Chapter Two #4
Some girls married young in order to run away from home.
She’d married early so as to try to have one.
An only child of two magnificently self-involved parents, on the move with every new booking they secured, she’d always longed for what she’d seen her parents able to enact on stage, but never experienced in reality: a stable life in a real home.
One that would be far from the theater, a place like the ones she read about in Little Women and other of Miss Alcott’s books, or like those she’d seen portrayed behind the footlights since she’d been old enough to dream of a better life.
It didn’t have to be an elegant place, such as the kind she’d seen created for School For Scandal or The Mighty Dollar, for example.
No, it might even have a humble parlor like the one she remembered the Beacon Theater set up for East Lynne—something filled with samplers and rag rugs and glowing firelight, a home that was so warm and welcoming, the audience could understand, after one look, why a girl would truly weep to be exiled from it.
And a kitchen, a real one, only very like the one she’d seen at the Savoy for The Old Homestead: a place fit for unimaginably domestic wonders to be done in; a room in which miraculous things, like the actual baking of pies, could be performed.
And a front yard filled with real, not cardboard flowers.
But most of all, whether elegant or homely, it would be a home like none she’d ever known: one that wasn’t rented or temporary.
With someone in it like no one she’d ever known: someone who’d love her for herself, and not for her reaction to themselves.
John Roberts had come backstage one afternoon when she’d been seventeen.
He’d come to deliver a parcel from his mercantile store, only that.
He hadn’t even tried to scrape up an acquaintance with any actress there, he’d only ogled them as if they’d been creatures from another world, which of course, they’d been to him.
But so she’d found him to be to her. Because they’d started talking.
And then walking out together. He was no more than average-looking, and she could not, even now, remember even the cleverest things he’d said.
But he’d listened and looked at her as she’d never been attended to before, and he’d said he never cared for any other girl as he did for her.
She’d no reason to disbelieve him, because for all he was and was not, he was certainly no actor.
They hadn’t known each other very long, nothing like the year she’d heard girls from the outside world required for a proper courtship, when she decided to marry him, as he had asked.
And at once. As he had not. Because when Father had finally noticed their courtship, he’d laughed at the very idea of her making a life with a man from outside the theater, and one with such meager prospects, at that.
It had done what John’s courtship had not had a chance to do.
It decided her. And so by the time Julius Caesar was done with its run, and it was time to move on, she’d moved out and into holy wedlock with John.
Father had come to the hasty wedding and wept at being made to feel so old, as Mother had grieved at losing an able pair of hands backstage. To give them their due, they’d said it was because they’d expected so much more from her. John only wanted a wife. At least she knew she could be that.
But she was wrong. Because not two months after their wedding day, John had finally raged up from out of their bed, telling her the truth, at last, about her deficiency as he’d packed.
And then, still avoiding her eye, had left her and the city forever.
She could hate, but scarcely blame him for it.
It couldn’t have been easy for him, he was not that much older than she was, although vastly more experienced of the world—and women.
How should she blame him for refusing to live half a life with her?
And all because of something so profoundly intimate and embarrassing that she still could not so much as think of it without blushing.
A thing neither of them could have suspected or helped or even discussed before they were wed, much less at any length after—a thing she’d been born with—or was—she’d never got the terminology straight.
It hardly mattered. It was certainly enough to know she was imperfectly made, and so for all her charms, useless as a wife or a prospective mother, as well as unable to grant him what he most wanted from her.
She understood that part of it absolutely.
There’d been enough difficulty to establish that fact even before he’d spoken.
Isolated as her life had been, she’d no other female to confide in—certainly not her mother—and had been unsure of whether she had to go to a doctor, and then afraid to, and then it was unnecessary.
He’d been to see one, he said. She was not, she was given to understand, a complete woman, and certainly, even after all that embarrassment and pain, all too obviously not his wife.
It was because of a mistake of nature, imperceptible to her eye even if she’d the courage and the means to look, or the knowledge to know what she’d see if she did.
An error of nature’s that she’d not known about, but one of great magnitude for him—and her.
Still, she understood his decision even as she wept for it.
After all, hadn’t she run from a life, however attractive on the surface, that offered her nothing she really wanted?
It was ironic that it turned out she was so like everything she’d tried to escape from.
Because it seemed to her that she was like that magnificent cake she’d coveted when she’d been a child, the one she’d seen her mother carry on stage one night…
only to discover after the show that it was literally only for the show, being nothing but a perfect fraud with wooden layers and painted icing.
She’d no course but to conceal the fault as she did the hurt of having it, which wasn’t difficult since it required only that she never again permit anyone mental or physical intimacies with her.
And since she’d never had the one and couldn’t achieve the other, she was safe enough after she went back to the backstage of her parents’ lives.
John Roberts had done better, though his life had been briefer.
Because he’d taken up with some woman in Philadelphia, and produced a son with her before his hot temper had gotten him into a saloon brawl that took his life and widowed her.
He’d left Hannah nothing but a hard lesson, and alone, even though she’d returned to her parents when he’d first left.
What else was she to do? Now the very idea of marriage was absurd.
Even if she were the sort of woman who had no morals, which she was not, the thought of a lesser and more profitable affiliation with a man—such as many girls in the theater had with their admirers—was equally ridiculous.
