FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Ordinary? I don’t know. I was in their keeping, but I wasn’t theirs. And when I was about fifteen or so, I suddenly went from having a pretty and true little voice to having a Voice. I cannot tell you how that discovery changed me, and changed everything. It led me then, my Voice. I couldn’t not use it and it told me loud and clear that it and I were no longer suitable for light entertainment.”

  “That is when you were ‘sold’ to the maestro?”

  “They resented my defection to the legitimate stage, but I desperately needed a good singing tutor at that point, and was lucky enough to find the maestro. I could no longer stay up late to perform feats of breath-holding or between-act turns before the curtain. That’s when I began working for the Pinkertons and studying opera every moment I could.”

  “And that is all the training you had? One American tutor?”

  “The maestro possessed a remarkable musicianship, Nell. He was already past sixty when I began training with him, but his ear was as acute as an F-sharp, and his hands were strong and nimble on the violin. I should have been working on this level years earlier, but he had an amazing method of hastening my progress.”

  “And what was that?”

  “You will doubt me.”

  “I never doubt you. Well, not often. Tell me.”

  “It was why my friends in the theater distrusted him so. They felt he was one of them, but had pretensions and denied their common background.”

  “They felt he was a fraud, but why? Surely the progress of your voice argued for his genius.”

  “It was his methods they distrusted.” Irene stared at the long, island panorama passing before our eyes, her smile fond. “Perhaps because those methods were as eccentric as they themselves were. One’s own oddities always look worse in others. The maestro had much time to make up for in my haphazard musical education, and many bad habits to cure.” She turned to me with a shrug. “How do you think I learned the gentle art of mesmerism, Nell? He hypnotized me, to free my voice of my conscious control, and he taught me to do the same to myself, and, incidentally, others. It has proved a most useful skill, as you may remember from an adventure or two we have shared.”

  “Hypnotized you! And the results were benign?”

  “Completely! I made remarkably fast progress. In fact, that is how I got my last name, I remembered during that sleepless night after Delmonico’s, so there is no wonder that it can’t be found in the birth records of New Jersey.”

  “Your last name? Adler, you mean. Are you saying it is not yours?”

  “My mother, whoever she is or was, though insisting on my first name, left me no surname. The maestro named me after his own instructor in the arts of combining hypnotism and music, an oddly intense fellow he had encountered in Paris in the mid-fifties, even before I was born. This ‘Adler’ had quite impressed the maestro with his approach and had gone on to train one of the singing marvels of the time, a woman of absolutely no artistic background who apparently could not sing a true note before then.”

  “You had no such handicaps,” I ventured.

  “No, save for my naturally dark soprano that is not in fashion.” She leaned against the railing, gazing on the intimidating profile of the city of New York as if it were becoming a phantasm beyond her reach. “So what used to be my avocation has become my mainstay.”

  “You mean investigating mysteries.”

  “Even if they concern myself.” The smile faded as her thoughts darkened. “I would hate to think that the mystery of my origins has brought disaster and death to those who cared for me when I was too young to care for myself. I can easily live with having no past beyond the point I took a steamship to England. I cannot live with the possibility that these people face current danger because of me, and who I was, or was not.”

  “Shall you be sorry at what you find?”

  “I may be, but Pink was right to summon us. I’m somehow central to these appalling murders, which seem almost staged to demand someone’s attention, perhaps mine.”

  “Pink! What do you suppose she is up to now that our paths have separated?”

  “Nothing that bodes well for our mission. Once again we wish to expose this murderer, or murderers, and yet return my long-ago friends and myself to private life. Once again Pink has been drawn into my orbit by the morbid scent of the sensational, and will find it necessary to expose my friends and my own private life to the public.

  “In a way, Nell”—She eyed me with an apologetic expression I seldom saw on her face—“I am very glad Quentin is here to distract her from mischief. No doubt his government feels the same way, although it might be that I make a far better distraction for Pink, and serve us all up to expediency. However, I have had an interesting communication from him.”

  “You? From Quentin?”

  “Indeed, but it was about you.”

  “Why should he write to you about me?”

  She smiled roguishly. “To get back into both of our good graces. He has invited you on an outing to Coney Island.”

  “Through you?”

  “He wished to be sure that I was still not angry with him.”

  “And did he not care whether I was still angry with him?”

  She eyed me with what could only be considered a smirk. “Apparently he is confident that you are not.”

  “Perhaps I wasn’t, but I am now! Why can he not write to me about me?”

  “Nell, he is being the complete gentleman. Were your father alive, I am sure he would have written him on this matter.”

  “My father is not alive and you are not my parent!”

  “At any rate, I myself, as your friend, would urge you to go. After all, you may discover more of what Pink is up to.”

  “I will not associate with Quentin merely to spy on Pink!”

  “Then associate with him for yourself alone.”

  “I have heard about Coney Island. It teems with gamblers, and loose women and thieves, and huge numbers of people in bathing costumes. . . .”

  “And spectacular hotels and fireworks and the beautiful seaside. Besides, you would be safe with Quentin anywhere, Nell.” An expression crossed her face I couldn’t quite read, an exceptional instance, perhaps, in which I should definitely not be safe with Quentin, but she was not about to voice it.

