by Diana Forbes
I picked up the newspaper clipping and read aloud, “Such property shall continue to be her sole and separate property, as if she were a single female.” I turned to my sister. “Lydia, there are some advantages to being single. In fact, given the man in question, I’d advocate staying unattached till Death do you part. He has no right to dupe you into giving away our home.”
“Is this true, George?” Lydia asked, wiping her lips with her napkin. She quietly folded it and laid it on the table.
“I ce-cer-certainly don’t want you to stay single when I’m in love with you,” he piped in.
Lydia looked like she might leap across the table and kill George. Her face turned blotchy, her eyes bulged, and her eyebrows formed one thick, unbroken line. “I mean, did you know about this law—The Married Women’s Property Act?”
George Setton glanced around the table, his glassy eyes reduced to marbles. He coughed, sputtered, and stared down at his napkin. He reached for his water goblet, as something he had swallowed seemed to go down the wrong way.
“Why wouldn’t he?” I asked. “He’s Father’s estate lawyer. It’s his job to know about these acts. If he doesn’t know about them, he’s incompetent. If he does, and he’s been hiding them, he’s a crook. Either way—”
George Setton sputtered and pointed his finger in the air. “You do know, Missy, that the acts vary from state to state.”
“Yes,” I said, lifting my wine glass to toast my parents. “But in the state of Rhode Island, this act is enforceable.”
George Setton stretched his hands and began to pull at his knuckles.
“I-I-I’m happy to look into it,” he said with a frown.
“It’s too late,” I said, pointing at him. “It was your moral duty to inform my parents about this Act. Instead, you seized upon their ignorance, made a play for their youngest daughter, and sought to steal their estate right out from under their noses.” I held up my hands in the air and pantomimed a rug being pulled away. “Poof.”
“Poof,” Lydia echoed.
“Poof,” Mother said.
George Setton threw down his linen napkin on the table and glared at me. “What gall. You have the effrontery to accuse me of thievery when your sister’s at Death’s door.” He guzzled his red burgundy. “Your parents hired me to give them an opinion on the estate. Well, my opinion is they’d be better served bequeathing it to me and having me fend off the creditors.”
“How convenient,” I hissed. I turned to my parents. “Bear in mind that if you ‘bequeath it’ and Lydia and George Setton ever divorce, he’d gain full right to the property even though it came to him from Lydia’s side of the family.”
Lydia pushed away her plate. Her small mouth dropped open, she bared her teeth, and, for a moment, she resembled a mountain lion ready to pounce.
“Get out,” she said to George. “Now.”
He gulped some wine, then wiped the red moustache off his face with the back of his hand. “Lydia, don’t be rash. Your sister is hotheaded and rambunctious and knows not of what she…”
Lydia reached her tiny hands to the table and stood up. “My sister has more moral integrity in her left pinkie than you have in your whole body.”
“The door is there, Mr. Setton,” Mother said, gesturing to it. “If you don’t leave voluntarily, I’ll have no choice but to throw you out by your ear.”
“I’ll help,” Sam said. He stood up, wiping his hands as if readying for a boxing match.
My father rubbed his thin lips with his napkin and stood up. “I have to agree, George. The owner of the estate has asked you to leave. Who am I to argue with her?”
George awkwardly stood, placing his hands on his girlish hips. He looked as if a big wind could knock him over. “I’m sure this has just been a misunderstanding, one that will resolve itself in a few days. I’m very much in love with Lydia, and…”
She pursed her colorless lips. “Pity, I’m not in love with you. Goodbye, George.”
“Goodbye and good riddance,” I said, lifting my glass to toast his departure. I sipped the elixir, savoring each tangy, tantalizing drop of victory.
As he slammed out the French doors, Mother turned to me. A benevolent smile beamed across her face. “When is your next speaking engagement, dear, and how can I help you promote it?”
