Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  Your loving daughter,

  Sister Thaddea

  The line directed to Grandpa, about his love for Mollie, was always, I believed, also directed at me by my omission. And how can I blame her?

  I have not seen or spoken to Mollie since she sent that letter nearly forty years ago. Your aunt Libbie has visited with her, but your uncle Simon remains furious with her to this day for the shame she brought upon the family. Your mother, too, has had only occasional contact with her. From the time you were born until this year, your aunt Mollie sent you birthday gifts, which your mother donated to a Jewish charity before you ever saw them.

  After we received the letter from Mollie, we sat shiva and recited the kaddish just as we would have had Mollie died, for to us that is precisely what had happened. At first it was a deep sense that she had betrayed not only us but the Jewish people. When she wrote letters to us we burned them unopened and again recited the kaddish. In more recent years the anger and pain has turned into regret, for I had betrayed her, a small girl not even six years old whose mother inexplicably disappeared from her life for well over a year to ride a bicycle around the world, disappeared a second time to California, and then disappeared her to boarding schools, seeing her but rarely. I never could bring myself to ask for her forgiveness. Sometimes too much time passes, and we carry the pain as a kind of penance.

  Though the anguish of Mollie’s conversion remains, and I will carry the burden of our rupture to my grave, I can’t help but think that perhaps in some way I freed her by dint of my own example. She even said as much in her letter, written when she was not much younger than I was when I freed myself by escaping on a bicycle. Like me, she created her own path, and I suppose hers was no more outlandish, really, than mine, though living the life of a nun in a Canadian convent is hardly my idea of freedom. But who am I to judge? There is so much I was unable to give my children, but maybe I gave Mollie, at least, the power to choose the life she wanted, to color outside the lines as I like to say.

  As long as I am in the mood to confess, there is one more thing I want to get off my chest, and it will, I hope, help you to understand your uncle, who, I am sure you have long noticed by now, is an odd and angry man. It was only after he graduated from high school in Quebec that he confided in your aunt Libbie that he suffered unspeakably at the hands of the priests. I only learned of this when Libbie gave me a copy of a letter he wrote to Mollie the year after her conversion. He had written out a second copy, which he gave to Libbie. He was twenty then, and his wounds were fresh. The letter also describes, quite accurately, I should say, how news of Mollie’s conversion was felt by Grandpa and me. He refused to refer to her as Sister Thaddea.

  November 14, 1912

  Dear Mollie,

  Had you pierced my heart with a murderous bullet, or with the glistening blade, I shouldn’t have felt the pang any stronger. My life, our lives, will be forever ruined by this curse you have inflicted on the family. We will live a life of degradation carrying this secret to our grave, for we will not breathe a word of what has become of you to anyone. With pain and sorrow I watch my harried young mother strive to keep up a home under impossibly removable obstacles. With a pain of intenseness I see her daily go to work. God! It’s terrible; it’s frightful. Insanity is a joy compared to this. Can’t you realize the extent of your damage, my dear sister? Your father is no longer gray, he is white. Your mother and mine is no longer gray, she is white. You are driving inch by inch a mother to her grave. Do I speak truthfully? Positively. And a father also. Mollie, I predict you will be a murderess in a very short time. Did God command us to kill or did he say, “Thou shalt not kill”? You forget who your mother is; the world famous globe-girdler has no charm for you, has she: a woman who was good enough to interview every living ruler and sovereign in the world. God, how can you remain as you do? Mollie, I spent many years of my life amongst these people who claim to be good by closing themselves up, when their leader told them to go out in the world and preach good and virtue. I know their innermost secrets, and someday the world will be startled; both sexes, I make no exceptions. The armies of the world will rise up against them. Do you want to be of them?

  Your brother,

  Simon

  Reading this letter again all these years later, painful as it is, I have to chuckle at one thing. I filled the heads of my children with stories of my bicycle ride that exceeded even those I told at the time, and I was, apparently, very convincing. But, just as the pain of Mollie’s conversion is one I have borne to this day, equally painful has been living with the knowledge of Simon’s abuse, which made Mollie’s choice all the more hurtful to him. Mollie and Simon suffered the most, I think, from my failures as a mother. Your aunt Libbie, despite a tempestuous and short-lived marriage, seemed to come through relatively unscathed, and your mother, too, but maybe I sometimes wear rose-colored glasses.

  * * *

  I will close with one final story because it seems, in many ways, to sum up my life. Young Simon was right about my going to work every day. About a year after returning home from California and reuniting with Grandpa, our bank balance quickly dwindling, I knew it was necessary for me to again make my way in the world financially. I was the family breadwinner, a heavy responsibility I took seriously.

  In the spring of 1902, a year or so after I had returned from California, I had a chance encounter that would open another door. I had taken the train into Manhattan just to enjoy the flowers in Central Park. After walking for nearly two hours, I stopped at a cafeteria on Forty-Second Street for a bite to eat. It was crowded, and I took the only available seat at the counter. Next to me, a man about ten years my senior was thumbing through a catalogue of women’s accessories—hats, belts, handbags, that sort of thing. He was gazing at it quite intently. Never at a loss as to how to start a conversation with strangers, I asked him if he was looking for a gift for his wife and offered to provide a feminine opinion on anything he thought would be of interest.

