FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “That is least suspicious, Nell. I remember enough of America to know that anything French was assumed to be elegant, sophisticated, and much desirable.”

  “And to think these citizens were once English! How far they have declined. Frankly, it is only the matter of sinning that the British cede to the French.”

  “Yes, the French do seem to be superior to the British in that one area. At least.”

  “You are trying to aggravate me, but I won’t be distracted. The woman also had a brother, Joseph. And . . . remember, Madame Restell was born British. So much for your giving the French the upper hand, even in the matter of scandal and sinning.”

  Irene stubbed out her cigarette and sipped the last bit of brandy.

  “If Madame Restell was not my mother, why would Pink be so eager to make her so? And if Madame Restell was not my mother, why did she linger among that minor theatrical set during the early years of my life, and then disappear afterwards until she died sixteen years later, by her own hand? If she was my mother, she was willing to leave me to my own devices for a good, long time.”

  “And that is why she cannot have been your mother, Irene. Anyone who knows, or knew you, would never permit you to be left to your own devices for long. That includes Godfrey and myself.”

  41.

  The Wickedest Woman in New York

  While she lived no woman was more eagerly discussed and

  after her death more mercilessly slandered.

  —BIOGRAPHER OF ADAH ISAACS MENKEN, THE MID-NINETEENTH-

  CENTURY EQUESTRIENNE MAZEPPA

  We spent the rest of the day studying the news stories and pamphlets and trial book that Pink had left us much as an anarchist might lay a bomb at a target’s feet, in my opinion.

  We had no doubt that Pink had left them only because she had leeched every bit of useful information from them beforehand. Or what she discerned to be useful information.

  By twilight our eyes had grown bleary in the lamplight. Without consulting each other, we set aside the piles of fine print.

  “I still don’t quite know what to make of ‘the wickedest woman in New York,’ ” Irene admitted. “Some called her demon, some angel. She grew enormously wealthy at her trade, moving up the island from modest quarters at the bottom of Manhattan to finer quarters and finally to a mansion on Fifth Avenue to match the Astors. Although she was never accepted openly in society, the veiled wives and daughters from Mrs. Astor’s guest list of four hundred elite New York City families came and went at her mansion nightly. The wealthy and powerful protected her, for she held the secrets of their hearts and hearths, yet they couldn’t prevent the moral reformers from charging her in court and even sending her to prison for as much as a year.

  “Even in prison her wealth and social connections made her stay far more pleasant than an average prisoner’s. Her daughter followed in her footsteps, then disappeared into history, as did Madame Restell’s brother Joseph. She outlived her husband, who seems to have been constant, and as much a quack doctor as she, except that their treatments were apparently effective, and that they wrote quite eloquently on their pioneer effort to educate the ignorant and prevent pain, poverty, and suffering. Then, facing yet another prison term, she suddenly slit her own throat in her bath the very morning she was due in court for sentencing, after decades of fighting all detractors in the newspaper columns. She is an enigma!”

  “And so is her brief period of haunting the theaters when you were a child performer. How long do they say she did so?”

  “For a year at most. Eighteen-sixty to ’sixty-one.”

  “The opening years of the American Civil War? Can that have some bearing?”

  “Of course it can! But it was also the opening years of my life. I was given to believe that I was born in eighteen fifty-eight, so I would have been three and four when the Woman in Black visited me at the theater.”

  “Madame Restell was a respectable married woman, at least in her private life. She was known to have one daughter, who would have been quite a bit older than you. She certainly knew how to prevent births. I agree, how could she have been your mother? Why would she have hidden you? She apparently hid nothing else of her private life.”

  Irene shook her head without speaking, then set her selection of newspapers on the desk.

  “Ah, let us dine like queens tonight, Nell. Tomorrow I will take a different tack. I must find the maestro, if I can. Perhaps he can tell me more about myself, for he was instrumental in my becoming who I am today.”