  “You must go, Nell. It is an opportunity not to be missed, and there is nothing in the nature of the invitation I could object to even if I were the sternest English parent, even if I were Prince Albert himself.”

  The notion of Irene in men’s dress as the late and inflexibly dignified Prince Albert was so ludicrous I had to laugh. And in laughing, I lost all high moral ground, and was suddenly forced to do what I most desired and dreaded in all the world: agree to see Quentin Stanhope, alone, in a strange country, at an isolated and bizarre and shiveringly notorious pleasure garden.

  So my only sojourn on water that was kind to both my eyes and delicate stomach ended with dire anxieties and mad speculations that made me as internally queasy as whitecaps on the Atlantic.

  I was not optimistic about visiting the Pig Lady in such an uneasy state, for I had never been adept at tolerating the abnormal, despite the intense dose of it I had faced during our last expedition to another land.

  The residential streets of New Jersey were no more exotic than those of New York City. One faced a long brown and red row of four-story domiciles, most of them boarding houses, I assumed.

  I absolutely thirsted for something Georgian with white pillars and pediments, but little of that vintage seemed to have survived in this new land of America, except perhaps in public buildings. I even began to long for the elaborate mansard roofs of Paris in all their rococo frivolity.

  American boarding houses may have had a domestic goddess, like Mr. Holmes’s cherubic Mrs. Hudson in London, but they were not on constant duty like a Paris concierge. After consulting a row of mailboxes in the tiny entry hall, Irene led our assault on a set of rooms that appeared to be at the end of a
long and turning unlit staircase.

  “She has retired from performing, I heard,” Irene whispered back at me as we twined our way upward single file. “I don’t know why, but certainly her funds are limited. I understand the current performers take up a collection for her needs from time to time, for she cannot convert to ordinary work. Like poor Phoebe, the very condition that made her an object of curiosity and pity and employment when she was young may prevent her from supporting herself now that she is older.”

  I felt in my coatdress pocket for my small leather coin purse, wondering what I could contribute. I was used to feeding the pigs from my early youth, but not a pig-faced woman, and couldn’t think of a delicate way to do it.

  I huffed out one breath after another for four tall stories, much missing our charming cottage in Neuilly, which featured only one staircase, and that one straight up. It seemed odd to think of Godfrey occupying our country home alone.

  We were forced to stop several steps shy of the single door that ended the stairs. Irene rapped on the door’s lower half, several times, and then it opened perhaps a foot wide.

  I expected an occupant, but no one filled the interstice, or appeared not to until I looked down.

  Another dwarf!

  I was beginning to feel like Snow White.

  Irene began chattering with this stunted figure until it became clear to me that this was not the Pig Lady, but a mere child. Once I realized that this was a species familiar to me, above all of Irene’s exotic former associates, I leapt to the fore in both conversation and position.

  “Well, my dear,” I said, brushing past Irene. “I know we are strangers and may seem rather frightening, but we are quite harmless and need only to meet the lady of the house.”

  I was interested to see in such close, though dim, quarters that the small figure was indeed a “child” of four or five, not a dwarf at all.

  My firm but friendly way with children once again produced results. Her already wide eyes grew as large as lace doilies. “Mama’s working,” she said.

  “She is not here?” Irene asked from behind me with a sad wrench in her voice.

  I realized how very important this quest had become for her, and bent to take the child’s tiny fingers in my own. They curled around my first joints in a most engaging and trusting way.

  “We need only a few moments with your mama,” I said in a conspiratory whisper, “and my friend is a famous opera singer who may have work for her.”

  “Oh!” The child eyed Irene, who was still a suppliant several steps below us. She frowned and stared. “She looks like the lady in the picture above my bed. Mama said she was my guardian angel.”

  I smiled on such childish faith. Doubtless her mama had pinned some madonna of the advertising world above the little girl’s cot. If Irene’s visage served as a calling card with this tiny gatekeeper, I was not about to argue.

  As the child pulled the door wide I stepped inside, Irene practically climbing my skirt hems as well as the last steep stairs to enter this aerie.

  I turned back to shut the door behind her and almost teetered on the threshold, so steep were the stairs leading below. I turned with trepidation, realizing that the Pig Lady and this delightful child were living in straitened circumstances.

  The room we stood in was dim, but the little girl tripped through its shadowy geography as ably as a mountain goat. An inner room had a window that overlooked the street, and at that uncurtained window sat a figure on a low stool. In her lap lay piece sewing work, a man’s shirt, or an apron, perhaps. White at least, and made of coarse material from which the brutal square of daylight picked out every heavy thread.

  The shock of such broad daylight made a silhouette of the sitter’s figure. The curve of the head blossomed into a shapeless funnel. The profile was so inhuman that I clasped the child’s small hand again, more for my own sake than hers. She was used to this place and this person.

  “Anna,” Irene said softly.

  The oversized head lifted from the work in its lap.

  “See!” the child exclaimed, wresting free of my hand to cavort toward the wall. The daylight fell on a small cot . . . and the unframed print that was nailed above it. Not a print, but a playbill (I had seen enough lately), and I recognized the subject with a start: Merlinda the Mermaid.

