by Mary Volmer
“A few months after he went off warring, I f igured what was ailing me. I seen my mama grow big enough times to know, but kept it close until Mama guessed what was what. She mighta kept me, sin or no, but sent me begging a place at the big house, else daddy come home and kill me.”
Landis’s mama, Mrs. Wilcox, wouldn’t even see her through the door. So Mama set off, already big, and not knowing anything but the name of the man Landis had gone to f ight for: Zollicoffer.
I’d known most of this, a sketch of it anyway, and maybe, maybe I should have been content to let wondering die years ago. To let it be. To assume the rest. That Mama didn’t f ind him. This would have made it possible to believe—to go on believing—that after she stumbled on Dot’s house, after I was born, she went looking again for him, my father. That she did love him and went looking and that was why she left me. If I’d been writing the story, as I had been for most of my life, that’s what I would have written. What I wanted to believe. Maybe I should have been content with that and never asked for the truth.
Because the truth was, Mama did f ind Landis, three months after she started searching. She found him on the north bank of the Cumberland River. It was November, the river swelling over its banks. She’d come upon the regiment and a ragtag band of camp followers days before. Since then she’d been begging soldier to soldier and might not have recognized Landis at all, f ilthy and bearded like the rest, except for the second look he gave her. The last look he gave her.
“He stood there,” Mama said, her voice cracking, staring into that room like the memory was onstage before her. “He stood there acting like he never in his life had seen me. Never even laid eyes on me. Wasn’t nothing I could say to prove it.”
There were men everywhere, she said, all around, gathered close. They started up teasing Landis and poking at Mama’s belly, touching her all over, ripping her dress, until one of the men broke it up. She didn’t remember much after that. Somebody—same man, maybe—gave her coffee and hardtack to eat, wrapped her in his peacoat. Sent her away. Next day the pains came.
Mama told the end sitting straight as a nail in that chair. Like someone reciting a Bible story of people long dead and gone, all but the moral remaining, and that’s what got to me. What it all was building to. That’s what made the tears come, and the anger, in spite of hearing all she’d suffered.
“You weren’t looking for him? When you run off and left me at Dot’s, you weren’t looking.”
Mama shook her head.
“Then why’d you run off, Mama? Because of me. You left because of me.”
Her silence, the hard shard of grief on her face held the truth of it, and I—ruthless, broken girl—still pressed.
“Well then,” I asked, “why’d you come back?”
Her answer, a whisper: “Same reason.”
PART iii
1876
28
That January, shades of gray erased the line between sky and horizon. By the time the eagles came, the river between the Illinois and Missouri shores had frozen into colored panes of jagged ice, driven one atop the other by the current, cracking and moaning at all hours. No skiffs or steamers braved the bend for weeks, and when they did, they found the river beneath reshaped, banks shifted, sandbars lurking where none had been, to catch a wheel or snap a rudder.
Even so, that winter felt neither as long nor as bleak as the last. With Mama’s admission, something essential inside of me had shifted as well. Inside Mama too, I think, though of course, after that day, we didn’t talk about it. “Same reason,” was all she’d said, thin f ingers gripping her handbag and I, stunned and desperate for anything more to say, said nothing. She opened the door to leave. The curtains swelled. White light, like a thousand knotted threads of lace, dazzling in their complication, f illed the room, and when she shut the door, settled back into gray. Sick with grief and gratitude, I cried myself to sleep.
Really, I’m not sure if I can say what I felt for her in the days of convalescence that followed—not forgiveness, exactly, and anyway Mama hadn’t been asking. I can say that in my dreams, alongside Aileen dead in the river and Muriel bruised in that frame bed, there now lived a girl, a pretty girl, a girl cursed with beauty, marching alone through a war. Oh, Mama! Poor brave Mama. As far as all the things that might have happened between the time she left me at Dot’s and her return, well, I’ve learned enough by now about the lives of camp followers to imagine the burdens she must still bear.
