Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  * * *

  By mid-October I had still heard nothing from Alonzo about the prize money, and I made no effort to press him. I was eagerly waiting for the story of my bicycle journey to appear in the Sunday World where it would be read by hundreds of thousands of people. I didn’t want the colonel to render his verdict until the story was published. Indeed, I had gone way out on a limb in the story, claiming that I had already collected the prize money!

  Then, on October 20, 1895, as Mr. Goddard promised, the entire front page of the special-feature section of the Sunday World, perhaps the most widely read newspaper page in America, was given over to the only first-person account of my journey ever published.

  THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY EVER UNDERTAKEN BY A WOMAN, cried the headline. Even more remarkable, however, was the byline, a decision about which I was not consulted, but one that thrilled me completely. I was no longer Miss Londonderry, or even Mrs. Kopchovksy, but Nellie Bly, Jr.! This was my debut as the successor to the great Nellie Bly in one of the country’s most important and prestigious newspapers. The story of the Wild Man followed just two weeks later. I couldn’t have been more excited.

  To be compared to the most celebrated woman journalist of the time, and to have my journey compared favorably to the one that made her famous, was more than a great compliment. It was, for my private purposes, great leverage. Annie Londonderry was well enough known that anyone familiar with her journey would have realized that Annie Londonderry and Nellie Bly, Jr., were one and the same person.

  Sketch that accompanied my story in the New York World, October 20, 1895.

  The day after the article appeared, I picked up several copies from the newsstand in Scollay Square. (The World usually reached Boston the next day.) The story’s publication proved I had a prominent soapbox and the means to make myself heard to a wide audience. I tore the page from one of the copies, autographed it with an inscription designed to flatter (“For Alonzo, who made it possible”), and sealed it in an envelope with a note:

  Dear Alonzo,

  Perhaps you have seen this already, but I wanted you to have a keepsake of what we accomplished together. I know the World got a little ahead of itself in the introduction where it says, “Her trip also decided a wager made that no woman could accomplish such a feat.” But given that it is now public knowledge, I fear that were the colonel to withhold the prize, it would reflect badly on him and the company. I have accepted an offer from the World to become a reporter for them and plan to move my family as soon as practical to New York. But to do so depends on my securing the funds promised for making the journey. I do hope you will speak with the colonel as soon as possible. Fondly,

  Mrs. Kopchovksy

  Three days later I received a note asking me to come to Alonzo’s office the next day at noon. I was there promptly. My worst fear, that an enraged Colonel Pope, angered at being boxed into a corner, would be there to confront me did not come to pass.

  “I doubt I shall ever meet a woman as clever and, dare I say, as capable of pulling off a scheme as you, Mrs. Kopchovksy, and I mean that as a compliment,” Alonzo said. “Men, especially men of industry such as the colonel, are used to such scheming, to probing the weaknesses in their competitors and adversaries, and using whatever leverage they can muster to their advantage. When I met with the colonel and presented him with your article, I expected him to turn purple with rage and reject the pressure that you clearly intended. But he didn’t. His respect was grudging, but it was respect nevertheless. He didn’t say a word, but I know him well, and what I saw was a man who admired in you traits he knows himself to possess. Without saying a word, he sat down at his desk, opened the top drawer, and wrote out this draft.”

  Alonzo took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a check for ten thousand dollars drawn on the Bank of Boston and a note on a small piece of stationery with the colonel’s name on top. Written in a neat and stylish cursive, it read, simply: “Well played, Mrs. Kopchovksy. Well played. A. Pope.”

  Whether Colonel Pope ever collected ten thousand dollars from Mr. Dowe, or Mr. Dowe ever collected twenty thousand dollars from Colonel Pope, I do not know. They could have debated the question of “did she or didn’t she” for years without resolution, for I left a long trail of ambiguity, twenty-five-thousand miles long, in fact.

  P.S.

