by Anna Maclean
When I arrived at the Home half an hour later, a midwife was already there in the birthing room, kneeling beside Queenie and holding her hand. Rather, Queenie held her hand in a grip so strong that the midwife winced but did not pull away. The lamps cast long, well-defined shadows in the small room used exclusively for this purpose. A huge fire roared in the fireplace, and a double layer of curtains had been drawn to keep out all drafts, for it was deemed beneficial for women in labor to perspire and all but melt from heat. The room was so close I could barely breathe.
Queenie was in the bed, with its single well-used sheet over a thick layer of straw to absorb the various liquids associated with this particular process. The linen was twisted and tossed about like whitecaps on a stormy sea.
“The contractions are ten minutes apart,” the midwife said, looking up at me. “They have been ten minutes apart for hours now.”
I could not help thinking dark thoughts about Edgar Brownly. Oh, if only he could be here now to see his handiwork . . . I asked the midwife when Queenie’s labor had begun.
“Last night,” the midwife said. She wore a light muslin gown with no crinolines or laces, and I realized for the first time the true purpose of the simplicity of nursing garb—it makes the warmth of the illness room bearable. “Around midnight. I had her walking around the room till just about an hour ago, to get it moving.”
I did some quick mental math. Queenie had been in labor six hours. If her labor proceeded normally, it would last about another eleven hours, according to Abba’s prediction.
“I don’t want to do this,” Queenie said, curling up on her side and weeping. “Make it go away.” Her voice cracked with exhaustion.
“Ergot?” I suggested, myself on the verge of tears. This was the herb cordial commonly administered to increase contractions.
“She’s already had as much as I dare give her,” the midwife said. “We could take her to Harvard Medical. . . .”
“No!” Queenie shrieked, trying to sit up but unable. “Not the hospital. I’ve heard what they do there. They make you go to sleep and cut it out.”
“Sometimes it is necessary,” the midwife said, stroking Queenie’s damp hair. “Didn’t Queen Victoria herself let them give her chloroform for her seventh delivery?”
“I won’t go there. Miss Alcott, don’t let them take me.” She twisted toward me, her hands in supplication before her thin chest.
“Hush, Queenie. Rest and gather your strength between the contractions. No, we’ll just have to wait a bit more. And, Queenie, you’ll have to be strong.” I took a deep breath. I’d have to be strong, too.
A new contraction swept over her, and Queenie’s face crumpled, her body writhing; she screamed and cursed.
“There’ll be none of that language, missy,” the midwife said. “There’s young’uns out there, a-listening.”
The pain seemed to lessen for a moment then, because Queenie stretched a bit and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes, and long, childish lashes rested against her damp cheeks. I had never seen her look younger and more helpless than at that moment, when she was beginning the first and perhaps most dire responsibility of motherhood—bringing her baby alive into this world, and somehow surviving it herself.
The midwife took me off to the side. She looked unhappy. “Too small,” she muttered. “The girl’s too small.”
“Oh, Queenie.” I sighed. I knew what that meant. In my days at the Home several expecting mothers had died in childbirth, and for most it was because they were undernourished and painfully thin, too thin to come through the ordeal alive.
Queenie had a long day ahead of her. Perhaps several. Perhaps worse.
“Ether?” I asked, desperately wanting to find a way to reduce Queenie’s pain.
“Later, if it gets too bad,” the midwife said. “Though I don’t like to use it, not like those medical gentlemen from the Boston Medical Society do, and the girl is right to be afeared of it. Ether can kill as well as old-fashioned childbirthing. But get the forceps out of my bag, in case.”
At the word forceps, Queenie let out a howl such as I had never heard before. Between waves of pain, she managed to roar, “I’ll kill him for this!” her first verbal response to her seduction. “I don’t care that his namby sister was found in the water. She deserved it as well as he does!”
I sat at Queenie’s side all through the morning and afternoon, and by evening, when Queenie was slipping in and out of a strange sleep between bouts of screaming and pushing, I, too, was exhausted. The midwife was napping, sitting up in the rocking chair. Sweat streamed off both of us from the cloistered heat of that room.
