanket to my chest. “I loved you enough for both of us …”

  Floating towards me, her arms outstretched as if she meant to make things right between us, she came nose to nose with me, then stopped.

  “Who took your hair?” she asked, her face stricken with horror.

  Frantically tugging at the ends of my curls, I said, “Mrs. Wentworth did, but it’s coming back, Mama, see? Every day, it’s coming back.”

  “She’ll take your mind next …” Mama moaned, repeating the words again and again as if she were casting a spell. She’ll take your mind, she’ll take your mind, she’lltakeyourmind … And soon her face began to change, turning round, plump and healthy, and looking for all the world like Mrs. Wentworth.

  Holding a pair of scissors over her head like a dagger, she cried, “You’re still mine, Miss Fenwick!”

  And so, Johannes, fully determined on this promising scheme, began to cast about him for a medium who was acquainted in the spirit sphere, to introduce him to some of the eligible ghosts.

  —Q.K. PHILANDER DOESTICKS,

  The Witches of New York, 1859

  For a short time, Miss Everett showed a great deal of thoughtfulness towards me. She allowed me to sleep the day away, and in the evenings she had Mrs. Coyne prepare hot milk and oatcakes for me to eat in bed.

  Alice, careful not to upset me, seemed eternally interested in discussing the latest news in necklines and fabric choices as shown in the fashion plates of Godey’s Lady’s Book. “I do hope the princess cut will hold over for 1872, don’t you?”

  Mae, on the other hand, was more direct. “If I’d known Miss Everett could turn so sweet,” she smirked, “I’d have paid some old bag weeks ago to deliver the news of my own ma’s death.” Her bitterness was, of course, expected—Miss Everett had discovered (or at the very least strongly suspected) Mae’s outings to the Bowery Concert Hall.

  Mae had made a bumpy entrance through the window the night after Mrs. Riordan’s visit, and Miss Everett had stormed into our room and informed Mae that if she couldn’t keep herself safe and secure, she had no choice but to see to the task for her. “You’re not my child,” she’d scolded. “You’re my whore.”

  “Near-whore,” Mae had spitefully whispered as soon as Miss Everett had gone out the door.

  After that night, Cadet had been assigned to hover over Mae during the day and to stand guard on the rooftop at night until the concert hall was closed.

  I felt jealous that she had him so near, and I felt sorry for Cadet out there in the cold, his collar turned up against the wind. Mae tried to get him to go to bed by promising him an hour’s worth of affection for every night he turned in early. She’d climbed out the window and gone to him wearing nothing but her dressing gown. Holding it open so he couldn’t help but see her naked body, she entreated him: “Take something of me then let me go!” Cadet just stared straight ahead, as if by a miracle, he was immune to her charms.

  Three days after I’d got the news about Mama, Miss Everett’s sympathy ran out. Sunday morning arrived and despite my tears, she wasn’t about to excuse me from my turn in the second parlour.

  Taking me by the arm, she led me down the stairs.

  “Please,” I begged again, “don’t make me strip off for them today.”

  “If you can’t perform this simple task, Ada, perhaps you’re not meant for my house.”

  After it was over, she took me upstairs to my bedroom and told me to stay there with no food or company for the rest of the day. “Think about it, Miss Fenwick,” she said. “Don’t let grief be the end of you.” Then she took Mrs. Riordan’s tear-catcher from where it hung by my bed, placed it in her pocket and walked out the door.

  The next morning, when Dr. Sadie arrived for her weekly visit, I overheard her having a disagreement with Miss Everett in the parlour. I pressed my ear to the door in order to hear what they were saying, but I still couldn’t make out their words. In the end, all I le
arned was that Miss Everett was “severely disappointed.” Then I heard Dr. Sadie, as she approached the door, say, “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Miss Everett would like you to come with me for the day,” Dr. Sadie said after she’d finished with my examination. “She feels the fresh air might do you good, and I could use another pair of hands on my rounds. There’ll be no talk of orphan trains, I promise.”

  Worried that Miss Everett was about to put me out on the curb, I accepted her invitation. Truth be told, I was anxious to get out from under the madam’s watchful eye.

