It was early on the morning of Tuesday, January 30, 1894, that Jennie’s train snaked its way southward from Baltimore, crossed the Anacostia River, and entered Washington, a broad, low city that still seemed like a mirage in the dawn mists on what had been the nearly empty tidal flats of the Potomac just seventy-five years earlier. One visitor to Washington City in 1827 found it so sparsely populated, amid a handful of government buildings and the “wide formal avenues” that Peter Charles L’Enfant had optimistically laid out, that he thought it “look[ed] as if some giant had scattered a box of his child’s toys at random on the ground.” When the pioneering ophthalmologist and stenographer Isabel Barrows arrived in 1867, she found “a great, sprawling country village” where “clouds of dust rose up from passing wagons” and “cows and geese wander[ed] the paths while pigs rooted in the streets.”
In the years since, Washington had grown in leaps and bounds alongside the federal government and was now the capital city that L’Enfant had envisioned, with grand public buildings and a population closing in on a quarter million. Even then, journalist Frank Carpenter thought the city still had a “fairy-tale sense of instability about it,” as if “it has sprung up in a morning, or rather a whirlwind had picked up some great town, mixed the big houses up with the little ones, then cast the whole together in one miscellaneous mass, keeping intact only the city streets.”
It wasn’t just the physical city that had been transfigured; so, too, had its inhabitants. Beginning in the 1880s, Washington became a fashionable city for the wealthy who had nothing to do with politics, especially the nouveaux riches who had Gilded Age fortunes to spend but not the pedigree to break into the old-name high societies of Philadelphia or Boston or New York. As word of the “capital’s various charms” spread—its permeable high society, its mild winters, its fine paved boulevards perfect for promenading the smartest horses and equipage, its “beautiful homes with large ballrooms”—it became a magnet for the nation’s “rootless rich,” says the historian Kathryn Allamong Jacob. By 1884, Century Magazine could assure its readers that “it is the fashion to go to Washington in the winter as to Newport in the summer.” The change turbocharged the city’s social scene, as both new money and old, official Washington and this unofficial big-spending populace, partook in an annual bacchanal of luncheons and receptions and dinners and balls known as “the season,” which stretched from December until June. In February 1892, upon his return from a sojourn in Europe, Henry Adams lamented the changes that had taken place in the provincial city he knew, where a handful of diplomatic families like his and old-line cave dwellers controlled a fairly parsimonious social scene that ended promptly at Lent: “Houses had been opened up and there was much dining; much calling; much leaving of cards.” Julia Foraker, who first visited the capital as the daughter of a congressman and came back as the wife of a senator, described a “brilliant” social whirlwind in the 1890s, when the “rich, spectacular New York-crowd-with-the-names” came to town, “took big houses [and] gave extravagant parties.”
Frank Carpenter, the Washington correspondent for the Cleveland Leader who wrote the popular “Carp’s Washington Letters” column, reported, “There is enough silk worn here every winter to carpet a whole state; there are pearls by the bushel, and diamonds by the peck.” Carp was especially amused by the craze for extravagant, color-themed entertainments complete with towering sugar-spun sculptures and “monumental floral decorations” to match; he himself attended a red luncheon, a violet dinner, a pink tea, and an orange reception. His wife attended Mrs. Dr. Nathan Lincoln’s “pink and gold” Valentine’s luncheon that featured a life-size sculpture of a white swan filled with maidenhair fern perched on pink silk and lace, “above which poised a big heart of pink carnations pierced with a golden arrow.” After finishing their lunch and their heart-shaped ices, each guest pulled a pink ribbon on a pink Jack Horner pie and “found attached to it a bisque Cupid holding a gold heart.”
The winter Jennie wound her way into Washington, the florists and caterers were quieter than usual. The whole country seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to see what happened with the economy, “drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siècle,” as Adams put it. Cleveland had gotten his repeal of the Silver Act after a protracted battle in the Senate, but still the economy sputtered, businesses failed, and unemployment rose. There was in the capital itself “a vast army of unemployed, and men pleading for food who have never before been compelled to seek aid,” the Washington Evening Star reported. For the moment, however, Jennie undoubtedly was preoccupied not with the economy but with the question of how, exactly, she was going to get herself into the House of Mercy. Stoll had told her to make up a “pitiful tale,” but Jennie knew that she would have to come up with more than just some sad story to fool the nuns. “Don’t you know that the ‘pitiful story’ must fit the particular conditions?” she asked Stoll, chiding him for not finding out more about the home. She said she supposed it was like the Young Women’s Christian Association homes that had been established in cities to provide refuge for single working girls. If this was the case, she told Stoll, she would be “delighted,” as she had “always wanted to study the practical workings of such charitable institutions, and see whether they really accomplish the desired purpose.”
