American Follies

by Norman Lock

  “In the Middle Ages, the unicorn was a symbol of virginity,” said Susan pointedly. “It applies to only one of us.”

  “How can you be certain of theirs?” I asked, indicating the sleeping special agent and the coachman.

  “Like many of the blustery sort, Gallagher is all talk. As for Mr. George Melville, I have it on good authority that he is a eunuch.”

  Susan was plainly enjoying herself. She smiled beneath her drab bonnet and waved her hand languidly at the crowded pavement like a queen of England. “Be glad Elizabeth isn’t with us; she’d turn the carriage into a traveling pulpit from which to lambaste her enemies. I doubt you could stand the attention and embarrassment.”

  “How do you stand it?”

  “I’ve stood it for going on thirty-five years and intend to continue till one of us is dead,” she replied in a voice to match her profile. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the most brilliant woman I’ve ever known and the most combative. She speaks her mind regardless.”

  “Regardless of what?”

  “Of the harm she sometimes does the cause.”

  “I can’t imagine her doing anything to hurt the movement she and Miss Mott founded.”

  “The clergy won’t stand for blasphemy, not even from Mrs. Cady Stanton.” She took a letter from her reticule and unfolded it. “Last night, I found this on my pillow.”

  I recognized Elizabeth’s scrawl.

  “Shall I read it?”

  “Please do.”

  Settling her spectacles on the bridge of her nose, Susan read: “‘A book’—mind you, it is the Bible she belittles—‘that curses woman in her maternity, degrades her in marriage, makes her the author of sin, and a mere afterthought in creation and baptizes all this as the Word of God cannot be said to be a great blessing to the sex.’”

  Gallagher grunted in his sleep.

  “I share her view of patriarchal Christianity, tyrannical marriages, and ruinous divorces, but nothing can change until we are made men’s equal under the law. Woman’s suffrage must come first, and for that to happen, we need the support of men as well as their wives.”

  Swaying in the gutter, a tipsy roadmender brandished a shovel and shouted, “Votes for women!”

  “Forgive me, Ellen. My nerves are shrilling. I dare say little Martin has a lot to do with my irritability. We must find the dear lamb.”

  “Yes, we must!” I cried, glad that she had once more caught the tide of affairs that had taken us to Barnum and was at that moment carrying us in a fancy equipage toward the famous clairvoyant. “I won’t rest till I find my son!”

  “Nor will I! Nor will Elizabeth, by God!”

  I suppose I looked dubious, because she went on to say, “And if you think she’s too fleshy to be of much use, I can assure you that, underneath the fat, she’s tough as gristle. She will roll over our enemies like a juggernaut! Krakatoa is nothing compared to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a rage!”

  In such a voice did the prophet Ezekiel foretell the destruction of Jerusalem. She grinned. “Thus do I fire the thunderbolts hot from Elizabeth’s forge. So let us ‘hustle our bustles,’ as the vulgar say, though I would not be caught dead in one.”

  We arrived at Barnum’s Hotel. The trombonist licked his lips and prepared to announce our arrival, but Susan hushed him. “I would rather not wake Mr. Gallagher from his detecting.” She took the gin bottle from his hands and, setting her bonnet with an emphatic tug on the brim, marched into the hotel.

  I followed in her boiling wake, as if she had transformed herself by the heat of her rhetoric into a stream of lava. We flowed up the staircase and to the door of the psychic phenomenon, who, sensing our presence or else the bottle of gin, bid us enter. We did and were invited with a cordial wave of Madame Singleton’s hand to sit. She accepted our offering—a bribe in fact—graciously. I was delighted to see Margaret there. We exchanged pleasantries until Susan, her purposefulness bottled up like steam in a boiler, hissed, “There’s no time for frivolity!”

  “Mr. Barnum would disagree,” said the psychic wryly. “Life is intolerable without it.” She patted the gin bottle affectionately. “Honey catches more flies than vinegar, my dear, though I can’t imagine why anyone would wish to catch them, unless it’s to pull off their wings.”

  “We’ve come about my little boy,” I said, my eyes suddenly wet with tears.

  “Yes, I know,” she said with a mysterious air. “He’s been kidnapped.”

