Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  Illustration from Le Figaro. Those are advertisements pinned to my pant legs.

  Having received considerable attention in the newspapers in the week or so after my arrival, I found it relatively easy to collect adverts from local merchants in the neighborhood where the Sloans lived, much as I had started doing in earnest in Buffalo, in the form of banners and patches of fabric I could pin to my riding costume. Though the Sterling had yet to arrive from Le Havre, I borrowed one from Victor’s bicycle shop, a model not unlike my own. When Catherine and I were not walking the streets of the city, or I was not out walking alone, I would spin my way through the city and became quite the rage as an advertising medium. Nothing breeds success like success, and I soon found I had more offers for this novel brand of advertising than I could accommodate, for within a week’s time there was nary an inch still available for rent; I was covered from head to toe with adverts for everything from dress shops to apothecaries to restaurants. To repay Victor for the loan of a bicycle and for my lodging (remember, I was to accept nothing gratuitously), I placed on my back a large advert for his bicycle shop and rebuffed offers from his competitors, which, in a city as bicycle-crazy as Paris, were many.

  As luck would have it, my stay in Paris coincided with the magnificent Salon du Cycle, one of the largest bicycle exhibitions in the world. Bicycle makers from all over Europe and America, including Sterling, came to show off their wares, and I was engaged at the handsome sum of fifteen dollars American a day for three days to appear in my riding costume and talk with visitors about the virtues of the Sterling wheel. It was also arranged there for me to deliver a lecture, in English, of course, because the only other language I had any practice in was Yiddish, and I drew a large crowd of curious onlookers, dressed as I was in my pantaloons and men’s riding jacket still covered with adverts.

  I don’t know how many who came to catch a glimpse of the woman billed as “Mlle. Londonderry, Globe-Girdling Girl Extraordinaire” spoke English, but it didn’t seem to matter. Every few minutes I would shout, “Vive la France!” and the crowd would go wild! In a phrase that could be a motto for my entire modus operandi, I told Victor and Catherine when I returned to their flat that night, “I found out what they liked and gave them plenty of it!” I was discovering that I was, among other things, a show-woman at heart, and this trip had become the movable stage on which I produced the greatest show of my life.

  As I said, the Sterling, my Sterling, arrived in Paris from Le Havre two days before Christmas, a welcome holiday present, for I had grown quite fond of my own wheel during the miles from Chicago to New York. I could have continued on a substitute if necessary, but a woman and her wheel that have traveled together through rain and wind and cold form a bond. My Sterling now felt as much a part of me as my left arm or right leg.

  I set my departure date from Paris as December 30. The Sloans and I spent a quiet Christmas together. Aware that I could carry little with me, the Sloans gave me a gift of a jeweled pin I could fix to my lapel; I had a local artist make a fine sketch of me in my riding attire, which I signed and gave to them as a memento of our time together.

  After Christmas I called on the American consulate in Paris for I needed the signature of the consul there, or some other official, to prove I had reached Paris. There I received a surprise gift from the consul general, a New Yorker with an Irish brogue named O’Rourke: an American flag of fine silk on a staff about two feet long.

  “Display it prominently, Miss Londonderry,” he said. “It will protect you wherever you go.”

  I thanked him, quipped that I would rather have expected to encounter him in Dublin than Paris, and assured him I would take his advice, and I did. I immediately realized how traveling with the Stars and Stripes affixed to my wheel would heighten the spectacle. That evening, with Victor’s help, we affixed a small mount that would allow me to fly the flag from my handlebars when desirable, though I would most of the time keep it tied tight to the top tube with twine.

  * * *

  Before sailing for France from New York I had dispatched several telegrams back to Boston: one to Alonzo Peck, who, though I was no longer riding the Columbia wheel, I felt obliged to keep apprised of my progress, for the colonel still had a vested interest in my success or failure; one to my brother Bennett; and another to Susie. I apprised each that should they wish to reach me by post or telegram in Paris, I would be at the Sloans and provided the address. Three days after Christmas the postman delivered a small packet of letters postmarked in Boston a few weeks earlier.

  Alonzo wrote a brief note of congratulations for my having reached France, assured me that switching my mount from the Columbia to the Sterling had done nothing to diminish his admiration for me or his fervent hope that I would succeed in my venture. He said nothing about the colonel, though, and I wondered if I had burned an important bridge with my switch to the Sterling.

  From Bennett I received the usual news of the children’s activities, that all, along with his own children, had suffered with a cold that exhausted Baila and him around Thanksgiving, but that all was well now. The letter was, happily, free of any recriminations about my absence, a welcome sign that he was done trying to persuade me to cut the journey short and return home. My persistence, I surmised, had worn down any hopes that he might, as he would have said, “talk some sense into me.” He enclosed a little drawing Mollie had done of me on a bicycle with the Eiffel Tower in the background; she was old enough to understand where her mother was, but I am sure by that point, six months gone, I had become something of an abstraction. Still, deep down, I was cheered to see that she seemed to have some vague understanding of what I was doing even if it was terribly unfair to her.

