by Diana Forbes
She promised me we’d find something. It might take some time, but we had savings, and the Suffrage Movement grew stronger daily.
“Is this really your heart’s desire? To join the Movement?”
“Yes.”
I admired Lucinda’s fire, but my mother had enough strength to tamp down any flame. And Mother detected tiny sparks of rebellion in the smallest things. Even a hair gone astray was cause for her to instruct me on the dangers of veering too far off the chosen course.
I glanced at my tresses in the mirror. The red tangle stood up in some places.
With it loose and flying around, I almost looked like a woman of the night. I tried to wrap my hair around itself into an oversized red bun. But my hair, just washed that morning, refused to cooperate.
“I should tie my hair back,” I said.
Mother glanced up from the magazine. “Don’t act so damned Victorian,” she hissed. “A little hair framing the face softens the features and adds femininity.” She stared at my pointy chin. “You don’t want to look like one of those suffragettes.” She shuddered, a ripple of revolt crossing from one side of her ample chest to the other. “A woman’s place is at a ball, not a voting booth.”
As another leaf cascaded to the ground, I considered how little Lucinda had to lose by leaving. And maybe I had no reason to stay either. In just a few days, I’d be wrapped in a City Suit and packed off to New York. What was I trying to hold on to?
“Rebel, then,” Lucinda was saying. “Make no mistake: If you go to New York, you’re doing so as Edgar Daggers’s mistress. He’ll impregnate you, and once that happens he’ll pay you to leave him alone. But it won’t be enough. You’ll have to squeak by, doing God knows what, and live down on Orchard Street. Do you know how crowded it is? The water closets are outside in the courtyards. And it gets cold in the winter. You’ll be miserable,” Lucinda shook her head as if she pitied me greatly in the grim fantasy she had concocted. “Together, we can help change things for women. You view this as a choice? My God, it’s a calling.”
“My mother is opposed to the Movement and my father just wants me to do something—anything—to help earn his keep.”
“Then you know what you must do.” She winked at me like a co-conspirator.
And after a moment, I winked back.
On the long walk home, I reflected on the background causes of rebellion throughout history. I didn’t believe rebellion could exist without the conviction that somewhere, in some way, it was perfectly justified.
Chapter 7
Rebellion
I entered our home from the back door, trying to commit each room to memory in case I never had the chance to see it again.
The hallway seemed dark for the middle of the afternoon. I wandered past the formal dining room with its autographed photograph of Abraham Lincoln propped up on the white mantel. Mother had won the picture at a charity auction after she’d nagged the auctioneer to put the Mr. Lincoln aside for her in a separate room. I continued past the Navy Blue Den with the models of Father’s merchant ships on the shelves.
I refused to look into the green drawing room where I had begun to teach young girls. Much as I loved learning, I found teaching a terrible burden and had not understood my parents’ decision that I should practice teaching in our home. How I had resented being dragged away from my beloved studies! I was told then that I needed time to prepare for my introduction into Society to learn curtsying and the quadrille and to perfect my needlepoint. I came to a halt.
All those afternoons teaching, I’d consoled myself with various reminders of words Sam Haven and I had exchanged that would imply marriage—an accord that was sealed over my father’s finest port wine. But then, with just two words, Sam had reneged on his promise.
The Library smelled of old ladies, weak tea, and cowardice—if fear had a scent.
Sam gazed at me coolly. I never realized his eyes could ice over that way.
“Our wedding…” I faltered. “Why do I keep hearing that it’s been called off?”
“What wedding?” Sam asked.
I glanced down at my shoes. I wondered if the Tabriz rug where I stood would be pulled out from under me, rolled up, and sold to pay off a creditor. Circling back to the emerald drawing room, I stopped at the doorway. I stared at my teacher’s desk, crouching on hideous claws at the front of the room. Father hadn’t talked about presenting me to Society for months. True, I’d continued to go to the parties, but missing was the special instruction from a private Dancing Master to demonstrate some of the new turns and partner changes that were coming into style along with other graces. And though we had all been waiting for Sam to graduate, there had been no wedding preparations.
