by Norman Lock
SUFFRAGIST CUDGELS WARDER WITH STICK!!!
“I know that stick,” I remarked. “I saw her demolish shrubs and wildflowers with it.”
“For the life of me, I don’t know why you subscribe to the Herald!” said Elizabeth, ignoring my first-person account of Lilian’s hickory stick. “What it lacks in intelligence and fair-mindedness, it makes up for in exclamation marks.”
“I want to know what my enemies are saying about me,” replied Susan airily.
“You need only step inside Flynn’s barroom to be enlightened.”
“Louts and drunkards!”
“Will you kindly let me finish?”
“You were the one who divagated.”
“I did no such thing!”
“What of Lilian Heigold?” I asked, impatient with their bickering.
Elizabeth resumed her reading of the item. As her eyes descended the column, her voice grew breathless, as if she were being swept away by the purple prose of a Romantic novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.
MRS. L. HEIGOLD OF DOBBS FERRY ARRESTED IN TARRYTOWN FOR ASSAULT!!
[BY TELEGRAM TO THE NEW YORK HERALD]
TARRYTOWN, N.Y. OCTOBER 24—During a meeting of radical suffragists, crackbrained reformers, and Mugwumps held last night at the Tarrytown Lyceum, Mrs. Lilian Heigold, age sixty, of Dobbs Ferry, charged into the yard and, without provocation, beat John “Johnny” Walker insensible with a hickory stick. So grievous are his injuries that Dr. Dryback, eminent physician and raconteur, fears that Mr. Walker may be reduced to a condition of permanent imbecility, if the inflammation of his brain does not subside.
Mr. Walker, age twenty-seven, is a lifelong resident of Sing Sing and has been a guard at the penitentiary for the past two years. His father, Johnny Walker, Sr., owns the Chappaqua Cider Press, on Saw Mill River, and is the Esteemed Leading Knight of the Chappaqua Lodge of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. John Walker’s mother, Sarah (née Haywood) Walker, is the organist at the Sing Sing First Methodist Church.
Mrs. Heigold has been charged with assault and battery, with the intent of causing grievous bodily harm, and was released from the Tarrytown jail on her husband’s recognizance, while she is awaiting trial.
“Rubbish!” exclaimed Susan. “I know for a fact that Lilian’s sixty-five.”
“Ellen, did you know about this?” asked Elizabeth.
“I left before any news from Tarrytown would’ve reached Dobbs Ferry.” Having neglected to tell the truth earlier, I could hardly do so then.
“It’s outrageous!” said Susan with sufficient vehemence to undo the gray bun screwed to her head.
“Did you know that the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was originally called the ‘Jolly Corks,’ an after-hours drinking club for minstrels, founded in this very city in 1868?”
“This is not the time for a history lesson!”
“History is always timely,” replied Elizabeth imperturbably, heaving her bosoms into place.
The following week, I received a letter from Lilian, which I read to my suffragists:
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
November 1st
Dear Ellen,
By now, you will have read of my troubles during Emma Hall’s lecture on the reformation of criminal girls. I want you to know that the events of that night were not presented by The New York Herald in their entirety. I did hit Mr. Walker, Jr., on the head—twice, in fact. But there can be no question of brain injury, because he is as thick-skulled a piece of work as God ever miscreated. As Mr. Lincoln used to say, “Thick skulls are hard to break and twice as hard to pound sense into.” The Sing Sing doctor who attended to Walker, a Mr. Dryback, is an Elk, like Mr. Walker, Sr., and I suspect them of colluding.
During the lecture, the younger Walker shouted the most vile and hateful things about Miss Hall in particular and the rights of women and prisoners in general that have ever burned my ears. When I could tolerate it no longer, I went outside to upbraid him. He was too far gone in drink to listen to reason, and after having knocked me to the ground, I got up and cudgeled the few brains God gave him.
I pray for the health of your unborn child, and remain—
Your friend,
Lilian H.
