Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction

by Russell, Vanessa

  I could only stare open-mouthed. Strangely, my first thought was that I hoped Robert remembered to come back for the milk for the children’s breakfast. My second thought was that now Robert would know what it felt like being on the other end of an angry hand. In my exhausted state, it all seemed like a gray nightmare.

  Jesse climbed onto the bench next to me, flicking the reins, clicking his tongue to get things moving. He and the horses pressed forward, while I looked behind.

  I gazed back at my home of twelve years. The memory of my daughter pulling the bench up to the wash pan, and the memory of my son’s knobby knees came back to pinch me. Was that only yesterday? They both had asked if they could come with me. I longed for them to ask me now. What would they do without me?

  I yearned for a glimpse of their faces framed in their bedroom windows. The blinds were drawn, like closed eyes shutting me out.

  “Oh my babies!” I whispered through choked tears. I clutched the bench to keep from jumping off and running for home. But Robert wouldn’t open the door again now, for certain. And I didn’t want the children to see me like this. Yes, Jesse was doing the right thing.

  As we rolled slowly past Aimee’s home, I could see her motionless figure, watching from her parlor window.

  I shivered against the chilled morning air and Aimee’s hesitance to wave, against Robert’s cold eyes, against the frigid snow in my dream. A chill pierced through to my soul and I needed the love of family to bring warmth again.

  Jesse silently handed me the reins and reached back behind him to the backbench. He pulled out a coarse woolen horse blanket and draped this around my shoulders. Quiet and self-assured like Papa, he was accustomed to spending a great deal of time alone with his own thoughts. And like Papa, early every morning he delivered his farm-fresh milk to the local dairy in the large aluminum cans. In exchange, they gave him clean empty cans and several cases of fresh bottled milk that he would then deliver to assigned homes on his milk run. My street ended his deliveries for the day, on his way back to the farm. I rarely saw him but instead I could set my clock to the sound of his timely footsteps on the wooden planks of my porch along with the clink of milk bottles as he replaced two empties with fresh bottles. Sometimes hand-written notes would be tied to a milk bottle with a string, Jesse’s way of passing on news or invitations from the farm. He always refused to take money for the milk. “Nope. Family,” he’d say.

  “Jesse, you are God’s gift, did you know that?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and straightened his cap, in his way of shyness. With that crooked smile and beloved dimple, he said, “Do me a favor and tell that to Edith. She won’t be too happy when she finds out I just punched Robert.”

  “I have more explaining than you do, Jesse. You had cause to do what you did. Robert had it coming and I am glad you did it. I’m sorry I forgot to set the empties out.”

  “I’ll get them tomorrow,” he said. “I’m sure once I knock on the door, Robert will bring them right to me.”

  We both grinned at that.

  “I’ll make it up to him,” he continued. “I’m delivering eggs starting next week. Edith’s eggs are selling for twenty-two cents a dozen.”

  I turned to him in surprise. “What a marvelous plan, delivering eggs with milk!”

  He shrugged. “Edith’s idea. She can tell you all about it when you get there.”

  Like always, it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk about the details.

  A long stretch of silence ensued with us listening to the occasional snorting and jingling of harnesses and the sounds of the horses’ hooves plodding over the cobblestones and then sounding more muffled as the road reduced to hard-packed dirt outside of town, the wagon wheels creaking over the deep pits and ruts.

  “Jesse?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Thank you for looking after me.”

  “Papa would turn over in his grave, if I didn’t look after his girls.”

  I remembered Papa’s voice in my dream, and what Robert said about his mother turning over in her grave the night before. That means I’ve disturbed two dead ones in short order. How can I bring peace back to the living and to the dead, and still want to live myself?

  What is honesty?

  Not only my parents but the newspaper redefined ‘truth’ in those days. The agony I felt when I saw on page four the most unflattering portrait of myself. The photograph showed me standing at the podium during my speech, my mouth wide open, my wide-brim hat a bit lopsided. I should have had no modesty by now and I certainly did not agree with my schoolteachers who believed women should not find their names or photographs in the press. Of course this was silly, when publicity was exactly what I wanted. But feminine vanity prevailed, and I would have preferred to be caught in the act of smiling sweetly. It was so easy to get your name and photograph in the paper – common women got more advertising for saying anything publicly, than did popular male candidates for election. It was such a novelty.

  The editorial page was worse. A cartoon was drawn of a woman in only a camisole and old-fashioned petticoat, rising into the air, corset and other garments falling away. She held a sign reading, “Free, Free, Free; Me, Me, Me!” Her arms extended above her toward a man’s leg, covered in trousers and shoes. I recognized this as a mockery of the last rambling portion of my speech. My words came back to me: corset of social injustice; be free ladies, etcetera. A letter to the editor written by a Mr. Edrite Formen (that couldn’t possibly be his real name) expressed the mockery more clearly.

  Good News, Men! Now that women have won the right to vote, we men of drudgery and dirty battles can relax into our easy chairs for the remainder of our callous irresponsible days. Women will clean up our mess and right the world once again. A rebel spirit has been born, shedding herself of all responsibilities of the pure woman, and instead wants to ‘move forward’ and make the world a decent place to live in. Oddly she must become interested in herself to do that. Internal muses will save the external. If we dastardly men only knew the power of the vote we once owned as our own, why think of what we could have achieved before the women came along to save the day!

