Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Listen to this article describing how Lola was to ‘introduce for the first time the Spanish dance to the English public.’”

  “This member of the ‘the English public’ sees no need to be introduced to the Spanish dance at all.”

  Irene, however, had become so caught up in the report of Lola’s debut that she leaped up and began to act out the words as she read them.

  “‘The French danseuse,”’ she declared, taking on the ripe voice of Sarah Bernhardt, “‘executes her pas with ze feet, ze legs, and ze hips alone.’”

  “That already strikes me as a great deal more than is decent.”

  Irene was undeterred by my Greek chorus of objections, as ever.

  “‘The Spaniard dances with the body, the lips, the eyes, the head, the neck, and with . . . the heart. Her dance is the history of a passion . . . “Lolah Montes” is a purely Spanish dancer. In person she is truly the Spanish woman—in style, she is emphatically the Spanish dancer. . . . The variety of passion which the Spider Dance embodies—the languor, the abandon, the love, the pride, the scorn—one of the steps which is called death to the tarantula and is a favorite pas of the country, is the very poetry of avenging contempt—it cannot be surpassed. The head lifted and thrown back, the flashing eye, the fierce and protruded foot which crushes the insect, make a subject for the painter which would scarcely be easy to forget.’”

  Irene, having evoked all these motions and emotions, awaited my reaction. Or possibly my applause, although she should have known better.

  “A person making those same movements in Shropshire would be judged as having fits and sent to a madhouse for life.”

  “Exactly why Shropshire doesn’t have Her Majesty’s Theater in its environs. But you miss the point, Nell. Lola was as Spanish as your left foot! It was all . . . a glorious fraud. Here’s the prestigious London Times: ‘grateful at last to have seen a Spanish dance by a Spaniard, executed after the Spanish fashion.’”

  “I don’t see that England had or has any need for either French danseuses or Spanish dancers.”

  “Or Irish frauds?” Irene asked impishly. “I may be an Irish fraud myself.”

  This quieted me. Irene was coming to relish rather than deplore the adventures of Lola Montez. I tried to compare the audacious young woman who had passed herself off as a Spanish heroine to the penniless young woman on her own who created scandal everywhere she went, yet had always spent freely for the good of others less fortunate, and had ended her days in the bosom of the Church (even if it was Episcopal; at least it was not Catholic!).

  “And . . . Lola had always claimed that the Jesuits had slandered and persecuted her. I’m sure the Jesuits would have slandered and persecuted me, had they been aware of my existence, or I of theirs.”

  So. What was I to make of Lola, really? She had begun to matter to Irene. From the accounts of Lola’s final illness, a certain Father Hawks had been deeply moved by her conversion in her last years.

  What was I to make of her that she hadn’t made of herself? I didn’t know. I was used to knowing exactly what I thought about everything, but Lola Montez had defeated me. She had crushed my inborn certainty under the drumming of her flashing feet, and, through the veil of the decades, had fixed her stunning blue eyes on my heart and head, daring me to dismiss her at my own peril.

  MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN

  California Dreaming

  The danseuse was obliged to search for the spider in her skirts

  rather higher than was proper in so public a place.

  —SAN FRANCISCO NEWSPAPER

  She is the bravest and most daring woman ever to trod the earth.

  At the same time, she has real intellect and an uncommon education.

  —BOHEMIAN VIOLINIST MICHAEL HAUSER

  San Francisco, a city of fifty thousand souls, was but four years old when I arrived. Anything was possible here for anyone. Buildings of brick and stone had sprouted like mushrooms. San Francisco’s new American Theater held three thousand and they all had heard of the Countess of Landsfeld.

  Despite not having a contract and having had to fire my manager (again) on arrival, I opened five days after as Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal. I knew the part and the resident company knew the play.

  Seats went for the scandalous sum of five dollars apiece, five times the rate in the finest New York theatrical house. The box office collected almost five thousand dollars on my opening night alone. Truly California was a fairyland of instant riches, and the price to play in it was very high indeed.

