Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  “But it seems,” I ventured, “that you do have everything, Mrs. Palmer.” She looked down at her shoes, then lifted her head and fixed her gaze on me.

  “Listening to you these past few days, it has occurred to me that I have virtually nothing of real value, Miss Londonderry. Oh yes, I have many things, too many things, but those that I lack cannot be purchased. Our life is filled with elegant parties. The people we socialize with are men of industry and great means and their dutiful and glamorous wives, worn much as man puts on his shoes and his vest. Conversation is predictable and dull, the social calendar repetitive, and the roles we all play well understood and adhered to as if a religion. My every word is spoken as if written by a playwright and my every move made as if determined by a director. And marriage? It is like a precisely choreographed minuet right down to the passionless sex.”

  Realizing that she had let slip words unintended, Mrs. Palmer suddenly looked mortified, shocked that the words had even passed her lips. I looked at her, uncharacteristically without words of my own for a moment. It seemed an eternity, but it was probably just a few seconds before she regained her composure.

  “Oh my, Miss Londonderry, please do forgive me. I should never have said such things or put you in such an awkward position. I am terribly sorry for being so indiscreet.”

  “It is quite all right, Mrs. Palmer,” I said. “Sometimes we can only keep our feelings bottled up for so long. I suppose that is why I am sailing on this ship with a bicycle.” But I said no more. Mrs. Palmer knew nothing of my real story, of Grandpa and the children and the endless toil of my life back in Boston, only the yarns I had been spinning into a quilt all week.

  Mrs. Palmer allowed a small smile and nodded.

  “You see, Miss Londonderry, as I have watched and listened to you these past several days, I have wished to be you. You are free as a bird it seems. Your life is an adventure and an unscripted one at that. I am terribly envious. I would like nothing more than to trade these clothes for a riding costume and this ocean liner for a bicycle and join you and leave my world behind for the one you are about to discover.”

  It was clear that she was not seriously proposing this but just expressing a flight of fancy (in two senses of the phrase), so I did not feel the need to tell her I preferred to go alone.

  “Miss Londonderry, would you do me a great kindness? Please, as you go, write me a letter from time to time. I will give you our address in Chicago. It would mean the world to me to have some personal word from you, to sustain in a small way this connection we have made this week. I shall be looking for news of your adventure in the press but would be so grateful for your letters. Would you do that?”

  I knew I would not, and Mrs. Palmer would not be the last to make such a request or feel a strong kinship with me that was unrequited, but I assured her I would. I took Mrs. Palmer’s attachment to me as a good sign that my venture was speaking to some great, unmet need of women in the civilized world. I was about to ride away from Mrs. Palmer forever, but for now, I was a salve for her needs and yearnings and disappointments.

  Mrs. Palmer took my hands in hers and thanked me profusely, then said Mr. Palmer would be getting worried as she’d been out on the deck for longer than she’d expected.

  “I will see you in the morning, then, Miss Londonderry, before we reach port, so I can say goodbye.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Palmer,” I replied. “Until the morning.”

  She turned and walked back, one gloved hand gliding along the railing, toward a gilded life from which she felt there was no escape. It was hard not to feel sorry for her, a woman who had everything but what mattered most.

  Ten

  I never did see Mrs. Palmer the next morning. In all the commotion, as the hordes prepared to disembark in Le Havre, our paths did not cross and she never did pass me a slip of paper with her address on it. Just as well.

  Captain Franguel had sent word to my cabin early that morning that he wanted me to have the honor of being the first to disembark. In a brief note he expressed his gratitude for my having made the crossing one of the most lively of his tenure as a captain with the French Line. I was happy to be so honored, for it would help make my arrival in France a moment for all who witnessed it to remember.

  As I wheeled my Sterling through the throngs assembled on the deck to the top of the gangplank, the captain, in his dress whites, awaited me. Only those close to the scene could hear his remarks, but up and down the deck people jostled to get a good view as he shook my hand. In his deep baritone he declared that on behalf of all who had had the pleasure of meeting me on the voyage I should go in good health and create good will among all the peoples of the earth I would encounter in the months ahead. He signaled to the bridge, and the ship’s horns let out a deafening sound. Then I turned and waved in every direction, one hand on the Sterling, and made my way onto French soil as the crowd roared its approval.

