Sarah Canary Page 13

  He looked for her along the wall, saw the hem of her dress. Harold grabbed for it and missed, falling painfully onto one elbow. The gun jumped out of his pocket and spun through the water and broken china, coming to rest underneath a large, curved part of the washbasin. Harold didn’t go after it. There were things guns could do for you. There were things guns could not. Threatening Sarah Canary with a gun would be about as logical as telling her he loved her. And just about as effective. ‘I love you,’ said Harold. ‘I love you. I’m only going to love you. I’m dying. Help me. Be a good girl.’

  He pushed himself to his feet, squinting into the corners of the room, looking for Sarah Canary. He thought he saw her over by the door, and there she was again, standing at the bedside, watching him, watching him. He rubbed at his eyes and tried to focus. Two figures remained, but they were close together now, more like the double image from the saloon, though never quite that close. They overlapped only at the fullest part of their black skirts, like two halves of a butterfly, like twins attached at the hip.

  This was clever of Sarah Canary. Damned clever. Obviously, she was doing it with mirrors. ‘The Wild Woman does not recognize herself in a mirror,’ Harold said, laughing because he was not taken in, had never been taken in, had never believed that innocent Wild Woman act for a moment. Harold had seen a woman sawn in two once, not a woman like Sarah Canary, but a beautiful young woman with long ringlets of brown hair, and he had known immediately that it was done with mirrors. Harold was not born yesterday.

  Harold had not died yesterday.

  He hesitated, wondering which figure was the image and which the real woman. ‘“The mirror cracked from side to side,”’ he said. Both figures were silvered from the moonlight or the mirror, but the silhouette on the left was taller and shivered suddenly. ‘“The curse has come upon me”’ – he lunged left, gripping her shoulders – ‘“Cried the Lady of Shalott.”’ When he felt the solid bones beneath his hands, he knew he’d made the right choice. ‘Here now,’ he said. ‘Now I have you. You should be grateful, darling. There can’t have been many other offers. No more tricks now,’ and he thought that at the same time he was talking, she was telling him to take his hands off her, but before he could be sure, something sharp and excruciatingly painful slid into his chest between two of his ribs. He stumbled, letting go of Sarah Canary in surprise. The handle of a chopstick protruded from his body. It was white and carved with those damned markings the Chinese pretended were words. You looked at Chinese writing and it looked like chicken scratchings. You heard the Chinese talking out loud and you still thought you were listening to chickens.

  Harold put his hands on the chopstick and tried to pull it out, but he was too drunk and too weak. He fell forward instead, the longest fall of his life. He had plenty of time before he hit the floor to wonder that, after surviving the Battle of the Wilderness and the fire afterward and the march to Andersonville and the camp at Andersonville, which was one more thing than even Jimmy had survived, he should die like this, spitted by a Wild Woman who, as far as he knew, had never done anything before in her life. What are the odds of that? he wondered. Jimmy, he said, only no words came out. Look at me, Jimmy. Dying for love with a chopstick in the heart. What are the odds?

  His head landed on a jagged piece of china. It hurt for a moment. Then it felt like a pillow beneath him.

  ‘Come on, dear. Perhaps you’d better sleep with me tonight,’ he heard her say and he thought, Well, that was all I wanted, but it’s a little late now, isn’t it? And then he thought maybe death had said those words, that he had heard death inviting him to come to bed one more time and that he seemed to be saying yes.

  v

  In the November 2, 1872, issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, Victoria Woodhull, the Spiritualists’ candidate for the presidency of the United States, accused Henry Ward Beecher of having slept with Elizabeth Tilton.

  Beecher was a popular preacher who drew thousands to his church every Sunday. He had a wife, but she was not Elizabeth Tilton. Elizabeth was married to Theodore Tilton, Henry Ward Beecher’s best friend. Theodore was the one who had revealed the affair to Victoria Woodhull. He had done this because he was sleeping with Woodhull.

  Victoria Woodhull was continually vilified by the press for her advocacy of free love. Why should she be persecuted, she now asked, for practicing openly what the most admired men in the country did in secret? By evening, copies of the paper were selling on the streets at forty dollars apiece.

