Femme Fatale (52 page)

“An atrocity indeed,” Irene said, “but more indicting of the father’s authority than of Madame Restell’s actions.”

Pink shuffled papers. “When she came to her senses the poor girl, the mother of the adopted babe, looked for years, but could never find it. Madame Restell had been requested to arrange things in that manner, and so it was done.”

“Any other charges?” Irene pressed.

“That she sold unwanted babies to people who wanted them and couldn’t have them.”

“Is there any surviving portrait of this monster of commerce in human misery?”

Pink passed some loose pieces of faded newsprint to us without comment. Irene handed me one piece while she studied another.

I gazed upon a sketch of the she-demon, a woman of late middle years, stout and plump-faced, wearing a lace cap of the kind worn thirty years ago. She resembled a grandmother, or a landlady.

Irene’s brows had arched as she studied the other likeness. I peered to see. It was the older sketch, for Madame Restell looked in the prime of life, with her hair parted in the middle to fall in sausage curls at her ears, rather resembling the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or her favorite spaniel, Flush.

Altogether a most pleasant representation, except . . . I frowned
at an image like a coat of arms beneath the upper torso portrait. “What do these wings represent . . . Mercury?”

Irene leaned over the image to view it again. “I believe those are the wings of a giant bat, Nell, and the small pale thing in its claws is an infant.”

“Oh!” I nearly dropped the drawing, so grotesque was its import.

“She was the most hated woman in New York of her time,” Pink observed. A tight smile did not enhance her usually cheery features. “And the most beloved, especially by the most well-todo.”

“A true conundrum,” Irene said casually, “but I don’t see why her now-dead career has much bearing on things nowadays.”

“But it’s so obvious, Irene. Bearing indeed! How odd you should use that word. I believe that Madame Restell was your mother.”

40.

Unwanted Mother

Restell was brought from the Tombs about noon. . . . She was
wearing a rich black silk gown, a handsomely trimmed black
velvet mantilla, and a white satin bonnet with a lace veil, but
looked pale and anxious
.
—TRIAL FOR PROCURING AN ABORTION, 1847

“Ridiculous!”

Irene spat out the word as a man will mouth an oath after Pink had left, but she went at once to the brandy decanter and the cigarette case.

“Pink has the mind of a P. T. Barnum!” Irene raged. “Next she will aver that Jumbo the Elephant is my mother. Why not claim I am the daughter of a mermaid and an octopus! Really, I regret the day I ever thought that a jaunt to America might—”

“Might what? Do
me
good? Admit it, Irene! You and Godfrey decided that poor Nell needed a change of scene after . . . after everything, and now see what a box of imps you have loosened on yourself. I am extremely happy to be a woman of no importance whatsoever, with no past whatsoever, since if I were not so utterly ordinary, such unpleasant surprises would be in store for me.”

“You have had one very unpleasant surprise on this trip already,” she reminded me, sipping from brandy glass and cigarette holder in turn.

She was more upset than she wished anyone, including herself, to know. I had only listed to my own grievances, which I had much exaggerated, to draw her attention from her own situation.

If only Godfrey were here! One thing I had not exaggerated to myself: I was terribly disturbed by Irene’s uncertain past, not only by the shiftless, bizarre nature of her upbringing, but by her disturbingly vague recollection of whole years of her life. This was a woman who held every note and word from the complicated librettos of numerous grand operas in her memory. Who never failed to recall a word or deed of mine that I wished to forget. Who could speak several languages. And I was to believe that her childhood was as smudged as a few chalk traces on a blackboard?

No. Someone had wanted Irene to forget her youth, and had succeeded. And this was a sinister thought indeed.

So here was Irene, handicapped for the first time in her life by a lack of knowledge about, of all things, herself, at the mercy of the reportorial inquisition and deeply personal investigations of that untrustworthy little minx and maneater, Pink Cochrane.

Much as I deeply appreciated Irene’s and Godfrey’s sincere, if misdirected, concern for my welfare, I was very glad to be here in America with Irene, after all. She had never needed more looking after, and the pity was that she did not know it, she was not constituted to know it. She was used to looking out for others and therefore would be useless at looking out for herself.

However, looking out for others had formerly, if briefly, been my profession, and I was determined to resurrect it now.

Part of that welcome duty would be to see that Pink did nothing to harm Irene in any way.

Once Irene was in the grip of her usual pacifiers, I gingerly
began my own investigation of the apparent facts. Obviously, Pink’s conclusions were sadly askew.

“Irene, I do not believe for an instant that you are that woman’s daughter.”

“On what grounds, Nell?”

