by Marge Piercy
SIXTEEN
1852
WHEN VICTORIA WAS FOURTEEN, she took to her bed with pneumonia. Buck had exhausted her on the road with Tennie as spiritualist sisters, traveling in a caravan wagon. When she was silent, afterward Buck would beat her until she could not lie comfortably on her right side or her left or her back, but only on her stomach. If not enough money was taken in from a performance, he would eat and leave the girls hungry. Buck preferred Tennie, who was amenable and didn’t take séances seriously. Buck found Victoria too reticent, too serious—unwilling to flirt with men who wanted their fortunes told. Now, shaking and drenched with sweat, she saw visions in her fever. An angel appeared to her as to Mary and announced she would be a great woman. The angel stood between the faded dirty curtains of the bedroom she shared with her siblings, shining too bright for her eyes to endure, speaking in a voice like organ music.
Buck finally called a doctor, Canning Woodhull, afraid she would die and he would lose a meal ticket. Dr. Woodhull sized up the situation, held her hand, mopped her forehead. He insisted she be fed properly and regularly. She must go back to school and have rest and sleep. She must walk in the fresh air to strengthen her body. He would walk with her. He was twice her age, but he began to court her. She found a protector in him, for he seemed far more gentle and educated than men she had known. He gave her books to read and advice on how to carry herself, how to behave, how to speak correctly. He lent her a book on grammar and one on deportment.
“You’re being so good to me. Why do you bother?” “I’m educating you to be my wife. Would you like that?” “Oh yes!” She would escape Buck, Roxanne and the rest of the screaming, scheming, crazy clan. She would be a doctor’s wife. He told her he came from a prominent family. Sometimes she smelled liquor on his breath, but Buck always smelled of liquor, as did most men she met on the road.
When Dr. Woodhull, as she thought of him still, asked Buck about marrying his daughter, Buck was furious. She was waiting at the head of the stairs in the drafty dirty house where they were living in Mount Gilead, Ohio, ready to rush down. Buck told Woodhull to get out of the house or he would empty a shotgun into him. Buck ran to the back porch where he kept his guns and the doctor fled via the front door.
She went back to her bed in despair, but Woodhull did not give up. He caught her at the stream as she was doing laundry, kissed her and said he still wanted to marry her. She must be true to him until they could run away together. She swore that she would wait. They worked out ways to meet and places to leave messages.
She turned fifteen before a good opportunity opened up. It was a mild November, although the rain had knocked most leaves from the maples and oaks. Buck had gone off to see a man about a horse. Roxanne had taken to her bed dead drunk. Utica, who’d become addicted to opium while helping their mother cook up the elixirs Buck sold, lay on her pallet dead to everything. Victoria sent a message.
They eloped and were married in Cleveland. Canning took her to bed in a hotel. The act itself was over in five minutes, her hymen broken and a little trickle of blood staining the bed. Then he passed out. She realized he was drunk. The next day they moved on and a week later found them in a cheap boardinghouse in Chicago, an iron gray city of smoke and the stench of blood from slaughterhouses. Most evenings she would have to go in search of her new husband from tavern to tavern. She began to wonder why he had been so persistent in the face of Buck’s refusal, for now he seemed indifferent. Was she lacking in some female way? Her body had begun to fill out, but she wasn’t fleshy. One night a bartender gave her an address, snickering. It was a brothel. She found Canning in bed with a woman even older than he was.
They had moved from a boardinghouse to a tiny top-floor room containing a bed, a basin, a chest of drawers and two straight chairs. She had only the dress she had eloped in, her cloak, a worn pair of boots. Winter was coming on rapidly. Far from having a thriving medical practice, Canning worked only occasionally in connection with local pharmacies. He was an educated man, and when he was sober he would teach her history or etiquette or grammar, but he was rarely sober long. He liked the company of whores, while he seemed to find little pleasure in hers. She was always having to beg him for money, to chase him from tavern to brothel, to turn out his pockets when he fell into bed and began to snore. From his wallet she learned he had a child—illegitimate perhaps?—in Indiana to whom he sent money, when he remembered, when he had any She wondered if their marriage was legal, but she could not ask since she was not about to admit to searching his trousers.