But my teaching had continued unabated—French verb conjugations, feminine versus masculine nouns, la, le, les—zut alors!
How had I not realized it before? Father just kept insisting that teaching was an excellent profession for well-read girls from good families. Fallen families, he should have said.
I frowned at the desk’s shiny lacquer. I wanted to take an ax to the mahogany piece and chop it into firewood.
I poked my head in the dreaded yellow Sewing Room where Lydia and Mother sowed gossip while they stitched garments. The room was empty. Then I passed the rose-colored den that served as a second receiving room if a caller was deemed worthy of an immediate audience.
From the doorway, I heard Lydia’s girlish laughter pealing like church bells. George Setton was entertaining her as usual, unchaperoned.
Clutching my childhood locket around my neck, I walked on by.
I listened for Mother’s heavy footfall, and hearing nothing, ducked into the first receiving room in the house. It was a Spartan, all-white room with white overstuffed couches and chaises, white shelving, and a white mantel over a white marble fireplace. Everyone in the family always called it the “White Room.”
Mother’s voice clanged through my head like a loud, persistent bell. We were to receive visitors only from three-thirty to four-thirty p.m., on Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday afternoons, and only for ten to fifteen minutes at a time (unless the visitor was granted an immediate audience, in which case he or she would be ushered into the pink receiving room).
For the rest of the week, the White Room was to remain empty. This would keep the upholstery pristine, Mother had assured us numerous times.
Casting a hasty glance over my shoulder to assure myself that no one was watching, I knelt down on the ground near the fireplace. Although it was early June, the nights had been crisp, and Bess and Jesse had taken the precaution of lighting a fire during the hours of three-thirty to four-thirty on visiting days to warm the room for any guests. On the brick floor of the fireplace, I spied a large piece of ash that hadn’t been swept away yet.
I combed the fingers of my right hand through the ash, and stood up. Then I walked over to the largest white couch and ran my hand across the top of one of the pristine seat cushions.
Chapter 8
Suffering the Suffragettes
Sunday, June 4, 1893
Shoes. Skirts. Corsets. Stockings. Bustles. Dresses. Hats. Parasols. Notebooks. Fountain pens. Hair ribbons. A small charm bag containing a rabbit’s foot Bess had once given me for good luck. It was difficult porting all those items out of the house in box after box, on the pretense of donating a mass of clothing to a charity drive.
My arms ached under the heft of the boxes, and my head hurt from all the lies and half-truths I had to manufacture about the charity for it to pass muster with Mother: its cause (a good one), its need (dire), its demand for women’s clothing (urgent). It certainly helped that she believed I was moving to New York and couldn’t take everything. Although she advised me to pack plenty of ball gowns along with the City Suit. Once the summer season was over, the eligible bachelors would all be back in New York.
I didn’t attempt to curry Father’s approval. He had proved that my earning capacity was far more important to him than my
affection, and an uncomfortable silence loomed between us, thick as soda bread. How could he think only of his own wellbeing? We should be moving somewhere as a family to face our uncertain future together.
Lucinda met me in a hired carriage to lug all the items over to her house, where servant-free and for the most part devoid of prying eyes, we ascended her staircase, crept into her bedroom, shut the door, and quietly repacked everything in some of her valises. This time, her mother seemed content to leave us to our own devices; and after several backbreaking hours, we were done.
We were running away—to Boston.
Monday, June 5, 1893
Early on the morning of our departure, I wrote Mother a note telling her that I had followed Father’s orders and had gone to stay with Evelyn and Edgar Daggers. Then I knelt down by the iron bedpost and prayed God’s forgiveness. It was hard to imagine that the same father who’d once sat up all night reading Jane Eyre aloud to me might never again kiss my cheek.
