Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

“I’ve been vaccinated,” Tillie said. Ruefully, she thought, Opium taught me how to lie. I might as well use it for good. She walked over to the child Betty was holding, who eyed her with curiosity and wide blue eyes. She was perhaps a year old. “May I hold her?”

  Betty, in a state of shock, handed the child over. As the bottle was now empty, Tillie fed her spoonfuls of milk and oats until the girl fell asleep. She let her fingers run across the sores on her little arm as she slept, thumb in mouth. It reminded her of Piper. She would tell Ian to bring the newsies to the nearest dispensary to have them vaccinated, and soon.

  “I wanted to speak to you,” Betty began, “but I was in the Tombs for ever so long.”

  “We found out you had stolen from us. And then, Ada told me it was Lucy, not you.”

  “Yes,” Betty said, somewhat miserably.

  “Yes to which truth?” The child stirred, and Tillie rocked her in her lap. She was a bit surprised by how naturally it came to her. Perhaps Lucy had been good with children too. If only she had Lucy’s diary back; it was still with the police.

  “I am not a thief. Miss Lucy had set aside baskets of food and goods for me to bring to the asylum every week. The cook saw it and said nothing, but neither did my mistress. In the end, I was the one blamed, and Miss Lucy was dead, and she had no voice to tell anyone the truth.”

  “Well, I know now. And I can tell anyone who needs to hear what happened.”

  “It won’t matter. I am content to work here now. The nuns knew me well, and Miss Lucy knew I would be fired once she was married. Mr. Cutter didn’t want me in the house.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  Betty suddenly scrunched up her face and frowned. “I don’t want to say. I heard that you and he—that he’s your betrothed now. Is that true?”

  “It isn’t. Everyone would like it to be.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “Absolutely. He has been very kind to me, but . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but Lucy’s voice in her diary continued to speak a warning to her.

  The toddler had fallen asleep, mouth slack. A few times, she coughed, and Tillie did not turn her head away. She would be certain she caught the virus, no matter what. Finally, she laid the child back in the crib and smiled. Sister Cecilia would be looking for her. “Time to go.”

  Tillie headed to the door, but Betty stopped her. “Wait. In case you aren’t fully sure about marrying Mr. Cutter, you must know one thing. She had an argument with him, you know. Over me.”

  “You?”

  “He was kind to me. Almost like a brother at times. I thought it sweet and a sign that he would treat your sister well, if he could treat the servants like family.” Her face soured. “But I saw him once with that lady’s maid who’s with Miss Harriman all the time.”

  “Hazel!”

  “Yes. Once, when they were all riding together on Long Island, Hazel kept back, and James said he’d twisted his ankle. I saw them in the stables together. He had her skirts over her head, and they were . . .” Her face contorted with disgust. “Like goats.”

  Tillie put her hand over her mouth. Hazel and James? “I had no idea.”

  “It’s no surprise. That woman’s been wanting James to marry Dorothy all this time. Keep him closer and keep her job. Why, she’s the one who told James that Lucy was always going to the Foundling Hospital. Them fighting was her dearest wish.” She waggled a finger. “You see, if Dorothy marries someone else, Hazel might get let go. But James would always keep her under their roof, wouldn’t he?”

  Tillie thought about Hazel caressing James’s arm, of the intimacy between them that she thought had been a dream—and now she knew she had imagined neither. Hazel had seemed so kind. Could this be why she was always offering opium and morphine to her? To ruin her chances with James? Or to keep her pliant, unaware, too clouded to notice what was happening right before her eyes?

  “Did my sister know about this?”

  “Oh yes. She suspected it. And she tried to keep him away from me too.”

  Betty was near to Lucy’s age of twenty-one, but she had large elfin eyes and a tiny frame. Tillie had always thought she looked barely sixteen, even younger in a certain light. But now that worry and care had aged her a little, she looked like she was approaching thirty. Exhaustion blanketed her like an invisible smothering cloth.

  “What happened, Betty?” Tillie asked slowly.

