Belle Cora Read online

  When we were halfway down the steps, my mother apologized to the clerk and said that she must stop to rest. She sat down on the steps. I sat beside her. The clerk stood behind us, thinking God knows what. She coughed: a familiar sound. Whenever I played at being a mama, at a certain point I would interrupt my pretended chore to rest, saying, “Mercy.” I would cough, with a reflective, listening, diagnostic expression, as if the cough contained a message, and put a hand on my chest or side. Then, grinding my teeth and wincing, I’d get up and return to my imaginary work.

  Often I would tell my dolls to hurry up and learn to be good, since I would not always be there to teach them.

  LATER IN LIFE, WHENEVER I TALKED about my mother I would begin to sob. There wouldn’t be any buildup—nothing at all—then the tears. Those who knew me as a hard woman would find it distasteful. Who could blame them? How could they understand?

  She had fine flaxen hair, which she kept in a severe bun under a plain bonnet. She was small and, in my early memories, pretty, with a graceful figure. (Not later; the progress of the illness made her delicate beauty shrivel.) Her nose was straight and thin; her eyes were long-lashed and bright, her lips bow-shaped; her chin was small. Her complexion was pale, except when she was feverish, at which times the black-and-white hues of her clothing contrasted with a hectic, ruddy, deceptively healthy-looking glow.

  Slicing apples, sewing, polishing the candlesticks, or trimming the lamps (four duties she said were permissible for ladies), she would remark, “The Lord may take me early. Then I will be sorry not to be here with you and your brothers, but, on the other hand, I will be very glad to again see my own mother and my grandfather and my aunt”—all dead of consumption—“and of course I expect to meet you in your time. That is why you must do your duty and love God.”

  We believed that completely and literally. We would be reunited in heaven. That was our plan, as practical to us as “Let’s meet at sundown in front of the clock tower.”

  Growing tired, she would rest, while I went on sewing or polishing. She’d tell me how helpful I was—what would she do without me? She would cough, intending it to be a small, cautious throat-clearing cough. The cough would have bigger ideas and go on and on, while she ran to a pail, and she would spit and study her sputum. Was it white or yellow or green? Or red—the most feared color.

  In retrospect—now that “consumption” is “tuberculosis” and the diligent Dr. Koch has traced it to a microscopic bacillus—it is clear that insufficient efforts were made to save my mother’s life. Even based on the knowledge then available to physicians, everything possible was not done. It never was when the sufferer was a woman. Male consumptives made survival their life’s work. They went on long sea voyages. They traveled to better climes. They changed careers, shunned brain work, and sought to restore their health with vigorous labor out of doors. These measures were considered impractical for women. How could they change careers, when motherhood was their true occupation, without which their lives were empty? How could a sick woman contend with the thousand inconveniences of travel, or bear to be separated from dear friends and relations? Women were too good to do the selfish things that might have preserved them, so they weren’t told to. Only seldom did doctors even advise a consumptive woman to refrain from childbearing, although they knew that each pregnancy would shorten her life.

  My mother believed ardently in what was then considered to be the modern view of woman’s nature—it was a relatively new idea, that women were finer than men—and if any doctor had suggested that she ought to leave her family or avoid childbirth she would have found another doctor. She had five of us: Robert, Edward, Frank, me, and, last of all, Lewis. She was found to be in the second stage of consumption soon after Edward, and each subsequent birth resulted in a permanent worsening of her condition.

  Within these limits, it was her duty to improve. On Dr. Boyle’s advice, she ate bland foods: wheat breads, apples, boiled rice, boiled beef. She took opium to relieve the pain and to reduce the severity of her coughs. She took calomel to relieve the constipation caused by the opium. When she was well enough, she walked or went riding. She relieved her swellings with blisters and poultices, which she became expert at preparing for anyone who wanted them, and she bled herself with leeches, the descendants of a little family of them imported from Europe, which she bred and raised at home. The leeches mated and bore their young in pond water that she kept in a porcelain tub in her bedroom. Her blood was their only food.