“If only Mr. Garrison had not up and died!” lamented Susan. “He’d have made such an unholy stink over this fraudulent business that Lilian would already be exonerated.” Turning to Elizabeth, she asked, “Is there nothing we can do for her?”
“I will write a letter to the Herald.”
“That will hardly suffice!” remonstrated Susan. “Some action is required, no matter how reckless.”
“I’m too old to hurl myself upon the town. I’m too old to shake Dr. Dryback by the lapels until his brains rattle like seeds in a gourd. Nor am I up to picketing the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks and demanding an investigation into the character of its Esteemed Leading Knight. My dear Susan, I’m afraid I can do no more than petition the Tarrytown fathers for Lilian’s release.”
Better that ink is spilled than blood, I thought. I’d soon have reason to think otherwise.
“If I were younger, I’d put a stick of dynamite under the Grand Exalted Ruler’s chair,” said Susan, her eyes alight.
“Dear old ‘Thunderbolt!’” cried Elizabeth affectionately.
My suffragists joined hands and sang “The Internationale.”
“Elizabeth,” I said after they’d finished the anarchists’ anthem.
“Well?”
“If ever men give women the vote—”
“The right to vote is not theirs to give!” she snapped indignantly. “If only Jefferson had been more explicit in his declaration!”
“Should Margaret Hardesty be enfranchised?” I asked, wanting to bedevil her.
“She deserves half a vote in consideration of her stature,” said Elizabeth in that dogmatic way of hers, which would often vex me.
“By that reasoning, Mr. Dode should have two votes!” retorted Susan.
So should Elizabeth, I nearly said, by reason of her adiposity. (I owe my high-flown style to having taken Mr. James’s dictation; words would run through my fingers like rosary beads.)
“Would anyone care for cake?” asked Elizabeth, lapsing into her usual cheerfulness.
And so the days leading up to my travail, as it is aptly called in recognition of its agony, passed—seesawing between high seriousness and low comedy. I awoke at eight, took dictation after breakfast and a nap after lunch. I arose at three and worked at the Sholes & Glidden till six. After dinner, we sat in the parlor and made trivial conversation. Appreciating the frayed condition of my nerves, the two women avoided political controversy and domestic bickering. Instead of reading aloud from The Woman’s Journal or The Woman’s Tribune, Elizabeth read to me from Mary Nichols’s Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology or Sylvester Graham’s Lectures on the Science of Human Life, which she herself had consulted “in my time.”
We played backgammon, Fox and Geese, charades, and the Mansion of Happiness, “an instructive and morally entertaining amusement” in which pieces are moved on a board marked with vices and virtues toward a mansion where God’s own pawns are eternally glad. Elizabeth had played it with her children to teach them lessons in hypocrisy. Thus does poetry enhance an advertising circular, art grace a biscuit tin, and theology become a parlor game. At ten o’clock, we retired to our beds and slept, soundly or not, according to our state of mind and digestion.
I recall little of the days just prior to the birth. I had grown large and was uncomfortable in all but the loosest clothes, with which Elizabeth supplied me from her closet. I was often sick and feverish, despite the late-autumn chill in the air. I could no longer sit at the machine and found even stenography beyond my strength. I was desperate to have the child out, and often during the day, I called to Franklin, who was either in San Francisco, looking for work, or in New York, getting ready to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Believed to be unwed, I bit my tongue
and waited for nature to bring to full term what man had begun—a statement that, had I voiced it, would have given Susan and Elizabeth a conniption fit.
The baby arrived in a confusion of steaming tubs and shrieking kettles, spotted clouts and bloody gouts, the midwife’s hands as red and beefy as a laundress’s, pain and the sharp sting of blackness in my eyes, a slap, a cry, the looming faces of the eager suffragists. Were they eager for a boy to educate in human rights or for a girl to bind to their cause?
I glanced at the raw being laid across my belly, tasted bile, smelled the reek of blood and afterbirth, and, shutting my eyes on it all, slept deeply. I recall having dreamed of a constellation shining in my mind’s darkness. I took it, or the dreamer took it, as a portent of an extraordinary event:
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 opened my eyes on a strangely familiar scene: Three clowns, dressed in silk finery, were kneeling before the infant boy I held in my arms.
