FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “A pittance. A pity.” Irene looked askance, as if she couldn’t quite bear to be in the here and now.

  “Did you learn anything?” I asked.

  “Learn? More than I wanted to.” She began walking down the steep stairs ahead of me, one ungloved hand grazing the dingy wall.

  I followed her as fast as I could in the unlit dark.

  It was madness to descend without a candle. I recalled the faint light within the rooms above, thrown by one candle, I guessed. Hence we would make do with none, even if we broke our necks over it.

  In this mood, I walked into an impediment on the stairs I could barely see, solid and soft as a big sack of flour.

  I moved aside and stopped until my eyes could make out the variances of shadow all around me.

  My impediment was Irene! She had unexpectedly sat down and was crouched like a clot of darkness on the stairs.

  I, like the spider of nursery rhyme, sat down beside her.

  Was she weeping? I could not move or speak a word, for I had never seen, or heard rather, her weep.

  Certainly she had never heard or seen me weep.

  That was much to be recommended in a long-term associate.

  Of course I didn’t know what to say, and, what is worse, risked joining her in her maudlin occupation if I spoke at all.

  So we sat side by side in the dark, and ignored each other.

  I had more to ignore, such as sighs from the dark. Finally, I withdrew the clean linen handkerchief I carried at all times from my skirt pocket and tucked it into the general area of her hands.

  She thrust it back at me, as if insulted. Perhaps I had misjudged the depth of her despair, but despair she did.

  “Their situation,” I finally said, “is quite desperate.”

  “Oh, desperate can be cured,” she answered bitterly from the dark. “I can cure desperate, if they will let me. I cannot cure memory, Nell. And . . . I once was that innocent child. I thought all these exotic grown-ups around me were the sun and the moon. That they could do no wrong, suffer no wrong, feel no hurt. And if they could do and not do all this, surely I could also. They gave me my sense of self and survival, which is the greatest gift to be given. And now they pay for it! Because of me.”

  “Pay! How?”

  “I was the mystery child imported into their midst twenty-eight years ago. They accepted me without question, and even let me go ten years ago, with good wishes and no awkward questions. Now I return, and all my questions are awkward, and the answers are . . . lethal.”

  “Goodness! Were you really that important? A mere chit of a child?”

  There was a shocked silence. Her voice came meek and mild from the growing blackness. “I am not the centerpiece of this story, this mystery, Nell. I know that. But, somehow, I am the pretext. I cannot allow once-dear lives to end in pain and chaos.”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “Nor can I allow us to linger a moment longer in this dark stairwell. We shall have to make our way down like the blind, as it is, and I shudder to think what has attached itself to our skirts.”

  I pulled and prodded her like a reluctant child until she was upright again.

  “It is not only their sad state that is lamentable,” Irene said, her voice still low and thready. “I have finally learned the name of the woman who came to visit us children in the theater and boarding houses. It is the infamous Madame Restell, and I very much dread what that may mean.”

  “She cannot be very infamous, for I have never heard of her. The name sounds French,” I added with a sniff, though my heart wasn’t in it. “That is a recommendation only for all that is trivial.”

  After living so long near Paris, I fear my determination to dislike those of that nationality who had enjoyed such a long enmity with the English was becoming corrupted.

  “Hardly trivial, Nell.” Irene began plodding down in the dark, clinging to the wall and whatever filth it might host. “I may have forgotten much of the middle years of my childhood, but I remember that Madame Restell was loathed as ‘the wickedest woman in New York.’ ”

  “Wicked! One hardly hears that word any more. She must be a hideous old soul.”

  “No more. She died horribly two or three years before I left New York for the Old World, by her own hand.”

  By then we had reached the ground floor. The pale spill of electric lights finally allowed us to see our surroundings, and each other.

  “Cobwebs!” I cried, batting at the stringy veiling that had attached itself to my hat like spidery ectoplasm.

  Irene quickly brushed the threads away, using her undonned gloves as a sort of broom, but her face remained stony and distracted.

  “Surely this wicked, dead woman cannot cause us hurt now,” I insisted. “I am not afraid of anyone dead.”

  Her smile was tepid. “Then ghosts would not alarm you. Perhaps I can produce a figure that will. If Madame Restell is involved in whatever sad history has caused these vile current events, we have no time to waste in learning the worst. There is only one way to do that speedily, and that is to swallow our pride and call on Pink and all the resources that a newspaperwoman like Nellie Bly would have.”

  “Go begging to Pink! After that night at Delmonico’s? Never!”

  “Then I will handle it myself.”

  Irene suited deed to word by pushing through the old wooden doors and tripping down the stairs to the street to hunt up a hansom.

  Well, I needs must follow, wondering if I would more dread learning about the wicked Madame Restell or confronting the treacherous Pink again.

  36.

  The French Conjuction

  Is it not but too well known that the families of the married

  often increase beyond [what] the happiness of those who give

  them birth would dictate? . . . Is it desirable, then, is it moral

  for parents to increase their families, regardless of

  consequences to themselves, of the well being of their offspring,

  when a simple, easy, healthy, and certain remedy is within our

  control? (Introduced by the celebrated midwife and female

  physician, Mrs. Restell, the grandmother of the advertiser.)

