Lawfully Wedded Husband

by Joel Derfner

  “And that was the beginning,” my father told me, “of twenty-five beautiful years. Some hard years, no question about it. But she had been told as a teenager, when she was diagnosed with diabetes, ‘You’re not going to live very long, don’t bother getting married, finishing school, you won’t have children, anything like that.’ So I always thought that whatever I had with Mom was a gift that she wasn’t expecting to have.”

  “So what you’re saying,” said Mike when I told him this story, “is that your parents were homewreckers.”

  “Well, homewreckers whose work together made it possible to practice civil rights law in this country,” I said—my mother wrote the law that allows lawyers who win civil rights cases to be paid by the corporations and government agencies that lose rather than by their clients, who rarely have two chickens to rub together—“but yeah, homewreckers nonetheless.”

  I once asked my dad’s sister what Marcy had been like. She looked at me blankly and said, “Marcy?”

  “Dad’s first wife,” I said.

  “Oh, you mean the poisonous bitch,” she said.

  “I guess you’ve answered my question.”

  “I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

  The only thing I remember my mom ever saying about Freddy was that she should have known they were doomed when he came back from a trip out of town and was furious to find that she’d written a check for $100 (worth about $650 today) to a charity her grandmother supported. “I could have used that money,” he said, “to buy a pair of shoes.” Then again, when she died in 1992 he did come to her memorial service, which I thought was pretty classy.

  A couple weeks after Mike and I came up with our plan for the other engagement ring I realized I might be in trouble, because Dad called to tell me he couldn’t find the ring he wore when he was married to my mom. “I’ll call Gigi,” he said, referring to my mom’s half-sister. “She may know where it is, or at least know where Mom’s dad’s ring might be.”

  But using my maternal grandfather’s wedding ring would be symbolically much worse, given that he was only one of what turned out to be nine men my grandmother married (seven if you don’t count the annulment and the common-law bigamy, but in for a penny, in for a pound, I say).

  My mother’s mother, who had spent four years in Paris and whom we therefore called, at her request, “Mémé,” was short and reeked of perfume, which I loved. The other sense memory she conjures up is the clinking of her rings, which seemed to me to number in the thousands. She was able so to bejewel herself because her grandfather had been some sort of New York real estate mogul, which meant that the family owned things like the Waldorf Astoria, the Omni Berkshire, and the ABC building. (This never helped me much; they sold everything for pennies in the early 1970s when the city went broke, because New York was a town whose time had obviously come and gone, and then spent it all. On rings, apparently.)

  Mémé’s paternal ancestry, however, while it made her rich, also made her Jewish, if not in the eyes of Jews then at least in the eyes of certain circles of society to which she was never able to gain full admittance. At my mother’s funeral, when I was twenty, my father’s mother, who went by the much homelier moniker “Grandma,” went up to Mémé to offer her condolences on the death of her daughter. “A parent should never outlive a child,” said Grandma in her thick Yiddish accent.

  “What Armand needs to do now,” said Mémé after thanking her, “is find a nice Jewish girl to marry.”

  “He did. He was married to her for twenty-five years.”

  “Mary Frances was not Jewish!” Mémé hissed. “She was a good Christian! She read her Bible every day!” (We didn’t have a Bible in the house.) “My daughter was not Jewish!”

  Grandma looked Mémé in the eye calmly and said, “She was Jewish enough for us.”

  As a child I found Mémé an incredibly compelling figure, and it’s not difficult to think of her now as a sort of evil Auntie Mame. When I was eight she begged and begged my parents to let her take me to Afghanistan so I could see the Khyber Pass by moonlight (this was in the eighties, when during the Soviet invasion Afghanistan was littered with land mines that ultimately killed a million Afghan civilians). At the same time, whenever I came back from her house, holding, like Persephone returning from Hades, a pomegranate from her pomegranate tree, I would subject my civil-rights-worker parents to a righteous monologue about something like the travesty of justice that was the graduated income tax. When I was a baby, apparently, on a visit to our house Mémé said something about how the niggers were ruining everything, to which my normally conflict-avoidant mother responded, “Mother, the next time this child hears you say that word will be the last time you see him until the day you die.” I have no memory of hearing the word issue from Mémé’s mouth, so she must have paid attention.

