The Madam Read online

  Praise for the novels of bestselling author Julianna Baggott

  The Madam

  —The Tennessean

  “{The Madam} is exquisitely written, rich in lyrically rendered detail and peopled with sentient characters of depth and complexity.”

  —Bust

  “The Madam is a poetic rendering of the inner characters, the human psychology of the unusual situation … a beautiful read.”

  —Booklist

  “Baggott’s insights into the selling of sex … are galvanizing in their intensity and drama, and her cathartic and commanding novel is a provocative paean to unconventionality, unexpected alliances, courage, and autonomy.”

  —Star News (Wilmington, NC)

  “Think of Angela’s Ashes … crossed with Cold Mountain.”

  —The Historical Novels Review

  “[R]eveals, with honesty and sympathy, the day-to-day life of a madam…. [A] beautiful tribute.”

  —The Greensboro News & Record

  “Baggott’s world … brings to mind John Irving’s The World According to Garp … [a]nd yet this world … is dominated by women…. Full of lush description and raw emotion, [this] is a thoroughly engaging tale.”

  —Madison Smartt Bell, author of Anything Goes

  “Few writers of the twenty-first century can rival the verve, the energy, and the sheer delight in language of Julianna Baggott…. The Madam is an extraordinary novel which will open a whole new phase of what already looks like a brilliant career.”

  —Elizabeth Graver, author of Unravelling

  “[Baggott] not only has a wonderful story to tell but she also has the voice—by turns poetic and bawdy, sober and mischievous—with which to tell it. The world of The Madam is at once sensuous and sad, hardscrabble and full of unexpected tenderness.”

  —The News Journal (Wilmington, DE)

  “[Baggott] juggles several intricate characters and many sharp complex emotions, all while performing prose back-flips and somersaults on a high wire. And without a net. The Madam brims with risks … re-creating the rural West Virginia of the 1920s and 1930s in lyrical, dreamlike prose … rich with characters and emotions, all portrayed warmly and generously.”

  —Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble

  “[Baggott] has transformed a piece of history into a luminous and epic piece of literature, bringing to the page the dark and lyrical and bizarre and sexual and comical and violent and mysterious and supremely heart-breaking spectacle of wide, wild lives rendered vividly before our eyes.”

  —Christine Wiltz, author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

  “[Baggott’s] prose is lit with the fire of passion; it is haunting, luminescent, and irresistible…. [A] tour de force.”

  The Miss America Family

  —USA Today

  “An emotional and darkly comic examination of growth, loss, love, secrets, and lies.”

  —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

  “Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak, and that makes her a writer after my own heart.”

  —Tom Coyne, author of A Gentleman’s Game

  “[A] stunningly written novel, lyrical and undeniable and relentlessly insightful about the love hiding within the oddities of family life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[A] charmingly messy tale of love and redemption.”

  —Fred Chappell, author of Look Back All the Green Valley and Brighten the Corner Where You Are

  “With her first two novels, Julianna Baggott has achieved a premiere place among American writers. The Miss America Family is ruefully funny, cheerily sad, and wears its hard-won wisdom lightly. What a treasure!”

  —The Boston Herald

  “Baggott employs a captivating narrative technique … the two narrators each [have] a compelling style and situation … The Miss America Family shows a pristine, innocent heart with a big, generous, optimistic message.”

  —Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, PA)

  “[C]ombines the indigenous dysfunction of Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral with the uninhibited disclosure of Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone. The result is a tumultuous domestic adventure with soul.”

  Girl Talk

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Baggott’s brand of witty psychological observation is dark and corrosive … [she] has a knack for finding the oxymoronic in any situation.”

  —Poets & Writers Magazine

  “A breathless novel that manages to be both funny and bleak, poignant and bitchy—[it] will make Baggott famous.”

  —Glamour

  “[A] smart, quirky chronicle of mother-daughter bonding and binding.”

  Washington Square Press

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Julianna Baggott

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 978-0-7434-5458-2

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7434-7599-0

  0-7434-5458-8 (Pbk)

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition August 2004

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to Mildred holderfield Smith Lane, my grandmother, and to her mother, Ella, the matriarch and madam.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my grandmother—who was raised among show people, nuns, hustlers, and whores—for her willingness to share with me the particulars of her astounding life. This is a work of fiction, but it never would have been created without my family mythology, which has been so lovingly handed down. I thank her for her permission and for her patience with my endless, often intimate questions.

  I want to thank my father for his tireless research of hosiery mills and railroad switching yards and for finding an elephant on a Miami dock. He also gave me the landscape of his youth, mountains and coal ash, and I’m grateful.

  I would like to thank my mother for never burying anything, not even our ugliness, and for her exuberance, her adoration of storytelling, and for passing that love on to me.

  I couldn’t accomplish anything without my husband, David. I would still be fishing for my keys without him. I thank him for his inexhaustible patience and well-timed row-diness. And I want to thank my kids, Phoebe, Finneas, and Theo, for understanding that it’s just a job, that we could just as believably run a fish shop and have to wash our hands with toothpaste to get rid of the stink and forever be discussing the special on herring or sea bass.

