by Wally Lamb
“Where would I go?” I asked him “Anywhere. Just throw some things in a bag, get in the car, and drive until you’re tired. You got a lot of thinking to do, Caelum, and if you’re like me, you do your best thinking at the wheel.”
And so that was what I did. Packed a bag, gave Jerry a key, and started toward the door. Then I stopped. I went back into the bedroom and grabbed Lizzy Popper’s story. Wherever the hell I was going to sleep that night, I would take it along. Finish it before I crashed.
chapter thirty-three
In the years following the Civil War, many female abolitionists transferred their energies to the causes of temperance and women’s suffrage. Lizzy Popper gave tacit support to both of these movements, but she was active in neither. A chance reunion with Maude Morrison, the former Connecticut State Prison inmate for whom Popper had once advocated, reignited her interest in prison reform for women, and it was this feminist cause that would become the focus of her later years.
Maude Morrison’s imprisonment at the age of seventeen had been a classic case of blaming the victim. Morrison had emigrated from Ireland the year before and had found work as a barmaid at a New Haven tavern popular with Yale College students. Morrison was raped and impregnated by two inebriated but well-connected collegians who charged that she had seduced them. She was found guilty of “being in manifest danger of falling into vice” and sentenced to the state prison at Wethersfield.
Sequestered with a handful of other female inmates in the windowless attic of the Wethersfield facility, Morrison resisted the sexual demands of guards and trusties and was flogged for insubordination. Midwifed by her fellow inmates, she birthed a stillborn in the sixth month of her pregnancy and nearly died from subsequent infection.
An ability to read and write and a resourcefulness born of desperation won Morrison her freedom during the second year of her incarceration. With stolen paper and pen, she recorded the details of her prison life and slipped these pages to Lizzy Popper in March of 1849 during the latter’s tour of the facility on behalf of the Society for the Alleviation of the Miseries of the Public Prisons. Popper’s subsequent letters of complaint to government officials resulted in Morrison’s release.
Like many women with prison in their past, Maude Morrison might well have become a pariah, destitute and unemployable, if not for the intervention of a wealthy socialite with whom Lizzy Popper put her in contact. Mrs. Hannah Braddock, whose husband’s family owned J. J. Braddock & Company, a popular New Haven department store, arranged for Morrison to work in the store’s millinery department, where she fetched and fitted hats to the heads of Braddock’s well-heeled customers. Within a year, Maude Morrison was designing hats. Her elegant creations, veiled with fine Irish lace, sold briskly and afforded her status at J. J. Braddock, and later at Gimbel’s in New York. Under Hannah Braddock’s tutelage, Morrison was schooled in the manners and mores of polite society. At the age of twenty-seven, in Newport, Rhode Island, she was married to Lucius Woodruff, a New York financier twenty years her senior. A year later, Woodruff was deceased and Maude was a wealthy widow.
Maude Morrison Woodruff was the picture of refinement when, in May of 1868, her carriage passed Lizzy Popper as she walked along a busy New Haven street. Woodruff recognized the little Quaker woman who had once acted on her behalf and instructed her driver to stop. The two women took tea together and, at the end of an hour, decided to join forces for the betterment of “fallen” women.
Possessed of a first-hand understanding of the plight of female prisoners, Woodruff pledged a portion of her wealth to advance their lot. Her generosity fueled Popper’s resourcefulness. Lizzy designed and Maude funded a boarding house, farm, and school for women exiting the state prison. Located away from the temptations of the city in the coastal village of Noank, Connecticut, the twelve-bed Lucius Woodruff Charitable Home and Farm for Women sought to provide a safe haven for “women who have run afoul of the law, so that they may rise again and be restored to their natural feminine dignity.” Opened in November of 1869, it was, in effect, Connecticut’s first halfway house.