  While the company of the American Theater was learning my signature play, Lola Montez in Bavaria, I entertained audiences with Yelva, in which I played a mute Russian orphan, and with performances of my Spider Dance.

  The California critics found my skirts lower and my art higher than had been anticipated, and my Bavarian play soon opened, an utter triumph. One critic went so far to say . . . now, where is that newspaper squib? . . . to say, “The play represents Lola as a coquettish, wayward, reckless woman, intent on good . . . but not the wily diplomatist, the able leader which she is represented in history. She counsels the King with all the enthusiasm of a Red Republican sophomore. . . . History pays her a higher compliment than her own play.”

  Ah, and isn’t that how everyone wanted to see me? Flirting with revolution, dancing my way into dangerous diplomatic waters? Good history doesn’t make good theater. Or good profits. Lola Montez in Bavaria made me $16,000 my first week at the American. And I made almost as many friends.

  Viva California!

  I tried to enlist my dear Miska, a charming violinist sponsored by P. T. Bamum at one time, into forming a company of solo acts to take to the smaller cities and mining camps where a full play couldn’t be mounted. And to him I confided that I would marry the Patrick Hull, whom I’d met on the Northern en route here. (Some ungentle observers would comment that I tended to find new lovers or husbands on every voyage. Perhaps that’s because I was never still enough on land to linger long with one man.)

  “Why marry?” Miska asked. “You seem to have found the fountain of youth, stalling in high summer under the two glorious day-stars of your incomparable eyes. I would think no one man would match you.”

  “He is a fascinating fellow, dear Miska,” I told him. “A big, roaring lion of an Irishman. He’s handsome and he makes me laugh. In truth, I enjoy the company of men even if they are not material for love. Hull has made a Benjamin Franklin of me! He took me to the offices of the San Francisco Whig and Commercial Advertiser and taught me to set type. (I was later to amaze associates in New York by this skill.) I weary of constant travel. This sunset land of the West is more than holes of gold in the earth. I might settle here, have children. Don’t laugh, Miska! The touring theatrical life won’t always be for me.”

  I had arrived in San Francisco in early May. By July the marriage was made, a Catholic ceremony which began with me offering two vases of white silk roses to the Virgin. And so Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Landsfeld Heald (as I had been styling myself after my second husband, George Heald, a handsome but weak young man under his spinster aunt’s thumb) took a third husband and became Mrs. Hull. We celebrated at the reception with cake, wine, and cigars and cigarettes! We moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Grass Valley, which reminded me of the Himalayas as seen from Simla when I was a child in India and the lovely Alps of my beloved Bavaria. I could offer a child no better birthplace.

  A pity it only lasted two months, but it soon became bitterly apparent, after he sold his newspaper, that Hull wished only to live on my money, and I was forced to throw him out. Divorce? I don’t believe in it, and reverted to using the surname of my second husband, Heald, when I traveled incognito.

  Of course I’d told Father Fontaine, the officiating priest at our marriage, that I was twenty-seven. (Although I didn’t mention my undissolved youthful alliance with Lieutenant James. The laws of England might want to put me in legal limbo for eternity, but t
hat marriage was long null and void in my head and heart, such ancient history!)

  It would have never done to admit to thirty-two and exceed my bridegroom in age! Husbands may come and go, but these facts are put on record, after all. The newspapers do have an annoying habit of going back to look them up and keep track. Always so inquisitive about one’s age, the newspapers. . . .

  21

  POTTERING ABOUT

  I look forward with great pleasure to my return to N. Y.,

  for it is the only city in America where I prefer living. . . .

  —LETTER FROM LOLA MONTEZ, 1860

  If someone had told me that I would one day journey to New York City in search of my friend Irene Adler Norton’s mother . . .

  If that same someone had said that in the course of this inquiry I would be obliged to call upon the Episcopal bishop of the city to ask him about the most notorious woman in the world . . .