  Walking up Third Avenue, we came to a row of tenements that looked much like my home on Chrystie Street. “I’ve got house calls today,” Dr. Sadie said as she took hold of a fire escape ladder at the side of the corner building. “Up we go.”

  I followed her up the rungs and then across the roofs of building after building. It was amazing to see how well she got around, lifting the heavy black skirts of her doctor’s dress with ease, and using abandoned crates and boxes as steps to get over the edge of one roof to another. She told me she visited most of her patients this way, finding it easier to get where she needed to go if her feet never touched the ground. “My nightmares are made of tenement stairs,” she said with a shudder. “I avoid the rat-infested dark of them as much as possible.”

  Many of her patients lived in crowded rooms at the tops of buildings, sweating away while they did piecework—rolling cigars, gluing envelopes, or sewing shirt after shirt after shirt. Sickness made itself at home in their close, dark rooms, disease thriving in the absence of windows and hope.

  We climbed in to see them through skylights and fire escapes. We looked in on a widow who had no one to care for her, and weary mothers who had far too many children to tend to on their own. We found people lying in their beds, wasting away from some illness or from not having proper food to eat. With every room we entered, I thought of Mama, and how bitterly she’d always complained about not having enough.

  While Dr. Sadie treated coughs and fevers, lanced boils and stitched up cuts, I did my best to get the children to smile, taking them into my lap for a game of “to market” or playing peek-a-boo with a tattered blanket. In their company I felt shame for having left Chrystie Street behind, and guilt over the comforts I had now.

  We worked through noon and late into the afternoon. Finally Dr. Sadie stopped to rest on a rooftop, sitting down to lean against a chimney. She pulled two apples from her bag and handed me one. “Put your back to the brick,” she said. “It will help keep you warm.” The day had started out with bright, warm sun, but the cold, damp winds of a late November evening were coming on fast.

  Whenever she caught me glancing at her hands, she promptly folded them in her lap. They were chapped and raw from the soap she used to keep them clean, the struggle between science and beauty evident in every pore. Her worry over her appearance was plain to see no matter how much she tried to hide it, showing me that even the most serious of women still suffer under vanity’s harsh rule.

  “We’ve one more stop to make and then we’re through,” she said.

  I nodded as I took a bite out of my apple. “That’s good,” I said after I’d swallowed, hoping that I didn’t look as exhausted as I felt. Twirling the apple by its stem, I thought of my time on the Bowery. No matter how guilty I felt for the comforts I’d gained in Miss Everett’s care, I hoped I’d never go back to begging for pennies on the street.

  Dr. Sadie’s last visit brought us to the door of a Miss Katherine Tully.

  “Come in,” a weak voice called out to us after we’d knocked.

  The small single room was cold and dark, and smelled of stale urine. Miss Tully was lying in her bed, wearing what must have been every stitch of clothing she owned. She had two patchwork blankets wrapped around her feet but was still shivering so violently her bed frame chattered with sympathy.

  Handing me a tin of matches from her bag, Dr. Sadie instructed, “Get a lamp lit, Moth. Let’s make things a bit cheerier for Miss Tully, shall we?”

  As I hurried to light the wick before all daylight was gone from the room, Dr. Sadie sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to Miss Tully in quiet tones. I watched as she wrapped her fingers around the woman’s thin wrist and counted her heartbeats.

  The dim light made it difficult for me to guess Miss Tully’s age or what was ailing her, but clearly her sickness was doing its best to take whatever life she had left. She and Dr. Sadie kept company more like friends than doctor and patient, and Miss Tully even laughed as the good doctor made light of their shared spinsterhood.

  “Just two old maids, aren’t we?” Dr. Sadie said with a wink.

  “Happy as can be,” Miss Tully replied with a sigh. Then in a softer voice, she asked, “Nothing’s changed in your situation?”

  Answering the question with a shake of her head, Dr. Sadie reached for a medicine bottle that was on the bedside table and held it up to the light. “It doesn’t look like you’ve taken much of the remedy I brought you,” she said. “Didn’t you understand the directions?”

  “I did,” the woman replied, smiling meekly. “I understood just fine.” She motioned for Dr. Sadie to hand her the bottle. Pointing to the label, she read, “Take only after meals.”

  “I see,” Dr. Sadie said, getting up from the bedside and going to Miss Tully’s cupboards.