She seemed to have married two men. Sober, Canning was intelligent, well spoken, well educated, a gentleman who seemed to care for her. When he was drunk, she was nothing to him. She was married to two men, but both were liars. There was no affluent family. There may or may not have been medical training. She turned to fortune-telling to survive. She never knew when he would come home or when he would vanish for a week. That summer she found herself pregnant. She was sixteen, with child and desperate. When she complained too much, Canning began punching her. He knocked her down several times. When he was sober, he did not remember hitting her and asked her how she had come by such bad bruises.
A bitter cold winter day she gave birth with Canning in attendance, a bottle of rye whiskey at his side. Her labor was long and several times she passed out. She believed she would die, but finally she gave birth to a boy with a misshapen and enlarged head. Canning left her and did not return for several days. Too weak to move, she lay in the bloody bed, her breasts dry, unable to nurse the baby, who seemed to have difficulty even finding the breast. A woman who lived down the hall cleaned her up, washed the baby and took him to a wet nurse. But the nurse must be paid and Victoria had no money. She was feverish and flat on her back. She had not eaten since she went into labor.
When she woke from an exhausted fever lying in her own sweat with Canning still gone, her mother was there. “I dreamed you was in trouble,” Roxanne whispered. “A vision came to me. An angel appeared waving a fiery sword and told me where to find my poor girl.”
Roxanne nursed her. She said something was wrong with the baby. The woman down the hall told her that Canning had come back, found her ill and left saying he was going to send a telegram. That explained Roxanne’s miracle. Victoria was grateful to her mother, who fed her broth and eggs, cooing, “You’re my daughter again. My sweet daughter who loves her mama. You’re my beautifulest girl. Men are pigs, Vickie mine, just pigs rooting for their feed, for drink and dirtiness.”
She held Byron tenderly. At last her milk had come down, a full week after the birth. Her mother was the rock she clung to as she slowly recovered. Roxanne said, “You see? Family comes through. Family is all you can count on, Vickie mine. We must always remember, we’re one blood and that’s what matters in the end. Whether you marry or you don’t, you still got family. Blood counts.”
“Mama, what’s wrong with Byron?”
“I don’t know, Vickie mine. But he’s not right. Still he’s a Claflin, you can see it in his black hair on his head and his black eyes. He’s one of us, and we’ll cleave to him and care for him, no matter what he is. Because family counts and he’s family. You got blue eyes, but you’re one of us through and through. So I come to bring you back from death’s doorstep, by the will of the Almighty and my own powers.”
Victoria had been raised to put blood before all. She had run off with Woodhull, so perhaps what was wrong with her son was punishment. Her mother had come to save her life when her husband had abandoned her to die in the tiny cold room of the dirty tenement. She would not forget.
Victoria slept with her mother instead of her husband. Gradually the whole Claflin clan appeared in Chicago, dribbling in. Utica, her next youngest sister, pretty but dim-witted, Buck, even Margaret Ann the eldest came to stay. She had been unfaithful to her husband, who had thrown her out. Tennie came with Buck. She was gorgeous now, no longer a child although only twelve. She had blossomed physically over the last two
years. They moved into a boardinghouse together, all the Claflins and Canning. Buck had forgiven him, and often they went off drinking. Roxanne stuck close to Victoria, as if losing her once had determined she must keep a tight hold. Victoria was reading fortunes and consulting the spirits for those who wanted to speak with the departed. Almost every adult had lost a child or two or six; many wanted to be in touch with parents, grandparents, lost lovers. People died so often and easily. Most clients sought reassurance, and that she could give in plenty.
“Mama, I am in a bright place where the angels walk amongst us. I can see you and I know you’re sad for me, but you shouldn’t be. Brother Teddy and me, we’re studying with the angels, things that you can’t imagine on your plane of existence, Mama. I am not dead, Mama, but gone beyond. I am in a finer life where there is no disease, no pain, no poverty or hunger, no danger. There are other heavens beyond this one, but here is a fine place full of good souls. When you join us, Mama, we will be waiting for you.”
