Mistress Suffragette

by Diana Forbes

  “Would you have me walk to New York City from Newport? Or would you prefer I remain standing in the train the whole way?”

  Faced with a dilemma, Mother clucked on the sofa—a hideous chintz affair with giant purple and yellow hydrangeas, the room’s yellow wallpaper deliberately chosen to match the flowers in the upholstery because the Ladies Home Journal said so. The dressmaker produced a small, round wooden platform from the closet along with a full-length mirror, which she carefully leaned against the wall.

  As she started to close the door of the closet, I noticed a huge stack of newspapers tucked away inside. They lined the shelves, spilling from them onto the closet floor like a paper waterfall. I’d been told Mother and Father didn’t get the papers anymore.

  I stared at the closet floor in disbelief. “Mother, is that a pile of Chicago Tribunes?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It’s not the Chicago Tribune?”

  “It’s also the Boston Herald.”

  “But why?”

  “Hush, Penelope. We needn’t concern ourselves with any news coming out of Chicago.”

  Although no windows were open, she seemed to feel a draft in the room and shivered. “Chicago. Dreadful place,” she murmured. She hurriedly motioned to the dressmaker to shut the closet door. In my mother’s mind, the conversation was no doubt closed.

  “There’s a world exposition in Chicago,” I said, wishing the topic to stay open.

  Indeed, at a recent luncheon at Marble House, everyone had spoken excitedly about some of the new inventions that were being shown at the World’s Columbian Exposition—electric streetlights everywhere, something called a “zipper” that supposedly could fasten trousers even better than buttons, and a new molasses-coated popcorn concoction called Cracker Jack.

  “Chicago is a world away from Newport,” she sniffed.

  I considered the solicitor from Chicago mooning after my sister. “Chicago” had been in the Pink Room, the White Room, the stable, and no doubt in plenty of other rooms in the house.

  “Isn’t Setton from Chicago?” I asked, knowing full well that he was.

  “Sometimes you have to shake the city out of a man,” Mother said. “You know your father grew up there, dear. What do you think I did with him?”

  There was so little left of my father that I thought she should have left some of the Chicago in.

  The dressmaker held out her gnarled hand for me to step up onto the platform. She helped me slip into the emerald green City Suit. It had a giant sash in the back (an additional hump to prevent easy sitting). The pleats and padding at the bust gave me the full figure of a much older woman. Stepping back, the dressmaker asked me to survey the results.

  As a final touch, my mother waddled off from her couch perch and stood on the platform with me. She removed two ivory hairpins that had bolstered up my unruly hair. I could see her plump, made-up face staring back at me in the mirror. She looked pleased.

  Shyly, I glanced at myself in the looking glass. My wild hair flailed about, framing my pale face with fire. My large gray eyes, which I had inherited from Father, stared back at me, appearing more blue-gray than usual due to the flattering tones cast off by the suit. My short nondescript nose flared at the image in the mirror. I looked very grown up. But did I look like myself? I asked as much of Mother.

  She stared at me as if we must be unrelated. “You worry your head over the strangest things. The Daggerses are providing you with a golden opportunity. Nothing would make your Father and me prouder than to see you married off, to someone of good standing of course, before—er—certain unfortunate rumors reach a crescendo.”

  “How long, do you think, before the truth will out?” I asked.

  She handed me back the hairpins, stepped off the platform, picked up the Ladies Home Journal, and riffled through its pages. “Keep your head up, dear, and pay no mind to the gossip. Avoid all naysayers. Focus, instead, on the reason you’re staying with that lovely Society couple.”

  “The reason? You want me to work is the reason. And to send you all my earnings.”

  “Penelope, there’s no need to air negative thoughts. Many women find husbands on their way to work, while other women find work on their way to the altar. As I learned in the last Panic, the only way to survive is to make a virtue out of necessity.”

  I grimaced at my reflection. “This suit makes me look matronly,” I said.