  Anthony Comstock arrested Woodhull for the transmission of obscene matter through the mails and Henry Ward Beecher declared his innocence. Beecher had been the first president of the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. Many of the suffragists were personal friends of his, and they were friends of the Tiltons. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and his own half sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, were all aware of the affair. They were bound to be questioned.

  Unlike Victoria Woodhull, these were women known for their integrity. They could not be bought off. They could not be manipulated. They would not lie.

  They had to be discredited.

  Beecher began by characterizing the suffragists as ‘human hyenas’ and ‘free-lovers.’ His half sister he accused of insanity. As for the woman who claimed he had pursued her through months of persuasion and argument, Beecher said that Elizabeth Tilton had ‘thrust her affections upon him unsought.’

  Theodore Tilton was simultaneously telling the world that he had merely feigned affection for Victoria Woodhull in the hopes of keeping her silent on the subject of his wife’s affair. He had certainly never, never been in love with Woodhull.

  The appearance of respectability was worth more to many men than actual respectability, Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed. Clearly it was worth more than any woman.

  Theodore Tilton sued Henry Ward Beecher for the destruction of his family. Two years later, the case came to trial. Victoria Woodhull testified decorously. Beecher carried violets and was witty. The existing statutes held a wife incompetent as a witness either for or against her husband, so Elizabeth Tilton was not permitted to speak. She sat in the courtroom, listening quietly while her husband and her lover abandoned her by turns. The jury reached no verdict.

  In 1873, one of Sophie Tolstoy’s neighbors gave up his mistress for a younger and more beautiful woman. Anna, the discarded lover, threw herself under a moving freight train at the railroad station in Tula, and Leo Tolstoy began to write Anna Karenina.

  In 1873, the Association for the Advancement of Women was founded.

  9

  Adelaide’s Theories on Seduction

  Whatever it is – she has tried it—

  Awful Father of Love—

  Emily Dickinson, 1871

  The moment Adelaide Dixon saw the Alaskan Wild Woman in the unsteady moonlight of the upstairs Bay View Hotel, she recognized the infamous profile of Lydia Palmer. She had seen Lydia’s picture often in the paper; the hair so coarse, the lips so full, the nose so very distinct. There could not, Adelaide told herself, be two such profiles.

  Lydia was wanted in San Francisco for the murder of Andrew Hamelin, Superintendent of the Presbyterian Sunday school and a trustee of the school district – beloved husband, lamented father, adulterer. His body had been found about six months ago in the basement of the nest he’d procured for Lydia, three bullets all in a row across his abdomen. Lydia had removed his shoes and put them beneath his head as a pillow. One dark curl, shot with gray, was missing from his forehead; the newspapers speculated later that it had been taken for Lydia’s locket. Nine blocks away, his family sat around a Sunday pot roast, waiting for him until the meat grew cold.

  Lydia had attended the funeral, dressed all in black, with black net obscuring her face. She carried a black-bead bag and a small white handkerchief whose embroidered violets she watered copiously during the service. Then, through an implausible series of misunderstandings, the San Francisco police had let her simply walk away. Lydia ha
d not been seen since.

  Not until Adelaide, sitting at her desk, looking dispiritedly through her lecture notes, heard the washbasin break. Adelaide was as close to despair as she had ever allowed herself to be. The response to her evening lecture was not an unusual one here on the frontier. In Steilacoom they had crumpled their programs into balls and tossed them about the room, and drawn mustaches on her face in the promotional bills, and then Adelaide’s traveling companion, Louise, had deserted her to marry the sheriff, a loathsome man. ‘My only regret,’ Louise told her, unable to meet her eyes, ‘is leaving you. And with so many people so anxious to hear you and so many people needing your message. Perhaps you can find another companion in Sacramento or San Francisco and finish the tour in the summer.’

  ‘Or get married,’ the sheriff suggested, winking. ‘There’s no shortage of men. Catch yourself a big one. “Better once than never, for never too late.”’