Women wept with joy when their lost children spoke to them of their new lives. She made their souls lighter. That she was always willing to do, because even if she didn’t sense that particular soul, after all, she had visions of the next existence and she could describe it perfectly to these mourners. Women spoke to her of beatings, of abuse, of cruelty and neglect, of husbands who sent them out to work, then took every penny and spent it on whores. She was a sponge who absorbed their pain and sorrow. Women had so much trouble. When she had power, she would change their lives.
Buck passed out flyers with pictures of both sisters. MORE RENOWNED THAN THE FOX SISTERS, THE MIRACLE SISTERS. The Fox sisters lived in upstate New York where they had started the craze for séances with spirit-rapping. When Tennie worked with Victoria, it was not the quiet meetings she conducted alone. Spirits rapped on tables, whooshed around the room, sometimes appeared sparkling, moaned or groaned or shrieked. Fellow boarders complained of the noise or of the Claflins usurping the parlor. When it got too bad in one boardinghouse, they moved to another. She was thankful to be eating regularly. Utica was seeing men in a room down the hall. The other boarders objected more to the séances than they did to the men visiting Utica. Buck brought them up and hung around to make sure they weren’t brutal and that they paid. Usually he sat in the chair in the hall tilted against the wall smoking a cigar. Victoria was glad he had taken up cigars. Chewing tobacco was messier and he used to spit it all over the floor. She had become more squeamish. She felt embarrassed by her new attitudes.
Byron never learned to walk or talk. He could crawl so he had to be watched. Utica was good at that, and so was Tennie, when Victoria had clients who needed to commune with the spirits. Roxanne developed the habit of praying loudly over him, which scared the poor child so that he would begin to cry. Victoria noticed bruises on him. She did not know if Roxanne or Buck was responsible. She knew it was not Canning. In spite of his occasional drunken brutality with her, he had infinite patience with Byron. They were sinking deeper into Buck’s scams and his willingness to make a living through the bodies of his daughters.
Gold had been discovered in California nine years before. She met men who were traveling there, following Horace Greeley’s advice, Go west, young man. Maybe there Canning would straighten out. Whether he did or not, gold was supposed to have created an economy of easy money in San Francisco. Canning did not need much persuading, for he’d grown weary of the quarreling, screaming, praying Claflins.
The preferred way to travel was by boat, across Panama or Nicaragua, where Cornelius Vanderbilt had created a route, but they lacked the money Then one day Canning came home with the amount. He would not answer her questions. She found blood on his trousers, on the cuffs of his shirt, splattered on his medical bag.
In San Francisco, she set herself up but people seemed uninterested in communing with spirits. The atmosphere was one where Canning felt right at home, with saloons and brothels everywhere and prostitutes on every busy corner. She got a job in a saloon but was fired when she refused to flirt with the customers and was not interested in sex with them. She tried sewing, but it paid miserably. They were living in the toughest part of town where men were shanghaied—knocked out by drugs in their booze to wake as crew on a steamer a day out to sea on the way to China.
Here in the land of gold, they had not enough money to pay next week’s rent in the cheapest boardinghouse she could find. She made sure Byron had enough to eat, but frequently she had nothing but a little bread and maybe a few oysters or hot corn from a vender. A woman in the boardinghouse suggested she try out for the stage. She got a job as an actress in The Country Cousin. Her ability to memorize was useful, as was her beauty. She hated being strapped into a tight corset and low-cut dress to flounce around the stage while an audience of men ogled and roared. Still, she was making enough to move Byron and Canning out of the dreadful boardinghouse on the Barbary Coast and into a respectable one run by an Italian woman who could actually cook. The landlady pitied Byron and took him under her care. She did not think much of Canning, although she called on his medical services when necessary. Victoria got on with her. At twenty she often liked the women she met better than the men.
