by Brandy Purdy
At first, we only talked, but we had little to talk about; there were so many awkward silences and long, uncomfortable pauses. Then he tried to fill the anxious silence with kisses that would make us both forget that we really had nothing to say to each other. Then he groped my breasts and fumbled clumsily with my clothes and told me I was pretty and grabbed my wrist with bruising, hard fingers and pressed my hand against the plump “sausage” in his pants and whispered hot, urgent words into my ear, urging me to take it out and hold and pet it. “It” wanted “to come out and play,” he said, but “it” was never satisfied with just play; what “it” wanted most was a kiss from me, David said, assuring me that once I became accustomed I wouldn’t gag and feel queasy like I had the one time I gave in and tried, but I could never stomach a second attempt; just the thought was enough to make me roll over in the straw and retch.
Part of me wanted to push him away, but another part of me, the part that wanted so badly to be wanted, yearned to draw him nearer, deep inside, to fill me up with all the love I had spent my whole life longing for. I kept telling myself it was a compliment, to be desired by a handsome young man like David Anthony, so dark and dangerous; everyone has to play with fire once in their life in order to discover that it burns. It was my mistake to think that I, being older and richer, had the upper hand and could control the game.
He said he wanted to marry me, but I had only to look at his perpetually pregnant sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins, and aunts, and his mother, wretched and worn out from bearing a child almost every year since she was nineteen, to know what life with him would be like: a life spent in servitude to the Anthony men, marked by black eyes, burst lips, and broken ribs, and other bruises conveniently hidden by high collars and long skirts and sleeves, veils, and discreet applications of powder and paint. A life spent out of sight in the kitchen, or on well-dressed parade at Sunday services and afterward sitting placidly in the parlor or around the dinner table, silent unless spoken to, rising only to cater to the needs of the menfolk. To marry David Anthony would have been to exchange one prison for another, one where generous brutality, not excessive frugality, defined the jailer.
I made excuses; I told him that Father would never give his consent. I was too cowardly to tell David the truth—that I would never give my consent. I didn’t want to marry him, but I didn’t want him to leave me either, not just yet; it felt so good to be desired, to lie there in the straw with my shirtwaist and corset open, letting him kiss my breasts, so I kept postponing the inevitable. I wanted to play with fire for just a little while longer. Though I feared the burn, I liked the heat of it very much.
But David Anthony was a dangerous man to play games with; I should have known better than to think I could just stop and dismiss him like a servant whenever I liked. At our last rendezvous in the barn I found that out. That was the day I got burned, but no one ever knew; the pain, the fear, the charring, and the scarring were all beneath the skin. Fires are furious, merciless things, I discovered, and hard to control, and so was David Anthony.
That day we were up in the loft. I was laughing, and had my hands up above my head, holding on to a rafter, swaying and giggling like a silly girl. David had told me a joke; I can’t remember what it was now. My white cotton shirtwaist was hanging open and my breasts were bare, my blue satin corset unhooked and the long blue silk ribbons on my chemise dangling free, teasingly tickling his face whenever I leaned down. I was happy and enjoying the unaccustomed sensual freedom and the feel of his admiring eyes on me.
Kneeling at my feet, David twirled a piece of straw between his fingers. He reached up to tickle my nipples with it before he let it fall and then he reached for me. Suddenly his hands were under my navy-blue skirt, gliding over my black stockings, playfully snapping the sky-blue satin garters, then, rising higher and higher, his fingers hooked over the waistband of my white cotton drawers.
For what seemed like a very long moment, Time, and the two of us, seemed to stand still as we gazed deep into each other’s eyes. Then, with one quick movement, he yanked my drawers down. I wanted him to! I stepped out of them, willingly, savoring this special moment of brazen bare-bottomed delight, of being naked under my skirts. It felt so wonderfully wanton, so decadently daring! David smiled up at me. With a swift motion, he ducked his head beneath my petticoat. I felt his mouth on the most secret part of me and I was lost, drowning in the most exquisite pleasure; it was even better than my wicked, wanton dreams. I felt like I was melting into his mouth and I would soon lose all of me and be swallowed up whole and devoured by David. I bore down, pressing into him, and felt his broken front tooth, cracked on a diagonal, against the secret pink pearl of my womanhood. It felt so good, I thought I was going to die; surely no one could withstand such pleasure and survive.
The next thing I knew I was flat on my back in the hay and he was on top of me, grinding his loins hard against mine. That was the moment when all the pleasure died. His hand was clamped hard over my mouth, and my legs, kicking futilely, were splayed wide around his hips, the pounding of my heels upon the wooden floor of the loft muffled by the straw we were lying upon. I felt a pain, like a railway spike was being driven between my thighs. I struggled and squirmed and tried to break free, to scratch and bite, anything to break free of him. He took his hand away, but before I could scream or wriggle free, his fist struck. I felt my lip split and tasted my own blood, salty and hot, as I lay back in the hay, still and stunned, stars dancing before my eyes. Then David was upon me again and a gushing wet warmth filled me, to mingle with my virgin blood, but it soon grew cold and did nothing to ease the burning pain.
