1910
Opal waited to see if the woman might go away.
She didn’t dare move, not even to peer through the peephole.
When the woman knocked a third time, Opal relented.
There Bertie Tuttle stood, umbrella aloft, a gasp of yellow against the morning gray.
Her expression was pleasantly inscrutable.
She wore honeysuckle perfume, like the coming of spring.
It was only the first of March. Rain bore down, making Opal feel lightheaded, far away from her body.
When she felt this way, Jagr would give her a tonic to ensure the weather didn’t trigger an unusual episode.
“Bottom to the top,” he’d say, tipping her glass until she nearly choked on the liquid. Now, she reminded herself to breathe.
“I found your address in your employment file. I hope you don’t mind,” Bertie said. Behind her, a bright yellow Franklin with gleaming chrome attracted the attention of neighborhood children. She motioned to the driver, and he pulled away, up the street and around the corner, out of sight.
“Mrs. Tuttle,” Opal said. “How unexpected.” She tried to focus, to anticipate why Charles Tuttle’s wife would be here, at her home. It couldn’t be good. Hadn’t she always been taught to never bring attention to herself? Isn’t that why her mother brought her to Jagr in the first place?
Bertie extended her hand to be shaken. Her nails were manicured, filed to a point. How could she manage the most basic tasks with nails so long? Then she remembered: domestics.
“Please, Bertie.”
Bertie. Informal. Familiar. Not the way she’d imagine the woman might speak to her help.
Her voice held a musical quality—years of enunciation training from the finishing school she’d attended in New England.
She remembered how when she saw Bertie a month ago, the woman had walked right up to her and touched her necklace, as though they were already intimate.
Opal motioned Bertie inside.
Opal’s rented rooms were shotgun style, no hallways.
The door opened directly into the front parlor, and Opal gestured toward the chair near the window.
Bertie set her umbrella in the stand. She registered the table, the muslin window coverings, the unlit hearth, the wallpaper the color of weak tea.
She removed her coat and unpinned her hat, then, looking about for a place to hang them, finally handed the items to Opal.
“My husband would be in a fit of pique if he knew I was here,” she said.
“I don’t need to be the further subject of gossip in the Inquisitor.
Dixie Ellison, the classic quidnunc, now really.
She’d twist any story into a sordid tale, make it about the depravity of human nature, the undoing of mankind.
” She stopped and turned toward Opal. This was a woman accustomed to an audience, but now she recognized the two women were finally alone.
She softened some more. “Well, you know what I mean, I’m sure, since she’s recently made you a subject of her writing. ”
Opal did know. Two days ago, at the beginning of her shift, the Earthshine Girls had crowded around her station. Betsy produced the newspaper and spread it out. “You’re famous, Madame Doucet,” she said. “I bet they’ll want your picture.”
Her picture in the paper was the last thing she wanted.
Now Bertie produced a cutout of Dixie About Town, as though evidence of a crime she’d committed. “I’ve come to talk to you about this.” She set the paper square on the table between them.
An Earthshine Girl who goes by Madame Doucet claims to be a medical spiritualist who can divine ethereal cures from “the other side” and is treating the Earthshine Factory Girls for a variety of mystery ailments with Comet Pills.
Such quackery, as has been seen in other cities, makes a mockery of Christianity and modern science alike.
Pity the girl ensnared by such fleecing.
Opal’s eyes fell on her name. The words “Madame Doucet” looked foreign to her, like the name of an actress on a playbill after you’ve come to know the character she played onstage. “I need my job. Really, I do. I was only trying to help the women. Tell your husband—”
“My husband is not the reason I’m here.” Bertie removed her gloves and set them on the table.
They looked ghostly, satin white and still molded in the shape of her hands.
“Trusting you’ll keep my confidence, I won’t have to bring my husband into this at all.
In fact, I prefer it that way.” Her words contained a threat, though she delivered them conspiratorially.
She took a seat, adjusted herself, and said: “I’ve come, myself, for a cure. ”
Rain pitter-pattered on the roof. A barge horn sounded in the distance. Opal wondered if this was a test of some sort, and what she must say to pass it. Bertie was a woman of means; what help could she possibly need from someone like her?
“You’re unwell?” Opal asked finally. “Like the others?” Betsy had missed three days of work last week, but when she returned her complexion was dewy with what the other girls called a pregnancy glow.
“The others,” Bertie said. “I don’t want to talk about the others. That’s the problem with doctors. They’re always comparing me to someone else.”
