Three and a Half Deaths (Short Reads) Read online

mounting

  She’d been yanked out of the car by her shawl, when it got tangled round the wheel. Dragged along for maybe a hundred yards.

  it is the alternate attraction and resistance

  of the law of gravity

  that causes this wave

  She was trapped, you know, between the panel and the tire.

  to find the movement

  which expresses the soul

  No, I’m not proud of myself, but you never know how you’ll react when something like that happens. Don’t be so quick to judge. I may have screamed a bit, yeah. Well of course I was in a panic! And there was this crowd all of a sudden, I couldn’t see . . . Yeah, her friend and some guy prised up the back of the car and got her out, her body I mean. Her friend Mary kept talking, telling her to breathe, they were taking her to the hospital, but I could tell it was too late for that. The head, you could tell by how the head hung sideways.

  when my body moves

  it is because my spirit moves it

  Did I go to the funeral? No way, I didn’t want everyone to point me out as the one who killed the famous dancer.

  So that’s it.

  No, I haven’t left anything out. Well I’m sorry mister, but it’s the truth. No kissing, no embraces, nothing like that. I was just the driver, it was my bad luck I happened to be there. I don’t care if it would make a better story if I was her lover, that’s not how it was.

  thus, the body itself

  must be forgotten

  You mean your paper won’t publish this? That’s ridiculous. The story is the lady died, that’s what the story is.

  Will you still pay me? I’ve been talking to you all afternoon, it’s not my fault if your paper won’t print it. Okay, I suppose five dollars will do.

  Was she beautiful? I already told you—

  Oh, you mean was it beautiful, what happened? I don’t know what you’re driving at. She didn’t fly free, it wasn’t elegant like at the opera. A fat lady gets her neck broken, as quick as a hanging but messier, hauled over the edge of the car like a side of beef and dragged along behind the wheel, her legs all crooked and scraped, blood on the street and gravel in her hair, her face battered and purple . . . How can that be beautiful?

  perhaps

  you will be nearer to my spirit

  when the body

  with all its material nuisance

  is not there

  You’re asking the wrong man here.

  I guess, yes, the moment, when I put my foot to the floor and the car purred and began to move, that’s always beautiful to me, and the Madonna – well, I don’t know, I wasn’t looking at her anymore once I released the brake, I was driving, wasn’t I? I had my eyes on the road.

  Note

  Lines in italics are all quotes from Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), who has been called the mother of modern dance.

  The bizarre accident that killed her at the age of fifty, at 239 Promenade des Anglais in the French city of Nice, has never been fully explained. A year later, the friend who was staying with her, Mary Desti, published a detailed account (but one that has more than a whiff of fiction about it) in The Untold Story: The Life of Isadora Duncan, 1921–27. The person whose role in the drama fascinates me is the young driver whom Duncan nicknamed ‘Bugatti’: her acquaintance, her hapless killer, her last audience. He is identified in most of the newspaper reports – summarized and quoted in Peter Kurth’s Isadora: A Sensational Life (2001) – as one Bénoit Falchetto, and he seems to have become a race-car driver in the 1930s.

  ‘What the Driver Saw’ has appeared online (http://gres.concordia.ca­/­ecrire­/­index.shtml) in a slightly different form but never in print; this is its first e-book publication.

  The Trap

  Their first conversation took place in the house on Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street popularly known as the Palace. Hearing the bell, she opened the office door to a tall, bull-necked man with gingery side-whiskers. His clothes were black, like hers, but rumpled cloth instead of sleek embroidered silk.

  ‘Good morning, I wish to see Madame Restell.’

  ‘In a professional capacity?’

  A nod. He was balding, with blue, truculent eyes. His face was carved with earnest lines, but there was a scar on one cheek, only half hidden by his mutton-chops, that suggested he’d once been reckless. In her long experience even the most bewhiskered men, the most respectably veiled women, had things to hide.

  She led him past the waking canary, into her elegant green office, and made sure the lace curtains were closed. ‘So, sir. What do you need?’