I lay there gasping. I felt like a noose was tightening around my throat; I couldn’t seem to get enough air. What have I done? What have I done? I kept desperately repeating in my mind. I had just given a woman’s most precious gift, the one that can be given only once, the chastity that should be preserved for her wedding night, to this man who did not deserve it. No one must ever know, I decided then and there; this must be my most deeply guarded secret and go to the grave with me. If anyone ever found out, I would be ruined, or worse . . . I would be thrown into the prison of wedlock with David Anthony as my jailer.
David picked up my arm, as stiff and lifeless as a corpse’s, and pulled my handkerchief from my sleeve, then let my arm fall back into the straw again. It was one of my best handkerchiefs, snowy white, painstakingly embroidered with my initials in blue silk thread. He reached under my skirt and roughly wiped at me. I winced at his touch, at the rawness, the terrible searing, throbbing pain. I briefly saw the bloodstain before he wadded the handkerchief up, wet and sticky, and thrust it into his pocket; then he retrieved my drawers from where they lay abandoned in the straw and pocketed them too. Evidence, proof, my befuddled brain instantly understood.
He stood up and stared down at me with hard, unfeeling eyes. I should have known he had no heart!
“Now you’ll have to marry me.” He smiled fiendishly with a devilish gleam lighting up his eyes. “You’re caught!”
As he towered over me and did up the row of small black buttons on the front of his trousers, he boasted to me about how fertile the Anthony men were. There was always more than one woman expecting in the family.
“You’re caught, Lizzie Borden; you’re caught!” He bolted from the barn laughing all the way, jubilant and mocking. He had set a trap for the miserly millionaire’s daughter and I had walked right into it, blind and trusting. I was a fool! Father had been right all along! I was nothing but a dollar sign in men’s eyes! No one would ever really love me!
I do not know how long I lay there in that hay, weeping, with blood seeping from between my legs. At last, I struggled to my feet, blood crusted on my lips and chin and staining the collar of my shirtwaist where it had dripped down—I would tell everyone that I had tripped and fallen in the barn—and slowly made my way down the ladder. Wincing and nearly weeping at the raw stabbing soreness between my thighs, I hobbled into the kitc
hen. I remember thinking what an odd feeling it was to be naked underneath my skirts, to feel David’s seed, mingling with my blood, trickling down my thighs to sop into my stocking tops.
I don’t know how I did it without breaking down and weeping, sobbing the whole sorry story out to someone, anyone, but I managed to keep a calm exterior and tell the lie I had concocted about a fall as I was coming down the ladder from the loft, as I heated enough water to fill the tub and went down into the dark privacy of the cellar to bathe. I wanted to be clean. I wanted to forget. I wanted to wash away every trace of David Anthony from my life and skin and forget what he had done to me, even the pleasure that had come before the pain. But I was afraid of what he had left inside me, and I couldn’t get that out of my mind, or, I feared, of my body.
I knew I should just wait for my courses to come. Worrying about it, and whether they would come or not, would do no good and might even delay them, but I couldn’t help it; I couldn’t stop thinking about it and what would happen to me if they didn’t. Somehow I remembered the discreetly worded advertisements I had seen in the backs of women’s magazines, the ones that promised a remedy for “delayed courses and feminine obstruction,” their discreet, coded references for unwanted or inconvenient pregnancies.
After I was bathed and dressed in clean clothes, everything fresh and uncontaminated by David Anthony, I found myself in the sitting room seated on the horsehair sofa where Father liked to nap in the afternoons, frantically flipping through old magazines searching for those ads.
There were several of them, more than I remembered from the casual, mildly curious glances I had given them in the past when I had no need of them. My eye lit upon three nestled right in a row.
But which to choose? Dr. Harmony seemed commendably straightforward, a man who seemed to understand the worries and woe that went hand in hand with my predicament, and even sugar-coated his pills to make them more palatable, but Swami Fecundi had centuries of success on his side and thousands of testimonials from satisfied customers all over the world. He was a holy man with exotic wisdom and herbs and his spiel had me swaying like a charmed cobra in his direction.
But then I thought that surely, in a situation like this, a woman, and a worldly, sophisticated French woman at that, must know best? And with Saint as part of her name, well, surely that was a good sign. A saint wouldn’t lie!
And wasn’t Saint Genevieve some sort of patron saint to troubled girls, or had she saved a village from a horde of raping and pillaging barbarian invaders? It seemed like I had seen a shrine to her somewhere during my travels or read an informative tidbit somewhere. Perhaps upon a bronze plaque mounted on a church wall or in a magazine or Baedeker? Or it might have been a romance novel wherein a troubled heroine had knelt veiled and in tears and lit candles before the saint’s benevolent statue. But it seemed a most fortuitous memory, perhaps even a gift from that very saint to this troubled girl besieged by the barbarian David Anthony.
I made up my mind then and there to put my trust in Madame Saint-Genevieve. Praying that the address was still good—the magazine was after all several months old—I ran upstairs to address the envelope and enclose the requisite dollar.
