The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  The Venetian policeman’s suspicions have put Rainfleury and Tristan under a charge of conspiracy to murder. My book has left their characters shattered. The Eileen O’Reilly wrote persuasively to her uncle Declan that they must separate Growant and themselves from the filthy contamination of Messrs Stoker and Rainfleury. The gentlemen were made to surrender their Growant shares at the tiniest of prices. Declan O’Reilly has kindly diverted the proceeds to the Swiney sisters who had been so black betrayed by way of moral recompense for the frauds practised on them.

  Rainfleury and Tristan were last heard of in Australia, where they had fled under false names. The outlaws were trying to train a native woman hairier and more simian than the poor Baboon Lady Julia Pastrana. I have written to the ‘Australian Monstrosity’ with a copy of my book, and some newspaper cuttings about the alleged murderers, to ensure that the expense of their travel will not be rewarded. They may not return to Europe, as they have rewards on their heads in both Italy and Ireland.

  It was my idea to spend a small part of the Growant money improving the formula with genuinely health-giving ingredients.

  Oona has stopped pining after Tristan. It was one more blessed thing that came from my book. When she read my account of what had happened, she could not avoid seeing what he was and what a beguiled innocent she had been. Because she truly loved him, she knew immediately how to hate him, cleanly and thoroughly. It is a joy to hear her stretching her vocabulary with denouncing him.

  ‘It is a woeful dry shrivelled thing that Tristan has inside himself,’ she says now, ‘where you’d expect to find a poet’s heart, all moist and mighty there.’

  Now there is a handsome Venetian merchant who pays Oona court and treats her like a princess. He has made a better offer at love than Tristan ever conjured in his shabby verse.

  Berenice has likewise recovered from her passion for Augustus Rainfleury. She had wanted him because Enda did, not for the man he was. So now she manages a little regretful tenderness for him, wondering if the Antipodean sun has crisped his delicate pate. She has become religious and says her rosary daily for Enda, especially the Sorrowful Mysteries. I have never asked Berenice if the candle flame on the Pembroke Street stairs was deliberate, because I know Darcy’s push over the banisters was.

  We see our father often, though it is never often enough. The road did not fly under us to bring us together. There is too much time, and too much loving, to be caught up with.

  His love for the joyous multiplicity of Venetian boats is a thing to see. We are looking into buying him a stake in a shipwright’s business in Pellestrina as a way of keeping him more often among us. He has taken to Eileen with delight, pronouncing her his lost daughter. Indeed, looking at her hair, which grows ever more luxuriant, I sometimes wonder. Her butcher father loved his gin more than he cared for his scrawny daughter. Was Eileen the fair sister we should have had, instead of the cruel Darcy all along?

  And it was Phelan Swiney, ex-Mariner, ex-Fenian, who arranged our last trip to Harristown, where we reburied baby Phiala and Annora side by side in a grave by the old chapel, while the slow crows wheeled overhead, mourning the world, the Swineys and all that had passed, all that has been lost.

  The Eileen O’Reilly made sure that Phiala’s little coffin held her shoe dolly too. The crossed spoons with her initials – I brought them back to Venice and I have planted them in the garden here, near the clover-sweetened grass where I like to read and write in the perfumed shadow of the wisteria.

  Eileen spends her days among her uncle’s purveyors of foodstuffs and brings home a comfortable spread of samples. Her evenings and nights she spends with us.

  Venice has become our village more than Harristown ever was. We have friends in every sestiere. We have the foreigners’ freedom to mingle between the classes and we are welcome everywhere.

  ‘Dénouement’ – that is the French word for ‘untangling’. The Swiney Godivas are all untangled now, and each sister wears her hair as she pleases. Strangely perhaps, I have not cut mine. I find that I still love the whisper of it about my ears and the cloak it makes around my body, and its fierceness that would spring out and ambush you at any minute were it not plaited or caged inside a snood trussed with a stout pin. Although my book has brought us many requests, we shall never go on the stage again; for us, it was a place of servitude and uncomfort­able exposure where we were sent, by Darcy and by our so-called protectors.