I put on my childhood locket and the City Suit, its weight a type of penance for the guilt I carried. A kiss had blossomed into a secret and now an outright lie. How I longed to say goodbye to Mother, Bess and Jesse, and even silly Lydia. But it was smarter to march out the door without looking back over my shoulder.
I did stop to bid my horse farewell. Silver neighed and stamped her foot, possibly sensing my distress—horses are very intuitive! Then she quietly munched the carrots I’d brought. Near her hung my black leather riding crop, which I tucked in the waistband of my skirt as a memento of the life I was leaving behind. I fed Silver some sugar cubes, rubbed my tears into her pearlescent coat, and kissed her on the neck for the very last time.
Lucinda met me at the train station. We purchased two tickets for one dollar apiece and watched out foggy windows as our past rolled away from us in a sea of verdant green.
I had been in Boston for all of five minutes before I wanted to turn around and leave. The legendary United States Hotel had recently burned to the ground. The New Colony passenger depot was ensconced in flames, and the fire assumed such dimensions that the National Guard had been called in. The city was in an uproar. All along Lincoln Street, stately fireproof buildings with stand pipes and water hoses on each floor had started to be built to replace the old ones, but the whole district was still referred to as the “Burnt District.” The smell of charred wood hung in the air.
The fresh beaches, cut cliffs, and rolling hills I had known back home had disappeared behind a dark smudge of putrid smoke. The weather was pure fog. And rising up out of the bleakness, standing in the nether shadows of what looked to be a rundown shop, I spotted four women, clothed head to toe in black, carrying Temperance posters. They reminded me of vultures, circling around a lost cause. (And, with their drawn faces, to a person, they all looked like they could use a stiff drink.)
Pooling together our money, scrimped and saved from a year of tutoring, Lucinda and I leased the only flat we could afford. Located on West Newton Street, on the same wide boulevard as the Girls’ Latin School, the street was handsomely laid out with its row of brick townhouses with double-bowed fronts. But our townhouse had been carved up on the inside to create cheap flats to lease out for income with little thought given to the comfort of its residents. Our quarters were dark, undignified, and filthy, yet reeking of malodorous cleaning products that had been used to mask other, more unpleasant smells.
To me, the outside of the building so fought with what had been done on the inside that it represented a sort of architectural hypocrisy—a double standard I hoped wouldn’t carry through to the other areas of Bostonian life.
On the inside of our mean flat were two impossibly small bedrooms with makeshift furniture that threatened to sink, buckle, or break; a dismal kitchen with a window curtain fastened up with a fork; a minuscule parlor with a tattered green couch; and a sagging entranceway with an out-of-tune standup piano. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t give any piano lessons here. A poorly lit water closet across the hallway smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in a fortnight.
It was a far cry from my parents’ abode and the celestial whiteness of the White Room. But that whiteness had been defiled.
Together, we arranged to pay monthly. A crotchety landlady with gray springy hair and a missing front tooth cackled as she took our few dollars. Then we unpacked our few items of clothing and settled in to a level of shabbiness I had never experienced before.
Tuesday, June 6, 1893, Boston, Massachusetts
The dingy kitchen had one pleasant feature: a generous bay window that overlooked the streets of Boston. Outside, a row of brick townhouses proudly boasted their two-toned, double-bowed fronts. A few clothing shops on the periphery threatened to eventually turn this sedate residential district into a crass, commercial one. But for the moment, the Church bestowed a kind of breathless hush over the neighborhood; and in the distance, a giant white Church spire reached up to the heavens.
Yet overall, I felt homesick. I missed my horse. I missed my mother. And I missed the delicious certainty of feeling grounded—the feeling I used to have when I looked ahead and could see my future clearly.
That feeling had evaporated.
I scoured the kitchen. It was finally clean but appeared worn out, as if no one of any importance had ever eaten inside its four walls, and eventually the room had tired of trying to look hospitable.
