Spider Dance (47 page)

My jewels I still have, thanks to that man’s sagacity and generosity, motives that don’t always fight each other.

All I have to decide is what to do with them, what worthy soul I should leave them to. A soul, I hope, less willful and wild than my own.

Not long after this remarkable visit, I gave my last performance of the Spider Dance at the Metropolitan Theater in San Francisco, under the invitation of its manager, Junius Booth, of the great acting family that included his brothers, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.

I took my curtain calls and so danced off the California stages forever.

But not before I read in the newspapers of the passing of my former husband, George Heald, twenty-eight, from the “white death” of tuberculosis.

My lungs had always been weak, so I could imagine his agony. In honor of his passing, I considered myself his widow, and used the name “Mrs. Heald” from then on offstage.

I boarded the Pacific Mail steamship
Orizaba
at San Francisco on November 20, Thanksgiving Day, though I had little to be thankful for except my enterprising benefactor who had settled for squeezing my knee.

The morning paper hailed my departure and estimated that my latest tour had netted $23,000. Money had always been a consequence of what I did, not purely a reason, else I wouldn’t have spent it so freely on myself and others.

The many bags and trunks from my long-ago life in Europe that I had imported to California were now being laded aboard the
Orizaba
. This was a long, low two-masted ship, with sails fore and aft. A large wheel on her port side kept the tall black stack amidships billowing forth black smoke at a rate that almost matched my own with a cigar or cigarette. As usual, the lading crew hooted and hollered at the number and weight of my trunks. I could not but agree. My whole life seemed a long train that I was dragging behind me, including the jewels my benefactor had returned to me.

No more Panama for me and mosquitos the size of humming birds. No more mule trains. We were bound for Nicaragua, a country above Panama, where a new railroad built to accommodate gold prospectors would speed passengers across the Central American neck to a steamship waiting on the Atlantic side.

Soldiers of fortune thronged the passenger manifest. Nicaragua was open, unclaimed country. I met a tall, gray-eyed soldier from Tennessee, William Walker, who was determined to rule that land.

Such claims were not unheard of in those days. Once it was bruited about that I was encouraging backers to make me ‘Empress of California.’ Why not? I was Countess of Landsfeld and uncrowned queen of Bavaria, me, a little, lively Irish girl by way of India.

We landed at San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. There New York–bound passengers took a modern coach to Lake Nicaragua and then boats down the San Juan River to the Caribbean coast. All my many, many trunks came with me.

At the coast, the steamship Tennessee awaited at San Juan del Norte. Mr. Walker, the “man of destiny” from Tennessee, stayed behind to conquer Nicaragua.

I moved on, with my trunks and my weight of sorrow. I arrived in New York on December 16, shortly before Christmas, and I wasn’t entirely unexpected. Old friends who represented something new for me, Christian spirituality, awaited me. And my gentleman caller from California. And the family of my lost love, Frank Folland.

How famous some of these would become, and rich, though none as notorious as I. At my age, notoriety was no longer a boast but a burden.

I came to visit New York City. I would try to leave it one last time, but the Statue of Liberty had claimed me as her own, and this Sligo girl would never leave her, nor the hundreds of thousands of starving sons and daughters of Ireland who found refuge there, as did I, finally and forever.

One of the steps which is called death to the tarantula . . .
is the very poetry of avenging contempt . . . the head lifted
and thrown back, the flashing eye, the fierce and protruded foot
which crushed the insect, make a subject for vie painter
which would scarcely be easy to forget
.
—THE LONDON
MORNING POST
ON LOLA’S DANCING DEBUT, 1843

“It would help to find Mrs. Buchanan,” Irene said.

“I presume you are not referring to the former U.S. president’s wife.”

“No, Nell. I wish I were. It would be easier to lay hands on such a public person.”

“And what would you do, could you lay hands on this private Mrs. Buchanan?”

Irene paused in pacing and smoking.

“A fine question. I would like to know if she was a greedy, grasping harpy in the guise of a compassionate friend. Of course it wouldn’t gain me a scintilla of knowledge to phrase it that way. So I would say I was compiling a biography of the late Lola Montez, and required her testimony.”

“How will you find her?”

“Since she and the Episcopal Church were equally involved with Lola at the very end of her life, I’ll see if the bishop can help us again. After all, we are highly valued donors.”

“Perhaps you should call on him at his office rather than at the club.”

She considered my suggestion with a tilted head. “I think not. I suspect the bishop wishes to keep news of Father Hawks’s quest for Lola’s sainthood unofficial. I’m sure it was considered the crotchet of an aging man, but tolerated because it was so crackpot.”

“You are not inclined to Father Hawks’s view of her, then?”

“I believe she became truly contrite for her high-tempered earlier years. She acknowledges that she was a ‘wild, willful child’ from her youngest days. I think time mellowed her, especially her years in Grass Valley, and then her disastrous trip to England to marry such a fraud. In some ways, she was always searching for a man who could take care of her, even as her fiercely independent ways rebuffed their very solicitude. I would describe her at the end of her life as wiser but not necessarily holier.”

An ugly thought reoccurred to me. “Irene, given the fact of her stroke, and the rumors of her neglect and abuse, it would be easy to torment a person in such a weakened state. Do you think someone did, and that’s why no trace of her wealth remains?”