  From Susie I received a letter that, in truth, I had been expecting for some time. She was, she told me, engaged to be married. It was a letter received with some sadness, but mostly resignation and understanding. Few women, especially society women of Beacon Hill, no matter their feelings for other women, could forever resist the pressures all around them to conform their lives to the expectations of family, friends, and neighbors. In her late twenties, Susie was already, by the standards of the day, what we called an old maid, well past the age when most respectable women had already found a husband and settled into a life of domesticity, tending to babies and young children and ensuring a peaceable and well-kept home for the man of the house. Her letters were, as I said, among the relatively few I saved in my life: I understood that this one in particular was a letter of moment, one that I might, in the years ahead, want to revisit, if just to remember how near impossible it was for such a love to survive in those days. I am enclosing it here for you to read so that you will better understand just how hard it was (and still is) to live true to oneself.

  December 5, 1894

  My dear Annie,

  In the nearly six months you have been gone, you have never left that special place in my heart that will always, always belong to you. My feelings for you have never changed and never will. But when we next see each other, the terms of engagement, if you will, will have changed irrevocably. As an astute and keen observer of life in all its complexity you know well the harsh reality of love between two women in this rigid society of ours.

  When I received your last telegram sent from New York, it took me several days to reckon with how to tell you the news this letter bears, news that will, I suspect, not entirely surprise you but which, I fear, will pain you as it does me.

  Not a week has gone by since I turned 18 when my parents, my siblings, my friends, and my acquaintances haven’t asked me when I would finally settle down, marry, and start a family. My seeming disinterest, badly hidden beneath rote recitations that it would be “soon,” was a puzzlement to all, but to my knowledge none suspected that the reason for my apparent apathy was that I was not in the least attracted to men, they are mostly a boorish lot, but keenly attracted to brilliant, independent-minded women, an attraction that found its ultimate fulfillment in you. />
  For reasons I cannot fully articulate or fathom myself, the pressure to conform to the expectations of all around me, and to the social mores of this stodgy old town, have worn me down. I have searched my soul for the reason and believe it is this: there is within me a maternal instinct I have long suppressed but which age has teased from me. If it were possible to have a child without the assistance of a man I should be glad to do it!

  Back in October I chanced to meet a nice, gentle, shy man of about 30 at a party on Joy Street. His family, too, was constantly pestering him about his bachelorhood at an age when most men have married. I found him quick-witted in conversation, well read, and industrious; he is an attorney engaged in the practice of maritime law at a firm in Boston, hails originally from Brookline, graduated from Boston Latin, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School. And, you will certainly appreciate this, he is an avid rider of the wheel. Why he never married I have never asked, nor has he asked the same of me. He will be a good husband and father, though I expect my feelings for him, which I would describe as fondness, will never come close to rivaling those I had, and still have, for you.

  We will, of course, renew our friendship on your return, though on different terms. I am to be wed in the spring, so when you return I will be Mrs. Alfred Constable. My dear Annie, I think I know you as well as I have anyone in my life and you, me. So I say with confidence that this news, though it will be accompanied by some despair, will be met with even greater understanding, for few understand as you do what it means to be a woman in 1894.

  Do write whenever you have the chance. I peruse the newspapers every day for the short items that keep me apprised, more or less, of your progress, and read every newspaper clipping you send me from the road, which I beg you continue to do. It would mean the world to me to hear from you directly as often as you can, for what remains unchanged is my deep and abiding love for you.

  Forever yours,

  Susie

  Though Susie accurately predicted my emotional response to her letter, I found my reaction more muted, and less debilitating, than one might have supposed. I was now so thoroughly inhabiting the character I had created, out of both necessity and by choice, that Annie Kopchovsky seemed like a remote cousin whose pain I empathized with but felt with greatly diminished impact. Perhaps, I thought, this abrupt and unwelcome change in my life would be felt with more immediacy when I returned home. For now, here in Paris, nothing, as a practical matter, had changed. Susie had not been a part of my day-to-day life for six months, and I expected to be gone and away from her presence for another nine. It was surprisingly easy to put this news aside, into a little invisible compartment, to be dealt with, if at all, many months hence. I wasn’t angry, and when I allowed myself to think about it at all, my love for Susie was, like hers, undiminished. Indeed, though she passed away almost ten years ago, it never did extinguish itself entirely, though I saw her again only a handful of times after the trip had ended and before I moved our family to New York in 1896. After the move, we never would see each other again, though we corresponded from time to time. Susie’s marriage to Alfred, whom I met but once early in 1896, lasted until his death in 1930. To her everlasting regret, Susie was never able to bear a child; several pregnancies resulted in miscarriages. It was one of the great sorrows of her life.

