American Follies

by Norman Lock

  The two women apparently sensed my surprise and perplexity.

  “We’ve spent our lives mostly among women and have helped many ‘unfortunates,’” said Elizabeth meaningfully.

  “Are you married, Ellen?” asked Susan bluntly. “It makes no difference to us whether or not you are.”

  Elizabeth nodded hopefully. “Not in the least!”

  What dears! I said to myself. Bless them for their tolerance.

  “I am married,” I replied. “My husband is in San Francisco, looking for a place on one of the papers.”

  They received this piece of intelligence glumly.

  “Is that so,” remarked Susan, disappointment evident on her face and in her voice.

  “We can’t allow our work to be interrupted,” said Elizabeth, having stiffened. The rigor was provided by her own bones and not borrowed from a dead whale’s. “You understand, Mrs. Finch, that what we do must take priority over other considerations.” She had resorted to an ominous formality. “If your husband were to find a position in California and send for you, we would be very much at sixes and sevens.”

  “Very much so!” said Susan, offering vigorous confirmation of her friend’s misgivings.

  Sinking into the horsehair sofa, I beheld in my fancy the scuttling of the household—Franklin’s and mine—awash in debt. I watched as our best hope of rescue drifted among the wreckage like a seaborne spar or bobbing hogshead beyond salvage. I had not counted on the women’s single-minded ambitiousness. No, the word wrongs them and belittles the devotion with which they pursued the overthrow of a fraternity that deemed women unequal by law and custom and no more deserving of protection than a mule. Their altruism, then.

  As if to clarify the importance of their efforts, Elizabeth remarked, “A negro man can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of two hundred and fifty dollars; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool. But women are voiceless and oppressed.”

  “The Lord will admit a good and virtuous woman into Heaven, although during her life, she was made to wait outside the polling place while her husband cast his vote. By the law of coverture, his vote represented hers regardless of whether or not her opinion was considered in the matter!” said an indignant Susan, who had neither vote nor husband, but had been arrested for violating the sanctity of the polling place.

  I knew that the child’s welfare and my own could be assured in those delightful rooms kept by a pair of suffragists besotted on the intoxicant of high ideals and, in Elizabeth’s case, a pleasing sense of martyrdom. The infant would be nourished, loved, and endued with sympathy for the disadvantaged, whose lot I did not wish to share as I waited for Franklin to send for me.

  I began to sob. They leaned forward, not with the pity that conceals self-righteousness or spitefulness, but with genuine compassion.

  Elizabeth sat beside me on the sofa and, putting her arm around my shoulder, intoned, “There, there,” as if those two words had the power to resolve the disharmonies of the world. I let my head rest against her bosom and sneezed when particles of her violet sachet entered my nostrils.

  “Tell us what’s troubling you, child,” encouraged Susan from across the room.

  “I have no husband!” I cried, but the words were muffled by a snowy expanse of muslin.

  “What’s that you said, Ellen?” asked Susan, whose withered breasts had never felt the greedy mouths of infants or of men.

  I turned my head toward her. “I’m not married!”

  “Ah, I thought as much!” she gasped.

  “Wonderful!” The word had escaped Elizabeth’s lips before she could purse them.

  “Please don’t send me to the Home for Magdalens!”

  “We would sooner send you to the Tombs!” vowed Susan.

  “Or to the river, along with a stone to tie around your waist!” cried Elizabeth, the more theatrical of the two.

  “You’re a skillful Sholes and Glidden operator, not a laundress,” said Susan, alluding to the fate of unwed Magdalens who did not throw themselves into the river.

  “I have no idea how I’ll manage,” I said ruefully. Oh, I was shameless!

  “You will manage perfectly well with us!” replied Elizabeth, and in her resoluteness, I glimpsed the young firebrand who had omitted the words and obey from her marriage vow and affirmed our sex’s equality in the Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed at the Seneca Falls convention: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal …”

  “When your time comes, you won’t find us wanting in either compassion or skill,” she said, or maybe it was Susan who did. I’d begun to weep in earnest, picturing myself left to face poverty and shame on my own. On the other side of the continent, Franklin seemed a figment of a dream.

