• 40 •

BEULAH KNEW WHERE Nurse Cartwright kept the extra blankets, and she just happened to remember that a spare bottle of brandy was stored in the same cupboard. She took one of each — a blanket, and a generous and (to her mind) well-deserved slug of brandy — while Constance and Nurse Cartwright murmured outside the infirmary. When the nurse returned Beulah feigned sleep, having already made herself entirely comfortable.

She would explain herself to the nurse in the morning. There would be a great deal of explaining in the morning, and decisions to be made about her future. Under any other circumstance she would’ve stayed awake all night worrying about it, but firing that shot at Freeman Bernstein had cleared her head remarkably. There was a rousing finality to that gunshot, even if the bullet had only gone into the ground. (Was it lodged there forever, or would someone dig it out? Beulah thought she might like to have it as a souvenir.)

Whatever news the morning would bring, Beulah felt that she had, improbably, brought the darkest chapter of her life to an end. Her misfortunes, it now occurred to her, had begun with a bullet. Perhaps it was true all along that a bullet was the only way to end them. If she’d known that, she would’ve fired off a near-miss in Freeman Bernstein’s general direction years ago.

With the benefit of hindsight (for she now viewed the last several years as an epoch that had ended and could be put upon a shelf and studied from a distance), she knew that her situation could’ve been much worse. She emerged, as it were, unscathed — which is to say that after everything Henry Clay inflicted upon her, he did not leave her with what Louise’s mother called the “evidence of his sin.”

She learned about that only after Freeman abandoned her. She’d gone around looking for work in New York — he’d left her no choice — and quickly found that she couldn’t give her own name. Women drew away from her, and men whistled and called their colleagues to come running over and have a look at “the real Beulah Binford.” She rushed out of more than one office red-faced and fighting back tears.

What was that silly name she chose the first time? Lucy Lane. As Lucy Lane, she could secure work as a clasper in an envelope factory. With a week’s pay in hand, she found a boarding-house and a girl willing to share a room with her. Mabel was her first friend in New York, and the only one who ever knew the truth.

It was Mabel who told Beulah what the soiled undergarments meant. They’d been living together for about a month when Mabel arrived home with a gallon jug of wine. “Don’t ask how I came by it,” she said, “but we’re going to have us a party tonight.”

With nothing to eat but crackers and potted ham, the wine went straight to Beulah’s head. They reclined together on her bed, end to end, with their elbows resting comfortably on each other’s knees. No circumstance is more conducive to setting free a secret than two women with a bottle of wine and an entire night to themselves. Beulah was all too ready to surrender her real name, and everything that went along with it.

Fortunately, Mabel couldn’t be shocked. She’d lived in New York too long to find anything scandalous in Beulah’s version of events, and in fact considered herself privileged to share a room with a woman whose name was probably better known to most Americans than Edith Wilson’s. “Every one of my roommates had a story,” Mabel said, “but you happen to have the only story of 1911. You were right not to go on the stage, but I won’t pretend I’m not highly entertained to hear the entire business from your side.”

Beulah didn’t find it at all callous of Mabel to say that her misfortunes were so entertaining, and in fact it lightened her spirits to bring the sordid mess out into the open and to give it an airing. She relished every detail, lingering over her veiled figure at the back of the church during Henry Clay’s wedding, and that afternoon at the stock pond when he brandished his gun.

The part about Louise’s mother describing the soiled underclothes came out hours later, well past midnight and well into the wine.

“I always wondered why they bothered about his nasty old pants in the middle of a murder trial,” Beulah said.

Mabel sputtered. “Do you mean that you don’t know?”

“Well, I . . .” Beulah didn’t know, and there was nothing to do but wait to be told.

“Surely you’ve heard, after all those years you spent . . . I mean, from what you’re telling me, you lived in a house full of women who . . .” Mabel couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. “These were women with experience. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Beulah couldn’t help but be annoyed at the way Mabel was dancing around the subject. Hadn’t she just told her everything? It had taken them each a hefty portion of that raisiny old cheap wine to work themselves up to this point in the conversation. Beulah didn’t think she could keep much more of it down. Hadn’t they reached the honest end of the bottle yet?