“It’s possible, as I’ve suggested, but a stroke wreaks havoc with the victim’s reason, and you can’t squeeze sense from a stone. I do hope her end was natural, and that the presence of the clergy kept any mischief at bay. The unwelcome visit of her greedy mother seems to have been the worst torture inflicted upon her.”

“How sad.”

“So, it’s settled. We revisit the Episcopal Club.”

“I’m not sure I wish to keep on deceiving the clergy.”

“We are not so much deceiving them as not fully informing them. And you must go, Nell! That young Father Edmonds who took a shine to you will no doubt be more generous with information than if I go alone.”

“That’s all nonsense, Irene!”

But I fetched my hat and gloves.

We took a streetcar, I think because Irene wished to salve my penny-pinching nature. While we jolted through the bustle
and odor of high summer traffic, I considered the fact that I indeed had become an object of interest to strange young men. Was it the freer social atmosphere of America? The department-store clothing? My new Nellie Bly waist? Or some substantive change in myself? I was not about to ask Irene her theory on the subject, nor would I interrogate the bookstore clerk or Father Edmonds either. And especially not Quentin.

We grew not a little warmer walking the two blocks to the Episcopal Club. When we asked within for Father Edmonds, we were told that he was not available. After Irene introduced us, we were shuttled to the parlor to await the bishop himself again.

“My dear ladies,” he greeted us as he turned to close the door behind him. “What can I do for you today?”

“We didn’t mean to impose on you personally,” Irene said. “We’d asked for Father Edmonds, but he was unavailable.”

“It’s no imposition,” the bishop said with a ready smile. “Please. Ask away.”

“I wondered about the Mrs. Buchanan who attended Mrs. Gilbert in her last illness. Would it be possible to find and speak to her?”

“A shame Father Hawks is not available.”

“Is he the only priest who was pursuing information about her?”

“Certainly! You must understand that we tolerated his devotion to her memory because of his age. The likelihood of him uncovering any striking information about her was slim. The most he had to offer were reports of occasional strange noises in the room in which she had died when it was empty, reported by the landlady. The building had suffered recent renovation, so the rooms might even be hard to assign with confidence nowadays. As I told the newspaper gentleman who called, Father Hawks is a sincere man who perhaps has been overimpressed by this woman’s sad yet repentant death.”

“The newspaper gentleman? When did he call?”

“Why, just before you first did, or after. I don’t quite recall
Frankly, I wasn’t as forthcoming with him as with you. I don’t want poor Father Hawks’s odd notions paraded in large type before all of New York. Your own inquiries are personal, and I’m sure that you wouldn’t wish them to become public.”

“Certainly not!” I spoke for the first time, and rather adamantly.

“Exactly, Miss Huxleigh. I could see from the first that you were women of sense and sensibility. As for your quest for Mrs. Buchanan, Mrs. Norton, she would be quite old today, but the family was a solid one. Still, the population of New York City is much greater than it was almost thirty years ago.”

He paused to consider. “I can only suggest you inquire at her old neighborhood.”

“And will the newspaper gentleman be there before us? How would we know him?”

“Tall, stooped fellow. A bit old for the ink trade, but most avid. A civilized fellow, yet I wasn’t inclined to help him, for obvious reasons. The newspapers chase sheer sensation these days, especially all those muck-raking lady reporters. I don’t care to have the Church as a subject of lurid speculation in the public press, you do understand.”

“Of course!” I said. “It is shocking what such ink-stained wretches will do to get a sensational story these days.’

“Miss Huxleigh, I agree entirely. Is there anything else you wish to know, Mrs. Norton?”

“Just where Father Edmonds might be. He was so helpful in your absence during our last call. Miss Huxleigh and I wished to thank him, perhaps to invite him to tea.”

“Alas, young priests are called from pillar to post to serve their superiors. I can’t say when he will be available again.”

This last sentence he addressed to me with great sympathy, as if I had any reason to care! Oh, Irene! She was forever pushing people into the most unlikely situations.

“A pity,” Irene said, blithely ignoring my unease. “Miss Huxleigh had been minded to knit some useful article for
him in thanks for his previous assistance. Perhaps
you
shall have to be the recipient”

“I am honored,” the bishop said with a bow, smiling as he stood to show us out.

I was too outraged to speak, which was just as well.

“I cannot believe it!” I told Irene when we stood atop the steps of the Episcopal Club again. “There were women in my father’s parish who’d set their caps at the widowed parson, you may be sure. You made me look like the worst of those churchgoing hussies. I would never—”

“It gives us another excuse for visiting and asking questions, don’t you see, Nell? If I weren’t known to be married, I would have put myself in that role in a wink.”

Before I could summon the outrage to answer this dubious reasoning, she spoke again.

“The elderly newspaperman disturbs me.”

“You think it is Mr. Holmes. You led him to the Episcopal Club, though he showed scant interest.”

“Yes, it could be he, but that wouldn’t disturb me.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Someone far more sinister.”

“Such as—?”

“The older priest who was
not
Father Hawks.”

“I had forgotten about him. So what are we to do now?”

“You noticed that ‘noises’ have been reported in Lola’s former room. Not an expression of saintly phenomena, I think, but of repeated searches. The gullible landlady would take each such ‘visitation’ as a sign.”