Cranky Ladies of History

by Tehani Wessely

  On this last day of her life in September 1910, Cora doesn’t think about Nellie or Jennie. She’s doesn’t even think about Steve. She rises late, eats a breakfast of hot tea and cold cheese, and watches the yellow sun reflect on the Atlantic. Bathers frolic in the surf, water soaking their wool swim dresses and suits. Cora thinks about her girls back at the Court, and how she should redecorate their rooms to keep the place fresh, and who she’ll hire to play the piano now that the regular man is moving on to Gainesville. She’s planning to balance the accounting ledgers. She’s hoping Ernest comes on the noon train from Jacksonville with some of those gourmet chocolates he knows she adores, and later maybe they’ll travel up to Mayport for some fresh crabs.

  It’s noon, but Ernest doesn’t arrive. Instead, Cora helps a female motorist free her car from the tricky beach sand nearby and then, struck by a headache, retires to her bed to listen to seagulls and shrieks of laughter from the surf. She slips into a coma and dies alone, covered by thin quilt and slants of yellow sunlight, an open book strewn in her lap.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Not an alternate history, but instead a true story lost in time. The year is 1886, and a giddy Cora accepts a marriage proposal from a dashing rogue named Tommy who lives in the same boarding house as she does on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Surely marriage will set them both on a successful course through life. Although Cora dreams of becoming a Broadway actress, the closest she usually gets are the cheap seats to afternoon matinees. The night after they become engaged, Tommy treats her to good tickets for a now-forgotten play at the Herald Square Theater on Broadway. Holding hands in the dark with Tommy’s warm whispers in her ear, young Cora has no way of knowing her marriage will only last two rocky years.

  Seated in the most expensive seats that night are Lady Randolph and the cousins she has come to visit from London. Sitting five rows behind Cora and Tommy is Elizabeth Cochrane, an ambitious reporter from Pittsburgh who is thinking of moving to New York City.

  After the show, on the short walk home, Cora’s gaze flickers for a moment over a teenage boy playing hooky from his seminary school in Trenton. He’s got dark hair and a thin face and gleam in his eye that promises trouble. Then Tommy laughs at something, tugs at Cora’s arm, and the boy is forgotten.

  Impossible, you say. Why would I lie? We are all of us ships that pass in the darkness and sail on. Yet sometimes we drop anchor together, however briefly, in ports foreign and domestic.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  One last note to these notes: I am not forgotten after all.

  An adjunct professor with a passion for history and a librarian boyfriend has rescued me from my shelf, carefully dusted off my pages, and is digitising me for future generations. Cora’s autobiography will be available for the entire world to see. A story can’t ask for a finer fate.

  During her labours, the professor realizes Cora’s typewriter had a worn-away “n” key that barely nudged ribbon ink onto the paper. This autobiography’s title: The Trouble with Men. Her original passages:

  “Full of deceit and cruel to others. That’s the trouble with men.”

  “Harsh speech that cuts too deep. That’s the trouble with men.”

  “Hold too tight to soured dreams. That’s the trouble with men.”

  At the end was she truly bitter? Wounded? Certainly many men treated her wrong, and she had a penchant for picking the worst among them. I couldn’t blame her for any cynicism or disappointment. But she never finished typing my pages to share her final disposition on the matter.

  Know this much: on the last sunny afternoon of her life, in that bedroom by the sea, she took with her to bed a worn copy of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was the first novel Steve published, and the first of his works she fell in love with. Maggie the prostitute makes some bad choices and dies tragically young. Cora made many bad choices, but here at middle age she has the Court and her girls, this house aside the pale sand and blue waves, and a lover who might be arriving later bearing a box of sweets.

  The inscription in the book reads, “To my beloved wife/Two ships in the night/Love always/your Steve.”

  “Cora Crane and the Trouble With Me” by Sandra McDonald

  VINTANA

  Thoraiya Dyer

  ~I. Madagascar, April 1828~

  A cow will never starve to please a god.

