The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  3

  The next morning I was awakened early by the hoarse lowing of cattle. Like most women in the neighborhood, Mrs. Nedel owned her own cow, but the city was too built-up for private stables. Instead the cows, like the pigs, roamed freely in the streets, going into the hills at night and coming back by themselves in the morning. Mrs. Nedel had given me a room on the third floor next to the attic; its only window looked out over the narrow back alley, where I could hear more than one cow lowing angrily for breakfast. I picked up my father’s pocket watch to look at the time, forgetting it was waterlogged and broken from my swim across the river. A couple of hams were hanging in one corner of the room to dry, wrapped in cloth bags to keep the insects out, and in the other corner stood a covered rack with Mrs. Nedel’s winter dresses. The room smelled like a smokehouse strewn with camphor. I dressed as quickly as I could and went downstairs.

  There was coffee already made and set out in the dining room, and as I poured myself a cup I set myself the task for the day: coming up with a plan to make money. I had never intended to be Comfort’s dresser, but it was work that suited me. I had gone to visit her in New York after my mother died, not planning to stay. My mother and I had been living in town ever since we sold the dairy farm, and when she died she left me, as I suspected she would, all her shares of pig iron. It was a handsome amount, although not quite enough to live on. A few weeks later I received a letter from Comfort on heavy, cream-colored paper.

  March the 2nd, 1832

  My dear May,

  I just received your letter. I am so very sorry to hear about the passing of my aunt Constance. It is very bad for you, I’m sure. Why don’t you come visit me for a while? Jasper is still recovering from his pneumonia, which gave me quite a fright, and although he is much better now, he tires in the afternoon. That is very dull, and the idea came to me even before I read your letter that the person I would most like to cheer me up is you.

  New York is glorious. The fashions here would amaze and delight you, I am sure. The best dresses come from Belgium, but there is no one in Belgium or anywhere else who can turn a dress like you. Please come for a month or two so you can have a change and keep me company, and I will try my best to persuade you to make one or two dresses for me while you’re at it.

  I’ve enclosed money for your tickets. Now, don’t say no, Frog. Life is too exciting for no.

  Your loving cousin,

  Comfort

  Comfort and her husband, Mr. Jasper Sinclair, lived in the country in Flatbush, Long Island, but according to Comfort’s letters they drove into the city three or four evenings a week to have dinner or to go see a play. Mr. Sinclair’s father had made his fortune from oyster crackers, and Comfort met the younger Mr. Sinclair when he stopped in our little town to look at some land, thinking to build a new factory. Whether she was in love with him I don’t know, but he was rich, and he was a way out of small-town life. She married him, and by her accounts—her infrequent letters—she was happy. However, he was not an attractive man, Mr. Sinclair, with his long nose, his close-set eyes, and the deep pits on his cheeks from childhood smallpox. He suffered from poor health all his life, and by the time I reached Flatbush, twenty-two days after I received Comfort’s letter, he was gone.

  “Dead,” Comfort told me at the front door, which she answered herself. “And it seems that he lied to me about his great fortune.”

  She was wearing a black dress with uneven side seams. The funeral had been a week before, she said, and she met with Mr. Sinclair’s solicitor the day after that.

  “One thousand dollars.” She was not one to keep anything back. “That’s all he left me. I’ve had to dismiss all the servants. Even the house isn’t mine: he’s been leasing it all these years. Oh, Frog! I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve eaten nothing but bread and cheese for three days. Let’s go into New York for dinner—I didn’t want to go by myself.”

  I had hardly put down my bag. We were still standing in the house’s round foyer, and the cabbie bringing up my trunk knocked at the door. “I haven’t even washed off my travel,” I said.

  “Then wash!” she told me. She threw herself down in a chair with an embroidered seat cover, letting me answer the door.

  Although I was sorry that Mr. Sinclair had died, I was glad to be useful and to think of something other than my own grief. As soon as I could, I hired a part-time domestic to help me with the cooking and cleaning—Comfort was useless in the kitchen—and I sold whatever furniture could be sold. Comfort was right: Mr. Sinclair had lied about many things. He owned no property anywhere, and his paintings were all copies. His father may have made a fortune from oyster crackers, but now both father and son were dead and the fortune spent.