  She belonged to a sewing circle consisting of pious Congregationalist women with consumption, whom she had come to know at church or through the recommendation of her doctors. She went to their houses; they came to ours. Before I was seven, I attended the funerals of three of these ladies. They had sat facing each other, plying their needles, trading medical details they had learned as dutiful invalids. One by one they were put in boxes, stored in the ground, and replaced by others in earlier phases of the process.

  All of these doomed women had children whom they were anxious to infuse with a full course of moral instruction in the little time that might remain. Every incident was an occasion for a lesson about piety, work, or self-effacement. Never take the best chair when someone older is present, or speak of hating things or people, or say you do not love what is given to you. Never leave chairs out of place.

  For my mother’s children, there was special advice on the art of being a guest. She had been only four years old herself when her own mother died. Her father had been unequal to the task of caring for her and her sister Agatha, and from an early age she had become—as she put it—a “wanderer” and a “pilgrim” in the houses of relations. She had learned to be neat, quiet, obedient, and useful. We must learn how to be like that, too.

  Perhaps she and my father had decided that he wouldn’t keep us after she died. In any event, we weren’t merely told that acting in certain ways was wrong—we were told that it would not be tolerated by people less indulgent than our parents. She was forever teaching us how to act during long visits, so far wholly imaginary, at the houses of friends and relatives. “Try every day to cause them as little trouble as possible.”

  Would we wear well on long acquaintance? Naturally, she worried. We were lovable, yes, but each of us had endearing imperfections that, in her considered judgment, would not travel well.

  Robert, six years my senior, found it hard to occupy a chair in a manner befitting a descendant of the Puritans. His knees would climb to his chest, or one leg would behave itself while the other leg was flung out; at the table it was always “Robert, sit up,” and his posture was at its worst when he was reading, as he did every spare moment, articles about the Crusades, the habits of the pelican, the use of flying buttresses in cathedrals, the methods of snake charmers, Swedish forest fires, etc., in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and accounts of murders and steamship disasters in the Sun and the Courier. My grandfather had given him a complete thirty-six-volume translation of Buffon’s Natural History, used but in good condition, which he read with his head on the floor and his feet on the wall.

  In a letter to Robert—to be opened after her death—my mother wrote: “As you grow I know you will learn how disrespectful your strange postures seem to your elders.”

  There was a letter like that for each of us, our mother speaking as if from the grave so that we would remember her, get a lump in our throats, and resolve to be better people. In Edward’s she hopes he will learn not to tear out of the house without a goodbye, and to study harder and not tease me. In her letter to Frank she recommends that he seek vigorous outdoor work in a better clime. Frank was born with a large black birthmark directly over his heart, like a target placed there for the convenience of the Angel of Death. He was small for his age, and we used to say he could not watch the rain through a shut window without getting a fever, and wherever he is I hope he will forgive me for saying that he wet the bed occasionally until he was eight. He, too, l
iked to read. He liked the sea tales of Captain Marryat.

  Writing to Lewis, who could not yet read, posed special problems which are reflected in her confusing advice to him. Sometimes she is writing to a little boy who loves to climb things and to look at pictures; sometimes she is addressing a young man who must be told to shun gambling hells and theaters. Lewis came too late for her really to know him. She knew only that he was beyond her control. From the moment he was able to crawl, he was busy damaging property and risking his life. It was more than she could do to keep him out of cabinets and flour bins, to keep his hand out of jars, to keep him from tossing fruit, stones, and plates from second-story windows to learn whether they would bounce, splash, or shatter. Curious and lawless, he was bitten by dogs, scratched by cats, nearly trampled by horses, had the same hand run over by another boy’s hand truck and cut by an apple corer, had a bookshelf topple onto him, was burned by a hot pan, and was trapped in a trunk for three hours. By the age of four, he was covered from head to toe with tiny scars.