  I was going to leave it there, Mary dear, but over the past few days I have wrestled with a difficult question: How much should I tell you about what happened to our family, your family, in the years that followed my bicycle trip, for some of it is very painful? But I would be remiss if I went to my grave with this heavy heart about the price others have paid, and may yet pay, for my adventurous spirit and frequent absences, some, like the one of 1894–95, prolonged. You will be an adult when you read this, if my wishes are honored, a woman of thirty, perhaps with a family of your own. You deserve to know the truth. It may help you to understand yourself.

  Much of what I am about to tell you has been a weight I have carried for decades now, though I have said nary a word of my burden to anyone. Perhaps this is my confession, for I am not proud of some of the decisions I made. They were selfish, to be sure, but I doubt my life would have been better had I not made them. I probably would have escaped my life in some other way had the opportunity to take up Colonel Pope’s wager not presented itself. I did what I felt I needed to do at the time to preserve my own sanity, and believed, perhaps self-servingly, that doing so was important to the well-being of the children, too, especially my daughters. I cannot change it now. I just hope you will not judge me harshly, for we have always been close.

  * * *

  We moved to New York the month after the story of my bicycle ride was published in the Sunday World, into a house in the Bronx that I purchased for twenty-five hundred dollars, a handsome sum in those days. For Bennett and Baila it was a mixed blessing. They were sad to see us go, but, I think, relieved, too, for we had leaned heavily on them even as they had their hands full with their own growing family.

  I met Susie, now married, for tea the day before we left. Our conversation was awkward and unsatisfying, but important nevertheless to bring some closure to our star-crossed romance. There were no hard feelings, just a shared sense of sadness for what once was and might have been, though Susie seemed reasonably content in her life with Mr. Constable.

  Even after the trip ended, I still took a ribbing from some in the press. From as far away as Singapore, a few were still feeling scorched. It bothered me but little, for I had succeeded in my larger purpose. This little item appeared three months after I put my wheel down in Chicago. I get a pleasant tingle down my spine and a smile when I read it now!

  Miss Annie Londonderry, the lady bicyclist, is held up to Exhibition by the writer of Sporting Notes in the China Mail, as “a brilliant and original fictionalist” in her own account of her travels, the battles she said she saw and the wounds she declared she had received. Reverence for the Eternal Verities compels us to affirm that this sporting damsel has fibbed fluently and incessantly all along the line. Perhaps it would be politer to say that she has displayed a consistent feminine disregard for common, coarse ordinary facts, and has invested her wanderings with the fanciful play of a graceful and inventive imagination. That is much nicer. But we fear thou wilt come no more, Gentle Annie, this way round. You would have too many things to explain.

  (The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, December 17, 1895)

  Over the following months I wrote a couple dozen stories for the World, all sensationalized accounts of decidedly more mundane matters. I went to New Jersey to visit a commune established by a self-proclaimed messiah. I went undercover to expose the secrets of a New York matchmaker for lonely hearts. I wrote about a women-only stock exchange near Wall Street and rode the New York mail train, where I became the first woman to sort the mail on the overnight run from upstate New York into the city. I am leaving you with copies of all of them a
s they may be of interest to you and your own children someday.

  But my career at the World, such as it was, turned out to be brief, for in the summer of 1896 I started to feel unwell and discovered that I was pregnant with your mother, something I had not intended to happen. I was no longer able to go out on assignments, and by August of that year the doctor told me I needed complete bed rest or I would risk losing the baby. Fortunately, the money I had earned during my journey plus the prize money I received from Colonel Pope allowed us to live comfortably for quite a while, but my stint as Nellie Bly’s successor was over.

  Your mother was born in early 1897. In late 1899, when she was not quite three years old, I left home yet again. Shortly before the new year I told Grandpa that I had hired a woman to help care for the children, four of them now, and that I would be taking the train to California to try to regain my health. You see, dear, I had become terribly depressed after the birth of your mother and was utterly incapable of attending to the family in any way. Not physically and not emotionally. The modern term is postpartum depression, and it lasted for a long while. I began to wonder if Le Figaro had it right when they wrote of me that I had suppressed all love and maternal function.

