WOMAN’S OWN
Robyn Carr
Copyright © 1990 by Robyn Carr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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In loving memory of Alice Entzminger, “Grandmother E”
A certain light was beginning
to dawn dimly within her--
the light which, showing the
way, forbids it.
But the beginning of things, of
a world especially, is
necessarily vague, tangled,
chaotic and exceedingly
disturbing. How few of us ever
emerge from such a beginning!
How many souls perish in its
tumult!
--Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Prologue
Philadelphia, April 13, 1859
There is no power so reckless as a woman’s need to be loved. It is a hunger destined to be fed, a yearning that is oblivious to class, intelligence, discipline, and probity. Her urgency for a wholeness of the body and soul, to be made complete, to possess and be possessed, is an inevitable force. For some women it is an awakening of life. For others, their doom.
Mary Leshay, known simply as Old Mary, pondered the dilemma of this need routinely, for she was a midwife in a poor Philadelphianeighborhood. Her faith in God was unshakable, but she often wondered why so many of His children were created and then abandoned to desperate lives. Her patient might die, which was all too often the case, but the man who had answered a young woman’s need with his own was not here to share in the meaning of life, nor to act as an escort to death’s gate.
Old Mary mopped the fevered brow of the woman. Betsy, her granddaughter and helper, held the just-born infant while the woman’s first daughter, a blond tot of fifteen months, whimpered and clung close to Betsy’s skirt.
“Mama. Mama.” The cry did not come from the small child, but from the mother’s anguished mouth. Her second daughter had come forth with great difficulty; the baby was large and breech. Old Mary had been forced to turn the infant before it could be born, a procedure both torturous and dangerous. Now the bleeding would not stop and there was fever.
The woman Old Mary tended, Emily, had lived in this shanty for months, but little was known about her. The midwife was called by neighbors who saw Emily’s child standing alone in the opened door of the shanty, her face tear-stained and her hair snarled. Emily usually kept the little one tidy and quiet and so those who passed her shanty daily knew something was wrong; they were afraid Emily was dead.
Old Mary mixed her herbs into water. “You’re the mama here, child,” she told her patient. “You think about getting well so you can take care of this new baby girl.”
The midwife squeezed out a rag in cool water and placed it on Emily’s forehead. Her eyes, glazed with fever, stared up at the old midwife. “My baby?”
“That baby’s fine--strong and pretty. But you’re a sick mama. Can you drink this?”
Old Mary lifted Emily’s head and helped her. If the fever broke, Mary would go home and get broth and cider. Emily had stale water in supply but there was nothing in the little house to eat.
For several months Old Mary had seen this woman standing in the doorway of the ramshackle hut. Her little girl was either balanced on her hip or stood clinging to her skirt. She grew round with her second child. Once or twice Mary talked with her but the midwife’s services were not requested. Mary had but to look around the room to see that the reason was poverty. Emily should not have waited for that reason; Old Mary had never turned her back on a woman in need.
Emily had very few possessions, none of them practical. A bowl and pitcher sat on the floor; a china chamber pot on the other side of the room. It was the first one Old Mary had ever seen in this neighborhood. Most people here had a bucket, if that. There was a small oval portrait in an ivory frame: a young girl. This girl? There was hardly any resemblance between this poor creature, her face bleached and drawn, and the robust blond beauty in the painting. A few dresses lay on the floor in the corner; a crate held two cups and two bowls. Emily’s table. There was a miniature stool for the child, no chair for Emily. Did she kneel beside her daughter?
Old Mary called to her granddaughter. “Betsy, bring that baby here.” Mary pulled back the thin quilt from her patient’s breast. There was only an old, stained sheet between the woman and the rough straw tick on which she lay. “Emily, child, if you nurse this baby maybe the blood’ll stop. It works sometimes with the herbs. It can hurt terrible, but we have to try. Can you try, child?”
Emily’s eyes opened and she strained herself to concentrate on the midwife’s instructions. “Emily,” she whispered. “I am Emily. Please. Try. Please.”
The midwife arranged the baby against Emily’s breast, propping the infant with a rolled towel; Emily lacked the strength to hold her newborn against her. Then, as the baby suckled, Old Mary dug her wrinkled hands into the woman’s flaccid abdomen, massaging deeply. She felt Emily’s innards tighten underneath her skilled fingers in response to the babe’s suckling. Emily moaned and cried as a bright river of blood flowed between her thighs. Then it slowed.
When the pain from the contractions stopped, Emily slept again. The bleeding had been so severe that if the fever didn’t kill her, the blood loss might. Mary carried the newborn back to Betsy and began the arduous task of cleaning up. She should have guessed that poverty was the reason this woman did not hire her. Much of this suffering might have been avoided had Mary turned the baby much earlier to make the birth easier.
“She gonna live, Granny?” Betsy asked.
“Maybe. She’s too sick to get well here, too sick to carry out of here. But these babies sure is pretty ones.” She looked around the little shelter. Though poor and nearly bare, there were painstaking touches of home. Half a thick green velvet skirt covered the only window, wooden spools served as candleholders, rags used for washing had been cut from quality undergarments, a clothesline had been stretched between two walls at the corner. Right now, however, there was no food. Poor thing, Old Mary thought. How’s she gonna feed these babies?
