But then there is another pull, as if Smitty has changed his mind and decided not to try to come to the surface but to pull Alma down with him. Her head goes under. Her eyes are wide, but the water is grayed by bubbles and thick with silt, swirling muddied clouds. She holds onto the shoulders of his shirt, but he has her now. His arms clasp her waist, an embrace, like the end of a lurid, disastrous affair. His body arches like a fish, swift and unpredictable. She could die. They could drown together and then swirl in an awkward, passionate lock until they bump up against a stony bank. They would say she was trying to save him, that he was trying to save her. In the confusion, both seem possible. The struggles blur. She lets air slip from her mouth; it fills with water. She imagines Henry’s face in the window of the car, the reverend, the small swollen bite on his cheek, and one by one, her children as children, nearly babies, sweaty and pink with sleep. Her lungs will fill tightly and she will die. She’s sure of it now. It seems fitting that her anger, her protectiveness, her desire to keep safe what is hers would be the death of her. But there is a small give in Smitty’s arms. She has his wrists. The grip loosens on the fabric at the small of her back. She slips away and beats to the bright sheen of water, breaking the surface, her lungs rung out, gasping. Smitty rolls away from her, his arms tumbling around his head, as if he’s dancing.
Alma looks to shore, and there stands the nun, nearly naked, her shoes and black habit, her wimple, lay in a pile. She is wearing only her black stockings, pinching her long, narrow waist, and a thick strapped camisole, one strap safely pinned where it snapped loose. Her hair is thin and short, cropped at odd angles. Lettie is there at her feet, dragged out, nearly limp, but breathing. Alma paddles weakly to shore. Delphine and Roxy are still downstream. Not much time has passed after all. The nun is tall but thicker than Alma imagined. She is so very human, achingly real, down to the detail of her longer second toe, nudging out of a hole in her stockings. Sister Margaret edges down on the rocks, holds out her hand, and pulls Alma in. They are both breathless.
“Were you going to come in?” Alma’s voice is raw, her throat burning.
Sister Margaret doesn’t nod. She is shy and pale like this, ashamed. It’s hard to say why. She steps into her dress and begins zipping it up the back. She arranges her wimple, which attaches with little fuss. She steps into her shoes. She wipes her hands on her skirt. She says, “Follow his body downstream as far as you can. Let the fish feed on it some. And then draw it out. I will call the police from my office. It will be simple. Keep the story very simple.”
“Were you going to save me?”
“I was praying for your soul.”
“But you were undressing to swim. Didn’t you trust God to answer your prayers?”
“I am an instrument of God,” she says. “I do his will. You should understand this, Alma.”
“I should understand what?”
But Sister Margaret doesn’t answer. She turns and walks back toward the convent, her skirt grazing grass tips. She moves with such fluidity, such ample grace, comfortable, it seems, hauling around contradiction. It’s as if she, too, is being swept off by a strong, ceaseless current.
Alma steps outside of herself, this drenched woman, her dress pressing wet to her breasts, hips. She allows the moment to expand and expand. The nun can be an instrument of God, if she wants. But Alma is simply a woman. She asked for a miracle. It didn’t work the way she’d wanted it to, and so she knew it was necessary to create her own, an accident. It will fade. She knows how quickly they will all return to their daily habits. Soon she will go home, and perhaps Irving will be there awaiting a good meal. He will not have abandoned her like his father. He missed last Sunday, but he’ll be back for it, won’t he? Perhaps he’ll bring Lucy, and Alma will try to hold her tongue. She will ask him to tar the bee holes, and she might tell him that Smitty drowned, but not even mention that there was ever a marriage. He wouldn’t have to know. But quickly she changes her mind. Even this soon, she can feel another version rising up. Yes, she will have to acknowledge the marriage, so that Lettie, for her sake, can become a tragic young widow. Her husband died just days after the wedding. Drowned at a picnic, a celebration. He couldn’t swim, you see. The nun is on her way to call the police and then, no doubt, to perform some perfunctory part of her day for which she’s late, a tardy instrument of God. It all seems quite ordinary and disorienting.
Alma tilts her head back to open her throat and take in deeper breaths. The air is cindery, the sky pale with fleet, untrussed clouds, a bunker of them, now darkening, low bellied, like the lone cow, milk-swollen, heavy with its own curdle. It is good to be a murderer, Alma decides. She already finds herself keeping track of all she has stolen from Smitty. Each moment of life, the trees filled with twittering birds, the river’s agitated surface of water spiders and mosquitoes, the sky. It is what he would have taken from Lettie, from her, too, if he’d gotten the chance to kill them, her daughter slowly over years, herself dragged to the bottom of the river. It’s better this way.
She turns. Yes, there is Willard, carrying the cake. He’ll remember the body later, pulled up from the river. He’ll talk on and on about dead Smitty and she’ll have to explain it to him again and again. For years to come, he will turn to her on any given day, and ask her why he was blue like that and why he drowned. And she will say that he didn’t have enough air. He couldn’t swim. From here, Alma can already see Willard’s lips white with tongue-smeared icing. She has stolen even this small sweetness, Willard’s mouth, from Smitty, but she is good with figures, with keeping track.
