Free Femme Fatale by Carole Nelson Douglas Page B

eyelids in sign that I had heard. And then the soothing trills of her voice mesmerized me, bore me away on a tide of maternal memories . . . not of the dead mother I had never known, but of my own frail attempted lullabies when my schoolroom charges were ill and feverish. I was indeed fortunate to be as sick as a beached seal with a prima donna for a nursemaid.
    Smoking was not permitted belowdecks, so even during the night Irene would desert me for a short while. And, often, when she thought me asleep, she paced as she was wont to do only when smoking and puzzling out a conundrum. Now, however, her thoughts rather than tobacco drove her fevered stalking, and she berated herself even more.
    “This journey was folly. Folly! Nell is no better for it, but worse, and I . . . my past is checkered, to say the least, and will certainly shock Nell, even though I cannot remember the half of it! Why? Why! I can master the libretto of a four-hour score in a foreign language in no time! I am a nine-day’s wonder of a quick study. Why do I only have fleeting mental pictures of most of my childhood, with familiar but unnamed faces looking on? And something . . . something awful that I almost seem to recall but, maddeningly, cannot quite grasp. What is that mystery looming ever since I unearthed the violin and memories of the maestro! Everything before England is blurred, as through a misted window. Everything after is clear as crystal. Why!”
    Her words passed over me like ocean waves, agitated at the onset, but soon drawing away into the shallows of my mind like some ebbing eiderdown quilt.
    Later in the voyage, Irene brought back lively reports about that segment of the human race that is impervious to the act of bouncing endlessly in the deep vales and steep hills of saltwater. Somehow she expected that commentary on others’ seaboard amusements would cheer me up.
    During the day she leaned over me, her expression unnaturally cheerful while she regaled me with tales of promenades on the ladies’ deck and her unauthorized excursion to the gentlemen’s billiard room, where she won a round and smoked a cigar—Irene would be Irene on Noah’s Ark, I swear!
    I learned of rattan deck chairs and breezes so lively the women’s skirts hoisted like sails. (Our swift and modern steamship only flew a couple of pennants, she explained, and sported two black smokestacks billowing dark clouds.) Of deck-side games of shuffleboard and something called “bull,” which did not make me pine to be up and about.
    She very considerately brought me no reports on the ship’s menu. And she emptied my slop pail with the dash of a milkmaid in an operetta performing an entirely quaint and graceful chore,for which I was most grateful. I had never before considered that a gifted actress’s dissembling could be an act of charity.
    “I have been asked to sing,” she told me once, greatly excited. I cannot say when, for there was no night or day for me in my floating bed of pain and disorientation. “At the Captain’s gala. He well remembers Buffalo Bill’s mind-reading act from a previous crossing. Imagine Buffalo Bill as a mind-reader. It is too amusing.”
    I muttered something that was not amusing.
    “Poor Nell!” She sat beside me glittering like the Diamond Horseshoe of an American opera house in her evening dress, passing a limp cold compress over my hellishly hot forehead. “Had I any idea that you were prone to seasickness I’d have never allowed you to come.”
    I muttered something not translatable.
    “Even toast and tea can’t answer. Well, at least you will land with a waist as narrow as Nellie Bly’s!”
    On that note, she left me. And I felt much better about feeling so bad, as I had once heard the wasp-waisted Nellie Bly so ungrammatically put it in her bold American way, of which I was soon to see much more, unfortunately. . . .

    What can I say about our being tugged into New York harbor like a large, dignified matron being