by Peter Quinn
Eliza wasn’t sure whether the remark had been directed at her, whether it was something she should respond to, or whether the Prince was merely thinking out loud. She kept silent.
The Prince stepped back from the window. He looked directly at her. “Are you really an Indian?”
“Part.”
“You are part Negro also?”
“Part.”
“Many Americans seem to have Negro or Indian blood, a result, I suppose, of the preponderance of men among the settlers. They took squaws for wives, I’m told, and produced a mixed race. Even when their skin is white, you can see they often have thicker lips than is normal. Many also seem to have a discernible slant to their eyes. The Lord Mayor of New York, whom I met tonight, had a distinctly aboriginal cast to his eyes. There also seems to be a prevalence of brachycephaly among the laboring classes.” He pressed his hands against his skull. “You know, the kind of short, broad heads you find among the non-Teutonic peoples, especially the Irish. And prognathism seems to predominate as well.”
Eliza wanted to say something, but was at a loss. The Prince said, “When I was in Canada last month, I met a number of pureblooded Indians. Ferocious-looking fellows. Chippewas, they were. Turned out that despite all their feathers and war paint, they were the cordial sort. We smoked a pipe together. It’s often the case, you know, at least from my experience, that people aren’t as bad as they first appear.”
The Prince continued to stand across the room from Eliza. He launched into a description of his visit to Niagara Falls and to the fair in St. Louis, two of the sights along his trip that seemed to impress him most, and as he kept talking, he began to stammer.
“We toured Mis … Mis … Mister Barnum’s today,” he said, “and I saw the most dread … dreadful creature! What-Is-It?”
“Pardon me,” Eliza said, “what is what?”
“No, no. That wa … wa … was its name: ‘What-Is-It?’ Mis … Mis … Mister Barnum claims it’s the missing link. Claims it was cap … cap … captured on the coast of Africa. Says it’s ha … ha … half man, half gorilla. Looked like … looked like a poor deformed nigger to me.”
Eliza didn’t say a word. The Prince took his watch out of his vest pocket and glanced at it. Eliza saw there was a tremor in his hand. He walked to the door. “This is not the time,” he said. “I’m fatigued.” And then he left.
Eliza untied the headband and took off her dress. She wrapped herself in the sheet and rumpled the pillows. Several minutes later, Mrs. Woods came in.
“He was quick,” she said.
“Very.”
“But he seemed pleased.”
“I hope he was.”
Mrs. Woods never spoke openly about the Prince’s appearance in her establishment. Sometimes, perhaps, she might hint at it in an indirect way, embellishing her invocation of the Empress Theodora with a veiled reference to her intimate familiarity with the amorous instincts of a certain royal person. But she left the rumors that surrounded the Prince’s visit to the city’s raconteurs, who fabricated an elaborate myth of a princely debauch in Manhattan’s lowest dives. Eliza kept silent, too. She had no interest in becoming the object of attention of every man in New York who wanted to share the Prince’s pleasures. She knew what she wanted from Mrs. Woods, and concentrated on getting it.
Mrs. Woods often talked about her financial stake in a local theatrical production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she saw as an investment in the fortunes of the Republican party. Lately, she had been complaining about the return of her investment. Attendance was way down. Eliza had seen a notice in the paper that the management was seeking replacements for most of the major roles.
There was no precedent for people of color appearing on New York stages, and she expected Mrs. Woods to express shock at her request, but she had been made a promise. Whatever I can do for you, I will.
She knocked on the door of Mrs. Woods’s room in the early evening, before the patrons began to arrive. Mrs. Woods invited her in.
“I have a favor to ask,” Eliza said.
“Anything I can do, I will.”
“I should like to try out for the part of Eliza.”
“Eliza?”
“In Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
“You wish to appear on stage?”
“Eliza is a person of color.”
“So is Uncle Tom, in fact of a far deeper color than Eliza, but no one has ever suggested that he be played by a real Negro. It isn’t done.”
“I’ll say I’m Cuban.”
“I’ll have to think it over.”