  “No, miss, I am a salesman for the company that makes the handbags in this catalogue,” he answered. “I’m just familiarizing myself with the new line.”

  The details are mundane, but over the next hour Morton Feldman and I chatted about his business, about our families, and about the prospects for business now that the country had emerged from the depression of the mid-1890s. Mr. Feldman told me that the company whose handbag line he represented made the basic leather bags but contracted for the straps, for it turned out that the processes for making each are quite different, and it was just more economical to buy the straps from a separate supplier. And, according to Feldman, the supplier was often way behind, because the market was large and they had no competition.

  To make a long story short, that was the beginning of Kay & Company (in business I went by Kay, not Kopchovksy), the small manufacturing firm we established in a space adjacent to our home in the Bronx. Grandpa did the books, I oversaw the manufacturing, and Feldman managed the sales. And we did quite well, starting with handbag straps and expanding to straps for dresses, brassieres, nightgowns, and other apparel.

  At its peak we employed twenty-five women who did the piecework, mostly immigrant women from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and even Africa, and we treated them well, paying wages above average. Small factories like ours were subject to frequent visits by city inspectors. Ostensibly they came to make sure the place was safe and that we weren’t abusing the workers, but really they came for small bribes. But I knew how to handle them. After all, I had handled myself with all kinds of people in all kinds of far-flung parts of the world; I could handle these weak, corrupt pissants. If the inspector was O’Malley, I poured on the Irish brogue. If his name was Martini, I had the accent of a Roman. If his name was Goldberg, I would kibbitz with him in Yiddish. The business did very well.

  When the factory building caught fire and burned to the ground in 1924, it took me over a year to settle with the insurance company. They initially deemed the fire “suspicious
” and refused to pay. When they finally did, I offered to buy Feldman’s half of the company, and he agreed, as he was getting on in years, and I used the rest to start a new company, Grace Strap & Novelty, at the corner of Twenty-Seventh Street and Third Avenue, where, as you know, I still went to work every day until earlier this year.

  I suppose, Mary dear, enough years will have passed by the time you read this, so I will tell you. The insurance company was right.

  Now, how much of what I have told you in this letter is true? How much of the bedtime stories I told you as a child were true? If you were sitting across from me now, I would wink and say, “My dear, I’m not entirely sure myself. Perhaps one day you will sort it all out.”

  Author’s Note

  In 1993, my mother Baila, named for her grandmother, Bennett’s wife, received a letter from a stranger who said he was researching the story of the first woman to circle the world on a bicycle, a woman named Annie Cohen Kopchovsky. He was hoping my mother might have information that would help him.

  Like Annie, my mother’s maiden name was Cohen, but it’s a common Jewish name. In addition to copies of a couple of newspaper articles about Annie, the writer laid out some of the genealogical research he had done, research that led him to locate and then write to my mother. The letter writer explained that Annie had a brother Bennett, and that for a time Annie and Bennett shared an address on Spring Street in Boston’s West End. Bennett, he wrote, had a son named Harry. My mother’s father was Harry Cohen, and her grandfather, who died well before she was born, was Bennett Cohen.

  My mother had never heard of Annie, or anything about a bicycle trip. On my mother’s behalf I wrote back and explained that while he’d apparently found the right family, we knew nothing about Annie and could not be of help.

  Ten years later, the same man wrote me to see if we had learned anything in the interim. We had not. I had kept his letter and the enclosures stashed away in a file. But I was now an avid cyclist, and I wondered why no one in my family—I had made a few queries over the years of family members, all of which came to naught—had heard of this rather remarkable ancestor and her improbable story. I decided to do some research of my own.

  The historical record of Annie’s life and her bicycle journey is rich in some ways, but frustratingly barren in others. She was a gifted self-promoter and left a trail of newspaper coverage around the world; many hundreds of pieces about her appeared in newspapers from New York to Paris, Singapore to San Francisco, and points in between, in large cities and small towns. I have quoted directly from several of them in this book. But no diary, if she ever kept one, survived, and precious little correspondence of any kind still exists. This left her largely unknowable.

  As I was tracking down newspaper accounts from around the world, a painstaking task because few newspaper archives were digitized and searchable online in the early 2000s, I was also trying to locate any distant relatives who might have a closer connection to Annie, biologically, than I did. I hired a professional who specialized in Jewish genealogy. The search was complicated by the fact that Cohen is a common Jewish name, and though Kopchovsky is not, many Jews, and this proved to be the case with Annie, Anglicized their names at some point; Annie’s became Kay, at least for business purposes. But after nearly a year of research we finally hit pay dirt when we located Annie’s burial place in a Jewish cemetery in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, and cemetery records that listed a contact for the family plot. Annie, Max, and their three youngest children are all buried in that plot; Mollie, Sister Thaddea, for obvious reasons, is not, though at the time I didn’t know why she alone among the six family members was not buried with them.

