She had read about Venice, California, in The Examiner. Mr. Abbot Kinney, an impresario, had drained marshes south of Santa Monica by digging a network of canals, and he was building houses where people could live in the style of the Venetian Renaissance. He’d also built a concrete boardwalk and amusement pier and convinced the Pacific Electric Railway to open a new route from Hill Street Station all the way out to the new community. Seaside Venice had already acquired a raffish, bohemian reputation, all by itself out there on the rim of the world where the white fog — the marine layer — was often bitter and deep.
On a bright winter Sunday six weeks after her mother’s death, Iseult rode the electric cars into Los Angeles, then out to Venice. Thousands of people had come for the day, and with them she wandered the oceanfront promenade past a barn that billed itself the world’s largest dancehall, and another that called itself the world’s largest roller-skating rink. On the pier a seafood restaurant was built to look like a ship. The vulgar, boisterous atmosphere was as far from Pasadena as she could imagine. She bought a hot dog and ate it while she watched grown men compete in a sandcastle-building contest.
Strolling out onto Fraser’s Pier, past the Mystic Maze and the Panama Canal exhibit, she came to the Incubatorium. She had read about it in The Examiner: infants prematurely born were cared for there — and exhibited. A gaudy sign insisted
ONCE SEEN NEVER FORGOTTEN
while another declared
ALL THE WORLD LOVES A BABY!
Babies had been fascinating her lately. She was alone now; she was no one’s daughter and sick to death of her supposedly delicate health. And she was not fooled by her own good manners and niceness, though others might be. She knew just what a raging, self-conscious, desirous little beast she really was.
When Iseult was twenty, her beloved father — a scholar by temperament, a mill owner by inheritance, a New England gentleman of the old school — had killed himself. He’d never had to struggle with anything other than his own disposition and native sorrow, but it had been too much for him all the same.
In Pasadena in the weeks following her mother’s death, she had felt like a worn-out flag snapping in the wind, a forgotten banner signifying nothing. She wanted something and didn’t know what, something bigger than herself that was also in some way latent. She had often — more so since her remaining parent had died — imagined having a strong, coarse man in her bed, holding him there. Roughness seemed a kind of strength to her.
Desire was like that: frightening and promising, though the most she had been able to do so far was stare at the ceiling and touch herself in a way that thrilled, embarrassed, and frustrated her.
She paid her quarter to the ticket seller, who wore a starched white cap and apron like a nurse. Once inside, Iseult found herself peering through a window into a large, bright white room where a dozen incubator machines were arranged in two rows. The numbered incubators looked like iceboxes or small kitchen ranges of shiny white enamel, with steel fittings and glass doors. As she watched, a nurse opened one machine — number thirteen — and extracted a baby no bigger than a loaf of bread, with morsels of red hair on its head.
Iseult watched, fascinated, as the nurse unwrapped the baby from its swaddling, then tried to feed it by spilling liquid into its nose with a narrow spoon. Most of the liquid, whatever it was, seemed to run off down its chin.
She was standing so close to the observation window she could smell her breath clouding the glass. The smallness of the life she was looking at frightened her. The baby writhed and kicked feebly. Maybe it was famished. Couldn’t the nurse do a better job? Where was its mother? Didn’t incubator babies have parents?
On her father’s side of the family there was a pack of Boston aunts, uncles, and cousins. They had always seemed stiff and cold. Her mother’s people were warmer and kinder, but they were textile manufacturers in Lille, so she rarely saw them.
How could something as small and defenceless as Number Thirteen ever survive? The nurse had given up trying to feed it and was brusquely changing its tiny diaper. Showing all the maternal tenderness of a baker sliding a loaf into the oven, she bundled the baby and slid it back into its incubating machine.
This was giving Iseult a sharp pain in her chest, and she couldn’t stand it. She fled. Short of breath, gasping, she forced herself to walk all the way out to the end of the pier, struggling for calm. Cold, sour marine air opened her bronchial tubes. Elderly Japanese men were fishing; pelicans tried to snatch fish from creels and bait from buckets as the men shooed them off with cries like angry birdcalls. She had never felt so alone in the world.