  James Quisenberry—thank you for all of your intelligent and thoughtful explanations about the business and history of coal mining. It was a wonderful education. And I thank the other miners who, once they heard the title and subject of the novel, chose not to be acknowledged here. They, too, were brilliant with detail.

  And I want to thank all of my readers: David Teague, Marisa de los Santos, Elise Zealand (as always!), Blake Maher, Jim Loscalzo, Rachel Pastan, Fleda Brown, and Kirsten Maxwell. And thanks, Tom, Gary, Ray.

  Th
ank you, Greer Kessel Hendricks, for your keen eye, your trust, for your faith in me and my work. So much more than an editor to me, you are brilliant and fabulous in every way. Thanks also to Louise Braverman and Suzanne O’Neill, and my sincerest thanks to Judith Curr.

  And thank you, Nat Sobel and Judith Weber, for sending me down this curious, astonishing road.

  I would like to thank my ancestors—hustlers, yes, but poets, too. I know it was in you; how else can I explain its presence in me?

  Part One

  1

  Before there can be a murderous heart, or, for that matter, before there can be a whorehouse, an orphanage, a dank trunk with rusted hinges, there must first be a hosiery mill. And a woman within it—Alma. You must imagine her as a young mother, thin, cheerless, her hair frizzing around her head. She stands in front of a smoothed pedestal, curved like a flexed foot, fitting each toe seam to it, pulling stockings on and then, quickly, off again. It is like dressing and undressing a thousand women’s bare legs. Sometimes she thinks of their legs, the future bodies that will stretch and wear thin the cloth, their fine, soft hairs and broad calves. Sometimes she sees thousands of legs—pale, dark, thin, fat—the endless churn of days swaggering toward her as anklebone and soft knee. She doesn’t want to be here, righting stockings all her life, the wet air, shivering from the livid machinery, spiked with the acrid pinch of dye vats catching in her nose each time she breathes. She has no interest in moving up to mending, looping, to stir yarn at the dye vat, to sit like the old pallid men in the corner with their magnifying glasses counting threads. Who would? she hisses to herself. Who would ever desire this? And it seems to her that a person should desire something.

  It’s spring, the sun only musing about heat, and it should be cool enough, but the factory is kept hot, intentionally humid, so the threads won’t snap, wad, gum up the machines, or simply spin out to whir blankly. The factory is one giant roaring room, the winding machine’s high-pitched whine, the great clacking cams, the unending ruckus of the beating machines, and the women bow to them, their fingers fidgeting and smoothing around insistent needles. Despite the oil, the gears grind corrosively, a damp rustiness that smells of blood. When Alma looks up from the hose and the upturned wooden foot, her eyes tear from the dust and the whole wide factory before her tilts and quivers. The room seems fragile, like it could shatter, but then the tears plop to her dress front and the factory is as it should be, churning, thunderous, massive, an immovable train with a million pumping engines. The noise is so loud it seems that it should send the workers rattling into their machines. But it doesn’t. Some scuttle up and down the alleys, coughing, coughing, their lungs nicked by barbed cotton dust. Others bend to their fast hands. The dust and humidity are so thick, Alma feels like she can’t breathe. She’s heard of the bigger mills where clouds billow in prep rooms as workers beat and claw out the raw cotton, the lint flying up from openers, pickers, cards. But in this factory, too, when she walks by to go to the bathroom—a foul room with its slimy floor and thin partition—and looks back to her station at the end of the long room, she sees nothing but stirring bodies caught in a white haze, the workers moving like ghosts.

  Here the air is choked by whiteness. It’s the opposite of the world outside where the steep mountains empty into the valley, its city shuffling in black dust from the coke oven fires and coal mines up in the mountains, a thin mist that grays the streets, the buses, dimming everything from her paint-chipped porch rails to the university’s white pillars. The dark dust swirls in the Monongahela, teeming with catfish that rake up slow silty clouds. It’s worse in winter when each house heats up from its coal-burning stove, each chimney pouring smoke and ash. Perhaps you can see her days, the blur as she moves from white cloud to dark, from lint to ash to lint.

  But Alma can feel things shifting. She knows nothing of atoms. She can’t. She’s a woman in a hosiery factory in Marrowtown, West Virginia. It’s 1924, nearly summer. Atoms are still the matter of physicists’ dreams, dim stars with the skies just beginning to ink. But if she did know of atoms, she would say she could feel the restlessness of them, like schoolchildren at the end of a long spring day. She’s aware of the vibration of everything—not just the factory’s thrumming hive, but in some minute invisibility all around her, inside of herself, a small electric charge.

  She’s always felt that she’s known a bit of the future, nothing specific—more a feeling, an inclination. And she can tell—does she hiss this to herself as well?—that the future holds a change, an abrupt one, like the two wide factory doors that swing out just before the end of the shift—as is happening now, Mrs. Bass lifting the heavy latch—and suddenly the dark factory of hunkered sweat-stained backs is swimming in sun. Mrs. Bass walks up the stairs, her knotty backbones poking out of the thin cloth of her work dress. She sounds the whistle, a hollow rise of air. The machines wind down, but not all the way—a kept purr, and it’s as if the purr is in Alma’s chest, locked in her ribs.

