FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Simply handling these objects that had been a surprise gift from Godfrey gave me a sort of tranquility. I was no Papist, but I could understand the solace of rosary beads through the fingertips, thanks to this exquisite thing of use and beauty, which was the only gift that I had from any man, save my father’s steadfast support and spiritual guidance.

  “I don’t know how you feel about the work of such women as Madame Restell,” Pink was saying, looking from Irene to me and back to Irene.

  She clearly did not expect us to have the same opinion as each other, or that she held.

  Silence greeted this gauntlet she had hurled down, aggravating the already tender bonds of our relationship.

  Irene answered. “How did Madame Restell regard her role in society, in keeping its secrets?”

  Pink rustled her papers. “I don’t know. I only know how she was regarded: as either sinner or saint, and at times she looked a good bit like both.” Then she eyed us. “By being what I am, a ‘stunt’ reporter, I have looked in the face certain realities of life from which most people avert their gaze. I have seen the factory and sweatshop girls with their one day off a week fall prey to the shallowest mashers and pay the price with disease and pregnancy and sometimes even death.”

  I winced at her plain speech. Her quick blue-gray gaze fastened on me.

  “You see yourself as a governess still, Nell, tending to sheltered green girls from good families. Yet even they, and especially they, and their frantic parents, were clients of Madame Restell in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies of New York City life.

  “I think back on my own family,” she went on. “I think back on the judge’s prodigious progeny—fourteen living children by two wives—and how custom left a mother dead before her children grew up and made second wives and second sets of siblings more common than not. My mother and her children were quite disinherited at his death, and you know the shameful consequences of our helplessness.

  “The mere act of birth, once, killed your mother, Nell, and left you without brothers or sisters and ultimately an orphan.”

  “ ‘Lonely orphan girl,’ ” Irene quoted the signature to Pink’s first and pivotal letter to the editor that had begun her journalistic career. “That is how you represented yourself, yet you still had mother and siblings.”

  “I had mother, yes, and siblings, but they were all children still, and someone had to take care of them. Me. I still do. Then, I was as good as alone. As Nell was. As you were, apparently.”

  Irene nodded, acknowledging Nellie Bly’s greatest feat: surviving not only for herself, but for others.

  Even I could not dislike her at that moment, despite Quentin and despite her ability to sacrifice anyone to her need to reveal what the world was really like. I wondered how many people truly wanted to know that? And how many people who lapped up other people’s scandals and pains understood that they were behaving more as hyenas than humans?

  There was something admirable in telling the truth at any cost, and something horrible as well.

  “So,” Irene asked, “was Madame Restell more sinner or saint?”

  “She was arrested four times,” Pink reported. “She served three prison terms. She killed herself with a butcher knife rather than face a fourth. Yet for decades she rode in her coach and four daily along Broadway, wearing silks and diamonds, flaunting her wealth.”

  “Four?” I asked. “Four horses?” I remembered someone at the theater saying the Woman in Black had a coach with “four white horses.”

  “Two bays, one chestnut, and a gray,” Pink answered, consulting her papers. “She was most precise about that when one newspaper reported the horses’s coloration inaccurately. Imagine splitting hairs on the color of a horse hide, yet finding no harm in seeing that babies were not born.”

  “There always,” Irene said, “have been certain women, in the woods surrounding villages and in the alleyways of cities, who know all manner of ways, real or fraudulent, supposed to end a scandalizing pregnancy, and all pregnancies are potentially scandalous.”

  “Not to married women,” I put in.

  Irene regarded me. “Even to married women. Husbands may be gone for more than nine months, or may be ill, and still the wives wax pregnant. There is nothing more telltale than a pregnancy. No wonder women are so desperate to conceal them one way or another.”

  “For all the huge numbers of the men who are arrested for bastardy in New York City,” Pink added, “the testimony falls upon the girl or woman involved, and they are easily labeled liars. That is why I never will marry. The men have all the advantages.”

