Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Sophie dipped her hand into the purse next to her chair, brought out a tablet and set it on the white-cloth-covered table. She tapped it on, entered the password with one swift motion of a bright red fingernail, flicked right, opened a document and then just as quickly tapped it off again.

  “After dinner. Let’s not ruin our appetites.”

  Ruth took the smallest possible sip of wine. She usually loved wine, but it didn’t taste right tonight. Nothing had felt right since the fainting spell in the café.

  Sophie looked around the restaurant, body rigid with impatience, wine glass and bread basket equally empty, but this time the waiter didn’t appear. They both stared at the darkened tablet.

  “Fine,” Sophie said, giving in by half. “It’s a letter she wrote to a friend and never mailed. It references a doubt. That’s all.”

  “About?”

  “The feasibility of using a gun for protection in every life circumstance. Based on a single bad day she had.” Sophie leaned across the table, whispering. “Man pushed up against her on a New York subway. Not so easy to pull out a shotgun.”

  A revolver, maybe, Ruth thought. But she understood, because it had happened to her, too. It had happened to every woman.

  Ruth said, “That doesn’t sound damning.”

  “In the wrong hands, it could be. And then you’ve got the immigrant problem. Maybe in a city like New York in 1904, you don’t want every person—even every woman—to have their own gun. Annie wondered about that, too. It didn’t mean she was a racist.”

  Before, questions about racism would have grabbed Ruth’s attention. But now it was the date—1904—that pricked up her ears.

  “Surely, you’ve been in this situation as a biographer,” Sophie said. “You read something that challenges an assumption; it’s unclear or unproven, but you know that others will read all the wrong things into it.”

  Ruth dipped a toe in the water. “Like, for example, the fact that Annie might have spoken to a doctor about her mental state?”

  Sophie sat up straight in her chair, eyes wide. “Mental state? When?”

  “After the train crash.”

  “Oh, no no no. Nothing like that. My goodness!” Sophie brought a hand to her mouth and paused there a moment before losing herself in nervous laughter. “Hell’s bells, Ruth. You almost had me. That’s the first laugh I’ve had all day.”

  “I’m glad,” Ruth said. “But if we could be serious again—”

  Sophie’s smile faded. “When you asked me about Lila, you had something in mind. Tell me it’s not this.”

  Ruth plunged ahead. “Did you ever hear of Annie Oakley making a trip to Vienna?”

  “For?”

  “Psychoanalysis. To discuss a problem that had been haunting her at least since the 1901 train crash, and to discuss earlier trauma, brought back into focus by that accident.”

  “Psychoanalysis,” Sophie repeated, incredulous. “You weren’t pulling my leg. Like, on the couch. Talking.”

  “Is that not possible?”

  “Annie wasn’t a talker.”

  “I understand . . .”

  “She was a doer.”

  “Well—”

  “She didn’t make mountains out of molehills. She wasn’t a victim, unlike so many people today.”

  Ruth started to say something more, but Sophie stopped her with a wagging finger. “Hashtag #NotMe. Or how about, #IdLikeToSeeYouTry. If Annie Oakley had tweeted, that’s how she would’ve done it.”

  “But the Wolves . . .”

  “Precisely. The Wolves. She didn’t talk about them.”

  “She mentioned them in her autobiography.”

  “Her unpublished autobiography.”

  “Unfinished. Written near the end of her life. If she’d had more time, and maybe more support . . .”

  Sophie scowled. “But she didn’t name them. She never blamed them specifically for anything that went wrong later in her life—because, in fact, things didn’t go wrong. She was a self-made woman. A winner. An undeniable success.”

  “You can be a success,” Ruth said slowly, carefully, “without being invulnerable. I think, just maybe, that Annie was marked by her challenges—by the things that happened to her at a very young age. That doesn’t make her a lesser person. Only a more complicated one.”

  The waiter appeared at their table, two oversize plates in hand. Sophie pretended he wasn’t there.

  “Ruth, I’m disappointed. If there was one thing I appreciated about your book—your manuscript, rather—it was your restraint. You didn’t go on about Annie’s supposed victimization in the manuscript.”

  “I’m not labeling it victimization. But certain things are facts: the Wolves, harassment from Hearst—”

  “Name one famous all-American patriot or hero who is best known for the bad things that happened to him, rather than the path he blazed. Daniel Boone. Kit Carson. George Washington. The point is, only when it’s a woman do we emphasize what she suffered rather than what she accomplished.”

  “I’m not sure suffering and accomplishment are incompatible. You might even say—”

  Sophie stood and dropped her napkin onto her chair.

  “Ruth, you’ve done me a favor. Lila tried to tell me and I wouldn’t listen. People are always ready to twist things out of perspective. Maybe I misjudged her. Maybe I’ve misjudged you, too.”

  For a moment, Ruth thought that Sophie was angry enough to walk out. But she was only going to the ladies’ room.

  “Steak sauce and a second pinot gris,” Sophie said to the waiter before she left the table.

  Ruth sat quietly as the waiter set down the steaks and arranged new cutlery, avoiding eye contact. Then he was gone.