Time clips. Roxy lunges through the water and pulls Smitty’s body up as best she can, dragging it up the rocks. She sets it down, an odd angle of bones, one arm pinned behind his back, his chest hefted forward. His skin is luminescent, so fine it seems his blood shines up blue beneath it. Willard eats cake. The clouds pass. Delphine and Roxy hover like the clouds. Lettie sits, agog and dreamy, knees to chest, tightening. The captain arrives—a gouty waddle, the beefy mound of his sweat-soaked back. He gets his boys to lay the body properly on the grass, white on green, arms to sides.
The captain says, “It was just you women here. Is that right? And he was drunk, you say?”
She hears herself retelling the story, a voice that swims in her chest, words rising up from her mouth. The captain tugs his belt, looks at his shoes, old and toe-warped.
Lettie says, mournfully, “He wasn’t strong in water.”
The captain repeats, “And Willard wasn’t here. It was just you all women. Just you old sorry, whoring women. Is that right?”
She is the nigger-lover’s daughter, a madam of a whore-house, a murderer.
“No.” Sister Margaret is here now. “No,” she says. “I was the one to call you. I saw it all from my window. He was drunk. It was an accident.”
The captain apologizes for his language, his cheeks slack, a humbled reddening. He’s disappointed but dutiful. He harbors a deep cowardice known to Alma. She recalls the shame-faced way he tucked in his wilted penis. This is his expression now. He has a notebook, a pencil, to write it down. He nods, unwilling to challenge, taking it all in word for word.
Alma feels like she is finally giving in to the world, her imagined self. She feels like a woman who sets out to collect each oily peanut bag, each button, each sun-filled bowl, and she caresses her things, even Smitty pulled from the river, his eyes nibbled at by bottom fish—she will keep him, too, so beautifully blue. She will polish, polish each memory with the quick hissing strokes of her mind, a sweet penance. Her heart begins its clangor. The Prophet, her father’s tongue, the girls with sticks, her imagined baby, dead in its sheet, and also a miracle, squalling, with its many arms and many legs, the Mule-Faced Woman reading with her ankles crossed, Mrs. Bass’s hunched backbone. Her children, circling, circling, innocently, before the consumption, the fire. She recalls the nest squirming with baby rats, the moths rising from the open trunk, the dog in the trap, and Henry, whom she doesn’
t expect to ever see again, not ever, although she would like to know where he buried the dead baby. Finally, she recalls finding her mother in bed, the stench of the body’s difficult final resolute task of returning to dust and the durable, inexhaustible brass buttons of her coat. Everything returns to her in a blurred rush motored by the intricate mechanisms of her raucous heart, and she gives in to it, although she doesn’t understand it, doesn’t have a name to call it. The coal—its fine dust raining down, its constant blessing—covers everything, all of them with its gritty veil of absolution. The orphans are ringing their little bells.
Afterword
Irving guides the blind woman across the yard. “There’s a hedgerow and wild flowers, an empty laundry line. An empty grazing field. There are porch steps here. One, two, three, four. We’re alone. Everyone is out.” Her eyes sometimes reveal a milkiness, as if she’s filled with it, and at the top there’s risen cream. He says, “Let me take you to my old room. There was a bear once who stayed in it, and Mr. Bucci. But the bear died. It was old.” He counts going up the staircase. She has her arm curled around his. They have been traveling together in the laundry truck. He has learned to narrate landscapes, and now it’s time to come home.
She says, “I’d learned mister’s story. I needed a new one. I confess I’m addicted to this, being led through rooms on a strong arm.”
He hopes that she won’t ever leave him, that she won’t one day ask a stranger to take her with him—perhaps while he’s sleeping like the furry, waspish service station owner—and, if she does, he hopes that the stranger is a better man than he is. He is disastrous at being good. He can feel himself failing even while he prides himself on being the strong arm. He can hear his own tinny voice rising up: How is this good? Stealing a blind woman from a service station to make love to her in your mother’s house? Never returning to your job, because you see fit to show someone the world you know? And yet he is desperately trying. Mostly, he has much to say, so much his heart aches in his chest. It isn’t love but the urging toward release. He leads her down the hall. There’s a douche bag hanging on a hook behind the door, iodine and vinegar bottles on a table. The room holds the yeasty ferment of bodies, sweat, the weeping ocean scent of sex, and deep in the room’s cankerous history, the bear’s fur and breath, Mr. Bucci’s small gas burner. He’ll get to his father, his mother, Willard, Lettie, the show people, the whores. He feels embattled, a casualty and yet resolved.