“Well, they must’ve told you how to be with a man. How to keep yourself from having a baby, things like that.”

“Oh, those horrible rubber bags.” Beulah shuddered. “They put the same soap up in there that they use to clean the toilets. Do you know how that stings?”

Mabel didn’t want to talk about the soap. Beulah couldn’t blame her. “And didn’t they tell you about . . . social diseases?”

Beulah said, “I don’t recall that term. Maybe they didn’t use such polite language, for fear of not being understood.”

“I’m trying to ask you if you were ever told what it meant if a man had sores. Did they tell you to look at him when he pulled his pants down, and to see for yourself if he was . . .”

“Clean,” Beulah said crossly. “They told me to look and see if he kept himself clean. But I never could stand to look. Can you?”

Mabel reached over and took Beulah’s hands in hers. “Beulah, dear, I want you to think about this. Those sores — those were a sign of his disease. That was the stain in his underpants.”

Beulah shuddered. Now she felt truly ill. “I can’t believe Louise showed that to her mother.”

Mabel sighed and tried again. “You told me he was acting crazy just before his wife died. Isn’t that right? He was going off like a lunatic?”

“He sure was,” Beulah said. “I’d never seen him like that. I hardly knew him.”

“Well, don’t you know? The disease does that to a person. That could be why he was out of his mind.”

Tears came into Beulah’s eyes, and she pressed her palms against them. Henry Clay had only been dead a month at that point. They’d put him in an electric chair and burned him to death. She woke up every night thinking about it. There’d been no picture of that in the papers — someone at the news bureaus had a sense of decency — but she could imagine it, and she did, between the hours of two and three o’clock, every morning.

“Are you saying that all he needed was some medicine, and he wouldn’t have shot Louise?”

“I think he might’ve been too far gone for medicine,” Mabel said.

“Well, didn’t the judge know about it? Couldn’t he have brought in a doctor?” Beulah sniffed and looked around for a handkerchief.

Mabel handed hers to Beulah. She spoke more gently now. “What I’m trying to tell you is that he was diseased, and you might be, too. You need a Wassermann test.”

Beulah looked up at her sharply. “Do you think I have what Henry Clay had?”

“Well, that is how you get it. Don’t you know that?”

Beulah pulled away from her. She didn’t like to have all the things she didn’t know pointed out to her. “I know that you can get a disease from a man, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t have one. And I hardly let Henry Clay touch me last summer. Before that, it had been . . . I don’t know, a few years.”

“And how many baseball players in between?”

Beulah smiled at the thought of those ball players. “Oh, a few, but they’re so clean and good.”

Mabel put a hand over her mouth to stop from smiling. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m going to have to teach Beulah Binford a thing or two about men. We’re taking you to a lady doctor next week.”

Beulah had never seen a doctor of any kind, but there was no arguing about it. Mabel kept every promise and every threat, including this one. She hauled Beulah off for a Wassermann test, and Beulah was found, through some miracle, to be free of disease. The lady doctor gave her a lecture on the evils of social illness and the importance of keeping herself pure until marriage.

“And when you do marry,” the doctor said, “after you marry, there’s a better way to make sure you don’t have a baby than a hose and a bag of toilet soap.”

She pulled a little rubber cup out of her desk and pinched it together. Beulah didn’t require very many words of explanation. “I’ve heard about those,” she said. “How nice for the married ladies.”

The doctor dropped it on her desk. “I believe I hear my receptionist calling. Wait right here.”

Beulah didn’t hear anyone calling. When the doctor didn’t return she stood up, slipped that little rubber cup into her pocketbook, and went out into the hall, where Mabel was already paying the bill.

“Did you get one?” Mabel asked on the way out.

“Well, I stole one, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what you were supposed to do.” Mabel put an arm around her, and they leaned into the wind on Forty-Sixth Street. “You’re a New York girl now.”