My Notorious Life (38 page)

—Susan, I reproached her, pained. —You know that is not true.

—She wrapped a plaster over my bosom, she sobbed, —and stood hard-hearted while my baby cried to be fed. She’s sold him to a Satanist, Papa, just as you feared.

Dr. Applegate quivered and clenched his hands so ferociously it seemed he was practicing to strangle me.

—Susan, I said, —my own heart breaks to see your distress, but please look to your conscience before you tell such tales.

Tragically, them two Applegates preferred lies to the truth, and while I refunded them all the fees I had charged, and forked them over a nice BONUS sum of a thousand dollars, they would not keep quiet. They marched out and took their fabrications to the newspapers, and thus began my dangerous days.

Infant Abduction

Madame DeB_________, a Notorious she-devil, the keeper of a stylish house for the slaughter of “petit innocence” has stolen a young boy from his mother’s bosom, presumably with plans to sell the infant, or fling it off the docks into a watery grave in the Hudson. Susan Applegate, still weak in the aftermath of childbirth, clung to her baby as it was wrested from her arms, and despite her cries of “My child! My child!” the well known Madame persisted in removing it, and will not reveal its whereabouts. The public will now make Liberty Street too hot to hold this wretch, unless the child is forthcoming.

—Susan! I cried aloud when I read this vilification in the
New York Herald
. —How could you?

She cut me. I helped that girl. I did what she asked, wept with her and coddled her, and now she repaid me with libel and publicity. What I’d reply to her if I could give her a piece of my mind would not be printable. Charlie tutored me what to say instead, how to address her falsehoods with reason
and science. But he did not warn me how the roaches of Printing House Square would write a slanderous headline for the letter I wrote, and label me a monster:

From the Pen of Madame DeBeausacq, the Wickedest Woman in New York

To the editor:

The truth is that Miss Applegate applied to me for help during her difficulties, and being a midwife of longstanding practice, I gave her room and board until she delivered a healthy child. The mother then asked me to find a placement for her infant, as she could not raise it herself. I found a wet nurse, and Miss Applegate surrendered her child willingly. The arrangements were made between the mother and the nurse, and it seems preposterous, does it not? to hold anyone else responsible for what may have ensued after the child’s birth.

Sincerely, Madame J. A. DeBeausacq, midwife

The newspapers ignored the truth. They said I ripped the Applegate child from its mother’s arms. They wrote how I threw it off the docks at South Street. They wrote how I had killed another, different mother and deposited the remains in a secret sewer that flowed underground from my home to the Hudson, so that I might dispose of bodies without detection. They wrote how I sold infants to witches for their Satanic sacrifices. It was exactly what Susan’s Papa had tutored her to claim. A resurrectionist, the
Gazette
wrote, had been seen leaving my premises, with grisly packages! They had me trafficking with grave robbers. It was a steaming horse pile supplied to the papers by Applegate.

—It’s only hacks, said Charlie. —They can’t hurt you. What power do they have?

I took what he said for an article of faith. The press was toothless. Charlie knew the papers, right? Still I did not like that it was MY name dragged through the gutter. Maybe I was Mrs. Ann Muldoon Jones but also I was
Madame J. A. DeBeausacq, and proud of my success. And so it was with dismay that one day I opened the
Sunday Morning News
to see that a certain Doctor, a man called Dr. B. S. Gunning was gunning for me, now, too.

On the Ignorance of Midwives

by Dr. Benjamin S. Gunning

In light of recent lurid information pertaining to the tragic disappearance of an infant at the hands of one Madame J. A. DeBeausacq, a self-proclaimed midwife, it behooves the medical establishment to speak out against such nefarious practices as are all too common in our grand metropolis. It is precisely the quackery and ignorance of those old women who imperil the wives and daughters of the better classes, at the most delicate period of their existence, the time of parturition.

Gunning went on to write that only a doctor with a diploma was qualified to attend a birth. Meaning only a man.