  Here’s what I know about Mémé’s husbands (numbering from 1–9).

  Her marriage with husband #1 she annulled after four days because he’d said he had money and he didn’t.

  With husband #2 she produced my Uncle Bill, who to this day on the rare occasions when he calls his father and says, hi, Dad, it’s your son, Bill, receives the answer, I don’t have a son.

  Husband #3 was my mom’s father, an engineer for the Navy.

  Husband #4 was actually married to somebody else, or maybe it was Mémé who was married to somebody else, but they lived together for long enough that if nobody had been married to anybody else it would have been a common-law marriage, so I think of their relationship as common-law bigamy. He was a lawyer and my mom’s (and her siblings’) favorite of all her stepfathers, until she came home from school one day to find him hanging by the neck from a rafter with the stool kicked out from under him.

  Husband #5 was some sort of tennis champion.

  Husband #6 was both a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee and a Quaker, which I always thought was unbeatable, but then along came Paul Ryan with Ayn Rand and Jesus, so there you go.

  Husband #7—the first one I was alive to meet—was a Frenchman with an Italian title (I remember it as Conte di Lumazon, but I can’t find any evidence of such a title ever having existed) who wanted my mother to renounce her father so that she could be a viscountess and eventually inherit his rank. I am still furious that she refused, because if she hadn’t I could have found a way to interpret the rules of heritability, Italian nobility being infamously flexible, so that upon her death I would have become a count and people would have to address me as “My Lord.” The count was also, if memory serves, a French royalist and an arms smuggler, which fact became clear when my babysitting aunt called my mother and asked whether she ought to do anything about all the guns he and his friends had piled up on the piano.

  Marriage #8 was to a truly wretched Englishman named Archie. He would do things like insist, on the way to Christmas morning at my great-grandmother’s house, that we stop to get batteries in case we needed them for any gifts, and then, when we walked in late, say he was sorry but my dad just had to stop and get batteries. Once, when Hannukah and Christmas overlapped, we were having a quiet little Hannukah celebration in one part of the house, and Archie began blaring Christmas carols at full volume from the stereo (“I still don’t understand why I stopped your uncle Bill from strangling him to death,” my dad says). The pièce de résistance, though, was definitely when Mémé decided to take in a woman and her son who had been staying at the local women’s shelter. As soon as she told him what she was planning to do, Archie installed locks on all the cabinets and the refrigerator so that, if their guests got hungry, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, and then, the first day they were there, when the son left his breakfast bowl of Rice Krispies unfinished, Archie made him fish the leftovers out of the garbage can and eat them. No one was surprised when, after Archie’s death, we found all sorts of malevolent-magic paraphernalia in his closet (an inscribed dagger, a cauldron, you name it)—and I’m all for Wiccans but I guarantee you that if he
ever used these things it was to injurious purpose.

  (My father was with Mémé when she filled out the marriage license application before her wedding to Archie. He says that, after checking the box indicating she’d been married before, she answered the question “How many husbands have you had [1, 2, etc.]?” by writing “3.” “What?” she said when he looked at her agog. “It’s obviously what comes next.”)

  Marriage #9 was to a former doctor about whom I remember only that a) he’d had his medical license revoked for incompetence, b) an avid gardener, he set the kitchen on fire when at one point he used the microwave to sterilize some potting soil, and c) once, after spending several minutes examining my mother’s plastic ficus tree, he said to her, “You know, with a new pot and some watering, this plant could really thrive.”

  One day I told an elderly friend about my much-married grandmother and her face lit up. “What an optimist!” she exclaimed.