  Betty’s gray eyes reddened. “There was a baby. Mr. Cutter’s baby. Your sister knew. We were returning in the carriage after bringing her to visit a friend, and in the carriage . . .” She passed a hand over her eyes. “He was stronger, and I felt that I’d put myself in the situation. I thought it was my fault.”

  “Oh, Betty!” Tillie covered her mouth. “Good God, no, that was not your fault.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. Lucy cared for me as best as she could, lightening my load.” Her mouth twisted. “I miscarried around the same time as your sister died. She was going to call the wedding off. Did she not tell you?”

  “No,” Tillie said. “I wish she had. I wish I’d asked her.”

  “She kept too much to herself. That was a terrible week. But it got worse, because Mr. Cutter told your grandmother that I was stealing silver, and the police came. I wanted to warn you, Miss, but it took months for the sisters to help me out of the Tombs.”

  The footfalls grew close, and Sister Cecilia’s shadow darkened the window of the door. She looked alarmed and began knocking at the door. When they didn’t open it, she began trying different keys in the lock, one after the other.

  “He promised me he’d help if I stayed quiet. He would give me money, more than I was making as a maid. I didn’t know what to do. The day your sister died, she’d decided to call off the wedding. I remember that day. She liked to write down her thoughts in a little book sometimes, but she’d forgotten it at home. She begged me to give her time alone to think. Away from me, and away from everyone. I was angry at her, because I was afraid I’d get in trouble for not accompanying her. We fought at the doctor’s office, but in the end she got her way, and I went back to the house by myself. And then . . . then I lost everything!”

  Betty finally broke into tears and snatched her apron to her face.

  The door burst open, key ring jangling. Sister Cecilia was red in the face, almost redder than Betty. “Miss Pembroke! I thought I had lost you!”

  “I’m not lost,” Tillie said, turning around and heading for the door. She looked at Betty, who was trying desperately to regain her composure before the nun. They nodded to each other, an acknowledgment of so many things, and more to come. “I’m not lost at all,” Tillie said.

  The illness arrived slower than expected, but it came with an inevitability that frightened Tillie.

  In one week, she succumbed to a fever. Tillie coughed and ached, and her head throbbed with a severity she had not known before. Her mother called for Dr. Turnbull, but Tillie asked for Dr. Erikkson, and only Dr. Erikkson.

  “Why? That man—that family. We cannot allow him in here,” her mother said.

  “Dr. Erikkson,” Tillie said again. “He knows this illness well. He’ll know how to care for it.”

  Tillie begged relentlessly, even when her mouth grew sore with a rash that spread to her tongue and palate. Between bouts of vomiting, she asked for only Dr. Erikkson.

  As she knew what would be coming, she’d banished Ada from the house. When she’d come home the night after her visit to the Foundling Hospital, she’d instructed Ada to remain at a distance.

  “Don’t come near me. In fact, leave the house, Ada. Leave your things and just go. I’m sick, and I can’t have you or the baby get sick. Go to your family, and I’ll send for you when it’s safe to return.”

  “Sick?” Ada cradled her belly. “But you look so well!”

  “It’s smallpox,” she warned. “Leave right now.” Ada picked up her skirts, turned, and left the room.

>   Tillie questioned the rest of the servants through one of the older maids, whom she remembered had also received a vaccine all those years ago. All the unvaccinated servants were sent away on Tillie’s command, and fear drove them away before even receiving word from her mother or grandmother.

  Days after her mouth erupted, the fever subsided only to return when her skin broke out in a rash. The rash started as flat red dots the size of a small button. They rose to blisters a few days later, filled with pus a few days after that. They dotted her skin, from her face and neck down her trunk. She’d heard of children getting the smallpox so badly that hardly any normal skin showed through. Tillie could see swaths of normal skin, but looking in the mirror, dizzy and feverish, she knew. She would never look the same again. She cried a little at this—saying goodbye to a version of herself she had taken for granted her whole life. Planned as this was, there was still shock and mourning to be done. But she also knew that she would survive this. Purpose thrummed strongly in her heart.

  This would be worth it.

  Wouldn’t it?

  A letter from Ian arrived well into her second week of sickness. One of the newer maids, already vaccinated, didn’t know the policy to destroy them first.