  Yet there he is, Radama, my blundering bull of a husband, refusing to partake of the zebu sacrifice to honour his ancestors.

  From the shaded corner of the palace courtyard, a fan held in front of my face, I quiver with rage and shame to see him, calling foolishly for fish as though the long-horned royal herds were not a sacred channel for communication with the blessed dead. As though the Lenten fast should mean anything to a king of the Merina.

  And if the dead should curse him? If he should lose all that our father gained, the rule of the whole island, from sea to sea? Is he already cursed? Is that why demons of drink keep him from my bed, when I am the only one of his twelve Great Wives sanctified to bear the royal heir?

  Three servants wait on me in the courtyard. The Royal Cook, the Royal Ombiasy and the Royal Weaver. All three of them have been loyal since the day, almost twenty years ago, that I was adopted by the old king and betrothed to Radama. They expected, as I did, that I would fall pregnant quickly, that my position would be secured. We were all mistaken.

  My womb remains empty. Even Andrianmihaja, my valiant young officer, my true love, has not been able to fill it. He fills my heart but a full heart is not enough. Only greater piety can win the ancestors’ favour. Only greater respect for tradition can win a child for Radama and for me.

  The king refuses the red meat a second time. He refuses to see he is leading us to disaster.

  “Shall I fetch some fish for him, Great Wife?” the Royal Cook whispers. A tall and wide-hipped woman with big, scarred hands, she squats on her heels in her lamba wrap to keep her slave’s head lower than mine. Her teeth are very white and her cheeks dimpled.

  “It is one thing to serve fish to foreigners,” the Royal Ombiasy mutters. “Quite another for the king to insult the very bloodline that brought him to the throne.”

  The Royal Ombiasy wields supernatural powers. He is a wearer of crocodile teeth, a selector of suitably marked zebu for sacrifice and a guardian of one of the twelve royal sampy. The sampy are exceptionally powerful talismans, sometimes worn, sometimes paraded, always respected and feared, which grant victory to armed forces, warn of danger and foretell the future.

  He is also a skinny old man with a round, bald head and conspicuously protruding ears. When he grows too bossy with me, I rub his head to ignite his temper. I am not afraid of the Ombiasy. The sampy Ingahibe, though he seems no more than several ornamented wood-sections to an outsider, is another matter.

  “Fetch the king some blackfish from the west,” the Royal Weaver suggests salaciously. “Radama will lick the bones clean.”

  My anger abruptly alters direction. I find it difficult not to strike her. The Royal Weaver was born a princess, as I was, and sometimes forgets how far she is fallen. She dares to speak to me of Radama’s favourite wife, she of the ebony skin from the Sakalava tribe in the west. He licks her clean. That is certain. She has birthed his child, but that child will never rule.

  “Do not irk me,” I say, fluttering the fan, “unless you wish to begin weaving your own funeral shroud.”

  “Forgive me, Great Wife.” The Royal Weaver bows her grey head.

  “Fetch my husband what he asks for,” I tell the Royal Cook.

  “At once, Great Wife.” The Cook backs carefully away from me, turning the corner before she straightens to her full height.

  “Fish!” I seethe in the hot stillness. “It is not fit for a king.”

  In my mind, I beg the ancestors for their forgiveness.

  ~II~

  What do you see

  Keeper of the Sampy

  through a god’s eyes?r />
  Through a god’s eyes?

  Interpret the vintana

  the inexorable destiny

  look to the east

  along the axis

  between living and dead.

  Healer, astrologer,

  mpanandro,

  maker of the day.

  What does

  the sampy say?

  Death comes!

  Death desires him!

  Death will not be denied!

  But he will go alone

  long before his queen.

  She was born on a Friday

  a red day

  the day of kings.

  ~III~

  The Royal Cook was born on a Thursday.