Jennie’s train pulled into the Baltimore & Potomac’s foreboding neo-Gothic station on the northeast corner of the Mall a little after 7:30 a.m., just as the hansom cabs and drays and streetcars would have been clattering to life, filling the streets with an early-morning clamor: the clip-clop of hooves and the clang of trolley bells. As she exited the depot, she passed the ladies’ waiting room, where a bronze star in the floor marked the spot where President James Garfield had been assassinated twelve years earlier, adding to the slightly haunted feeling of the place. Following Stoll’s directions, she went one block north to Pennsylvania Avenue and the St. James Hotel. After she checked in and had breakfast, she took the green cars of the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar toward Georgetown. She disembarked near Washington Circle and found herself standing on K Street in front of a light gray, three-story brick building with a large gilt cross over the front door and a polished brass plaque that read “House of Mercy.” The house had an iron gate in front and “carefully curtained windows” that, she told Stoll, “gave it that no-one-ever-allowed-to-look-out appearance.” If Jennie could have seen around back, she would have realized that this was no YWCA home. The backyard was ringed by a six-foot-high brick wall that had been inlaid with broken glass bottles—with the jagged edges facing up to foil escape.
Afraid that she would lose her nerve, and “overcoming a strong desire to turn and run,” Jennie pulled the bell with a “nervous but determined jerk.” A middle-aged nun answered the door. Feigning a faltering voice, Jennie asked for the matron of the house. “You mean Sister Dorothea,” said the nun, who took Jennie’s card and escorted her to a plainly furnished parlor. The rattle of keys announced the arrival of Sister Dorothea, a sad-faced nun in a long black habit and small white cornette. She asked Jennie what she wanted. Jennie told her that she had come from Boston on account of her health and needed a place to stay until she was well enough to earn money to pay for a boardinghouse. At that, Sister Dorothea led Jennie to her private office. “My child,” she said sternly after closing the door, “you evidently do not understand the character of the house you have come to; you should have gone to the Young Women’s Christian Association. This, my dear, is a home exclusively for fallen women. We do not take anyone into the Home who has not committed this sin. The Home is carried on wholly for the purpose of reclaiming these poor creatures.”
A feeling of consternation swept over Jennie as she realized that the story she had prepared wouldn’t do, and if she was “going to tell a lie now, it must be a big one.” She took a breath and began. “Sister, I know the character of this house, and because of its character came here,” she said. “I want to have the example of my fallen sisters to help me lead a better life. I, too, have sinned.” Out spilled the story of an orphaned girl who had fallen prey to lust and the imaginary physician who made her promise to leave Boston and begin life anew. The nun was sympathetic, taking Jennie’s hand and holding it kindly as she spun her story. Jennie was so nervous that she wasn’t sure if she would laugh or cry, so she buried her head in her handkerchief and was relieved when it was the latter, the real-enough tears only adding to the performance. When she finished her story, however, the nun looked doubtful. She told Jennie that she would be glad to help her but feared that Jennie “could not stand it at the Home.” She told Jennie that the girls were “coarse, rough, ignorant girls, and that it would not be possible for one who had been brought up as she could see [Jennie] had been to live in close contact with them.”
Sister Dorothea said that the girls who came to the House of Mercy were required to stay for one year, during which time they would be expected to learn sewing and housekeeping skills that would fit them for some useful work. She said despite her reluctance to take Jennie on, “this resolve on your part is so brave that I am going to make a concession to you.” She said that Jennie could come for a one-week trial and “after that if you conclude that you can endure the life here, I shall ask you to promise to stay with me for a year.” The rules, Sister Dorothea said, were very strict and Jennie would have to follow them like the other girls. She must wear the uniform of the other “inmates,” could not go out unless attended to by one of the sisters, and must have no communication with the outside world. Jeannie blanched, thinking of her plans for a post office box to get her dispatches to Stoll, but seeing no other way, she agreed to the sister’s terms. She told her that she had some arrangements to make and would return that afternoon.