  The captain had seen to it that one of the ship’s crew would be waiting with my steamer trunk on a dolly and would escort me through customs.

  It was the third day of December, and I took a minute to think of your aunt Mollie, for it was her sixth birthday. I was sure Baila and Bennett would make it as happy a day for her as they could, but I briefly felt a pang of guilt that I was not there on what is, for a child, the most important day of the year. But there was little time to linger on the thought as I was immediately caught up in a dispute with the customs men.

  Though I often claimed to be fluent in French (and several other languages I did not know!) when I was not in France, in truth I knew but how to say “thank you” and a few other phrases I had collected during the voyage. To cover for my ignorance of the French language, I often said that the terms of my wager prohibited me from speaking French. Thus was the encounter at customs a tangled, confusing affair that even the French-speaking crew member assisting me with my trunk was unable to untangle. Apparently, unable to immediately ascertain the value of my Sterling for the purpose of calculating the import duty, the customs men insisted that it be impounded until such time as the value was determined and the duty paid. The spirited argument between the customs agents and the poor man assigned to assist me involved much gesticulating and raised voices and crosstalk, all to no avail.

  As the argument progressed I looked at the crowd now flooding the customs area and searched for Dr. Chancellor, the U.S. consul in Le Havre. Luckily, he passed right by me and did his best to intervene, but again, it was no use. He gave me instructions on how to reach him from Paris and assured me he would see to it that the duty, once figured, was paid and the bicycle safely packaged for shipment to Paris. This was very reassuring. And I asked him, for I had been remiss on board, to sign his name in a little notebook I carried to prove, as I was required to do, that I had indeed passed through Le Havre.

  With the battle over the Sterling lost for the moment, I thanked my helper for trying: “Merci! Merci!” We secured a receipt for the bicycle and assurances that once the value was ascertained and the duty paid the bicycle would be released to Dr. Chancellor for shipment to the bicycle shop of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Sloan, the Sterling agent with whom I had made arrangements to stay while in Paris.

  * * *

  La Havre was a bustling port city with great ocean liners coming and going nearly every day. The train station was not far, and there I purchased a ticket to Paris and sent a telegram to the Sloans telling them I would be arriving at the central train station early that evening with my steamer trunk, but not my wheel, in tow.

  On the train I dozed off and on, tired but excited to have this new leg of the journey, the first outside of the United States, under way. But most of my excitement was focused on Paris, one of the world’s greatest and most glamorous capitals. I could not wait to see Eiffel’s tower, built just six years before, but already famous as the city’s most recognizable structure.

  The Sloans were waiting at the platform holding a sign that read BIENVENUE MLLE. LONDONDERRY! so that I w
ould recognize them immediately. They were an ordinary-looking couple of middle age, he (Victor) rather tall and thin with a moustache like my brother Bennett’s; she (Catherine) a bit stout, but with a warm smile and a twinkle in her eyes. They spoke some English but were not nearly fluent, and of course, I spoke hardly a word of French. But they seemed excited to see me and to serve as my hosts for what would turn into a stay of more than three weeks, in part because the Sterling didn’t arrive until two days before Christmas and in part because Paris was positively intoxicating.

  Sometimes alone, sometimes with Catherine, I walked for hours on end, sipping coffee in any number of magnificent cafés alive with conversation that I strained to decipher, Catherine serving patiently as my French tutor so that I might leave Paris with a few more phrases in my French arsenal.