  “I’m not sure what that would reveal about your distant past, which is where all the mysteries lie.”

  “I don’t know either, except that music saved me. From what, I can’t quite say. Once I had found my voice, I never lost myself or my memory again. I recall setting out from my boarding house each day to audition. I recall Allan Pinkerton, a remarkably liberal man on the role of women, seizing upon a diffident singing pupil as a promising private inquiry agent, as if I were a jewel plucked from a trash heap. He saw worth in me before any musical director did, and thus gave me a profession before my voice had earned me another one, and, more importantly, a confidence in myself one can only gain from going against the grain of society. And thus I come back to Madame Restell, not so different from me after all.” Irene sighed, and her eyes were very bright. “I cannot ever repay Pinkerton, for he is dead these five years, and also his vision of a female force that I was a part of, but I hope that the maestro is not, and that he may give me some needed answers.”

  We returned, as apparently Irene had often done in her youth, to Professor Marvel.

  He was playing cards in a small park near his boarding house with a set of old fellows as mellow as he. Though this was a huge, bustling city, they reminded me of the village elders in Shropshire warming the benches outside the pubs on mornings both foggy and fine.

  I remember that as a child I had often sat with these benign old fellows, who taught me inappropriate card games and beguiled the time of a child who had no siblings, no mother, and a harried father.

  Professor Marvel sported the side whiskers of a more gracious time and welcomed us with an offer of tea and warm intentions.

  “I don’t much get called upon by handsome young women,” he said, winking so innocently that for a moment I became as beautiful as Irene.

  “The maestro,” he reminisced as we walked back to his boarding house for tea. “Quite an amazin’ fellow. Been abroad, you know. Vienna and Paris and such. So he said. I never much worried whether he spoke the truth. We all said much in those days, and were young enough to believe our own lies.

  “Would you like some sugar for your tea, ladies? I don’t keep much about the place, except a kettle for the fire and a cannister of pekoe, and sugar cubes in my pockets at all times. Love the horses, you know. Poor burdened beasts. I walk daily down Broadway and greet them and give them a bit of sweet. I like to think my example inspires some toleration in the drivers and passengers. With my pockets full of forty pounds of answers to every question, I sometimes feel like a swaybacked old horse myself, forced to trot to the whip into eternity.”

  “How very kind of you,” I said. “I shall remember that when I return to Paris, although the French are exceedingly horse-proud, and quite pamper them, unlike the English.”

  He nodded, squinting his rheumy blue eyes at the past, as Irene had requested.

  “His name was Stubben. He was German and a hard taskmaster. I wanted you to study with the Italian contessa, such a warm, gracious woman, but she returned to her warm, gracious homeland, and there was only the maestro left. I had reservations. He was fine dealing with automata—machines that perform like humans—but a young, live girl who had never had a father? I had my doubts, little Rena, but one doubt I did not have. You had a Voice. It would be a crime not to train it. So, I sent you to the maestro.”

  “It must have worked out well,” Irene said, “for a singer I became, and did quite well on the Continent. Until . .
. other circumstances forced my early retirement from the operatic stage.”

  “Oh, my dear!” His lovely blue eyes shimmered behind the frank tears that eighty-five years may bring. “Not using your Voice. Surely a crime of the first water!”

  “But,” she said hastily, “I’ve just received a libretto by Oscar Wilde and another English writer, with a score by Sir Arthur Sullivan of operetta fame, and I do intend to add it to my repertoire for solo chamber performances.”

  “Ah. Sullivan. I’ve heard of him. And this Wilde fellow toured the U.S. with some fanfare a few years back. Quite the dandy I understand, but he was a hit in the Wild West. Who can say what the modern theater will embrace. Look at Buffalo Bill!”

  “We have met him,” Irene said, “and I am to reprise Merlinda for his show in Paris.”

  “Treats his horses well, does he?”

  “And his Indians and women.”