  * * *

  The day before my departure south I gave my final Paris interview to a writer from the newspaper Matin, which means “morning” in French. I really pulled out the stops for this one, telling the reporter I was born to wealth but had temporarily lost the fortune in a family lawsuit. Nevertheless, I said of the prize money I was trying to claim, “winning money preoccupies me little. What I want is to show what a young American who has the will and the resolution can do with very simple resources.” I claimed to be a doctor of law and an accomplished pianist, but refused to make use of these skills to help finance my journey because that would be too easy. And to ensure that some mystery lingered behind me, I closed the interview by saying that Miss Londonderry was my stage name, and a pseudonym I used as a journalist. “My real name,” I said, “is much more beautiful and of course more well known, but I can’t tell you for the moment. You will know it if I succeed.” There is an old adage in show business, dear: Always leave them wanting more!

  * * *

  On the morning of December 30, 1894, I bid Catherine Sloan adieu. She sobbed, something I found awkward, for the depth of her feeling for me was not matched, though she was kind and agreeable and I was fond of her. Victor, who tried to be stoic, looked crestfallen, though he would, along with his brother James, cycle with me for some distance out of the city.

  The weather was cold and wet as we stood in front of the Porte Doree café on the Avenue Daumesnil from which we would depart. With Catherine’s help, we had on a small piece of cloth written in French, “Miss Annie Londonderry from Boston (America) is traveling around the world on her Sterling bicycle, built like a watch, with only a penny. Please show her the way to Marseille.” On the inside breast pocket of my riding jacket, I sewed the piece of cloth in case I needed help along the way.

  As in America, nearly every village and town in France had a wheelman’s club, and as I had on my trip to New York from Chicago, I planned to alert the local papers along my route as to my impending arrival, knowing that such news would likely be seen by the local cyclists who might escort me into and out of their towns and, in turn, alert other clubs along my way. Such was the extraordinary popularity of the wheel in France, I knew I could count on an enthusiastic reception wherever I rode in the country and make some money to boot. Indeed, the major newspapers and magazines in Paris had devoted so much space to me during my stay there that I had already achieved a high level of celebrity throughout the country.

  As in America, few roads outside of some in the cities were paved, and wet weather often turned the dirt thoroughfares into slick, muddy messes. And so it was for the twenty miles from Paris to Lieusaint. Victor, James, and I often had to dismount and push our bicycles along. In dry conditions the ride might have taken two hours, but on this horrid day it took twice as long.

  We took a break in Lieusaint to dry off and get a bite to eat before slogging on through the dense, magnificent, and mysterious forests of Fontainebleau, and finally to Nemours where, relieved, we checked into Hôtel de l’Ecu de France. In nine hours of riding we had covered fewer than fifty miles, slow progress even by the standards of the day, but it felt good to be on the road and moving once again.

  I fell asleep shortly after dinner, exhausted by the difficult cycling we had done that day, a deep and satisfying sleep.

  The next morning, the last of 1894, dawned cold and snowy, but I would not allow the inclement weather to slow my progress. It was, after all, winter in France, and I expected to confront unfavorable conditions.

  The Sloans had been kind and congenial hosts, but I felt smothered by their constant solicitousness. My element was now to be on my wheel and moving forward pedal stroke by pedal stroke. It was here that I bid farewell to a downcast Victor and his brother James. Victor was such a forlorn, down-on-his-luck fellow; his bicycle shop was struggling, he and Catherine were trying without success to have a child, and he seemed daunted that he now had to ride the return fifty miles in the wintry weather. James suggested they take the train, but Victor, perhaps embarrassed at the prospect of riding in the warmth and comfort of a railcar as I journeyed south by wheel, rejected the idea.

  A crowd of several dozen townspeople gathered outside the hotel to see me off. I shook many hands, signed autographs, and gave brief remarks in English, of course, which they politely pretended to understand. Two employees of the local bike shop arrived on their wheels and offered to be my escort for the day, an offer I gladly accepted.

  Within an hour the weather turned positively frightful; the wind picked up (a headwind from the south, unfortunately) and the snow grew heavier. It was dark by the time we arrived in Montargis, a mere twenty miles
from where we began the day. Bundled up as I was in every piece of clothing I had, and some loaned to me by my companions, freedom of movement was constricted and the pedaling hard. Yet my spirits were high that New Year’s Eve in Montargis, where, it seemed, half the town came to the hotel where we were staying to celebrate the arrival of the “globe-girdler, Mlle. Londonderry,” now a fixture on the pages of newspapers throughout the country. To the French I was a real celebrity, if an eccentric one; a bright light on a dark midwinter’s night as the calendar turned to 1895.

  * * *

  It was a new year, but the same old dreary weather as I rode south along the national highway for Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, where I arrived in a very good state but covered in mud. The temperature, hovering just above freezing, had softened the road surface, and with each turn of the pedals mud from the front wheel spattered my pants from the waist down, and mud flung up by the rear wheel covered my back. In La Charité-sur-Loire the local representative of France’s largest cycling organization, the Union Vélocipédique de France, beseeched me to take the train to Lyon, some one hundred and seventy miles south, because of the deplorable state of the roads ahead. To this suggestion I was not averse, for the clock was ticking, and given the state of the roads it might well take another full week to reach Lyon at the rate I was traveling. I told the gentleman I would ponder the question overnight.