Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  We followed her out through the dining room into the hallway and then back in the dimness to some doors tucked behind the stairway.

  The landlady’s keys chimed with our steps, and she darted ahead to unlock the door on the right.

  “Mr. Burnside is an old bachelor, don’t you know? Not the tidiest soul perhaps, but good-natured and prompt with his rent. I can’t speak to the condition of the premises.”

  I was struck first by the bareness, and saw only the wide-planked wooden floor, the roughly-plastered walls whose pale paint had weathered with time and dust into the color of cardboard. An odor of old tobacco was the only incense to be found in this so-called sainted room.

  Furniture was spare: a narrow cot, an old oaken armchair upholstered in worn carpet tapestry, a wooden chair, a table with a basin, towel, and small round mirror above it. A battered bureau whose drawers did not quite close, and a wardrobe that sagged against one wall.

  One window looked out on . . . I had wandered over to see the view, and regretted it. I saw an alleyway lined with trash buckets facing rows of back stoops and not an inch of sod anywhere, or a flower, only the effluvia of city life, papers. Above us were strung not the ugly electric and telephone wires that plagued even Fifth Avenue but lines of laundry flapping in the contained winds of the inner courtyard.

  “It’s gaslit,” Mrs. Fenster noted with pride, going to one wall and holding her hand up to the level of a crude metal fixture.

  “Wonderful,” Irene said. “But we don’t need it now. If we may spend some time alone in this chamber.” She bowed her head. At least she was not enough of a hypocrite to say what her posture implied: that we would be praying.

  “Of course, my dear lady. The place is yours for as long as you like, as it was for your dear, sainted mither. Me own mither was God’s own emissary, but she died in the Famine.”

  I bit my lip. I’d heard of the Famine, of course, but it seemed some dry fact of ancient history having to do with that unruly island to the west of the “sceptered isle” I and William Shakespeare had been fortunate to call home in vastly different eras. To see an Irishwoman standing before me whose mother had been lost to hunger and hunger alone in these modern times made my soul shrivel. Perhaps the French were not completely wrong to disdain the English on some issues.

  In fact, the moment the poor woman had left us alone, I rounded on Irene, perhaps because I could not turn on myself.

  “How could you deceive that poor, unlettered woman, Irene, and mouth churchy sentiments you don’t believe a jot of?” I whispered.

  But Irene hardly heard me. She was standing by the big, bare window coated in dried raindrops of dust, staring at the grim, monotone scene beyond, and the ragamuffin children playing under the dingy laundry lines above.

  Their childish cries came faintly through the glass and brick that separated us, and they sounded as happy as children in Hyde Park, though they looked nothing like them at all.

  Irene stretched out first one arm, then the other, to the filthy walls of the room, unaware how her figure made the shape of a cross against the bright white light of daylight beyond.

  She turned slowly, studying this bare, naked, empty room in utter silence. She paced its length, then width, touching each wall with the same slow wonder.

  Irene almost resembled a ballet dancer, in her grace, her aloofness, her silence.

  She trailed a hand along each wall as she made a circuit of the room, stepping back when she encountered the interruption of furniture pieces as if they were clumsy dance partners she avoided rather than embraced.

  At one particularly dingy spot on the wall, she stopped and pressed close to examine the variations in texture and color with her fingers as well as her eyes. I was reminded of a blind person, attempting to read what was unseen with fingertips alone.

  This room was indeed a shrine for Irene, far more than it ever could be for me, and I was ashamed that I had doubted her.

  What had stuck me as facile was, I saw, genuine. The worldly cynicism I both deplored and envied actually was no more than a key to Irene. Her feelings ran far deeper than she allowed anyone to suspect.

  “Some say she had become a fanatic,” Irene said, rather dreamily. She touched the wall again. “She pasted religious sayings all around the room. She read the Bible over and over, particularly the New Testament story of Mary Magdalene. What had she come to, this rebel, this revolutionary, this intense lover and hater, this spider dancer? In this room. Was she mad? Was she saved? Was she pathetic? Or triumphant?”

  “I think . . . she was sincere.”

  “Sincere.” Irene turned to smile at me. “I knew you would find the perfect word, Nell. If we can all end at least sincere, then we have accomplished something, and the rest doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Well . . .” I was not quite ready to say that penitence erases all, although parts of the Scriptures might. I was not quite ready to be as magnanimous as the Scriptures.

  “Father Hawks described her as at peace. She died with her hand on the Bible and him at her side. She rejected the Catholic faith she was born to. She called upon an Episcopal priest and bishop at the end. If she is a saint, Nell, she is an Anglican one.”

  I opened my mouth, speechless, when I saw in Irene’s eyes that fond twinkle with which she liked to tweak my deepest sensibilities.

  “This particular sainthood has only one advocate, and he is dead.”

  “Yes.” She made a circuit of the room again, this time at a brisk, businesslike pace. “One wonders if that is why he is dead.”

  “Martyred,” I couldn’t help saying with a shudder.