  It was an impulsive decision, and I could not answer Grandpa’s questions. No, I did not know how long I would be gone. No, I did not know where exactly I would be, for I planned no further ahead than to take the train across the continent. No, I could not promise that I would return, though I hoped the trip would be restorative and allow me to come back and be a proper mother and wife, much as I thought, naively, that the bicycle trip would.

  My memory of the train ride is fuzzy. It took about a week. I spoke to no one except perfunctorily. Mostly I gazed at the passing scenery trying to make sense of my life. I arrived in San Francisco some four years after I had stepped off the Belgic, having sailed there from Japan. I took a room by the week near Fisherman’s Wharf and from there penned a note to Mark Johnson, the man I had fallen in love with in California and who had proposed to me, and had it delivered to the Olympic Club. His reply came two days later. He was, needless to say, stunned to hear that I was in the city. We had corresponded for a little while after we parted ways in Los Angeles. I had demurred on his marriage proposal but was vague about why, and it had been nearly three years since we’d had any contact. But he was happy to hear I was in town. He met me the following day in the lobby of the Palace Hotel, where we had stayed four years earlier.

  The moment I saw him, still so handsome, I knew something had changed. He was warm, eager to hear of all that had transpired since we had last corresponded, but the spark between us had ebbed away. I told him everything, my real name, of Grandpa and the children, all of it. He was shocked, to say the least, but bore me no ill will for having misled him by omission when we rode through California several years before. I think he was actually rather dazzled that I had pulled it all off—keeping my real identity a secret, I mean. And he seemed to understand my reasons, but maybe he was just being polite.

  When I finally stopped talking he told me news of his life, which included marriage and a young son, not even a year old. I suppose I was disappointed but not surprised. He was, as they say, quite the catch. I had not traveled west intending to renew our romance, at least not consciously, but it was now clear that the memories of our time together would be the full story of our love affair. We parted with an embrace; no words were needed. We still had the mutual attraction that brought us together four years earlier, but we both knew this was goodbye forever.

  I made an excursion to Yosemite Valley, a place of beauty beyond words, and then, simply because a fellow tourist I met hailed from Ukiah, about a hundred miles north of San Francisco, traveled there, rented a room in a boardinghouse, and took a job as a salesclerk in a dry goods store. For a year I lived anonymously and alone in Ukiah, keeping very much to myself and revealing virtually nothing to the curious who wondered who the quiet new woman in town was. I wrote to Grandpa every month, mostly to assure him that I was all right, and his letters back were so typical of him—newsy, matter-of-fact, and always with a single question: When will you be coming home?

  By the time I returned to Boston in early 1901, having been gone a little over a year, Grandpa seemed to have aged a decade, and I suppose it’s no wonder. He had been, with help from a series of women he had to hire because none stayed on the job more than a couple of months, raising four young children, including a toddler, on his own. Through it all, the bicycle trip, my long absence in California, and my utter unpredictability, he never spoke of divorce. Ours wasn’t the marriage of anyone’s dreams, and Grandpa was hardly pleased with my repeated comings and goings and lengthy absences. Yet he remained faithful to our marriage and to our family, refusing, quietly, to let it fall apart and carrying the burdens of two with little help from me. In his way, even though he probably felt powerless to stop me, he enabled me to clear a path for myself few women of the day could have walked (or biked). I wish I had told him before he died how much that meant to me. He was a good man, your Grandpa. Not many would have put up with what he did.

  Mollie, now twelve, had been attending a public school near the house in the Bronx, as had Libbie and Simon. Your mother was still too young for school. I was, to all of them, still a distant stranger. About a month after my return from California I made a decision that would have profound consequences for the children, for the entire family, consequences that were, in retrospect, completely foreseeable, but which I did not glimpse at all at the time.