~
Iseult had never been good at developing sustaining friendships with other young women. At boarding school in New York City, most of her classmates were from large Catholic families and accustomed to layered networks of relationships, easy habits of intimacy. As the only child of older parents, she was not. Almost everyone else in Harrison, New Hampshire, had been poor, and nearly all of them had worked at her family’s woollen mill. During much of her time at boarding school she had been ill with one thing or another, isolated in the convent infirmary or recuperating in the White Mountains.
Sometimes she imagined that her body lacked whatever organ it was that sweetened the other girls, pumping into their blood the nectar that gave them self-confidence as well as a profound instinctive need of one another. Her classmates were fixed and defined by their relationships, by secrets shared, by arguments and rituals of forgiveness. Her classmates developed crushes on the prettiest, youngest nuns and paid to have Masses said for their favourites at uptown chapels and churches, even at St. Patrick’s. During Iseult’s second year at the convent, buying Masses became something of a fad, and Mother Superior had to ban the practice after parents complained about the sums of money their daughters were spending; at St. Patrick’s Cathedral even a Low Mass in a side chapel could cost twenty-five dollars. The more daring girls then sought out obscure Italian or German parishes on the Lower East Side, in York-ville, or even in Brooklyn, secretly paying to have Mass cards printed and Masses said, even if no one from the convent could be there to hear them.
It seemed to Iseult that almost everyone at the convent was besotted. Mother Power, the tall, plainspoken nun who taught mathematics and was in charge of the infirmary, was the exception. Most Sacred Heart nuns were French or Irish, but Power was from San Antonio, Texas. Her manner was aloof. Girls were wary of her. She did not encourage crushes. Anyone coming to her class unprepared was sharply questioned, sometimes reduced to tears. Girls spoke of hating her. Behind her back they called her “Mother Longhorn” or “the Texas Cow.”
Mother Power did missionary work every Saturday afternoon in Hell’s Kitchen. One Saturday Iseult was alone in study hall with her sketchbook open, trying to draw her own left hand in pencil, when Mother Power came in looking for a satchel. Seeing Iseult, the nun brusquely invited her to come along.
Maybe it was chance, or maybe she recognized that Iseult was the most alone, the wickedest in her thoughts, the hungriest for connection. Or perhaps she had watched Iseult fighting through sickness and decided she was tougher than anyone realized.
“You might as well see how the other half lives. I warn you, I walk there and back. I don’t take the ’bus, and certainly not a cab.”
“I’d like to come.”
“Another thing to get straight is attitude. You’re not Lady Bountiful. And they’re not beggars. You’ll get more from the Kitchen than the Kitchen will ever get from you.”
“Yes, Mother. I’d still like to come.”
Mother Power walked along 54th Street with bold strides, the skirts of her habit swirling. The leather satchel over her shoulder was stuffed with missals, rosaries in little tin cases, apples, and pieces of hard candy.
“Sickness can give you strength,” she told Iseult. “City air isn’t as bad for you as everyone seems to think. It’s foolish and missish, this fear of life and dirt that’s bred i
nto you girls. Study the life of Mother Cabrini, Iseult. Puny little thing she was as a girl in Italy, much sicker than you’ve ever been. Much smaller too, a shrimp. You’ve good bones, Iseult; you’re going to be rough and tough. Cabrini, bless her, was never nothing more than a holy ghost of a girl, but see what she has accomplished, the orphanages and schools she started in this country for her Italian people. Learn from your weakness, Iseult, and you’ll soon be stronger than any of the jewel-box girls.”
That afternoon they had visited tenements lining the streets from Eighth Avenue to the river. The nun examined sick children, washed, deloused, and dosed them, and scolded their mothers. Iseult saw children with welts and bruises, children scabby with insect bites, children with broken arms in handkerchief slings. Mother Power had a list of doctors and dentists who would treat them without charge if she wrote a note and pinned it to their clothing. She threw open every window she could reach and shooed healthy children outside to play in the streets, where acacias and other weedy trees were sprouting the first green of summer. She distributed apples and candy to a pack of newsboys living in a livery stable on Ninth Avenue.
