Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

  Dear Lucy,

  I have decided to start writing in a diary, just as you did. This is my first entry. One must start somewhere, don’t you think?

  You will be satisfied to know that Mrs. Erikkson will never hurt another soul again. She is currently awaiting trial, but everyone believes that she will end up in Sing Sing and meet her fate via “Old Sparky.” A terrible way to die, but her fate is no longer in anyone’s hands but the law’s now.

  Dr. Erikkson and his son were released, having been found innocent of the charges of conspiring with her to kill all those people. They found that she had killed at least ten others in the preceding year as she perfected her technique of cooking down blood from her victims and methodically spoon-feeding it to Tom. This, all in the name of improving his constitution, which rapidly improved once he stopped taking all the medicines she constantly fed him. Apparently, the arsenic and mercury in the Fowler’s solution and calomel were doing more harm than good.

  I believe she drew a deep happiness from keeping him sick and dependent on her, though I cannot imagine why any parent would want that for their child. It is confounding, as a concept. Tom wrote to me one last time, promising to be a better man, to respect the fairer sex. I have hope he will succeed but care little about waiting to see what happens. That is between him and society, and his God. He deserves to be in Sing Sing.

  I am working on more articles. One, on the results of the chemistry analysis of Keeley’s formulas and my time at the institute. Do you know that none of Keeley’s Gold Cure contains gold? It’s scandalous!

  I am also writing another with Ian, on the working situation of children in this city. Children ought to be in school, not working in the factories and on the streets. It’s quite horrible, but you knew this, I am sure. You never had the chance to meet Ian Metzger, but I believe you would approve. Aside from those absurdly long eyelashes of his, he is quite respectable. Well, aside from the one serious lapse on his part regarding that article about you. I suppose we have all made our grievous mistakes at some point in our lives. Mine were learning about the world without being in the world, and not being in your life enough. But now, with a pen as my sword, I am listening, and I am watching, and I am unafraid to confront the truth.

  Ian has tried to make his earlier omission up to me by being forthright about all his thoughts, at all times. It is quite irritating. He has told me that my pockmark scars look like the constellation Cassiopeia. He said that was fitting, until I stumbled upon some research by Henry Bryant Bigelow, who has named an upside-down Caribbean jellyfish “Cassiopeia.” That I have such a creature splattered across my face pleases me. Ian laughed and said that is just like me, to be enthralled over being associated with such a fantastical creature. I told Mama this, and she clucked her tongue, which is all she can do lately to keep me well behaved.

  Speaking of Mama and Grandmama, they miss you. They do not say this aloud, but I hear them sigh when they pass by your room.

  Grandmama has not changed much, but Mama has. When I demanded to go to the Foundling Hospital to continue your work or said I would write all day on my typewriter, Mama defended me. She and Grandmama yelled like cats over a fishbone for nearly a week, but Grandmama has finally gotten over her shock that her female descendants do, in fact, have as much backbone and fire as she has. As a result, she no longer forces me to go to balls and has not refused my plans to organize a fundraiser for the Foundling Hospital with Dorothy.

  Hazel is helping, too, though I see her far less than I used to. She is married, and her husband is already away in California. I am sure James is happy about this situation. Dorothy too. Dorothy is pleased that her companion is still by her side. Hazel is pregnant already! I have said nothing about who the father must be. It is not my place to say anything. She seems to know she will have a girl. “It’s our lot in life,” she said, “for women like us to have girls that end up as companions to ladies in high society.” She said she would name the girl Birdie because she liked the idea of a child feeling free in a world where so much keeps us tethered. I think it’s a beautiful name, though I am relieved not to see much of her lately.

  Speaking of Dorothy—she is to be married!

  You’ll never guess to whom.

  Yes, you will.

  She is to be married to James. I am not surprised, nor is Hazel, nor is Mama, but the news is stirring nevertheless. I only just heard yesterday when Dorothy came to visit. Their wedding is to be in one month. She told me that she hopes to be with child as soon as possible so that she and Hazel can have children close together. She says she wishes for a girl, too, and that the child will unfortunately be named after one of the Cutter grandmothers or great-grandmothers. It’s some name that sounds vaguely chemical, like Chlorine, or Allene, I cannot remember.