  “Perfect.” She clapped together her plump hands. “With any luck you’ll be a matron soon. Oh, dear, don’t look so forlorn. The streets of New York teem with eligible bachelors, I’ve heard.”

  I tried to imagine being in New York with its army of bachelors wanting nothing more than to wed, but could foresee nothing but a succession of rainy days spent working for my supper.

  And, if my mother had her way, most of those days would be spent standing up.

  Chapter 6

  Piano Forte

  Only one person could patch my nerves—Lucinda.

  She was my friend of friends, the one I held dearest to my heart. Never mind that I had promised Mr. Daggers no one would hear of our little escapade. That oath was rendered meaningless the moment he tried to coerce me to move into his home. I marched out the front door, down pristine Bellevue Avenue, on the way to the town of Newport a mile away.

  I passed rolling hills, and lawns so long that it was hard to see mansions at their base. But they were there. Owned by newcomers who only invited merchants like my father to their lavish parties in a polite move to include the neighbors who had lived here more quietly for years.

  “Are you lost, dear?” a gray-haired matron asked, toying with the double strand of pink pearls slung around her slender neck. “Do you need us to escort you somewhere?”

  I shook my head. “Thank you, no.”

  “Young women out by themselves now,” she murmured to her husband as they ambled past me. “It’s the decline of civilization.”

  I pressed on. I passed Marble House, a Versailles imitation that boasted a twenty-two carat gold ballroom. Summer cottages bigger than the White House were popping up everywhere. Some of the parties held within their grand walls were the so-called envy of Europe. I thought it more likely that the owners were the envy of each other. My parents’ twelve-room Tudor was considered modest by comparison.

  Nearing the port, I slowed my pace, not wishing to draw attention to myself. Glancing down at my skirt, I noticed it had turned around so the back was facing front. If only I could wear pants, I’d never have to worry about this nonsense. Only women fretted about being unfashionable and unattached. Men were the luckier sex by far. Except when it came to war. And not letting their estates go. And paying the bills.

  I straightened my skirt.

  I felt someone watching me and looked up. Standing in the shadows of the fishery, I spotted a huddled, old woman begging for alms. She wore a filthy purple scarf on her head, and her face was creased with scars, lines, and pockmarks. Her clothes were torn. Practically hearing my mother’s stinging reproach in my ears to stay away from the wretched underclass, I reached into the folds of my dress, extracted a coin, and handed it to the woman.

  “Bless you, child,” she murmured.

  My shoes felt two sizes smaller than usual, and my feet had started to blister by the time I reached Newport’s poorest neighborhood.

  The harbor had a rank, fishy smell, and it was impossible to ignore the noisy clank clank of men working on the docks. I kept my head down as some of the workers catcalled to me. My father knew this world: the world of working men. And it was rough. My father would cast me into this world without any protection. If he’d cherished me the way I had thought, he wouldn’t force me out. He would have trusted that I had valid reasons for not going. I thought back again to that day I’d first learned of his financial crisis—how I’d tried to support him, and how he’d shut me out even then.

  He threw his olive-green ledger into the bed of crocuses. />
  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I love you. You can tell me anything.”

  “Nothing that can’t be resolved with perseverance,” he said. “And nothing you should concern yourself with,” he added with a slight laugh. “As the head of the family, it’s my responsibility to figure out these things. Let me.”

  I’d put my trust in him, and he had failed me. I believed he would devise a strategy that would save us. I thought he would take care of me when he couldn’t even take care of himself. My father’s words about sending me to the Daggerses came back to me. It would be considered a loan, of course. I’d be on loan.

  How dare he offer me up to Edgar Daggers? I was nothing more than chattel, a piece of property, to be leased, and Mr. Daggers my tenant landlord.

  I hurried my pace. Each step released the strong, musky scent of Edgar Daggers, and I could feel his kiss staining my reputation.