“She got any people?” Betsy asked. “I can’t see ‘bout these babies, Granny.”
The little girl had crawled closer to her mother’s pallet, curling up in a tight little knot on the edge of the quilt. She wore an old shirt, one that might have been found on a rag pile. On her feet she wore her mother’s stockings, doubled over and tied with grass rope. Her knees were drawn against her stomach, probably in hunger. Emily had labored for two days and couldn’t rise from her bed to see about her firstborn. The little one shuddered and whimpered from time to time.
“There ain’t no one,” Old Mary said.
“She’s been callin’ for her ma. And someone named Ned. Ned her man?”
“Women don’t get this way alone, but there sure ain’t no man here now.”
The neighbors said that a man had moved this woman and her child into the little dwelling and left them. Shortly after he had left, they noticed her belly rounding out, but they didn’t see him again. And from the way they lived, he didn’t send money. The neighbors took pity on her now and then and gave her scraps of food and such, but they complained she couldn’t do for herself at all. Someone gave her ground wheat and lard, but she only stared at it; she didn’t even know how to make flat bread. No one understood how she had lived this long without starving to death.
But Old Mary understood. She had looked at the quilt that covered her patient. Emily had obviously sewn it for herself and her young. Her stitches were pretty, neat, and strong; she had
cut scraps evenly, decoratively, though she had no batting to fill the quilt, which was thin as a sheet. But the child wore an old shirt. Emily had not cut down one of her dresses for her daughter because, although she knew how to sew and sew well, she did not know how to make useful things. Such was the case with many rich girls. Emily did not know how to do for herself, Mary decided, because she never had before.
“I can’t see ‘bout these babies while she’s sick, Granny. I got my own babies to worry ‘bout,” Betsy reminded her grandmother.
“Just worry ‘bout your own, then. I’ll see ‘bout ‘em.”
A sound came from the mat and Mary crouched down again. Emily looked like a china plate, her skin was so pale and thin. But her eyes blazed with a potency rare for a woman who had endured so much. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, help me…my babies…”
“You’re gonna be all right, child. You sleep if you can.”
“My babies…my Patsy…”
“Old Mary’ll see ‘bout these babies, child. And you. We’ll get you right.”
Emily sighed and let her eyes close, exhausted sleep consuming her. Mary touched her forehead and found it had cooled. A slow smile grew wide and dark on her nearly toothless mouth. She had beaten the sickness again. The fever was waning. She pulled back the curious quilt and looked between Emily’s thighs. There was only the old, dark stain; there was no new red glistening. They had gotten the bad blood out.
Mary had grown up in this neighborhood when it was far less crowded. Her husband had built the house she still lived in, but all around the waterfront little shanties like this one had taken over. Negroes fled from southern slavery to the northern cities and thousands of Irish and Germans clustered on American shores, light of money but heavy with dreams of freedom, opportunity, and success. Sometimes it seemed they never got farther than the docks, living in these little boxes--still, better homes for many of them than what they had left. The shanties were built against warehouses and against each other, far into the street. Some were made of wood, some were hardly more than crates discarded by shippers, tied or nailed together. They were never purchased or sold like real property, but traded, claimed, or just abandoned. One like Emily’s, with a window of glass and a door that closed, was a quality shanty in a sea of waterfront hovels. There were no yards, of course, and it was not unusual for coaches or wagons carrying people and goods to the docks to scrape against these little houses and knock them down.
Old Mary had seen women in Emily’s straits every day of her life. Alone by some misfortune, left to scrape together an existence for themselves and their young because some man’s sin had been visited on them. They came from all manner of beginnings--poor since birth, immigrants from foreign lands, from good families, widowhood, illness, joblessness. Destitute women, trapped in poverty they couldn’t escape, could be seen all over Philadelphia. Some could find drudgery work in richer homes or factories, and they left their children alone on the streets while they went in search of earnings. Some would take another man, sometimes for money straight out and sometimes with the hope that this one would stay and keep them fed. If they didn’t take a man, a man might take them; many of the infants Old Mary delivered were the result of rapes, for these women were not only lacking in money and love--they had no protection.
Mary delivered their young whether or not they could pay; she had opened her door to them, had been called out to their shanties, to where they were. If called, she would go even to alleys to deliver women of their young.
Emily was older than most; had she lived this kind of low life through her youth, she would have some knack for survival and she probably would have birthed her second child at fifteen, not twenty. She offered to work in the neighborhood but had no skills. Her skills or the lack hardly mattered here; there was no work. She tried to trade trinkets, so the neighbors wondered if she had stolen; people here did not have lace hankies, lockets, hair combs, petticoats, corsets, fans. Mary could guess why she had such frivolous things when she had no decent cooking pots. A man, Old Mary thought, took her away from a good family, filling her head with promises and her belly with his young before leaving her here. Such a story was not rare.
