Work Text:
New York, 1874
God, how she sweated and struggled all that spring.
It had been a mistake to sell her poplinette walking dress, no matter how badly they had needed travelling money up front. More generally, it had been an error to go to New York without first assessing the fashions there. But then again, who had she known who could have told her what one wore in New York? Her father had visited the city on some business before, and certainly as a tailor he would be conscious of fashions, but he hadn't had any idea that his daughter had intentions to visit—more than visit—on business of her own. If he had realised as much, he would have stopped her, and if he had mistaken it for an idle query, he would have laughed and said something nonsensical, as if she were a girl of ten and not a woman of eighteen. She could have asked Joe—but what would Joe ever know about fashion?
The damage was done. She had sold—oh, utmost irony—the dress which might have stood her in best stead for those times when she had to drag herself through the streets of New York, skirts trailing heavily behind her. Instead, in her pastel marshmallow colours, lacking in friends and fashion, Irène Bordin—no!—Irene Adler felt soft, sticky and fatally Southern. In New Orleans—in her small part of New Orleans—she had been fashionable. In New York—well, people ignored her, if she was lucky.
It wouldn't be so bad, she thought, if she could only find the courage to raise her head up. The trick, she knew, was to act as if her daddy owned the street—and not a shop in the French Quarter. But that first staggering reel of I am in New York, the rush of arrival as she was delivered into the arms of harsh alien structures and unfamiliar rules, had been so terrifying that she'd shoved her head down and not dared to look up since. It seemed like the longer she stared at the ground the more unthinkable glancing at the sky became.
"Why did you not tell me?" Irene said one night, quite suddenly, just as Joe McCord collapsed onto her, his mouth finding her throat and his breaths hot against her skin, his hard shudders and pushes having exhausted him.
"What about?" he groaned. His beard scratched at her neck.
Between her legs was sticky and wet, his seed cooling there. They had agreed that they could hardly risk children—not when Joe was still married. And besides, Irene had said not at all seriously, hands wandering wickedly up his thighs as he’d shown her the little apartment he’d rented for her...besides, she was a Catholic, and part of the fun when you were a Catholic was denying yourself all sorts of things.
Now, the heat was cloying, the room too small, and Irene felt her own outsidership too keenly to keep her mouth closed. She longed for some revelation that Joe was more than he was, and would know what she meant. “Of how I look here,” she said, staring desperately up at the ceiling.
“You look pretty,” Joe said. Irene closed her eyes. It wasn’t the answer she had wanted, but with Joe it never was.
“You don’t understand.”
“Sure I understand.”
“You never could.”
He sighed, rolled off her and was silent, seemingly accepting this. Irene gritted her teeth. She turned onto her side to frown at a different corner of the dark, pulling down her nightgown and trying to inconspicuously daub away what he had spent against her leg with the plain white cotton.
“I like New York,” she said thoughtfully, finally letting it be and getting comfortable with her back to him. “Despite it all—I do like it here.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a New Yorker.”
“I’m practising. I think it’s better.”
“Better than your real voice?”
“Better than my old voice. And even if not—it is ever so useful to be able to fit in, is it not? When one wants to. And then one can rebel when one doesn’t want to. I’m furnishing myself with all the tools of freedom, Joe,” Irene Adler murmured, knowing he wouldn't understand a thing she was saying. Sometimes, talking to Joe (when she wasn’t aching for him to react, to understand, to give some sign of her words coming into contact with him) was wonderfully like whispering her secrets into a hole in the ground. Except holes never got anxious about what didn’t touch their sides. Joe knew she was cleverer than him, Irene thought with vicious satisfaction, even if he didn’t quite believe it.
“Well, I think your voice is prettier when you talk like...”
“Like a black Catholic girl from Louisiana?” Irene Adler said, hoping for a reaction.
She got one. Never comfortable talking about where Irene was from, Joe sat straight up and got out of bed, scrabbling with his trousers in the dark. Irene tried not to laugh at him, more out of an instinct for self-preservation than any kind of moral impulse. The man got defensive about the whole state of Louisiana—got a hunted look in his eyes whenever he had to think about who he lay with most nights. And heaven forbid the word ‘Creole’ come up, for Joe would almost immediately stop breathing until it was confirmed that—never fear—it was the white sort of Creole being discussed. She didn’t know what he’d do if one of his friends ever showed any awareness that Louisiana Creoles (say it quietly lest you make people nervous) weren’t always lily white. It was pathetic.
She wondered where on Earth he was scrabbling to go. Not back to his wife, that was for sure. And he wouldn’t like wandering around the streets doing nothing—especially not smelling of her. He made such a point about that. He kept spare clothes in her closet because, he said, he hated to smell like her in public. It was embarrassing, he said. It made him feel bad, like an adulterer or something. So he’d go off in his other suit, she’d wash the clothes he left behind and hang them up in the closet, and then the cycle would continue—unless Irene mentioned something she wasn’t supposed to mention, and he stormed off without changing.
“Is something the matter, my love?” Irene said lazily, rolling onto her back to watch him. It proved impossible. He was just a clump of darkness against darkness, wrestling angrily and absurdly with his clothes.
“You’re pale as me,” he said roughly, tucking in his shirt. His logic fascinated and repulsed Irene. Her parents might have been gens de couleur libres before the war and her sister might be darker-skinned than her, but in Joe’s mind she could never belong to them, not really, because to him no one the slightest bit black could act like she did. And so, believing it made him a good man, he had decided to exempt her, had forgiven her the crime of her race by virtue of her looking “almost Mediterranean” and—had made sure not to let his wife know.
“Am I? Maybe I am. You’d think it’d matter, wouldn’t you.”
“You don’t make any sense, Irene.”
“Not to you I don’t. You see? I did say you could never understand.”