When she got back to the hotel, Jennie wrote to Stoll and told him she had gotten in. She gave him an outline of what transpired and told him of Sister Dorothea’s “appalling proposition” that she commit to a one-year internment. “I feel as if I was going to my own funeral,” she wrote. “I only hope it will not be as difficult to escape as it was to get in.” She closed her letter with a warning. “If you hear nothing from me at the end of three weeks,” she told Stoll, “you must devise some way of getting me out.”
* * *
By late morning, Jennie once again stood before the House of Mercy, this time with a “miserable sinking feeling” in her heart. Her own dread aside, she was dying to find out if Madeline Pollard was still in the house. She didn’t have to wait long. Before she joined the others, and after the front door was locked behind her, Sister Dorothea came to speak with her. She warned Jennie that there was another young woman living there “in a false position” as “a teacher, and not as an inmate of the Home, which in reality she is.” Sister Dorothea said that the woman went by the name of Miss Dudley and that she couldn’t tell Jennie her real name, but she was a “notorious woman.” She went on, apparently distressed by her visitor. “It was a great mistake to permit her to come here at all,” she said, but when her order took over the house last October, her predecessor had already given her permission to stay. “I have told her lawyers repeatedly that I would not keep her; but they have put me off … As the woman claims she has not a cent in the world, I cannot turn her into the street.” She warned Jennie not to talk to “Miss Dudley,” as she “seems determined to tell her miserable history to everyone who will listen to her. She goes on in the most minute and disgusting details.”
Now Jennie had no doubt whom she was talking about, and her mind was already turning over the possibilities as she followed Miss Grey, one of the staff in charge of the girls, to the dormitory. It put Jennie in mind of “the woman’s ward of a prison”: a “large, bare, whitewashed room, with rows of narrow iron bedsteads, with just enough space between each for a small chair.” There she changed into a “very ugly blue gingham dress” that still had molasses drippings down the front from its previous inhabitant, an apron of the same dye-pot blue, and a white cap. As she dressed, Miss Grey took her clothes and locked them up, which caused a pang as Jennie realized if she had to leave in a hurry, she would be out on the street in the “dreadful clothes” without her hat or coat. But she did manage to conceal a chamois pouch around her neck with some money and stamps in case of an emergency and a little diary for her shorthand notes of what she discovered. She decided she was safe enough for the time being, “unless I lose my mind before getting out, which is not altogether improbable, considering my surroundings,” she scribbled in her diary.
Dinner didn’t improve her assessment of her surroundings. She sat at a long table with the other girls and ate in silence, as was the custom. Supper was bread and butter and tea. “The tea certainly was ‘wet,’ but there was nothing else attractive about it,” she lamented. Afterward, she went with the other girls to a plain sitting room, with a bare floor, a large table, and a few wooden chairs. Jennie had her first chance to assess the other inmates. She was surprised at how young they were; she guessed most to be about seventeen or so. They were mostly lower-class girls. “None of them seem to have had any education,” she noted. “Some are very coarse and common in every way; but as a rule they are not vulgar, simply noisy and untamed.”
Jennie shouldn’t have been surprised at the age or the social class of the girls. Homes for fallen women like the House of Mercy were designed to intercept working-class girls who had an out-of-wedlock pregnancy before they began what was believed to be the inevitable downward spiral to a life of prostitution. Some girls were sent by their parents and others by the courts. They were roughly modeled after the network of homes for penitent prostitutes and wayward girls established by the Catholic Sisters of the Good Shepherd throughout the Mississippi Valley and major East Coast cities before the Civil War. A surge of interest by middle- and upper-class reformers in quashing prostitution in the booming postwar cities resulted in the establishment of a wave of facilities for fallen women in the 1880s and 1890s, including homes run by the Salvation Army and the Florence Crittenton Homes established by the “millionaire evangelist” Charles Nelson Crittenton. This burst of philanthropic activity reflected anxieties about working women alone in the big cities, both as victims of male sexual predation and as possible temptations to respectable husbands and sons.