  “Elizabeth brought seven children into the world and can be trusted to know what to do!” said Susan as confidently as if she herself had suffered a woman’s agony and, according to men, her purpose.

  “An excellent midwife in sympathy with our movement lives nearby,” said Elizabeth, who at that moment resembled a flour-faced mammy. “Her swine of a husband beats her when he has ‘a brick in his hat,’ as she calls his sprees. By now, he ought to have enough bricks to build a house of ill repute.”

  “‘A man can’t close his eyes to pray without falling into a rum-hole!’” declared Susan, quoting from The Lily. “I’m waiting for someone to take a hatchet to the taprooms, bucket shops, spirit vaults, and doggeries that turn men’s fuggled brains to mash!”

  “You beat that horse to death!” complained Elizabeth.

  “Better that I should beat the horse than a drunkard his wife!”

  “Ellen, we are happy that you’re unmarried and with child,” said Elizabeth pleasantly. “We can point to you as an example of the necessity for statutory protection of unwed mothers. Their welfare and that of their children cannot be left to the whim of churches and the discretion of private charities. Bastardy—odious word!—must be expunged from the law books, from the minds of those who set themselves up to judge women, and from the hearts of mankind.”

  “Which are seldom kind,” said Susan. “That New York’s married women have a legal right to their wages and to their children is due, in part, to our campaigning.” As if having read my thoughts, she went on to say, “I could not give up my life to become a man’s serving woman. When I was young, if a girl made a poor marriage, she became a housekeeper and drudge; if she made a rich one, a pet and a doll.”

  I couldn’t imagine her as a young woman, much less a man’s pet or doll. Her figure was gaunt like an old stick, her face drawn over bone and framed by two taut drapes of gray hair that appeared to have been screwed into place for eternity by her bun. Yet in her girlhood, she was accounted pretty and had been courted. But no man could inspire in her the passion she felt for her mind’s pursuits, which must be kept unencumbered. She refused to be anybody’s property. She agreed with Elizabeth, whom I once heard say, “To be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.”

  “Wait and see, Ellen; all will be well,” promised a broadly smiling Elizabeth.

  “You will be happy here with us—”

  “And a great help to our cause!”

  I thought then that I would be helpful and happy.

  Sholes & Glidden

  THE REMINGTON MODEL NUMBER 2 was the latest thing in typewriters, but I preferred my old Sholes & Glidden machine, whose operation I had learned at the Young Women’s Christian Association on Lexington Avenue.

  “Does it bother you that my machine can make only capital letters?” I asked the ladies at the conclusion of the first day’s dictation and transcription. The Remington keyboard had both the upper- and lowercase alphabets in its chassis.

  “Not at all!” replied Elizabeth. “It will remind Susan to speak emphatically.”

  I guessed that she needed no
reminder.

  “Elizabeth forges the thunderbolts, and I fire them!” she said.

  “Women should be grateful to Mr. Sholes for having chosen his daughter instead of a man to demonstrate his machine,” said Elizabeth. “As a result, the typewriter is considered a woman’s tool, and for the first time in the history of our sex, women work as clerk copyists in offices where previously only men had been employed.”

  “A man would never choose to operate a machine so prettily decorated,” observed Susan, tapping, with a gnarled finger, a wreath of painted gillyflowers emblazoned on mine.

  “Naturally, Mr. Sholes was not motivated by altruism or sympathy for our cause,” said Elizabeth, who gave every appearance of being omniscient. “He saw women as an opportunity to sell his machine to a boodle of new customers. But we would compact with the Devil in aid of woman’s rights.”

  “Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” growled Susan, who wore no stays except those fashioned of an elastic piety. “I will not give the Devil his due, though he gives women charge over the whole world in exchange.”

  “I would trade my immortal soul for the vote!” replied Elizabeth theatrically.

  “Will you never outgrow the need to be thought of as naughty? Heaven knows why you should find preening in blasphemy and provocation so much fun!”