The Woodruff Home ran quietly and successfully at first. Its residents assimilated discreetly, marrying local farmers and fishermen and becoming mothers. One woman opened her own tailoring shop in nearby Mystic. Another, illiterate when she entered the home, became the secretary of a New London shipping company scion. Yet the Woodruff Home faltered in its fourth year. A group of villagers who had objected to the admittance of the home’s first Negro resident stole onto the property and burned down a hayfield and a chicken coop. Blight killed off most of that summer’s crops. A deranged resident laced a supper stew with rat poison, killing one woman and making several others violently ill. The press gave the story lurid coverage, and the matron resigned as a result. Lizzy Popper was forced to step into the role of acting matron, even as she attempted to quiet the negative publicity and the calls for closure of the facility. The final blow came when Maude Woodruff learned that her late husband’s business partner had swindled her out of several hundred thousand dollars. Her financial advisers told her she could no longer provide the funds needed to run the home and farm. The residents were dispersed and the doors were nailed shut in January of 1873. The property sold at auction the following month.
To her husband Charles, supposedly traveling through Massachusetts on business, Lizzy wrote philosophically about the closing of the Woodruff Home. Interestingly, the letter also presents a blueprint for Popper’s later life as a Hartford lobbyist on behalf of “fallen women”:
And so, our noble experiment dies an early death. Poor Maude is beside herself, but I am not, for I am convinced that our model is sound and can be made to work if we are not reliant solely on the generosity of a private benefactor or benefactress. Society must bear its burden, for in most cases, it is society’s ills—poverty, prostitution, and whiskey chief amongst them—which subvert the female and make her a criminal. Government, therefore, must become involved, and so I must convince the politicians. I have been in this world and see how it works, Charlie. My shortcomings at Shipley Hospital can be attributed to a failure of diplomacy. Mrs. Dix was a worse “politician” than I—sincere in her advocacy for the sick, but all vinegar. In my advocacy for the betterment of female prisoners, I shall make honey drip from my tongue. Better to spend a productive thirty minutes in the wood-paneled office of a state official or bank president than to spend a hundred hours with ladies’ societies whose members are well-intentioned but powerless to exact change. Mrs. Mott and Miss Anthony may yet win us the vote—it is a worthwhile goal—but as for me, I shall politick with men of mark and, when I deem it useful, bend the ears of their spouses, too, for more often than not, a wife serves as her husband’s moral compass and can steer him in the direction of benevolence and Christian charity.
Lizzy’s letter, dated February 13, 1873, never reached its intended recipient. Charles Popper, supposedly in Boston, died in Manhattan that same evening. Having drunk a flask of brandy during a sleigh ride with his mistress, Vera Daneghy, he stood, lost his balance, and fell from the sleigh, breaking his neck. Popper succumbed three days shy of his sixtieth birthday. His widow had turned sixty-seven the week before. Vera Daneghy was thirty-eight.
Compounding the shock of her husband’s death was Lizzy Popper’s sudden awareness that he had kept a mistress for the previous eight years and fathered a child by her—a girl, Pansy Rebecca, now nearly five years old. Among Lizzy’s trove of papers and letters, a thin file labeled “Daneghy woman” survives. Inside are six letters bound together with string: the three Vera Daneghy wrote to the wife of her deceased lover and carbon copies of Popper’s three responses to Daneghy.
Vera Daneghy’s first letter to Lizzy, dated ten days after Charles Popper’s death, informs his widow of her own and Pansy’s existence, and of her expectations in the wake of her lover’s demise.
We was going to be married, him and me, after we both got free of our situations. Now that day will nev
er come. Charlie told me once about your baby girl that weren’t right in the head and died. When Pansy come, and Charlie held her and seen she was all right, he cried. He said over and over how, come Hell or high water, he would always do right by his daughter so she could enjoy the good things in life and not have to do without. Now that promise falls to you.
Daneghy’s letter ends with instructions as to how Lizzy is to make monthly deposits to the bank account which Charlie had established for Pansy’s well-being. Daneghy suggests a sum of nine dollars per month but warns, “I can’t make do on any less than eight. Charlie would be mad if you was stingy.”
Lizzy’s response is curt and to the point: “This is to inform you that I have not the means, the intention, or the moral obligation to help with the support of a child conceived of thy own and my husband’s sin.”