  In their naiveté, I will kindly take this time to remind these new freedom fighters that achieving their goals through political action is like running a mule in a horse race. The mule doesn’t belong there, she has no prior training to run, and although she may make it to the finish line … eventually, by then the winning horses have gone on to other races.

  I was livid and immediately carried my anger and this article to my old friend, Thomas Pickering, the editor of the Annan News and also the owner of the Lighthouse. I met him at the front door to his office, he as usual heading the other way. He had a smile that could charm a squirrel from its tree limb.

  “Bess, my dear, just the person I wanted to see! Amazing you would come here today of all days when I have a job offer for you.”

  As in the past, I had to resist moving his careless hair from his forehead. He invariably appeared as if he didn’t have time for such foolish vanity. The color had become more gray than blond but again something he likely was unaware of. He’d been a widower of ten years since his wife, Cady, leader of Mama’s Ladies Legion, passed away. He’d traveled extensively since then as a reporter and did so for the war, and only recently stayed more in place since his promotion to editor. Most of the rooms of his manor were handed over to the Legion for their Lighthouse upon Cady’s death. Only the master chamber had been sanctioned off and its double doors locked. He rarely visited the Lighthouse, preferring to live downtown. Lizzie and I and the many battered women whom we had cared for at the Lighthouse, were eternally grateful.

  Which was why I was so aghast at the article.

  Incensed I met him with a shake of the newspaper in my hand. “Why would you let such trash go into your paper?”

  He returned his hat to the hook on the back of his door. “Free speech, dear. You believe in that, surely. Besides.” He pulled open
a desk drawer and waved a stack of letters back at me. “I printed the decent one. There were worse, believe me.”

  I slumped into a chair unlady-like. “All we heard before we won the vote was that men dreaded the change women would make in politics. Yet now I think they will be disappointed when the change doesn’t come as fast as that. One married suffragist explained it like this: Men imagine us housecleaning politics in the same manner as they saw their mothers spring clean in a frenzy by beating carpets and scattering dust and children everywhere. Actually women just plan on cleaning one room at a time and the men will hardly know the cleaning is going on.”

  He sat in his own chair and stretched. Hands behind his head, he looked at me for a moment, his eyes squinting in thought. “You’ve consecrated the cause. Give it up.”

  “That reminds me.” I pointed to my paper on his desk. “Can you print this for me?”

  He placed wire spectacles onto the end of his nose and read. He finally looked up at me over the top of his lenses, his green eyes intense, his countenance all business. “The suffrage movement has changed you. You are entirely radical now.” He took his spectacles off and gave me a level gaze. “Don’t be so hard on the southern cotton mills. As you know, I was born and raised in the south. The only reason they used child labor after the Civil War was because the hands of the adults were too callused from working in the fields. Only children could do the delicate operations necessary for a mill-worker. I also know that if we print this, we are going to get antagonistic letters from our local women’s union. There are talks of unfair practices in the factories and I wish there was something I could do about it.”

  “But as you said, ‘free speech, dear’.” I smiled, enjoying the challenge. Billy had called me a radical suffragist too, when I argued once that I didn’t believe in that printed pap they fed me in school about civil government, all ruled by men.

  Thomas didn’t return my smile. “I’ll print this on one condition: you come work for me. I’m being bombarded with requests for advertisements for any consumer goods you can think of. More and more electrical gadgets, motor cars, shampoos, washing machines. Demand for goods has grown since the war. The factories are more than happy to accommodate since they no longer manufacture munitions. People no longer must put aside personal needs for wartime. Now they want to indulge in luxury and convenience. Simplify tasks. Travel more now that many families own a motor car. People want to celebrate our peacetime and go to movie houses and be entertained. You could appeal to the liberated woman. Women make most of the purchasing decisions of the household so we would do well to direct our advertisements to them. I give you the product, you write the advertisement, and I’ll pay you five dollars a day. Deal?”

  I desperately needed a purpose in my life. I felt depleted and distant, unsatisfied with fate’s offerings. Not even when Miss Gail Laughlin (President of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs no less, and a well-known woman lawyer I’m proud to say) approached me to write an article on the recently conceived Equal Rights Amendment proposal and submit this now to Thomas, did I feel any sort of nourishment. This would take care of today, but what about tomorrow? There were many other members of our chapter of the association who had also lost their enthusiasm once the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, and Mrs. Catt talked about closing the National Association of Women Suffrage for good. There were many more battles to be won, we all knew this, but taking these issues to task were tedious and anticlimactic at this point. Only a handful of suffragists brought legislators to civilization, inch by inch.

  And now we needed to introduce these same war-weary women into the political sphere. But women wanted to go back home and mend fences, make peace with their chicken soup.

  “I suppose I could try advertisements. I’ll take the job on one condition: You agree to come to the Lighthouse for dinner tonight.”

  He returned his attention to me with such an unabashed gladness that I could feel my face redden. “I would love to!”

