A casual observer strolling between the Bowery and Fulton St. late one frosty night in November 1833 would have seen a young woman running with all her strength, wildly waving her hand for an omnibus. At all hours of the day and night (and above all during those November nights, when so many couples and groups and individuals were out on the town to watch the meteor storm, or to stargaze, or to drink, or gamble, or find other means of entertainment), the omnibus, just recently introduced to the city, was running quaint and smooth along the tracks. The crack of the cabman’s whip, his loud cursing, the noisy grunting and complaining of the sleek white horse, or the hailing of the passengers who strategically positioned themselves in front of the horse and whip – or tried to run it down – carried a long way in the chill air.
But amid all that uproar and stench and hurry and sound there was the voice of one woman calling out in more agitation than the rest. She caught an omnibus and was taken three blocks down to visit a doctor. She knew what she wanted (there seemed no other choice): Swaim’s Panacea, which was said to stopper every kind of sickness between syphilis and the common cold. What was in it? Sarsaparilla, she heard, and then some secret ingredient—sometimes mercuric chloride did the job, sometimes a powerful acid that corroded the lining of the stomach or small intestine (the patient would be laid up for a week purging out the corrupted lining of his stomach), and sometimes sugar. When she met the doctor, he asked what was wrong. “It’s my husband,” Lydia said (because this lady is the same). “Dr. Gibson,” she went on, “poor Levi—for the last three days he’s been confined, and only my friends have seen him. Meanwhile consider that Mr. Och, his partner at the firm, has been frenzied terribly about him at work. His wife told me, ‘Levi has been inattentive in conversation. Charles says that at work he appears unusually fatigued, and sometimes drifts off to sleep. He says it’s been altogether a damned rummy situation, and he's advised him to stay home and see a physician. He will take up the costs.’ Oh, Dr. Gibson, whatever shall we do? Is it cholera again (I’ve heard about the plague in London)—Doctor is it that or could it be something worse?” (That is, she hinted: Could it be syphilis? Gibson’s Swaim’s Panacea was usually prescribed as a cure for syphilis.) “I’m losing my head over him. I can scarcely put two thoughts together." She panted, anxious to get home with the Swaim’s as quickly as possible.
Dr. Gibson rubbed his chin and nodded, which he appeared to consider a strict aid to concentration. His eyes drooped sleepily, and then his nose began to run. “There’s a snappy chill outdoors, my dear, so I don’t have time to follow you back. I regret…that is, my advice, dear child,” he blew his nose with his handkerchief and then sharply cleared his throat. “My dear, here is some sarsaparilla mixed with Swaim’s. Come back to me tomorrow, and we’ll look at him together.” He handed her a bottle of amber liquid, waved off her money, and lumbered back to bed. Lydia thanked him profusely and then left.
She ran back home, where the candlelight still glimmered in the upper story, and then ran to the icebox (a new invention) to take out the milk she promised her husband. She shut the icebox door and then ran, milk in hand, to the fireplace to heat it up, “I hope—oh, I hope I’m not late.” A minute later, she ran up the stairs and looked around for her husband.
And this is where we left them last. Fifteen minutes had passed since she left the house and hailed down an omnibus, which took her to the doctor’s. After placing the warm milk on the cherry-wood dresser, she scanned her eyes around the room, and finally, after putting on her slippers she—well, she stumbled upon a five-inch tall man: a five-inch tall man, who was also her husband.
Levi tumbled out of the shoe and alternately crawled and lunged his way over the rose-patterned carpet to his wife. “Oh Levi!”
“Lydia—”
“Come here—what is happening to us?” She reached down and picked him up, then set him down on the dresser by the milk. “Why were you crawling in my shoe?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh, I’m still shrinking.” Lydia, he thought, you’re the size of the apartment building—you’re at least 70 ft. high.
“Drink this—please drink some of this milk.” She studied the room quickly by candlelight, and then yanked a button from her dress, a button which, to him, was about the size of a saucer. She dipped the button into the glass of milk mixed with Panacea, and carefully set it down in front of him. “Take a sip, Levi, one sip. Please.” He looked up at her eyes, now the size of a glass pane from one of the oriel windows projecting out of their front parlor, and at her worried, unsmiling mouth, larger than any lioness’s and, for a brief moment, was disengaged from his mind. He seemed to be watching everything go on below him, the tiny man and the gigantic world, the button-saucer filled with milk, the candlelight, and the beautiful face of a giantess, a giantess in the form of his wife, Lydia, looking down on him. “Drink it, Levi. Hurry—drink it. You’re shrinking before my eyes.” He still froze.
