The Virgin Cure

by Ami McKay

  Thinking my walking suit better than any other choice she might have in mind, I said, “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Do you trust me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  As soon as I’d given her my reply, she sat down at her desk to pen a letter, sending word to Miss LeMar and Miss Eva Ivan to ask if the two ladies might be willing to “assist a young girl in making a bit of magic.”

  “Two thousand dollars,” I said, looking across the table at Mr. Dink.

  Deep in thought, he stroked his chin.

  I was about to take it back and tell him he could make me an offer instead, but Miss LeMar, who was sitting to my right, gave me a stern look as if to say hold your ground. Miss Eva, who was on my left, did the same.

  My costume was made from fine, embroidered silk. The skirt had several rows of ruffles, and I wore a robe that went all the way down to the floor. The sideshow ladies had used beer to fashion my already unruly hair into the full mane of a “moss-haired girl.” I was now a Circassian Beauty.

  “Seventeen hundred,” Mr. Dink countered.

  “That’s an insult,” Miss Eva said, crossing her arms. Miss LeMar whispered, “Tell him you’ll go to Barnum.”

  “Two thousand and not a penny less,” I said. “Any respectable impresario or curiosity hunter will offer me at least that.”

  “That’s highway robbery, my dear girl!” he exclaimed.

  “Two thousand,” I repeated to Mr. Dink with a smile. “And you’ll also have my undying loyalty.”

  He gave me a big grin and stuck out his hand. “It’s only because you remind me of a girl I once knew,” he said as we shook to seal the bargain. “Miss Fenwick I believe was her name,” he added with a wink.

  After discussing a few more details, he said I’d need to get my picture taken as soon as possible, so he could put my image on a carte de visite. “Mr. Sarony is a magician with that camera of his,” Mr. Dink said. “He makes stars out of sunshine, silver nitrate and glass.”

  The photographer’s studio was in the top of a building on Union Square. All the notable actors and actresses of the day went to see Mr. Sarony there: Mr. Joseph Jackson, Miss Lotta Crabtree, Mr. George Fox, Miss Susie Lowe. Mr. Dink said that their fame had come soon after Mr. Sarony made their portraits and that he expected the same would happen to me.

  He arranged for me to stay at the Astor Place Hotel the night before I was to see the photographer. He said it was important that I feel comfortable and have all the necessities at my disposal. “Please think nothing of the cost.”

  Dr. Sadie stayed with me in the suite, and we ordered milk and cakes to be sent to our room before bedtime. I called for the maid three times more, just so I could have three extra pillows for my head. I didn’t want my curls to lose their shape overnight.

  In the morning Mr. Dink and I travelled by private carriage to the studio. Mr. Sarony’s reception room was filled with all sorts of unusual things, almost as strange as those Mr. Dink had in his museum. There were paintings and pictures hung all over, of angels and saints and ladies with nothing but flowers in their hair. There were shields and swords leaning along the walls, and animal heads, open-mouthed and staring from every corner. A crocodile, just as pale and white as Miss LeMar, was suspended from the ceiling.

  Before long, a lovely woman with a long striped scarf around her head came down the stairs. She motioned for me to follow her. As I approached the staircase, I made room for an earlier client, a gentleman, who was making his way out carrying another man on his back. The second man had his arms draped over the first man’s shoulders and was holding tight as the first gentleman took one careful step at a time. As they passed me, I could see that the man being carried had no legs.

  Both stopped to look at me and smile. “He’s Jerome,” the first man said of the man on his back. “He don’t speak.”

  Jerome had dark eyes that made me think of Cadet and I hoped that he might be set to appear at Mr. Dink’s, and that I’d see him again.

  “Mr. Dink’s beauty to see you, sir,” the woman said when we finally entered the studio.

  Hearing her words, I found it wonderful, even unbelievable, that she could be referring to me.

  Mr. Sarony was something of a spectacle himself. Dressed in a bright red jacket, he wore a soft velvet fez on his head. His hands moved constantly as he talked and every so often he’d reach up to his head and take the fat tassel that was hanging from his fez and flip it over to the other side.