  “So you will publish my article for me?”

  His smile dropped and his business mask came back. “As long as you understand there will be repercussions.”

  But like an old war-horse smelling cannon fire, I only felt at home.

  Thomas was twice surprised when he entered the Lighthouse that evening: Firstly with my hello kiss on his cheek at the door; secondly, with my request to go out after dinner.

  “You? Jazz music?” he asked.

  “Yes, while it may be hard for you to imagine me kicking up my heels and having fun, I believe I can.”

  He laughed as if the whole thing was preposterous. “Have you before?”

  “Yes, well, once … with Billy. It wasn’t jazz music but the orchestra was lovely.”

  “Do you know what these speakeasies are like? Illegal—” He cut himself off and looked at Lizzie, shaking his head.

  “My sister asked that we meet her and her boyfriend at Hullabaloo’s. It’s all set. You’re a worldly man, Thomas, you can handle such an establishment, can’t you?”

  He leaned toward me and grasped my hand, those green eyes warm with mischief. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  Lizzie stooped over with a grunt and picked up Thomas’ scarred leather brief case. She could no longer walk upright, but in a permanent bend, her cane now as natural an appendage as her arm. She motioned me to follow her ever-constant black dress and unfashionable petticoats to the back parlor. I thought to ask how she felt but Lizzie’s pride was intolerant of sympathy. She wouldn’t take it and she wouldn’t give it. Brought as a former slave by Thomas and Cady when they first married Lizzie was as much a part of the house as the staircase.

  “Why do you want me back here?” I asked as we entered the back parlor. Papers and books were everywhere; the typewriter, desk, and chairs practically hidden by the collage. The walls were covered with posters, announcements, and letters thumb-tacked anywhere within reaching distance. But there were no women there to blame or claim credit for it. The vast old house was unusually quiet; especially considering it wasn’t that long ago that our chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association met here regularly. The well-worn furnishings and marked floorboards proved many women harbored here. This became my home away from home when younger, and now my only home. A harbor for others, a haven for me.

  Lizzie’s dark brown lips protruded in deep thought. “What did I do with those letters?” she mumbled. She remained still, her small black eyes skimming the room as if suspiciously waiting for such papers to announce their hiding place. She shrugged, while I silently agreed with her that it would be hopeless to find specific papers here.

  “You’ve got work to do,” she said. “People are complaining about your speech and you need to answer their letters. Besides. You have no business asking a man, and Cady’s husband at that, to take you to a sinful place.”

  Deceased ten years, Cady still lived in this house it seemed. I felt rebuked and shameful, and by a colored person at that.

  “Know your place, Lizzie. This is not your concern.”

  I walked over to my roll-top desk and read again the words of my heroine, Susan B. Anthony, before her death. When it is a funeral, remember, that I want that there should be no tears. Pass on, and go on with the work. This yellowed clipping from a newspaper article, was pinned below a fading photograph of the aging spinster, hair severely pinned back into a bun, her thin spectacles framing eyes that revealed fathoms in determination, intelligence, and sorrow. I had met her once, while she was on one of her cross-country campaigns, and will never forget it. She had died in 1906 without seeing her dream realized.

  I had seen the dream realized and had woken up. I had nothing now to say. I now wanted to live. The many papers’ scrawled writing, bold typing, red underlines, seemed to be shouting at me like a mother with too many demanding children. I decided not to answer to any of them, including Lizzie. I walked out of the room, seeking out Thomas as my temp
orary refuge, leaving Lizzie alone with the parlor and its past.

  After dinner, we said our goodbyes to Lizzie, her furrowed brow letting me know her deep disappointment. I made a mental note to discuss her role as housekeeper and for her to keep it at that. Besides, I was tiring of writing speeches and articles, only to be accused of dirty rhetoric. Thomas was right; I’d consecrated the cause and should just give it up. But I didn’t know how because I didn’t know what else was out there to do. As Pearl had said earlier, during her invitation, “Step down off your soapbox and come see how the other half of town is living.”

  “I warn you, you’re going to feel simple in that dress,” Thomas said, as we headed toward the door.

  “What is wrong with it?” The white Peter Pan collar and dark brown cotton fabric belted at the waist were slimming when I last looked in the mirror. The length fell to about mid-calf.

  “Nothing is wrong with it, but, well, you’ll see.”

  I certainly did see. Pearl’s sack dress was like so many others in the crowded and poorly lit Hullabaloo’s – short to the knees and one even above the knees. “She rouges her knees for that dress,” Pearl confided, her hand beside her mouth as if telling a secret. No need – she had to shout this twice, the trumpet and drums were so deafening. Women were decorated with ornate beads and feathers and holding cigarettes as if all understood they were at a costume party. In comparison, I felt dressed to take notes as the stenographer. I watched one lady across from our table smoking a cigarette as if kissing her lover, her eyes closed, her lips puckered to inhale and exhale slowly. Obviously the fashion was to cut one’s hair short and put in waves; I was the only bun in the place. I got the message and decided to let my hair down - literally. Thomas glanced over at me, looked away and then his attention snapped back to me with a surprised look. I awaited his disapproval but his face creased into a big grin and he nodded.