  If that very individual had also asserted that the need to call upon the bishop arose from information found in the “morgue” of a New York City newspaper . . . well, I would have said I knew a liar three times over.

  Alas, no one had warned me of these eventualities, so I had no one to blame for this turn of events but myself, or perhaps my shameless companion who would plot herself into any preposterous situation and carry it through on sheer bravado.

  We owed this one respectable call of our stay in New York to another expedition to visit the ogre of the New York Herald. He greeted our return to his dingy subterranean domain with a sort of evil glee.

  When Irene told him we sought news of a Bishop Potter of the Episcopal Church in 1861, he led us down another confusion of aisles, cackling all the way.

  “A bishop you want now? That would be on the churchly aisle, all the denominations together, as they so seldom are in life. In the same pew, so to speak.”

  When we finally stopped, his mottled hand waved at a row that looked longer than the nave of a major cathedral. My heart sank, and then I sneezed.

  “Bless you, ma’am. It’s the paper dust. And all the weevils and spiders and that sort down here. Shouldn’t wonder if you’d inhaled some dead spider legs. Paper is nasty stuff. The ink smudges and powders. The pages rot and crumble, you know, and attract vermin.”

  By now I was ready to retch as well as sneeze.

  “Not a place for ladies, newspapers, not even in the offices upstairs. And especially not down here.”

  His voice had risen into the strident tone of an itinerant preacher admonishing a flock.

  “The sooner we find what we need the sooner we will be gone,” Irene said, and if a soft voice could turn away wrath, hers was warm honey.

  “Suppose so. Watch yer hems, they’ll be sweeping up mouse and rat droppings.”

  Thus warned, we were led to the middle of the aisle. “Lucky for you Potter has been a hallowed name hereabouts for thirty-five years; still is.”

  Our glances met as our hearts leaped up.

  “So Bishop Potter is still the prelate here in New York,” Irene said.

  “Must be,” our guide grumbled. “They is always writing about him in the paper.”

  He’s alive, thank the Lord. That is the phrase that came unbidden into my mind. If we had to investigate the life, and death, of this troublesome woman, it would be luck indeed that an honored churchman could add a personal recollection to the lurid stories the newspapers had recorded.

  Of course Bishop Potter may not have visited her deathbed personally, but from the accounts of her passing, an Episcopal priest, the reverend Francis Lister Hawks, had been beside her reading from the Good Book at the end. His account of her death brought tears to my eyes.

  Irene had sniffed and said that deathbed conversions played well enough on the stage, but that she always mistrusted them in real life.

  I do believe that, as much as Irene was mortified by a possible mother who was inept onstage, she was even more embarrassed by a penitent one.

  “Here it is.” Mr. Wheems pulled an actual file from the shelf. “You ladies know where the table is.”

  We didn’t, not in this maze of glaring electric lights beaming down on us, creating shadows larger than ourselves.

  Irene told him so, and he led us back to the rickety table we had used on our first visit. The dust we had left undisturbed still lay there.

  This time we had clippings of articles to scan, all in a huge envelope marked “Potter, Bishop.”

  As soon as Mr. Wheems’s departing shuffles had died to a whisper, Irene began drawing out leaves of yellowed paper from the large envelope. I showed my agreement with our guide about the lamentable condition of old newsprint by sneezing several more times.

  Irene snatched the papers from my vicinity like a mother saving a child from a fire. “Here’s my handkerchief. We don’t want the ink to blur.”

  She sifted through the collection. “These are filed from the most recent dates to years back. Let’s see . . . ‘Bishop Potter Addresses Episcopalian Club. This spring. Henry Codman Potter Succeeds to Bishopric of New York City. . . .”

  “But that announcement is dated only two years ago!” She frowned and eyed me with astonishment.

  “How could he be ‘Bishop Potter’ in the 1861 news report and be made ‘Bishop Potter’ in 1887? Instead of a cart before the horse that puts a bishop before a priest.”

