The Scarlet Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

July picnic. She sold apples to buy a pair of shoes for the occasion. On the way home he said to her, “My little puss, tell your father and mother that I want you for a wife.”
    Victoria is depicted in this sketch as a startled innocent who beseeched her parents to save her. This does not ring true. Canning was a handsome doctor who said he was from a refined East Coast family. Surely to a child who dreamed of power and her own glory, and who fully believed she would one day ride in a fine carriage, he must have seemed a magical escape from her dreary life. Her story continued: “But the parents, as if not unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time, were delighted at the unexpected offer. They thought it a grand match.” Victoria also admitted that she soon looked at the marriage as “an escape from the parental yoke.”
    On September 23, 1853, Victoria celebrated her fifteenth birthday. Two months later, on November 23, she celebrated her wedding—yet, all her life, she would say she was married at fourteen, to throw an even more helpless cast on the union. “On the third night,” her husband “broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-repute.… she learned, to her dismay, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication… She grew ten years older in a single day. Six weeks after her marriage (during which time her husband was mostly with his cups and his mistresses), she discovered a letter addressed to him in a lady’s elegant penmanship, ‘Did you marry that child because she too was en famille ?’ ” On the day of his marriage, Woodhull had “sent away into the country a mistress” who gave birth to his child.
    “He suddenly put his wife into the humblest quarters, where, leftmostly to herself, she dwelt in bitterness of spirit, aggravated… by learning of his ordering baskets of champagne and drinking himself drunk in the company of harlots.” At this point the couple was residing in Chicago, probably because Canning could make a better living in this bustling frontier city, known in those days as far out West. However, his drinking left him incapable of functioning. Wrote Tilton, extravagantly, “Through rain and sleet, half clad and shivering, she would track him to his dens,” compelling him to return. Other nights, she would wait by the window until she heard him “languidly shuffling along the pavement with the staggering reel of a drunken man, in the shameless hours of the morning.”
    Somehow Canning had found time to impregnate his wife. In retelling the birth, Tilton poured on the pathos: “In the dead of winter, with icicles clinging to her bedpost, and attended only by her half-drunken husband, she brought forth in almost mortal agony her first-born child.” For icicles to have found their way to bedposts, the temperature would have to have been mighty frigid, but miracle of miracles, Victoria and even the newborn babe survived. A neighbor brought her food and wrapped the baby in a blanket and took it “to a happier mother in the near neighborhood” to nurse the infant.
    Her firstborn child became the real sorrow of Victoria’s life, one that would haunt her and spur her lifelong interest in eugenics, her arguments for planned parenting by the most physically and mentally pure, and her fight against loveless marriages. She blamed Canning’s drunkenness, and their empty union, for the son she bore on that last day of December 1854: “Her child, begotten in drunkenness, and born in squalor, was a half idiot; predestined to be a hopeless imbecile for life.” The son, named Byron, would live a long life. In 1871, at the age of sixteen, he was “a sad and pitiful spectacle in his mother’s house… where he roams from room to room, muttering noises more sepulchral than human; a daily agony to the woman who bore him.” Byron also displayed an “uncommon sweetness,” wrote Tilton, that won