  —ADVERTISEMENT, NEW YORK SUN, 1839

  Irene sent a message to Pink’s residence from the lobby of our hotel. Then we retired to our rooms to dampen and brush our abused clothing. We had packed hurriedly for a transatlantic voyage with one trunk apiece. Nothing we had brought with us was expendable.

  Irene then lit and smoked a small cigar, pacing rapidly in long, carpet-swallowing strides, so as to spread the dreadful smoke even more democratically throughout the room.

  I coughed diplomatically, then frantically, but she seemed deaf and blind to anything but her own dark and murky thoughts.

  Finally she stopped and stubbed out the last of the cigar in a crystal tray she had imported from the bedroom dressing table.

  “I suppose we must eat. The hotel dining room is respectable.”

  I didn’t even bother to protest that it likely was not. I had to know more about this demonic woman whose very name struck terror into my usually too-brave companion.

  So we adjourned to dinner, where the only smoke I had to contend with, at least while Irene was eating, was from the many gentlemen in the room puffing away on cigars the size of piccolos.

  Several women were sprinkled among the tables, including a pair or two like us, who were without male escort. New York seemed a very fast city indeed.

  “It was quite improper for Pink to dine alone with a man she hardly knew,” I observed when the main course was but a memory, for we were both ravenous for some reason.

  “Not in New York, as social customs go here, but it was more than improper for her to meet secretly with Quentin behind our backs. I won’t trust her again soon.”

  “Then why do we need her?”

  “Because my own memories of Madame Restell are quite casual, and the newspaper files record every arrest, ev
ery trial, every mudslinging exchange of letters to the editor, every death, every jail term, and finally her demise. I must know what she was doing in eighteen fifty-eight and in the immediate years afterward, when the ‘lady in black’ visited my troupe of child performers.”

  “This creature sounds wholly possessed of an utterly black heart,” I said, shocked by Irene’s recital of such melodrama staples as arrests, trials, jail terms, unnatural deaths and vituperative verbal duels in letters to the editor.

  “There were even rumors, at the time of her suicide in the late seventies, that she had not really perished, but merely escaped the authorities to pursue her lurid career elsewhere.”

  “If even you speak in such condemnatory terms, this woman was a monster!”

  Irene paused to light a post-dinner cigarette. I glanced around to see, with shock, that she was not the only woman in the room wielding a costly cigarette holder, although Irene’s was the most exquisite of all, with its diamond-set golden serpent twining the mother-of-pearl length like a precious swirl of smoke.

  She had ordered brandy, like a man. I watched every male eye pause on her figure, then register surprise and a certain uneasy envy.

  She took no more note of them than she would have a dust mote.

  “What was this creature?” I pressed. “A modern Medusa, whose very look could turn a man to stone? Some American femme fatale who drove men to distraction and destruction?”

  “All monsters, particularly when they are women, are misunderstood. Do you wish me to confuse you, Nell? I could tell you she was a self-appointed physician, a benefactor whose name held a sacred and secret place in the hearts of many women, even as it publicly became the very emblem of brutality.”

  “You do confuse me!”

  “And then I would tell you that she was English, not French.”

  “No!”

  Irene smiled.

  “Restell was a name she adopted because to some people, believe it or not, a French origin conveys a certain automatic respectability and cachet that few other nationalities can. If one is French, if one’s wares are French, if one’s training and methods are French, all civilized people suspect that they may be superior.”

  “You did say that Sherlock Holmes claimed a French connection through Madame Worth, née Vernet. And he certainly acts superior enough for three men, even if they are English.”

  “Like many on these shores, Madame Restell immigrated here. When I heard of her, she was so well established that all New York knew her trade. Some blessed her for it. Others condemned her.”

  “She was not just another notorious mistress, then?”

  “She was no mistress but a long-married woman, and a mother.”

  “Then how could she have become so disgraced?”

  Irene twirled the dark cigarette in its pale rococo holder between her fingers, watching a quarter inch of ash fall off and disintegrate into a dish apparently placed on the dining table for this very obnoxious act of smoking.

  “I must wait, impatiently, until Pink arrives tomorrow with more solid facts about the woman than my memory.”

  “You seem to remember more about her than you do about your own entire childhood.”

  “That was because I had set aside the things of a child by then. I was training daily for the opera, auditioning for singing assignments and working for the Pinkertons. It’s only my girlhood that I see through a veil, darkly. And the papers were full of her, the entire city then was intensely aware of Madame Restell, and especially a young woman of my age and . . . condition.”

  I was not sure to what “condition” Irene referred, only that I did not wish to inquire too deeply into it. I returned to the subject of our speculation.

  I pulled the triangle of wafer impaled in the mound of my vanilla ice cream dessert and nibbled meditatively on it. This was my after-dinner “cigarette.” It was not Delmonico’s famed “baked Alaska,” but it was a divinely civil sort of occupation for a parson’s daughter.

  This Madame Restell was a conundrum, a construction of opposites in the public mind. Yet she dallied with Irene and her young fellow and sister performers.