He will get to everything he knows and form from dust what he doesn’t. But he’ll begin here, undoing the small, chipped buttons on her sleeve’s cuff that loosen at her thin wrist, and inch his way, painstakingly, irrefutably, into the swollen, swelling past.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for discussion for Julianna Baggott’s The Madam. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
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A Conversation with Julianna Baggott
Q: You have said that Pixie, one of the main characters in your previous novel, The Miss America Family, is the most deeply feminist character that you have ever written. Do you still feel that way, or has Alma surpassed Pixie in that vein?
A: Feminism is a political stance. Pixie is very interested in the politics of being a woman in our society. In fact, her short-lived venture into prostitution isn’t about survival at all, but her own philosophy about being a woman that she chooses to play out. Although she would refuse to call herself a feminist, she is one, doggedly, nearly militantly so.
Alma, on the other hand, is a pragmatist. Although her childhood memories, her fears and desires play a role in her choosing to be a madam, she is mainly being practical in an era that offers few options. I would be interested in reading a feminist investigation of Alma, but I don’t think of her in those terms. She is, simply, a woman who makes her way in the world, a fierce mother, and, ultimately, a survivor.
Q: Do you have a sense of who your audience is? Do you ever write with them in mind?
A: Because The Madam was based on people in my own family, I began by thinking of them, and then the story rose up, as swollen as the Monongahela River, and I waded out into it. The language is teeming, and I showed my love for the people who came before me by the tender crafting of each sentence. I didn’t think of my larger audience except that the novel has an intimacy that I hope readers feel reeled into.
Q: What were the challenges that you faced when writing this book? Was it difficult to write a fictional story that was based on actual events in your relatives’ lives?
A: The novel demanded a lot of research—hosiery mills and Miami docks, opium and coal—but unearthing family secrets proved more emotional than I’d expected. My grandmother, my main source, was very open, her memory pure and accurate. And although she was at peace with the past, I wasn’t. A certain heartache surfaced alongside an undeniable power. I hope that these are evident.
Q: It is interesting that some of the most significant, healthy, supportive relationships in this book are between women. And while they are not necessarily romantic (save for Roxy and Delphine, of course) they have an intensity and a strength that is admirable. Was this something that you consciously tried to describe in this book?
A: No, I wasn’t consciously trying to make women out to be admirable, nor the bonds between them. I think that men and women under duress form unusual alliances to survive.
Also, I didn’t make the men out to be weak. One reviewer gave me a hard time about my treatment of the men in the novel. In my mind, however, the only truly evil man in the book is Sir Lee. His cruelty shaped Smitty—who is a sad character. Henry suffers wanderlust. I don’t rule out his return. The reverend is a good man, desperate to save his daughter. Willard is innocent. And Irving is the character in the novel who is most concerned with his soul, his own need to be good.
Q: On a similar note, do you think the ending of this novel is a positive one? You have said before, when asked where men belong in the story, that Irving (who has the last point of view) is “redemptive.” But is he just redeeming men, or does the voice speak to a larger sense of redemption for everyone?
A: Irving gets the final voice because—still protected from knowing the fate of Smitty and Lettie—he has the broadest view at the end of the novel. I didn’t want to end within that final violent scene. I wanted the novel to reach beyond it. I never thought of this novel politically while writing it. So I wasn’t thinking that giving Irving the final point of view was a commentary on patriarchal society, etc…. Irving is the writer, in a way, and the blind woman is the reader, and the novel lifts away from itself.
Q: At one point in this novel, Alma begins to question her parental approach; she wonders if maybe she hasn’t been giving her children “poisonous creatures” by showing them the ugly, real world. What do you think of Alma’s parenting style?
A: The initial attempts at writing this novel failed because I was judging Alma. She had three children. I have three children. I was hard on her. But I know the success or failure of a piece that I’m writing depends, at the moment of writing it, on my willingness to fall in love. If I’m too busy judging then I’ll never fall in love. I tried desperately to shake the judgments. Finally I realized that I had to do more than fall in love with Alma. I had to become her. It helps that we have the same heart, something piston-driven, that I’m lustful and strong-willed, naturally, genetically.
Q: In a sense, most of the characters in this novel seem unable to heal the emotional scars that they carry around with them. In fact, they seem in large part motivated by the negative experiences that have shaped their world. Do you think people are ever free from their pasts?
A: No, I don’t think people are free of their pasts. However, we can change
the way we look at the past and therefore change its effects on us. If you look on the acknowledgments page, you’ll see that I thank my mother for not hiding anything, even our ugliness. For me, it was important to know about my family’s history. I’ve been questioned about it many times—this idea of knowing, of my mother handing the darker stories over to me—and I’ve never truly understood the questions which often insinuate a sense of shame. I’ve never had a moment of shame, only a deeper understanding of the raucous heart given to me, the persistent soul, and, I must admit, I’ve had to contend with a fiery sense of ancestral pride.
Q: This novel ruminates quite a bit on the nature of desire. It’.s certainly a force to be reckoned with—so much so that even a holy man like the Reverend Line is not immune. Do you think people can ever conquer their desires?
A: I think people conquer their desires all the time, because desire is little match for fear.