For a while after this I found myself, for lack of a better word, unmoored. But also freed. With Mama’s admission, the jagged line between us sharpened into focus. I felt, maybe for the f irst time, free to love her as she was—and to grow apart from her, to grow up. Into what, into whom, I didn’t know. In my uncertainty, I clung to that promise of transformation Miss Rose and Mrs. French each had made in her own way. And, of course, to my infatuation with William.
Whereas, before, I’d lingered with Nettle and Alby until the last minute before lessons, now I arrived at the library early enough to sharpen my pencils and arrange my books before the clocks chimed eight; when they chimed noon, I’d stay to f inish a page or rewrite a thought. I poured over my French and German grammars, muddled devoutly through whatever Mrs. French gave me to read, be it Euclid, Plato, Wollstonecraft, or Emerson. It felt like a fever, this new determination, and might well have passed, except that Mrs. French treated it as a permanent condition, going so far as to invite me to ramble the riverside with her several days a week thereafter.
“Self-reliance is all well and good, Madelyn,” she conf ided on one of our walks. We’d stopped, huddled in the cold, to watch eagles plummet toward the ice and circle again. “So long as one is given the opportunity to develop one’s individual talents and character. What if the eagle were told her realm was the nest and, although she possessed wings, must never be allowed to fly?”
As the pages of her manuscript accumulated, Miss Rose, too, began asking me to accompany her—to the Wayward Home, for example—and trusting me on more errands about town. Now, when Mama or anyone else saw me coming, they knew I came in Miss Rose’s name. When I confronted my image in Miss Rose’s mirror, I saw my mark, yes, but also felt a new, tissue-thin dignity, extending from that bony region where my head met my neck, deep into some vital part I hadn’t known existed.
I f igured it was only a matter of time before William noticed, too. You see, I’d quite effortlessly ignored any comparisons, intended or not, Mama had made between her experience and my own life.
That William was so often in Saint Louis on business for Miss Rose didn’t bother me. I knew from books that true affection between lovers required hardship and separation; each absence allowed me to repair my idea of William, to trim away any incongruity in the character I’d made for him. By the time he returned, he f it nicely into the role of my secret admirer, too bereaved over the loss of another to acknowledge, much less express, his affection.
But, of course, this hopeful self-deception would not be long in the world. It would be one casualty in the turmoil of the coming months. I was lucky, by comparison. Miss Rose would lose much more than hope; she had much more than hope to lose.
After the f irst thaw, in February, Miss Rose resumed her soirees. By the end of the month, the newly christened Reliance Theater boasted a new stage, footlights, and a working curtain. She hired Hanley to distribute flyers and manage the house on the weekends and hired his sister, Muriel, to take tickets. Three members of the Lyceum Circuit, Mr. Alcott among them, and a traveling company from Albany had been slated for the summer season. In the meantime, Miss Rose hosted a magician and hypnotist (a husband-and-wife team), and Lydia Lemarch, a nervous, bird-thin soprano with the brownest teeth you ever saw. Once, unexpectedly, a troupe of Chinese contortionists rolled down Grafton Road in a Conestoga wagon and sold out six shows in three days before continuing south to Alton.
And
after every show, there appeared in Mr. Stockwell’s rival paper, the Sentinel, anonymous condemnations, which Miss Rose read aloud with relish.
“Listen to this, Madelyn. Listen.”
One unfortunate young lady, subjected by an irresponsible aunt to the display of a contortionist, suffered, for two days following, wide-staring eyes and a protruding chin. I laughed as she parodied the description. Even the most benign of the dramatic arts, she read on, excite the passions, encouraging immoral and unclean thoughts to proliferate.
She tossed the paper on her desktop, serious again. “To some men, Madelyn, all thought is unclean. They are better off not doing it.”
Of course, I could tell she was not entirely displeased. Ticket sales at the theater were never as swift as after one of Mr. Stockwell’s condemnations. “I should write them myself, perhaps.”
