Bad Marguerite
-for Radclyffe Hall,
1880-1943
If there were others like me,
they were buried away
with spinster aunts in the Cotswolds,
cowering in drafty mahogany chambers.
I am Radclyffe Hall, but you will call me John.
Her birth name,
Marguerite Antonia,
sticks to her palate like sticky marmite
on a stale Duchy biscuit.
Unsavory, unwanted.
Marguerite was a petulant child
raised in a drafty nursery schoolroom.
Unruly dark braids, large clumsy hands,
unable to crochet or thread needles for cross-stitch.
She would not play mother to cipher-faced baby dolls
presented to her by absent parents.
When Nanny was not looking,
Marguerite tossed the blank-eyed puppets into her fireplace.
The sound of porcelain flesh crackling,
then erupting into shards, was exhilarating.
Bad Marguerite.
With Father’s inheritance,
There was no need to marry, or work.
Off went the heavy grey bombazine skirts,
out came the plus-fours and sturdy tweed blazers.
I discarded the stiff-heeled shoes,
broke in that first lovely pair of soft
leather walking boots to explore the foggy moors.
I regarded my strange new world through one eye,
squinting into a monocle hung on a polished brass chain.
Everything magnified--
Those slant-eyed scowls at the market,
whispers behind slender leather-gloved hands,
the icy emptiness that shrouded me before sleep.
I lost every woman I loved to men and marriage,
stockpiled every experience,
and published five books of poetry in nine years.
Then came Mabel.
She found me in Frankfurt,
floating face up in the
warm mineral springs,
my dark eyes fixed on an indifferent sky,
rough fingers praying decades
on my lapis lazuli rosary,
as the sisters trained me to do.
At the casino Mabel sat beside me,
placed her chips near mine
on number 27, my age at the time.
The roulette wheel spun round and round,
finally slowing to its final tick, tick, tick.
She clasped my hand, and the croupier
called our number.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have two winners!”
We took the money and went to my suite
with a bottle of excellent cognac.
Sweet, fleshy Mabel.
I still smell her verbena and clove cigarettes.
She baptized me in the claw-toothed tub.
I curled against her in the warm water
while she washed my long hair.
She toweled it dry, gently combed the knots,
then carved it into an Eton crop.
Wrapping the snarls of my past self
into yesterday’s newspaper,
we chucked it into the hallway trash chute
down to the awaiting iron furnace.
About the Author: Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).
Image Credit: Radclyffe Hall by Howard Coster half-plate film negative, 1932. Creative Commons image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
As It Ought To Be 