  As for the original ‘Miss Swiney’ dolls, they too have come to rest in Venice. But they sleep day and night in the dark, in a large trunk never opened, up in the hot eaves in the attic. But those dolls are not as they once were, stiff and splendid. For each doll’s body is inscribed with the fate of the girl she so hollowly imitated.

  Enda’s doll consists only of ashes in an urn. We cremated her in the fireplace. Pertilly’s doll is shaven, and Darcy’s has a great dark hole in the breast.

  You might think ‘Miss Manticory’ would have a hole there too, since the heart was ripped out of me when Alexander died. Or rather, that the cavity opened when I discovered his betrayal. But I left the ‘Miss Manticory’ doll intact because I intend to heal. And because Saverio is helping me to forget what it is to be disdained and know what it is to be cared for, gently but passionately well. As he rows me around Venice in our green boat, I sometimes see a pale face on a bridge that reminds me of Alexander’s. There is no pain to that vision. With the waves infinitely creative beneath me and love infinitely kind beside me, I think of Alexander as a land creature, and in the end, prosaic.

  Land creatures – I’m not sorry there are no foxes in Venice. I still don’t believe I could see one without thinking of Darcy swishing her hand behind her back and in front of her thighs, snatching my memory backwards through the years until it arrived dishevelled, terrified and helpless at the copse by Harristown Bridge.

  Venice is full of bridges and maybe a few trolls. But I am up to meeting a gentleman troll now on any bridge and would not hesitate to knock him into the water. It’s the ghosts who still trouble me occasionally. I have moved back to my room of peach and apricot and Chinese pavilions. On hot nights I see the face of Millwillis on the pillow beside me, flattened, with the breath pressed out of him. Then I realise who really lies there, fond and tousled and soft with sleep. Relief and gratitude course around my body like liquid sugar.

  Some nights I see Darcy walking through the enfilade of bedrooms, restlessly shuffling the cartelle from the tombola notturna, which she never once won. I can look right through the hole where her heart should be. Other times I wake with a vision of my beloved Enda filling my eyes with liquid regret. She is lying broken and burning at the bottom of the Pembroke Street stairs. Saverio knows what my tears recall, and he holds me until they are all spent.

  I even glimpsed Annora once, rising like a mermaid out of the water, with her stringy hair hanging down, waving a hand wrinkled from washing a yoke-necked smock in the greenness of the Grand Canal. She smiled at me with her long teeth, and offered me a salt-encrusted penny, as if to say, ‘I told you it was true about your father.’

  And then she slowly melted into the mist that rose forgivingly from the sweet soft water.

  I don’t believe I’ll see her again.

  They say that the Irish don’t understand irony, but in fact we’re teeming with it, like a head full of hair, like a head full of memories, like a moth in a mousetrap, like a sack of shame that empties itself into a book and finds itself redeemed.

  For all I wished to put behind me, my book will keep the sodden earth of Harristown wet and the bodies in the Famine pits close to the surface, with only an inch of grass between us and death, only a long red curl between me and you.

  One long red curl, partly inside me, partly outside.

  Historical Notes

  All the characters in this book are invented apart from the La Touche family, Marcel Grateau of the Marcel waves and Julia Pastrana. London, in 1857, was convulsed by the spectacle of Julia P
astrana, the ‘Baboon Lady’ or ‘the Missing Link’, who danced and sang on the stage. Her face was simian and hairy with extra sprouts of growth in the form of a moustache and a beard. Five years later, her embalmed body was displayed at Piccadilly’s Burlington Gallery.

  ‘Captain MacMorris’ is the name of Shakespeare’s only Irish character.

  My sisters’ story has elements in common with that of the long-forgotten Seven Sutherland Sisters, who were once household names in America.

  I would never have heard of the Seven Sutherland Sisters of Niagara County, New York State, if my friend Bill Helfand hadn’t mentioned them over lunch a couple of years ago. Bill, an eminent medical historian, has advised me for the last three novels. He had an inkling I’d be interested in seven hairy sisters who took to the stage to peddle a quack hair restorant, made a fortune, spent it eccentrically and fell into obscurity with the advent of bobbed hair.