  He seemed uneasy on the sofa; he leaned forward, elbows on knees. He hesitated, as they all did. ‘Does Madame Restell by any chance . . . sell articles to prevent ladies getting into difficulties?’

  ‘Madame can offer both advice and materials,’ she conceded, ‘but no results can be absolutely guaranteed.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘The female system is of a complex and subtle nature.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ the stranger said dully.

  That was true enough, and the reason why her business had survived – flourished, in fact – on the margins of legality for all these decades. If the female system had been a more reliable machine, nobody would have needed any help from Madame Restell.

  Her visitor looked at his polished leather shoes. He seemed ground down, somehow, as if every day he took up a huge burden.

  She knew what the matter was. ‘These articles – would they be intended for a married or a single lady?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  How jumpy he was! They all were, men or women, as if their private, mortifying worries were unique. ‘If she’s single,’ said Madame Restell with a hint of a smile, ‘there might be more cause for haste.’

  ‘The matter’s delicate,’ he added hoarsely.

  ‘It generally is.’ She took pity on him; she would draw out his story. ‘Marriage, though a marvellous support – I speak as one recently widowed for the second time – it doesn’t solve all one’s problems.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’

  ‘Many are the happily wedded who find their mutual affection worn away by the years. Their energies, too. Their domestic happiness. Children are of course a blessing—’

  ‘Of course,’ he said with a desperate sincerity. He loved the ones he had, she could tell that much. It was rarely a shortage of love.

  ‘—but should persons not be allowed to choose the time and number of these blessings?’

  He hesitated, then nodded very fast.

  She could speak so frankly only one to one, in private consultation, and even at that she was taking a risk since the new laws. In her advertising she had to be far more circumspect, relying on such phrases as menstrual irregularities and female remedies. It was a kind of doubletalk that everyone understood: Caution to the married, if this medicine were to be taken accidentally in the early months of pregnancy, it might have undesirable results.

  Her customer needed more encouragement, she could tell; he was appalled to find himself here today. ‘I’ve often seen a wife in broken health of body and mind – worn down to a shadow by repeated pregnancies,’ she murmured. This was the spiel, spoken in one long soothing stream, but Madame Restell meant it too. ‘A husband, afraid for his wife’s life, working like a dog to provide for his family . . . ’

  ‘You’re most understanding,’ said her visitor.

  She smiled. ‘Although clearly a gentleman, sir, you don’t – may I suggest – seem prosperous?’

  A glum nod.

  ‘No doubt you and your wife feel caught in a dreadful trap, not of your own making.’

  Another short nod. ‘I – I have a note for you, in fact.’

  Ah, had the wife provided him with a letter in case he found himself speechless with embarrassment? Madame Restell skimmed the lines, noted the ladylike handwriting. No signature; the usual timid stuff about wanting something for safety.

  ‘I believe I can
set her mind at rest.’ She went out for a few minutes and came back with a bag of powders in twists of white paper, and a syringe. ‘You know how to use this?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The powders are to be dissolved in water,’ she explained, ‘and – with the help of the syringe – applied beforehand. Inserted far up,’ she said, with a little gesture towards her skirts that risked indelicacy. (She’d once met a fool of a husband who’d tried to put the stuff up himself instead.)

  He nodded.

  ‘You’ll note the medicine is not labelled,’ she pointed out meaningfully. ‘It can be stored as if it’s a tooth powder.’

  ‘But what if . . . I must be honest with you, Madame, I fear that in this case it may already be too late.’

  She felt a surge of irritation. If the man’s wife was actually pregnant, why hadn’t he said so in the first place? Why were her customers so knotted up in shame?

  Thirty years ago her enemies had managed to convict her of an abortion, and she’d served a year in jail. She would never let that happen again. Despite her wealth, despite her connections to all the best families, despite the grandeur of the Palace – Madame Restell never forgot to be careful.

  ‘In that case, sir, may I ask, for how many months—?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure.’