  “Don’t bother,” Miss Tully said. “You’ll not find anything there.”

  “Katherine,” Dr. Sadie sighed. “I suppose there’s no coal either?”

  “No—”

  “Why didn’t you mention how bad off you were the last time I was here?”

  “Leave me my pride,” Miss Tully answered.

  Unburdening herself of every coin she had in her pockets, Dr. Sadie directed me to take them to the nearest grocer and bring back all the food I could carry. “A bag of rice and a sack of oats … bread, milk, apples, beans and two of whatever meat pies he’s got in the case. The shopkeeper’s name is Mr. Hannigan. Tell him we need coal delivered today. If you say Dr. Sadie sent you, he’ll take care of it.”

  Not long after I returned with the groceries, a delivery boy appeared with a bucket of coal. Having a fire in the stove instantly made the room seem a far happier place. I kept it stoked while Dr. Sadie prepared a pot of porridge and apples for Miss Tully’s supper. We stayed with her until she’d eaten it all.

  After spooning a dose of medicine down Miss Tully’s throat, Dr. Sadie sat herself on the edge of the bed and began to brush the woman’s hair. Making long strokes with a silver-handled brush she’d found in the drawer of Miss Tully’s small table, she tended to the young woman as if she were a queen.

  “I had a baby once,” Miss Tully said to me as Dr. Sadie wove her hair into a loose braid. “She was a tiny thing that didn’t live past two days. I called her Olivia, after my mother. She would have been a beauty, just like you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, hanging onto the last of her words so I wouldn’t have to imagine Miss Tully holding a dying baby in her arms.

  She had no ties to me through family or friendship, so I saw her sadness quite clearly. Every hesitation in her manner, large or small—in her breathing, in her words—brought the overwhelming desire to go to her and say all will be well, even when I know it wouldn’t be.

  The sky was completely dark when we left that room. Dr. Sadie scolded herself under her breath as we walked down the street. “I should’ve checked the cupboards last time. I should’ve made sure she had something to eat.”

  Rain began to fall, coming down in heavy sheets, and we were without proper wraps to keep us from the weather.

  “My room’s closer than Miss Everett’s,” Dr. Sadie shouted over the downpour. “We’ll go there until it stops.”

  Her garret was above the place where she’d been taught how to be a doctor, and only steps from Miss Keteltas’ mansion. In all my wandering up and down that street, I’d never noticed the building before, or the sign above the door that
said, THE NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR INDIGENT WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

  “I’m sorry the room’s so small,” Dr. Sadie said as she creaked the door of her stove open to poke at the makings of a fire. “I don’t often have house guests.”

  Her room seemed fine to me. There were beautiful things all around—a basket of apples, a shadow box that held a collection of striped, spiralled seashells, a white cambric nightdress draped over a chair. There were books scattered everywhere, lined up on the shelves and on the desk, and still more of them piled in tall, crooked stacks.

  She had a collection of morbid drawings pinned to the wall beside her bed—picture after picture of arms and legs, bodies and faces, made to look as if a person’s flesh had been cut open for all to see. Jars of pickled creatures sat here and there on the mantel and between her books. Bloated frogs and twisted snakes peered out at me through murky glass, their eyes glowing, green, yellow and red.

  “Would you like something to eat?” she asked, reaching high on a shelf for a tin of biscuits.

  “Yes, please,” I answered. I hadn’t had anything to eat that day except the apple she’d given me.

  As her hand went towards the box, I caught sight of a rat sitting next to it. I was about to scream when Dr. Sadie grabbed hold of the thing by its tail and set it aside. It stayed stiff and silent in her hand, its glass eyes twinkling. Opening the biscuit tin, Dr. Sadie offered me first pick.

  “Have as many as you like,” she added.

  As I took a handful of biscuits, I suddenly noticed the skeleton hanging from a hook in the corner of the room. Held together with wire, it wavered ever so slightly whenever Dr. Sadie passed near it. I could have sworn it was staring at me from where its eyes should have been.

  When she caught me looking at it, she said, “Oh, don’t mind her, that’s just Miss Jewett.” There was a hint of pride in her voice, almost as if she’d known the girl and turned her to bone herself.