In the morning, Mrs. Woods gave her decision. “I’ve considered your request,” she said. “Matter of fact, it kept me awake half the night. I will see what I can do, but you shall say nothing about your race. We’ll let, people wonder. The mystery is what draws them, the possibility that they’re seeing something they’re not supposed to see. In this, the theatre has much in common with our business. We’ll let them decide for themselves what you really are.”
Mrs. Woods was as good as her word. She took Miss Therese La Plante to see the manager of the theatre. He was resistant. She was insistent. “The wind is gone out of the sails,” she said. “This production is becalmed and is rapidly taking on water. It’s in danger of sinking.”
“They’ll rip the theatre apart if you put a nigger on stage.”
“Who says Miss La Plante is a Negro? Perhaps she’s part Spanish, part Indian, a native of Louisiana, an exotic. The distinction between the races is often blurred. It is not the science some pretend. Let them guess what she might be. People will admire their own daring in going to see such an intriguing figure, a woman who might well be a Negress. Let them believe whatever they want to believe.”
“This is a theatre, not Barnum’s Museum. We’re not in the business of displaying freaks.”
Mrs. Woods said the issue of race was closed. She had no intention of debating it further. She was exercising her prerogatives as the major investor. The only question left to consider was, Could Miss La Plante act?
“What is your background?” the manager asked Miss La Plante.
She invoked Mrs. Euphemia Blanchard, and the Fulton Academy: a university education in the theatrics of survival. The manager shrugged. He had her read from the script. “Well, you can act, there’s no doubt about that,” he said when she was finished.
The theatre filled again. The war and the crowds of soldiers in the city brought in new audiences, even after the question of Miss La Plante’s identity faded from the city’s conversations.
She met Jack soon after she got the part of Eliza.
Their first night together, after they made love, he stood in the dark by the window of the hotel room. Eliza felt herself drifting off to sleep. Jack smoked a cheroot, and she watched the tip flare brightly as he drew on it. He sang softly, in a lovely tenor:
Come where my love lies dreaming,
dreaming the happy hours away,
In visions bright redeeming
The fleeting joys of day.
She dreamed she was on a boat, traveling from Staten Island to the city. Her father was at the tiller. Her mother sat in the bow, facing her. They were both smiling, and as they neared the shore, they saw that all the people lining the docks were colored and were shouting welcome.
JUNE 1, 1863
Beware the ingratiating stranger, whether comely girl, genteel woman, decorous gentleman, or sincere and friendly tradesman! Beneath the polite veneer and winning smile may lurk the blackest of hearts and vilest of intents. Guard the portals of the home as you do your own life! Never admit a guest whom you have not been told to expect. Never give entry to a laborer, artisan or tradesman without specific instructions from your employer. Failure to heed this injunction can result in consequences too terrible to describe.
—Mrs. Sarah Benning Oswald, A Decalogue for Domestics:
A Primer of Rules, Regulations and Suggestions
for Those Engaged in Household Ser
vice
MARGARET O’DRISCOLL FLIPPED the skinlike pages of her missal. Holy sounds: people turning their prayer books and missals as Mass progressed, rattle of rosaries against the pews, drone of the Latin prayers. She found the page she was looking for and marked it with one of the ribbons sewn into the spine of the book. June 1st. The feast day of Saint Angela Merici. She rested the missal on her bed, and covered her face with her hands. A habit: first thing in the morning, down on her knees, the book open to the prayers the priest would say in honor of the saint or sacred event to which the church dedicated the day. So easy to fall back to sleep. She said a Hail Mary, and her eyes went back to the same place on the page.
June 1st. The feast day of Saint Angela Merici. Virgin. 3rd class. White.
She rested her head on the bed sheet. White. The color of the vestments the priest would wear this day. White for virgins, red for martyrs, black for funerals. She raised her head and turned the pages forward to a place marked by another ribbon.
August 28th. Her father’s birthday. Saint Augustine. Bishop. Confessor and Doctor.