  “Oh, fudge! Heaven only knows how I’ve stood you all these years!”

  “Primp!”

  “Prude!”

  “Poseur!”

  “Prig!”

  “Humbug!”

  “Stickleback!”

  “Egotist!” shouted Susan. “Must you always be the biggest toad in the puddle?”

  I crossed my arms on top of the machine and, with a pitiable moan, rested my head on them.

  “Ellen, what’s the matter?” they asked, competing for my recognition of their sympathies.

  “I feel faint.”

  “Is your corset laced too tightly?” asked Susan.

  “If you cannot renounce it entirely, you must do so until the baby is born!” admonished Elizabeth.

  “Rest yourself, dear girl. We shall not disturb you any more today.”

  The two women took the manuscript pages I had finished typewriting into the kitchen, where I could hear Elizabeth reading them over slowly and articulately to Susan, who, now and then, would disagree with a word or phrase. They bickered until they remembered themselves—or rather, they remembered the cause that was their common ground and source of amity. Then they would eat a piece of strudel.

  Not caring for accounts of other people’s lives unless they’re made up by a wizard like Mr. James, I found the ladies’ History dull. Having fixed my gaze on the machine for nearly three hours, my eyes were tired. I closed them and saw the keys in the darkness behind the curtains of the lids, arranged like a constellation whose stars had assembled into nothing legible.

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,

  Q W E . T Y I U O P

  Z S D F G H J K L M

  A X & C V B N ? ; R

  I went out for some air. Underneath its freshness, I caught the unsavory odor of the tidal strait released by the unseasonable heat of a September afternoon. I walked along Forty-second Street, my thoughts not yet my own after toiling at the two women’s prose, until I found myself beneath towering plane trees in Bryant Park, not far from the site of the Colored Orphan Asylum, which immigrant and nativist hooligans had burned to cinders during the draft riots twenty years before. I chose an ornamental iron bench placed in the shadow cast by the Sixth Avenue elevated railway. The person sitting opposite, half-hidden in the gloom, whom I had taken for a girl of six or seven, turned out to be—on close inspection—a little person unkindly called a “midget.”

  I observed her discreetly, with sidelong glances, to satisfy my curiosity without causing offense. She was perfectly formed. Her round face was pretty, her dark hair thick and done à la mode. When she turned her head toward the chittering of a squirrel, her movements impressed me with their grace and elegance. Had she been of ordinary height, she would have been the object of a young man’s greedy eyes. Anger arose in me at God or—if He was disinterested, as Deists claim—at the mill of destiny, which will grind human beings into dust. By now, my furtive glances had settled into a stare.

  “I’ve been admiring your hat,” she called from across the walk that separated us. Later, I would admire the tact with which she had spared me embarrassment by making herself out to be the one who had been staring. “It’s becoming to your face.”

  “Thank you.” Inclining my head, the green felt hat waved a garnet and a sage plume at her.

  “I don’t think I could wear such a hat half as well as you,” she said graciously.

  “I’m sure that’s not so. It would suit you. Am I mistaken, or are your eyes green?” I asked, feeling that we had exhausted the subject of hats. I don’t know why I remarked on the color of her eyes. I couldn’t rightly make them out, because of the shadow cast by the brim of her straw bonnet. An awkward silence ensued, which I felt obliged to put to an end by crossing over to her bench. After a moment’s hesitation, in which I considered whether to sit beside her or a little apart, I decided on the former as being the less likely to embarrass. I did not want her to think that I was shy of her, as one might be in the presence of an anomaly.

  She smiled, gave me her little hand, and said, “My name is Margaret Fuller Hardesty. Father was a Transcendentalist until he followed Mother’s example and died. I often wonder what became of him and his philosophy. Having no relations, near or distant, at least no one willing to acknowledge the connection, I came to New York to find employment. I suppose it was small wonder that I found none”—she smiled archly—“until Mr. Barnum happened to see me in the Central Park. I was walking on Sheep Meadow, my eyes intent on the ground, in the hope of finding the remains of a picnic lunch, when I was startled by a lumbering shadow on the grass, accompanied by heavy footsteps. I looked up and there, like a maharajah, sat Mr. Barnum astride Jumbo the Elephant, together with the Milo Brothers and, languid within the curve of its trunk, Miss Adelina, the famous high-wire ascensionist and juggler.”