While the first homes for fallen women were run by Catholic nuns, Episcopalian clerics and laypeople became interested in the issue when the church created a counterpart to the Church of England’s White Cross Army, which promoted “social purity”—a single standard of morality for men and women that eschewed premarital sex and prostitution. Creating new institutions to disseminate moral education and protect working girls before they could be led astray by the temptations of the city or the exigencies of a low wage became a fashionable cause. New York’s Bishop Henry Potter was especially prominent in these efforts, and his daughter Virginia and the heiress Grace Hoadley Dodge established a widely copied Working Girls Society to provide moral uplift to working girls by giving them a place they could come after work to take classes and learn middle-class values, especially the civilizing effects of domesticity and the expectation of premarital sexual abstinence. By 1890 there were eighteen such clubs in New York alone, offering classes and lectures on household affairs, the “grandeur of womanhood and motherhood,” the “influence of women over men,” and “purity and nobility of character” to some two thousand young women.
In 1884, the Women’s Auxiliary of the Washington Episcopal Diocese founded the House of Mercy as “a house of refuge and reformatory for fallen and outcast women.” At the time, Washington had only one other home for unwed mothers, St. Ann’s Infant Asylum, founded by the Daughters of Charity and incorporated by an act of Congress signed by President Lincoln in 1863 to provide for “deserving indigent and unprotected females during their confinement in childbirth” and for the care of “foundlings”—abandoned, usually illegitimate, infants. In 1887, the District got a third home for wayward women when the local chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, under the leadership of its president Sarah La Fetra, opened its Home for Fallen Women. The WCTU, at the time by far the largest women’s political organization in the country, had added social purity work to its mission of banishing liquor two years earlier following the scare over “white slavery” caused by the publication of the sensational “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” exposé in England, in which reformer William Stead showed how easy it was to purchase a virgin working-class girl to enslave in a brothel. The WCTU also started campaigning around the country to raise the age of consent, which was ten or twelve in most states, to age eighteen to combat what it decried as the widespread sexual exploitation of young women by older men.
Different homes had different specializations. St. Ann’s took unwed mothers for their “lying in” until they gave birth and kept their children, as well as the infants that were routinely left on their doorstep with pleading notes pinned to them. “Please accept this little outcast son of mine,” read one found on a baby at a similar asylum in New York City. “I would not part with my baby were it in any way possible to make a respectable living with him, but I cannot.” The WCTU home specialized in trying to reclaim prostitutes and other denizens of the street from their lives of sin. The House of Mercy confined unwed mothers for one year after they had given birth to “rehabilitate” them. By the time Jennie arrived in 1894, it had space for twenty-five girls and, like St. Ann’s Infant Asylum, received a regular appropriation from Congress as part of a network of semi-official female penal institutions focused on policing women’s sexuality.
The House of Mercy attempted to instill middle-class sexual morality through plain living, hard work, and the cultivation of domesticity—a taste for “fancy dress” and “excitement” was believed to be a major risk factor for women’s moral downfall. Girls were taught sewing and housekeeping skills so that they would have some means of support after they were released. Ideally, in the minds of those who ran the institutions, they would become servants in private homes where they would have proper supervision. They believed that jobs in the public world—working in stores and factories—were the cause of most women’s downfall in the first place. The production of domestics also conveniently helped address the “servant problem” that plagued middle- and upper-class women like those on the home’s Board of Lady Managers. These women reluctantly had to hire immigrant and African American women for servant jobs they would prefer to see filled by native-born white women, who increasingly eschewed domestic work because of its grueling nature and the lack of personal time.
Unfortunately for the girls being groomed as domestics, they were most likely being sent right back into the proverbial lion’s den. Mary Conyngton, who undertook a pioneering federal study of fallen women early in the twentieth century, found that a “disproportionate number of the fallen women had been domestic servants.” And, she wrote, the fact that “the home and domestic service furnish the majority of the inmates [of homes for unwed mothers] is the more striking since the superintendents [of such homes] held strongly to the established opinion that domestic service is the safest occupation for women.”
As an Episcopalian, Jennie obviously had been exposed to religious reformers’ progressive ideas about these “fallen” women, which held that it wasn’t inherent immorality but unfortunate circumstances and despair that drove women to “dissipation and degradation.” She told Stoll she had been “taught to sympathize with erring sisters,” echoing the language used by one WCTU purity activist, who spoke of “the necessity of suspending judgment in the case of an erring sister.” In fact, Jennie told Stoll when she agreed to take the job, if she found “that this woman was really ruined by your client, and that she had given her life for him, and had been deserted and abused by him, I shall as certainly espouse her case as the sun shines.”
