by Brandy Purdy
I spared no expense to entertain her and her troupe. Every night the house blazed with golden light, and glorious music, played by a full orchestra, wafted out into the darkness. There were hothouse palms in gilded pots and silver trays of sweet and savory delights. Lobster tails and oysters, steaks, and cakes galore. Tiered silver trays towered over the tables displaying the most tempting array of pastries. Champagne and Nance’s magical elixir of the green fairy flowed like water, and if any of my fair-weather friends from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had dared say one word about it I would have snapped my fingers in their face.
Nance wore a clinging mint-green silk gown embroidered in silver and gold with a wreath of blue-green satin roses around her naked shoulders, and she sparkled with emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds everywhere she could think to put them.
And I wore the most fantastic creation of chartreuse and amber, cut daringly low and baring my shoulders in a fashion that was far too young for me. But that was how Nance made me feel—young and alive! When I was with her I was in the springtime of my life and not the autumn. My freshly hennaed hair was piled perilously high in a root-straining pompadour garnished with gold tinsel fringe and amber and chartreuse satin roses and I was weighed down with jewels.
I was a woman of forty-five making a fool and a spectacle of myself, but I was so in love I didn’t even care if the whole world was laughing at me. I was so gloriously happy I could even laugh at myself.
We danced in each other’s arms; none of the theatrical folk thought there was anything unusual about it, and even Nance’s husband smiled indulgently and saluted me as we waltzed past. I took puffs from her strange cigarettes and heady, intoxicating sips from her glass that made my head spin beautifully. The green fairy seemed to make the whole world shine; everything and everyone was beautiful and brilliant that night, and I couldn’t stop smiling and bestowing a thousand compliments left and right. I just had to stop everyone and tell them how wonderful they were and to thank them for coming to grace my home with their glorious presence.
As the evening wore on, Nance and I stole away to my summer bedroom. I was wild to be alone with her. Every time I looked at her I wanted to tear off her clothes and mine. On the pink-and-chocolate-striped sofa, Nance sat back, lost in ecstasy, the liqueur in her crystal glass glowing like the most perfect peridot or that subtle hint of green at the heart of a white rose, as I knelt reverently at her feet, lifted her skirts, and licked her sex, lapping it up like a cunning, greedy cat left alone in the kitchen where a bowl of rich cream had been left sitting out on the counter. I couldn’t get enough of her! She felt like liquid silk and I was starved for her!
That was when Emma walked in like a black storm cloud to rain on our picnic.
That was the end. That one wild, rash, uninhibited “lewd and unnatural and unforgivable” act cost me my sister. Emma hurriedly packed her clothes—every garment she owned fit into a single carpet bag—and walked out without a backward glance. She left all her religious ephemera behind for me, saying tartly that I had greater need of the Lord’s grace and forgiveness than she.
I ran down the stairs after her, weeping and shouting at her—“Emma, PLEASE!”—heedless of what my guests might think, trying desperately to make her understand, but she wouldn’t stop walking or even turn around and look at me.
“I fear for your soul, Lizzie!” Those were the last words my sister ever spoke to me, shouted back over her shoulder, as she slammed the front door.
I never saw her again. We never exchanged another word, not even by letter; those I wrote to her were returned unopened. She went to live briefly with the Reverend Jubb and his sister, and then with Orrin’s mother, Caroline Mason Gardner, in Swansea.
Caroline doted on Emma, they were not that far apart in age, and the two of them became best friends. She even insisted that my sister accompany her on a holiday trip to sunny Catalina Island one year. Orrin, back from Tennessee to visit his mother, was with them. I heard he also became “quite fond” of Emma. Caroline sent me many postcards, enthusing about the fragrant fruit trees, bright, sunny beaches, Sugar Loaf Bay, and the fascinating fishes spied through glass-bottomed boats while sailing over the sunlit blue waters, but not one word from, or about, Orrin or Emma. Did that silence, I have often since wondered, say more than words? They had such a good time in Catalina that the following year the three of them went to New Orleans, and there were more postcards about Mardi Gras and alligator parks.