Once, a few years later, when a particularly charming young Tristan had seemed uncommonly taken with her, she’d stolen out to buy a medical book, which had told her nothing she didn’t know, and more she couldn’t understand.
He’d been diverted by a more accommodating ingenue by the time she’d finished reading it, but by then she’d begun to accumulate more medical books expressly written for the common man and woman.
There were dozens available; people didn’t trust doctors, even if there’d been enough of them around to trust. There were fewer doctors that one could even think of speaking to about that secret, shameful subject usually covered in chapters titled: “The Generative Organs” or “Women’s Difficulties” or “Words of Advice on Marital Matters.” Soon Hannah estimated she knew more about the evil consequences of self-pollution, the various diseases of womankind, and the way to birth healthy babes, than any female of her age in New York City.
But nothing more about her problem. And as all the diagrams of intimate anatomy were done in cross section, it was even impossible to recognize anything she possessed. She gave it up.
Some time later, when a truly kind as well as determined older gentleman from She Stoops To Conquer sought her company, she found a new book by a doctor whose offices happened to be not two blocks from the theater they were at.
There were dozens of testimonials to him from satisfied patients in the book; he wrote in a kind, agreeable manner.
Best of all, at the conclusion of his book, after the usual chapters on diseases, the evils of unfortunate habits, and the rigors of childbirth, he’d written a personal note.
For a fee of five dollars, he stated that he would diagnose and prescribe for any woman’s ailment that she described to him by letter, because he realized so many lived too far from his New York City offices for any other kind of consultation to be possible.
And because, as he wrote with exquisite discretion:
“I have found that the mail offers facilities for a confidence between the patient and physician by which they may inform him of delicate matters that they would never divulge at an interview: matters that they have long worried over, and yet dared not consult their family physician about.”
Since Hannah’s family physician changed with each theater they played, and she was sure whichever one she consulted wouldn’t hesitate to share her confidences with her Father—and that, she could not bear to think about—Dr. Smith’s offer was a godsend.
She passed the better part of three nights revising her letter until it was a model of delicacy of feeling and euphemism.
Dr. Smith’s eventual reply was no less a masterpiece.
He reviewed the several things that could be her problem in language that only her reading of several dozen medical books enabled her to understand.
He then wrote with genuine sorrow, that in her case he believed her particular problem would need a personal examination in order to diagnose. Then he wrote:
“But, of course, as you are now a widow, the problem need never concern you again. Should you remarry, your husband might wish a finer diagnosis, and in that case, I would urge you to overcome your understandable and laudable scruples and fine sense of modesty, and come to my offices immediately for a thorough examination, Sincerely.”
Men continued to find her attractive; it had to do, she believed, with things she’d little to do with—her eyes, the way they seemed fascinated by her mouth…
She learned to disregard them. If she felt so much as the stirrings of temptation, she knew enough not to.
She acquired a reputation for virtue. She knew it for wisdom.
She acquired more. She plotted and planned another escape.
It wasn’t that her parents were cruel or unfeeling, only that she’d learned by hard experience from an early age onward that they were quintessential actors, and so thought only of themselves and simulated every other feeling.
It suited them, but she was weary of that.
Nor was it that she didn’t love them, but only that she knew they scarcely noted or needed her mite of adoration.
She wished for more, even if it was only to eventually deserve her own love for herself.
Times were changing, these days a woman might try to support herself, if she must. Of course, it was scandalous, but she was, after all, from a theatrical family.
She might have inherited some of her parents’ selfishness, if not their brilliance, she thought, because if she were only to be a helpmeet of theirs, she saw little reason to continue to be, at all.
She reasoned they must have passed on some of their courage to her, too, since an actor must have that or be nothing.
Because after six years she’d stored up enough money and confidence to strike out on her own.
Which was, she conceded sadly, looking about her small studio now, certainly what she’d have done literally this time if it weren’t for Kyle Harper’s offer.
It turned out that few people in New York City needed or wanted elocution lessons, at least not from her.
There were too many well-known actors and actresses reduced to giving lessons in this city of theaters.
And since there would never be any given by the woman who might be able to make a success at it—the one named Hannah Darling, a lady with a famous name that fairly shouted her experience and talent—she’d never have a real chance at it.
But just imagining the look on Father’s face if she’d taken his name and not his advice had been enough to keep her up nights.
That—and the thought of her growing debts.
Because after six months at her new profession, she’d only three clients; little Harry Platt, the butcher’s boy, whose stuttering irked his father so much it had almost caused him to lose a finger; Mrs. Harrison, who cherished dreams of reciting poetry at her church group so stirringly as to make Reverend Ames weep, before he proposed to her for her fine sensitivity; and, of course, the feckless Miss Lesley.
Three clients, one of whom disliked her intensely.
Not very much to show for having lived almost all of twenty-four years, Hannah thought wistfully as she sighed, arose, and began to make neat piles of that which she’d take, and that which she’d leave behind.
But she’d passed most of those years in the theater, and had a knowledge of it which was equaled by few women.
And so, she straightened her back as she straightened up her room, and remembered, at least, to keep that thought.
Because she didn’t doubt that where she was going, she’d need everything she could take with her.