  “She must have loved children,” I said. “Are you sure she wasn’t childless perhaps?”

  “She had one daughter. And some thought she loved children to the point of sacrificing herself that they might live happy lives. And some thought that she hated children to the point of slaughtering them.”

  “Slaughter!” My ice cream suddenly tasted like sawdust. “Innocents died?”

  “Innocents always die, particularly the innocents in ourselves,” Irene remarked as grimly as I had ever heard her speak. Her eyes met mine, full of import. “Nell, thanks to your association with me, you have seen some of the worst excesses of the human mind and heart. I refer particularly to our last . . . crusade. I know that Parson Huxleigh would be most shocked by where I have led his only, orphan daughter.”

  “He was a good man, even a holy man. But country life can be harsh and he saw humanity in all its frailty as well as its strength. He did, however, wish that I would never know as much as he.” I smiled ruefully. “I am finding that ignorance is not bliss, as the saying goes, but then neither is knowledge.”

  “No.” She looked down at the white linen tablecloth, then up at me again. “I am always the instrument of your disillusionment, Nell. Believe me, I would wish it otherwise. But the world and its ugliness will intrude into every life these days. Madame Restell was a new kind of femme fatale, as you call her. She was a woman who aided other women in dealing with the mysteries, and miseries, of being female and human. Sometimes that involved interrupting the begetting of children.”

  “Oh. This has to do with marriage?”

  “Or not.”

  Irene picked up her elegant holder and screwed another dark cigarette into it. Light and dark. The image resonated in my mind, as if my mind wished to concentrate on such abstractions instead of the concrete facts behind her words.

  She gazed at me through a new veil of smoke, her eyes as old and regretful as the Sphinx’s in Egypt.

  I realized that I again had no idea of how the world really worked, and that if I should have such an idea, I would not like it. At all.

  Yet I knew a certain irritated prickling: that it was unfair that Irene . . . and Pink . . . and Quentin . . . and possibly even Sherlock Holmes! . . . should know what I did not.

  Irene waited for my response. I understood that she had trusted me with the truth, and there is no greater confidence than that.

  “What did Madame Restell do that merited jail and trials and imprisonment and, perhaps, if I understand what you have not said, martyrdom?”

  “She was an abortionist, Nell. She kept babies from coming into a world where no one welcomed their presence. To do so, she offered potions and even procedures that prevented this. She was the wickedest woman in New York, and the one most secretly blessed and publicly cursed. I myself do not know how I feel about her, save that if she was indeed present in my early childhood scenery, the implications are almost more than I can bear, and, as you know, I can bear a good deal.”

  Children, I wondered. Can you bear children? Were you a client of Madame Restell, a beneficiary? Or a victim?

  I understood what she meant by something, some fact, some possibility being almost more than one could bear.

  “It’s not so easy,” Irene went on, exhaling a thin, steady stream of smoke as if it were some visible ectoplasm from her past. “Was I one she saved, her own or another’s? Was there also a market in babies born, as much as in babies not born? You see? If this notorious woman showed an interest in me, who am I? Who was I not meant to be? Was I not meant to be, at all?”

  To this I had no answer, not even a cowardly murmur.

  I saw now that to solve the mystery of Irene, we would have to face the mystery of Madame Restell, who was herself a pseudonym.

  And we would have to face letting Nellie Bly know far more of Irene and her p
ast and heritage than any self-respecting person could endure.

  “Pink sacrifices her present to the future,” I said.

  “As her past sacrificed her to the present. She was not a wanted child either, long after birth, though not before.”

  “You cannot be sure about yourself!”

  “I am sure that I had a mother, once, and that she left me to myself.”

  I stretched my hand across the table toward her. She didn’t move. Her cigarette still spewed a smoky spiral that vanished in the unseen air.

  I spoke.

  “So am I sure, and so I also was left. We are all best off mothering ourselves.”

  “Or each other,” she conceded, snuffing out the cigarette as if it was the embodiment of both our pasts, only so much ash.

  37.

  No Woman Is an Island

  People acted precisely as if the thing to do in the water was to

  behave exactly contrary to the manner of behaving anywhere else.

  —COMMENTATOR ON CONEY ISLAND, “SODOM BY THE SEA,” 1880S

  “I am not used to patronizing amusement parks,” I informed Quentin in the hansom cab.

  “Nor am I,” he answered with gusto. “I often think that is a serious omission in my education.”

  We were en route to the sidewheeler steamboat that would waft us to the infamous island on the southern, seaward side of the land mass opposite Manhattan Island called Brooklyn.

  “I suppose,” I answered, “that I could consider Irene and my outings at the World’s Fair in Paris last spring as an education.”

  Quentin took my hand and twined it over his forearm, which made us less companions and more of a couple. Such a gesture was utterly unnecessary within the safe confines of a hansom cab. Then again, perhaps the confines of a hansom cab were not so safe, after all.

  “Please don’t hark back to that terrible time, Nell,” Quentin implored. “There was nothing amusing about what happened to you there.”

  “I had merely wanted to see the shipboard panorama building, and—”