Opal’s eyes fell on her name. The words “Madame Doucet” looked foreign to her, like the name of an actress on a playbill after you’ve come to know the character she played onstage. “I need my job. Really, I do. I was only trying to help the women. Tell your husband—”
“My husband is not the reason I’m here.” Bertie removed her gloves and set them on the table. They looked ghostly, satin white and still molded in the shape of her hands. “Trusting you’ll keep my confidence, I won’t have to bring my husband into this at all. In fact, I prefer it that way.” Her words contained a threat, though she delivered them conspiratorially. She took a seat, adjusted herself, and said: “I’ve come, myself, for a cure.”
Rain pitter-pattered on the roof. A barge horn sounded in the distance. Opal wondered if this was a test of some sort, and what she must say to pass it. Bertie was a woman of means; what help could she possibly need from someone like her?
“You’re unwell?” Opal asked finally. “Like the others?” Betsy had missed three days of work last week, but when she returned her complexion was dewy with what the other girls called a pregnancy glow.
“The others,” Bertie said. “I don’t want to talk about the others. That’s the problem with doctors. They’re always comparing me to someone else.”
“I don’t claim to be a doctor,” Opal said. Though she had helped, hadn’t she? The Earthshine Girls reported their ailments had subsided. The Comet Pills brought them relief—euphoria, even. Pearl’s moodshad evened out. Ruth lost a few pounds. Gilly reported she’d never felt more energetic in her life. At her station, Maria looked radiant. She’d hold a bar of soap aloft before wrapping it—“Don’t you love how it just fits so perfectly in your hand?” she’d say. Maria couldn’t imagine why she’d ever felt so glum. She asked for a refill of Comet Pills; all the girls did.
A clap of thunder in the distance, unusual for this time of year. The news blamed anything on the comet: temperamental weather, electrical fires, the stock market, influenza.
“You must understand, I’ve never been to… one of…youbefore,” Bertie said.
She was uncomfortable sayingspiritualistorpsychic, ormedium, orspook. She was too bent on propriety; she wouldn’t utter those words any more than she’d utter aloud the term for a man’s reproductive anatomy. Acongress limb, she might declare it, if pressed. She sat back in her chair and held her head at a tilt, as though the world appeared crooked and she intended to right it.
Bertie continued: “Dixie Ellison calls me a wife of fortune and convenience, though whose fortune? And whose convenience?” She pressed her fingertips together as she spoke. “It’s my family’s company, though you’d think I’m the one who married him for money if you read the papers. It’s all so embarrassing, especially since I have no control over it.” She took in a long breath and exhaled like she was extinguishing a candle. “I’ve seen all the doctors. I even went to supposed experts in New England, and yet nobody can seem to answer the simplest question, the only question I want answered.”
Opal understood. Her fortune, her inheritance, at the mercy of her reproductive organs. “Sterility,” Opal said, and Bertie looked in receipt of an insult, shocked.
“So I’m told.”
Opal had seen plenty of sad-eyed women who’d visited Jagr when nature didn’t take its course. The causes were varied: anemia, overeating, tight girdles, too much reading, a faulty condition of the uterus,an unbalanced lifestyle, a husband’s frequent visits to prostitutes that left his poor wife with disease. Jagr had told Opal stories of “secret insemination” or other procedures performed under anesthesia, but he treated sterility with only botanical remedies.
That was the irony: Her husband could remedy sterility—or he could render it, like he had with her. He viewed each patient as a series of symptoms seeking relief, as a problem to be solved. He was a good doctor. His cures did not discriminate.
“My husband doesn’t read the gossip column,” Bertie said, and here she stopped speaking and her eyelids fluttered, just enough to register thatshe did, and so she knew what Dixie had written about her husband and his mistress. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t see this article. I’ll make sure there are no repercussions if he does see it.” Bertie folded the newspaper clipping in half, then in half again, then she tucked it into her pocketbook. She straightened her posture.
Then her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t looking at Opal so much as she was looking through her, as though her gaze were an X-ray machine that could detect the bone of her existence. Opal resisted the urge to move, to give away her nerves.
Opal settled herself at the table and leaned back against the chair. Recently, a pain had lodged itself beneath her rib cage and it wouldn’t relent unless she stretched herself backward. Her body was not her body, but something shifting and taking new shape.
“A little amusement, if nothing else,” Bertie said, lightening. “What, are the ghosts here?” She laughed, and sound returned to the room: the pigeon roosting outside the window. The rain like a scurry of animals against the glass. “We could all use some amusement, couldn’t we? Those scientists say the world will end with that comet, that’s all you hear about. It gives me the morbs. I don’t want to think about endings.”
“Then let’s think about beginnings,” Opal said.
A few minutes later, Opal struck a match. She and Bertie joinedhands. Their toes touched beneath the table. The room sparked with anticipation. She asked Bertie to count with her to three, then Opal let go and pounded the table with her fist. She sensed the tingling at her feet that rose up through her bones. A warmth. The slowing of her heart. A stillness and excitement. A kind of fear. A kind of ecstasy. As she spoke, her whole body felt buoyant, like she was floating on water. She listened.
Bertie closed her eyes, and Opal studied her respiration, counting her breaths. She made note of her nails and her coloring, and her pulse, which could be felt by extending her finger to graze her wrist.
“Think of the good I could provide for a baby,” Bertie said as the two women began to hum. “Think of all the good I could do with my inheritance.” Bertie squeezed Opal’s hand, and for a moment the world contained only possibility.
1986
Lovely, appealing skin attracts men, just as honeysuckle attracts bees.
—LUX TOILET SOAP
Technique can be taught: elocution, stage presence, articulation, posture. It’s not just skill that captivates an audience. Real stars affect a celestial presence—of the sky, of the heavens—more God than human. Someone who can’t be touched.
I was not a star.
At the studio, Elliot pulled me aside. “You see next week’s script?” he asked.
Another Jane Doe had come forward, and now there was talk that the lawsuit could turn into a class action. I’d watched her interview with John Dale Fox on the local news. Her voice had been altered, her body shadowed. Since she’d spoken out, she said she’d been receiving death threats. Her phone rang in the middle of the night. Cars honked past her house, and in the morning, she’d find garbage tossed into her yard. She believed coming forward had ruined her life.
“You’re doing it, Nona. You’re killing it in these coffin scenes,” Elliot said. “Our ratings are up. They want more of you.”