  “What?” I said.

  “She never stopped trying!”

  Which, while true from a certain vantage point, wasn’t particularly how I wanted to solemnize my marriage to Mike.

  Because even if my aunt came up with a wedding ring from my grandmother’s jewelry stash, how could I be sure I wasn’t consecrating Mike to me with a ring worn by a member of HUAC or a French royalist arms smuggler?

  “That,” said Mike when I told him about Mémé, “explains so much about you.”

  “In a good way, I hope,” I said.

  “That explains so much about you.”

  When I called Dad again to ask about the search, he said he hadn’t gotten any further in finding the ring. He was waiting for Gigi (I can never remember which husband she came from) to call him back, he said, but now Mike was very nervous, because a third possibility, frightening if unlikely, had occurred to me: what if I ended up giving him the wedding ring that marked the union of my great-great-grandparents the poisoners?

  In the summer of 1910, my mother’s father’s father’s father, forty-year-old insurance superintendent Frederick Henry Seddon, his wife, Margaret, their five children (two sons and three daughters), his father, and their servant moved into a large house in Leeds, England. It was a neighborhood on the upswing; the Seddons were going places.

  Before long, there was another addition to the household in Miss Eliza “Chickie” Barrow. Also in her forties, and exceedingly wealthy, Miss Barrow arrived at 63 Tollington Park after having lived with a succession of relatives and friends, all of whom had taken her in for her money but had eventually kicked her out both because she was querulous and slovenly and alcoholic and her relatives never knew whether she was going to be nice to them or yell at them and spit in their faces, and because she was virtually deaf and the only way they could communicate anything to her was to tell it to the small orphan she kept about her so he could shout things in her ear and whom she controlled by shaking him, shouting at him, and threatening to throw herself out the window if he didn’t behave. Her hosts stood her and the small orphan as long as they could, because it really was a good deal of money, but eventually further hospitality was made impossible by the fact that, in addition to the idiosyncrasies I have detailed, she also suffered continually from bouts of particularly noxious diarrhea.

  The Seddons, however, when her despairing cousins responded to their room-to-let ad and moved her in, simply put her on her own floor of their house, where the diarrhea didn’t cause anybody else problems, except, one assumes, the laundress. The small orphan was unfazed by it, having developed, fortuitously, an adenoidal condition that robbed him of his sense of smell.

  The household ran quite smoothly for a while, despite the challenges presented by Miss Barrow and by the Seddons’ servant, Mary, who spent most of her time telling people about how her enemies were out to get her, except on those occasions when she broke into violent fits of screaming at people who weren’t there. Margaret ran a dress shop, Frederick either seduced or raped women in the houses he insured (I can’t figure out how to interpret the quote, “it is said of him that, with regard to women, he abused his position as an insurance superintendent with constant access to houses during the absence of the husband”), and everybody was happy, more or less. Meanwhile, the Seddons managed to persuade Chickie to transfer more and more of her money to them, starting with £1,600 worth of India stock (about $169,000 in today’s American money) and continuing with some sort of lease on a pub worth £1,300 ($137,000) that brought in £120 a year ($12,500), until they owned about £3,000 ($316,500) worth of her property, in exchange for an annuity of £1 a week ($105 today) for the rest of her life; this left about £1,000 ($105,500) in her possession, some in banknotes, some in the bank, and some in gold coin in the lockbox in her room.

  The Seddons did nothing by halves, however, so after Chickie had lived with them for a while, Margaret cashed the banknotes one by one under a false name and then, in June of 1911, took her tenant to the bank, where Chickie withdrew the £216 ($23,000) she had deposited there—giving it to Margaret to take care of, naturally—at which point there was only the £676 ($71,500) in gold coins in the lockbox. A few weeks later Margaret went to the pharmacy and bought a package of flypaper under a false name; she and her husband soaked the flypaper in water to leach out the arsenic, poured the arsenic-filled water into a bottle of a tonic Miss Barrow took regularly named, thrillingly, Valentine’s Meat Juice, and the rest took care of itself. Since the symptoms of arsenic poisoning include terrible diarrhea, when the already valetudinarian Miss Barrow responded poorly to the new addition to her daily regimen, nothing seemed unusual.