  The night shift stands in the open doorway, men and women spitting their tobacco juice, their orangy ambeer, in bright sluices. Mr. Bass sits at his little table because it is the end of the week. He looks mannerable in his pressed white shirt with a starched collar that seems to catch the sharp knob of his Adam’s apple each time he clears his throat, a habit that draws attention to him, his tally sheet, his shiny hair parted straight down the middle. Alma stretches her back.

  “How many gross you got there?” Mrs. Bass has snuck up on her. Mrs. Bass is a cankered woman, slightly older than Mr. Bass, it seems, bent, with big thievish eyes behind small glasses, ferretlike with snapping buck teeth. Like Mr. Bass, she shouts, because she is nearly deaf, having lived her life amid the drumming. She doesn’t seem to trust anyone and asks even this simple question as if expecting a lie.

  “Eleven, ma’am,” Alma tells her.

  “You sure there? You count it twice?”

  “Yes,” she says, although she only counted once. It is eleven sacks, though, stuffed tight. That’s the truth.

  The old woman writes it down, the last on her list, and scurries to the little table and Mr. Bass with his tray of money, his pencil stub.

  There are two lines now, one to get in, one to get out. The night shift jaws in the doorway. Some are coal miners’ wives; Alma can tell by that ashen, obdurate look of having breathed so much dust your skin grays, and yet being willing to breathe more. Threadbare, worn by the burden of toughness. She recognizes one of the women from her school days. Tall now and angular, the woman holds onto the boniness of her childhood. Alma remembers her as one of the girls with the sticks, who’d run after her until she fell, and then lashed her arms and legs, red, tender. The sticks were sharp, some pulled from trees, still green, pliable, snapping whips. It happened twice, and then she stopped going to school. It was her mother’s fault, and her mother said there was no need for Alma to suffer for her mother’s passions. The woman nearly catches her eye, but Alma looks down quickly and then away, across the factory, as if she might have left something behind at her station.

  Alma feels herself slipping away into her childhood skin, the nigger lover’s daughter—for that’s what she had been called for years. She had felt like an ugly, ruderal child. On her mother’s farm, its sweet peas shriveled on their curled stems, suffering from the atrophy of her mother’s dismissal of love, all of the crops, corn, tomatoes, yellowed and sun-bleached, she was a cast-out child, an oddling who learned on her own how to trap and skin and boil wild rabbit and squirrel. She recalls that those squirrels, wiry and quick with their sharp teeth—like Mrs. Bass—gave her bad dreams. She preferred the rabbits. Even here in the factory she can still have moments like these, of bone-deep memory when she sinks into her girlhood and feels forever fastened to that delicate skeleton. She tries to remind herself that she is a wife, a mother. She will go home to Henry’s back, pained from switching rails all day, hooking and unhooking heavy metal clasps, and the pressing needs of her three children: Irving, out
growing his shoes; Willard, with his oversize head and fat hands, talking about God, sweet, slow-witted Willard; and her girl, Lettie, who has started with the bad dreams, calling out in her sleep about water and a hand. Sometimes Alma is afraid of her children. She was raised in a sullen house, her parents silent. Her mother’s kind of silence was stern, proud; her father’s, ashamed, even before there was a humiliation. Alma was never loved lavishly. Even Henry’s courtship, although lusty, was reserved. She remembers only once in a guttural whisper that he told her she was beautiful. And that was enough for her. In fact, it might have been all she could have endured.

  But the children, as infants, clung to her while crying, and then they fell asleep, creating a patina of sweat that she dared not break for fear of waking them. And even now, older knobby-kneed kids, they rush her with wild attention. Willard, nearly the size of a man, will sometimes race to find her seated in the kitchen—when she least expects him—and he’ll bury his face in her lap, kiss her hands. Lettie, now ten, is a river of emotion, winding, quick, a dipping whirl, a surge strong enough to carry Alma away. Irving has grown distant, and yet he can throw a hungry glance and her knees give, her stomach clots. Often she senses a need in them so deep it seems they want to swallow her. She imagines them, hands joined, circling, and it’s not her children but a giant mouth. She fears disappearing into it, into herself, into the house, its rooms rented to noisy boarders—show people—a troupe working for the Tremont Theater, a variety act. The sign reads: DANCING BEAR! SINGING PARROT! ACROBATICS, CHORUS GIRLS, AND COMEDICS! THE GREATEST PERFORMERS OF THE WORLD! 10 CENTS, PLEASE. But they’re a lousy bunch. The bear is even a shuffler, small and old with an arthritic hip. And who can afford a show these days?

  This is her life. Better than her childhood, sacred by comparison, but still she is desirous of the change she feels. She is here to turn stockings, but it can’t last too long, not with her heart charged as it is, not with this buzz of change around her.