  Lucinda’s parents were of plain stock, and her surroundings, Spartan. No pretty crockery or fine settees graced the parlor. No gewgaws charmed the eye. The room was arranged to discourage visits and dampen conversation, allowing any guests to return to their daily rhythms without delay. The rug on the floor, perhaps once a lush Oriental, lay colorless and threadbare.

  Lucinda’s father worked at a different bank than my father’s but as a teller. Her mother took in paid boarders. Yet, somehow, Lucinda’s Grecian features—dark skin, black almond eyes, long, wavy black hair, and statuesque bearing—belied her modest background.

  Like my young sister, Lucinda tended to collect the men assembled in any gathering like so many ornaments. Yet, unlike my sister, my friend offered something deeper: something akin to character analysis.

  Lucinda fancied herself a sleuth, but in reality she had a knack for compassion. In a different life, and had she been born a man, she might even have entered the ministry. That afternoon the analysis would need to take place over piano practice, as her mother, hunched from carrying numerous loads of other people’s laundry over the years, had the unfortunate habit of eavesdropping. I wished that Mrs. Caliounis would stop polishing the brass doorknob of the parlor door, or whatever it was she was pretending to do, that gave her the excuse to afford us no privacy.

  Lucinda and I hunkered down at the piano bench, as far away from her mother as possible. “He only kissed you once, right?” Lucinda asked, clearing her throat and hitting the C-note on the modest standup piano. “La,” she sang. Her soft, ebony-hued eyes perused my face.

  “Yes.” I swallowed hard.

  As her mother loitered in the doorway, Lucinda sang a robust scale. “La-la-la-la-la-la-la.” She nodded for me to lean in close.

  I whispered, “The next day, Lydia and I went riding with him and his wife, but nothing happened. Still, I felt his aim was to convince me to live with them and do his bidding.”

  Lucinda pounded out another scale, then leaned toward me and sotto voce, asked, “Does his wife know?”

  “I can’t tell.” I lowered my voice another level. “At times it almost seems as if she’s trying to throw us together.” It sounded crazy, and yet…

  Humming to herself, Lucinda pretended to search through her piano songbook. At last her mother wandered away.

  “I bet it’s not the first time,” Lucinda murmured. She scrunched up her olive face and batted her eyelashes repeatedly as if counting his marital infidelities with each blink. “They’ve been married less than two years.”

  “Oh, it’s the first time with you,” Lucinda agreed with a sympathetic stare. She pounded out a Brahms lullaby. Over the chords she continued, “But he’s probably sneaking off with the servants and personal secretaries.” She bit her lower lip in thought.

  She wasn’t judging me; she was simply trying to unravel the truth of the matter. Lucinda glanced around the room and cocked her head in an exaggerated listening pose. Neither seeing nor hearing her mother, my friend concluded it was safe to talk.

  She stopped playing and continued in a normal voice. “Mrs. Daggers saw you and her husband leave the dance floor, right?” She rolled her dark eyes up to the ceiling as if performing a mental calculation.

  “Yes, but there were many people milling around.”

  “And she was well aware of how long her husband was gone?”

  “Yes, Lucy, but it happened fast.” Then again, the kiss had replayed so many times in my memory that the sensation lingered.

  “Of course it was fast. But consider: then she invited you to go riding with them,” Lucinda pointed out.

  “No—it was Mr. Daggers who delivered the invitation.”

  “I understand, but suppose it was with her explicit approval.”

  Even as I recognized that my friend might possess the world’s sharpest criminal mind, I wondered if she had lost her detective’s touch.

  “What are you saying, Lucy?”

  “What if he’s ravenously hungry all the time?” Lucinda stretched her arms the length of the piano to illustrate the expanse of his appetites.

  “You base this line of reasoning on little evidence.”

  “Oh, really?” Her eyes lit on a well-thumbed copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, lying open on the threadbare couch. “After he kissed you in the receiving room, he came to your house to see you in private.”

  She hit some piano keys for emphasis.

  “Correct.”

  “Do you realize how unusual that is? For a married…”

  I considered his behavior during the riding party. And his wife’s.