  Grandpa was weary. I was emotionally unable to nurture the children and provide them with the love every child deserves. Maybe that explains why, of my four children, only your mother had a child: you. She was, after all, not yet born when I first disappeared. Honestly, I am at a loss to this day to explain the decision I made, but I determined that the children should be sent away to school come the fall.

  I had heard that there was an excellent French-speaking boarding school for girls in Lewiston, Maine, run by the Dominican Sisters, that the environment was nurturing but strict. It also had the advantage of being not terribly far from my sister Sarah’s home in Bath. But, I am sure you are wondering, why on earth would a Jewish family send a child to Catholic boarding school, and to that question I have no good answer. Grandpa of course, was appalled—he was far more devout than I was—but again I had made up my mind. The school had a good reputation, it was affordable, near my sister’s, and that was that. Grandpa fretted that his two daughters would be indoctrinated in the theology of the Church, a concern I dismissed as far-fetched.

  Early in September we put Mollie and Libbie on the train to Boston with their suitcases and told Mollie to keep a close eye on her sister. Bennett promised he would fetch them at the station, though he was as appalled as Grandpa that his nieces were being dispatched not just to a boarding school, but a Catholic one at that. The girls would spend the weekend with their aunt and uncle and cousins before again boarding a train bound for Portland, where the nuns would meet several girls all heading for the school in Lewiston.

  The morning we took them to Grand Central Station, Mollie was subdued, stoic, and slightly bewildered. Libbie, two years younger, seemed to think it was all a big adventure. There were no tears except for Grandpa’s, and he did his best to hide them. I told the girls they would be home at Christmastime, to study hard and make friends, and that they would be well cared for at school.

  As for your uncle Simon, we sent him off at the tender age of seven to a school for boys in Arthabaska, Quebec, a school recommended by the Dominican Sisters. I confess, Mary, we never visited the children at school and saw them only at Christmastime and in the summer. They wrote letters home, letters filled with news about their studies, complaints about the food, and about the friends they were making. If they ever wrote forlorn letters, or angry letters, or anything likely to arouse our concerns, those were probably confiscated by the nuns and the priests before they were ever sent
.

  When your mother reached school age, I decided it would be better to keep her closer to home and enrolled all three girls at Mount Saint Mary’s, another Catholic school in Newburgh, just a two-hour train ride up the Hudson from the city.

  Looking back on it now, it was a harsh decision to dispatch the children this way, a selfish decision. So many of my decisions were. But given how inadequate I was as a mother, perhaps it wasn’t such a selfish decision after all. Who can say?

  * * *

  At the beginning of this letter, if you can call such a long account a letter, I told you that you had an aunt Mollie, which I suspect came as a surprise to you, and that she had died when she was twenty-three or, to be more precise, that she was dead to me. Oh, Mary, this is the hardest part and my biggest regret now that I am an old woman.

  Why I was surprised to receive the letter I do not know. In retrospect it all seems to have been so predictable, and Grandpa’s fears, which I so summarily dismissed more than a decade earlier, had come to pass. The letter was postmarked Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and dated April 15, 1911. It was direct and to the point.

  Dearest Mother and Father,

  More than ten years ago we stood together on a train platform in New York City. It was the day Libbie and I left for school in Maine. For years I felt I had no home, no place where I was accepted and loved without condition. I say this not to hurt you, and I do forgive you, for I believe you did the best you could. In Maine and later New York, my teachers, the Sisters, became my family. In time I also came to see the Church as my home and to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. I have recently come here, to Saskatchewan, to live in a convent with the Sisters of Sion and to become a nun and a schoolteacher at the academy here. I am most happy here and believe this is where I was meant to be. I have a new name, as well, Sister Thaddea of Sion. It is not my desire to cause you any pain, though I know this will not be welcome news. Nor is it my desire to cut myself off from my family. Please do not try to change my mind. This is the life I have chosen, and you, Mother, should understand as well as anyone that we must each choose our own path and fulfill our own destiny no matter how unusual it may seem to others. Father, I know how hurt you will be by this news, but do know that I have always known that you loved me. I do hope to have a letter from you when you are able.