  Somehow this tiny child had recognized Irene, a decade later and with her flowing sea-drifting locks pinned up under a hat.

  “Anna,” Irene repeated, softly.

  The face turned toward us, and I flinched.

  But I saw only the odd half-moon that surrounded it like a dark halo, some sort of bonnet or hood. Something within that vague circumference spoke.

  “No one calls me by that name anymore.”

  Her voice was low, and mellow, and not at all hoggish.

  “You said I couldn’t,” the child trilled. “That I must call my elders ‘Mister’ and “Missus’ and ‘Miss.’ And you ‘Mama.’ ”

  The woman didn’t answer her, so I caught the child’s hand and lifted her up until she perched on one arm, a mite of perhaps thirty pounds. “I am a ‘Miss,’ ” I explained. “And my friend is a ‘Missus.’ ”

  “Is not! She’s a Mermaid.”

  “Not recently. Now she is Missus Norton.”

  “ ‘Missus Norton?’ ” The woman at the window’s voice smiled in the shadows. “You went away to seek your singing fortune, little Rena, and have returned a married lady, is that true?”

  “Well,” Irene said, moving cautiously toward the window, “I have done some singing, that is true. And I’ve found some fortune. And I am a Missus.”

  The Pig Lady’s hands lifted from her lap, thimble on one, needle in the other, and she clapped her palms in approval. “I am so glad to hear what became of you. Once you began to study music so seriously, you were soon lost to us.”

  “It was unbelievably demanding.”

  “All gifts are. Are you well?”

  “Very.”

  “And your friend who has such a way with my daughter?”

  I couldn’t help blushing in the dark.

  “Miss Huxleigh. A stalwart soul. I have been living, and working, in England, and most recently France.”

  The woman’s sigh pushed her dark breast up and down against the bright window like a bellows.

  I grew impatient, worried. This was like conversing with a silhouette, a cutout of black paper against white window. What was so horrific about the Pig Lady’s face that it remained such a mystery? At first I didn’t want to know, but now I did, burningly.

  I began to understand what had attracted Eve to apples.

  Irene had found another small stool and sat down upon it, despite the discomfort. I think it was the child’s seat and I asked her, “What are you called?”

  “Edith,” she said in the very dignified way that the name deserved.

  “What a delightful name.” I sank with her onto the cot. “I am Penelope.”

  “Penelope! I’ve never heard anything so silly!”

  “Perhaps I am a silly person,” I suggested.

  She grasped my thumb and leaned close. “I think you are! But I’m silly too. Sometimes it takes two to be silly.”

  And time, I thought. Silliness takes time, which is why adults so seldom enjoy it. I couldn’t help wondering how often her mother had time to be silly. Or how often she had heard people jeering at her mother.

  “Anna,” Irene said, “I’ve come back because there’s disturbing news. Sophie and Salamandra are dead.”

  The shrouded head bowed, as if struck.

  Irene spoke on. “A reporter for the World is determined to expose me, embarrass me, for my humble beginnings.”

  The woman at the window laughed.

  “This news cheers you?” Irene asked.

  “Only in that no one would wish to expose your ‘humble beginnings’ unless you had a more elevated present. I am so relieved, little Rena! In some ways you were the child I thought I could never have
, back then, when I was young and foolish and so. . . flawed.”

  “The young are always flawed,” Irene said quickly.

  “I more than most. When you are known as the ‘Pig Lady’ from a very early age, you expect nothing of life but swill and a quick trip to the butcher. I had both.”

  “I’m so sorry! It’s the strangest thing. My memories of my childhood years are vague and intermittent—”

  “Not so strange.” The silhouette of the Pig Lady leaned nearer to us even as her voice became hoarse and fainter. “You came to us by dark of night, not yet the age of my Edith. Bundled up from head to foot, as if the sheriffs were after you.”

  “From the West? I came from the West?”

  “I don’t know. Here in New Jersey, the World is East across the river: New York.” The strangely shaped head turned toward me. “Miss, can you take Edith to the stairs, play some game with her. Little pitchers have . . .”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling no umbrage at being left out, as I too often could. Edith was a charming child, and I welcomed her wiggling weight on my lap. It had been so long.

  Although I was madly curious to hear the Pig Lady’s story, I knew . . . hoped . . . that Irene would later tell me every last detail.

  In the meantime, I had a serious game of patty-cakes to play against a very skilled opponent.

  The door above Edith and me suddenly cracked open. The child leaped up, crying “Mama,” and vanished within. I was slower to rise, my heavy skirts and stiff corset, and my greater years, making impromptu moments hard to come by . . . except when I had been unconventionally clothed in recent captivity.

  Now Irene’s silhouette stood in bold relief against an interior rather than an exterior brightness.

  I realized a lamp was lit, and that if I returned to the chamber I could solve the puzzle of the Pig Lady’s features. I realized that I didn’t wish to.

  Irene came down the four or five steps that brought her back to my level.

  “Poor Nell. Are you stiff?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “A charming child.”

  “So children often are, before the world grabs them by the nape of the neck and shakes. That poor woman? What can she earn?”