At Times Square the Texas nun seemed to know people at every corner and under every marquee. “Variety acts wrecked on drink, burlesque queens in a family way, busted circus people — Broadway and 42nd Street is one of the neediest spots on this earth, Iseult.”
North of 42nd Street, Mother Power stopped to talk to a tramp while the Broadway crowd broke around them. Iseult watched her hand the tramp a rosary along with a silver dollar extracted from the folds of her black habit. At a loft on 34th Street, Iseult helped hand around rosaries to Polish girls sitting at Singer machines, sewing black woollen bathing costumes. Hundreds of finished costumes were piled in crates on the workroom floor, the stink of lanolin and sizing recalling New Hampshire, where the power looms rumbled day and night.
Trudging up rancid staircases to factory lofts and tenements was hard work. The air was musty or worse, and Iseult was shocked at how oblivious people seemed to illness and mean circumstances. In a third-floor walk-up on 47th Street, holding a struggling, squealing, urinating infant as Mother Power dabbed mercurochrome on a rat bite, Iseult felt she was participating in a great struggle. She had always wanted a great struggle. When she was sick and despising her illness was also when she had felt most determined, bravest, most alive.
That night, lying awake in her white iron bed, Iseult told herself she had found her vocation. She would take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, join the Order of the Sacred Heart, and go into the Kitchen every week in her own swirling black habit.
She didn’t tell anyone about this decision. She was afraid Mother Power would ridicule her, for one thing. And she knew for certain that her parents would object. Her father, a New England Congregationalist married to a Roman Catholic, feared all nuns, though he tried not to show it — in his mind they were close to witches. Her parents would probably want to remove her from the convent and install her in another sanatorium in the White Mountains.
On Monday Mother Superior, a pink-cheeked little Irishwoman, quizzed Iseult about her outing. “A girl with your medical condition missionizing in Hell’s Kitchen? I never heard of such a thing. What was Mother Power thinking of? I don’t want you going there ever again.”
But the following Saturday Mother Power came into study hall again, and Iseult hurried to fetch her gloves and hat before anyone could stop her.
“Don’t think you are different than these people, Iseult, because you are not,” Mother Power called above the din of traffic on Eighth Avenue. “And don’t get sentimental either. Always try to see things up close, and as clear as you can.”
It was strangely warm as they went south of the Kitchen into a meatpacking district, where the air stank of blood, railway soot, and cattle crowded into pens. Iseult and the nun handed out prayer beads and recited a decade of Hail Marys with German and Austrian butchers on the loading dock of a slaughterhouse, the men in bloody boots and aprons. Heading north on Ninth Avenue, Mother Power pointed out street corners where Negroes had been tortured and hanged during the Civil War.
“Catholics did this, Iseult. The suffering of the innocent is inflicted a hundred times worse on Him. The Christ feels every lash, every burn, every scar. This was where the martyrs died, and now it’s a flesh market.”
Young women dressed completely in white, carrying little parasols, occupied most of the street corners along those blocks of Ninth Avenue.
“You know what prostitution is, don’t you, Iseult?”
“Yes.”
Patrick Dubois, a boy she’d known back in New Hampshire, had insisted that prostitutes — he called them “chippies” — lived in the Thatcher Hotel, between the woollen mill and the railway station. Her parents never said anything about them, just as they never mentioned the scrawny, unkempt children Iseult saw sitting on stoops along Textile Street. Often enough, walking past those ruthless three-deckers, she had overheard men and women inside, screaming at each other.
Ferme ta gueule, tu, putain de cochon!
They had sounded like people losing their minds, and she used to wonder if her father made a practice of hiring crazy people. Or did tending power looms cause people to lose their minds? It was Patrick Dubois, not her parents, who told her of a famous battle between Irish mechanics and foremen and French-Canadian factory hands on the bridge over the falls: one man thrown into the river, another kicked to death in the road. She’d wanted to ask her father what he remembered, but her curiosity would only have annoyed him.