  One thousand dollars. No one in New York could live long on that.

  But Comfort was not without ideas. Might she take up miniature painting? She had a good hand, and they were very popular at the moment. Or she could invest in a coffee farm or a tea plantation and live off the interest. I could always go back to Oxbow, though there was nothing and no one waiting for me there. But one morning Comfort told me that she had fixed on a plan:

  “I’ll go on the stage.”

  It wasn’t the most practical decision, and it was one based, I suspected, on vanity: Comfort was proud of her looks and her voice, and she knew something about the life, since her mother had been an actress for a few years in Europe. Still, acting—or, rather, learning to act—cost money. We moved into a cheap women’s boardinghouse near Gramercy Park, and Comfort began taking fencing lessons to learn how to “loosen her limbs,” as her trainer—an old actor who began drinking at noon and could no longer reliably perform at night—put it. He also taught her how to walk across the stage, how to stop and turn, and how to present herself in a three-quarter view to the audience. After lunch she exercised her voice with a former operatic singer—the one with very bad breath whom Mrs. Howard reminded me of—to increase its power.

  We agreed to use my money from the pig iron shares to offset the cost of all this training, and to use Comfort’s inheritance to live on before her debut. But the costs of both the training and the living kept mounting, and even after Comfort began getting paid work, we often had to dip into our own savings to pay the rent at a rooming house or for transportation to a theater at another city or a hundred other things. By the time we reached Pittsburgh, six years later, all the pig iron money was gone. So, too, was Mr. Sinclair’s one thousand dollars. The amount of cash we still had was small enough to be carried with us, and subsequently lost, on the Moselle.

  The good news was that Comfort had an offer to join a company in St. Louis. The question was: How to get there? As I drank my coffee in Mrs. Nedel’s dining room, I thought of the banknotes I’d had in my purse on the Moselle. All gone. However, even that lost sum would not have kept us in salt long, as my mother used to say.

  • • •

  “It’s funny, you being a seamstress,” Mrs. Nedel said to me when she sat down to breakfast. “Nedel being German, you know, for needle.”

  She was a heavyset woman, not young, but still wearing her brown hair in tight ringlets like her daughter, Elizabeth. She surveyed the array of dishes with a pleased expression—turkey, ham, hotcakes and waffle cake, custard, hung beef, warm bread and biscuits—as she asked her daughter to pass her the coffeepot. Breakfast was a serious meal in this house, although Mr. Nedel, I was told, took his breakfast every morning at a coffeehouse near his warehouse. I had yet to meet him.

  “Now, my dear, what plans have you made for your departure?” Mrs. Nedel asked me mildly. Her eyes were tiny and blue, and her nose was like a little sausage roll in the middle of her face. “If it is not too impolite to ask. Of course, you may stay however long you need. I know you’re waiting for your sister to get well. And then you two are off to . . . Chicago, was it?”

  “My cousin,” I told her. “And we’re going to St. Louis. Mrs. Stoke was the one going to Chicago.” Mrs. Stoke had left the ho
use the day before; I never learned if she’d found her third child.

  “Poor Mrs. Stoke,” Mrs. Nedel said. Like many ladies that year, she wore a good layer of pulverized starch on her face and arms and neck. When she dabbed her mouth with her napkin, I saw tiny white flakes float down toward her coffee cup. I pulled my own cup slightly closer to me.

  “Do you have family in St. Louis?” Elizabeth asked. She was only fifteen, but the starch on her face was nearly as thick as her mother’s.

  “My cousin has been offered a role at the New Theatre. She’s an actress,” I explained.

  In spite of her powder, Mrs. Nedel’s cheeks turned red and she glanced at her daughter. “An actress! Goodness!”

  There were still plenty of people, and not only clergymen, who believed that actresses took work as paid companions at night. In case Mrs. Nedel was one of those people, I sought to put her right.

