Ada

by Kaz Cooke

  And to the tall, deep-bosomed women,

  And the children, nine and ten!

  Nine or ten children, he recommends, does he, this blarsted Kipling! While being vulgar as you please and none of his business how deep anybody’s bosom is doing if I may observe. I wonder how much time for salutary poetry Mr Kipling would have should he be required to birth, feed, clothe and change nine or ten children, one after the other for twenty years or so. And lest it escape Mr Poetic Kipling, how many children do most people need to have, to end up with nine or ten live ones? I hope for his sake he never loses one. If Mr Kipling was here now and began reciting that poem I should jab him in the shins and put his hat in the fire. All right, we haven’t got a fire. But you take my meaning, and so would he.

  I’m going off like bacon on the windowsill. I do apologise. Now, mind, I’m covered with printing ink and quite put out. I wouldn’t speak this way was it not for the morphia and the fact I can see you are a creature of sense, stalwart and brave in the face of nasty facts and their ilk.

  I ask you though, what man has any idea how he might proceed with life were he to be plagued with innard-grips every month, the feeling of a heavy stone in his middle, dragging it all downwards, and the mess of bleeding. You tell me that’s part of God’s plan and I’ll tell you that’s a madwoman’s breakfast of a plan. I don’t intend to be blasphemous but it’s not the sort of thing you can ask a parson, and I do wonder. They talk of the splendour of God’s perfect design and if you don’t count the very beautiful, cashed-up sort of people who have all the luck, like Fannie Dango, God’s brilliant plan is apt to go wrong at the best of times, and unspeakable in the worst of times, and if he’s God why doesn’t he get a better plan? The only thing worse than the attendance of your lady’s monthlies, especially while you’re travelling, is its terrifying absence.

  I am sorry about all this unseemliness, Horace, but you’re a doctor’s son after all, and shouldn’t be too shockable. You wanted the truth and the truth often lacks a lace flounce around its edges.

  We all knew women who had fallen. And it wasn’t because we were theatrical. You’ll know them too, you just don’t know you know them. Look at the papers. ‘Maid of all work’, ‘young and without family near’, ‘already a mother’, ‘a governess down from the country’, ‘a Collingwood factory girl’. In other words, any sort of woman at all. Flash-girls who walk the corners near the top of Lonsdale Street, and girls who don’t know how babies are born even as they’re doing it themselves. Who did this to you, the doctors ask. Did what? they say, poor bewildered wee things.

  You’re right, it is considered not fit to talk about, so imagine how unbefitting it feels to be forced to live it.

  The choices, then. A life of shame and scratching hardship with a child nobody wants to feed or give a name to, or various methods to stop a confinement – drink mercury or throw yourself down stairs, take the long walk off the Anderson Street Bridge into the Yarra, or try to find an illegal operation with what the papers called ‘terrible instruments’ that won’t land you in the courts, or the gaol, or the overcrowded septicaemia ward up Lonsdale Street, or the morgue. There’s not a single portion of any of that that’s fair to a girl.

  And I didn’t like to think of what might be in there. Alice and I attended a night-time Ladies’ Tour of Kreitmayer’s Waxworks of a Monday night, when we first arrived in Melbourne and had a thousand ways to amuse ourselves. In the back rooms of Kreitmayer’s there was the usual effigies of the Pope, Tom Thumb and Lola Montez, checking her skirts for spiders. Upstairs, Mrs Kreitmayer led us past the gas-lit murders and stuffed improbable mammals and Solomon’s wives. We saw the spleen in formaldehyde that had been pierced by a whalebone corset. And the medical specimens of bits of people showing the effects of rheumatic fever, and typhoid, blinded and made deaf from the black measles.

  And then – thank Heavens we’d left the girls at home – we were led in front of a tiny, curled, strange thing in a jar that Mrs Kreitmayer said was not-yet-a-baby from an illegal operation. People who’d never been to a Catholic church in their days crossed themselves, Alice burst into tears and I clapped my hands to my cheeks. A Toorak lady-wife who’d been giving out little frightened gasps for at least a quarter of an hour, fainted and lay on the floor. Her maid straddled her and began shouting and slapping her in the face with gusto, this way then that. The maid had to be restrained before she settled into a rhythm.