White for Augustine, too, the missal said. A great saint, but he was no virgin. A great sinner before he was a great saint. Why white for him? The Church had reasons that only the theologians could understand, and even they had trouble sometimes. Augustine himself, it was said, almost went mad trying to figure out the Trinity. But 3rd class, what did that mean? Why was Saint Angela Virgin. 3rd class? Either you were or you weren’t. Virginity wasn’t the Trinity, a mystery only theologians could understand. The great bull in the field outside Macroom, the way he mounted the cows, his masculinity jutting out beneath him, there was no 2nd or 3rd class about that, all the cows got it the same way. Wasn’t a virgin among them. Unless, of course, you were one of those always wanting a man and never getting one, like Miss Kerrigan, a virgin by default, because no one would have you. Maybe that’s what it meant: Virgin. 3rd class. But anyone who spent her life wanting it, but not getting it, she would be no saint, certainly not one to whom the Church would give a feast day.
Probably 3rd class had some significance she didn’t know, something to do with how the Church ordered its calendar. Another mystery. Mystery on top of mystery. Mary was, at once, a virgin and a mother. Some mysteries you could ask the priests about. They might look at you a little quizzically, surprised that you were questioning holy truths, but they always tried to answer, even if the answer was invariably the same: There is no explanation, only faith.
True enough. Who could hope to understand all the works and wonderments of God and His saints? The Church drew its existence from them. There was no explaining. Besides, who would approach a priest and ask, Father, what makes a virgin 3rd class? You could never utter such a thing to a priest.
From downstairs she heard the soft, muffled bong of the standing clock by the staircase as it struck six. She crossed herself quickly and read the first prayer.
O God, through Blessed Angela You caused a new society of holy Virgins to flourish in Your Church; grant through her intercession, that by living angelic lives and detaching our hearts from earthly joys, we may merit enjoyment of those that are eternal. The prayer ran down the left side of the book. On the right was the Latin. The priest’s language. An unintelligible jumble, but holy words, the very sound of them far holier than English, a Protestant language. Under Saint Angela’s name was a brief biography. She founded the Ursuline Congregation to undertake the education of Catholic girls. She was fond of saying that the disorders of society were the result of unsanctified families, and that there were too few Christian mothers. Saint Angela died at Brescia on January 24th, 1540.
Odd, a nun worrying about mothers, since she would never have a family of her own. A new society of holy virgins. There was something to be said for it. Frances Kelly, Betty O’Connell, and Molly Foley, all Cork girls, were now in the convent.
In the days when he was still proud of the sobriquet “Pagan” O’Driscoll, Margaret’s father had railed against the convent, the same way he had railed against everything connected with the Church. “A waste of human fecundity,” he called it. “Another priest-driven nail in the coffin of the Irish nation.” There were things her mother would listen to in silence. This she wouldn’t. “God Himself commanded it,” she said. “Blessed are the women who take it upon themselves, never having a family and living in rooms by themselves, praying all the time.”
“In this country, a woman needn’t be a nun to end up alone. Emigration sees to that.”
“There’s no telling the suffering we’ve been spared—and will be spared—because of their prayers and intercessions.”
“What we’ve been spared? What other curses could Jehovah send against the Irish besides subjugation, persecution, famines, exile, and death? He’s already been harder on us than any save the Jews. What’s left for Him to visit on this island?”
“Maybe if we weren’t such a vicious tribe of spiteful, backbiting sinners, we’d have been spared these things. Archbishop Cullen himself said that the Famine was a calamity sent by God to purify the Irish people, and there’s no denying the return to religion in this country since it happened, and now, with the consecration of so many lives to God, maybe we’ll finally be a people that find some favor in His eyes.”
“Archbishop Cullen is a swine,” Pagan O’Driscoll said.
Margaret closed the missal. A farewell present from her mother. There was never any time during the week to go to Mass, only on Sundays, at one o’clock, when she got off from work. But she knew her mother was saying these same prayers, kneeling every day in the Dominican church in Cork City to hear Mass, always in the same pew next to the Fourth Station of the Cross: Jesus Encounters His Mother. Prayers linked to prayers. The confidence that they would meet again after this, our exile, in another life, all of them gathered in by the Virgin Mary, no one left out, not even her father.
There was a sharp rap on the door and muffled words she couldn’t hear. She didn’t have to. They were the same every morning. Get a move on. The world won’t wait for you.