  “Of course, you know that actresses aren’t prostitutes,” I said.

  Mrs. Nedel made a strange sound like the rubber top to a bottle coming off. “Oh, my dear! We don’t speak like that in Cincinnati.” She lowered her voice. “We call them public women.”

  Public women. I could remember that.

  “I made all of my cousin’s costumes,” I said after a pause. I was proud of my work, although everything was now at the bottom of the Ohio River.

  “I have absolutely no talent for sewing,” Elizabeth said, buttering a biscuit. “Mama can vouch for that.”

  “I certainly cannot! You just need more patience.”

  “It doesn’t signify anyway. We have someone in every Easter to make our spring clothes, and then again in October. Miss Justine.”

  I was curious about this, since doing alterations seemed the most obvious way for me to earn money. “How much do you pay Miss Justine?” I asked.

  Elizabeth blushed, looking for a moment like her mother.

  “We don’t speak so plain about money here,” Mrs. Nedel said a little hesitantly. “Maybe it’s different in New York.”

  I reflected to myself that it wasn’t so different; I had only forgotten. “I was thinking about ways I could earn my passage to St. Louis, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Nedel reached for the jam jar, looking thoughtful. After a moment she said, “We give her twenty cents for the day.”

  The room darkened, and through the three long windows I could see heavy clouds gathering in the sky. Twenty cents! I didn’t see how anyone could live on that.

  “It’s on account of Cincinnati being so close to Kentucky,” Elizabeth explained. “The white seamstresses don’t get paid so well because there’s slaves to do the work instead.”

  “Slaves? There are slaves in Ohio?”

  “Oh, no. But, you see, if someone has family on the other side of the river, why, they might just borrow one of their slaves for the day. We get my aunt’s girl Minnie about once a month when we turn the mattresses, and she sometimes makes over a dress if I want.”

  Lending slaves across the river. I had never heard of that.

  “Do you pay Minnie?” I asked.

  “She’s not used to getting money,” Elizabeth told me.

  “We feed her dinner, of course,” Mrs. Nedel said, dabbing at something on her dress.

  I thought of the slave boy I had seen on the Moselle. Twenty cents a day was more than dinner but not by very much; I would be a pauper in no time at that rate. Mrs. Nedel was still dabbing at the mark on her dress, and now she began to cluck at it.

  “If that’s jam,” I told her, “I can get it out if you have a bit of pearl ash.”

  “Pearl ash?”

  “And a clean cloth.”

  “I’ve never heard . . . But of course you would know about such things, helping your sister and so on. Pearl ash. I believe I might have some in the cellar; I’ll just have a look after breakfast.”

  Outside, the rain started suddenly, a quick torrent that hit the windows sharply like a cat’s claws. “You know,” Mrs. Nedel said, raising her mild voice over the noise, “I think I have an old dress that might suit you. And as we’re talking about, I have a blouse with a stain on the front; maybe you could look at that, too? I’ve nearly given up on it, and it was once quite my favorite.”

  • • •

  I’d been invited back to Mrs. Howard’s house that afternoon, and Mrs. Nedel—pleased with my work on her clothes—gave me a ride there in her carriage. Standing once again at the front door, I was aware that the rain had brought out the smell of ham in my clothes and my hair, but there was nothing I could do about that. Donaldson took the umbrella Elizabeth had lent me, and Mrs. Howard herself led me into the parlor, saying that Comfort was feeling much better and would be downstairs presently.

  “We’ll drink our tea in here,” she said, sliding the pocket doors open. Apparently today I was allowed to go farther than the hallway.

  The parlor walls were lined with baby-blue wallpaper with scenes of milkmaids at their work. Mrs. Howard called my attention to the intricate carvings on the long mantel all done by a penknife, she said. Can you imagine? The house was over a hundred years old, and when Mr. Howard bought it they discovered pig hairs in the ceilings upstairs.

  “That was what they used back then to strengthen the plaster,” she told me. “But it made them furry.” She smiled. Was she joking?