  “How he treats a horse defines a man, even in these Eastern cities. It will reflect on how he treats a woman.”

  Irene rolled her eyes at me as this antique philosophy came forth. “And where might we find the maestro, if he is still about to be found?”

  “Ah! He was like me: too stubborn to die. I believe he plays the violin at the Union Square theaters. But you must ask for Dieter Stubben now. He has not been a ‘maestro’ since shortly after you left him to make your own way in the musical world. You were his finest pupil, and he declined after that.”

  “One must live one’s life,” Irene said as we walked away from the professor’s boarding house, our pockets bulging with sugar cubes.

  “Of course! One must live and leave the ones we admire and love behind us, for we are young and they are old.”

  She paused before a poor old horse attired in a ragged straw bonnet and offered him a gloved palmful of sugar. The huge, clumsy lips snickered at her hand.

  “It is odd, Nell,” she said. “Not a month ago in France I discovered an old violin that is worth a fortune. Now I search in American for an old violinist. And the link is one that would be laughed off the stage. My invaluable Guarneri is one the maestro gave to me when I left America for a singing career in the Old World. He may be poverty-stricken now. I can return his violin if I find him. The student may support the teacher.”

  “It is a good thing that Sherlock Holmes refused your too-generous offer of the violin, then,” I noted.

  “I knew he would. I merely wished to see him discomfited by the offer. That was cruel of me. There is something about him that makes me wish to push him to his limits.”

  I recognized a certain affinity of feeling that frightened me. “He is not a likeable man.”

  “But he is . . . unique. A performing artist like myself should be more appreciative of that. And he plays the violin, so he has hidden depths. Perhaps I see the recluse that I would have been had circumstances not forced me to take the world by the throat and make it sing in my key.”

  So we spent the evening doing what I had never done before, treading the arc-lit Broadway streets, visiting theater after theater, and leaving early, studying the house orchestras, looking for a man with a violin.

  If that description alone would have answered Irene’s quest, I knew where to direct her: Baker Street.

  But we were in New York City now, tracking her past, and all that was required was an old man with a very old violin.

  The Alhambra playbill advertised dancing horses and horse-faced dancers, according to the illustrations.

  We went inside, no one questioning two women buying tickets and taking seats. New York was a world away from everything I had been reared to believe.

  Irene paid top dollar to get seats nearest the orchestra pit. Once seated, her corrosive glance scoured the forty or so men in penguin formal dress, all the same shabby sort.

  At last, during the overture that introduced the Lippizaner stallions of Vienna, she almost leapt, like the vaunted stallions, from her seat.

  “It is he! Grizzled, it is true, but the very man. Oh, poor fellow! An artiste forced to saw a fiddle for a group of performing horses.”

  “Noble beasts,” I pointed out, forcing her to sit down and sit out the act.

  The steeds were all that had been advertised. I was struck by how in all ways they served mankind, whether whipped to death in the street or trained, at the snap of a whip that never touched hide, to rear on their hind legs and dance.

  It occurred to me that people also served such contradictory roles. Perhaps I had been listening too much to Nellie Bly.

  At any rate, once the curtain had rung down on an interim, Irene seized my sleeve and drew me into yet another backstage maze.

  The dressing rooms were loud and crowded, and the one for the orchestra was the farthest and smallest and most overpopulated.

  The smell of rosin and horse hide, not to mention horse elimination, hung like a miasma over the understage cubbyholes.

  Irene was not to be stopped. We surged together through the room full of men in evening dress, four mirrors among them and perhaps twenty powder puffs for their mostly bald heads.

  She finally stopped at one chair. “Maestro!”

  His hair was white and waved back from high temples. He was as thin as a catgut string, yet his posture was more tightly wired.

  The pale eyes that regarded her were blank.

  She struck her clasped fist against her breastbone, a sort of human percussion that made him blink.

  “Irene Adler,” she said. “I most urgently desire to speak with you.”