“I don’t claim to be a doctor,” Opal said.
Though she had helped, hadn’t she? The Earthshine Girls reported their ailments had subsided.
The Comet Pills brought them relief—euphoria, even.
Pearl’s moods had evened out. Ruth lost a few pounds.
Gilly reported she’d never felt more energetic in her life.
At her station, Maria looked radiant. She’d hold a bar of soap aloft before wrapping it—“Don’t you love how it just fits so perfectly in your hand?
” she’d say. Maria couldn’t imagine why she’d ever felt so glum.
She asked for a refill of Comet Pills; all the girls did.
A clap of thunder in the distance, unusual for this time of year. The news blamed anything on the comet: temperamental weather, electrical fires, the stock market, influenza.
“You must understand, I’ve never been to … one of … you before,” Bertie said.
She was uncomfortable saying spiritualist or psychic, or medium, or spook.
She was too bent on propriety; she wouldn’t utter those words any more than she’d utter aloud the term for a man’s reproductive anatomy.
A congress limb, she might declare it, if pressed.
She sat back in her chair and held her head at a tilt, as though the world appeared crooked and she intended to right it.
Bertie continued: “Dixie Ellison calls me a wife of fortune and convenience, though whose fortune? And whose convenience?” She pressed her fingertips together as she spoke.
“It’s my family’s company, though you’d think I’m the one who married him for money if you read the papers.
It’s all so embarrassing, especially since I have no control over it.
” She took in a long breath and exhaled like she was extinguishing a candle.
“I’ve seen all the doctors. I even went to supposed experts in New England, and yet nobody can seem to answer the simplest question, the only question I want answered. ”
Opal understood. Her fortune, her inheritance, at the mercy of her reproductive organs. “Sterility,” Opal said, and Bertie looked in receipt of an insult, shocked.
“So I’m told.”
Opal had seen plenty of sad-eyed women who’d visited Jagr when nature didn’t take its course.
The causes were varied: anemia, overeating, tight girdles, too much reading, a faulty condition of the uterus, an unbalanced lifestyle, a husband’s frequent visits to prostitutes that left his poor wife with disease.
Jagr had told Opal stories of “secret insemination” or other procedures performed under anesthesia, but he treated sterility with only botanical remedies.
That was the irony: Her husband could remedy sterility—or he could render it, like he had with her. He viewed each patient as a series of symptoms seeking relief, as a problem to be solved. He was a good doctor. His cures did not discriminate.
“My husband doesn’t read the gossip column,” Bertie said, and here she stopped speaking and her eyelids fluttered, just enough to register that she did, and so she knew what Dixie had written about her husband and his mistress.
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t see this article.
I’ll make sure there are no repercussions if he does see it.
” Bertie folded the newspaper clipping in half, then in half again, then she tucked it into her pocketbook. She straightened her posture.
Then her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t looking at Opal so much as she was looking through her, as though her gaze were an X-ray machine that could detect the bone of her existence. Opal resisted the urge to move, to give away her nerves.
Opal settled herself at the table and leaned back against the chair. Recently, a pain had lodged itself beneath her rib cage and it wouldn’t relent unless she stretched herself backward. Her body was not her body, but something shifting and taking new shape.
“A little amusement, if nothing else,” Bertie said, lightening.
“What, are the ghosts here?” She laughed, and sound returned to the room: the pigeon roosting outside the window.
The rain like a scurry of animals against the glass.
“We could all use some amusement, couldn’t we?
Those scientists say the world will end with that comet, that’s all you hear about.
It gives me the morbs. I don’t want to think about endings. ”
“Then let’s think about beginnings,” Opal said.
A few minutes later, Opal struck a match.
She and Bertie joined hands. Their toes touched beneath the table.
The room sparked with anticipation. She asked Bertie to count with her to three, then Opal let go and pounded the table with her fist. She sensed the tingling at her feet that rose up through her bones.
A warmth. The slowing of her heart. A stillness and excitement.
A kind of fear. A kind of ecstasy. As she spoke, her whole body felt buoyant, like she was floating on water. She listened.
Bertie closed her eyes, and Opal studied her respiration, counting her breaths. She made note of her nails and her coloring, and her pulse, which could be felt by extending her finger to graze her wrist.
“Think of the good I could provide for a baby,” Bertie said as the two women began to hum. “Think of all the good I could do with my inheritance.” Bertie squeezed Opal’s hand, and for a moment the world contained only possibility.