Emily wept and begged for help on behalf of her babies. When poor, broken women brought forth a child, all too often they cursed the offspring and, in despair and hopelessness, cried bitterly for death. Poor women learned early that the presence of children made life only harder, more impossible.
The light of dawn began to streak through the loose seams in the shanty walls. Everyone slept but Old Mary, and in the growing light she could see that the room was free of cobwebs, the dirt floor was packed solid and uncluttered. Emily had kept the place as clean as possible; other shanty dwellers battled vermin for they carelessly dropped food scraps and didn’t dump their slops. Old Mary considered Emily’s effort and pride.
It seemed she would live. Would her family take her back? What if she had food and a place for her children? If she were taken in, trained up, taught to bake bread, and put those neat little stitches to something that wanted mending, could she make her way? She had fight in her; it took fight of a powerful sort to survive childbed fever in circumstances like these.
Generosity was typical of Old Mary, but she had never before considered taking a woman in. She needed help now, because of her age and because her granddaughter had her own children to think about. Maybe if she could get Emily strong and teach her a few things, she might help with the midwifing and chores in exchange for keep.
Old Mary’s hand had been grasped and squeezed by many a tortured woman, but Emily had reached out to her in a forceful way. Something almost radiant cut through Emily’s pleading voice, through the gloss of fear and fever in her eyes. It was a quality rare in this part of the city, and perhaps it would die in Emily, too. But it could save her. It was the very thing to be blamed for creating this tragedy, yet the only thing that could give her the spirit and strength to free herself from this kind of life.
A willful spirit.
Chapter One
April 20, 1876
“I don’t think I can,” Lilly said.
“Of course you can,” Patricia insisted. “There’s nothing to it. And men are very attracted by it; well, they’re attracted to frailty.”
Lilly frowned her doubt.
“All right, I’ll show you again, so pay close attention. First, show that you’re shocked--offended. Outraged. Maybe bring your hand up to your mouth, like so, then begin to fade away, as if you’re overcome. Turn your feet slightly, let your knees buckle, and…” Patricia, eighteen and slight of build, swayed downward in an authentic-looking faint. She melted to the floor where a collection of pillows, petticoats, shawls, and quilts softened her fall. Then she sat up smiling. “See?”
Lilly rolled her eyes. “It’s so…dishonest, Patsy.”
“Oh pish, men aren’t interested in honesty, ninny. Not at first anyway. I read about this in Ladies’ Own magazine--when men are looking for prospective brides, they’ll judge a woman’s moral character by how she reacts to a slightly, well, provocative remark or gesture. They’re supposed to protect and defend our moral character. Think about it, Lilly. You’ll be tested. Why would a man want a woman who needn’t rely on the strength of his protection? They count on us to be weak. Well, at least weaker than they are.”
“This whole thing keeps sounding worse and worse,” said Lilly. Seven years ago, when she was ten, Lilly had been the only child in the neighborhood brave enough to walk right up to the maggot-infested body of some unfortunate killed on the railroad tracks. Boys included.
Patricia stood up from the cushioning pile and smoothed her skirt. “Come on, try it. You said you would.”
Lilly was almost a year and a half younger than Patricia, but larger of stature by three inches and fifteen pounds. Their mother had declared Lilly not quite graceful, and considering all the possible uses for grace, such as preening or pretending to faint so that some as yet u
nknown man might become attracted to her feigned weakness, it did not stir any excitement in Lilly.
“Try. Just in case you decide, as I know you will, that it’s something you need to know. And try to look womanly.”
Lilly took her place in front of the pile as Patricia had instructed, but she distrusted the reasoning. Their mother, Emily, whom they both considered the epitome of womanliness, would never faint. Though small like Patricia, Emily had the stamina of a general. And sometimes the air of command as well.
“Lillian! Patricia!”
Patricia made a face to show her annoyance, but she went to the bedroom door to answer their mother’s call immediately. Emily stood below at the banister. “Yes, Mama. One minute more, please? We’re pract-- We’re just cleaning up, Mama.”
“Be quick then. Don’t dally.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Patricia obediently promised. Then she turned back to Lilly. “Go on,” she demanded. “Try it.” There was an obstinate lift to Patricia’s chin. Lilly was very well acquainted with her older sister’s single-mindedness. “Do it.”
Lilly concentrated hard for a moment. She thought this was probably foolishness, but she had to admit that Patricia had already mastered many feminine wiles by her seventeenth year. At eighteen she had a gallery of beaux. Lilly didn’t have beaux, nor did she wish to, but Patricia kept insisting she would soon change her mind about that. These lessons, according to Patricia, were essential. Partly because Lilly feared her sister might be right and partly because Patricia would not give in before having her way, Lilly prepared to faint.
Lilly opened her eyes suddenly, as though she had just seen a naked man, drew up her hand to cover her startled, gaping mouth, and went backward. She forgot about turning her knees slightly, forgot about drifting slowly to the floor. She hit the protective pile in a stiff, poorly orchestrated thunk. Then there was the telltale sound of ooofff.