  We adjourned to Delmonico’s.

  The old fellow walked in like a prince, but it was clear he had not dined so well in ages. Irene ordered like a caliph, and lit cigarette after cigarette.

  I kept watch.

  “Irene,” the old fellow murmured between courses. “I never thought I would hear you sing again.”

  “I have your violin. I wish to return it.”

  “Violin? What violin? A poor second to a human voice. Say that you still sing.”

  “I still sing.”

  “I still saw away on my lifeline. Times have changed. Did I do you a disservice, I ask myself? More escalloped potatoes? New York can be very cold. You cannot return to the past.”

  “Maestro.”

  He cringed, but ceased jumbling his thoughts together.

  “I must know,” she said, “why I can’t remember my own past. An artist without a past is . . . nothing. I’ve come back to remember.”

  He pushed away the princely dishes. I saw an old man, hungry and ashamed. A beggar with an inferior violin. I couldn’t look.

  “Maestro,” she pled.

  I couldn’t look.

  “I am a fraud!” he declared. “I have not played a heartfelt piece of music since you left. You were my violin. You were my masterpiece. Yet, I cheated.”

  “I am a cheat?” she asked, heartbreakingly ready to accept his judgment.

  “No! I! I alone.” He held up his wine glass, and a waiter filled it. “My dear child.”

  I sensed that he had never spoken so intimately in his strange, lonely life. Was this her father, then?

  “I was obsessed by music. I required an . . . heir. A legacy. Something better and bigger than I could ever be. In you I found it. Yes, I drove you. Yes, I was the stern taskmaster. Yes, I understood the sheer talent you and I had been blessed with, and it was my duty to evoke, enhance, encourage, drive you and let you leave me.”

  “The role you took on was harsh,” she said. “You never let me be grateful, yet I understood what you did, and more so as the years passed. You had never encouraged me to acknowledge you, and I never did. Until now. Maestro.”

  He cringed again. “Don’t call me that. You don’t understand the price I paid to free you. The price I made you pay. I couldn’t do it today, but I still had hope and perhaps some hubris then.”

  “Price?” she asked.

  He sighed, swayed from side to side. “My dear Irene. What a wonderful name,
the goddess of peace, yet your history was anything but peaceful. You came to me wounded in mind and soul. I wanted and needed a voice. I had no hope of getting it after what you’d been through. One mad hope, though. I’d studied in Europe. Music, voice, a spiritual sort of technique. I’d met a man, a Solomon of musicians. He used mesmerism to free the voice from its containment. You had lost your voice when they brought you to me. They swore you had once had it, the nightingale gift. I so desperately needed to believe in nightingales. So . . . I cheated. I mesmerized you, Irene, until your voice came free of your past, like one clear note, and then I worked with that and then another note and finally you were a whole chorus of musicality. Only because I mesmerized you.”

  “I am an automaton?”

  “No. You are what you could have been had not fate flattened all your potential.”

  “But . . . I can hypnotize others.”

  “I gave you the technique, for yourself. And for others. It was taught to me by a musical genius I met in Vienna in the fifties, before you were even born. A man called Adler. Later, known as a musical genius called Svengali, he produced the supreme soprano of the age in an unknown artist’s model named Trilby. When I told you once that he was my own maestro, you took his true last name for your own, as you had none.”

  “I remember doing that now. Adler! So I am named for a fraud.”

  “A genius, though misguided, for I have followed misguided genius all my life.”

  Irene had drawn out her smoking apparatus again.

  The maestro frowned as she drew breath through the cigarette. “That is bad for your voice.”

  “Not that anyone has noticed. Besides, I don’t sing as frequently as I once did.”

  “Even worse!”

  Irene turned the blue enamel case in her hand, the bediamonded initial “I” twinkling like a star.

  The maestro stared at that small movement, that mote of winking light. He seemed to have lost the thread of his thoughts.