Now, Jennie was finally going to meet the woman the whole country was talking about and find out the truth for herself. She stayed in the sitting room playing games with some of the other girls until Sister Dorothea summoned her for another chat. When she returned, she found Miss Dudley playing checkers with one of the girls. When Jennie, whom Sister Dorothea introduced as “Agnes,” according to her pseudonym of Agnes Parker, came in, Miss Dudley got up and insisted that she finish the game. She sat nearby cheering her on and complimenting her knowledge of checkers. After the game, Jennie shared a copy of Harper’s Magazine she had bought on the train with Miss Dudley, who immediately turned to the table of contents and began pointing out the names of the authors she said she knew: William Dean Howells, whom she said she met when she was studying at Cambridge, and Charles Dudley Warner, whom she said she knew “very well indeed” and had been to his home in Hartford, Connecticut. “She seemed to be on very intimate terms with all these literary people, and seemed anxious that I should realize how well she knew them,” noted Jennie.
As Miss Dudley spoke, Jennie cataloged her as if she were some nineteenth-century explorer studying an elusive specimen. She was, Jennie scribbled in her notes, about five feet, five inches tall; thin with square shoulders: “Her face is almost repulsive in its coarseness; her eyes are too far apart, gray in color, with heavy black brows. Her nose, which is particularly ugly, is turned up, with very large, round nostrils; her cheeks are fat and round, giving her a doughy, expressionless profile; while her mouth is decidedly coarse, her upper lip being very thick and extending over the under.” Her best feature, noted Jennie, was her “very abundant” hair of a “bronze brown” that was coiled in braids at the back of her head. She was, Jennie thought, “between thirty and thirty-five years.” In the dark blue dress and white cap of the home’s teachers, Jennie thought she looked like “a neat but rather coarse-looking housemaid.”
When Miss Dudley became animated and spoke, however, Jennie described the same almost-magical transformation that others had: “When she smiles, her face loses much of its hardness. Her voice is decidedly soft and musical. There is a particular, indescribable something in it that is attractive.” Nonetheless, Jennie’s overall impression was of a studied, almost schoolmarmish carefulness—she thought that Miss Dudley pronounced each word with a labored exactitude and sat “bolt upright,” as if to “impress you with her determination to appear to be doing the perfectly correct thing.”
Miss Dudley told Jennie she had done some writing of her own, so Jennie tried to press her for details, but Sister Dorothea sent Jennie off to bed. It was a long, restless night. Jennie had “no idea beds could be made so hard,” and she couldn’t settle with the rustle of strange bodies all around. Jennie was awakened at dawn by the clanging of a large bell. She donned her spartan uniform in the gloom of the gaslight and then waited in line with fifteen other girls in a “cold, cheerless” hallway for her turn to wash in cold water at one of four basins. Then it was off to chapel for prayers, followed by a breakfast of coarse oatmeal, bread, and “a rather doubtful article which was called coffee.”
Jennie arrived at her sewing class to find Miss Dudley substituting for the nun who usually taught it. They spent the morning sewing and talking. Miss Dudley told Jennie that her father was an Englishman who died young and left the family poor. She said she went to live with an aunt and uncle, who also died, and that she then went to live with another aunt and uncle outside Lexington, where she had two thoroughbreds of her own to ride “and generally had whatever she wanted.” She said she had a governess and tutor, the latter being a charming old German gentleman with whom she rode around her auntie’s grounds as she conjugated Latin verbs and studied botany. Her only dissatisfaction was with her grandfather, who refused to rise when she entered the room, which she considered such an unbearable breach of etiquette that she “stood all the time she was in the room with him.”
Afterward, as Jennie stewed over her lunch of liver and mashed potatoes—she detested liver—Miss Dudley ate the better fare served to the sisters and teachers at a table waited on by the girls. Jennie soon learned that Miss Dudley ate her breakfast in bed and had a private room, with “the luxury of a bureau, wash-stand, table, rocking-chair and book-shelves.” That evening there was music and singing in the sitting room. Miss Dudley sang in a “small, weak voice” but told Jennie she had once had a “wonderful voice” and had studied music in hopes of becoming a famous singer, but lost her voice in an attack of diphtheria. By the time she turned in for her second night of tossing and turning on a bed that felt like “the soft side of a pine board”—the thin mattress was stuffed with corn husks—Jennie was sure that she had heard nothing but “fairy tales” of Miss Dudley’s life. Now, she was burning with curiosity as to “her real story.”