I had to take action. I couldn’t wait for Mother Nature to tell me if I was in trouble. My courses weren’t due for over two weeks and that seemed an eternity, and I didn’t want to wait for them, I knew all too well their leisurely, laggardly ways. I wanted the blood to come now and set me free from this prison of uncertainty and panic! I wanted to bleed and be done with it, and David Anthony, forever! I prayed that Madame Saint-Genevieve’s promises were real and that she would be my salvation and the answer to my prayers.
Even though my hair was still wet, I put up my braid and pinned on my hat and set out for the post office. I needed my dollar to start its journey today; I needed to know that my remedy was on its way, and if my courses came before it did . . . it was only one dollar wasted in the quest for peace of mind, so it was worth it. As I strode boldly down the sidewalk, I felt my confidence returning now that I was actually doing something to save myself from a fate worse than death instead of sitting around waiting, worrying, and wallowing in misery.
Madame Saint-Genevieve was prompt, not fashionably late like I feared a Frenchwoman would be. The remedy arrived on Tuesday, August 2, 1892. She kept her promise of assured discretion, sending the preparation in a plain white wrapper bearing the elegant fleur-de-lis-embossed label of Madame Saint-Genevive de Paris, Parfumier to Royalty, but I can’t really say whether it contained a miracle or not.
Father brought the mail home with him after his daily business rounds. An immense sense of relief filled me as I held the small discreet packet that contained my salvation in my trembling hands. I took it into the kitchen. Bridget was occupied elsewhere, and the stew made from the leftover mutton was simmering on the stove and didn’t require her attention. I stood beside the stove and threw the wrapper in to feed the fire. I held the little amber glass vial of hope in my hand and pulled out the cork that sealed it and shook two little brown pills out onto my palm, which was quivering like a leaf. At that most inconvenient moment, Father called me. I heard footsteps and thought he was about to come in. I nearly leapt out of my skin. The vial and pills fell from my hand and, with a splash that sent a spray of scalding droplets onto my face, plummeted into the mutton stew. I burned my hand trying to fish them out before I thought to use a spoon, but it was too late. All I was able to retrieve was the empty vial; the pills had already melted and mingled with the mutton broth.
Hopelessness overwhelmed me. I stared despairingly down into the nauseating muddy brown depths of the mutton stew after my lost hope and wondered what to do. I could not take it upon myself to throw it out, or even feign an accident by knocking the pot off the stove, though it would have brought joy to every soul in the house except Father; we’d been having it for days on end for every meal and could not wait to see the last of it. But Father would have been furious at such wastefulness. That was why we were having mutton in the hottest summer Fall River had ever known; he had been given the meat by the tenant of our Swansea farm, and we had to make use of it quickly before it spoiled.
Abby had already tentatively voiced her concern that it might have gone bad already; she’d been feeling a trifle poorly since the mutton sandwich she’d brought up to bed with her last night. But Father scoffed at her concerns. There were few things he deplored more than the wasting of food, and as long as there was a morsel of meat left or a drop of juice that mutton would be on our table and there was no getting round it. Nor would he sanction anyone in the household eating anything else than what was laid before them on the table; he even balked at special food for invalids. “You will eat what is set before you or go without,” he always said. “There will be no special meals in this house!” To think, I actually feared Father’s anger more than I did accidentally poisoning us all!
So, foolishly, I did nothing. I just let the pot sit and simmer until supper. Perhaps it was naïve of me, but with all the advertisement’s promises of safety and gentleness, I didn’t think it would hurt anyone. It was an herbal preparation after all, not poison. Since no one else was in the same predicament I feared that I was in, I thought it would just pass through their bodies harmlessly as water. Madame Saint-Genevieve had promised that it did its work without pain or nausea or detrimental effects of any kind and she, this acclaimed Parisian specialist with Saint in her name, certainly didn’t strike me as a charlatan who would presume to peddle a dishonest product in the pages of a popular and highly respected women’s magazine. The publishers most assuredly would not stand for it; they had a reputation to uphold, and there must be laws about that kind of thing. And they must think very highly of her indeed to put her on the same page, in the same column, as the compassionate and renowned Dr. Harmony and a holy man like Swami Fecundi! Why the latter must practically be upon a par with the Pope!
Father, as a man, should have been immune, and Abby was
well past childbearing years. Emma’s courses had also stopped; she was, regrettably, in all ways withered and dried up, and she was away visiting the Brownells in Fairhaven, so she would not be affected by my blunder at all. Bridget and I were the only women in the household of childbearing age, and she did not even have a fellow as far as I knew, and thus no cause for concern, so surely it would not hurt her. Madame Saint-Genevieve promised prominently in all capital letters that her product posed no detriment to future health and domestic happiness.
And it was a big stewpot, and there were only six, or maybe eight, or ten at most, tiny pills. So surely there was nothing to worry about. I only hoped, whatever little bit I ingested, might be enough to do me some good and save me from the bleak future I feared and foresaw for myself trapped in wedded misery with David Anthony. If I were found out to be with child by him, he would be compelled to make an honest woman of me, and that was what he had intended all along. That I did not want him was both insignificant and immaterial. We must save face and do what was morally and socially proper; Father was certain to insist upon it, and the Anthonys doubtlessly would also.