Then, as the thunder after a lightning-bolt, he felt her pluck him up with one hand, and tip the button-ful of milk into his face with the other. He woke up, gulping down the sweet milky liquid, for a full ten seconds. Then it ended, and he felt himself gently deposited on the cherry-wood dresser, wheezing and choking. “I’m sorry about that, Levi, but I had to prod you. It’s just milk mixed with the Swaim’s Panacea I got from Gibson’s. Sarsaparilla, he told me, and something else.” Levi tasted the liquor, and the something else. He licked his lips in a daze, still coughing, and tasted something distinctly metallic. “Could be mercury,” he said. “Could be ordinary New York water.” He smiled sadly, tasting sugar. “And maybe a few gumdrops.” He stood up shakily and looked up at his wife, towering above him now. “Am I still shrinking?” He clapped his hands on his legs, and slapped and wrung the milky cure-all from his arms. “I don’t seem to be.”
Lydia shook her head, “No, Levi. You’ve stopped, I think. But you’re smaller.”
“Smaller than what?” he asked. He stared up at his wife, and did a quick calculation. “You must be twice as tall as you were, Lydia.” He moved back a few steps, and looked down at his shoes. “How tall am I?”
Lydia leaned her face down to the edge of the dresser, and measured him with her eyes. “You’re two and a half inches, about…well, about two inches. I can’t say exactly.” Levi looked over the edge of the dresser, and found an abyss below him. He felt woozy and nervous, and then the hopelessness returned. What now? He thought. “Lydia, what do we do now?”
She shook her head. Work was over, obviously, at least until he returned to his normal size. Fortunately she had money, about $11,000, from her marriage. They would be forced to sell the house, leave their friends, and move to a different place, &c., &c., until something altered (that is, until his size altered for the better). After five years of living together like this, perhaps several other people could be confided in. Until then – she thought ahead – I must return to the appearances of single life. With a low heart she turned her face down to her husband, pacing sorrowfully, chin to chest, and with matted clothes and hair across the dresser-top. He finally stopped in his tracks, and looked, a bit frightened and somewhat wearily, up at his wife. He said something quietly, but she couldn’t hear him.
She bent down her ear to his level, and pointed to it, indicating that he must repeat himself. He shouted, “I have an idea!” and then explained his plan.
“What strikes me first, of course, is that any sort of legal work will henceforth be impracticable, if not impossible. I cannot make my condition known—Lydia…dear [how strange it feels, he thought, to call a 180 ft. woman ‘dear’, even if she is—was—your wife]…please don’t press me on this point, because at the moment my defense doesn’t go beyond the fact that ‘I am nervous about showing myself to the world as I am’), so it follows that we must leave the city at once, to avoid gossip. Let us escape suspicion and gossip, for the time being, by traveling out of the City—and the more distantly we travel, in my view, the better.
“Now to business—how we will accomplish this: send a letter tonight, stamped with my seal and pressed with kisses and perfume and flower petals or whatever you like, to Lucy Och, Charles Och’s wife. At my dictation, you will write a love letter to this woman, detailing my undying and eternal passion for her, my enchantment with her beauty, my wish to arrange a rendezvous, and so on. Simultaneously, you will send another letter, in your own words, to Charles Och, in which it is revealed that I have been making unwanted advances against his wife, Lucy. You do not name yourself, but hint that Lucy told you this in confidence, and wishes it to be kept a private matter. Lucy may deny or aggressively affirm this—it matters not. Charles will be enraged, and will likely challenge me to a test of my manhood or somewhat else. But tonight, we will leave this house and turn East toward the Ferry at Corlears Hook (a messy district, yes, but you must get out quietly). That’s my idea.”
Lydia raised her head, studied her husband for a moment, and then lifted him up and gave him a smacking kiss. “It shall be done!” she saluted him, mockingly, though not without a few tears glazing the corners of her eyes, and put him back down. “I shall write the two letters at once. First give me the salacious and raunchy tale of romance, and don’t spare me. As for the wronged and injured wife, resentful of her husband and the world, well, I suppose I’ll do all right with that. I’ll fetch my pens and paper, and then call an omnibus.” She turned out of the room (rather, to him, she ‘stormed out’—or, as a 21st cen. comparison, you can imagine Liberty stooping off her pedestal for a quick bath in Hudson Bay. The sudden gale of wind would upset a few helicopters circling her crowned head, or her yellowy-white torch, wind-swept).
She came back, they wrote the letters, and then left the house. Where would they go first? And what would happen to them, or what sorts of people would they meet, that night and in the future? She dropped him between her scented breasts (about 15’ by 12’ each), with the perfumed letters, and then stole off in an omnibus down Fulton Street, toward the Ferry, east of Manhattan.