  Tillie,

  I heard from Ada about your illness. I sincerely hope that you haven’t done what I think you have. If this is your plan, you’re mad to have put yourself at risk. I’m furious. Do I even have a right to be furious? I don’t know but I am.

  Since I know you’ll worry, I’ve brought Piper, Pops, and Sweetie to the dispensary on Eldridge Street to get them vaccinated. I’m vaccinated too. Say, we should do an article on vaccination rates in the city. Wouldn’t that be swell?

  I hope you get well soon. I would visit you, but no doubt I’d be turned away.

  Stay off the dope, will you? I know you can.

  Yours,

  Ian

  “I can’t be kept away from my chum, even if she does look like a raisin muffin,” said a voice from her doorway.

  Tillie looked up. “Oh. Dorrie. You have a way with words. What are you doing here?”

  “Says the lady who writes articles for the newspaper. My family was against my coming, but I’ve been vaccinated, and I don’t care.” As if smallpox were an occurrence as irritating as a canceled theater show. Dorothy settled herself in a chair by Tillie’s bed and withdrew some needlepoint from her reticule. “Well, all right. You look like a currant bun, then.” She glanced at Tillie, her smile faltering. “Are you uncomfortable? Can I get you anything?”

  “Really, Dorothy. I don’t need the laudanum anymore,” Tillie said, adjusting her pillow. Well, that wasn’t completely truthful. The longing for opium had sewn itself into her very being. She could not simply loosen the stitches and pull it out for good. It took every ounce of effort to refuse it, but refuse it she did.

  “Ah, good. Wretched stuff, laudanum. Hazel wanted to know if you needed any, so I shall tell her no.”

  “About Hazel,” Tillie said. There was no proper way to say it, so she just blurted it out. “I heard that Hazel and James have . . . they’ve . . .” Her face was aflame. “I know on good authority that they’ve had an affair. I thought you should know.”

  Dorothy stabbed a red flower in her needlepoint. She yanked the needle through, but the thread knotted on the fabric, and she frowned. “Damn. I don’t know why I bother. I do hate needlework.”

  “Dorrie. Did you hear what I said?”

  Dorothy looked up and smiled, a beatific expression on her face. “Hazel would never do such a thing. It simply isn’t true.”

  Tillie tried to press on, but Dorothy began to relentlessly gab about some new play in the Tenderloin district. Her friend tackled the embroidery with gusto for the next hour with fingers that trembled ever so slightly. Not a single stitch was added that wasn’t ruthlessly snipped and undone.

  Tillie had tried. Later that day, when two boxes of exquisite roses arrived from James, Tillie had them thrown out with the kitchen garbage.

  Ian’s letter wouldn’t leave her mind. Tillie had the typewriter brought up to her bedroom and placed on a table by the window. When she had the energy to be out of bed, she started making notes for two different articles—one on the truths about living through smallpox and one on the experience of having lived through Keeley’s Institute as a real patient. Just that morning, she’d had a maid send off her Keeley’s medicine samples (those, James hadn’t taken) to Dr. Biggs to have them tested. She couldn’t wait to find out the contents.

  Though her grandmother and mother hadn’t forgiven her reckless abandonment of James at the theater and the unexpected visit to the sickrooms of the Foundling Hospital, they were so terrified that she would die from the illness that they relented and allowed Dr. Erikkson to visit once. Only once. Both Pembroke matrons insisted on being in attendance.

  “Classic smallpox,” Dr. Erikkson announced, a surprise to no one. “Bed rest and aspirin. I’ll prescribe a salve to rub on the pockmarks once they heal to minimize the scarring. She’s very lucky she didn’t get one of the more malignant cases or the hemorrhagic type.” He left several bottles of his proprietary medicine and was gone. After such a perfunctory visit, they weren’t sure what to think.

  “Very professional,” her mother noted.

  “He seemed like he was ready to bolt as soon as he could. Only the guilty act in such a way,” Grandmama said. “Are you satisfied, Mathilda? Can we finally remove that dreadful man and his family from ours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will you promise not to write anything about it?”