It is for us, gentlemen of the educated medical establishment, to prove that human life is too sacred to be entrusted to the uneducated midwife, whose ideas are scarcely adequate to the management of a poultry yard! Meanwhile, we shudder at reports of a resurrectionist seen leaving the premises of that most notorious demon of Liberty Street, and we can only surmise she sells the corpses of her poor victims to this wretch.

A poultry yard. A resurrectionist. Where had I heard this before? From a certain Dr. Applegate. Didn’t he say to my face I was not suited to run a chicken coop? Didn’t he accuse me of consorting with undertakers?

—Gunning, I muttered the name. —Gunning. Gunning.

—Are you all right, my dear? Charlie inquired, over his egg.

—Listen, Susan Applegate was to wed a Dr. Benjamin and raise her
child with him against her will. Could she have referred to Dr. Benjamin Gunning? Is he one and the same?

He was. I inquired about it. Gunning was a friend of Applegate and member of Columbia College Medical Hospital. He was the SAME Dr. Gunning whose book I studied at the Evans, and who advised the mustard bath and the letting of blood to restore the Catamenial Discharge, and the vegetable diet to relieve the cramps, and while it seemed this bad advice was alone enough to brand him a first class nimenog who would not know the difference between a bustle and a barnacle, still he was a very learned man. Very important. He delivered lectures at the University of New York. He was the president of the American Medical College. He wrote books. Now he wrote against me. Who was I, an orphan girl from Cherry Street, to go against him?

—Perhaps Gunning is right, I said. —Perhaps a medical doctor is best.

—Hooey, said Charlie. —Is he a woman? Does he know the cunicle from the crinkum-crankum? Can he divine a breech child with the pass of the hands like yourself? What does he know that you don’t?

—Charlie, Gunning is an expert author. You yourself have read his book.

—So? He should read mine. Charlie shrugged. —You’re not to worry about Dr. B. S. Gunning. Nothing will come of his b.s. or his blather. You know he is angry because he didn’t win the beautiful Susan for himself. He and his cronies only want to take your business and cut the midwives out of it.

—Pfft, they won’t get our business. Ladies always prefer to see a female.

Dr. Gunning was no threat to my livelihood, we decided. But what we did not bargain on was the power of his personal grudge. Dr. Gunning was angry at losing his Apple Blossom, and Dr. Applegate was angry at how I lost his grandson the wee Adolphus, and the two of them old b******s mustered all their friends, the white beard whifflers in their white coats, and then enlisted the inky bungers of Printing House Square to their cause. I know now they were in cahoots, just a bunch of knackered old animals fit only to be RENDERED, the drippings poured boiling hot down their own throats. They was all of them in high dudgeon. They set about to bring me down.

*  *  *

Now in the papers it was war against me. Madame was written up by the
Police Gazette
. I was called “A wholesale female strangler, a modern THUG of civilized society.” My medicines, the paper claimed, was at best sugar water, and worst, probably poisons. They wrote that my interventions was worse than dangerous, they was immoral.

Their insults made me angry as a cut snake. I could not stop arguing with newsprint. —First, I said to Charlie, —Mrs. DeBeausacq’s powders are made of the BEST ergot and tansy oil available which are known to relieve a woman of most obstructions if taken in a proper dosage. Second, the ingredients are the SAME as what anybody can buy at Hegemann’s or any chemist.

—You will write them back a challenge, Charlie said, —argued in law and science.

He wrote it for me as I talked, as was our practice since our long ago letters to Dutch, which we did not write now anymore since I had lost track of her and all hope of a track. His eyes shone with his love of argument and I seen that for him this excitement was as good as the life of a hack he used to covet. Though I still had the grammar of the old neighborhood, Charlie made me sound first class. Then I read what he wrote in the fine print:

Editors:

What criminal evidence have you against me? What gives you the right to slander my good name in public? None. I hold myself amenable to the law. My medicines are known purgatives that are sold in reputable pharmacies. Therefore, let any of my lady patients for whom I have cared these past years come forward and say that my medicines or practices have been harmful, or that any of the good care that I have extended to them in my practice of midwifery be dangerous to their health, and I will pay you and them each one hundred dollars.