Chapter 27
The Queen of 52nd Street
Monday, July 31, 1893, Manhattan, NY
Every city has its urban myths, and the only question is how much the reality departs from the legend. In Newport, the myth was that everyone who lived there was a robber baron. Certainly I knew several; but many of the residents were, like my parents, simply members of the rapidly expanding middle class who happened to be living there when the wealthiest families in the country decided to turn Newport into their playground.
In Boston, legend said that all inhabitants were rabid, left-winged intellectuals. Again, I knew several people who fit this description. But there were also artists, workers, fishermen, businessmen, suffrage leaders—a huge, boiling cauldron of personalities.
And New York was believed to be home to the “New Woman.” This term, invented by the press, seemed to cover an enormous swathe of women, including bohemians, bachelor girls, working girls, and of course, the Gibson girls. However, where we lived, I didn’t see one female who fit this description. I saw washerwomen. I saw women who toiled in factories. I saw women saddled with five or six children. These women, on the whole, looked like “old women” long before their tender years caught up. The newspapers painted New York as a metropolis, teeming with working women, optimism, and opportunity. Meanwhile I felt like I was living in a Stone Aldrich painting.
Verdana, Sam, and I moved into a tenement on Orchard Street. Verdana assured us it was only a temporary residence, until we decided whether or not to stay in New York. Privately, she took me aside and told me that her father’s bank was experiencing some bumps due to the Panic and to please not alert Sam. I agreed to keep her secret, although each time I entered or left our new residence I questioned the wisdom of having come at all.
Our building was so dingy and down at its foundations that it actually made me miss Boston. The dark entryway, with a dank, steep stairwell rimmed with a mahogany railing, was lit only by skylight. On one of the steps I noticed a clump of dark hair, whether animal or human I couldn’t tell. Four families on five floors shared one water closet per floor and one communal sink. In this case, “sharing” involved a process of negotiation with the few who could speak English. Otherwise, how could one even slip in to brush one’s teeth in the morning?
Our apartment, located on the third floor, had four rooms: a miniscule kitchen, two bedrooms smaller than matchbooks, and a dark, sad parlor. One of the bedrooms had no window, and I chose that room as our block was so noisy that otherwise I felt sleep would be an infrequent visitor. But I had my own street view: I hung Stone Aldrich’s picture over my bed. The painting decorated my wall like a badge of honor—a reminder to only fall in love with someone with a little room in his heart for me.
Pigs roamed freely just outside the front door, making me feel as if I lived in a sty. Horses, too, had a way of becoming detached from their carriages and ending up on our block. There were rumored to be garbage collectors in New York, but from the newspapers, ash, and other detritus whirling around in the fetid breeze, I suspected that Orchard Street was a forgotten pocket as far as city services were concerned. At the back of the building, enormous sheets dripped from clothing lines across a grim cement courtyard unalleviated by bushes or trees. But the thin interior walls were the building’s worst aspect. One constantly heard neighbors squabbling with each other in all different languages. The squalor surrounded me.
And the rent for living in this luxury? A whopping $16 a month. We needed to secure eight speeches in a hurry, or find other employment, if we intended to live here for any length of time.
Wednesday, August 2, 1893
There should be a law agai
nst frying bratwurst in August. And grilled onions. The scents clung to the walls of the stairwells in a putrid stew. A mildewy odor seeped from the banister railing. I trudged up the dark stairs of our tenement, trying not to pass out from the smell. As I approached our landing, the old, stringy-haired Chinese matron from across the hall raced toward me. Dear God, I prayed, please don’t let this be about the water closet. She started speaking very fast in a high-pitched voice, in what I could only assume must be her native tongue.
“Ni-kan-dao-de-dong-hua-pian-ma?” she said.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
She frantically pointed to our apartment door.
I shrugged. “Apartment?” I guessed.
“No,” she said. “Ni-kan-dao-de-dong-hua-pian-ma?”
“I don’t speak Chinese. No Chinese.”
She put up her hand. “Stay here,” she said in faltering English.
I stayed put as she darted inside her apartment. What could she possibly want? Somehow this seemed more complicated than claiming first in line to use the water closet. After several minutes, she returned carrying a newspaper. She opened it with great fanfare and turned to a page featuring a cartoon. It was a black and white drawing of a large woman dressed as a man and wearing bloomers. Oh no!
