PMS 9 | 2009
Memoir excerpt from To Famous Cases of Syphilis
“This is my memento mori: to Aunt Hazel; to her horses; to her bastard, bliss; to famous cases of syphilis.”
Mary Todd Lincoln probably contracted syphilis from her husband. Norbert Hirschhorn and Robert Feldman published an article in 1999 reviewing the work of the four doctors who had diagnosed her progressive spinal trouble. Finding a clear case of tabes dorsalis, Hirschhorn and Feldman argue convincingly that the doctors would have known very well by then that tabes was caused by syphilis in the majority of cases and would have opted to save her reputation (and to assure a benefit that might have been withheld by a censorious Congress) by stating that her tabes dorsalis was caused by an injury to her spine when she fell from the French chair. “Given the widespread medical knowledge about tabes dorsalis at the close of 1881 and what then was considered its most likely cause [syphilis], it was inevitable that the four physicians chose the least pejorative diagnosis.
My aunt is famous, but only in our family, for managing to contract syphilis. She was young. She was twenty-one. She had wanted to be a nurse.
By the time I was ten she was dead. She had died in a jump out of a window of an asylum where we had sent her. She became famous for this too, in our family-for I think we preferred fame to sadness. She had a high forehead, a widow’s peak, clear eyes that pooled in between hazel and blue. Before she was famous for syphilis, and for suicide, she was famous for the changing color of her eyes.
When we were children she was known to us for being able to stare without blinking. And we, in our quest for stature in the world, ran the no blinking contest every Sunday when we saw Hazel.
“She only saw him once,” my grandmother whispered in the back seat of a taxi, which is where she chose to tell me this secret when I was nine. It seemed there was no fame in it, and no glory. To see a person once, and then to die because of it. “I could kill him,” my grandmother said. “I could murder him.” This grandmother, Grandma Lottie, was famous for being a sharp shooter with blue ribbons from the California fairs. She was famous for her chicken ranch in California, and for her California dream of making it big, and she was famous for living at the ranch with a man who owned a chain of underwear stores. He was known as the king of underwear. But before she could become famous for this, she left him, to come to Chicago and take care of her sister. In Chicago she was only famous for her gold colored car, which no one else on the block had, for purchasing a cookie factory with her underwear money, and for keeping a rifle behind the door. As a child I stood in the middle of the block, closed my eyes and spun until the trees and breeze around me, became part of me. I knew only this: I was the granddaughter of a woman whom everyone seemed to know. She owned the cookie factory. Her sister was crazy.
There was a storage room in my grandmother’s basement-where everything of her sister’s was kept. The door was damp and bloated, and scraped against the cement floor when we pulled it open. We went down there, my brother and I, just to stare. The one window there faced south. There were short, lace curtains on this block of light. And all was dark beside it, as if a resurrection had been held there. Standing there we knew-that someone once lived among all these things. Against one wall, a huge armoire. Next to it, a rocker. Then the small bed, twin size, with a brass headboard and a chenille bedspread still upon it. A pillow at the head, waiting for someone. There were lamps with yellow shades and lace fringe. There were two steamer trunks filled with towels and china pieces. There was a dowel rod in the oak wardrobe. Her lacy dresses hung there. She had been someone once. She had been lighter, she had worn lace; she had picked it all out carefully, and then had lived somewhere among these things. I did not know for certain, but felt, that there were worlds of wonder where people had walked, like dinosaurs in a forgotten time, now supplanted by what they were famous for.
Abraham Lincoln’s great love was Ann Routledge, who had died young, of typhoid. Before he met Mary Todd, he proposed to three or four more Illinois women. He was said to be depressed and at odds with women. He remarked one day when it was raining that “he could not bear the idea of it raining on Ann’s grave.”
According to Lincoln’s biographer, friend, and law partner for eighteen years, William Herndon, Lincoln told him that he had been infected with syphilis in Beardstown in 1835 or 1836 (by a prostitute). Herndon wrote to his (biographer) co-author “Friend Weik” in January 1891, (and later) wished that he had not put the confidence in writing.
In famous cases, the syphilitics become visionary. In dreamlike fashion they can “see” the breakdown of their body from within. They can pinpoint the moment– the hour, the face above or below them in coitus– that liquid, liminal moment the syphilitic bacteria is ushered from one being to another.
My aunt was famous for sitting and rocking her body at the breakfast table. She liked to stare out to the sun porch. She liked to tell stories, recite her poems. Not whole poems, but a mosaic of lines from poems and sayings that she liked.
She was famous for shouting from the kitchen table:
It is ill-manners to have silenced a fool but cruelty to let him go on.
A man in a passion rides a mad horse.
The wise man draws more advantage from his enemies than the fool from his friends.
He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.
Either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
She was famous for her buttery, flaky homemade biscuits. The biscuits steamed when she put them on our plates, and smelled of baked dough. Being large children, my brother and I were famous for our strong desire of the biscuits-such became the outline of myth for our family. She served them with a quietness. We picked them hot out of the basket with quiet giddiness. I imagined the moment the warm dough would be pressed to the roof of my mouth, and in this way I dreamed and fantasized more than any other-I dreamed of how good something could get.
“Half a league half a league half a league onward…” she would recite as she placed each biscuit on our plate. We all asked who made the biscuits, an endeavor to create even more fame for my aunt. It was the charity, and perhaps even the conceit of this family to give each her fame. She, who stood at the corner of the table, waiting, with her biscuit basket waiting for us to finish the first round, would purse her lips and pretend to zip them shut: “I can never tell,” she’d say, “Theirs is not to reason why.’”
“Hazel made them, and she will never reveal her secret,” my great grandmother said, flattening the moment by explaining this to us. We laughed, I think, because we wanted to affirm the greatness of the battle between the sister who had nearly been someone, and the sister who could now not ever be.
We were a family fomenting with ideas of fame. “That’s right, no one makes them better!” This would be said by my father, who was becoming a wealthy realtor, and often told the story of the fight he had with a tenant, and how the tenant swung the bottle of scotch he had been drinking at him “right there in the vestibule,” and broke it on his head. The story ends with my father pulling his eye-patch up to reveal the half whiteness of one eye.
“She’ll never tell how she made them, ” my grandmother would say again. My grandmother was wealthy, or at least the wealthiest in our family, and liked to tell stories of the ranch she once owned in California, and the sharp shooting contests she had there. She once nearly shot a man who came to the door of her ranch house, except she had aimed at his sample case. “I thought the man was harmless.” The case was filled with jars of cleaners and cans of wax. The jars and cans “clinked like crazy” when he flung the case down, and ran from the house. My grandmother famously called him back, and gave him a cold beer. They sat for the afternoon on the porch. I would close my eyes at the table and think of how family fame was like a magic light, how the salesman might be telling his story of being shot at by the woman at the chicken ranch. How that might be the answer in life, to fly in the light and the actions of fame.
“She won’t tell about those biscuits,” said my grandmother. Aunt Hazel would clap her mouth shut with one hand, and pretend to zip it again with the other. My grandmother would clap her own mouth shut, and then both the sisters would pretend to laugh, bending back for pretend belly laughs. They were famous for this ending to their opening act, and once finished, Hazel would sit down with us, and we would fall into the lull of passing chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy. She was famous for making us silent.