  Chickie Barrow died in short order, fallen victim to, as the doctor who signed her death certificate put it, “epidemic diarrhœa.” That night Margaret went out to the music hall; the next day, after sending Chickie’s cousins a letter to an address where he knew they no longer lived, Seddon took her diamond ring and gold watch to the jeweler, the ring to be resized for him, the gold watch to be stripped of its inscription to “E.J. Barrow, 1860” and reinscribed to his wife. The undertaker told him that a proper funeral would cost £4 ($422); Seddon said that he’d only found £410s ($475) in her room, a sum that wouldn’t cover the combined expenses of such a funeral and the doctor’s bill, so the undertaker dropped his price and buried her in an unmarked public grave, paying Seddon a commission, of course, for the referral.

  Apparently the small orphan failed to show up at school for a few days in a row, so Miss Barrow’s cousin stopped by the Seddons’ to find out what was going on. Seddon coldly told him he’d already missed the funeral; when the cousin came back the next day and asked about the will and insurance money, which was of course his real interest in the matter, Seddon said he knew nothing about any of it. It was at this point that the cousin began to grow suspicious, so he alerted the police, and before long the Seddons were in custody, held on a charge of willful murder. The trial was held in early 1912, and, though the jury declared Margaret innocent, Frederick Seddon was found guilty and presently hanged by the neck until dead.

  “If Seddon had not given evidence himself,” writes the editor of the trial transcript, who was himself in attendance, “few jurymen would have dared to bring in a verdict of guilty.” He did, however, and so they did, because, although the case against him was entirely circumstantial, and not even Law & Order circumstantial, where it’s obvious that the guy did it and the defense attorney is just grasping at straws, but actually circumstantial, Seddon was “as cold and hard as a paving stone, and had such a jaunty and overweening confidence in his sharpness and cleverness that, had the issue been less grave, it would have been only human to wish to triumph over him at any cost.” The editor is of the opinion that “he was obviously capable of the crime with which he was charged” and that upon hearing his testimony the jurors’ only choice was to believe he was “a scoundrel and a murderer.” During his trial, the one moment of feeling Seddon permitted himself came when the prosecutor accused him of counting Chickie’s gold coi
ns in his office while his assistant watched. Seemingly unperturbed by the idea that he had murdered his tenant in cold blood for her money, he was nevertheless incensed to be thought such a “degenerate, greedy, inhuman monster” as to count it in front of his assistant. “I would have had all day to count that money!” he shouted at the prosecutor.

  Here is what the editor of the transcript has to say about Mrs. Seddon and her relationship with her husband:

  His wife, as she appeared to those who saw her at the trial, is a somewhat more inscrutable character. A woman with some pretensions to good looks, dressed with some taste, apparently gentle, and rather weak in character, she had been doing practically the whole of the lighter household work of this fourteen-roomed residence, living, in short, the life of a domestic drudge. It was obvious from the evidence, and as a matter of knowledge outside the case, that she and Seddon were not on particularly good terms; it was obvious that everyone in his household was frightened of him, and that he was a hard and tyrannous man. Business, and especially Mr. Seddon’s business, came first in that house, and every one had to make way for it. Looking at his wife as she gave evidence, it seemed humanly incredible that he would trust her with any matter of importance outside the kitchen, and, in fact, I am convinced that he did not. Only once did Mrs. Seddon unconsciously reveal the attitude in which they stood to one another, when to the question as to why she did not tell him something, she answered, “He never used to take any notice when I said anything to him; he always had other things to think of.” And, again, “I did not tell my husband everything I done; he never told me everything.”