The spry little river was the reason her great-grand-father had come up to New Hampshire in the 1820s, and in the early days the mill machinery was geared directly to the speed of the wild stream. Her grandfather had tamed and scheduled the river, first by damming it, then by installing steam turbines. A business doesn’t like wild things.
At the precinct house on 35th Street, Iseult and Mother Power prayed decades of the rosary with kneeling policemen, then visited the lock-up. The cells were relatively quiet on Saturday afternoon, awaiting the weekly bacchanal between Times Square and the river, although anything like real silence could not exist in such place, with drunks and morphine addicts snoring and whimpering, someone muttering crazy nonsense, someone else weeping. Iseult helped Mother Power hand prayer beads, missals, and holy pictures between the bars, and the cutting, violent stink of bodies was almost overpowering.
Iseult knelt beside the nun as she led the inmates in a novena, then stayed close, watching her comfort a German prostitute named Flossie, who had stabbed a man the night before. Clinging to the iron bars, Flossie was pretty in a demolished way. She might have been eighteen or thirty. Her yellow dress was torn at the shoulder, and whatever happened to her, she didn’t want her mother finding out.
“In Brooklyn my mother lives. I shall write a letter, say I go to Germany, home.”
All her life Iseult had been handled like a carefully wrapped package. When the nun touched Flossie’s hands, knuckled around the bars, and the girl began sobbing, Iseult, absorbing Flossie’s noise and scent and the plainness of her despair, felt an almost sickening awareness of her own privilege.
Prostitutes. Raw rivers. Secrets, drunks. Broken glass, bodily violence, dirt, and various forms of hunger. It was curiosity that drew her to the Kitchen, not religious feeling. She had never been able to feel that God was close. Her notion of having found her vocation had been a delusion, a conceit, a fantasy.
Flossie let go the bars and started coughing and wheezing. Mother Power sent the female jailer for a jug of cold water and tried to get Flossie to drink, but it didn’t do much good — cold water never did, in Iseult’s experience. She could still hear the girl coughing as they left the precinct house.
She would never be a nun like Mother Power, but she would try seeing herself in others, others in herself. She went to the Kitchen with Mother Power every Saturday for the rest of the term. Mother Superior must have known b
ut for some reason never again tried to stop her from going. Mother Superior made fun of Mother Power behind her back but, like everyone else, she was also scared of her.
The first Saturday in June was graduation day at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Iseult and her classmates, all in white and carrying nosegays, entered the chapel where their parents were already seated. Cardinal Farley celebrated the High Mass and afterwards there was a strawberry tea. It was a warm, emotional afternoon. Girls who over three years had barely spoken to Iseult hugged and kissed her.
Mother Power attended High Mass with the other nuns, but sometime during the strawberry tea she disappeared before Iseult had a chance to say goodbye to her. It was a Saturday, after all.
That evening Iseult’s parents took her to dinner at Delmonico’s, where she drank her first glass of champagne. The next morning they boarded a Pullman and travelled up to Maine, where her father had taken a big, breezy cottage at Kennebunkport for the summer. With her mother she joined a ladies’ art club and spent many afternoons trying to paint seascapes that were no worse and no better than anyone else’s. That fall she started at Smith, but a wicked bout of asthma weakened her and her parents would not allow her to return to college after Christmas; she was confined to bed for most of the winter. The next year her father died, and a few months later she and her mother left New Hampshire for good and moved to Pasadena.
Iseult never saw Mother Power again but often thought of her. Bold, awkward, lit up by something inside herself, the nun was the first woman Iseult had met who possessed a powerful vision of herself operating in the world.
~
She felt the California sun hot on her bare neck. She was wearing one of her day dresses, cotton poplin in crisp blue and white stripes. Her New England relations would have been annoyed that she wasn’t in mourning.
No one she knew would ever have thought of settling in Venice, California. The Boston relations somehow had the idea that now her mother was dead she would go back and live with them in their narrow, dark Back Bay houses. She wasn’t going to, not in a million years.
The O'Briens Page 5