  “‘How do you do, little lady?’ I couldn’t have guessed that his voice—he had addressed me in the most cordial way—was able to reach the last row of seats in the Hippodrome, over the din of beasts and human beings come to gloat—or so it always seems to me, who has never felt at one with them.

  “‘I have not had lunch,’ I said, hopeful that a banana or a bag of peanuts might be among the paraphernalia carried on the elephant’s back.

  “‘Where do you live?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean to pry, but if we happen to be traveling in the same direction, I can give you a ride home.’

  “‘I am presently stopping at a gardener’s unused shed.’

  “‘Very resourceful.’

  “Barnum grew thoughtful while Miss Adelina scratched the elephant’s huge leathery ear and Mr. Marsh, a renowned trombone soloist, blew spit from the mouthpiece of his instrument. He had been playing circus ‘screamers’ in the van to advertise an engagement at Madison Square Garden.

  “‘I think you’d be happier with us,’ said Barnum, smiling radiantly. He let down a silken ladder and, lifting his high hat in welcome, bade me join him.”

  “And you accepted his invitation?” I asked, fascinated by her tale, as anyone would be.

  “I most certainly did!” replied Margaret, who had been alone and, like other pariahs in the world’s richest city, destitute.

  A multitude beyond a miracle of fish and loaves to feed is packed into tenement houses, choked by stench, freezing or sweating according to the season, and famished for light and air, from the Five Points to Hell Gate. And a great many more of their predecessors lie in paupers’ graves on Ward’s, Randall’s, and Blackwell’s islands—infinitely beyond the reach of Barnum’s screamers, in an eternity of silent waiting for the promised recompense.

  “Was Mr. Barnum kind?” I asked, hoping that he had b
een.

  “He was and still is,” replied Margaret, smoothing her skirt. “I’ve been with him since that afternoon in 1862.”

  “And are you happy?”

  “I am.” She regarded me a moment. “It is not for you to be angry.” She took note of my perplexity. “Earlier, I saw it in your face. Your anger at whoever or whatever made my friends and me is as unwelcome as your pity.”

  I bit my lower lip and frowned. I did not tell her that the anger and the pity had been for myself.

  “We are not mistakes,” she said, modulating her tone into a softer register. “We are, as Mr. Barnum says of us, ‘nature’s eccentricities.’ And I am ‘La Belle Excentrique.”’

  I looked at this miniature human being, remarkable in every aspect, and felt a surge of affection and—strange to say—gratitude. I admired her courage, knowing instinctually that she would have considered my admiration demeaning because it implied a sympathy—a pity, even—for the difference between us, a difference she would have vigorously denied. There she sat, her short legs dangling above the pavement, her head reaching only as far as my shoulder, endowed by nature, as though to compensate her for having fashioned her thus, with a ferocity—a strength of will—that carried her proudly past the rude stares, which might be contemptuous or kind, and the constant insult of a world not suited to her needs and dignity. There she sat as if I and not she were to be pitied for having been born “normal.”

  “I invite you to tea,” she said, and for a dreadful moment, I pictured the two of us sitting in a Fifth Avenue tea shop, inviting careless stares in which I would be implicated. Before I could accept her invitation regardless of the tearoom she might choose, she said, “My rooming house is not far.”

  I watched her clamber down from the bench as unselfconsciously as a child would have done. Not wanting to embarrass her, I did not offer my hand. We left Bryant Park, which had been a potter’s field until, in 1840, the nameless graves were opened and the remains unearthed and transplanted in the demotic soil of Ward’s Island. We headed for her rooming house, at the seamy edge of Longacre Square, erstwhile center of the city’s carriage trade. I matched my stride to Margaret’s shorter one, inconspicuously, so as not to slight her.