  Paris was quite unlike New York and Chicago. Where the energy of those American cities was raw, rambunctious, and brittle, both cities of hard edges, Paris was infused with a different kind of energy, a refined intellectual and understated energy. Life seemed more graceful, more contemplative, more sophisticated. Elegant would be the one word, above all, to describe the City of Lights. This was the Paris of Camille Pissarro, Louis Pasteur, a young Marcel Proust, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who could be found most nights where I once caught a glimpse of his eminence, at Le Moulin Rouge, the world’s most famous cabaret, making sketches of the poets and painters, professors and writers who gathered there to smoke, dance, carouse, and debate the great political and philosophical issues of the day. During the day these conversations shifted to the city’s countless cafés, or the homes of its leading lights, a phenomenon that came to be known as “the salon.” Sophisticated and cosmopolitan, two million Frenchmen called Paris home.

  By the mid-1890s, Paris had been a magnet for decades for countless Americans drawn by its culture, intellectualism, and charm. The famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, painters such as the great John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, and writers of renown such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans, spent years in Paris, as did Samuel F. B. Morse, the painter and inventor of an electric telegraph and the Morse code. All found either inspiration or consolation in Paris. Saint-Gaudens was especially renowned for his many statues commemorating the American Civil War, the most famous of which now adorns Boston Common across from the statehouse: a bronze bas-relief that honors the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which, on its way south to join the fighting in 1863, marched down the exact stretch of Beacon Street on which I began my bicycle journey more than thirty years later. The statue took its place on Beacon Street in May 1897, the first public monument in the United States to honor the courage of Negro soldiers.

  But Paris, too, had its hard edges. It was in Paris that my decision to call myself Londonderry seemed prescient, for anti-Semitism was spreading like a virus through Parisian intellectual life. The notion that Jews had certain hereditary flaws that rendered them incompatible with other ethnic groups started to take hold among French intellectuals in the 1880s and by the 1890s was widely embraced and often openly expressed. Though many Parisians were well-to-do, poverty afflicted many others. Anarchists, too, were shaping Parisian life in the 1890s; less than a year before my arrival an anarchist named Émile Henry detonated a bomb at the café next to the Gare Saint-Lazare that killed one person and wounded dozens more. Life in Paris was gay, enlightened, and lively, but not without its dark side.

  As Catherine and I walked the city, in her broken English she told me some of her life story, and I found her to be kind and interesting, if a bit needy. A provincial girl, she had come to Paris in her early twenties, drawn by the poets, writers, painters, and other artists who congregated in the city. She soon met Victor, a mechanical engineer by training, and a few years older than she. As the bicycle took hold of the French imagination in the 1880s, the mechanically inclined Victor opened a small bicycle shop selling and repairing various French wheels and, just a year before I arrived, began importing the Sterling, which was quickly acquiring an international reputation for its superb engineering. Catherine was now thirty-five years of age, Victor close to forty, and the great sadness of their life was their inability to have children.

  I have to confess to you, dear Mary, that both Victor and Catherine grew quite attached to me during our three weeks together. It would not be an exaggeration to say both, each in their own way, fell in love with me. I would receive many letters from them en route after leaving Paris and even when I returned home, plaintive letters written in Catherine’s hand but most written from both of them, pleading with me to respond, which, I am somewhat ashamed to say, I did only once. They dreamed of me, they said, they were desperate to hear from me, to know if I had returned home safely to Boston, to have me return to Paris.

  In one letter Catherine wrote of hard times. Victor was trying to make his own brand of bicycle and apparently invested much of his capital in the effort to little avail. In my one letter to them, written in October 1895, about a month after I had returned home, I explained my lack of communication with a white lie: that I had never received their earlier posts. I had, in fact, received several letters from them sent to American consulates along my route, but I was indisposed to respond as I found them cloying.

  Not long after receiving my letter Catherine replied, but her letter was mostly a litany of burdensome bad news that arrived as I was coping with my return to family problems of my own. My sister, Rosa, in ill health in New Jersey, was pleading constantly with me for money and making unreasonable demands for my presence, all as I was trying, with considerable difficulty, to reenter domestic life with Grandpa and the children.

  “You can’t believe that since two weeks ago, I was every night dreaming of you,” Catherine wrote that fall, “that you were coming to Paris and my husband who says he never dreams, did, too, about two or three times this week. We hope you will come again soon, how happy we would be all together, you would interest us so much.”