  I found this news most . . . interesting. I had always considered never marrying a humiliating burden I must suffer in silence. I had not thought that it could be deemed an advantage.

  Irene resumed our discussion by taking up the reins, whether they lay over bay, chestnut, or gray backs.

  “So Madame Restell was both wealthy and notorious, and quite bald-faced about her profession.”

  “Bald-faced? She advertised.” Pink flourished a fan of yellowed newsprint. “I found more advertisements than actual news stories. The fact is that Madame Restell, and her husband, both misrepresented themselves as physicians, yet they seemed honestly committed to the task of advising women on the ways they might circumvent disease, pregnancy, and delivery, if the child was already conceived.”

  “But why would such a woman,” I asked, “spend time among the variety performers at—pardon me, Irene—second-rate theatrical venues?”

  “I imagine,” Pink said, “that many of her clients came from that class of women.” Before Irene could protest, she continued. “And the fact is that she seemed to have had a kind heart. She charged her clients according to their ability to pay, and sometimes asked nothing at all. In some cases she provided a place to stay for women whose pregnancies were too advanced to end.”

  “How could she know that?” I asked. “And what of the law?”

  “The law often looks the other way when the wealthy are involved.” Irene answered for Pink and her mound of news clippings. “What was the legal status of her business?”

  Pink pursed her lips as she thought before she answered. “Difficult to say, otherwise she and her competitors would not have dared advertise so obviously. From what I read, and there are hundreds of items, abortion was not illegal if it was done before the baby ‘quickened.’ ”

  “When exactly is that?” I asked. “I have heard of the ‘quick and the dead’ in prayers, but what does this term mean to a woman bearing a baby?”

  Irene shrugged. “Perhaps when the child first stirs in the womb. I hear that they kick sometimes.’

  “Kick!” I was amazed; no, horrified. “I knew childbirth was dreadfully painful, but I had no idea the child would try to kick its way . . . er, out.”

  “It shifts in the womb sometimes,” Irene said, looking about as enamored of this discussion as I was. “You come from a large family, Pink. What did your mother experience?”

  “More than I care to say. The fact is that the term ‘quickened’ was as little understood then as now, which may be why the law is much more strict today. When Madame Restell slit her own throat in eighteen seventy-eight it was the end of an era.” She stared down wistfully at the pile of papers in her lap. “If I’d been there, I’d have known the answers to all your questions.”

  I was growing impatient, and perhaps uneasy at this discussion. Such matters were best left unsaid. “Whatever the hairs that could be split over her ministrations, why was she visiting these theatrical folk?”

  “Such people are presumed to be loose livers,” Pink said. “Perhaps she was seeking clients.”

  “It sounded more like a social call,” I protested.

  “Well—” Pink eyed Irene rather as a common garden snake would regard the formidable cobra-slayer, Messalina the mongoose. “Other charges than providing contraception and abortion were brought against Madame Restell, not as often as the first, but of
ten enough.”

  “Other charges?” I asked, not sure I’d like the answer.

  “Oh, some of the women might have died from the treatment. Madame Restell and her husband were accused of chopping their bodies into pieces and smuggling them out of her building in the dark of night, along with the bodies of aborted babies.”

  I put my hand to my chest to keep my gorge from rising. “This is like some horrid gruesome fairy tale.”

  “And likely as true,” Irene put in. “What other horrors did this lady stand accused of? I’m sure ‘the wickedest woman in New York’ was capable of more atrocities.”

  Irene’s sardonic question helped quiet my imagination.

  “Some women were purportedly too far gone to abort, so Madame Restell forced them to stay with her until the birth, then took their babies from them.”

  “Her answer?” Irene asked.

  “In one case, she said the young woman’s father had insisted she find a home for the infant, and she did.”

  “An atrocity indeed,” Irene said, “but more indicting of the father’s authority than of Madame Restell’s actions.”