Other women brought us cups of tea and bowls of soup. The lamps had been lighted inside the Home, and the smoke from the roaring hearth in the room mixed with the soot of the oil lamps, creating an interior fog that gave the scene a nightmarish quality. The room had become all angles and shadows, smoke and obscurity, except for the white sheets roiled over the delirious Queenie. She looked so young, so small.
“I wonder if it was as bad for my mother,” I mused, trying to slip some of my own soup between Queenie’s white, cracked lips. “And to think she went through it time and again, knowing what was to come.”
“One forgets the pain, my dear, and remembers only the joy of holding the baby,” the midwife offered. “It is true but indeed hard to believe.”
I let my thoughts slip back to Dottie. Dot yearned for children and always talked about how she would fill her nursery someday with babies. Perhaps it was because she grew up surrounded by two sisters and a brother. Strange how the kind, lovely Dot was like a rare, unusual bird compared to the selfish brood that made up the rest of her siblings, always grumbling and thinking of themselves. Suddenly I was struck by an idea. Dot was different from her sisters and brother, truly different. It seemed important to clarify, finally, what had caused that difference, for it seemed a key to her sad death.
But at that moment, Queenie’s baby decided to cease her delay.
“It’s coming. Thank God,” the midwife said, peering between Queenie’s knees.
I gathered round the bloody theater of new life and watched, holding my breath. What would present first? The top of the head? Well and good. If it was a foot, that was a real problem. If it was an arm, and we saw that the baby was lying transverse . . . well, I refused to think about that one. Most likely both mother and child would die. I saw those gleaming forceps on the table and tried hard to ignore them, to pretend they would not be needed.
Queenie screamed and pushed so hard her teeth ground and threatened to break.
She panted, then screamed again.
The soft, domed top of a head appeared. We fought back the dangerous impulse to pull the infant free and then, one last push, one final scream . . . and Queenie had a daughter.
The noise of it was astounding, and reminded me more than anything of the noise a ship at sea makes, when the waves roll so high that the undertow sucks at the boat and tries to pull it under and the sailors yell for their lives. But this little ship had decided not to let the storm defeat her.
“Queenie!” I shouted, my eyes huge and moist. “Queenie, it’s a girl! A perfect little girl. See, ten toes, ten fingers . . . she’s perfect!”
She might have had ten of the required digits, but she was also red and mewing and flailing with clenched fists as if she were already having a temper tantrum.
“She’s beautiful,” Queenie whispered when the washed and swaddled infant was put to her breast. “See! Hair already. Poor thing. I was hoping she’d be ugly—safer that way. Oh, blue eyes.”
“All babies have blue eyes,” the midwife said, wiping her glistening red hands on a gruesomely stained apron and stepping closer to admire her handiwork.
“Oh . . . didn’t know.” Exhausted, Queenie fell asleep, words forming on her lips.
“Poor bugger.” The midwife tickled the infant under the chin. “They’ll both starve or worse, end up in a mill, working a
nd starving.”
A moment before, my spirit had soared. Now it sank back to earth. The Charles Street Home enforced a rule that women must leave three weeks after birth to make room for others, for there was a never-ending river of women abandoned or driven away by their menfolk. Where would Queenie go? Who would be willing to take her in?
“Maybe she can find someone to adopt the infant,” the midwife said. “It would be a kindness to her, to let her go. That’s what some mothers do when they can’t care for the child.”
I stood over the sleeping Queenie and brushed her hair with my fingertips. “A kindness . . .” I repeated. I looked at the midwife, startled, then looked back down at Queenie, wondering.
THE NEXT DAY I knew I had a fearsome task ahead. I had to brave, of all places, the Boston Athenaeum.