  “Mrs. Daggers rode to the beach with you, didn’t she?” Lucinda playfully hit a high note for dramatic effect.

  “She was with us the whole time.”

  “And she’s smart?” Lucinda hit another key; she was turning my pain into bittersweet melody.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Articulate?” Lucinda hit a third key.

  “She spoke beautifully and seemed very well-mannered.”

  “And she knows your father would never sue him.” Lucinda pointed her index finger in the air like a teacher explaining a difficult subject to a student. Then she lowered her finger, pointing it at me like a gun. “Or expose him for the scoundrel he is. Bang.”

  “Bang,” I echoed, pointing my finger back at her.

  “Because to expose him would bring shame upon your family. You’re not like the servants and bit actresses he carries on with.”

  “So, now he has his way with actresses, too?” I blushed, as my dream about him came back to me with vivid clarity. I could almost smell the horse in the stable.

  “His reputation precedes him.” Lucinda’s short nostrils flared with contempt. She played another scale and then turned to me on the bench. “He’s in the gossip pages frequently. One of my students—her family’s from New York—brings in the newspaper and doodles all over it while I’m trying to teach her.” She raised her hands and made giant quotation marks with her index and forefingers as if repeating something she’d read. “Playboy philanthropist.” She rolled her eyes. “Always with a different piece of fluff on his arm. From the bluest of blue bloods. Oh, and his sister desecrated a graveyard in Marblehead, claiming the dead bodies made excellent fertilizer! Wins the contest for ‘best azaleas’ every year, too.”

  I hadn’t been aware of any of that and wondered why I was always last to pick up news of grave importance.

  “Let’s suppose you’re his only plaything she approves of,” she continued, a glint in her eye.

  Lucinda rose from the bench, indicating with a quick head toss that I should follow her. We walked into the main portion of the parlor and stood inside the uncurtained window. Their front yard was a stark plane of grass, wilting in the noon sun. A disheveled elm dropped a leaf, followed by others, although it was almost summer. A fawn searched for a flower but came up short.

  “She knows,” Lucinda continued, “The wife knows—and oddly, she approves.”

  I recalled his lips finding mine, stirring up forbidden emotions. When it came to
preserving a stiff upper lip, ironically lips were a weak point. “Lucinda, what am I going to do?”

  “Move to Boston with me.”

  It wasn’t a non sequitur. She’d raised the topic of us moving there numerous times, and mostly I’d ignored her as one ignores crazy dreamers. Boston seemed far away and cold. But now I listened with rapt attention. My relationship with Father was broken. His threat played through my head: If I say you’re living with the Daggerses, you’re living with the Daggerses. And if I couldn’t trust my father to see after me, where could I turn? I’d always loved Newport, but without someone to love, or family, my future here seemed as rocky as the cliffs.

  Lucinda snuck her arm around my back and planted a tender kiss on my cheek. She turned to face me, still keeping her voice low.

  “Even if you were married to Edgar Daggers, he’d kiss other women. And still he gets his wife pregnant.” She stroked my right cheek with her index finger, wiping away a tear that had dropped there.

  I was feeling rather ill thinking about him having his way with his wife, a servant girl, me, a tawdry actress or two, and no doubt countless others. What if he had impregnated scores of women? A wave of nausea crept over me as I felt his lips violate mine. I moved away from my friend lest she detect that I had enjoyed it just a tiny bit.

  We walked outside. “What’s for me in Boston?” I asked, kicking a dirty rock away from my shoe. “I’m not much for the Transcendentalists.”

  “We could go work with the suffragists to stop men like him from preying on women.” A spark lit Lucinda’s eyes. “We should join forces with the women who seek to improve the lives of women.”

  She was convinced we’d find female revolutionaries on every street corner. Supposedly, Boston was full of them.

  “Land sakes, Lucy. What if we can’t find paid work?” I considered my ten French students and her fifteen math students. We made little enough from teaching as it was. And the Panic had lessened our chances of finding employment. How would we survive?