  The tablet was still there on the white tablecloth, just next to the empty bread basket. At tables all around them, in every direction, couples and families were absorbed in their own meals and conversations or, in a few cases, glued to their phones, ignoring each other and everyone around them.

  Ruth hadn’t meant to notice the passcode Sophie had used, but her eyes had been drawn to those red fingernails and she’d seen the unmistakable pattern: a straight diagonal, up, double tap on the third digit, and back. Sophie certainly wasn’t about to share the text of that restricted letter with her now. She seemed to be rethinking ever sharing it with any researcher.

  With one hand, Ruth pulled out her own phone from her jacket pocket. With the other, she pushed her plate of steak out of the way and casually let her arm drift across the table until her fingers reached the screen. 7-5-3-3-5-7. She brought the two screens closer, snapping photos of the letter Sophie thought the world wasn’t ready to see, then locked the device and put it back.

  A moment later, Ruth’s phone rang.

  It was the home inspector. No problems, all done; a report would be emailed promptly. Ruth finished the call and disconnected just as Sophie was coming back to the table, her face rearranged into a more pleasant expression, ready to tuck into her steak and pretend she’d never raised her voice.

  Ruth explained that she was trying to sell her house—a neutral topic, no hashtags.

  Sophie was just starting to speak when the phone rang a second time.

  “Sorry,” Ruth said, and took the call.

  “I found him,” the voice at the other end said. “Nieman. But it’s not Nieman. I’ve got his number for you.”

  Ruth pulled the phone away from her cheek. “The home inspector again,” she said to Sophie. “Something unexpected. I’ll take this outside.”

  Ruth hurried to the parking lot.

  Reece said, “Oh, exciting. You’re starting to lie now.”

  “More than that,” Ruth said.

  “Good for you. When you hear this next part, you’re going think I’m a genius.”

  “That remains to b
e seen.”

  “I kept calling the names on the Antiques Association Directory. ‘Nieman’ was getting me nowhere, so I started mentioning that the guy we were looking for has throat cancer, and after a dozen more calls, someone knew who I was talking about. ‘1901 guy,’ they call him.”

  “1901?”

  “Because they can’t pronounce his last name. Me neither. His last name isn’t Nieman. It’s like a username, a pseudonym, to get around the problem with the other name,”

  “How is it spelled?”

  “C-H-something. Maybe ‘Cheer-goss’?”

  “You spent hours on this and didn’t write down his last name?”

  “It doesn’t matter! I have his phone number!”

  “And do we know why he’s called 1901 guy?”

  There was a pause at the end of the line. “He collects everything related to 1901. Something to do with his family heritage. You’re the historian. I figured you’d put together that part.”

  It was coming to her. Nieman, 1901.

  “Czolgosz,” she said. “Oh my god. Are you kidding? His name is Czolgosz?”

  “That sounds really close.”

  “Czolgosz is the man who assassinated President McKinley, in 1901. Leon Czolgosz. Who sometimes went by the name Nieman.” She should have thought of it before. There were only so many presidential assassins in US history, and he was one of them. “It’s just a pseudonym. It means ‘nobody’ in German.”

  “And this is the descendant of that original nobody, evidently.”

  “But what does this have to do with Annie Oakley?”

  “Well, she lived around the same time, right? Maybe the 1901 guy got grooving on the train accident, just like you did.”

  “McKinley’s assassination,” Ruth thought aloud. It took place in the fall, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. “September 1901, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “And Annie’s accident was in October. Close, but not exactly the same time. And that still wouldn’t quite explain it. Sure, they lived in the same time period, but so did a lot of people.”

  “A time when a lot of people were waving guns around, apparently.”

  A line was forming outside the restaurant where Ruth had gone to take her call. A woman in a wraparound dress and heels was looking at her.

  Ruth put her head down and stepped farther into the parking lot, but families were walking back and forth to their cars. There was nowhere with privacy, and she knew she had to get back to Sophie. The meal would be awkward enough without Ruth arriving back at a half-cleared table, her own steak untouched on the plate.

  “Reece?”

  He had taken the phone away from his ear. He came back.

  “You’ll never guess this. October 29, 1901.”

  “That’s the date of Annie’s train crash, yes,” Ruth said.

  “And also the day this Czolgosz guy was electrocuted, seven weeks after the assassination. The exact same morning as the train accident. Now our two friends have something in common: a very bad day. Extra grisly for him.”

  Ruth felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.

  “It’s just a coincidence,” she said.

  “Maybe. But now we know what attracted Nieman—your guy—to the first journal. It might have been random, at least at first. But he’s obsessed with that date. He buys up a bunch of random stuff referencing that year, September and October most of all. And then he gets pulled into more of her story and feels bad for her and wants someone else to understand.”

  “No,” Ruth corrected him. “He made it clear that his primary interest wasn’t Annie. But one way or another, the past haunts him. It haunts all of us, but more so if your own ancestor was a notorious killer.”

  Back at the table, Sophie had eaten half of her steak and already requested that the waiter put the rest in a doggie bag. Ruth took the hint and ate a few bites before having hers bagged up as well. Then she picked up the bill.

  “I take it the home inspection news wasn’t bad,” Sophie said. “You’re feeling generous.”