  The closer Catherine tried to draw near, the more repelled I was, but it was her hinting that they needed some financial help that convinced me I had no interest in sustaining the relationship, not in Paris and not via the mail. Catherine wrote that since I had left Paris less than a year earlier, they’d had to surrender their flat and move into “a little room” near the bicycle shop.

  “We are so happy together,” she added, “but we have much trouble in the business due to that cursed money.” She also mentioned that they were still unable to have a child and were “sorry about it,” but there was little I could do or say that would have been of help. The letter was signed “yours forever, C. Sloan.”

  As much as the Sloans, especially Catherine, had shared with me in Paris, how little I shared with them you can imagine, for her letters to me were addressed to “Miss Annie Londonderry.” They never so much as learned my real identity, because I never revealed it. They never learned I was married or that, unlike them, had, by the age of twenty-three, three children of my own. Though they gave me no reason to believe they were anti-Semitic, I don’t know how they might have reacted had I shared my real name with them. My circumspection was not so much a matter of deception but of necessity. Especially now that I was on foreign soil, I was completely immersed in my new identity; the farther from home I got in time and distance, the more thoroughly I had become a new woman whose past I could invent as easily as my future. My joy in this new skin was delicious, and I steered clear of conversation that would puncture the illusion of the gay, liberated, globe-girdling wheelwoman, Mlle. Londonderry.

  * * *

  I made sure, of course, that the Paris newspapers learned of my presence in the city. Paris was the bicycle capital of Europe. Cycling was a bona fide craze and an intense passion for almost all Parisians. One Paris writer, noting the popularity of the bicycle among all classes, wrote, “No class of the community is free from the passion, the workers as
well as the butterflies.” How I loved that turn of phrase: “as well as the butterflies”; it so perfectly described the socialites for whom the bicycle was little more than a status symbol.

  It was without difficulty, therefore, that I was able to arrange for the scribes of Paris to spill considerable ink about me and my venture. I believed that all press is good press when your aim is notoriety, so it didn’t bother me to have the French reporters describe my physical appearance quite differently than I was accustomed to in America, where I was repeatedly flattered as being good-looking or attractive or as a worthy representative of the fairer sex. But a dour and pompous correspondent for Le Figaro took it a bit far. After referring to France’s “fragile and delicious maidens,” he wrote:

  Truth be told, Miss Londonderry is not of their race, not even their sex. She belongs to that category of neutered beings, single women without a husband or children. Such women resemble neutered worker bees whose superiority of labor is the result of infertility. And the suppression of love and maternal function so profoundly alters in them any feminine personality that they are neither men nor women and they really constitute a third sex. Miss Londonderry belongs to this third sex. It is enough to see her masculine traits, her muscled physique, her athlete’s legs, her hands which appear strong enough to box vigorously, and everything masculine which emanates from her energetic being.

  (Le Figaro, December 7, 1894)

  What a hoot! I have to admit, though, he wasn’t far off when it came to “maternal instinct.” I had, of course, become more muscular riding from Boston to Chicago and thence to New York, but, truly, I had a good laugh when Catherine, with the help of one of her friends whose English was more fluent, read this article to me from the newspaper. Catherine, though, was mortified.

  In interviews I repeated many of the stories about my history that I had conjured from whole cloth aboard La Touraine; you just would not believe how gullible were the newspapermen who sat on the edges of their seats, giving me their rapt attention as I spun gold from dross. One wrote, “Her adventures? We would need an entire book to describe them. Attacked by a tramp in New York whom she shot and nearly killed next to a railroad track where she had fallen off her bicycle onto the rails at the moment a train was coming with phenomenal speed. It was truly a miracle that she escaped death and saved her bicycle.” Ha! To this day I remember sitting knee to knee on two chairs in Victor’s cramped showroom where this handsome young reporter had called on me, his piercing blue eyes innocent and wide, his attention rapt as I let my imagination run wild.