He was already leaving. Her sentence was punctuated by the bang of the door, and then the creak as the broken latch failed to keep it in place. Irene Adler—a black Catholic girl from Louisiana—pressed her lips together and wrapped the sheets tighter around her, fiercely glad that he was gone. He had told her he knew people at the Academy of Music. Of course, he had lied. And he was never going to leave his wife for her, no matter how much he hated the woman—and he did hate her, or at least he disliked her enough to spill so much bile about her into Irene’s ear that she found herself faintly charmed by her, this mysterious Mrs McCord she’d never met and never would. Perhaps it was cruel to like someone simply because they made Joe angry, but he had been cruel to her. All that nonsense about escaping to New York, where the law said they could marry and where she’d be “just like a white girl”—his words—had been for the sake of having her handy. In Joe’s mind she had already been ruined by her parentage, so he need feel no real pangs of conscience, only faint disgust. But it was alright, Irene thought; after all, she had only been pretending to love him, and now she didn’t need to feel the slightest bit of guilt about it, or worry about having to do anything so awful as marry him. In fact, she was rather pleased with herself for that particular act. It had been a triumph.
The rest of it, though...
She had come to New York to be in a place where nobody could identify her. In New Orleans, so many people knew her—loved her, yes, she was always everyone’s darling, at least in her part of the French Quarter, but they nonetheless knew her, and there was such horror in being known. It was as if people made nooses of what they could prove about you. In New York, she had thought, she could reinvent herself and sing at the Academy of Music as whoever she might choose to be—not relegated to the more minor parts at the French Opera House lest the white French Creoles feel themselves trespassed upon. Certainly, she was pale enough—with stage makeup, even paler. But her father’s talents had made him too well known amongst all strata of Creole society for his daughter to go anonymous or ambiguous.
In New York, she knew—even lying curled in the sheets with the muggy, polluted heat still trying to choke her, even with sticky thighs and a painful lump of regret twisting in her stomach—she knew that she could be, somehow, more than the eldest Bordin girl, whose parents made clothes for the white Creoles (the whiter Creoles, Irene mocked, assured by rumour that the Pontelliers had African ancestors way back, and knowing she was distantly related to the Vinettes by strands of more or less white blood, however much they sought to deny even that). She could be more.
It might just take a while coming.
Irene curled up tighter and wished for burgundy poplinette and golden-green silk organza. It seemed so petty—but you had to make an impression in one glance. You just had to. One glance was all people gave you. Of course, the more cheering side of that was that you only had to be good for one glance, and then, why, the world was your oyster. You could do whatever, be who you were, and people would only ever see a strange mix of their own expectations, assumptions and desires.
But she’d been beautiful in her part of the French Quarter, she suddenly lamented, feeling that regret rise up in her throat. She’d been famous in a world which she wished had been big enough for her. In New York, out of context and suddenly poor—well. It was impossible to be beautiful when one was poor, Irene thought. It made you ashamed of yourself. That was what she was, she thought; ashamed of herself. This poverty made her feel dirty and small and embarrassed, like the whole world was laughing behind its fan at her. How could anyone be beautiful when they were so angry and miserable? She could barely remember how it felt. But if she was going to endear herself to the operatic world of New York City and claw her way out of this poverty and stamped down shame she’d been forced into, she needed to be beautiful—not pretty, or attractive, for it was nothing to do with her face—a prima donna had to be able to throw her head back and glow, surely, which was impossible if she did not have the glint of money about her. There was no way to win. She was trapped in herself; or she was trapped in what people thought of her.
It wouldn’t always be so.
She didn’t know that. She didn’t even quite hope for it, because she wasn’t impractical enough to believe anything happened without hard work, and she couldn’t bring herself to hope for hard work, though she wanted to do it for its rewards. And she would. Over the course of the next year, Irene Adler would take day work running errands in trousers and evening work singing at private engagements in dresses and middle-of-the-night work on her knees in whatever worked best. She would be mocked by her newfound friends (other women with sore knees and things to teach her) for penny-pinching, but she'd save and scrimp nonetheless, refusing to be embarrassed by it. She would learn to make herself look fashionable on the cheap, and she would discover that, with a little tweaking (wear rich colours; distract them with jewellery; talk like a New Yorker; baffle them with your presence; lie) it would not even occur to people that they were talking to a black Catholic girl from Louisiana. She would hear about the masked French Balls held annually at the Academy of Music, where a girl in a wisp of a costume could easily get an invite and where she would charm Richard Maypin, that famous opera impresario, from behind a mask, then vanish into the sea of bright, garish costumes—and later, in that same anonymity, she would offer to sing to the ball at large and half way through her first verse see them all fall silent, having expected the entertainment of a courtesan’s drunken caterwauling and having received—Irene Adler.
Though the name Irene Adler wouldn't mean anything to them—yet.
Richard Maypin would ignore the man trying to talk to him and stare at the stage she had hijacked, deaf to all but what she sang. The papers would rhapsodise about her voice. One would incorrectly call her an Italian. Others would wildly claim her as Greek. All would agree she was sublime, a diamond in the rough. She would make her debut at the Academy of Music in the role of Rosina.
Before all that though, in what she hadn’t at first realised was little more than a garret, curled alone in an uncomfortable bed, her eyes fell closed and she drifted off into a dream in which her sister shook her head at her and refused to speak, while Joe McCord’s faceless wife kept telling her she should get her photograph taken. When she woke up in the morning and rubbed the dregs of the dream from her eyes, Joe was still gone, and his spare suit was still there. She opened the closet and stared at it, long and hard, curling up her bare toes against the floor, which managed to be chilly despite the New York heat. She reached out slowly and touched the jacket. Finally she knew how she might step outside of herself, and the prison which other people’s opinions of her had made for her, if she dared—
And she dared.