  I don’t know, Horace, whether you’re a constable or a detective, or why else you want to know about all this, but I will finish the story in the way I want to tell it. I don’t get a lot of choices, so I’m choosing to tell you everything. You’re stuck here until I get to the end of it. It may not end the way you like. And for once I won’t be reciting lines I’ve practised on the train.

  This story goes back to when Alice was still alive. Just after we were back from the dread New Zealand tour. Alice had always been prone to lecturing us about respectability, with dark mentions of stains on a character. ‘It would ruin you and be the death of me,’ she’d say to Cissie and Lizzie who was wide-eyed the first time they heard it and rolling-eyed by the hundredth. Alice was determined the girls never appear as Skirt dancers, which she considered fast; though she didn’t mind me doing it, which rather stung.

  No, Horace, I don’t think you do want me to get to the nub of it. It’s like wanting to know the secret of the Mahatma. You won’t like it when you hear it.

  I was stuck. Watching a middle that was growing bigger all the time.

  Houses in Melbourne were abysmal that season. Everyone was feeling the pinch. ‘Only ten in the stalls, thirty-five in the gallery and a rat in the circle,’ reported Harry. There was hardly any work for anybody. Some people threw stones at windows so they’d get into a cell and have bread for breakfast.

  And there was a baby on the way. If Alice knew, I thought, it might kill her, but I had to tell Jim. Dear old Jim. It wasn’t his fault, truly it wasn’t. He can’t be responsible for everything.

  We tried all the Beecham’s pills and tinctures for ‘blockages’ and ‘restoring natural regularities’ (I’d thought they were for constipation, before I had to look into the matter). Lizzie and I would go out to different pharmacies and apothecaries, you see, separately, so as not to become known. We bought pennyroyal tisanes. We’d been told scalding baths didn’t work and it’s harder for a girl to get herself into the right frame of mind to throw herself down the stairs than you might think, and in any case that seemed far more likely to result in a broken leg, which doesn’t do in the theatrical professions.

  The flash-girls of Little Lon district must know where to go for such tricks of their trade but my face was too known for me to be seen asking about such things on the street, or worse, knocking on a door in Romeo Lane. And I certainly wouldn’t send Lizzie there.

  Some of the girls in the Tivoli ballet chorus told me where they thought I could go. The Singer sewing machine emporium at the Block Arcade. I was a bit surprised, to be truthful. Most of the doctors were in East Melbourne – probably still are – but you couldn’t knock on a door in case you got the wrong sort and they called the police instead. You could try to tell somebody but if they didn’t understand what you meant by ‘having an inside worry’ then they probably couldn’t help you, so why risk it?

  So, there we were, Lizzie and I, standing with our flanks together in the Singer sewing machine emporium at the Block Arcade, under the ceiling murals of ladies with their bodices off who were meant to be agriculture and the like. It’s a funny costume for a farmer if you ask me. Any road, as instructed by a girl at the Tivoli whose name I won’t tell you, we asked to see Nellie.

  We’d been told Nellie would take us down and slip us into the catacombs under the Arcade. Below one of the milliner’s shops we’d be introduced to a lady sitting on a hard-backed chair who would arrange everything if you gave her a guinea.

  When we asked for Nellie in the Singer shop we got blank looks a
nd a Fanny instead, who took us straight down the stairs in the corner of the shop to the basement which was full to the gunwales with bolts of cloth, and wall-to-wall seamstresses renting the machines by the hour, whirring away to show how you could set in a leg-o’-mutton sleeve without sewing it to your own leg, if you had the experience.

  Fanny showed us out a door into the warren of whitewashed passages with low, barrel-vaulted ceilings and red-bricked floors. We turned corner after corner, past the kitchen underneath the Hopetoun Tea Rooms where the scullery boys looked levelly at us. Fanny seemed less sure of where to go than we did, came over flustered and said she had to get back to work. She abandoned us at the back door of another basement kitchen – the Winter Gardens café, according to the delivery-box labels. Upstairs gentlemen and artist-blokes would be eating dinner and puffing cheroot smoke at one another.

  Now, you’re going to think I’m off down the wrong branch line and putting you off again, but stick with me. Everyone who was in Melbourne at that time pretends they knew Helena Rubenstein before she was a world-renowned millionairess with cosmetic and beauty massage establishments in Paris.