  I sat Dorothy down and told her everything I knew about James. About his forced tryst with Betty, about hitting you, about rumors between him and Hazel. I told her he seemed to want to keep me subdued with heroin. She shrugged and said all husbands are imperfect; it is up to their wives to keep the sheen of perfection well polished. And she did not believe a whit about Hazel and James. I believe she will be truly unhappy, but I cannot alter her decision. She is steadfast, but more importantly, she is poorer than I realized. Her father’s fortune is woefully dwindled, and James promises a life she is used to living. She will not be swayed, and it breaks my heart.

  We get along as if my previous engagement to James were nothing, and it is nothing, because I will support her no matter what. But I feel she is pushing me away, in increments. At some point, I would not be surprised if I have no mention in her life. She asks me about my prospects, and I find I am shy to speak of them.

  But she did urge me not to rely on Grandmama’s word on the family fortune. I spoke to the family lawyer, who said that even though I am not a male heir, I am due my dowry whether I marry or not. They never told me this. It is not a gargantuan sum, but it does mean I will not be penniless, with careful management. It also means I can marry whomever I choose. Grandmama was angry that I sought out that information, and Mama had no idea. Nellie Bly was right about one thing—one must take care of oneself. I can secure my own future and the future of those I care dearly for.

  Speaking of which, with the money, I have secured a better living situation for Piper, Pops, and Sweetie. They live with Ian now, and he has pulled them out of their daily work to keep them in school. They love it, especially Pops, who wishes to become a college professor someday, but Piper and Sweetie torment their teachers as much as the passersby they used to solicit with their papers. I have wishes to keep them closer to me. Adoption would be wonderful, but in many ways, I am very old fashioned. I should like to be married before I have children. I am only waiting to be asked.

  Then again, perhaps I should write an article about what happens when a lady asks a man for his hand in marriage. I should think that would be quite a scandal. However, I can weather scandals, as I know now.

  It’s only a matter of time before he asks, or I ask first. I wonder which shall happen first.

  Can you guess who the lucky gent is? I shall give you a hint.

  (He thinks I have a jellyfish splattered across my face.)

  I have mentioned it to Mama and Grandmama, and Grandmama accuses me of being intoxicated with opium again and out of my senses. I have assured them that I am intoxicated with an altogether other entity that cannot be bottled or sold.

  When I was recovering from the attack, I returned James’s ring to him with a note. He never visited me while I was ill, nor after. Ada tells me that she heard from one of the Cutter maids that he was horribly disappointed to hear that I had scars on my face after my illness, and that I continued to shun the heroin tablets. That was that.

  When I returned the ring, I enclosed a note. Do you want to know what it said?

  Dear James,

  Please find enclosed your gift. Thoughtful though it was, I do not believe it fits me very well.

&
nbsp; As for your offer to build me a grand library that would house all the stories I should ever wish to read, thank you, but I must decline.

  I prefer to write my own.

  Sincerely,

  Tillie Pembroke

  He never wrote back. Fancy that.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Book ideas are very odd things. They attack you in the middle of the night and cause insomnia; they pop up while you’re stalled in traffic and then make you miss a turn. I’ve ceased being surprised when weird ideas come to me from wherever. However, this time, there were several glimmers of inspiration that are responsible for making Opium and Absinthe come alive. They’re all over the place, so stay with me.

  First of all, there is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It featured Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves (Keanu! My heart!), and Anthony Hopkins. I was a junior in college when that movie came out, and it cast a spell on me. It was a grotesque, passionate, eerie, twisted fairy tale of sorts that left an indelible mark (bite?) on my memory. In particular, there is a scene when Dracula and Mina share absinthe together. The scene does not occur in the original novel, but I forever remembered the ritual of it as a token of a time, place, and era that was both romantic and brutal. More recently, I got my hands on the annotated version of Stoker’s Dracula, by Leonard Wolf—an amazing compendium of illustrations, photos, and notes that brought an incredible depth to the original story.