  Tillie pressed her lips together.

  “Why this need to write to the world?” her mother inquired.

  “It’s a fever, a passion. We all had them. We all left them behind,” her grandmother said.

  “And was it worth it, leaving it behind?” Tillie asked. Her mother seemed frozen into speechlessness, perhaps terrified that Tillie would ask her the same question.

  “Yes. Of course!” her grandmother nearly boomed. “It always is. We have our fortune. We have our name. It is always worth the sacrifice. Some mistakes are best left in the past.”

  A month ago, Tillie would have stayed silent, wretched and afraid under her grandmother’s gaze. But she couldn’t contain her anger.

  “Lucy. Lucy is the mistake you’d like to leave in the past,” she said.

  “Mathilda!” her mother gasped.

  Grandmama rose and headed for the door. “Go on and tell her. She’s good at finding answers; she’ll find out anyway,” she said to her daughter, and then to Tillie: “You’re clever, Mathilda. It’s a blessing and a curse.” She looked at the medicines Dr. Erikkson left. “Put that salve on your scars. How will we ever get you married looking like that?” She shut the door.

  Tillie would have waited for her mother to speak. But she was coming to realize that her mother was perfectly comfortable evading difficulty—for centuries, if possible.

  “Lucy never did look much like me. The hair, the eye color. Papa is not her papa, is he?”

  Her mother shook her head, staring at her lap.

  “Who was he?”

  “I can’t say. I won’t. But I loved him, and he didn’t want me. He was . . . is . . . already married and refused to divorce and marry me.”

  “And Papa?”

  Mama looked up, her eyes shiny with tears. “Oh, he loved me for years. I was already showing when he offered marriage. He didn’t mind. He took to Lucy like she was his own child. But Grandmama always feared that someone would tell the truth and our shame would be thrust upon all of New York.”

  Clarity entered Tillie’s mind. “Lucy knew, didn’t she?”

  “She saw him—her father—at a ball. He was visiting from Europe. I’ll say that much—he’s not American. She saw the resemblance immediately.” Mrs. Pembroke inhaled and hiccupped at the same time, the sound of a sob being swallowed. “She was going to tell James. She didn’t want to
lie about who she was.”

  “Did she? Tell James?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “And so Lucy died, and you and Grandmama were fine with that. Leaving the secrets behind.”

  “We didn’t wish her any harm. We would never! But the investigation and the newspaper articles—it had to stop. The more our family is in the public eye, the more likely the truth will come to light. We cannot have that.”

  Her mother rose, smoothing her skirt.

  “Others have died, Mama. Not just Lucy. Your secrets aren’t more important than preventing the deaths of more innocents.”

  But her mother seemed to have retreated back into her careful composure. “When you are better, things will be back to normal. No more writing, no more running around.”

  “I’ll never stop writing,” Tillie said. “The house, the carriages, the money. It’s always been enough for you and Grandmama, but not for me. I want to learn things outside of myself and bring more thought and knowledge to the world. Why is that so very terrible?” She sat up.

  “Mathilda,” her mother said. “Grandmama has made it clear to me. If you continue to write, we shall cut you off. No money, no dowry, no inheritance.”

  “Then I shall get a job, and I may even gain a living writing,” Tillie said with equal gravity.

  “Ugh. Working? Like your other grandparents?”

  Tillie tried not to look hungry, but she couldn’t help it. “They did? Tell me.”

  Her mama hesitated but seemed resigned to speaking. “They took care of the sick. Your grandfather was a doctor in Philadelphia. And your grandmother was a druggist. Can you believe that?” She shook her head. “A woman pharmacist! She had dark hair and eyes, like your father. Both poor as paupers.”

  Tillie grabbed her mother’s hand. “There is honor in having a profession, in not being idle. They had no money; there is no dishonor in being poor. I am glad you told me about them.”

  The color in her mother’s cheeks had disappeared, leaving her looking like an ink-and-pencil drawing on white paper. A whisper of wind might blow her away. “I suppose those memories belong to you, too, whether I like it or not.” She smiled uncertainly, then left the room without another word.