  ‘I always knew she’d be a success’; ‘Dear Helena, I was the first customer at her Elizabeth Street salon’. What horse mess. Nobody else remembers her, if you don’t count the Robur tea salesman who bankrolled her first face ointments, or the wet-lipped scion of the Grimwade family who put his chemicals factory staff at her disposal and provided the jars, or the printer who criticised the font on the menu one day during dinner and ended up designing her first labels. Nobody remembers a waitress with a boat-fresh Polish accent from the Winter Gardens basement restaurant underneath the Block Arcade, except me and Lizzie.

  A coltish kitchenhand took one look at us bunching together at the kitchen door, and called out, ‘Layna! Customers!’ Directly, a tiny waitress came out to us. She wore a frilly lace-and-voile tiara and a crisp white apron. She had a striking face with hooded eyes, and very dark hair pulled into a neat chignon. ‘Yes?’ she said, all business. I took a breath, wondering whether it was safe to explain.

  Fortunately she had no patience and began talking rapidly. ‘Vot sort do you vont? I have for dry, oily and ordinary skins.’ She glanced up at me and said firmly, ‘You, I think, are ordinary.’ She ran her hands over the lids of several jars next to an open box of lettuces. I opened and shut my gob like a Coogee Aquarium grouper, but Lizzie was quick as you like, ‘Dry skin,’ she said, reaching into her reticule.

  ‘Dry skin, one schilling, one sixpence,’ said the woman, and thrust a jar at us. Lizzie paid up without a word.

  We left with our potion, retraced our subterranean path and popped up back at the Singer shop. Out on Collins Street we leaned on each other, and laughed till we cried. It was the first time I heard Lizzie laugh in weeks.

  ‘To think women are paying one and six for a jar of rose-scented mutton fat,’ she said, half an hour later in the upstairs back parlour of the Vic Pal.

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Yes, but it was either that or explain the other,’ said Lizzie, inspecting our keepsake, a pot of ‘Crème Valaze’. ‘Jar’s probably worth more than the contents,’ she added, with an air Cissie called dismissy missy. ‘By next year, that waitress woman’s going to be rich or in gaol,’ said Lizzie.

  No, she didn’t. She didn’t say anything of the sort. We didn’t have the faintest cognisance of who Helena Rubenstein was. Never thought of her again until years later when we recognised the label ‘Valaze’ again, and she was millionairing away, selling hundreds of thousands of pounds of creams and face massages on the promise of magicking fat away from where it oughtn’t to be and sticking it where it ought, and telling people she can reverse the course of wrinkles. Now all the actresses use her tinted lip balm and rouge-coloured cheek stain for stage work, and some say, secretly during the daytime, too.

  So, that’s why there was no illegal operation. We tried, but we got face cream instead, and a Helena Rubinstein story we couldn’t tell anyone.

  I’ll own that it’s hard to talk about Alice in all this. In a way I think she got the worst of it, though it all came from trying to shield her. She was still alive back when all this happened, of course. As I said, she stayed in Prahran to look after Under-the-Table Walter’s children when the rest of us went to South Australia. And then we had the terrible, heart-freezing letter from Alice saying she’d had it from Madam Marzella that we was going away to have a baby to Jim and if it was true she washed her hands of us and she hoped Lizzie and Cissie had been protected from knowing of our sinful ways and how the only consolation she had left was the goodness of her girls, from whom she was cruelly parted.

  I know Harry threatened to stop booking Marzella unless she stopped flapping her gums about it, but it was too late. And though the theatre is forgiving, nobody wants to be associated with misery and trouble, do they? Or daubed with the same brush, as if my company was a bucket of sticky tar, clinging to anyone else’s skirts.

  Everyone felt very sorry for Alice, and for Lizzie having to be associated with my fall, even though she was an innocent girl a gentleman should still tip his hat to and a lady could converse with in public.

  Thankfully most people in the theatre like me better than they like Marzella, and that counts for something. Inside the business most folk will take you as they find you, though I know once a story is abroad there’s no putting it back. I could have lived like Joan of Arc and martyred at the stake for my chastity and there’d still be those who’d say, ‘She was in the theatre, you know.’ As if I was no step up from a flash-girl in the street. I won’t go quietly for that. But judge me as you find me.