“We have come to worship him,” they said as one.
“Who sent you?” I asked suspiciously, fearing this was another of King Herod’s tricks.
“P. T. Barnum. We bear gifts for him whose coming was foretold.” Each clown offered me a Washington Square on a plate.
“On behalf of the child, I bid you welcome and give you his thanks.” I laid the baby in the manger and handed out Egyptian cigars.
Dressed as though for a Nativity pageant, Margaret, wearing cardboard wings covered in chicken feathers and a halo, stood beside the manger, while, wrapped in a gaudy dressing gown, Shelby held a shepherd’s crook. His head bowed beneath the stable roof, Mr. Dode was chewing on a stalk of hay.
In dots and dashes, the Dobbs Ferry telegrapher relayed the joyous news of the Greatest Show on Earth:
Fred Heigold chalked a message on a slate: “May he grant us all, men and women of every race and kind, the scourged and pilloried, the feebleminded and the poor freaks of the circus, the right to exist.”
“We are exceedingly glad!” exclaimed Elizabeth, laying a dimpled hand on my shoulder. “We are free at last!” cried an enraptured Susan.
“But a drafty stable is no place for a newborn babe!” scolded Elizabeth, who in her day had brought forth seven babes and wrapped them in swaddling clothes.
Jumbo the elephant put his head in at an open window and trumpeted a theme by Handel.
The Herald proclaimed in a seventy-two-point blackletter headline:
“I must commemorate this great occasion, which henceforth shall be called the ‘People’s Day!’” said Jacob Riis, holding a camera. The magnesium flash filled the room with a blinding radiance. “What is the child to be called?” he asked, licking the end of a pencil.
“Martin Finch,” I replied, blinking my eyes in the morning light coming in at the window.
The imagination is part pleasure ground, part nightmare. Mine had become inflamed.
“Praise him!” cried the midwife who had attended me. She was washing the baby in a flowered chamber pot.
Stepping from the shadows, Henry James wanted to hear about my “sensations,” but I refused to let the mystery of childbirth be turned into literature, which is another kind of circus.
From December 1883 until the end of April, Susan and I reveled in the novelties of motherhood while Elizabeth acted the matriarch, giving us the fruits of her ample experience, whose gift neither Susan nor I resented. The two who had vowed to belong to no man vied for the boy’s affection and argued whether stewed prunes or mashed sweet potatoes were better for his bowels. The Sholes & Glidden lay under its shroud, as if it were a small mammal waiting for the provocations of spring, when new ideas would break through the crust, and somnolence be cast off.
Unlikely as it seems, I stood with only a slight trembling of the knees at the podiums of several lyceums. Elizabeth and Susan stayed home with Martin while I presented myself as an unwed mother, a status I’d come to believe to be the case. I demanded that the stigma attached to a child born out of wedlock and to his mother be erased, if not from the closed mind, at least from the statute books. I was the subject of articles in the press—most of them invidious—and saw my face engraved on newsprint. (I would live to regret the publicity.)
Invariably, I would end my speeches with a passage Elizabeth had once addressed to the New York State legislature:
Shall the frenzied mother who, to save herself and child from exposure and disgrace, ended the life that had but just begun, be dragged before such a tribunal [of men] to answer for her crime? How can man enter into the feelings of that mother? How can he be judge of the mighty agonies of soul that impelled her to such an outrage of maternal instincts? How can he weigh the mountain of sorrow that crushed that mother’s heart when she wildly tossed her helpless babe into the cold waters of the midnight sea?
The public howls for the blood of a mother who puts an end to her infant’s life regardless of the poverty or savagery of the life to which the child is heir. It matters not at all that she was forced to conceive or, having given birth, was maltreated, starved, humiliated, or left to her own devices, which the world calls “depraved.”
I came away from my orations—given with an ardor and an eloquence that surprised me, who was always shy of public speaking—feeling triumphant, as though my words would carry the day. I’d come home to my baby boy, kiss his darling face, and tell Elizabeth and Susan of the impression I had made, although they were more interested in telling me of a new feat of strength or agility little Martin had performed while I was gone. I was becoming vain.