  She repressed a slight sigh. ‘But not too many?’ If his wife was very far on, surely he’d know that much. Madame Restell didn’t offer board and adoption arrangements anymore, but she could provide an address of someone downtown who did. ‘Well, if it is still early . . . ’ She went back to her storeroom and returned with a bottle, a packet of pills and another printed page of directions.

  ‘Is this a sure thing?’

  ‘Nothing’s infallible but the Pope,’ she joked, to ease the tension in the room, ‘but this will work nine times out of ten. The cost for everything I’ve given you is thirty dollars.’

  He counted out the money with quivering hands. ‘But if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘If not, then the lady in question should come and visit me. It would only take one interview.’

  ‘And the cost?’

  She sized him up. Not that poor. ‘Two hundred dollars,’ she said with mild regret. ‘It would be a rapid and almost painless procedure. If the lady were from out of town,’ she said, hazarding a guess, ‘she could go home on the next train.’

  He said no more, and she saw him out. The canary in the hall had gone back to sleep.

  Their second conversation took place a week later, when Anthony Comstock rang the bell under the brass plate that said Office at the corner of 52nd Street. When Madame Restell answered, she asked after his wife. Instead of answering, he waved a handkerchief as a signal, and a crowd of policemen and reporters rushed into the mansion.

  Their third and last conversation, months later, on the night before the trial, was all in their heads. Madame Restell and Anthony Comstock were like parted lovers, made absent-minded by mutual preoccupation. Their lips moved speechlessly: they couldn’t stop explaining themselves. Their agitated minds shot spider-silks of words into the smoggy Manhattan air.

  Stretched out in the Palace under her canopy of blue silk and ashes-of-roses, Madame Restell thought, Oh, celebrated Mr. Comstock, Special Agent to the Post Office, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, I should have known your face. Her mind buzzed like a hornet. Of course it had been entrapment, but her attorney seemed to think that was no defence. I should have made it my business to know his face, to slam the door. Even Comstock’s scar was famous, she’d learned since her arrest: the knife-mark of a bookseller he’d hounded to the pitch of desperation.

  Do you hate the womb you fought your way out of, Mr. Comstock, is that it? Does it mortally offend you that you were conceived the way we all were, between a pair of sweaty sheets? Call it gross or amusing but the fact is that we’ve yet invented no way to get a child but by the frantic conjunction of prick and cunt.

  On his back on his hard marriage bed, Antony Comstock brooded on the extravagance of that monolith that took up half a block of Fifth Avenue. The balconies, the glinting windows with their stencilled shades. The carved black walnut woodwork and the walls of yellow satin; the floors of marble mosaic, the old woman’s rosewood canopy bed and great panelled bath. Ann Trow Lohman, alias Madame Restell, tomorrow I will triumph over you as an avenging angel. She-devil! Not Old Eve even, but the writhing snake.

  On the day of the arrest, he’d been almost hoping to find an operation in progress – evidence in the form of bloody linen or a half-formed baby in a basin. But all the police had discovered in her office was a sobbing mother of four, a merchant’s wife and, she swore blind, only consulting Madame Restell on behalf of a friend. I have come to divide the true women from the monster. To be a saviour to the whole sex: to stand between them and their vampires, between them and their sins.

  And it occurred to him that his life was an offering to his dead mother, a recompense for the ten children she’d brought into the world. Had she complained, as she’d sickened and grown heavy time after time? Had she ever raged against the pains, the trouble, the multiplicity of their mewing needs? She’d been as silent as a flower, as straight as a wall.

  And his dear frail wife asleep with her back to him, who’d had only one baby, that died in its cradle – did she ever rail against Providence? True women, they took what they were granted, they said be it done unto me according to Thy word.

  As the night stretched on, Madame Restell paced her mosaic corridors, dry-eyed with distraction. For weeks now she’d telegraphed her attorney ten times a day. She pored over the papers and what they said about her: nefarious, infamous, vile, steely-hearted female Herod, child-killer. She’d come to be convinced that there was no chance the court would set her free.

