Requiem for the Madame of Bradley Street…
Another night I wake and can‘t shake this restlessness, this want for something far beyond me yet disturbingly close. It‘s 2:30 in the morning… how often was she asleep at this hour, how long had the Victrola kept playing, the laughing, the now friendly groping for the other, the taste of joy that cheapens as the darkness drags on?
She rattles in my brain, dancing left and right, navigating the cheap, scarred furniture, cutting the rug now soiled from countless falls, now wet and reeking. She rattles in my brain, gently, but with mounting pressure, squeezing me in between… the pain-driven playwright, his hapless older brother Jamie… a sort of spiritual trinity on a timer completely absorbed in the now.
All the while, her husband, the cook forgotten in her shadow, leading a parallel quiet and patient life, inwardly amused and saddened while she whores… and whores only to bake slowly in the prison laundry… a men‘s prison in a charmless, colonial perfect Weathersfield, walled off itself from the rising tide of misery, greed and poverty that is Hartford, the capital.
I know a bit of her only, this Addie Burns, this Adelaide dead at 63, a long life, a later age of so many New Years Eves, after which I only learned to live. For she had lived, played, cried, laughed and lost eventually to be forgotten as the newspaper‘s interest waned and expired like a candle, all wick, but no wax. Better to be forgotten.
But not by me. Madame is fuzz on my brain, an itch that wakes me in the middle of the night. I am teased, lured into on location as the curtain falls, the hall empty. She takes me to another stage, further down the street. Addie the playwright, Adelaide the spider weaving a web that snares, holds me 80 years later, my senses tingling, the old world on hold through a memory, a consciousness I never had, the spiritual fallout of another life, truer to basic nature, placed in a linear time order of columned newsprint, phone messages from a line now gone dead, now silent. The past, present and future to be left permanently on hold.
Today I woke to glimpse her lodging house, this tenement which carried her to prison and later fetched her back. The blotched, dark silhouette that is the solid yet worn, exhausted address of a rooming house at #41 North Bank Street, the sun setting, the shadows from the granite and marble savings bank growing longer, enveloping this fortress of pay by the minute joy whose time has come as well.
For the cars need to park, the bank customers and employees themselves on a clock, but different… a 9-5 clock relentlessly punctual, predictable, demanding, meaningless.
The bulldozer is on its way.
Where is Addie Burns? Who is Addie Burns and how did this future Madame. make it from Stamford to New London to be buried in a cemetery named Jordan in a rural retreat called Waterford? Retired to Adelaide Broley, respectfully listed each year in the publicly trust tax records as the property owner and governess of 41 North Bank, nee-Bradley, Street.
After 13 years of epilogue, the curtain drawn down in the time it takes to read a short single-paragraph obit… no calling hours, no recap of a proud life relived, understood, to be emulated, toasted in the far corners of the world, but no, simply the quiet defiance of not going totally away, not turning to dust at the public‘s convenience.
And a proper farewell, one bereft of a portrait and left to the imagination? Well, perhaps it‘s time in this distant 2026 to write one for Mrs. Adelaide Broley Burns Abad, the Madame of Bradley Street.