  Astonished, I asked, “How did you know? Did you see him in the crystal? Did you read of it in the cards?”

  “I read it in a telegram.” She fluttered a gray scrap of paper in front of me. “From Mr. Barnum himself. I am to render whatever assistance I can.”

  “Oh, thank you!” I cried, getting up from the chair to take her hand in gratitude. I noticed a large sapphire ring and wondered whether or not it was genuine.

  Madame Singleton led me to a talking board. “Sit!” she commanded, her former gaiety in abeyance. I did, and she sat across from me, so that our knees touched. Margaret and Susan kept their places. “Madame Laveau!”

  “Oui, Madame Singleton. What is your wish?” A woman dressed in black appeared. Piercing the veil that covered her face, I beheld the snake charmer, Mrs. Stoner, whom I had last seen sulking on the hotel porch during the spontaneous demonstration of physical culture by the artistes. After the séance, Margaret whispered to me that Napoléon, the viper, had died of indigestion. Barnum had made Mrs. Stoner, whose charms were fading, Singleton’s assistant and given her the Haitian name of Laveau, because voodoo is, as every sucker knows, a specialty of that backward island nation. Since she performed in a dusky sideshow tent, blacking up was considered unnecessary.

  “Music, if you please.”

  Mrs. Stoner turned the crank on one of Mr. Edison’s new machines, and eerie music welled up from its tin horn. It was not music so much as an atmosphere produced by a single mesmerizing note of a cello.

  “Let there be night s’il vous plaît, Madame Laveau!”

  The assistant pulled the heavy drapes closed and lit a candle, which she set on the table between Madame Singleton and me.

  “Merci, Madame Laveau; that will be all.”

  Mrs. Stoner went into another room, or so I hoped; I didn’t see her leave. I don’t care for snake charmers, but I would not wish vanishing on my worst enemy, who would turn out to be a man named Ethan Dorn of Tennessee. He could go to blazes.

  “Have you ever attended a séance, Miss Finch?”

  “No,” I replied nervously.

  “There is nothing to be afraid of,” she assured me. “All that is required of you is to empty your mind of distractions and maintain a respectful attitude toward the spirits.”

  Susan giggled. Madame Singleton silenced her with a glance, which could have frozen pond water or, if you prefer, brought it to a boil.

  “I do beg your pardon!” said Susan, who was seldom humbled or apologetic. “I was recalling a joke of Mr. Barnum’s. It was one of those preposterous anecdotes that men guffaw over in taprooms and barbershops. Men are such ridiculous creatures! Madame Singleton, do continue, and if I feel an urge to laugh, I shall bite my tongue.”

  The clairvoyant dismissed her with a shrug and turned again to me. “Place your fingers on the planchette, a darling French word meaning ‘little plank.’ I like to anchor the spiritus in a world of undeniable facts.” I anchored my fingers on the heart-shaped cherrywood, as though I were about to play a thunderous rendition of “Dies Irae” on the piano. “Lightly, Ellen!” I did as I was told.

  As a rule, I am skeptical of spiritualism, placing it in the same category as the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar, Mark Twain’s Petrified Man, and Joice Heth, the 161-year-old former slave alleged to have been George Washington’s wet nurse. She was the making of the rascal Barnum, who exhibited her at Niblo’s Garden to gawking crowds until she died, and then he packed the Saloon at New York City with fifteen hundred spectators—at fifty cents a head—to
view her autopsy.

  “I will now call my spirit guide, Miss Roux, who may, if she is in the mood to be helpful, tell us where your son is.” Madame Singleton closed her eyes and warbled, “Eugenia, are you there? One rap for yes, two raps for no.”

  Rap.

  “Hello, Eugenia! Is your cold any better, dear?” Rap, rap!

  “Did you try honey and arsenic?” She looked up from the board and said, “Grandfather swore by honey and arsenic. In the end, it killed him. Naturally, Eugenia is quite beyond mortal peril, although the grippe can make eternal life a misery.”

  Rap.

  “She took the honey and arsenic,” said Madame Singleton. “Did you find it efficacious?”

  Rap, rap!