I’ve often wondered, despite the seventeen-year age difference, did Orrin, unable to have me, transfer his affections to Emma? I knew my sister was far too timid to defy social convention and marry a man almost two decades her junior, but that doesn’t answer the question: Did they fall in love?
Over the years that followed, I heard many bedeviling rumors that kept me awake at night. But I never discovered the truth, if there ever was any truth behind those rumors. I never delved into the matter or asked any questions of Caroline or any mutual acquaintances who would have been in a position to know. I was too afraid of what might be the answers. The truth is, I didn’t want to know.
Three years later, Emma abruptly left Caroline’s home and moved to Newmarket, New Hampshire, where, calling herself “Miss Gardner,” she led a reclusive existence in a cheap rented room on a farmstead belonging to a pair of spinsters, the Connor sisters, leaving only at dusk to take a long, solitary walk in the gloaming. She attended church services every Sunday with her veil down and rebuffed all attempts at friendship. Sugar cubes, which she had long been addicted to sucking on—they were cheaper than candy—and a rocking chair were the only luxuries she permitted herself. She kept her money in the bank and wore her plain black dresses and sturdy leather shoes until they fell apart and were past mending before she would deign to purchase new. Word later came back to me—as any unpleasant news had a way of doing—that whenever people asked about her family, Emma said she had had a sister once, but that she was dead.
I suppose it had to end sometime, but I wish it had not been like that.
But at the time of our parting, I was too enraptured with Nance to try to win Emma back, and later . . . after Nance . . . I was too embarrassed. Emma would have only said, I told you so, and even if she only actually spoke those words once, she would say them again every time she looked at the disgusting, unnatural thing I had become in her eyes. And by then there were also those rumors about Orrin and Emma standing between us. So I just let it go. For better or worse, I let things be.
“Never mind,” Nance purred huskily into my ear as she led me back to my bedroom, soothing me with sips from her glass, urging me to let the green fairy take all the shameful, painful feelings and inhibitions away and leave only the body behind and all its wild naked animal urges. Her hand was at my breast, and then between my legs, making me forget . . . at least for a time. “Never mind, Lizbeth; you still have me. . . .” she purred.
But in the end, I lost Nance too. Nothing worked out the way I thought it would!
Our idyll continued. There was still time before Nance must resume her tour and she begged me to come with her to Tyngsboro; she longed to show me her farm. After Emma’s abrupt departure, I just wanted to run away, to forget and escape, from all the gossip in Fall River about our abrupt parting after so many years and lose myself in the world of waking dreams I dwelled in whenever I was with Nance. So I went most willingly to her farm. I would have followed her anywhere, I think.
She was so proud of that quaint brown and white—or “chocolate and ivory,” as Nance picturesquely described it—Tudor-style gingerbread house sitting ensconced in the heart of a lovely garden. She called it “Brindley Farm.” She was always buying cows, donkeys, goats, pigs, and sheep whose sweet, docile dispositions or attractive appearances caught her eye and having them shipped back to the farm. She chose the chickens for their plumage too, declaring that the speckled hens’ eggs tasted the best and she absolutely abhorred the plain, boring white ones.
She played this scene several times to great effect for the so-called “gentlemen of the press” who applauded her selfless self-sacrifice, nobly devoting her life to bringing pleasure to thousands of theatergoers while steadfastly denying herself the dearest, sweetest, most natural instincts of a woman’s homebound heart.
“It is one of the vain regrets of my life!” she would heartrendingly sigh. “But I have schooled myself to say to all who talk to me of a home life, though that is ever a sore and tender spot with me, that I have no thoughts of settling down at all—the stage is my life, and I have ground my very soul under heel to succeed there!”