  The contact listed for the plot was a woman named Mary Levy Goldiner who, it turns out, is Annie’s only direct living biological descendant—her only grandchild. (Mary’s two children are adopted.) She is my second cousin once removed. When I wrote to Mary in the fall of 2004 explaining who I was, how we were related, and what I was interested in, I had no idea what her reaction might be, or if she would respond at all. I wasn’t even sure she was still alive. But about ten days after I sent my letter, desperately hoping this might help me crack Annie’s story wide open, she called me and in her gravelly voice said, “Peter, this is your long-lost cousin Mary.” I was excited beyond belief.

  A week later I was in her living room in Larchmont, New York, looking at photos of Annie (the first I had ever seen, even after more than a year of research) and other artifacts of her bicycle journey, and the sensational pieces she penned for the New York World, all of which Mary had stored in her basement. More than these physical artifacts, Mary also had vivid memories of Annie, for she was a teenager when Annie died in November 1947 and had been very close to her. She was probably the only living person with any direct knowledge of the ghost I’d been chasing around the world for a year.

  Mary thought I’d been sent by God, “someone upstairs,” she told me. She was in her early seventies then, I was in my early fifties, and ever since Annie had died, she felt she had an obligation to revive Annie’s legacy; that Annie would have wanted and expected that. But life had passed and her basement remained the dusty repository of a story completely lost to history. Now I had appeared, not only interested in Annie’s story, but a relative to boot. If I were to write Annie’s story, Mary could feel, at long last, that she had fulfilled her grandmother’s fondest wish.

  For three more years I researched Annie’s journey, following the many clues left behind in Mary’s basement. Many people, including some publishers, urged me to write Annie’s story as historical fiction given the gaps in the historical record, gaps that remain to this day. But I felt that to do so would simply obscure the matter; I wanted to write the story as it really happened as best I could.

  There came a point in my research when I could not escape the conclusion that while Annie did indeed travel around the world and rode a bicycle thousands of miles in the process, her own story, as she recounted it to reporters along the way, simply didn’t add up. For example, no one riding a bicycle, even today, could have traversed India and China in the few weeks between the time she left Marseille and arrived in Japan. And the stories she related along the way are riddled not just with inconsistencies but with outright fabrications. On more than one occasion she claimed she was a student at Harvard Medical School. When I called Harvard to see if I might be able to locate her transcript I was told that Harvard Medical School didn’t admit women until 1945. There are countless other examples. She was a serial fabulist with a rich imagination, and she spun improbable tales to keep herself and her audiences entertained. It wasn’t just reporters she regaled with these stories, but large audiences who came to hear her speak as she made her way. She was building her fame, and the further ’round the globe she got, the taller the tales became. Sorting fact from fiction became my primary task as I researched and wrote her story in a book called Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride, published in 2007.

  When I first realized that Annie wasn’t exactly what she appeared to be, that her purchase on the title “first woman to cycle around the world” was tenuous at best, I was disappointed. When I began chasing her across the years and around the globe, I saw my task as doing the research that would validate that claim. But in time I came to believe there was an even more interesting story to be discovered, and a much more complicated woman to write about. I found myself charmed by her utter unpredictability, her willingness to tell any story, no matter how far-fetched, to advance her celebrity. There may have been something pathological afoot, but I preferred to see her as my eccentric great-grandaunt (though I was writing about a twenty-three-year-old woman), like the ditzy older women in Arsenic and Old Lace. In short, the true story of Annie Londonderry would have to include a veritable catalogue of her untruths. Writing historical fiction, as some suggested, about a woman who was an expert in creating her own fictions, about her own life and her own experiences, seemed redundant
. After all, she was writing her own historical fiction in real time as she traveled.

  In the years since Around the World on Two Wheels was published, a short documentary film has been made about Annie (The New Woman), and a musical called SPIN, inspired by Annie, has toured all across Canada. Another musical, also inspired by Annie, Ride, has been produced in London. A street in Bend, Oregon, has been named for her. The book itself has been translated and published in German, Italian, Korean, and Czech. Articles about Annie have appeared in dozens of publications around the world; book chapters and countless blog posts have been written, podcasts created, and a children’s book published. Annie was the subject of an episode of the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum in 2016. In November 2019, as part of its “Overlooked No More” series of obituaries of notable women and people of color whose deaths went unreported, the New York Times ran a full-length obituary of Annie; it took up the better part of a page in the paper, complete with photograph. The same obituary appeared the next day in the Boston Globe. The West End Museum, dedicated to keeping alive the memory of Boston’s old West End neighborhood, the neighborhood Annie fled in 1894 and which was razed during the “urban renewal” wave of the 1950s, mounted an exhibit about her in 2020. I had an 1890-era Sterling bicycle restored and painted the color of Annie’s (cream white), a bicycle now on loan as part of an exhibition on women and cycling that started at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Israel and that has traveled to Germany, Poland, and will make its last stop in Ottawa, Canada. As Annie had hoped, her story has been rescued from the dustheap of history, and it’s been gratifying to watch to say the least.