  “I am sorry to hear it. I wish Allcott’s Porous Plasters or Munyon’s Grippe Remedy were available in the next world.”

  Rap, rap, rap, rap, rap!

  “Sickness makes her peevish,” said Madame Singleton. “Are you feeling well enough to help this poor woman find her child?”

  Rap and then rap, rap.

  “Won’t you please try, Miss Roux? The child is very dear to me!”

  “You must remember to speak through me, Miss Finch, or you will confuse Eugenia!”

  I apologized and waited for Madame Singleton to put my question to Miss Roux, who this time answered with a single rap.

  “Thank you, Eugenia,” said Madame Singleton. “Can you tell us where little Martin is at this moment?”

  Rap, rap.

  I tasted the gall of bitter disappointment and sighed piteously. Madame Singleton gave me a stern glance. By it, I knew that the conversation had reached a critical phase. I held back my tears and waited for the incubus to utter an encouraging rap.

  “Eugenia, can you tell us anything at all that will lead this good woman to her child?”

  Rap. Yes!

  I felt my own spirits, which had been cast down, lift. With a jerk, the planchette began to move on its short, spindly legs. It staggered across a piece of pale blue cardboard imprinted with letters of the alphabet, grammatical signs, and Arabic numbers from two through nine.

  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

  The little board tugged at our hands, lurching this way and that—an animate object galvanized by mesmeric currents. Madame Singleton intoned each letter at which the instrument stopped, while I held my breath in expectancy. Twice I heard muffled exclamations issue from Susan’s mouth. Margaret kept quiet.

  “Z—A—R—E—P—H—A —T—H.”

  “Do you mean Zarephath, New Jersey?” asked the oracle.

  Rap!

  “Excellent, Eugenia! Now tell us where in Zarephath?”

  “M—I—L—L—S—T—O—N—E …

  R—I—V—E—R … G—R—I—S—T—M—I—L—L.”

  “And who lives there, Eugenia?”

  “A—L—M—A … B—R—I—D—W—E—L—L

  … W—H—I—T—E.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us that will help them find the child?”

  “K—K—K.”

  “Do you mean the Klan?”

  Rap!

  “Those devils!” hissed Susan.

  The planchette shot from under our fingers, as though in terrified flight from the horde of evildoers masquerading in white sheets and the conical hats that naughty schoolboys are made to wear by pitiless schoolmasters.

  “It’s a wonder that Eugenia, who is delicate and impressionable, could bring herself to spell the vile monogram,” said Madame Singleton.

  Then a voice croaked from the gramophone’s horn:

  Over all the U.S.A., the fiery cross we display;

  The emblem of Klansmen’s domain,

  We’ll be forever true to the Red, White, and

   Blue,

  And Americans always remain.

  “You vicious brutes!” the medium shouted into the ether. She turned to us and raged, “They have pirated my séance!”

  Martin is lost! I moaned.

  As the voice began to croak another stanza, Madame Singleton poured gin down the gramophone’s throat. The voice slurred and shortly stopped.

  “What a waste!” she lamented.

  “What shall we do?” I cried.

  Susan drew on her gloves like iron gauntlets. “To Zarephath!”

  “Madame Laveau!” shouted Madame Singleton. “Open the drapes!”

  Pillar of Fire

  HOW SUSAN AND I GOT TO ZAREPHATH has never been clear to me. I recall a paddleboat, a chariot manned by the Gilford Brothers dressed in gladiatorial costumes, and a steam-powered airship shaped like a cigar. Bewildered, we found ourselves at a gristmill, the picturesque Millstone River chattering behind it. Susan pounded on the oak door as if her hand were iron-gauntleted. “It could have been heard by the stokers of Hell,” she later said, describing the sound to Elizabeth, who had been in Murray Hill, unaware of our assault on a bastion of prejudice and hatred. “If only I’d had my temperance ax!”

  “Well?” asked a formidable woman, glowering in the doorway.

  “Mary Surratt!” I exclaimed.

  “I hope to serve the cause as bravely as that great martyr of the South did!”

  “Are you Alma Bridwell White?” asked Susan, who had given me a look such as one bestows on the insane.