  “I’ve been waiting for you!” he cried as he took my hand and kissed it. “This is your first picture ever?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said, looking me up and down, tilting his head back and forth.

  The sun was filling the room through a large slanted skylight, making the blue paint on the walls appear to glow. Mr. Sarony hurried to the corner of the room closest to the window and began moving things around. After spreading out a beautiful rug woven with patterns of ribbons and flowers, he brought out several vases, a large stringed instrument and six tambourines. In the middle of all that, he put a chair. It was covered in green velvet and the wood on the arms and legs had been carved into lovely flowing scrolls.

  Patting the cushion, he said, “Please, come sit.”

  After I was seated, he came to me with a mirror in his hand. “What do you want people to see?” he asked, putting the mirror in front of my face.

  “I don’t know. I thought that was up to you.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head so hard he set the tassel on his hat to swinging. “You can’t leave that up to me. When I look through my box, you’re far away, upside down. It’s you who has to make the picture. You decide.”

  I paused for a moment, but nothing came to mind. “I can’t think of anything,” I replied, wondering if I’d come so far only to disappoint Mr. Dink, and myself.

  “Lady Mephistopheles,” he said, making more gestures with his hands. “She thinks of fire, of course. Miss Suzie Lowe, she thinks of love. Miss Lotta Crabtree, she won’t say, she keeps it a secret. You see?”

  “I think so,” I said, still without any idea of what to hold in my thoughts while he was behind the camera.

  Bringing three metal contraptions over to me, he said, “Head and arm clamps. They keep you still while I take the picture. It takes a bit of time.”

  I pulled away as he stretched the clamp for my head up the length of my back and nestled its cold tines against the back of my skull.

  “You must relax,” he scolded.

  I tried my best not to flinch as he worked to get me into the position he wanted. As I breathed in, I could smell lavender oil mixed with the strong sweet stink of something else I couldn’t name. It reminded me of Dr. Sadie and the way she sometimes smelled after coming back from the infirmary. I wondered to myself what Mr. Sarony would think if I asked him to take the lady doctor’s portrait with her skeleton.

  Ether is used by both physicians and photographers alike. Known for its sweet, medicinal scent, it can have an intoxicating effect when used in confined spaces.

  At last, he walked away to fetch his weighty monster of a camera. Slipping underneath a long black cloak, he looked like he was attached to the thing, his legs set wide apart, his head and torso replaced by a box with four eyes and a sliding glass-plate heart.

  He called to me, his voice muffled under the cloth. “I almost have you now. Five, four, three, two, one—think.” One hand reached out and took the cover away from the lenses.

  I held as still as I could, searching for the answer to Mr. Sarony’s question. Memories came together in my mind and heart—Cadet kissing me, Dr. Sadie wiping away my tears, Mr. Dink stroking his beard, Mama holding her chin high as she tied her scarf around her head at the start of each day. Sitting there, with all the trappings of a life I’d never imagined, it came to me. No matter what the title read at the bottom of the card, or whatever name Mr. Dink might give me, I wanted the person holding
it to see me—Moth, a girl from Chrystie Street.

  EPILOGUE

  I live in a house on Gramercy Park with two pug dogs, a pair of lovebirds and an ever-changing cast of maids. Tomorrow I’ll turn nineteen.

  Between a doctor’s garret and theatre lights I was raised to be a sideshow belle. Pretending came naturally to me. I’m my mother’s daughter after all.

  Miss LeMar trained me in the ways of soothsayers, and was a far better fortune teller than Mama had ever been. Miss Eva refused to teach me to swallow swords, saying she didn’t want me to risk my beautiful throat. Shortly after I turned thirteen, Mr. Dink started a travelling circus. For six summers I boarded a train and journeyed to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis and all the towns between. Each September, tired of strangers, I came back to the city and embraced my dear New York.

