Femme Fatale (47 page)

“It’s not so easy,” Irene went on, exhaling a thin, steady stream of smoke as if it were some visible ectoplasm from her past. “Was I one she saved, her own or another’s? Was there also a market in babies born, as much as in babies not born? You see? If this notorious woman showed an interest in me, who am I? Who was I
not
meant to be? Was I not meant to be, at all?”

To this I had no answer, not even a cowardly murmur.

I saw now that to solve the mystery of Irene, we would have to face the mystery of Madame Restell, who was herself a pseudonym.

And we would have to face letting Nellie Bly know far more of Irene and her past and heritage than any self-respecting person could endure.

“Pink sacrifices her present to the future,” I said.

“As her past sacrificed her to the present. She was not a wanted child either, long after birth, though not before.”

“You cannot be sure about yourself!”

“I am sure that I had a mother, once, and that she left me to myself.”

I stretched my hand across the table toward her. She didn’t move. Her cigarette still spewed a smoky spiral that vanished in the unseen air.

I spoke.

“So am I sure, and so I also was left. We are all best off mothering ourselves.”

“Or each other,” she conceded, snuffing out the cigarette as if it was the embodiment of both our pasts, only so much ash.

37.

No Woman Is an Island

People acted precisely as if the thing to do in the water was to
behave exactly contrary to the manner of behaving anywhere else
.
—COMMENTATOR ON CONEY ISLAND, “SODOM BY THE SEA,” 1880S

“I am not used to patronizing amusement parks,” I informed Quentin in the hansom cab.

“Nor am I,” he answered with gusto. “I often think that is a serious omission in my education.”

We were en route to the sidewheeler steamboat that would waft us to the infamous island on the southern, seaward side of the land mass opposite Manhattan Island called Brooklyn.

“I suppose,” I answered, “that I could consider Irene and my outings at the World’s Fair in Paris last spring as an education.”

Quentin took my hand and twined it over his forearm, which made us less companions and more of a couple. Such a gesture was utterly unnecessary within the safe confines of a hansom cab. Then again, perhaps the confines of a hansom cab were not so safe, after all.

“Please don’t hark back to that terrible time, Nell,” Quentin
implored. “There was nothing amusing about what happened to you there.”

“I had merely wanted to see the shipboard panorama building, and—”

“You see! You
do
have a taste for amusement. Tell me what about the shipboard panorama attracted you.”

“Well, that was before I had traveled on a real ship across a real ocean,” I said ruefully.

“Were you ill?” he asked with concern.

“Er, no. Not very. A trifle dizzy. Were
you
ill on the Atlantic passage?”

“I have been on far rougher seas in far smaller boats.”

“Oh. I understand there will be a boat today.”

“A steamship, but we will mostly move through sheltered waters. If you like, we could take one of the railroads across Brooklyn.”

“No. I traveled by ferry recently. I wasn’t even dizzy.”

“If you are dizzy on the steamship, I shall hold you up.”

“Oh.” I was feeling dizzy already. “About the . . . attraction in Paris. The city has many of these panorama buildings and they are quite fascinating. From the outside they look like monuments. Paris is crammed with monuments; apparently sneezing is an achievement worth celebrating to Parisians.”

Quentin laughed again. “And blowing one’s nose worth another monument?”

“It is a lovely city in many ways,” I found myself admitting. “At any rate, the panorama buildings feature scenic paintings done in a huge interior circle, so you feel surrounded by the image until you are a part of it. One such building is populated with famous Frenchmen, but the panorama at the World’s Fair is quite unique. It’s moored at Seine side, and is shaped like a boat.” I frowned, for I never knew the difference: why was a large ferry a “boat” and a large steamer a “ship”? “A boat. Or a ship. And it
rocks ever so gently on the water, and inside there’s a deck with wax figures of the captain and crew and passengers, and all around is a perfectly painted harbor filled with every kind of boat and ship. It’s like being right there.”

“And now you have been ‘right there,’ only it’s here in America.” He patted my gloved hand on his arm. “It’s so brave of you, Nell, to remember what fascinated you about the building, rather than the awful things that happened to you there. And you were very clever to unfasten your lapel watch—” His hand left mine and lifted to the very same watch once more fastened to the bodice of my gown. His forefinger lifted the small gold-cased face. “—and let it fall behind you as a clue to your abduction site.”

In that moment I relived the awful terror of eluding pursuers in the bowels of the panorama building and later in the exhibition area upstairs, my heart pounding like a pump during my scuffling, otherwise silent flight, then thundering in my ears when I felt hostile hands capture me and smother my breath. . . .

I felt the very same way again, the moment Quentin mentioned unfastening something from my bosom.

It probably didn’t help that Irene had insisted I wear the Liberty silk gown on this expedition, for its freedom of movement and lightness on a hot summer’s day, or that she barely tightened my corset strings, since the dress was so shapeless.

The hansom jerked to a stop, and Quentin stepped out to help me alight. Soon we were waiting for a two-tiered ship, with a great wheel spewing water fixed to one side, to dock and load passengers.