  “The ceilings were furry?”

  “With the pig hair in it,” she explained.

  She looked at me as if waiting for something.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Now, May, I want to have a serious discussion about your cousin. She and I had an interesting idea last night. Why don’t you sit—no, take that chair; it’s more comfortable. I want to put something to you.”

  I preferred straight-backed chairs, but I sat on the low upholstered one by the window that she directed me to. The parlor was in the turreted part of the house, and I could see the dark mass of pachysandra planted all around it shifting back and forth in the wind.

  Mrs. Howard picked up a small brown book from a side table and pulled out a letter in use as a bookmark. She unfolded the letter and, after a quick scan, found what she was looking for: a sentence or two about the moral weakness of slave owners and the unsound logic of those in the North who support them.

  “That was written to me by a man in my own organization,” she told me, removing her eyeglasses. “The Ohio Association for the Abolishment of Slavery and the Betterment of Mankind. I truly believe that, if not for the sin of greed, slavery would have been abolished before the time of Noah. That is the sin we face here in Cincinnati: greed. Greed and ignorance. Few in the North know the true facts about slave conditions, the terrible lives these pitiable men and women lead, and the poor little babies taken away from their mothers before their thumbs can even find a way to their mouths, deprived of a comforting bosom.” Her own bosom swelled as she spoke, and from time to time she looked at me with a severe expression as if at any moment I might say something she would not like. I did not think I was someone who had fallen prey to backwards morality or weak logic, but up until now I had spent most of my time in the North. After a while I stopped listening and watched her two crooked bottom teeth. Her lips stretched up and down, hiding and revealing them in turn.

  “And that would be Comfort,” Mrs. Howard finished.

  “What would be Comfort?”

  “A woman ideally suited to promote our cause: someone used to public speaking, possessing a strong voice that can reach to the back of a hall, and, of course, lovely to look at; that’s important, too, I’ve come to realize.”

  “You want Comfort to give speeches?”

  “For our association, yes. Go from town to town. Set the facts straight but in a pretty way. She could do that very well, don’t you think? We would pay her a salary, of course. That is, I would.”

  My first thought was that this would save us from going to St. Louis, and my second was that now Comfort wouldn’t be forced to take the matronly roles that she hated.
Mrs. Howard was watching me closely.

  “What does Comfort think?” I asked.

  “Why, naturally she likes the idea! It would pay better than the theater. And she can do it as long as she likes, or until slavery is finally abolished in this country. If she’s good at the job, she might be out of it soon.” Another flash of crooked teeth.

  “What would she wear?”

  “Nice dresses. Sedate. The best quality, of course.”

  “Where will I get the material?”

  Mrs. Howard looked at me. She clasped her hands behind her back like a man and faced me in her rocklike way. “May, I’ll speak plainly, as you’re someone who likes the truth. There isn’t a place for you in this proposal. You don’t want to speak in front of a paying public, do you? And Comfort won’t need what she used to need—costumes and so forth, help with dressing—and whatever help she does need, I am more than adequate to supply myself. But you needn’t worry: I know you’re in a bit of a fix right now, so I can pay your fare back home. Of course I would do that. You come from New York, is that right?”

  “No, near Toledo.”

  “As close as that! Well, I can certainly pay for your fare there. And you can finally leave off sewing for Comfort. My, you must be tired of that; how many years has it been? You’ll have a chance now to really be independent—I can see it clearly.” Her voice began to take on the force of a steam train pushing itself uphill. “I know a change would suit you; my Uncle Jacob always said that change was good for the soul, and, like absolutely nothing else, he was right about that. He was a slave owner himself, you know, which is why I understand slaves’ lives so intimately. I used to watch them in his fields when I visited: always hunched over, always working. In Uncle Jacob, ignorance and greed were combined in equal measure. But I believe Comfort has the charm and skill to turn even a man such as he was, God rest his little soul. And you, May, you will no longer need to pin and hem and wait for the curtain to drop as I know you have had to do so often . . .”