The Athenaeum was a private library founded ages ago by the Puritans of the early colony, and recently relocated to a new Italianate brownstone on Beacon Street, behind the Old Granary Burying Ground. It smelled gloriously of new mortar and wallpaper paste and leather . . . and that sacred odor of books. Boston gentlemen housed their special collections of books there, and went there to read, smoke their pipes, and pursue other gentlemanly activities, safe from the distraction of females and children and domesticity. Women, who frequently traveled en caravane with regiments of children in tow, were distinctly unwelcome, had, in fact, been forcibly turned away at the front door. But as the daughter of such a noted philosopher and abolitionist, I had acquired unofficial visiting rights to both the bookcases downstairs and the stacks upstairs.
Later that morning, dressed in a subdued gray wool jacket and skirt, I signed in at the Athenaeum’s front desk, adding Mr. Amos Bronson Alcott’s name after my own by way of reference.
Charles Agwerd was on duty that day: an elderly gentleman with scanty white whiskers bristling from nose, cheek, and ears and a suit cut in the style of fifty years before, with huge cuffs and a low, ruffled collar. He was old enough to remember having his milk cup broken on the day when Daniel Shays and his fellow rebels marched to the State Supreme Court in Springfield to protest the high land taxation that followed the Revolution. He reminded the patrons of the Athenaeum often of this fact, and usually concluded the rather lengthy retelling of that anecdote and others of his personal history with the opinion that men weren’t men anymore, and women certainly weren’t women. Despite my subdued costume and lack of prattling toddlers and babes-in-arms, he gave his usual disapproving glance when I signed the register.
“You look sensible,” he admitted with reluctance. “Can you make squirrel stew?” he asked testily.
I admitted I could not.
He sighed as though his heart would break and then muttered his old refrain that women had lost their femininity and good sense. Strange, I reflected, how many gentlemen associated femininity with the goriest of tasks. Yet when their own children were born, these men were nowhere to be seen, usually cowering behind the locked and bolted doors of their studies, fingers in their ears. I wondered if a time would ever come when fathers would also help see their own offspring into the world. If so, that should help population control.
Despite my poor knowledge of colonial cuisine, Charles Agwerd allowed me entrance and gave me a tag in exchange for my coat and hat.
Heads, all male, turned as I—that foreign, exotic animal, woman—walked down the long carpeted hall to the head librarian’s desk. The long room smelled most pleasantly of leather and cigar smoke, reminding me of Father’s study.
“I would like assistance researching the life history of Katya Mendosa,” I told the head librarian, who had risen in obvious alarm.
“Katya . . . ?” he repeated.
“Mendosa. An actress. A performer. One who treads the boards. Surely you have heard of actresses? If not, I will explain the profession.” One had to get down to business quickly at the Athenaeum.
“No need to explain,” he said, turning bright red. “Have you any information other than a name?” His tone of voice was peevish, yet he picked up a pen and prepared to take a few notes.
“Let’s see. She is still alive. Is that helpful? I would say she is about thirty years of age, though her costumes and makeup give her a more youthful appearance. She has an accent. Spanish, I believe, though it tends to fluctuate a bit between that language and several others. She is currently appearing on the Boston stage, and before that she toured in the West.”
“Newspapers and journals,” he said. “I suspect there will be little written of her of a more permanent nature. If you will wait here . . .”
He returned fifteen minutes later carrying piles and piles of yellowing periodicals.
“These are publications from cities of the South and the West,” he said, using a tone of voice that preachers often adopt with children. “If you find dates of her performances in various cities, you may also find reviews and biographies and other material.” He gloated as he released the pile in front of him with such alacrity that a small cloud of dust puffed out as it landed on the polished mahogany desk. For the first time during our exchange he seemed pleased. He’d had his revenge, he supposed, for my female act of trespass.
What he did not know was that the prospect of that tall pile of popular press gave me a thrill. I had a morning before me filled with news and stories from all over the country. What more could I wish?
And so I passed a very pleasant half day reading several years’ worth of news of Natchez, Saint Louis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Wheeling, and several smaller towns along the Western theater-touring route. There were stories from New Mexico, which had been acquired for the Union, and reports from M. C. Perry in the Japans, tales of gunfights and land claims and blizzards and more drama than any writer could seek. There were pages of poems by Tennyson that set me dreaming, and countless reviews of my dear friend Henry Thoreau’s book Walden.