  “Martyred. He was indeed.” Irene had grown grim again. “Eliza Gilbert, or Maria Dolores, or Lola Montez may or may not have merited sainthood, but that old man, that old priest, did not deserve to die as he did in any world I would care to claim.” She surprised me by shuddering herself. “That was an evil worse than Jack the Ripper’s, because it was done not out of madness but in the cold-blooded service of an ignoble goal.”

  “You know the reason?”

  “No. Only that nothing on earth, or in heaven, can justify it. Now. We don’t have forever.”

  “No one does, but what do you mean?”

  “We must search the room.”

  “Why? Nothing of Lola remains.”

  “Ah, I do believe that spirits leave their impressions on places, or vice versa. I sense her in this room. I understand nothing about her earlier life yet. The facts and the contradictory reports leave that all a mysterious swirl, like the spider dancer’s petticoats. But here, I find her. Sure of herself at last. I do not much like the word and concept ‘humble.’”

  “That is obvious,” I said, but she ignored my interjection.

  “It strikes me as an insincere stance, like Dickens’s awful ‘umble’ Uriah Heap. But I think Lola Montez had found her humble self here in this room, and it was not defeat but triumph. And to that extent I think that Father Hawks was not wrong. I think he died to protect that belief, in her and in himself.”

  “How awful, if true!”

  “How remarkable. He may have converted her, in the conventional sense, but she also converted him.” Irene sighed. “I almost feel regret for what we must do next.”

  “Which is?”

  “We must search this room, Nell, from stem to stern and back again.”

  “There is nothing here!”

  “There is everything here, only we have not found it yet. I doubt Father Hawks did either. At least that is my humble hope.”

  “Another man lives here now. We would violate his occupancy.”

  “In a good cause, Nell.”

  And so I joined her in the rough work of turning a simple room upside down. We moved the cot and searched under the supportive struts. We pummeled the mattress. We pushed the wardrobe away from the wall, and explored its every corner, filled mostly with mouse-eaten crumbles of wood and dustballs.

  We looked under and behind the b
ureau drawers, on the chance that it had been there when Lola was in residence. We turned the chairs upside down.

  Finally, there was no piece of furniture left to manhandle. We stood in the middle of the room, sneezing from the dust, perspiring like farm laborers, red-eyed and worn.

  Irene eyed the blocked up fireplace behind the wardrobe, for a small stove now sat near the window for winter uses.

  “Oh, Irene, no!”

  For answer she went to the stove and found a coal shovel beside it.

  “Lola was in this place from fall through Christmas and into January. I would venture to say the fireplace was unblocked and useful then.”

  She rammed the shovel lip into the dry mortar between two bricks. It crumbled.

  We took turns banging away at the bricks. Finally one consented to being pushed and pried and levered loose.

  Then another.

  “How will we ever restore this? What will we tell the landlady?” I wailed, surveying the mess that was beyond concealing.

  “Looking for relics of the sainted Maria Dolores, which is the absolute truth.”

  “What relics?” I cried.

  “This.” Irene sat back on her heels, withdrawing yet another brick from the ghastly hole we had gouged out of the wall.

  A brick of oilcloth covering.

  My heart began to pound with the possibility of discovery.

  Irene delicately pulled back the filthy, aged-stiffened cloth. It was the color of diseased dirt, and I myself would be hard put to touch it, even with gloves on.

  Irene, however, regarded it with the silent awe reserved for holy relics.

  “Nell. I think . . . I think it is her last diary.”

  I stared at the much-folded lump of thick papers. Could it be?

  Irene was ruffling up her skirt and baring her petticoat pocket. The filthy burden, oilcloth and all, was slipped inside. Her petticoat would do well not to sag and split with such an uncomely burden.

  “Quick!” Irene began pulling the chipped bricks back into a pile. “We must restore this wall to its earlier semblance. At least the wardrobe hides it. It’s a miracle that Father Hawks didn’t find this, for clearly this is what he sought here. Lola has left this for us.”

  “For you.”

  She paused to regard me with utter seriousness. “I do believe se. For me.”

  It took nearly half an hour by my lapel watch to jam the crumbled mortar and brick back into some imitation of a wall.

  We pushed the wardrobe over the fireplace again, grunting like longshoremen.

  Irene hiked her petticoat up at the waist by a foot, expecting the weighty parcel in it to inexorably draw it back down as we made our way home.

  At the door she turned to regard the room one last time.

  Again I sensed that strange presence and absence, both one and the same thing, with which Irene communed.

  Then we shut the door and bustled down the hall to the parlor, where our hostess was waiting. Oddly, she never noted our disheveled appearance, or if she did, she may have attributed it to religious ecstasy. These Roman Catholics are an emotional lot.

  “And—?” she asked, breathless.

  “You are wise,” said Irene, “to reserve the room for higher purposes. I’ll tell the bishop of your cooperation. And I’m sure Father Hawks, when he is communicating again, will be most grateful.”

  The landlady’s generously hopeful smile faded toward the end of Irene’s comment into confusion.

  “Father Hawks?” she asked. “Who is Father Hawks?”

  In the street outside, Irene took my elbow in a death grip.