February 1, Jennie’s third day in the home, was bright and warm. After the morning chores were finished, she went out into the yard with one of the other girls to get a better look at her surroundings. It was then that she saw the brick wall round the yard with its fearsome-looking glass projectiles. As she calculated whether she could climb over it, she felt for the first time like a “real prisoner.” When Sister Dorothea asked her if she would like to send a letter to the doctor she mentioned to tell him she had arrived safely—which, by prearrangement with one of her old housemates in Boston, would be forwarded to Stoll—Jennie slipped in a little shorthand note confirming that Pollard was at the home and reiterating to him that if he heard nothing from her in three weeks he should put their extraction plan in motion.
By suppertime she was so hungry that she could “hardly keep back the tears” when she sat down to her meal of bread and weak tea. So it caught her attention when she heard one of the girls telling Miss Dudley that “the biscuits have arrived.” She turned to Jennie and explained that she had taught the girl to call her to dinner with that phrase because when she was a child living in Paris, they often had to wait for biscuits from a nearby bakery before dinner could be served. When they came, she said, the “French waiter would throw open the door of the saloon and announce ‘the biscuits have arrived, Monsieur, Madam.’”
After dinner, Jennie sidled up to Miss Dudley and shared some of the same sad story she told Sister Dorothea, hoping to inspire an exchange of tales of woe. Miss Dudley became “quite confidential, and admitted that her own life had not been all that it should have been” and promised to tell Jennie her story before she left. Then they bantered about ideas of what they would do when they left the home. Jennie suggested they go West and “begin life anew.” Miss Dudley said she wanted to go to Germany and study and that “she would write and make a great name for herself, and that she would come back to this country so famous one day that no one would dare sit in her presence.” They mused about taking a flat together in New York City, where Miss Dudley said they could live “the pleasantest sort of Bohemian life” and throw after-theater supper parties with all the writers and artists she knew.
Jennie came upon Miss Dudley looking “vexed and disappointed” the following afternoon after a trip to her lawyer’s office. She fumed about the man who she said had ruined her and seemed to Jennie “very bitter and full of revenge.” She told Jennie the man was “thirty years older than she, and that she had given him the best years of her life.” She said that she “worshipped him, and that he made her believe that he loved her; but that he was a coward.” Her bad temper spilled over to the other girls. Jennie watched her thoughtlessly dismiss a “sort of a household drudge” who had spent an hour polishing her brass inkwell, and harshly scold a girl who had “vexed her by some little impertinence.”
Jennie spent the following day in bed, “too ill to get up.” Miss Dudley visited her and told her more of her story, about how she was an “innocent little thing” when she met the man who ruined her and how she “gave him all her girlhood and never had beaux.” She also told Jennie how he made her give up her children and “how she had discovered his infidelity to her” and did not “believe his wickedness possible.”
By this point, Jennie had decided she couldn’t bear it in the home any longer; she felt her “strength giving out,” probably because, with the exception of Sunday dinner, she would tell Stoll, she hadn’t had “a meal that I could eat.” She also learned that some of the girls had overheard her conversation with Miss Dudley about her wayward life, and Sister Dorothea wanted her to promise not to talk to her anymore. Jennie told Sister Dorothea that she had decided to leave after her week was up. “I am getting out of prison,” she scribbled with relief in her diary. She had been helping with the home’s books and told Sister Dorothea she would come back and work in the office, hoping with that excuse and the friendship she had struck up with Miss Dudley she could carry on her detective work from the outside.
After breakfast on Tuesday, exactly one week after she had walked through the front door of the House of Mercy, Jennie sat with Miss Dudley looking over the “rooms to let” section in the newspaper while she waited for Miss Grey to retrieve her street clothes. It was then that Miss Dudley leaned over, and “in a sort of stage whisper,” told Jennie that her real name was Madeline Pollard.