  Pink shuffled papers. “When she came to her senses the poor girl, the mother of the adopted babe, looked for years, but could never find it. Madame Restell had been requested to arrange things in that manner, and so it was done.”

  “Any other charges?” Irene pressed.

  “That she sold unwanted babies to people who wanted them and couldn’t have them.”

  “Is there any surviving portrait of this monster of commerce in human misery?”

  Pink passed some loose pieces of faded newsprint to us without comment. Irene handed me one piece while she studied another.

  I gazed upon a sketch of the she-demon, a woman of late middle years, stout and plump-faced, wearing a lace cap of the kind worn thirty years ago. She resembled a grandmother, or a landlady.

  Irene’s brows had arched as she studied the other likeness. I peered to see. It was the older sketch, for Madame Restell looked in the prime of life, with her hair parted in the middle to fall in sausage curls at her ears, rather resembling the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or her favorite spaniel, Flush.

  Altogether a most pleasant representation, except . . . I frowned at an image like a coat of arms beneath the upper torso portrait. “What do these wings represent . . . Mercury?”

  Irene leaned over the image to view it again. “I believe those are the wings of a giant bat, Nell, and the small pale thing in its claws is an infant.”

  “Oh!” I nearly dropped the drawing, so grotesque was its import.

  “She was the most hated woman in New York of her time,” Pink observed. A tight smile did not enhance her usually cheery features. “And the most beloved, especially by the most well-todo.”

  “A true conundrum,” Irene said casually, “but I don’t see why her now-dead career has much bearing on things nowadays.”

  “But it’s so obvious, Irene. Bearing indeed! How odd you should use that word. I believe that Madame Restell was your mother.”

  40.

  Unwanted Mother

  Restell was brought from the Tombs about noon. . . . She was

  wearing a rich black silk gown, a handsomely trimmed black

  velvet mantilla, and a white satin bonnet with a lace veil, but

  looked pale and anxious.

  —TRIAL FOR PROCURING AN ABORTION, 1847

  “Ridiculous!”

  Irene spat out the word as a man will mouth an oath after Pink had left, but she went at once to the brandy decanter and the cigarette case.

  “Pink has the mind of a P. T. Barnum!” Irene raged. “Next she will aver that Jumbo the Elephant is my mother. Why not claim I am the daughter of a mermaid and an octopus! Really, I regret the day I ever thought that a jaunt to America might—”

  “Might what? Do me good? Admit it, Irene! You and Godfrey decided that poor Nell needed a change of scene after . . . after everything, and now see what a box of imps you have loosened on yourself. I am extremely happy to be a woman of no importance whatsoever, with no past whatsoever, since if I were not so utterly ordinary, such unpleasant surprises would be in store for me.”

  “You have had one very unpleasant surprise on this trip already,” she reminded me, sipping from brandy glass and cigarette holder in turn.

  She was more upset than she wished anyone, including herself, to know. I had only listed to my own grievances, which I had much exaggerated, to draw her attention from her own situation.

  If only Godfrey were here! One thing I had not exaggerated to myself: I was terribly disturbed by Irene’s uncertain past, not only by the shiftless, bizarre nature of her upbringing, but by her disturbingly vague recollection of whole years of her life. This was a woman who held every note and word from the complicated librettos of numerous grand operas in her memory. Who never failed to recall a word or deed of mine that I wished to forget. Who could speak several languages. And I was to believe that her childhood was as smudged as a few chalk traces on a blackboard?

  No. Someone had wanted Irene to forget her youth, and had succeeded. And this was a sinister thought indeed.

  So here was Irene, handicapped for the first time in her life by a lack of knowledge about, of all things, herself, at the mercy of the reportorial inquisition and deeply personal investigations of that untrustworthy little minx and maneater, Pink Cochrane.