There was considerable space and verbiage used to describe the progress of Jenny Lind, who had toured the year before, but notices advertising the appearances of Katya Mendosa were scarce and, even when located, small. It was sobering to think that much of what Miss Mendosa’s promoters claimed for her was hyperbole and even invention. I half believed her to be famous and wealthy, or at least as wealthy as a woman of the working classes could become. She was not, as her lack of publicity and reviews indicated little interest on the part of audiences.
I did, however, find a few dates and listings of performances, and scribbled those down on a blotter.
When I left the Athenaeum, there was a closed carriage standing at the curb. The window had been rolled up and curtained, but not completely. Inside, strangely, sat Katya Mendosa herself. She glared as I passed. There was a man inside as well, but I could not see his face.
It felt a strange coincidence, but it was possible that another Athenaeum member might be spending time with the actress and escorting her about in a carriage.
Still, it did feel strange.
“Hmm,” I said later, biting my lip and looking at the list, once again alone with Sylvia. “I would have expected more.” We were in the small garden that came with our Pinckney Street house, and I was pulling away the pile of last year’s leaves that buried Abba’s daffodil bed.
“Why, Louisa, is something missing? To think you spent an entire morning in that dusty vault. Is this a weed or a flower, Louy?” She pointed to a small yellow tip just breaking the ground.
“Flower. Don’t pull at it, Sylvia. The Athenaeum is well maintained and not at all dusty,” I replied. “Certainly it’s not a vault. I could happily spend a month in there with all those books, those leather chairs and gas lamps at every desk, no wailing children . . .” I grew dreamy for a moment, and then resumed a brisk manner. “But I prefer not to spend my time there researching such actresses as Madame Mendosa. She was a fairly boring research subject.” I took off my thick gloves and pulled from my pocket the blotter on which I had written my notes of the diva’s appearances.
&nb
sp; “Did you notice anything about this list, Sylvia?” I asked when she had finished reading.
“A certain paucity of engagements,” Sylvia said, “with much time between them.”
“A worthy observation. We can assume Miss Mendosa has, and needs, other sources of income. Anything else, Sylvia ?” I was smiling encouragingly, giving her the kind of look I gave my schoolchildren when I was trying to make them feel clever.
“She had a run in Newport, in that little theater we used to attend as children, because they had ballet dancers and puppet shows in the afternoon.”
“Yes. And . . .” I cradled my chin in my hands and watched as the maid from the house next door carried a bucket of ash out to the pile. Sylvia frowned with impatience.
The maid, not knowing she was watched, scratched her red hands and sighed with exhaustion, though the day was not yet over. If her duties were typical, she still had a table to lay, a long wash-up to clean the kitchen after dinner, children to bathe, hearths to prepare for the morning fires. If there was mending, and there always was, she would have to do it by gaslight. She would be working long after the family was sleeping in their beds. If the poor woman had children they would have spent the day alone, probably in the attic, in soggy nappies and with their thumbs in their mouths to quell the hunger, and with that distant look in their eyes that lonely children soon develop.
I sighed, and Sylvia knew I was thinking of Queenie.
“Unfair!” Sylvia cried. “You hint at hidden meanings and then fall silent!”
“Katya’s career seems to have begun sometime in 1850, four years ago, for I found no mention of her before that.”
“And so? All careers must begin at some time.”
“Exactly,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Checkered Past Revealed
BOSTON HAD A SIMPLE system of restraining its criminal population. Offenders of modest ambition—Saturday-night drunks, meat-shop butchers with heavy thumbs and light scales, pickpockets, and others of that ilk—were housed in a small, uncomfortable jail till their fine was paid or their time served. Dangerous villains, however, were quartered in the courthouse itself, a building that I had already visited many times even before Preston fell headlong into his troubles, since my father’s Vigilance Committee had rallied there in the past, especially three years before, when the fugitive slave Sims had been held and tried.