  Irene was riffling back through more of the musty clippings. “Ah, here! ‘Henry Codman Potter Consecrated Assistant to His Uncle Horatio Potter, Ailing Bishop of New York.’”

  I couldn’t believe the coincidence. “Irene, there are two Bishop Potters! Horatio must have been the bishop referred to in 1861. So now he’s dead, and only two years ago. How unfortunate!”

  Irene’s toe tapped the rough brick floor, unmindful of any passing vermin she might be sending to their maker.

  “Yes, he’s dead. But the nephew might be aware of his uncle’s . . . what do they call it in churchy circles, Nell? . . . his uncle’s reign?”

  “Your mind turns too much upon kings and worldly monarchs,” I said. “Bishops are elected or appointed, so it would be called a term of office.”

  “Apparently his nephew was a shoo-in to replace him. Sounds mighty like a dynasty to me. Anyway, according to the newspaper stories, our man . . . the living Bishop Potter, that is . . . is something of a social reformer, a supporter of working men’s clubs, missions, kindergartens, improved saloons.”

  I frowned at that last mention. “I don’t see how saloons can be improved.”

  “Neither do I. They have served well as is for centuries.”

  “I meant that they were too debased to be improved.”

  “Well, apparently Lola Montez was not, to read the exceedingly treacly narrative of her last hours on earth.” Her forefinger stabbed Bishop Potter’s name in a current headline. “We shall have to call upon the good bishop.”

  “How? You can’t just ring up and ask for an appointment for no reason.”

  “I shall have the best of reasons.”

  “Which is?”

  “A donation to one of the bishop’s pet projects. I wonder if the Magdalen Asylum is still operative. That would lead nicely into the subject of the late, lamented Lola, for she left a bequest to it.”

  “Irene, not only is this scheme dishonest and shabby but you would be required to make an actual donation.”

  She shrugged. “One must sacrifice for the greater good at times, and what else use is that lovely letter to the Rothschild agent in New York? I am sure the charming Mr. Belmont can arrange for my bank in Paris to cable authorization for a few hundred dollars here to New York.”

  “A few hundred dollars! Irene, that is an immense sum to pay for a chance of speaking to someone who perhaps remembers or more likely knows nothing of importance about Lola Montez.”

  She whisked the clippings back into their envelope. “It’s for a good cause, Nell, in any event. And a paltry donation would not get us an audience with the bishop.
”

  “Us! I will not be present while you hoodwink a prelate of the Church.”

  “Oh, don’t be stuffy, Nell. He isn’t even Anglican.”

  “He isn’t?”

  “No, they started out that way but now they’ve become completely Americanized, which is why they’re called Episcopalians. It’s not like they’re Church of England.”

  “Oh.”

  “So you wouldn’t be mocking the faith of your father, et cetera. Besides, our cause is good.”

  “What is it?”

  Irene did not think long. “We wish to found a New Magdalen Society, inspired by the touching conversion of Lola Montez and . . . and the eloquent detective investigations of Miss Nellie Bly into the sore-tried lot of the working girls and the poor.”

  Her skirts swished back down the aisle as she returned the compendium of Bishops Potter I and II, to their shelf.

  I remained nailed to the spot, contemplating how Irene had managed to transform herself into the fictional emissary for two such divergent persons as Lola Montez and Nellie Bly. It was utterly audacious. On this and this alone, Sherlock Holmes and I were in concord.

  Only Irene, and only in New York.

  22

  AN AMERICAN ATROCITY

  A good while ago we gave you a tip to investigate Insane Akylum—

  you remember—and we suppose that ‘Nellie Bly’ is the result.

  —NOTE TO JOSEPH PULITZER AFTER BLY WROTE

  AN EXPOSÉ OF TEN DAYS SPENT IN A MADHOUSE

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  The Affair at Noll Cottage burst upon the New York scene on August 26 of the summer of 1889 like the Johnstown Flood. Unlike the flood of the preceding spring that leveled thousands, this was an intimate atrocity, but no less devastating.