Margaret went to the washstand and poured water from the pitcher into the basin. She pulled her shift over her head and threw it onto the bed. Bending over, she rubbed a bar of soap in the water, between her hands, and glanced up at the small mirror on the wall. It contained a portion of her nakedness, breasts hanging down and, framed by them, the triangle of pubic hair. She kept rubbing her hands. It was a woman’s body in the mirror, the breasts larger in this bent position than if she were standing straight, her hips full and well formed. She had once confessed to a priest the pleasure she took in looking at her body. He had been silent for a moment. “Try to practice modesty of the eyes,” he said. Gave one Hail Mary as a penance. Not much of a sin, with a penance that small.
She took a cloth, wet it, and rubbed it beneath her arms, lightly touched her breasts with it, wiped it across her stomach, and brought it down between her legs, cleaning herself quickly. Detaching our hearts from earthly joys. Holy women who would spend all their days atoning for sins. But it wasn’t for everyone, not for those who admired the heft and strength in a man’s body, the feel of his arms when you danced, joys not eternal but as real as any to be found on this earth. When she finished dressing, she brushed her hair, bending over so that it fell in a great mop toward the floor. She held it with one hand and brushed it with the other, quick, hard strokes that pulled through the knots until it was smooth and tangleless. As she stood, she flipped the mass of hair to the top of her head, worked it into a rope, laid strand upon strand, tied it with a small black band, and stuck in pins to secure it. In the convent they had their hair cropped like sheep. Molly Foley with her great mane of black silk. Such a sacrifice. And why? It was all covered anyway, hidden beneath veil and wimple, not a strand showing. Who would know if the nuns kept their hair? She reached down to the top of the small bureau that stood in front of the window and picked up her cap. A silly-looking thing. Round plate of white linen with a hi
gh, full crown and a short rim that was starched and corrugated. The washerwoman hated to iron them as much as Margaret and the other maids hated to wear them. But Mrs. Bedford had brought them back with her, mobcaps of English make, and insisted they be worn.
Margaret stuck the cap onto her head, worked it down until it was settled just above her ears, and tucked the loose strands of her hair beneath its stiff circumference. She bent her knees to lower her body, a crude curtsy, and stayed in that position as she adjusted the cap in the mirror. Except for above her ears and at the nape of her neck, her hair was invisible. “Such hair is a glory,” her mother had said to her when she was a child, as they sat before the firelight, in the hour before bed, the brush running through Margaret’s hair, rhythmic strokes, her mother’s hand following the brush. “It’s your great-grandmother’s hair. They sang about it at the fair in Macroom. They probably still do.”
Kate of the red-yellow tresses
That river of crimson gold
So lightly on your shoulders rests.
Margaret hummed the tune to herself and tried to remember the words, but she found herself recalling something else. I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair, borne like a vapor on the summer air. A snippet from somewhere. Where? The picnic the Cork girls held in Jones’s Woods on a Sunday two weeks before, the five of them sitting on the grass on their afternoon off, and the boys in their blue army uniforms leaning against a nearby tree, harmonizing. Many were the wild notes her merry voice would pour; many were the blithe birds that warbled them o’er. American, boys, they had stood around but never approached. Sounded like one of Tom Moore’s melodies, but it was more likely an American song. Beautiful, whatever it was. She gave the cap a final tug on both sides. Might as well be a nun as a maid. Small room. Hair hidden away. A life of rules. It was blasphemous to have such a thought. She crossed herself. A society of holy virgins. God’s grace on them, but she hadn’t traveled all the way to America for that. She shut the door to her room quietly. It wasn’t yet six-thirty. “Before nine and after ten”—that was the rule—“the servants should be careful not to disturb the family’s rest.” One of many rules, all of them written down in the booklet given her at the office of the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants. A bare room with benches that looked like pews, it could have been a Protestant church except that the seats were filled with Irish-Catholic girls. She had been nervous waiting for her name to be called. “Nothing to fear,” the girl next to her said in a voice thick with the accent of West Cork. “Ach, they’re desperate for help. Every upstart squireen in the city of New York has to have at least two skivvies or he doesn’t feel he belongs. This is me third job in six months. Get rid of me one place, I’ll find work in another, quick as that.”