  Reckless, more like. Ruth said, “Oh, I just think that things will work out.”

  “Listen. I didn’t mean to react so strongly to your questions. At the foundation, we get all kind of people contacting us with their crackpot theories: why Annie Oakley was one of the best sharpshooters in history, why her hair turned bright white after the train accident, all that stuff. Like maybe she wasn’t even human. We even had one guy call up a couple years ago, wanting to talk to Lila about aliens, or time travel.”

  Ruth kept her eyes down, pretending to be lost in figuring the tip.

  “My point is, Lila had her hands full,” Sophie said. “The crazy stuff made her resistant to the less crazy stuff—the real possibilities, the things she didn’t want anyone to know, only because they were too complicated. By the way, thank you for picking up dinner.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “You didn’t even drink your wine!”

  “Long day,” Ruth said. “I probably should have ordered coffee instead.”

  Ruth could tell Sophie felt bad and wanted to leave her with something—not the letter she had originally planned to show her, but a crumb.

  Sophie said, “We all know that Annie and Frank were a beautiful couple. But it didn’t mean Annie didn’t occasionally confide in other people. And you know how much Lila wanted to squelch any talk of even the slightest marital conflict. Well, that letter, in addition to questioning gun ownership as the only thing a woman would ever need to protect herself . . .” Sophie paused for effect. “It was written to a man.”

  “A man,” Ruth repeated. That was it?

  “The few of us at the board who have read the unsent letter have all made guesses about his identity. Henry or Hubert or Horatio. I mean, how many first names start with H?”

  “And to top it off, she signed her name as Z. A pet name, we can only guess.”

  “But then how did you know it was her?”

  “Because it was found with other unmailed letters and personal papers that are undoubtedly hers and written in her hand. One wouldn’t need an expert to do a match, but one could, easily. Of course, there was no need, since Lila wanted nothing more than to hide the thing. We never managed to connect the name with anyone in her circle.” Sophie stood up and gestured for Ruth to go first. Then she turned back for her forgotten doggie bag, still on the table. “So, he remains forever unknown. Her 1904 crush, I guess. H.D.”

  H.D.

  In the hired car to her motel, Ruth opened the document on her phone.

  There was Annie’s familiar handwriting. After her disappointment at reading the first journal, written by the analyst, and her long and futile wait to get the next letters, it gave Ruth chills to finally see something in Annie’s unmistakable hand: the cursive capital Ts with high, floating crossbars; the varying slope and size of letters and, where Annie’s pen had briefly paused, the specks of puddled ink.

  Dear H.D.,

  If Sophie had been a more willing collaborator, Ruth would have gladly explained. Herr Doktor.

  The letter continued: You asked me to send you my thoughts and memories as I have them, given the impossibility of meeting face-to-face.

  Ruth smiled, knowing how Sophie—and Lila—would have misconstrued that line: as if chaste Annie had ventured close to romantic temptation but was now, in line with the self-disciplined personality they all esteemed, turning away from even the appearance of an affair.

  Yet I do wish for your counsel, because I am not myself. There was much more I needed to tell you, but it isn’t easy to begin, especially when your skepticism is so evident. So, let me start gently.

  The other day I was on my way to give a speech in New Jersey to a group of women about the importance of self-defense using firearms, a favorite topic of m
ine and something in which I believe strongly. Since the train crash and the premature folding of my last theater engagement, I’ve had even more time to think about how I might contribute to the world, and what I’ve got to offer is what I know, and what I know is how to shoot—not that it solves everything. Do you see how I go around in circles with this?

  But I’ve started badly. The moment I must share with you was on the subway. I was traveling alone, and a man, a very rude stranger, turned and leaned into me, indecorously and not at all innocently, which aroused in me a familiar rage and also a familiar sense of impotence. I had a revolver on my person. What did it matter? I couldn’t get to it quickly, and I wasn’t prepared to shoot this man in the stomach, much as I wanted to. A moment later, he backed away. He’d already done what he’d done. And all around me on that New York subway were other people. Women, a Sicilian here, a Chinaman there, and I would have been no happier seeing them pull out a weapon and try to use it in such a sardine can without judgment. It’s not the same as being in the middle of the prairie, guarding your home.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I believe in the deepest part of me that there’s a role for protection with firearms, and I continued on my way and gave that speech, and afterward I showed a dozen women how to hit a target, and I had no qualms about that.

  What I mean to share, and perhaps this wasn’t what you wanted at all and I will have to start again another day, was the feeling that rose up in me on the subway train. It’s become stronger lately. Any minor encounter takes me back, and then I realize that this rage is not new—not new at all.

  Meanwhile, I continue with the practice I described when we met, the practice you gave me permission to continue, which doesn’t yield its satisfactions easily—a subject for another day.

  But I don’t think this is what you wanted from me. I don’t understand your method completely. Yet since we can’t see each other in person, this correspondence must suffice. I’ll set this aside and either mail it or try again in a more orderly fashion tomorrow. You mentioned an interest in dreams, and tomorrow I will begin with that. I hope you will forgive my inadequate form of expression and also my terrible penmanship. I came to writing later in life than a girl should.