Vera Daneghy’s second letter, dated one month later, is exasperated and self-pitying. It informs Lizzy that, in a fit of remorse, she has confessed to her husband that he is not Pansy’s father. In response, Seamus Daneghy has disowned his wife and the girl and put them out of his house. Her own and her husband’s families have spurned her and she has been forced to take a menial position “peeling potatoes and worse” at Delmonico’s, a fine restaurant where Charlie had twice taken her to dine. She wishes to remind Lizzy that it was she, not Lizzy, who, on the night of the accident, had to deal with the police, the corpse in the road, and “that skinflint of a sleigh driver who insisted he be paid, no matter the circumstances, may he rot in hell.” Had it not been for Lizzy’s husband, “him with his fancy airs, big promises, and books I never even read, most of them,” her life would not now be in tatters. The woman who rents her a room and cares for “Charlie’s child” while she is at work robs her of most of her wages and she cannot make due on what’s left. She is owed some help, and if Lizzy Popper will not provide any “then you are as cold a fish as Charlie always said you was.”
Popper’s measured response to Daneghy’s demands restates her disinclination to offer assistance and advises Daneghy that it is not the intrusion of her late husband into her life, but rather the wages of her own sinning, which find her in her current predicament.
Vera Daneghy’s third and final letter, written fourteen months after the last in May of 1874, is markedly different in tone; Daneghy is resigned and frightened. In desperation, she has turned to prostitution to provide for herself and her daughter. She writes from a charity ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where she has just learned she is suffering from a “womanly cancer” that is expected to kill her before summer’s end. Daneghy apologizes to Lizzy for the grief she has caused her and acknowledges that she has no right to beg for what she must: that Lizzy retrieve Charlie’s daughter, give her his name, and raise her “like she was yours.”
Daneghy’s dilemma presented Popper with one of her own. Her husband’s mistress had become one of the fallen women to whom she had dedicated the last several years of her life. If she did not claim the innocent child, Pansy would be abandoned to a city orphanage or handed a worse fate. Her final response to Daneghy was, once again, curt and to the point:
I shall make arrangements to collect the child at a time and place to be determined. My one stipulation is that thee not be present when I do so. I think it best that thee and I not meet face to face. I am sorry for thy suffering.
Of the many challenges life presented Lizzy Popper, perhaps none was more incongruous and ironic than what transpired next. On May 30, 1874, she returned home from New York with her red-haired, freckle-faced four-year-old charge in tow. A letter awaited her. Its author was her long-lost son, Willie.
Dear Mother,
I hope this letter finds you and father in fine spirits and robust health. I regret that I have not been a more faithful correspondent, but an actor’s wayfaring life leaves little time for letter-writing. This missive comes to you from Virginia City, Nevada Territory, where I have been appearing these past weeks at Maguire’s Theatre in the role of the frontier hero Davy Crockett. Maguire’s is as majestical a palace as any at which I have walked the boards. The Comstock lode has made this a land of lucre, and the silver kings who own the town demand the best entertainments and have the means to pay for them. Yet today I depart. A coach leaves in an hour, and I must post this letter before I climb aboard and begin my long sojourn east. The pages you hold in your hand will travel east as I do, and hopefully will reach you first, for reasons I shall explain. There is much to tell and little time to tell it.
Eight years ago, at the funeral of my mentor and friend, Mr. Waverly Calhoun, it was my great good fortune to have been approached by one Mr. Harry Truitt. Mr. Truitt and his wife, Nina, are two of the best theatrical booking agents in the business, and they have since put me on stages from Boston to San Francisco. Under the stage name of Fennimore Forrest, I have played the parts of Rip Van Winkle, Shakespeare’s Romeo, and Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. In Utica, New York, after the renowned actor Edwin Bixby took sick, I hastily replaced him as the noble aboriginal savage Metamora, Last of the Wampanoags. (Many have noted that my own interpretation eclipsed Bixby’s.) As the frontiersman Crockett, I wear buckskin breeches and a leather frock coat trimmed with fringe. Just before the curtain falls, ending the fifth and final act, I rescue a family of homesteaders from a fierce prairie storm while reciting Sir Walter Scott’s “Lochinvar.” The applause is enthusiastic and prolonged. Some nights I imagine that you, Father, Ed, and Levi are in the audience, witnessing my triumph. On the stage, I am loved!