  Oh, Mr. Comstock, do you really imagine that if you lock up all my kind, women will be forced to bring every accident into the world? You underestimate their desperation, their longing for self-sovereignty. You can confiscate every drug, every device women have ever used to free themselves of a burden, and they’ll simply improvise: mustard-spoons, wires, pencils . . .

  So many men she helped too; so many frantic fathers. But all her old connections, all the important gentlemen who’d been proud to pay a social call to Madame Restell, where were they now? Not pleas, not even hinted threats of exposure had brought them to visit her in jail, and her attorney had had to bribe men to stand bail for her.

  Her crime – she saw it now – was ostentation. The gentlemen of New York expected people like her to huddle and lurk in dark neighbourhoods, not set up shop opposite the Cathedral. They wanted the little problems of their wives and sisters and daughters to be dealt with invisibly. Her Palace was a shining offence. A monument to the terrible facts of life.

  Oh yes, Madame could lash out like a snake in a cleft stick: she could send a list of her former clients to the New York Herald. But even if they took the risk of printing it, what would that achieve, what would that do but wreck the lives of hundreds whose faces – girls, matrons, servants, heiresses – she could still remember? It wouldn’t save her; it was too late for that.

  At sixty-six, she had outlived her time, her pragmatic, business-booming era. Now it was all starched collars and noses in the air, hypocritical Comstockery. Her grandchildren would have to bear the disgrace of her public trial; the court would suck up all their fortune in fines, and send her to jail anyway. That ghastly old hag, they’d congratulate themselves in years to come, she’s rotting away in the State Prison. So passes the filthy tide of Old New York.

  Anthony Comstock was bone-weary but no closer to sleep. In a few hours it would be time to shave around his drooping side-whiskers, to put on a clean shirt under his crumpled black clothes, and a bow-tie. He’d looked forward to this trial for so long, longed to stand as a holy witness.

  He had his notes, a neat tabulation of all the paraphernalia of Restellism that he had confiscated from
that so-called wine cellar in the Palace: fifteen bottles of ruby-coloured syrups, some hundred boxes of white pills, five hundred packages of powders. The ingredients – calomel, aloes, savin, tansy – were the same as those available from any corner druggist, he would have to admit if pressed by the defence lawyer, but he had additional evidence of criminal purpose: the stacks of circulars advertising Madame’s obscene services, along with the syringes and the hundreds of little rubber discs that were known with a dreadful flippancy as safes.

  Sometimes, towards dawn on nights like this, Comstock liked to picture one great bonfire onto which all the sins of the world could be thrown. It seemed to warm him, lull him toward sleep.

  In the bathroom on Fifth Avenue, turning the gilt faucets on, Madame Restell felt a great exhaustion. She shut her eyes and breathed in the steam. Her nightgown with the diamond buttons she laid over a chair; she tugged a dozen or more pins out of her long hair. She left on her earrings and didn’t try to pull the rings off her swollen fingers. When the bath was full she turned off the water and felt the silence spread out around her. Moving a little stiffly, she climbed into the water. The heat made her heart thump with a slow measure. Self-pity welled in her eyes. Her work had made her rich, but what was wrong with that? In forty years not one woman had ever died under her care, which is more than most doctors could claim. Some of her clients had even called her Mother.

  She lay back, sighed once. Her hair slid into the water, but it didn’t matter. She reached over the edge of the bath for the slim carving knife that she’d found in the kitchen, and she weighed it in her hand only for a moment before she put the blade under her left ear. Wasn’t this body hers, after all, to keep or to let go? In the end, this was the simplest way to release the trap.

  Note

  Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) was a postmaster, politician and self-appointed vice-hunter. ‘The Trap’ is inspired by newspaper accounts summarized in Clifford Browder, The Wickedest Woman in New York: Madame Restell, the Abortionist (1988). On 1 April 1878, the day her trial was due to begin, she was found in her bath with her throat slit. Rumours spread: that Madame Restell had been murdered by relations of her rich clients, or even that the body was actually that of a client, and that she had escaped to Europe.