“On the grounds that anything Pink might conclude is only so much lurid newspaper talk. However, I do find it intriguing that this woman visited your theatrical environment when you were a child. From all reports, for such a monster, she seems fond of children, although I do understand that her business included the suppression of motherhood in one way or another.”

My comments stirred Irene to action, as I had known they would. She liked nothing better than explaining the seamier side of life to me, and, after my initial shock, I was beginning to find such knowledge rather interesting.

She began to page through the papers and the book Pink had left behind. “I suppose Pink would know the answer to your question, Nell.”

“I do not wish to know what Pink thinks she knows. I wish to know the facts, so much as newspaper reports can be trusted for such things.”

Irene dutifully bent her head to the material in search of the requested information.

Piteous! Normally I would be sent to do the tedious research, a task I had been well prepared for during my employment as Godfrey’s typewriter girl. There is nothing for inspiring tedium as the documents of the law.

I found my hands had made fists and my mouth had tightened into a grim line. The last time I had endured such impotent tension I had been consigned prematurely to a coffin. But I had arisen from the apparent dead and was now finding in myself a resolve that Irene’s dead past should never cause her that kind of distress.

“The husband was active in the business also,” Irene said suddenly.
“They were both one step up from quack practitioners, Nell, yet they espoused their work on philosophical grounds.” She looked up at me, much calmer.

“These opinions to curtail childbirth are not all evil. Your own mother died of it before she could do what she most longed to: see you, tend you, rear you. Nature demands more of some women than their constitutions can survive.”

“You approve of what Madame Restell practiced?”

“No, but I have seen the terrible cost that young unwed women pay, some of them even innocent of wrongdoing.”

“How can that be?”

Irene’s hands made vague gestures, as they often did when I asked to know more than she thought me ready for. “Nell, you know the New Testament, how an angel of the Lord—isn’t that how it was put?”

“Oh, yes, I know that passage; that is what the Papists cite to justify virgin birth.”

“Virgin birth. Exactly.”

“But I am not Catholic.”

“It doesn’t matter. According to that version of the New Testament, an angel told Mary that she was pregnant by spiritual means. This can happen to girls as innocent today, except the means are devilish. They come in the guise of men they would trust, men they are told to obey, who are, in fact . . .”

“This is not possible!”

“It is, Nell. Often it is not the girl’s fault. We are reared to be obedient.”

“Not in your case.”

Irene laughed, suddenly relieved. “Oh, Nell. You are right. Somehow, early in my education, I had the choice of being obedient or incorrigible, and I chose the latter.”

“I am glad that you did, if it helped you avoid answering to the ‘devils.’ ” I absorbed what she tried to say for a moment. “I understand your point. There are wicked men in New York too,
and they might have a stake in making out Madame Restell to be a wicked woman.”

Irene nodded. “If she is indeed my mother, I don’t wish her to be a monster.”

I didn’t answer, but shifted newsprint, looking for facts. “Aha! There was only one child, a daughter, but she is accounted for, at least until the age of fourteen, when she assisted her mother. I wonder what became of her in these last eleven years? Also Monsieur Restell, who seems to have gone under another name entirely, also French. That is most suspicious.”

“That is least suspicious, Nell. I remember enough of America to know that anything French was assumed to be elegant, sophisticated, and much desirable.”

“And to think these citizens were once English! How far they have declined. Frankly, it is only the matter of sinning that the British cede to the French.”

“Yes, the French do seem to be superior to the British in that one area. At least.”

“You are trying to aggravate me, but I won’t be distracted. The woman also had a brother, Joseph. And . . . remember, Madame Restell was born British. So much for your giving the French the upper hand, even in the matter of scandal and sinning.”

Irene stubbed out her cigarette and sipped the last bit of brandy.

“If Madame Restell was
not
my mother, why would Pink be so eager to make her so? And if Madame Restell was not my mother, why did she linger among that minor theatrical set during the early years of my life, and then disappear afterwards until she died sixteen years later, by her own hand? If she was my mother, she was willing to leave me to my own devices for a good, long time.”

“And that is why she cannot have been your mother, Irene. Anyone who knows, or knew you, would never permit you to be left to your own devices for long. That includes Godfrey and myself.”

41.

The Wickedest Woman in New York

While she lived no woman was more eagerly discussed and
after her death more mercilessly slandered
.

—BIOGRAPHER OF ADAH ISAACS MENKEN, THE MID-NINETEENTH-
CENTURY EQUESTRIENNE MAZEPPA

We spent the rest of the day studying the news stories and pamphlets and trial book that Pink had left us much as an anarchist might lay a bomb at a target’s feet, in my opinion.