  Much as I deeply appreciated Irene’s and Godfrey’s sincere, if misdirected, concern for my welfare, I was very glad to be here in America with Irene, after all. She had never needed more looking after, and the pity was that she did not know it, she was not constituted to know it. She was used to looking out for others and therefore would be useless at looking out for herself.

  However, looking out for others had formerly, if briefly, been my profession, and I was determined to resurrect it now.

  Part of that welcome duty would be to see that Pink did nothing to harm Irene in any way.

  Once Irene was in the grip of her usual pacifiers, I gingerly began my own investigation of the apparent facts. Obviously, Pink’s conclusions were sadly askew.

  “Irene, I do not believe for an instant that you are that woman’s daughter.”

  “On what grounds, Nell?”

  “On the grounds that anything Pink might conclude is only so much lurid newspaper talk. However, I do find it intriguing that this woman visited your theatrical environment when you were a child. From all reports, for such a monster, she seems fond of children, although I do understand that her business included the suppression of motherhood in one way or another.”

  My comments stirred Irene to action, as I had known they would. She liked nothing better than explaining the seamier side of life to me, and, after my initial shock, I was beginning to find such knowledge rather interesting.

  She began to page through the papers and the book Pink had left behind. “I suppose Pink would know the answer to your question, Nell.”

  “I do not wish to know what Pink thinks she knows. I wish to know the facts, so much as newspaper reports can be trusted for such things.”

  Irene dutifully bent her head to the material in search of the requested information.

  Piteous! Normally I would be sent to do the tedious research, a task I had been well prepared for during my employment as Godfrey’s typewriter girl. There is nothing for inspiring tedium as the documents of the law.

  I found my hands had made fists and my mouth had tightened into a grim line. The last time I had endured such impotent tension I had been consigned prematurely to a coffin. But I had arisen from the apparent dead and was now finding in myself a resolve that Irene’s dead past should never cause her that kind of distress.

  “The husband was active in the business also,” Irene said suddenly. “They were both one step up from quack practitioners, Nell, yet they espoused their work on philosophical grounds.” She looked up at me, much calmer.

  “These opinion
s to curtail childbirth are not all evil. Your own mother died of it before she could do what she most longed to: see you, tend you, rear you. Nature demands more of some women than their constitutions can survive.”

  “You approve of what Madame Restell practiced?”

  “No, but I have seen the terrible cost that young unwed women pay, some of them even innocent of wrongdoing.”

  “How can that be?”

  Irene’s hands made vague gestures, as they often did when I asked to know more than she thought me ready for. “Nell, you know the New Testament, how an angel of the Lord—isn’t that how it was put?”

  “Oh, yes, I know that passage; that is what the Papists cite to justify virgin birth.”

  “Virgin birth. Exactly.”

  “But I am not Catholic.”

  “It doesn’t matter. According to that version of the New Testament, an angel told Mary that she was pregnant by spiritual means. This can happen to girls as innocent today, except the means are devilish. They come in the guise of men they would trust, men they are told to obey, who are, in fact . . .”

  “This is not possible!”

  “It is, Nell. Often it is not the girl’s fault. We are reared to be obedient.”

  “Not in your case.”

  Irene laughed, suddenly relieved. “Oh, Nell. You are right. Somehow, early in my education, I had the choice of being obedient or incorrigible, and I chose the latter.”

  “I am glad that you did, if it helped you avoid answering to the ‘devils.’ ” I absorbed what she tried to say for a moment. “I understand your point. There are wicked men in New York too, and they might have a stake in making out Madame Restell to be a wicked woman.”

  Irene nodded. “If she is indeed my mother, I don’t wish her to be a monster.”

  I didn’t answer, but shifted newsprint, looking for facts. “Aha! There was only one child, a daughter, but she is accounted for, at least until the age of fourteen, when she assisted her mother. I wonder what became of her in these last eleven years? Also Monsieur Restell, who seems to have gone under another name entirely, also French. That is most suspicious.”