“Can I borrow this?” I asked.
“Bao-chi-ta, ta-jiu-shi-ni-de.”
I pointed to the paper, then to our apartment door.
The woman nodded, a twinkle in her dark eyes. “Is Verdana,” she said.
I slid through our door and ducked inside. Not even a hat hook relieved the monotony of the dark walls. In the center of the apartment, in the room the landlady had generously dubbed the parlor, sat Verdana. Her broad back was to me but she shouted, “Hallo there” as she huddled over the Remington No. 2. The typewriter churned out its magical rhythms.
“I know, I know,” she yelled over the noise. “I’m writing a letter to the bloody editor of the Times now.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Everyone has,” she said, finally stopping to face me. We both held up our newspapers.
“You’re a role model, Verdana.”
“Or the laughing stock.” She bit her lip. “I’ll bet Amy Adams Buchanan Van Buren just hates it.” Verdana yanked a piece of paper out of the typewriter and started to read it, muttering to herself. “Be a dear, would you, and go introduce yourself to Amy. If she mentions the stupid cartoon, tell her it’s been taken care of. She’s very wealthy, a huge supporter of the cause, and thoroughly impossible. But I know she’ll love you, anyway. So, go. Go.”
As I put down my newspaper, I noticed a small article about Mr. Daggers. The room spun. There was no escaping him. I took a fortifying breath and forced myself to plow through the piece. He was no longer a threat, and indeed I hadn’t thought about him for days. I’d vowed not to let him stop me from coming to New York or be an obstacle any longer. Confident I could protect myself from him, I had even left the Colt .45 packed deep inside my trunk.
I turned my eyes away from his photograph and skimmed through the words. The tone of the article was whimsical, describing him as a playboy with a noble calling. He’d finally purchased that building for the home for unwed mothers very far uptown in a neighborhood called Yorkville. He was deeply flawed but also generous. I tore out the article and slipped it in my pocket. Then I recalled how I’d once tucked Stone’s card inside a different dress pocket. The relationships were failed, fractured, better off forgotten. I had to leave these memories behind in order to press forward. Reaching inside my pocket, I removed the article and handed it to Verdana.
“Have you ever heard of this man—Edgar Daggers?” I asked.
Verdana shrugged. “Hasn’t everyone? Society couple…”
Apparently Sam hadn’t told her then about the day he’d found us. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad cousin, after all.
Verdana fiddled with a whisker on her chin. “Actually, if memory serves, dear, one of the bellmen at Tremont House told me that Edgar helped us secure that nice, large auditorium for the New England Women’s Club. We would have spoken in a much smaller room without his help. Who knows why he bothered? Oh, but it was very kind of him.”
Verdana jotted down Amy’s address. I glanced down at the paper and breathed a sigh of relief. Amy lived far, far away from Yorkville.
I left our cramped quarters on Orchard Street and happily stayed away. Despite the fetid odors of horse manure, human sewage, and filth, the sun seemed to shine brighter here than in Boston, and I opted to walk. Manhattan Island was small and, for the most part, boasted terrible architecture. Yet it was strangely fascinating at every turn.
The street life was active, alive, frenzied—as unstoppable as progress—but also chaotic. From every doorway hung hats, buttons, tickets, flowers, gloves and notions for sale while buyers haggled for them in English, German, and Polish. Above the merchandise, signs and peeling broadsheets shrieked the latest special—the paper versions of barkers. Pedestrians gabbled and jostled each other. Horses stamped. Children gathered at gazebos vying for free pasteurized milk while mothers watched, wringing their hands. Scaffolds and plaster dust clogged the air. Half-built masses of masonry formed an obstacle course on every corner. For every new building going up, one was being torn down. There was always something new in New York.
On Broadway, between 9th Street and 23rd, a crush of carriages lined four deep around fancy department stores like Arnold Constable. For the well-to-do, Ladies Mile was a shopping paradise.