  Since my mother could not contain Lewis, by the time he was three I took on this chore for her—watching him, teaching him, scolding him, kissing his boo-boos, making him wash his face and brush his hair every day and say his prayers each evening; punishing him—at my own discretion, which went unquestioned—by applying a stick to his bottom with all my puny might; and in the middle of the night I pulled him out of my mother and father’s bed and back into mine. When I assumed these responsibilities, I was just a little girl imitating her mother; I went on because she couldn’t and I was applauded for it and it made me feel important.

  Once, Edward and I were walking down Broadway, and Lewis was running ahead of us. A big sow coming out from a side street knocked him down. He was sitting in the road, not yet sure if he ought to cry about this, when the sow turned and charged him again; it would, for all I know, have eaten him had I not been there. I picked up a brickbat and with a lucky shot hit the sow in the snout, whereupon it turned on me. A small barrel, thrown from a nearby wagon by a quick-thinking teamster, hit the sow on its back. The cask bounced off the animal and went rolling down the street. Carts changed course to avoid it, and the sow darted between the tall wheels of a coach and ran off “to mend its ways,” said Edward, who had been laughing, like most of the onlookers.

  When we got home, the story was that Lewis had almost been eaten by a pig, and that I had risked my life to save his. “Lewis has two mothers,” said my father, adding that I was certainly the most courageous girl he had ever met; my mother said I was a blessing and a boon. “What would I do without you?” It was a prominent part of our family conversation for weeks. For a long time afterward, Lewis was afraid of pigs—not only of pigs in the street, but of any and all pigs, and he would not eat pork, for fear of angering the pigs. He ate ham, thinking it came from some other animal, and we would all be amused, and my father would offer him second helpings, saying, “More ham for our young Mussulman?”

  Were we happy? I want to tell the truth in these pages, and so I am wary of making any period of my life appear better than it was. Everyone has troubles. When disaster strikes, it finds us in the midst of everyday cares and sorrows. But I do not want to go too far in the other direction and imply that it was all grimness, growing up in the shadow of consumption. We all thought that we belonged together, in our house in Bowling Green, with our family stories and our foolish jokes, and each of us was indispensable. My mother’s illness gave me responsibilities. By the time I was five, I had given up playing with dolls. Lewis was my doll, and when I was not minding him, I was running and fetching and carrying messages and being praised for my usefulness. I considered myself wise beyond my years and braver than the common run of girls, and I honestly believed that the household would fall apart without me. “What a boon you are to me,” said my mother, “I could never get along without you,” and I took her at her word. Under her eye, or watched by the hired girl—the “help,” as we called servants in those days—by the time I was seven I could put wood in the kitchen fireplace, bake biscuits in a Dutch oven, and make buckwheat cakes and scrambled eggs in a cast-iron skillet that I had to lift with two hands. I mended holes in stockings. I conveyed my mother’s wishes to the help, and when my mother was too ill to say what she wanted done, I told them what my mother’s wishes would have been.

  I notice that I have not mentioned her special advice to me, in the letters I was to read after her death. What does the voice from the beyond say? She praises me for my diligence. She warns me against vanity. She tells me to be gentle, to keep my criticisms of others to myself and show the better way, if necessary, by example rather than by harsh words, and to be virtuous. I reread these letters recently, and how that felt I do not have the art to tell you. Mother, I’m sorry.

  AFTER I BECAME RICH, I MADE A POINT of acquiring the surviving evidence of my life long ago in Bowling Green, as a pathetic substitute for my lost childhood there, which ended abruptly when I was nine. I have the letters my mother wrote to us, and also her diaries, which came to me under circumstances I may as well describe here, though it requires me to break away from strict chronology.