  ‘I have my own engagements,’ she’d retorted. ‘As unbreakable as yours.’ And had gone on with the tour, scandalously unescorted. To Seabeck. To derision and ridicule. To frustration and despair. For what? Adelaide could not remember what she was supposed to be accomplishing, not the justifications she gave to others or the ones she gave to herself. She was too disheartened even to cry.

  Then she heard the sound of smashing crockery in the next room. Suddenly she wanted to see the Wild Woman for herself. The woman raised by wolves. The woman who didn’t even understand that she was a woman. Adelaide went out into the hall. She knocked on the door to the Wild Woman’s room, but no one answered. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked, opening the door. Like all the doors in the Bay View, it was warped and neither closed nor opened smoothly.

  There stood Lydia Palmer. In the upstairs of a tiny hotel in the middle of the night across a stream from nowhere. It was incredible. It was the most incredible thing that had ever happened. Not that there was time to wonder at it. Obviously, Adelaide had arrived not a moment too soon. What was it about Lydia that provoked such passions? No one could consider her a handsome woman.

  But the very air tonight was a syrup of violent desire and frustrated dreams and drink. The smell of whiskey was so concentrated in Lydia’s bedroom that just breathing made you dizzy. The Alaskan Wild Woman’s manager, a little man with a large mustache, had obviously been breathing for quite some time. He leered incompetently. He muttered incoherently. He clutched at Adelaide until she pushed him away, then he collapsed over Lydia. He gasped, clutched his chest, and toppled to the floor, like a felled tree, into his own drunken debris. Adelaide nudged him with the toe of her shoe. He didn’t move. If men could only see themselves.

  ‘Come on, dear. Perhaps you’d better sleep with me tonight,’ Adelaide said, stepping over the body on the way to the door. Lydia did not follow. She knelt instead and her skirts spread across the floor like spilt wine. She put one hand underneath a large piece of pottery and flinched. She pulled her hand out. The edge of the pottery had cut her on the side of her wrist; a thin red line appeared and she brought it to her mouth, licking the blood away and looking at the wound. She was holding a gun, pointed purposelessly about the room, sometimes at the man on the floor, sometimes at Adelaide, sometimes anyplace in between, as Lydia worried over the scratch on her wrist.

  ‘Here, give that to me,’ said Adelaide briskly. She moved to Lydia’s side and unwrapped Lydia’s fingers, one by one, until they all gave way, curling up limply into the empty palm. The gun was very cold. Lydia’s hand was almost feverishly warm.

  Adelaide had given a lecture to lumbermen on the finer points of female sexuality, prevented a forcible seduction, and disarmed a murderess. It was not a bad night’s work, after all. ‘Come to bed. Lydia,’ she said. She took hold of Lydia’s arm and steered her around the broken pottery and the puddles of water and the body, out into the open hallway.

  Downstairs the men were shouting – boisterous, happy sounds. Women were rarely safe when men got drunk and happy together. ‘Don’t stand out here,’ she said to Lydia, pushing her insistently forward, her hand pressing against the row of small buttons down the back of Lydia’s dress. Once inside her own room, she immediately closed the door, standing on her toes, slamming the upper corner once with her fist to force it shut. She turned the key.

  Adelaide folded back the bedclothes and helped Lydia lie down without undressing. She sat beside Lydia briefly, telling her to sleep now, looking without success for some sign that Lydia heard. She wanted to see if Lydia responded to the sound of her own name, ‘Lydia. Lydia,’ said Adelaide. Such a beautiful name. She called to her gently. ‘Lydia Palmer. You come here, Lydia.’ She leaned in closer to Lydia’s ear. ‘Lydia loves Andrew.’ Still no response. Adelaide slipped her hand shallowly into the neck of Lydia’s dress. Lydia did not even look at her. Adelaide’s fingers searched over Lydia’s shoulder and then she withdrew her hand in some disappointment. There was no locket. Of course, there were a thousand possible explanations, a thousand ways a woman could lose a necklace on the path between Lydia Palmer and the Alaskan Wild Woman. Not that a locket wouldn’t have been a nice touch, even for the Alaskan Wild Woman. Placed around an infant neck by the loving mother. Any manager with any imagination at all would have seen the possibilities. Still. The nose was so distinct. Adelaide was almost certain.