* * *
Jennie fled the House of Mercy with Madeline’s voice still ringing in her head. It had taken all her composure to maintain a “marble calm” when Madeline told her who she really was and to pretend that she was only vaguely aware of the scandal that had engulfed her employer and fascinated the nation. Madeline urged her to get a copy of the World and read her story and vowed that the upcoming trial was going to be “a very bitter fight.” As she said her goodbyes, Jennie promised to send word to Madeline of her new lodgings so they could keep in touch. Then, she headed straight for the dining room of the National Hotel, where she ordered herself a hearty meal that an astonished waiter watched her eat “like an Arctic explorer” back from the North Pole. “I was simply starved,” she wrote to Stoll from the hotel. “It was in every way a dreadful experience.” She was eager to assure him that she hadn’t left the house “due to a lack of courage” but because after their conversation was overheard, “the sisters objected to me having anything to do with Miss Pollard” and she “could gain nothing by remaining there”—although, in truth, she had decided to leave even before that happened.
Stoll, who, unlike Jennie, understood from the start that the House of Mercy was no YWCA home, knew what he was putting her through. “I think a cold chill must have passed down her back when she got an inside view,” he wrote to Breckinridge after he got her letter saying she had finagled her way into the home. He seemed to think what Jennie was most worried about was not getting her things back if she left precipitously. “They are going to take all of her belongings away … so that some scheme will have to be worked out to get them back” if she left early, he told Breckinridge. It wasn’t her belongings she was worried about getting back; Jennie appeared genuinely terrified that she would get stuck in the House of Mercy, with its spartan meals and weak tea, corn-husk mattresses, and jagged glass wall, and what she told Stoll was the “contemptuous authority” of the staff: “It is like a jail there, and one is watched every minute.”
For her suffering she had precious little to show. Stoll hadn’t given her any background on the case and had instructed her not to read Madeline’s World autobiography because, he told her, he didn’t want her to “fix [her] mind in a certain channel, which may prevent you from reaching that correct conclusion, as to her character.” Based on other avenues of investigation he was plotting at the time, it seems he thought all he had to do was get some woman to befriend Madeline and she would blab her heart out about who was really behind the suit. Without the details of Madeline’s life, however, Jennie had no way to suss out fact from fiction or to delve more deeply into areas of inconsistency. When that evening Jennie got a letter from Stoll with some specific points of the case they were trying to clarify, she told him she would have liked to have the information before she entered the home, but, “I did the best that could be done with the material I had to work with.” What she could tell Stoll was that a settlement was “out of the question,” as she thought Madeline took pride in the idea of the trial and was unfazed about any newspaper notoriety it might bring. She also told Stoll that Madeline had “a certain quick wit” and, in her estimation, was “a very good actress.”
Madeline’s backstory did appear to be cobbled together from bits and pieces of the lives of elite folks she met along the way. It was Breckinridge who had a governess and his children who had the idiosyncratic German tutor. She told Jennie about a young Yale student who fell madly in love with her while she was studying in Cambridge. His “parents were Kentuckians and great friends of hers” and they were “worried about their boy, because he was getting wild and drinking,” and his mother implored her to use her influence to try to save him, which was clearly a recasting of the Breckinridges’ desperate battle to save their son Robert. Who knows where she got the story of the Paris biscuits from, but the only Paris she had been to was Paris, Kentucky. She appears to have been a biographical magpie, collecting bits and pieces of other people’s lives to weave into the one she felt she should have had—and to create a persona that allowed her access to the world she wished to inhabit. Yet her story about her relationship with Breckinridge, her innocence when it began, the children she sacrificed, and how he betrayed her all appeared to be true in its essentials.
It’s also not wholly clear that Madeline wasn’t on to Jennie. She came to Jennie one day and told her she had “a strange dream” that Jennie was Nellie Bly, the famous investigative reporter who had gone undercover at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum to reveal the horrendous conditions there. “I thought you were one of those dreadful reporters, and that you had come here to take down every thing I said to you,” she told Jennie. “I thought to myself, how much I have been talking to this dreadful woman.” Jennie laughed it off, but inwardly she “knew it was not a dream.” Regardless, she seemed to think that her nascent friendship with Madeline was intact. But Madeline’s “dream” clearly was a suspicion tinged with a warning—Jennie had been very inquisitive, and it would have been very unusual for someone of her class to commit herself to a place like the House of Mercy. Still, she wrote to her mother, “Mr. S’s associates seem to think I’ve done mighty well for them,” and plowed optimistically into the next stage of her spy saga.