  I spoke like a doll with a button that makes it cry. “The ‘good father.’ If that wasn’t Father Hawks, Irene, who on earth was it?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly no one Episcopal, or Anglican, after all.” Irene gazed at the teeming street, seeing nothing. “And most probably, no one up to any good at all,” she added.

  MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN:

  Motherhood

  She came back to London and made her debut at her

  Majesty’s Theatre. When news of this event reached her

  mother she put on mourning as though her child was dead,

  and sent out to all her friends the customary funeral letters.

  —AUTOBIOGRAPHY, LOLA MONTEZ

  She had named me after herself: Eliza. I often had cause in later years to wonder why.

  Now that she has come all the way to New York City to see me as I lie ill in this autumn of 1860, I have to wonder why a woman who as good as disowned me should wish to claim me at what most likely is the end of my life, though not hers.

  Call me cynical, but I think she wonders how much money and jewels I have to leave her.

  My humble surroundings will certainly disabuse her of any ambitions in that direction, and I could not be happier about that.

  What will she say for herself when there is nothing to be gained? That should be interesting!

  How sad that I don’t expect her to bring me anything but an open palm. Father Hawks would chide me for lack of charity, but I cannot forgive the woman whose cold heart set me on the wayward path of my life. Whatever they may say of me, no one can deny that I was charitable to others, and that my feelings ran as deep and open as the great Mississippi River.

  I dread seeing her again. Or, rather, I dread her seeing me in this state. I wish my left arm could still lift a castanet, that I did not need to use my right to wipe the drool from my stroke-slack mouth.

  She comes at last when I am truly humbled. I suppose it’s a good exercise for the spirit, even if I can’t bring myself to forgive her, no, not even after all these years. . . .

  Some things are expected of a mother, and she gave me none of them but only grief.

  She was considered a beauty and married a soldier. When he died, she married a soldier of higher rank. By then I had been born, Mr. Gilbert’s only daughter. We were living in India at the time of his death.

  How a little child could learn from India, and how I loved it! In India I began what would become my legendary mastery of foreign language and horses. Horses have their own mute dialect and I rode them with abandon at an early age, safer on those broad, jolting backs dark with sweat than I have ever found myself on Mother Earth.

  My mother packed me off to England twice, both against my will. Once I was but seven, a half-orphan, and hardly understood why I should be wrested from all I loved to be cared for, or not, by strangers in that damp, chilly land that never called to me.

  My stepfather, Colonel Craigie, had some care of me, more than she. I sensed that even then.

  When I returned to India I had been well-served by an education most girls of my day never had, but was no more welcome to my mother. She was quite the belle of Delhi by then, and I was on the brink of womanhood. Already people praised my white skin, my deep blue eyes, and curling black hair, but even more, my poise and wit.

  In no time we were bound for England again, all three.

  I have confessed to Father Hawks, along with the more notorious of my sins, my lack of feelings for my mother, and why.

  Her desire to be rid of me when I was seven, and my helplessness to prevent her from tearing me from everything I loved, perhaps made me willful.

  She brought me back to England herself the second time, and she still desired to be rid of me, but in a new way. I was a pawn for her ambition for her new husband, which was at bottom ambition for herself. Like all women of her time, she lived to rule through others.

  She wanted to trade me in marriage to my stepfather’s commanding officer, a man past sixty when I was not yet fifteen. I used to lie abed at night and count the decades between myself and this old man: twenty-five made one; thirty-five two, forty-five three, fifty-five four, sixty-something, almost five. Almost fifty years. One might as well have told me to wed the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh!

  Can anyone imagine how a spirited child, one reared in the exotic freedoms of India, would
have regarded such a cold marital bargain? How my flesh and imagination both shriveled at the very thought?

  So when Lieutenant James informed me of this master plan, an elopement with a handsome, thirty-year-old lieutenant seemed the only answer. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.

  What did I know at fourteen, except that I wouldn’t be sold by anyone, even my own mother.

  Later, when I understood the range of feminine powers, I realized why I had been destined to be shuffled off to an old man’s boudoir. My mother did not need a blooming rose of youth in her own garden.

  Now that I no longer bloom, but wilt like damp tobacco leaves, it’s safe for her to approach me again and feel superior. Everything I had is wasted, including my body, if not quite my mind.

  27

  UNTOLD TALES

  [Mrs. Eliza Craigie was] a cold, passionless woman, who greeted

  and said adieu to her daughter, much as she might have made a

  fashionable call. She was greatly disappointed at finding Eliza

  without worldly wealth and visited her only twice, if I remember

  correctly, during her stay of two or three weeks.

  —A WITNESS

  We had late tea in our rooms, huddling over the musty, much folded and cracked wad of writing paper.

  I peered at the faded ink in the lamplight, although the hour was only 4:00 P.M. and daylight still filled the window frames. With more and more ridiculously high buildings going up all over New York City, however, soon the streets would be forever shadowed no matter the time of day.

  So I predicted to Irene.

  “You must remember that New York City sits atop Manhattan Island, Nell. There is more room here to go up than out.”

  “London and Paris have managed to keep to a decorous four or five stories,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe the Eiffel Tower will change that,” she suggested, knowing it was my least favorite monument in the world.