Chapter Twelve #2
It would be nice to take a hansom cab, and Hannah felt she could justify it, too.
She’d just secured a new position and had money in her purse that she’d reaped from the old one.
And after Aspen, she felt she was accustomed to some sort of luxury.
But her rooms were near the Elevated Railway line, and since she’d already arranged to have her great domed wardrobe trunk sent on ahead, her two traveling cases weren’t that heavy, and she’d plans for the new money in her keeping.
If she’d had to drag her bags through the streets toward Third Avenue, she might have splurged, and succumbed to the lure of the cabs and horses waiting all in a line for passengers outside in the street.
But there was a branch line to the Elevated right at the Depot.
A hansom cab cost fifty cents for the first mile, twenty-five for each additional, as well as the matter of a gratuity for the driver; the Elevated was a mere nickel, however far downtown she needed to go.
She might have to wait for the Elevated, though.
But for all she longed to get home, when she thought about the moment after her arrival, when she’d close the door and find herself home, alone, at last, she found she wasn’t in that much of a hurry, after all. She took the Elevated home.
When she’d left the city, she’d seen men in light jackets or with them folded over their arms, their arm garters holding their rolled-up sleeves, and all the ladies had worn pastel-colored dresses or white shirtwaists and gay shawls, with straw-brimmed hats shading their eyes.
Now everyone was swathed in wool and fur in the several shades of a New York winter, black or brown, or cobblestone, soot and pigeon gray.
But otherwise they were the same: their expressions as blank and inwardly directed as they moved just as quickly through the teeming streets.
It was she who’d changed. It wasn’t so much that she found herself staring at the brick, stone, and steel buildings, astonished to see some rising high above the level of the Elevated itself.
It was that all of it seemed unfamiliar now.
The numbers of people around her suddenly staggered her, and the fact that she seemed invisible to them struck her as odd, just as the way their eyes sidled away from hers when they encountered her bemused stare did.
Lord, she thought, as she sat and watched the city move by, far below her—a few months in the West, and I have become a tourist!
Then she remembered who it was who always said “Lord!” and remembered that her long vacation from reality was as lost to her as autumn was.
The mountains, the brooks, the golden aspens trembling in the breeze beneath a lucent sky as blue as—she shook herself.
They had nothing to do with this great gray city or her life.
She was lucky she remembered that in time, she thought, her inner visions fading as the outer world pressed in, as she looked down and blinked.
Then she stood up and fumbled for her bags, because she’d almost missed her stop.
Her landlady called a greeting, and she had to pause in the hallway and say all the inconsequential things expected of her.
It turned out she had to listen more to tales of the landlady’s cat and the weather than she had to talk about her travels, before she could decently plead fatigue and go to her rooms. Then she opened her door, and was greeted by the airless, unused smell of unoccupied rooms as she put her bags down.
She felt her heart plummet. Everything was exactly as she’d left it, and she’d taken pains to leave it neat.
There were her books, her pictures and her tables, her chairs and her fringed rug, all as if she’d left them yesterday, and all looking as they would if she left them again tomorrow, or ten years from now, or twenty, she thought.
At least by then, she mused as she trailed farther into her parlor, she’d have more books to leave.
But not medical ones, she decided, staring at what suddenly struck her returning-traveler eyes as the one inappropriate thing in what was otherwise a modest, pleasant woman’s home: a shelfful of books entitled: Women and Her Diseases, Everyman His Own Doctor, The Cottage Physician, The Practical Home Physician, Medicology…
and so many, many more. All the fat volumes with their fold- out color plates and testimonials, and all with the same advice that amounted to no advice at all for her.
A woman ought to have classics and bound volumes of Harpers or Lady’s Wreaths on her shelves, and not such rubbish, she thought.
For that was all it was, and all it amounted to.
She picked up a calf-covered volume and blew off the dust that had gathered on the gilt at the top of its leaves.