I remember a magazine feature, “A Day at Nance O’Neil’s Farm,” in which she posed for a series of photographs gathering eggs; herding the sheep; sitting by the pond playing with fluffy yellow ducklings; milking a cow; bathing a billy goat in her own bathtub with her lily-of-the-valley-scented soap; standing proudly, like a domestic goddess, beside the kitchen stove holding a large potato speared awkwardly upon a fork and smilingly declaring in the caption below that she was about to bake it for her husband’s supper before plunging it into a pot of boiling water; gingerly holding a broom as though she hadn’t the faintest clue what to do with it; sitting with a lapful of knitting needles and a mound of hopelessly tangled wool; and relaxing by the fire at day’s end dozing dreamily with her head resting on Alfred’s knee as he, per their nightly custom, read to her from one of the great classics of literature—actually a sporting magazine concealed inside a copy of David Copperfield. Life for Nance was indeed a stage, and she was always on it, playing a part; I sometimes wondered if she had any idea who she truly was.
It all reminded me of Marie Antoinette’s pretend farm I had read about where servants bathed and perfumed the animals before they were led into the royal presence. Nance even had two cows named Blanche and Brunette that she liked to take for walks as though they were dogs while she smiled and waved hello to the locals, or “quaint peasants,” as she called her neighbors. And she liked to dress up like Little Bo Peep, replete with sunbonnet and ringlets and ruffled pantalets, in a Mother Goose pantomime to herd the sheep, all of them curiously clean for farm animals and wearing blue or pink satin bows to denote their sex.
Like carefree young girls in bare feet and dresses of cheerful calico—Nance in green and yellow and me in blue and red—with our hair down in pigtails, the ends tied with ribbons to match our dresses, we wandered hand in hand all over the farm. One wonderful drowsy afternoon we made the most passionate love in a haystack. Afterward, Nance told me that the farm was haunted, that on nights when the moon was bright a pair of lovers from a bygone century roamed about and relived their own forbidden passion.
Back in the days when the Puritans still held sway, the farm had been an inn. The innkeeper had had a beautiful daughter, with long golden hair and a sweet, docile disposition. One day, while gathering mushrooms in the forest nearby, she had met a gypsy girl, part of a roving band that camped on the outskirts of town. The two had fallen instantly in love. And though the innkeeper’s daughter struggled with what she perceived as a great and terrible sin and fears for the fate of her immortal soul, she could not renounce her love. They continued to meet, whenever they could, in the woods, but as the weather grew colder they grew bolder and moved their secret trysts inside the barn. One night they were discovered in a naked embrace in the hayloft. The gypsy girl was accused of using witchcraft to seduce the innkeeper’s daughter and taken out and hanged from a tree on the grounds. Her beloved died shortly afterward, of a broken heart, the legend said. Some versions of the story claimed she had hanged herself from the same tree or drowned herself in the pond.
“And to think I shall lose this place,” Nance sighed as she lay in my arms, her head on my shoulder, drowsy with love, “if I cannot raise seventy-five hundred dollars.”
“We shall have to see what we can do to prevent that,” I answered, thoroughly under her spell, so caught up in her web I would have promised her the moon on a velvet pillow or the stars for a necklace if she had hinted that such was her desire.
One late Sunday afternoon, our last at the farm before the tour resumed, Nance and I were lazing away the day in the library. She was restless and got up from beside me and went and plucked a book from a shelf and carried it to the desk. I thought nothing of it and went on reading my own volume until she leaned over the back of the sofa and kissed my cheek and presented the book to me with a flourish.
It was a beautiful book with a deep-mustard-yellow cloth cover embellished with wreaths of golden flowers and a sky-blue satin marker sewn into the binding. It was a collection of poems by her friend, and sometime lover, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who had turned his epic poem about Judith of Bethulia into a play to create a worthy showcase for Nance’s “immense and awe inspiring talent.”
She had taken the trouble to copy one of the poems out onto the flyleaf just for me. It was called “Flower and Thorn.”