  Finally she took the top blanket off the bed for herself. The lantern continued to flicker on the little writing desk and a halfhearted fire burned in the fireplace. The inconstant light from both gave the scene a kind of uncertainty related to distance and focus, like something viewed underwater or seen through the body of a ghost.

  Adelaide wrapped herself in the blanket and sat. Her quill lay on the side of the desk blotter with the gun on the other, an illustration for the old parable that the pen is mightier than the sword, only more ambiguous as to its conclusion. Adelaide looked at the gun for a long time before she picked up the pen. It was probably the very same gun that had killed Andrew Hamelin. This was more than likely. Adelaide had to force her eyes away. Above the blotter, an envelope contained her current research and her notes. She reached for fresh paper. Her topic on her next tour would be seduction, not the forcible variety commonly referred to as female frailty, but the variety dependent upon persuasion and deceit.

  Lydia snored three times. The first snore was loud, the second quieter, the third almost inaudible. The wind blew water against the window with a sound like a handful of pebbles thrown by a secret lover. Only a little rain really, just a few drops running down the glass, spreading thinner and thinner until a dozen long trails each ended in a drop too reduced, too spent, to continue its descent. The moon came out again and the water on the window pearled against a background of black branches and black sky. Adelaide began to make black marks on the paper before her, marks that flew across the page like birds.

  There was an excellent chance that Lydia’s manager would want her back in the morning. Adelaide would have to think very carefully about the best way to prevent this. Something that wouldn’t draw too much attention to Lydia prematurely. Some private arrangement based, perhaps, on the ugly scene of attempted female frailty Adelaide had just witnessed.

  The air was cold on the back of Adelaide’s neck and she stood up, releasing her hair from its pins. She readjusted the blanket, higher and tighter about her body, so that she was swaddled when she reseated herself. Only one hand remained outside the blanket, one cold hand on the pen. She heard the rain begin again, tapping on the roof, and the wind, shaking the trees. She turned to look at the bed, where Lydia lay still as stone with the light swimming over her.

  Lydia might be feigning her current helplessness and confusion, of course. Insanity would be her best defense against a murder charge. Perhaps her manager was also a party to this deception and – for what motive? for love? for money? – had agreed to conceal her. Perhaps he was blackmailing her. Except that he had chosen such a public form of concealment. Exhibiting her, again and again, in town after
town when her picture had been so widely circulated and her nose was so very distinct. No. The manager was ignorant of Lydia’s identity or he would never have suggested it. And Lydia herself must be truly mad or she would never have agreed.

  Driven mad by disappointed affection. Destroyed by misplaced trust. It was not hard to reconstruct the events that had resulted in this; Adelaide had heard such stories many times. They rarely varied. She wrote down the outline of Lydia’s affair, the way she would tell it, the way Lydia would tell it if Lydia could. Of course, he had made love to her. Of course, he had said he would leave his wife. Someday we’ll be together. Not just now, though. Give me time to arrange it. Not yet, but someday. Not now. Not yet. Until the day he said he wouldn’t be leaving his wife, after all. He was home for good. He loved his wife. He was a happy family man. He had children. He didn’t want to lose the love of his children. If she really loved him, she wouldn’t ask him to risk the love of his children. And so he wouldn’t be seeing her again. Couldn’t. His wife might find out.

  And besides, it was wrong.

  You lied to me, Lydia said, unable to believe it.

  I never lied. I was very unhappy when I met you. Things changed. Things do change.

  Adelaide’s nose began to itch and she wiped at it with the scratchy edge of the hotel blanket. A flea appeared on the back of her hand. She set the pen down and reached over to pinch it, but it jumped away, landing in the ink pot. Adelaide watched it drown; kicking its little feet ineffectually, splashing invisible flea-sized drops of ink on the sides of the pot. She had been told not to stay in the Bay View. She had expected fleas.