  “I am! What business do you have here?” She stood like a bulwark not even a storm surge could topple. She would not have given way to the battering ram that had splintered the engine-house door at Harper’s Ferry, where John Brown had taken refuge. She snickered at our puniness.

  She terrified me but not Susan, who, for all her age and seeming frailty, was hard-bitten and iron-backboned. “We have come for the child!” she demanded in a tone of voice useful for pronouncing doom or announcing the end of days—a voice that could rattle spoons in a drawer, crack lath and plastered walls, and set a dog’s teeth on edge. In such a voice did Antony “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

  The sheer force of breath expelled by the suffragist’s powerful lungs had driven White backward, according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion. In an instant, Susan had sprung across the threshold, hissing like an outraged goose for me to follow. “Bolt the door behind you!”

  I did as I was told and felt a shiver down my back, which was part fear and part violent joy. Susan had her strong hands around the enemy’s neck.

  “Strangle her! Choke her to death!” I wished for Lilian Heigold’s stick, so that I might split White’s skull and examine the brain for a sign that she belonged to Satan’s legion or for a lesion that might explain her malice.

  Mouth pursed in contempt, she neither begged for mercy nor cried out in fear. Her eyes shone with an indecent hatred.

  “Ellen, find something to tie her with.” So calmly had Susan spoken, she might have been asking for a string to do up a parcel.

  I found a ball of jute and bound White’s wrists and ankles while Susan kept her thumbs pressed to the woman’s throat. Those gnarled hands could have squeezed her Adam’s apple to a pulp. The red tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth, Susan had borrowed a mother’s fury and resolve. Only when White was trussed did the suffragist relax her grip. The effort had cost her; her arms began to tremble and her hands to shake. White laughed, and then it was my turn to be possessed by rage. I picked up the first thing that came to hand—a laundry paddle—and would have bludgeoned her had Susan not intervened.

  “We’ll never find Martin if you knock her senseless.” She glared at White and asked, “What have you done with the child you stole from us?”

  Again, White smiled. Then she brazenly sang:

  So, I’ll cherish the Bright Fiery Cross,

  Till from my duties at last I lay down;

  Then burn for me a Bright Fiery Cross,

  The day I am laid in the ground.

  Susan put her foot on the woman’s chest.
Unable to sing it, White wheezed the obnoxious refrain.

  “Ellen, help me get her into a chair.”

  Grabbing her by the hair, we persuaded the woman into a ladder-back and secured her. Maintaining an icy composure, she would not give us the satisfaction of watching her squirm.

  “What did you do with the boy?” Susan’s sharp voice could have drawn blood.

  “Your friend Mrs. Stanton and I want the same thing. Yes, Miss Anthony, I know who you are. I’ve seen your sour face on enough placards and pamphlets. After your arrest, I saw an engraved likeness of your face and recognized the resentment and stubborn devotion to a cause I see in my own.”

  The woman had a face that could make cakes fall.

  In 1872, Susan was arrested by “a young man in beaver hat and kid gloves (paid for by taxes gathered from women)” for having dared to cast her ballot in a congressional election. The twelve men who sat in judgment found her guilty of voting “while female.” In a typeface suitable to the boldness of the unlawful act and the spluttering outrage it caused among men, The Union and Advertiser declared, “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote than it carries the power to fly to the moon.” In a letter to the editor that he did not print, Susan countered, “If, as Jules Verne imagines, mankind will one day occupy the moon, women will dust, bake moon pies, suffer their wombs to be tugged by lunar tides, and be as disenfranchised there as they are on Earth.”

  “I despise you and your hateful cause!” said Susan, baring her teeth.

  “Ferocity becomes you, Miss Anthony. It brings out the color in your cheeks.”

  Beside myself, I shouted, “Where is my son?” But she ignored me.

  “It’s to Mrs. Stanton, I should be talking. She also believes in white supremacy and is offended by laws that would let ignorant niggers vote when educated women like us can’t.” She jumped over Susan’s objection. “Didn’t she say, ‘If a woman finds it hard to bear the oppressive laws of a few Saxon Fathers, what may she not be called to endure when all the lower orders, native and foreigners, Dutch, Irish, Chinese, and African, legislate for her and her daughters?’”