  The demand for Circassian Beauties waned over time, but fortunately people still continue to yearn for a glimpse of the future. These days I spend less time in the theatre and the museum and more hours in private consultation with Mrs. Astor’s four hundred. The ladies of society wish to know if they’ve made right choices—in evening gowns and china patterns, in friendships and in lovers. Their gentleman husbands, having held on during the dark years, want to know which stocks will rise and fall, which ventures will return high yields. The excitement of a lucky guess has caused me to fall into the arms of a banker, and a broker or two, but these transgressions were by choice and delicate negotiation, not for my survival.

  Miss Everett goes on the same as always; she’s as much an institution in this town as Wall Street or the Metropolitan Bank.

  Dr. Sadie goes on as well, now married to Mr. Hetherington and living in New Jersey, her spirit renewed by the birth of their first child, a little girl. She holds meetings of the SPCC in her home, her babe in her arms, telling other mothers of the darkness she’s seen. I go as myself, modestly dressed, my hair pulled back, and tell them my share of the story. When the women ask what they can do, I tell them, “Teach your children to be honest; teach your daughters to be strong.”

  There is a new time ahead, Dr. Sadie says. I hope that she is right.

  I write these things from my sitting room, a place with a window so wide I can nearly see the whole of the park below. It’s surrounded by a tall iron fence to which only a chosen few hold the key. I wear mine on a chain around my neck, dangling down my back like a true Gypsy girl.

  Walking the perimeter of the park every day, I look for a weakness, a space wide enough for a child to crawl through. So far, it has not appeared. I prefer to promenade on the outside of the gardens because I find it hard to sit inside the park. The walkways are perfect, every shrub, flower and bench beautiful and right. Even the houses the gardener built for the birds are palaces of safety and shelter. But shutting the gate doesn’t suit me. The moment it clangs, I’m left wishing I could leave it open as an invitation to some poor child walking by, the ghost of my younger self.

  Requiring a lady’s maid, I opened my door to a girl six months ago, hoping to find such a ghost. Miss Maggie Harlow came to me from Forsyth Street, just steps away from where I once lived with Mama. She is a child with spirit, and eyes shining with pride.

  In the afternoons we wander Broadway and Sixth Avenue along with all the other ladies of the mile. From Stewart’s to Stern’s we promenade with purpose, the city pulsing with our stride. At Tiffany’s on Union Square we stop to sift through jewels and gems, looking for the perfect stones to match our eyes. Every clerk and shopkeeper is happy to see us, knowing that our dreams, our wishes, our secrets are what hold up the buildings that now fill Manhattan’s sky.

  As I close the pages on this tale, it is summer. Shoots are coming up from the stump of my father’s pear tree—I saw them only yesterday. Mr. Hetherington says that it happens every year: the tree tries hard to come back before Mr. Huber, in a rare appearance, comes to cut down its tender growth. One of these years Mr. Huber won’t come, and the tree will make a defiant return.

  Miss Harlow went about the duty of dressing me this morning, but she has since gone to the train station with my best wishes and a hundred-dollar bill. A wonderful child with ambition enough to take her anywhere she wishes to go, I hadn’t the heart to hold her back. I filled her pockets with money and set her free.

  She is steaming towards California to find her way.

  I must find another girl.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It started with an old painting, a long lost relative, and a little girl who once lived on the streets of New York.

  When I was young, I used to sit and stare at a portrait that was hanging above our piano, a beautiful painting of a woman and a young girl. The woman, dressed in black taffeta, was seated in profile as she watched over the little girl who was at her knee. The child, looking as if she’d been allowed to play dress-up in her mother’s clothes, stared out of the painting with contentment, a loose fitting dressing gown the same shade of blue as the sky in the artist’s background draped around her, a large silver bracelet on her wrist. Her dark hair was held away from her face with a red ribbon, and I’d often beg my mother to fix my hair the same way. Every time I asked her to tell me about the two sitters in the portrait, she’d patiently explain, “The woman is your great-great-grandmother. I was named after her, and she was a lady doctor. The child is her daughter.”