We stood on a Hudson River pier in the broad and benign daylight, I like a lady of the town, with a gentleman on one arm and a parasol on the other. Both were handsome. One, because I had borrowed it from Irene, and everything she owned was exquisite. The other, because he just was, and always would be so in my eyes.

Quentin was dressed for a day of amusement, in light-colored suit and straw boater, purchased, he assured me, on the spur of the moment at Macy’s department store.

“You are sure we are not too casually dressed?” I asked.

“Not in the least.”

“Paris is cluttered with department stores,” I mentioned for lack of anything else to say.

“Paris is sublime, but Coney Island, I am told, is astounding.”

“I have heard that it can be ‘rough,’ as the Americans say.”

“Anywhere amusing has its rough side.”

“What will we do there?”

“What we feel like doing.”

“And how will we know what we feel like doing?”

He bent to gaze into my face under the shadow of my blue straw hat with the yellow daisies clustered on the brim.

“You haven’t much done that, have you?”

“Done what?”

“What you feel like doing.”

“I was never in a position to.”

My words caused his expression to sober. He straightened and gazed at our arriving boat. “Today, Nell, if there is something you notice that you feel like doing, you must say so, and we will do it.”

Still, it was an order, wasn’t it? I
must
do what I feel like doing. I did not point out the contradiction in his prescription to Quentin.

The journey around the west end of Brooklyn was smooth and uneventful. Uneventful to me, on water, was not feeling ill. Good. I felt like
not
feeling ill, and I was doing it! Not exactly what Quentin had in mind, I feared.

Still, we stood side by side at the railing, watching the empty green land glide by, and I daresay it was much better than the panorama building on the Seine. The huge wheel churned, the steam billowed from two big stacks above us like clouds, birds screeched and careened, the air smelled of fish and salt.

As we rounded the bay, the ocean breeze made me hold down my hat brim. Quentin took my elbow.

“There it is!” He pointed to an amazing sight.

All along the ruffling waterline extended a long, wide, curving walkway of wooden planks. The island itself was as flat as an iron, but the constructions on it made up for the lack of geographical interest.

These too were wooden buildings, but of the massive size of Orient palaces, replete with huge domed cores and fanciful cupolas, wrapped around by moats of wooden porches. I spied three of the vast, rambling structures, reminding me a bit of Brighton in England, but looking far cruder, like everything in America.

Also evident were some amazing structures: railroads that ran up and down invisible Alps . . . an iron tower far more fragile than Eiffel’s Paris construction, a vertical frame of mere wire with the occasional supporting horizontal platform . . . a huge elephant with howdah on its back, big as a building, and apparently that was exactly what it was . . . a huge, moving blot of human forms edging the surf of the beach like swarming insects, people bathing in the sea and sunlight quite openly.

“Gracious! What shall we do here?”

“Mostly walk,” Quentin responded, his hazel eyes crinkling in a fine netting of wrinkles that reminded me that sunny climes were to his liking. “And what you wish.”

“What are those huge, rambling buildings?”

“Very elegant hotels . . . too elegant for us to dine there today, for formal dress is required.”

“What shall we eat all day, then?”

“What we find.”

“And that elephant structure?”

“We shall visit it and explore, if you like.”

I overlooked the entire thronging scene, liking none of it, and especially the lack of all shade, save for my parasol. The one thing I did like stood beside me, and expected me to regard this outing as a treat. Well . . .

I hoisted my parasol to rest upon my shoulder as a soldier on parade in the burning sun might brace his rifle. I would do my
duty and “have fun,” as Irene had instructed me, and as Quentin wished.

By my lapel watch—I lifted it to read the face and felt Quentin’s eyes follow my gesture—the time was just past noon. It would be a long, hot day.

First we had to disembark on the New Iron Pier, a structure as long as a train, divided into two broad walks for people coming and going. Waves lapped on either side as the sidewheeler’s passengers thronged briskly through one lane—for the next debarking was expected in twenty minutes!—the men wearing light-colored straw boaters with their dark suits. (Quentin’s elegant light-colored suit made him look like a very Parisian pigeon among a flock of less imaginative crows.) The women were dressed conventionally in tight corsets and dark gowns, which made my pink free-flowing Liberty silk gown seem as Parisian as Quentin’s garb.

I was grateful for the lighter dress, though, by the time we reached end of the pier, where the vast turreted bulk of the Brighton Hotel greeted us.

It transpired that this section of the island was named Brighton Beach! That was no doubt in honor of England’s older and more elegant seaside town popularized by the Prince Regent at the beginning of this century.

However, nothing loomed ahead of the English Brighton visitor like the Iron Tower that confronted us now.

“We can go up in it,” Quentin said, following my gaze and mistaking it for awe or interest instead of horror.

“Up in it?”

“There is a steam elevator,” he added enthusiastically.

“It is not so tall nor so architecturally interesting as the Eiffel Tower, why on earth should we go up in it?”

“To leave mother earth. From the top one sees all of Coney Island.”

I really didn’t wish to see all of Coney Island, or even this portion
of it, but despite Quentin’s encouragement to please myself, I was incapable of interfering with his wishes.

So we walked another great length past the endless wooden bulk of the hotel to this structure, where he paid good American money for a trip to the top. I had neglected to mention to him that elevators made me uneasy.