Take them and keep them,
Silvery thorn and flower,
Plucked just at random
In the rosy weather—
Snowdrops and pansies,
Sprigs of wayside heather,
And five-leafed wild rose
Dead within the hour.
Take them and keep them:
Who can tell? Some day, dear,
(Though they be withered,
Flower and thorn and blossom,)
Held for an instant
Up against thy bosom,
They might make December
Seem to thee like May, dear!
For My Lizbeth
With Love from
Your Daphne
Daphne—that was my secret name for her. I alone called her that. The idea had come to me one day when I saw her swimming naked in the pond, her body white, her hair like liquid gold floating out about her bare shoulders, among the pink and white water lilies. Daphne, for the chaste and beautiful water nymph of ancient lore, upon whom the gods took pity and transformed into a laurel tree the moment the lascivious Apollo’s eager arms closed around her—thereby preserving her chastity and saving her from rape. There she would stand by the river, stiff, proud, stately, and unyielding forever as a warning to presumptuous lovers who would force their lust, and their will, upon another.
Why couldn’t I see beyond the sentiment, that this pretty gift of poetry contained an implicit warning? My Daphne was telling me that if I tried to hold on to her I would be left with nothing. But I couldn’t think then; she was in my arms again, nuzzling and nestling, and telling me how happy she was that I had decided to go to Chicago with her.
In hindsight I suppose Nance was very happy to have me there. A lawsuit was looming and costumes and scenery she needed had been seized by an irate theater manager after Nance defaulted on a loan. Nance insisted it was all “mean-spirited meanness” and she couldn’t remember any such loan; the money was a gift, she insisted. She was determined to challenge the charges in court, and I followed her bravely into the arena, despite the clamor of photographers and newspapermen. I put on a dress of pearl-gray and pale-mauve satin trimmed with dotted black net, ropes of pearls, my silver fox fur, with a mammoth corsage of orchids, and an enormous veiled hat the size of a serving platter erupting with a riot of silk orchids and sleek pink, purple, and magenta feathers, and sat beside Nance, holding her hand and nodding encouragingly throughout the ordeal. And when she lost the case and burst into tears because she had spent the last $25 she had in the world on the orchid corsage she was wearing and her own lawye
r was going to sue her because she couldn’t pay his fee, I consoled her by writing a check, to discharge her legal obligations and secure the release of her costumes and props. The smile she gave me in return was like the sunlight breaking through the rain and vivid blue skies chasing away the grim black thunderclouds.
After Chicago a train whisked us away to New York. We dined every night at Delmonico’s. I remember sitting there simmering with jealously over a lobster dinner while Nance danced, flirted, and laughed with her admirers. I clenched my fists so tight my white kid gloves split. My face, captured in the mirrors lining the silk-papered walls, was as red as the velvet gown Nance had chosen for me. I sat there and watched her waltz obliviously right past me in the arms of a handsome, silver-haired financier, anxiously fingering the gold scorpion brooch, Nance’s own, that she had herself pinned on to my bodice as we dressed for the evening as a gift to thank me for chasing her financial woes away and to remember her by forever. As if I could ever forget her!
She reveled in the attention of her admirers, male and female; she simply could not get enough of their adoration, gifts, and flattery. Though she kissed me every chance she got and called me her “angel” and her “lady bountiful,” I was no longer enough. She had even started to plead exhaustion and headaches to keep me from her bed.
At first, I believed her, until, restless, and unable to sleep without her beside me, I rose and peeped out into the corridor and saw Nance’s door open and a black-haired girl with caramel skin in a beaded topaz satin gown softly slipping out with the dawn, satin high heels twinkling with faux diamonds in her hand as she tiptoed in her silk stockings down the rose-carpeted corridor to her own room. I recognized her as Alfred’s latest protégé and the newest member of the troupe, a Brazilian beauty named Ricca who was obviously taking her role as Nance’s understudy quite literally into bed and directly under the great star herself.