But as I moved north, the crowds vanished. In Manhattan, there was an inverse relationship between the size of a residence and the number of people living there. In the miniscule tenements along Orchard Street, each jammed with several families, it wasn’t unusual to find ten people living on top of each other. But uptown, after one passed the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, homes and mansions dotted larger and larger plots of land and few people milled about.
Downtown, there were more people than buildings. Uptown, there were more buildings than people. I’d need to keep one foot in both neighborhoods to have any impact here whatsoever. For if I stayed downtown the whole time, I’d never find any benefactors to promote our cause. And if I stayed uptown, I’d be surrounded by women so comfortable that, surely, advancing the lot of all women must rank as their very last priority. So, placing one foot in front of the other, I walked from the dirty and cramped but energetic Lower East Side all the way to the Spartan east fifties.
The Van Buren residence did not disappoint. It was a sweeping, limestone chateau in the French Renaissance style. Fairytale turrets tickled the sky, reminding me of a castle. Surrounding the building was a sort of dry moat whose purpose I couldn’t fathom.
The building would make the subject of a glorious painting. Of course had Stone Aldrich painted it, he would have included a few beggars soliciting Amy Van Buren for a slice of bread and maybe a Socialist or two agitating for an eight-hour workday.
As I stood in front of the mansion admiring its fanciful architecture, someone called out to me.
“Penelope? Is that you, dear?”
I spun around to see Amy herself, a short, wide-shouldered woman who was as difficult to ignore as Napoleon Bonaparte. Clearly a beauty in her younger days, Amy had pitched (and won) a two-front assault on Society in both Newport and New York. Armed with her husband’s money and her own considerable stamina, she had beaten down the doors of the 400 most influential citizens so effectively that the Old Money had had no choice but to finally scoot over and let her in.
Her full name was Amy Adams Buchanan Van Buren, her various family names a string of dead presidents that she wore like a pearl necklace of exceptional value. She had so many surnames that the newspapers constantly confused their order (or left one or two of them off entirely). But the papers were adamant on one point: she was not actually related to any American president, dead or alive, no matter how much she might wish to convince people otherwise. Still, t
he weight of those names lent her gravitas. The aggregated total of so much American history seemed to be on her side. And so she appeared to stand rather tall in spite of her five-foot-five stature.
Amy wore a red lace dress I couldn’t have afforded if I worked the suffrage tour for the next ten years and an enormous red lace hat that shaded over half of her face. From the half I could see, she didn’t appear to smile but set her thin lips in such a manner they approximated a smile. This was a middle-aged woman accustomed to getting her way, and it occurred to me that I should try to stay in her good graces.
Was it my imagination, or did a breath of smoke emerge from her tiny, upturned nose? There was no evidence of a lit cigarette, and indeed, no scent of tobacco. Then again, she could have tossed the evidence into the dry moat. It was her moat, after all, and she was, without a doubt, the richest woman I had ever met.
She extended her hand to me as if we were at a Society ball.
“Mrs. Van Buren, what a pleasure,” I said, grasping her hand and giving her my lowest curtsy.
She regarded my pose for an instant and withdrew her hand almost as an afterthought.
“There’s no need to be formal with me. We’ve met before. In Newport. Don’t you remember?” Her words snapped, simulating a rubber band against the ears. I stood up straighter.
“I remember your balls at Marble House fondly,” I said, shocked that she remembered me. We’d been introduced only twice, and I had spoken with her for less than five minutes each time. I recalled how she’d presided at Chateau-sur-Mer, too. “You look well, Amy. Life in the city agrees with you.”
“Yes,” she said, as if compliments flowed to her frequently. “So, I heard you fancy yourself a suffragist?” A glimmer of a smile lit her black eyes. It seemed like a trick question. Did I fancy myself as part of the Movement, or was I a part of it?
I stammered out an answer. “Verdana Jones is my employer and flatmate down at Orchard Street,” I said. “We’ve given several speeches, including one at Clarissa Clements’s house a few weeks back. I’m not sure if you ever met her, but—”