This next will surprise you, Mother, but I shall say it direct: I had a wife, and I have a child. Five years ago, I was wed to Miss Clara Chapman of Peoria, Illinois. At the time, I was touring in Jay Rial’s theatrical of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the role of Little Eva’s father, I sang a mournful psalm during the climactic scene of the girl’s death and apotheosis, and I daresay it was my singing, as much as the waif’s ascension from sickbed to celestial heavens, which, night after night, rendered audiences lachrymose. Clara was a fellow traveling performer engaged by the Truitts~a violinist who was one fourth of the Diederich String Quartette, performing in Nancy Potter’s Seven Pleiades. The Pleiades show was, that season, appearing in tandem with our own. Clara fell in love with me, and I with her. We were wed in Danville, Pennsylvania, during a two-week run at that city’s Opera House. When I learned that a child was coming, I sent Clara back to Peoria so that she might observe her period of confinement in familiar surroundings. Alas, the rheumatic fever my frail Clara had suffered as a child left her with a weakened heart and she died giving birth. The child, however, thrives. Mother, you have a granddaughter, Lydia Elizabeth. Though I have seen her but twice, I am told she has become a sweet and obedient child whose looks favor myself rather than her departed mother. You shall meet her soon.
The first leg of my journey eastward will take me to Peoria. My father-in-law has written me that his wife is ill and they are unable to continue caring for Lydia. I therefore will reclaim her and transport her to New Haven. The girl needs the steadfastness of grandparents far more than the thousand kisses of an adoring father whose life’s work makes of him a costumed vagabond, and so I will do the unselfish thing and surrender her to your own and Father’s care.
Mother, you may be shocked by what I must next impart. Father will not approve, I know, but I am in hopes that you, who worked so faithfully on behalf of the darkies’ freedom, will rejoice that your son, too, has been emancipated from another form of bondage. Along with several others of our company, I have come to embrace the tenets of the American Free Love League as espoused by our guiding spirit, the forward-thinking Stephen Pearl Andrews. Mother, I reject the notion that a marriage sanctioned by church and state is an exclusive and indissoluble bond. I subscribe instead to the philosophy that physical knowledge of others be based only on spiritual affinities, and that these, by virtue of human nature, are in constant flux. I have broken free of the notion that Man should know only one wife or that Wom
an should know but a single husband. After I deliver Lydia to your care, I shall travel on to New York, where I will board a ship bound for Europe. By mid-summer, I shall be ensconced at the palazzo of the Famiglia Urso on the sun-baked Amalfi coast of Italy. I shall be in the company of those I most adore in this whole world: the harpist Edwina Mathers (another of Miss Potter’s Seven Pleiades), the novelist Gaston Groff, and the love of my life, violinist extraordinaire Camilla Urso. Rejoice, Mother! Your son is unfettered and in love!
By my calculations, we should arrive during the week of May 15. It is my hope that Father and I might repair the trouble between us before my departure, but for that to be so, he must be willing to utter the words “I apologize.” The cruel things he said to me some years ago still ring in my ears. My ship departs for Europe on May 28. Until I see you, adieu.
Your loving son,
William
Willie Popper had come and gone by the time his mother sat in her parlor, reading the shocking news that she was now, at the age of seventy, the custodian of not one, but two, four-year-old girls—the first fathered by an unfaithful husband, the second by an irresponsible son. In her diary, she wrote poignantly of what happened next:
I sat there, trembling, wanting to rise and run from the room but was unable to move. In my lap was Willie’s letter, with its dozens of I’s, me’s, and my’s. He had learned humility in our home, and it troubled me to read how prideful he had become. Free love? Pish! What a fine and fancy term for lechery!…Last of the Wampanoags, indeed! If he has a child, he should be playing none other than the role of father-provider…. And what do I know of raising little girls? I had raised sons, and that with a husband’s and a sister’s help. Now the one was dead, and the other old like me and spending half her days in Florida. What would become of my work for the prisoners, and the traveling needed to accomplish it?…As I was mulling all this, I chanced to look over at the Daneghy woman’s daughter. That gaudy hair and freckled face were, I supposed, her mother’s, but her eyes gave her away as Charlie’s child. It pained me to see it. She was sitting on the settee, staring at me as if I, not she, were the curiosity. I realized then that I had been speaking my thoughts aloud. “And what, pray tell, is the matter with thee?” I demanded.