In this way, the weeks and months passed, as if our former lives had been adjourned and were awaiting fate to reconvene them. We were three women at peace. A sense of purpose filled my days, and I would go to my bed each night certain of untroubled dreams.
One night, however, I did not fall asleep immediately, as had been the case ever since I was delivered of little Martin by the socialist midwife. I attributed my restlessness to the oysters we’d had for dinner; at the time, I thought they were off. Since Susan and Elizabeth ate theirs without comment, I did the same. When I finally fell asleep, I was beset by a nightmare from which I struggled to awaken. When I did, the room was dark except for a beam of moonlight. I heard a rustling of clothes and watched in fascination as Mary Surratt stole out of the shadows and picked up my baby.
“What’s his name?” she asked pleasantly.
“Martin.”
“Such a sweet-looking picaninny!” she said, opening the bundle and peering at his face. “They usually are.”
“Picaninny?” I repeated, uncomprehending.
“I wager his father is one of those prissy, high-toned negroes got up to look like a lawyer or an undertaker.”
“I don’t understand,” I said in bewilderment. “Where are you taking him?”
“To the cross.” She might have been proposing to take a favorite nephew to the circus.
“Will I see him again?”
“You will see him there,” she said, climbing out the window, the small bundle cradled in her arm. “At the foot of the cross!” she called from the pavement.
“The crib’s empty!” cried Susan, shaking me roughly. “Wake up!”
“Someone has taken little Martin!” wailed Elizabeth. “Mary Surratt,” I said matter-of-factly, rubbing my eyes with my knuckles.
“Nonsense! Mary Surratt was hanged twenty years ago.”
Elizabeth corrected her friend: “Eighteen years ago, on July 7, 1865.”
“I’ll fetch a policeman!” said Susan, putting on her red shawl and the gray bonnet with pale blue ribbons.
“I’ll put the kettle on!” said Elizabeth bravely.
“No!” I shouted. The two women turned inquiringly toward me. “Mr. Barnum will know what to do! He’s just returned from his London engagement.”
“Ellen, I will go with you, seeing that I have already put on my
hat.”
“Will you have breakfast first?” asked Elizabeth, tying her apron strings around her ample waist.
We ate it cold.
Intermission
I muse upon my country’s ills—
—Herman Melville
WHOSE TEETH ARE THOSE GRITTING the spit-soaked end of a cigar, its blue fumes filling the room to take my breath away and make my eyes water? Melville, Shelby, Henry James—no, not theirs, though they do love their stogies. Franklin, too. Men smell of them and sweat that brings to mind the odor of a stable where no frankincense or myrrh perfumes Death’s sour breath.
“Die easy, Camille, die easy!”
The stone of madness weighs heavily on my breast.
“Juba dis and Juba dat.”
I shall perform the “Chloroform Rag” on the Sholes & Glidden. Now watch my fingers strut!
One said it was a frog,
But the other said nay;
He said it was a canary bird,
With its feathers washed away.
Look ye there!
My name is Ellen Finch, and I am no man’s wench—not even yours, dear husband, to whom in church I pledged my body and my worldly goods.
They have taken my child, and I do not know where to find him.
“Hish! God goes ’mong the worlds blackberrying.”
Mr. Tambo, Mr. Bones, kindly say where my boy has gone, and I shall be forever yours.
Olio
APRIL–MAY 17, 1884
… we shall go up or down together …
—Susan B. Anthony
Prince of Humbug, &c.
WE WERE SHOWN TO BARNUM’S WAGON by a roustabout carrying a monkey on his shoulder. No sooner had we climbed aboard than the abominable showman launched into a joke in dubious taste: “A bereaved husband kept the ashes of his beloved wife in a jar on the mantel, which he tended with the devotion of a monk for the Buddha. The next winter, this paragon of spouses sprinkled her ashes on the icy steps outside his house, so his new wife would not slip and fall!”