She didn’t need to. Stockwell was nothing if not persistent, and before long, he broadened the scope of his crusade. Claiming a postmaster’s authority, he and four men from the Sin Society raided William’s shop, looking for images of a “lewd and lascivious nature.” I’d seen William angry before, with Mr. Dryfus, but I’d never seen him as livid as he was when recounting to Miss Rose how they charged in, conf iscating plates, ruining prints, rummaging props.
“And they found?” asked Miss Rose. I watched him close, thinking about that cigar box of naked ladies.
“Nothing,” he said, caught me staring, and looked away. “Of course.”
A week later, Stockwell raided Lloyd Herman’s Bookshop, demanding every copy of Baudelaire. When Mr. Herman, a stout Frenchman with a sickly wife, refused, Stockwell demanded Whitman as well. To this action, Miss Rose responded in the Register: The sphere of individual liberty has shrunk, indeed, if it cannot protect all that lies upon one’s bookshelves. If the Lily White sold books, perhaps Mr. Stockwell would consider that establishment, and its patrons, worthy of reform as well?
The last sentence originally read: If the Lily White sold books, instead of bodies . . . I know because I wrote it down that way. Mrs. French convinced her that she’d enjoy a more favorable response if this explicit reference were implied—but there was little response at all. Such commentary sold papers, maybe, but roused little more than amusement from most people in Reliance. And Miss Rose? Well, I honestly think she was beginning to f ind Mr. Stockwell and his Sin Society a bit of a bore.
That is, until one day in the second week of February, as we were f inishing in her off ice, Miss Rose received a letter that raised the stakes of that feud and, it is clear to me now, propelled into motion both the glorious and the bitter events to come.
The letter, you see, was from her nephews, Willard and James, brewery owners in Saint Louis. They wrote to say they had received a letter of their own from a “Concerned Citizen,” kind enough to warn them of the damage their aunt might be doing the family name—not to mention the family coffers. And to say that “any alteration to Grandfather’s will would be viewed with extreme suspicion.”
“Concerned citizen!” I trailed after as Miss Rose, marching from her off ice to the library, thrust the letter at Mrs. French. “What a meddling ass Stockwell is!”
Mrs. French, after reading the letter, peered over her oculars. “And perhaps more resourceful than we had thought?” But her voice tapered. She’d noticed, as I had, the expression on Miss Rose’s face. Anger, yes, but more as well: the unguarded and mesmerizing glow of inspiration.
“Rose?” said Mrs. French.
“The name of Stockwell’s oldest girl, the painter.” I felt a little jolting tingle in my gut at this. “What is it? Georgia?”
“Georgiana,” I said, though she wasn’t asking me.
“Rose?” said Mrs. French.
“Lorena, you cannot expect a budding artist to reach her potential without study of masterful works. Well”—she took the letter back, folded it twice—“it happens that I own several such works.”
29
So it was that two days later, Georgiana Stockwell, oldest daughter of the town’s self-proclaimed moral paragon, arrived in the courtyard on horseback with Mrs. Smith, bundled against the cold. She leaped to the ground, taking in the fountain, the topiary, shaggy with winter growth, and the clipped rosebushes.
“Mother thinks we are out for a ride on the bluffs,” she said.
“And so you are, my dear!” said Miss Rose. “Welcome.”
At tea in the conservatory, Miss Rose spoke of nothing but artists and galleries and salons abroad, how in Europe a young lady with potential might develop her talents—if she were to f ind a patron, of course. Did she know William Stark’s mother had been a painter? Mrs. French choked a little on her biscuit. Neither she nor Mrs. Smith said much of anything during the barrage. Beneath Violet’s pasted smile, I saw a steeper grade of the jealous malice I felt at the attention Miss Rose lavished upon her; Georgiana remained oblivious to everything except Miss Rose’s words. When tea was over, Miss Rose sent her alone with her sketchpad to explore the gallery, insisting that we f ive stay right here to consider our spring wardrobes.
“Actually, Miss Rose . . .” said Mrs. Smith. The hesitancy in her voice, so unlike her, wrested my attention from Georgiana’s wandering form. “There is another . . . a rather delicate matter I hoped to broach.” She glanced between Violet and me. “The matter of French fashions?”