  Then there was this book: Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, cowritten by me and my journalist friend Nate Pedersen only a few years ago. Writing this book was an experience like none other. We researched some of the wackiest, weirdest, and grossest methods that people have tried to heal themselves over the last several centuries. People often ask me what my favorite chapters were to write, and my answer is usually thus: the chapter on cannibalism and corpse medicine.

  Egyptian mummies were once used as a cure-all. Human blood was once drunk from fallen gladiators to tame epilepsy. And human fat was a salve that was touted to treat rabies. Let’s face it. Sitting here in the newish twenty-first century, we think nothing of liver transplants and blood transfusions. Even face transplants are not so shocking anymore. But actually consuming parts of a dead person, for the sake of a cure? Unthinkable. Unless—it occurred at a time when medicine was still blossoming with truths.

  Some of my research also took me into the history of opium and opiates. I learned that in the late 1800s, when syringes were invented, they enabled a new legion of people to inject morphine (identified in 1804, but then available as an injection toward the middle of the 1800s). The interesting thing was that the syringes were expensive. Morphine addicts, also called morphinomaniacs, were oftentimes wealthy women being treated for all sorts of ailments. When heroin came on the market at the end of the century, it was thought not to be addictive. The original manufacturer was Bayer (as in the Bayer that makes aspirin today). These snippets of medical history were both fascinating and sadly still timely, given our opioid addiction crisis today.

  Finally, the last piece of this bookish pie came in the form of a musical—Newsies. My daughter became entranced with the musical and the story, and our whole family listened to the music countless times. I did a little research into the newsies’ strike and found out that all those events occurred in 1899, just before the new millennium.

  And then I found out that Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the original book—was released in the United States in 1899.

  I thought, Huh. What if someone was killing someone, and the murders looked like vampire deaths? And a newsie helped solve the murders? These were the questions that started the entire process. Opium and Absinthe was born.

  Tillie is near and dear to my heart, and I have done my best to portray her as a very imperfect person who became a victim to opiates in the way that any ordinary person might. Addiction does not just affect one section of society. It is a very complicated thing. It is physiology, psychology, social mores, pharmaceutical power—and it is pain. It is anything but glamorous, and it kills in its own right. If you or someone you know suffers from addiction, please do reach out for help. If you can, call your doctor for guidance. Here are more options:

  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Help Line: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

  NIH: National Institute on Drug Abuse Step by Step Guides: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/step-by-step-guides-to-finding-treatment-drug-use-disorders/table-contents

  For teens, check out https://abovetheinfluence.com/

  Thank you again for reading my book. It is always an honor and a privilege to share my imagination with you. As I spent so much time with all the characters in Dracula and in Opium and Absinthe, I found there was much to be learned about human nature, inhuman nature, and all the facets of humanity itself, both beautiful and terrible. We all have the capacity for much love in the face of cruelty. Remember Van Helsing’s words:

  “There are darknesses in life and there are lights; you are one of the lights.”

  Go forth and shine.

  —Lydia

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, a huge thank-you to my family. They have remained supportive and enthusiastic, no matter how many characters I murder off every year. To all my readers, who keep supporting my books—I am endlessly grateful. Thank you to Kate Brauning, Angela Hawkins, and Sarah Kosa for your early feedback and friendship. Thank you to Felicity Bronzan, who has helped keep my life from turning into utter chaos, and to Sarah Simpson-Weiss for being such a kick-ass assistant! To Dana Kaye and her team—thank you again for your awesome publicity support.

  Thanks to Eric Myers, my wonderful agent. And a deluge of gratitude to the entire team at Lake Union, including Jodi Warshaw, Caitlin Alexander, Ashley Vanicek, Nicole Pomeroy, Laura Barrett, Kathleen Kent, and Edward Bettison, who helped make this strange, twisted idea come to fruition and brought it to readers around the world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Chelsea Donoho

  Lydia Kang is an author and internal medicine physician. She is a graduate of Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine, and she completed her training at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. She lives with her family in the Midwest. Follow her on Twitter @LydiaYKang and Instagram @LydiaKang.