  Because we did go to a back-street boarding house in Gawler to wait for the baby. I wrote to Bob Bell and he came over like a shot from the West to help me do the necessaries with the paperwork. Jim brought him from the train and straight upstairs at the lodgings.

  ‘Hello, Del,’ Bob said, like a big tall angel. ‘I’ve come to help deliver a parcel for you. Hello, Lizzie.’ Lizzie was in the armchair in the corner, and I was walking the floor with the bundle, jigging it up and down. We both must have looked a sight. I turned to see myself in the looking glass. My eyes looked rouged.

  He held his arms out for the bundle, which wriggled. ‘Say hello,’ he said to it. A very small baby blinked up at him from the folds, and then opened its little sucker-mouth and yowled. ‘Our sentiments exactly,’ said Bob, tickling the baby’s dimple with his little finger.

  Jim reached out and clapped Bob on the shoulder. ‘Thanks for standing up with Ada. We have to have a man’s name on the birth papers. And it can’t be mine, for obvious reasons. And Alice . . . she can’t know, that’s all.’

  ‘Anything for Ada,’ said Bob, carefully.

  On the way in the carriage the baby began to cry again, and I put both hands to my chest and leaned forward, against the pain. Bob patted my shoulder and jiggled the basket on his knee. ‘All right, duck,’ he said, to one of us, or all of us. ‘Nearly there.’

  The driver pulled up the horses hard in a neat suburban street, lined with little front yards and wrought-iron verandah tops linking all the identical cottages below. There was a butcher’s cart near the corner. It looked nice. The street, not the butcher’s cart.

  We took the bundle inside, signed some papers, and came out without it. Without her.

  The house was clean and the man seemed affectionate to his wife, and she seemed pleased with the bundle. Even though I’d memorised it, I made a note of the address again, for sending extra money when we had it. Bob and I drove back to the hotel, holding hands, each looking out a different window.

  ‘All right, then, Dellie. I’ll take the carriage on to the station,’ he said as we arrived at the hotel. I stepped down with a wobble and looked in at my dear friend. ‘Nobody will know,’ he said. ‘They’d never believe it of me in any case.’

  ‘They’ll believe it of me,’ I said bitterly. The driver hadn’t tipped hi
s cap.

  ‘You’re an actress, dearie,’ said Bob. ‘You know what we’re like. I might have this coachman myself, on the way to the station.’ I reached up to press his hand, and I went slowly upstairs, where there was a closed door to get behind before tears, and the relief, and the grief . . .

  I don’t rightly know how they fed the baby, it might have been pap with condensed milk and water, or it would have been safer to get a wetnurse. Some of them travel door to door you know, like a milk cart. I knew a Gaiety dancer that did that before she came to the theatre every evening, for extra nicker. She was allowed to have malted stout in the dressing-room to build herself up for her other employment. I don’t know if her own baby had gone to glory, I didn’t like to ask, poor thing, she always looked done in to me, but I suppose with a bit of rouge on you couldn’t see it from the stalls when she danced.

  Those that condemn have probably never seen the strength it takes to leave a child behind when every part of you wants that baby a thousand times more than you’ve ever wanted anything before. When your bodice is wet from the milk that comes when you hear somebody else’s baby. Of all the sliver-sized choices offered to a woman, it’s one of the most cruel.

  Some get to keep their babies and some don’t, and nobody gets much of a say in it – that’s how the world works. It’s just as well we didn’t keep our baby girl, she would have been taken about like her parents were tinkers or swagmen, with the shame of her birth hanging over her head. She’s much better off with her decent little family there, I’m sure. I haven’t even been able to send money for three years.

  Yes, she was a girl. And do the arithmetic, Horrie, it was ten years ago. I’m not your mother. This isn’t a romantic and adventurous story that ends with your reunion and entrée into theatrical society, Horrie. If you were adopted in Rockhampton, then one mother did the right thing by you and gave you to the mother you have now. She’d be right pleased to know that you’ve grown up in a good home and turned into a fine young man. Well, you look done in, Horrie, is that what this has all been about? That’s burned down my imaginary cottage then, I’d say. No, it’s all right. It’s too late now in any case, dearie-oh.