It was not an easy life on the stage, working behind the gaslights and then at parties afterward, where the actresses were expected to entertain men with deep pockets. At first the other actresses viewed her with suspicion, because she had developed fine manners and an air of quiet elegance. Canning had taught her that, building on her natural dignity. But she reached out to the other women; soon they were confiding their affairs, their miscarriages and abortions, their children, their lovers, their sugar daddies, their ambitions and fears. When she occasionally brought Byron with her, she could see the other women pitied her, which took the edge off envy they might otherwise feel. At the parties, for the first time she entered bourgeois space. Having grown up in poverty and simple, bare interiors, she was overwhelmed by the clutter, thick fabrics hanging and draping, velvet, paisley, multiple floor and wallpaper prints. Every surface was laden with bric-a-brac, vases, statuettes, curios. It gave her vertigo at first, this passion those with money had to occupy and decorate all available space.
She became friendly with another actress. Josie Mansfield had come out from the East Coast with her parents. After her father was killed in a duel, her mother remarried and her stepfather forced her into prostitution. He sounded a bit like Buck. Josie’s mother was a hopeless drunk, much like Canning, who had also picked up a taste for opium. Canning was a millstone tied around Victoria’s neck. Because of her job, she was no longer faithful, which made his indifference and shiftlessness hurt her less. He was a dependent, like Byron. Byron gave her more joy because he was an affectionate creature, sweet and passive.
Two years of obscene productions with men pawing her afterward kept her family in food and rent and clothing but made her feel she would lose her mind. She got a letter from her older sister Margaret Ann telling her the family was doing right fine these days with Tennie at fourteen selling Miss Tennessee’s Magnetic Life Elixir. “How are you doing?” Margaret asked. “Bet you’re panning gold for sure in California. I’m considering getting married again. How is your doctor? We think of you out in the golden West just rolling in dollars.”
Victoria decided to return east. She had been on the stage long enough to know that her novelty was wearing off. She had to become a bigger star or be relegated to bit parts, and the way to bigger parts was to become the mistress of a producer. She didn’t want any man to have that much control over her, for it would feel like Buck all over again. Prancing about partly dressed for an audience of goats in strung-together melodramas with the obligatory scene where her clothes such as they were would be half ripped off, was not the higher mission she had been promised would be hers.
One thing she would take away from San Francisco: confidence in her powers as a sexual being. She had learned she could satisfy men very well, and that she herself could enjoy the emb
race. Once she overcame her reticence with a particular man, sexual response came easily, but she retained enough self-control always to know exactly how to apply pressure to the man at the proper time and place to effect intense pleasure. Sex was not simply something men visited upon helpless or compliant women. She could seduce. She would prefer to do so from a position of choice, but she found that sex gave her not only pleasure but strength. If she decided a particular man was the one she would prefer in a room, she had developed what she thought of as animal magnetism—a form of spiritual electricity—that would draw him to her. Once a man had met her gaze, she was sure she could have him. If women knew how to deal with sex more forthrightly, more intelligently, more aggressively, their lives would improve. Certainly they would enjoy them more. But it was a matter of power and choice.
Pregnant again, she took Canning and Byron to Indianapolis, where she worked as a spiritual healer and medium. She hoped she was carrying a girl this time, and that her daughter would be perfect. She wanted to bear her away from her family. In a dim and cold rented room, with the April rain striking the pane in torrents, a drunken and stupefied Canning delivered her of the baby girl she had been sure she would have. He left her and she woke to find the umbilical cord cut but untied and the baby bleeding to death. She grabbed the cord and tied it herself.
This time her milk came down. She named her baby Zulu Maud. The man in the white toga who had begun appearing suggested the name. “She will be a source of strength to you,” the spirit told her. She clutched her baby to her breast that was oozing milk and watched the sweet little mouth suck eagerly. Outside through the window open now to benign spring breezes, she heard newsboys hawking papers about war. Confederate forces had fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. What would war mean? She held her sweet baby, worrying. One thing she knew: between her family and Canning, there was only one choice. She was done with him. She would go home to the Claflins and let Buck send her on the road with his tonics and elixirs, his cancer cures and his schemes for blackmailing. She would leave Canning wherever he lay. She would get back on her feet and then she would leave the Claflins also. She would set forth on her own with only her children, for the spirits would command and protect her. As soon as she was strong enough, she rose and began to pack her few belongings into an old satchel.