Sincerely,

Madame J. A. DeBeausacq

—We will PAY them? I cried. —You went and invited them all to sue me.

—Nobody will come forward, Charlie said, pleased with himself. —Even if a lady didn’t like your medicines, who would admit she received your services? Or bought a remedy from you?

—Susan Applegate did.

—The only one ever, in years, and it was her father forced her. What can she prove? If you don’t like the letter, don’t sign it or send it. Let the papers say what they want. You can be a chickenhearted lily-livered quail or you can tell ’em what’s what.

As usual when Charlie accused me of being a coward I had to rush right out to prove him wrong. I would not roll over, not for those Maggots. No, I wouldn’t, so I sent that letter he wrote, offering MONEY to anyone with a complaint. Maybe I should’ve kept my trap shut as Mam used to advise me. —You’re asking for it, she always said and it’s what the papers said of me too. Ha! Well why is it every time a girl finds trouble it’s her OWN fault? I seen enough trouble myself already. Why would I ask for more? I had my own child to worry over, an angelic picture in ribbons, only five years old and sewing her little sampler with hearts and flowers, or going along with me to try on a new bonnet at A. T. Stewart’s.

—Oh Mamma you are a beautiful Mamma, said she, resting her warm head against me in the carriage.

Would I risk such happiness? Not likely. It was only letters. Only self defense.

*  *  *

The several letters I wrote to them editors did nothing to stop their fiery campaign against me and only seemed to rile them more. All that summer, the lies piled up in the papers, festering in the boiling sun same as manure in the gutter, where flies settled like the ignorant population on the dunghill of rumor. That winter, the
Police Gazette
wrote that I had killed a girl.

Has it ever occurred to law enforcement in this city that poor Mary Rogers, murdered last year, was the victim of that hag of misery, Madame DeBeausacq? The case remains unsolved, and yet it is well known that Miss Rogers worked as a cigar girl at
Anderson’s Tobacco store on Liberty Street, not three blocks from Madame’s house of death. It is entirely likely that she died at the hands of this notorious wretch, who then disposed of her corpse in the Hudson.

Mary Rogers! I had never laid eyes on the creature. She was the most famous murder victim in the history books of New York. The beautiful cigar girl. When they found her she was floating in the river off Hoboken, with her face smashed and her throat bruised, strangled. The
Gazette
claimed that it was ME, Madame DeBeausacq, who had killed the poor child in my EVIL DEN on Liberty Street. They claimed poor dead Mary’s body floated across the river to New Jersey and that I planted her clothes in a Hoboken sassafras grove where they found them, or hired somebody to do so.

Yes, sure. Also I could fly and shoot a moose off horseback. I never BEEN to F***ing Hoboken. The slander of it. These papers turned me into a wasp of rage. Why ever would I strangle a woman when every day I ministered to the gentle sex with all the tenderness I possessed. Plumped the pillows. Mopped tears. Sopped blood. I was the SAINT of Liberty Street. Of all New York. And what did they say of me? The
Police Gazette
called me Evil Doctress and suggested that a cordon of officers be drawn around my house, to prevent the entrance of unfortunate and misguided females, who, they said, “so desperately seek to hide their shame.”

*  *  *

Well, the newspaper boys underestimated female desperation. Nothing seemed to prevent my ladies coming to me. Not a cordon of police. Not firehouse dogs. In time, we had both out front. For now, thanks to Chief Matsell and his
Police Gazette,
with the helpful counsel of Doctors Apple-gate and Gunning, I was under threat, watched and hounded, the papers picking on me daily, a policeman walking a regular beat out front of the clinic, and still my ladies came to me for help.