Not one of the chapters had helped her. Not one illustration bore any more relation to her than a picture of the back of the moon might have done.
She knew. She’d looked. Now the thought of it amused as well as pained her.
Then, she had been panicky and shamed, her door locked, ears tuned to any unfamiliar sound, her hands hot and trembling, as though she were doing something secret and vile that was detailed in the chapters entitled: “The Solitary Vice: The Dangers of Self-Pollution,” rather than just trying to look and see, and know for herself what it was that was wrong with herself.
She’d held a mirror up to life, literally.
John had said there was something wrong with her.
He’d said his doctor had said it. He’d said he couldn’t come into her because she wasn’t made right.
But every time she undressed and looked in a long mirror, she saw a perfect anatomical illustration of a female.
Her problem lay deeper. What she wished to see required more courage than she knew she had, a hand mirror with extra magnification, and convolutions worthy of an acrobat.
Perhaps it was as bad a vice as self-pollution, she was sure it wasn’t a thing a decent woman would do.
Nor a thing she could have done unless she’d been driven by worse than demons—and she was: by confusion and despair.
She was fearful, but determined. It was the year she’d received word she was a widow, around the time that she’d met that charming Tristram, a time when she’d been so tempted to know more, to try more, of everything.
Or rather, as she knew now, a time when she was unwilling to know there was to be no more for her, not even an answer.
When she’d finally managed to grip the mirror tightly enough in her sweating hands to hold it fairly steady, and discovered how to hold it so she could shed light on the subject, she’d seen herself as never before.
And was horrified. The anatomical plates had left out much of life, and it took her a minute to realize that they never illustrated body hair.
When she’d taken a shaky breath and disregarded that, and positioned herself so more could be seen, her trembling hands won her wavering glimpses of a welter of pink fringes, as well as smooth portions, folds, and nubs of what appeared to be extra flesh and dark caverns…
damp, pink, red and black—what was normal, what was not?
It was not only dreadful looking, like seeing an internal organ on the outside, but impossible to know what was supposed to be right or wrong in such a jumble.
She’d dropped the mirror, but didn’t worry, because she didn’t know how she could have worse luck.
The problem might lie even deeper, as he’d said, but surely, no normal female looked like that.
She felt a flash of acute shame for how she’d have looked to John if he’d ever glanced at that portion of her. But she hadn’t known.
She still didn’t, and her desire to understand hadn’t died.
After a few years passed, she began to wonder if her fears and ignorance mightn’t have magnified things as much as the mirror had, and decided to dare to see a physician again.
She wrote to him in the hopes that he’d request an office visit.
By doing so, she’d hoped to outsmart herself as well, reasoning that despite all shame and fear, there was no way she would have denied a physician’s request. Then his letter had come, assuring her that an unmarried woman needn’t bother discovering the reason for her problem.
But there were other doctors, and the need to know was growing keener.
If she could conquer shame and terror…She was twenty-four years old and growing older, she needed an explanation—at least, a reason.
And perhaps she’d still a fairy-tale hope it could somehow be remedied.
They’d invented telephones and electric lights since she’d been born, hadn’t they? It was an age of miracles, after all.
Then she’d had to go West. Now she’d returned and knew that it didn’t really matter anymore.
She couldn’t bring herself to shame herself with a strange physician anymore than she could with a man she loved.
She didn’t know if she could cope with pity if it were offered by the one, but knew now that she could certainly never bear disgust, however well concealed, from the other.
She put the book back on the shelf and reminded herself to dust them all in the morning.
She couldn’t throw away a book, much less a shelf of them.
When she’d lived with her parents, she’d hidden them to hide her disgrace.
Now she’d leave them there as a reminder of why she’d sit in her parlor alone every night until the authors of all those books were dead, and she herself near to it.
That mightn’t banish sorrow. But it would, at least, explain it.
And that was all she could reasonably expect.
She picked up her traveling cases and set to unpacking. She was home again.