The wallpaper, a nondescript eggshell color, seemed like it might once have had a pretty pattern of repeating florets, long since faded. The modest metal table for four and matching chairs looked like they had never been new. The lighting was dim with little inside the flat to brighten my mood. As I hung the riding crop from home on the one lowly hat hook protruding from the kitchen wall, I remembered riding out to the cliffs. They seemed far away.
As strange spice smells drifted inside the kitchen window from a neighboring flat, I wondered if we shouldn’t spend a little more money to obtain a happier-looking flat.
Fortunately, my weariness was not contagious: Lucinda soon bustled in with energy and purpose. She flipped her long dark hair behind her shoulders and half bowed to me as she handed me a beige brochure.
“We need to join the New England Woman’s Club,” she announced, batting her dark eyelashes rapidly in the way that she did when making important calculations.
The name of the club sounded familiar. Where had I heard it before? Not from Lucinda, certainly. Not from Mother—that was inconceivable. Then it came to me: Sam Haven. At the Chateau-sur-Mer ball, he’d dropped that he had attended one of their meetings. Was my former fiancé somehow involved in the Movement?
The black riding crop hung from the wall like a giant tear. I should take care not to bump into Sam, or word would certainly get back to my parents that I was in Boston.
Of course once Mother found out, it would be only a matter of time before Mr. Daggers discovered my whereabouts. And even if he didn’t, my parents would be quick to deliver me to his front doorstep. I combed through my memory. Had Sam mentioned anything specific about the Club?
Meetings took place at the Tremont Hotel, Lucinda told me. She waxed prolific on the hotel’s luxurious benefits, not the least of which included the promise of better hygiene.
“It has running water and free soap!” bubbled Lucinda. “Let’s walk over there right now and introduce ourselves.”
I waved away the pamphlet while I stuffed a wet mop and used sponges into the cramped kitchen cupboard. “You join. Tomorrow, I need to start looking for paid work.”
I had to work if I wanted to stay. The math was self-evident.
“It will be easier to find work if you join the Club,” wheedled Lucinda. “We can sneak down to the baths,” she continued. “Then you’ll smell heavenly, a true benefit when it comes to seeking employment.”
I chuckled at her enthusiasm for free soap. Already I was feeling the Boston soot clinging to my face and neck. I could smell myself, for God’s sake.
Still, I hesit
ated. “What if my cousin is part of it? Sam can’t find out I’m here.”
“You ran away from the past. Don’t flee the present.”
“I don’t know if I can suffer the suffragettes.”
Her plaintive dark eyes widened into moist pools. “Don’t pin a label on it. Why not see what it’s about first?”
Impossible. In Newport, I’d met a woman who proclaimed herself a feminist. She was lovely. She was also eighty years old. Her name was Velma, and she worked at Sam’s library. Velma had regaled me with many tales about the Movement’s progress. Her forecast for female advancement? Slow, bordering on torturously slow. Joining the female army struck me as an exercise in futility. Here in Boston, I had already passed a few frowning women on the street wearing buttons proclaiming Votes for Women. There was something hardened about these radicalized, bonneted women speaking out on women’s suffering everywhere they went.
Were we really as a gender so deprived?
“We came here so you could join the Movement,” I reminded Lucinda. “I never agreed to it.”
She approached the standup piano, stretching long fingers over its yellowed keys. “It’s not enough that Edgar Daggers kissed you?” she asked, hitting a chord. A strangled sound twanged from the instrument. In frustration, she banged out a few more tortured chords. She wandered back to the kitchen with me. “You still think that men, on the whole, are basically good?”
“Don’t forget my father,” I said, collapsing in the chair. Or Sam, for that matter. “Still, I hold out hope.”
And the oddest thing was, I did. I glanced at my friend, so eager to dismiss men although her experiences with them were limited. And yet here I was, thrice spurned; yet still believing in man’s essential humanity. Outside the kitchen window the white Church spire sliced its way through the Boston fog.