  My desire to learn more about “Dr. Sadie” followed me throughout my life. I begged all the information I could from my grandmother and other relatives, but family papers, journals and letters had been lost over the years, leaving me with little more than a few names and dates. In 2007, my mother passed away after a long battle with colorectal cancer. In the months that followed, I decided that it was time to uncover Sadie’s past for myself. I went back to notes I had taken several years before and began to piece her life together, one clue at a time.

  It was a journey filled with serendipitous twists and turns. An envelope given to me by a medical historian led me to a woman who held a personal archive of letters written to and received from a young female medical student who happened to be a contemporary of my great-great-grandmother’s. Second-hand books as well as books and ephemera from the shelves of the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library helped me to understand what the city was like in the late 1800s (The Nether Side of New York: Or, the Vice, Crime and Poverty of the Great Metropolis; Sunshine and Shadow in New York; Darkness and Daylight in New York: Or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life; a pictorial record of personal experiences by day and night in the great metropolis, a “gentleman’s directory,” and a catalogue of exhibits at an anatomical museum, to name but a few.) Another trip led me to Dr. Steven G. Friedman of the New York Downtown Hospital, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2007. In his office I held in my hand an official historical document naming my great-great-grandmother as one of the first graduates of the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. I realized then that I had stumbled on a tale much larger than the one I had first set out to uncover, a tale that needed to be told.

  In 1870, over thirty thousand children lived on the streets of New York City and many more wandered in and out of cellars and tenements as their families struggled to scrape together enough income to put food on the table.

  Under the mentorship of sister physicians Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Sadie and her classmates worked tirelessly to care for such children. They faced fierce opposition from the medical establishment as well as from society. People sometimes rioted outside the doors of the infirmary, and funding was difficult to obtain. It was their mission to give health care to all women and children, no matter what their station or income might be. As the population of the city rose at an unprecedented rate, the ravages of disease were felt most keenly on the Lower East Side. Outbreaks of typhoid, diphtheria and smallpox rose alongside the continuous spread of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis. As the
“lady doctors” of the infirmary worked to increase awareness of the plight of the city’s poor, the young boys of the tenements were shoved out the door to find work, and little girls became a commodity.

  Sold into prostitution at a young age, many girls from poor families were brokered by madams (or even their own parents) as “fresh maids.” Men paid the highest price for girls who had been “certified” as virgins.

  At this same time in New York, syphilis was an overwhelming, widespread puzzle of a disease with no remedy and it was this taboo topic that my great-great-grandmother chose as the subject of her graduation thesis. In her day, there continued to be much argument over how the disease was spread and there were many unsuccessful (and often destructive) forms of treatment. An even greater tragedy than the human wreckage resulting from this disease was a deadly myth that preyed upon young girls. The myth of “the virgin cure”—the belief that a man with syphilis could “cleanse his blood” by deflowering a virgin—was without social borders and was acted out in every socioeconomic class in some form or another. In fact, the more money a man had, the easier it would have been for him to procure a young girl for this unthinkable act.

  As one physician of the time stated, “I have been surprised at discovering the existence of this belief [the virgin cure] in people generally well informed as well as among the comparatively illiterate. I have tried to find evidence for the theory that it is a belief traceable to certain districts but I have discovered it among people of different places and of different occupations—so different that now I should scarcely be surprised to come across it anywhere.”

  Originally I thought that the narrative voice of The Virgin Cure would be Sadie’s, but as I searched for the best way to write the story I wanted to tell, I discovered that it wasn’t to be found in her voice after all. I spent hours walking the streets and sidewalks that had once been travelled by my great-great-grandmother in her work as a medical student and physician in the late 1800s. As I walked, I tried to conjure up the memory of her life and the women and children she had served. On Second Avenue, I stared at the place where the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children once stood. I went to Pear Tree Corner to see where Peter Stuyvesant’s great pear tree had lived for over two hundred years. I visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and looked into the small, dark rooms of the past. On those streets, I found my answer. I found the voice I’d been waiting for, the voice of a twelve-year-old street girl named Moth.