  Thursday is the black day. It is the day of slaves. As she stands in the great kitchen where the zebu meat is being cooked without spices or adornments, where none will comment on the delicious smell for fear of implying that the sacrifice is mere food, she sees the runner girl crying in her corner cot and feels the unluckiness of her vintana, her inherited destiny, twisting the world around her.

  “What is wrong with her?” she asks the water-fetcher.

  “The wound in her foot. It turns black. They do not want her in the slave hut. If she dies there, they will have to burn it down.”

  The Royal Cook understands. If the runner girl dies in the kitchen, her cot-corner will simply be blessed by the Royal Ombiasy. There can be no burning down of palaces, not even to satisfy taboo.

  “Then I must go to the lowlands for fresh fish.”

  The water-fetcher says nothing. She has a clubfoot and is slow. The capital in its glorious seat on the high plateau is three days from the closest port. No roads have been built to Antananarivo. King Radama proclaims that paved highways invite invasion.

  And yet he wishes to dine on fish when the high lakes have been emptied by Christian converts.

  “Get me water for my journey.”

  The Royal Cook hides her overwhelming fear as the water-fetcher scurries away. A long, slow march through the lowlands is how royalty disposes of royalty without the taboo of shedding royal blood. One bite from the wrong mosquito in that dark, wet forest or mud-legged in the suffocating, sweaty swamps will send her on the path her parents took many years ago.

  On the plateau, it is windy, cool and clean. It is safe. She is only a servant but she is a servant of the Merina and does not wish to die of the dreaded disease. As she begins her run through the maze of square huts and terraced paddies that cover the hillside, she thinks of the cattle herder with the sun-kissed streak in his black hair. She thinks of how she has not bled this month and begs her ancestors for protection.

  They hear her. Before noon the next day, she meets a zebu-cheese merchant half way down the slope to the sea, returning from the coast where he has traded cheese for trepang and sea turtle meat. He gives her a woven basket of salt-packed golden trevally and takes two-sixteenths of a silver coin cut into pieces.

  He tells her that fishermen are blessed, because Jesus chose them for his disciples, and the Royal Cook tries not to think of the snarl that would form on the Great Wife’s face if she could hear the merchant speaking.

  It takes another night and morning for her to return to the palace. Without sleeping, without stopping, she goes to the great kitchen to prepare the fish. Great pots of rice simmer there for the midday meal. The runner girl moans and turns but has not yet died. The water-fetcher tells her that the king has drunk rum for two days and, though he has eaten rice, he still bellows for fish.

  Even curried, the fish smells nauseating to the Royal Cook. Perhaps it is the child she suspects she carries, or the half-delirium of exhaustion. She scratches a new itch on the back of her calf and allows herself to be soothed by the burning-rice aroma as the water-fetcher readies fresh ranonapango to accompany the King’s meal.

  Servants take the dishes from the kitchen. The Royal Cook sighs, leans against the preparation table and touches her belly.

  She smiles. She has survived; they have survived. Soon, ancestors-willing, she may have a lychee-smeared little face to wipe with the corner of her lamba. The Great Wife will not care that the Royal Cook is unwed. It is proper, and profitable, that slaves should breed.

  But what if the king is displeased with the lateness of his meal? What if he should order some brutal punishment?

  Her eyes feel filled with sand, but she cannot resist slinking towards the dark servant’s hallway with its concealed spyhole, to make sure that her monarch is satisfied with his meal.

  The Great Wife lurks at the spyhole. Her shape is unmistakeable, even in the gloom. She grows old but her curling tresses remain black as night, her angled eyes ever more piercing with pink spots of anger blooming, as always, in her pale cheeks.

  The Royal Cook flinches but she’s been seen. She bends her shaking knees.

  “You might as well take a look,” the Great Wife says. She steps back from the hole.

  The Royal Cook crawls forward until she faces the place in the wall, then straightens enough to put her eye to it.

  The dining room blazes with the light of naked flame. Instead of eating on floor-mats, the glassy-eyed, soppily-smiling king and his pair of rice-faced foreign visitors sit on wooden chairs at a long table draped in lace. Radama wears French clothing and sits between them, to the apparent displeasure of the Royal Ombiasy and other advisors who cluster well back from the table.