She had Violet’s full attention, too, now.
“Demand is waning?” said Miss Rose.
“No. Well, not exactly. Perhaps I might demonstrate?”
From her pocket Mrs. Smith produced one of the giant rubber thimbles I delivered, on occasion, to the dress shop. She turned to look at me.
“Madelyn. Will you tell us what you think this is?”
Her reaction did not please me.
“There, see!” she said brightly. “She doesn’t know. The ladies in my cousin’s circle particularly, they don’t know, either. Nor do most of the merchant’s wives. Much less what to do with it. The shopgirls, and the Lily White girls, some know, and they talk about such things. But the ladies, they don’t know.”
“Know what? What is it?” I said. Violet stretched the rubber between two f ingers and must not have known either, or she would have delighted in showing me up.
“Mrs. Biggs confessed that she keeps the article under her bed, like a talisman,” Mrs. Smith continued, “as if that will protect her. And, well, I did not feel qualif ied to explain, adequately, that is, the physiology. My cousin May Ann was the only one to ask and, frankly, I didn’t know what to say.”
Mrs. French looked at Miss Rose. Miss Rose put her teacup down.
“Mrs. Stockwell bought one?” asked Miss Rose.
“She . . . No. I gave her one. If you only knew what that poor woman has suffered. Of course, how could you?”
“Oh,” said Mrs. French, taking a breath. “Oh dear. How many?”
“She’s lost three, I think, since the baby died,” said Mrs. Smith. “The last one this summer. Such sadness I have never known, thank the Lord. Such pain.”
Miss Rose pushed her plate away, and the look in her eye, well, it scared me. Mrs. French saw it. Violet, too.
“And Melborn, he—” said Mrs. Smith. “Well, he is a man. He cannot restrain himself.”
“Huh,” said Mrs. French.
“And he fears for his soul, lest he stray.”
“He has strayed before,” said Miss Rose. It was not a question. Her tone, def initive. This time Mrs. Smith noticed, too.
“I don’t. I really don’t think . . .”
“What are you suggesting, Mrs. Smith?” asked Mrs. French.
“Well. Well, a class, I suppose. A seminar, of sorts.”
“Here?” said Mrs. French. “You are suggesting we have them here? But they would not come, would they? Especially if our purpose was clear.”
“
Not if our purpose was clear. Not if they believed they would be discovered, no.” Mrs. Smith’s attention swayed from her cup to Georgiana, sitting now in front of Daphne, her drawing pad open on her lap. “But yes. I do believe they would come.”
“They will come.” Miss Rose folded her napkin. A chill wind rattled the conservatory’s glass wall.
“Mrs. French,” I whispered in her ear, when f inally we stood up from the table. “Come for what?”
“The female organs,” Mrs. French said, “might be visualized as a lily or a fleur-de-lis.” She stood in the fractured light of the library armed with a pointer and four crudely enlarged diagrams, hand-drawn in chalk from Mr. Knowlton’s text. Pamphlets, complete with diagrams, lay open on a library table, around which sat Georgiana, Mrs. Smith, and three women carefully chosen from Mrs. Smith’s client list: Mrs. Biggs, the senator’s wife, Mrs. Shultz, and Mrs. Hershal.
And Mama, my Mama, f illed the sixth chair.
Except for Mama—who initially had come to f it Miss Rose to the dress she’d commissioned—each woman arrived that day by special invitation to pursue a conf idential benevolent venture, and for truffles and tea, which was growing cold as Mrs. French, pointing to various regions of her diagram, enunciated with the same precision with which she recited Latin roots for our morning lessons: labia, lips, clitoris.
“The shape is repeated and much more def ined,” she explained, “in the internal sex organs: ovaries, womb, birth canal.”
Mrs. Biggs gasped. Mrs. Shultz’s mouth, poised for the last several minutes above her cup, shut. Mama looked back toward the door where Violet and I sat out of the way, riveted, silent as ghosts.