  The Sutherland girls were born in rural poverty. There was also a brother, Charles, born in 1865, and possibly two other sisters who died young. It is said that their father, Fletcher Sutherland, a preacher and politicker, was exceptionally well endowed with hair, and that their mother had prepared a home-made ointment for her daughters’ hair, the smell of which made them unpopular at school. But the girls’ singing voices were popular in church. Their father cultivated their stage career from their early childhood. The Sutherland Sisters joined Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth in 1883, with Charles working as a gatekeeper. Naomi married J. Henry Bailey, then employed in the dining tent, in 1885. By this time Fletcher, with Bailey’s help, was marketing a Seven Sutherland Sisters ‘Hair Grower’. The Seven Sutherland Sisters Corporation was based in New York. It all worked like a well-oiled machine: the circus made the sisters famous, helping their Hair Grower to earn $90,000 in its first year. Soon they added a Scalp Cleaner Comb and Colorators in eight shades.

  The Sutherlands eventually made at least $3 million from their products, with 28,000 sales dealerships in the USA. Their best years were between 1886 and 1907, but they continued until 1917, with factories in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

  They spent their fortune at a ruinous rate, especially on a grand Gothic mansion in Lockport, built in 1893 and fitted out with turrets, cupolas and chandeliers. The sisters were notorious for exercising on their bicycles on a circular cinder path in the garden, wearing nothing more than bathing suits. They owned at least seventeen cats and seven dogs, the latter arrayed in handsome handmade collars. One dog, Topsy, wore dresses of silk and cotton in the summer and wool or plush in the winter. Whenever travelling, the sisters sent fresh steaks to the dogs (which generally arrived already putrid). The cats dined on fresh liver. Expensive funerals were held for the pets. The sisters also commissioned a group portrait, and kept seven individual portraits mounted on easels.

  But this lifestyle could not be maintained. They outspent their massive income, and the hair products lost popularity, leaving them destitute. The mansion was sold, with much Sutherland Sisters ephemera abandoned in the attic. Far from the days of the lavish pet funerals, sixteen of their cats were mass-chloroformed and buried in burlap sacks.

  Four sisters never married. Isabella married twice, both times to men much younger than herself. Her first husband, twenty-seven years old to her forty when they wed, was Frederick H. Castlemaine, a colourful, cultivated morphine addict, and obsessed with guns. Castlemaine was said to shoot the heads of turtles basking on logs, the spokes out of the wheels of passing buggies, the bowls out of his hired men’s pipes. He died of a morphine overdose in 1896. Isabella built him a $10,000 mausoleum, which was ransacked by thieves hoping to sell the body back to the grieving wife for a ransom or in search of the jewels allegedly buried with Castlemaine. They failed. Isabella grieved passionately for Castlemaine, until, at forty-six, she married Alonzo Swain, aged thirty. Victoria Sutherland married a preacher’s son of eighteen when she was fifty. Only Naomi bore children – four of them.

  The youngest Sutherland sister, Mary, died in the State Institution for the Insane in Buffalo in 1939. Grace Sutherland lived until 1946.

  Each Sutherland sister had a single doll made in her image (and using her own combings) – but these dolls were not mass-manufactured for sale. Instead, they were used in window displays of Sutherland products. Victoria was offered $2,500 (sometimes reported as $1,500) for her hair by a drugstore owner or hairdresser, but instead sold a single strand to a jeweller for $25. The seven-foot strand was strung with a ten-carat diamond in the jeweller’s window.

  The Sutherland archives – including five of the dolls – were destroyed by a fire in their former mansion in 1938, seven years after the remaining sisters – Grace and Mary – had been forced to move away. A film about their lives was proposed, but Dora Sutherland was killed by a car when three sisters went to Hollywood. A script has never surfaced. Ephemera from their products still exists, but little published matter, the most interesting of which is Clarence O. Lewis’s The Seven Sutherland Sisters, a 60-page pamphlet published by the Niagara County Historical Society.