  One of the London missionaries reaches for the serving spoon as the servant sets the dish on the table, and as he ladles some onto his plate, left-handed, the Royal Cook gasps. The missionary serves his companion second and the king third. The king’s plate is wooden like the plate of a beggar.

  “Wait, my child,” the companion says to Radama. “You forget. We must say grace.”

  The Royal Cook slides down the wall and away from the spyhole, clutching at her palpitating heart. She turns to the Great Wife in speechless horror.

  “Yes,” the Great Wife says viciously. “They dare to occupy the northeast corner, the noble corner. The chairs are of equal height. One serves himself first and calls the king a child. Clearly, they do not accept Radama’s divinity. If I were king, I would put them to death.”

  She sweeps away, pausing to spare a glance over her shoulder for the Royal Cook, still slumped on the floor.

  “Go and rest,” she says, frowning. “You do not look well.”

  In nine days, the chills begin, and the fever.

  The Royal Cook moans and turns.

  “Come,” the water-bearer says gently, taking her hand, trying to lead her away from the wattle-and-daub slave quarters and toward the Great Kitchen, but the Royal Cook will not go.

  If it is her destiny to die, let everything burn.

  ~IV. Madagascar, July, 1828~

  Radama is one of them, now.

  The ancestors have heard me and have called my husband to be one of them. They have proven their great power and I am afraid.

  What if I should fail them, too? How should I proceed?

  I summon the Royal Ombiasy. He hears their voices. He understands the visions they kindle before his bloodshot eyes. When he arrives, roused from his bed, rubbing his swollen-knuckled hands, he is baffled to see my handsome, faithful Andrianmihaja beside me in the lamplight.

  “Great Wife to the king. What is happening?” The old man’s voice is tremulous. In his shuffle through the moonlit corridors, he must have heard something over the ring of crickets and songs of frogs. Maybe the rattle of weapons. The whisper of conspirators.

  Andrianmihaja answers him, his eyes shining.

  “You are speaking not with a Great Wife but with the Great Glory, Ranavalona Manjaka, Queen of Madagascar.”

  I lift my chin. Manjaka. Majesty. Yes. I am Queen. Let those who do not acknowledge my divinity tremble.

  “The king is dead?”

  The Ombiasy has not used my new title a second time. I do not let my anger show. I have no choice but to forgive his lapse.
I need him. The ancestors speak through him.

  “He is dead. As you predicted,” I say, inclining my head. “Now I must know which of my colonels still come to you. Which of them still visit the shrines and kneel before the sampy. Tell me which of them honours the ancestors with his whole heart. He will be the one to defend me against false claimants.”

  False claimants. Rakotoba. My husband’s sister’s oldest son. He is popular with some of the traditionalists, but favour with the living, with the great true-blooded web of interconnected kin, is meaningless. Only the will of the dead matters now, and my adopted father is one of them, the closest in the chain but one to this red earth. Let the sea be the borders of your rice field, had been his final command to Radama in life. He unified my kingdom, he raised me up and his desires shall come to pass; nothing can prevent it.

  The sense of my glorious vintana surges through me, drowning out all fears of a misstep.

  “I can think of two colonels from your home village, Manjaka,” the Ombiasy says, naming them.

  I turn to Andrianmihaja. His bearing is so regal, his sober features so fine. Years have passed since he killed a scorpion on my windowsill, ate it without hesitation when I ordered him to on a whim, and looked on me with lust I had never seen in the king’s eyes. Andrianmihaja admires French warfare, studies their tactics while refusing their rum. He will be my proper husband, should we survive the night.

  “My heart,” I say, “go to fetch these colonels at once.”

  “I will go,” he says. “I will not be seen.” It was his eyes that first captured my interest but his fidelity that maintains it. Andrianmihaja has never taken any woman but me. He will never betray me.