  In 1884, my brother Edward died alone without heirs, with a wooden leg that he had not used in a long time, his stump being ulcerous, in a room full of empty whiskey bottles, heaps of clothes cured with pus and urine, and some old family furniture that he had given long black scars by letting cigarettes burn out on them. The police broke down the door of his apartment on Great Jones Street in New York City after a neighbor complained of the smell coming from his rooms. Handkerchiefs before their faces, they marched in to find my brother’s corpse on its back, clutching a wooden leg. A window was opened, a breeze came in, a slip of paper on his dresser drew attention to itself by fluttering, and it turned out to be a bank draft from Mrs. Frances Andersen of San Francisco. Eventually, someone thought of writing to the rich woman who seemed to be supporting him and might be persuaded to pay his debts, and that is how, a few months later, I happened to receive a parcel containing the diaries: the cracked red leather covers permanently indented where for so long they had been tightly wrapped in twine, the good rag paper, the straps, which Edward had slit, neatly, because the keys were lost (probably they still exist somewhere; they are all around us, in boxes, drawers, drains, and riverbeds, these brass widowers, these useless keys to destroyed locks).

  I laid my hands upon them for a while. When at last I permitted myself to open the first volume, I was a straight-backed, corseted old lady outwardly but, inside, a child desperate to be with her mother. And look how much she wrote! Alas, the length turned out to be deceptive; the details of her illness occupied half of each diary. Over and over: her lungs, her sputum, her cough, her food, how often she has bled herself. On first perusal, these passages were not without a power to awaken memory, but gradually I began to be dismayed, as I am when she copies out a hymn or lines from some dreadful book of spiritual guidance that comforted her in its time.

  In the diary, which she expected to be destroyed, she discusses her children in a less guarded way than in the letters, and it is bracing to read years later if you are one of us. Ink that once sat in a bottle on her bedroom desk records her worries about Edward—blurred ink on warped pages swollen from being drenched some years ago with whiskey. (Whiskey and tears on the very pages devoted to him, while cigarettes expired on the heirloom furniture—what a maudlin debauch that must have been.)

  Some entries made when I was four record the family’s flight from New York City’s 1832 cholera epidemic. We stayed with my aunt and uncle in their Massachusetts farmhouse, a year before they moved to western New York State. I had known about this visit but had no memory of it. When I read this part, I rose to my feet and paced the floor. Suddenly they were all present, younger than my earliest memories of them—aunt, uncle, cousins—and I couldn’t do a thing about it. There my mother was, forever, playing finger games with my cousin Matthew.

  When they were grow
ing up, after the early death of their own mother, my aunt Agatha and my mother had been together sometimes, and other times apart. Both had spent their childhoods in the homes of betteroff relations, bouncing from one to another. Both had tiny dowries. The great difference was that Aunt Agatha was plain, and she had not married well. I believe my mother was shocked by the fate that had befallen her sister, but she wouldn’t let herself think of it. In the diary, she does not remark on the poverty, narrow-mindedness, and ignorance of Elihu, my aunt’s husband. Instead, she praises them both for their hard work. They lived the old, virtuous country way, buying nothing, making everything, which kept them very busy all the time.

  II

  WE ALWAYS HAD A SERVANT—just one at any time, usually a German girl. Before I was born, my mother had formed a special prejudice against Irish help when she overheard one of them telling Robert that a medal she wore on a chain represented Saint Benedict, proof against consumption. Friends reminded her that not all the Irish were Catholics, and that, in any case, by insisting on Protestant help she was denying these girls the opportunity to benefit by our example. My mother replied that she had to take special care since, owing to her illness, her children were often in the company of the help. Native-born white American girls were considered too demanding and “ungrateful.” This left Germans and colored girls. There was one colored girl, Louise, who worked for us when I was two and then went to work for my grandfather. The rest were mostly Germans, and thanks to them my brothers and I learned the names of several German towns and principalities and went around the house repeating little German phrases of shock and exasperation like “Scheiße!” and “Verdammt” and “Verflucht nochmal!,” which the girl had uttered during kitchen mishaps.