  The coldness of the trail might have been a gift for a novelist, leaving wide-open tracts for the imagination to work in. But the Sutherlands had left numerous advertising photographs and they still loomed larger than life. Their campaign of celebrity endorsement, rags, riches, rags was a parable. I decided I could draw on the dynamics of the Sunderlands’ medical history, but set my novel in Europe, in the context of contemporary Victorian writers’ and artists’ obsession with long hair.

  There are other issues explored in this novel. The Sutherlands appear to have enjoyed fairly harmonious relations with one another and frequently chose to live together. They also had a brother. But I was interested in portraying a large set of sisters at war and peace among themselves – so I decided to create my own hairy family and to make them Irish – and much divided in nature and temperament – and to bring them to Venice for the denouement of the story. And yes, there is indeed also some reference to Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, in which the aged former lover of a celebrated romantic poet is stalked by an ambitious writer, for I also wanted to write a parable of one of the key moral debates of our own time: where does freedom of the press cross over into criminal intrusion, character assassination and simple venality at the expense of the prey?

  There are other similarities between the Swineys and the Sutherlands. Like my Pertilly, Naomi Sutherland (who died in 1893) and Victoria (deceased 1902) were replaced by fake sisters. Naomi, like Oona, sang with a bass voice though her hair was brown. Both sets of sisters, Sutherland and Swiney, were born in grinding rural poverty and broke into the limelight with singing shows in which their hair was the star attraction. Newspapers claimed that the Sutherland Sisters were obliged to be vigilant against frequent attempts to steal their hair. Mary Sutherland, like Ida Swiney, suffered from mental health issues. There was also a rumour that Isabella Sutherland’s husband Frederick Castlemaine may have been in love with her sister Dora.

  ‘Swiney’ is a version of the more common name ‘Sweeney’. In some slang usages, it means an unsophisticated person. The story several times refers to a Swiney who threw a psalter in the sea and later went mad: this ancestor of my characters was the hero of a legend entitled Buile Suibhne or The Madness of Sweeney, which began to take form in the ninth century but appears to refer back to the time of the Battle of Moira in 637. The story reflects tensions between Christianity and earlier Celtic faiths. Suibhne or Sweeney was king of Dal Araidhe, now County Antrim and north County Down. Sweeney was enraged when he was informed that the sound of a bell told of eminent churchman Ronan Finn marking out the site of the church in his kingdom. His wife tried to hold him back but was left holding his cloak as he tore away, completely naked. And so he arrived to find Ronan singing from his psalter. Sweeney flung the precious psalter into a deep lake and was about to deal harshly with its owner when he was summoned to do his duty at the Battle of Moira.

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nbsp; After a day and a night an otter raised the psalter from the water and carried it to Ronan, who then cursed Sweeney to wander Ireland insane and naked, and to be killed by a spear. As the armies gathered, Sweeney again encountered Ronan; this time the intemperate king killed one of his psalmists and struck the cleric’s own holy bell with his spear. Ronan uttered his second curse, condemning Sweeney to live bird-brained in the trees, terrified by any noise, mistrustful of all, even those whom he loved. And Sweeney exploded into a madness that had him floating all over Ireland and eventually taking up residence at Glen Bolcain where the insane congregated, eating cresses. He lamented his loneliness, the absence of music and a woman’s touch. He took to wandering for another seven years. After periods of sanity, he took again to the air, and crossed to the land of the Britons where he met the royal lunatic Alan, and they became friends until Alan drowned himself. Sweeney returned to his wanderings, finishing at Moling, where Ronan’s first curse was fulfilled when Sweeney was speared by a jealous husband.

  This story has in modern times been adapted by Seamus Heaney (Swiney Astray) and Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds).

  The natural selection theory of long hair in women was posed by Dr Beddoe, quoted by Daniel John Cunningham in a pamphlet published in 1885. Dr Cunningham himself observed the statistical matrimonial preference for women with brown hair. (His statistics, mysteriously, list three ‘social states’ for women: Married, Single and Doubtful.)

  The poems declaimed by Oona in Chapter 21 are as follows:

  As Belinda in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:

  Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains,

  And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains . . .

  Fair tresses Man’s imperial Race insnare

  And Beauty draws us with a single Hair.

  (Canto 2, lines 23 – 28)

  As Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost: