Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction

by Russell, Vanessa

  One thing was for certain; no one would recognize me, including me. I would have to travel through at least five states, walk through three train stations, and sit in open seating, dressed as a flapper girl.

  Once again, she had beaten me at my own game.

  As in days of old, Mama sat in her rocker, her black lace shawl about her shoulders, her head turned to her left, peering down the street expectedly. Only her location had changed. She stood as I stepped from the taxi and walked up the brick walkway to the Lighthouse, happy yet with a heavy heart.

  The old two-story manor continued to impress me with its whitewashed brick and blue shutters, an endearing elderly woman’s face now in need of some cosmetics, her glass eyes promising inner warmth, the brightly colored band of flowers around her neck now being pruned by Eddie. He saw me and gave a big wave and a white toothy grin. Coming home was what I had longed for, yet dreaded too. I would not see Lizzie here; I would not wait for Thomas to come home later. But Mama stood here in front of me, Pearl walking behind me.

  Mama squeezed me hard in her hug no different than if I had remained a child. “You need time to grieve, dear,” she said.

  I nodded and sniffed, relieved that I wouldn’t have to explain.

  “You girls must be famished. You’ve been traveling all night, haven’t you?” she said, still in that soothing low tone she reserved for the battered women who entered here. She didn’t ask about my costume but searched my face carefully. Now that my hair was under the wig, the exposed yellowing bruises on my neck glared and these she touched tenderly. “I would never have thought that someday it would be my own daughter coming into the Lighthouse battered and bruised. Come inside. I have food prepared.”

  I stepped inside the entranceway and memories flashed in my mind as if life-size photographs hung on the surrounding walls, waiting for my private viewing. I sat down hard on the settee. “This is all too much,” I said.

  “You’ll start enjoying the memories after a while and wish there were more,” Mama said. She lifted the wig from my head and began taking the pins from my hair. “I’m so sorry we couldn’t have been there for you.”

  She sat beside me and pulled an opal-studded comb from her hair, combing this through my own, her fingers separating strands as if they were different colored threads for needlepoint. She moved unhurriedly. “I dreamt you were in danger. I was several stories up in a tall building. Down on the street I saw a sea of women roll forward as if of the same mind. Toward the town square they were moving, all dressed in the Legion colors of black and white, but carrying no suffrage signs. There, in the center square I saw you, tied at a stake. You stood erect, your chin jutted out stubbornly, your face impassive as I’ve seen so often. But the women were angry, chanting, ‘Fight, fight! Fight for Bess’s rights!’ Over and over they repeated this, low at first, their voices rising with each chant. Your head turned slowly away from the crowd and tilted till your eyes met mine. Your expression changed to that of the eleven-year old little girl, when the sleeve of your dress caught fire at our old cooking stove. You screamed, ‘Mama!’ and I woke up paralyzed with fear. I woke Pearl immediately and told her to telephone you in Georgia. I knew then you needed me.”

  Braided hair fell over my shoulder and she reached for more strands.

  “Did Pearl tell you David broke off their engagement?” she continued. “Word got back to him about how she had been violated in the mill’s storeroom. He said she is now soiled. So terribly sad. Poor girl, now she is acting as her mama’s chaperone.

  “Bess, we didn’t know until we came back here from Tennessee and Victor told us. He didn’t know how to reach us and he was as mad as a wet hen. We were only gone a week or so but you know Victor. If I had told him where I was going and why, he would have done what he could to prevent me from going. He thinks he should be in control of my life. He loves keeping your father’s memory alive but then he was the one who benefited from your father’s death. I have yet to forgive either one of them.”

  I was having trouble with forgiveness too. “Why were you in Tennessee?”

  “I was looking for someone.”

  I waved my hands in the air in frustration, further agitated by her calm state. “You taught me indeed to fight, fight, fight for women’s rights, yes perhaps impassively as in your dream, but nonetheless I was out there. Where were you in those days when I needed you, where were you two weeks ago when I needed you? Now when you have the freedom to help me, you’re not to be found.”

  “And neither was he.”

  “Who?” I almost shouted.

  “It doesn’t matter. And you’re shouting at me.” Her hands worked faster at my other braid, perhaps to prevent them from slapping me. “Besides, I have a confession to make.”

  Finally!

  She remained quiet while she finished the braiding. “Opal and I had our best discussions while washing each other’s hair,” she said, patting my head. She sat next to me and it was all I could do not to scream, say it, say you committed adultery!

  “I had no choices – marriage was my only future,” she said. “Children were the next step with no choice. Oh, I was given one choice – your papa said if I didn’t stop leaving the home and my duties behind for women’s suffrage work, he would divorce me and take my children. Some choice. I wanted you to have more than that. And don’t tell me you’d want that same kind of relationship with a man as I had with your father. You’re more prudent. I’ll not be any more disloyal to his memory than that, but you must be realistic here. I’ll take some blame in reaching out through you. You could go where I could not. Try to understand as another woman. Billy understood and he was a man.”

  I had stood up by this time, antsy from my journey, my arms folded, pacing, listening, analyzing. I stopped in my tracks. “Billy? What does he have to do with Jere?”

  She bit her lip. “Jere? Who’s –” She waved her hand at me and said loudly, like I’d gone daft, “I’m talking about Billy. I probably shouldn’t tell you this.” Her eyes had trouble meeting mine. They darted between me and Pearl who had just joined us with a what-in-the-world-is-going-on-here expression.

  Mama finally spoke. “Billy and I had a talk – a few months before he went to war. We were so close to winning the vote and you seemed so close to wedding Billy. I thought it best you do it in the right order. Your work for the cause was invaluable. Mrs. Catt told me that herself. If you had wed then, Billy would likely have forbidden you to do any further work.”

  “Mama, how much did you interfere here?”

  “Quite a bit, I’m afraid. Or perhaps not at all. It was hard to read Billy. Relief and sorrow looked about the same on his face. You two were much alike in that regard in those days. It must have been a challenge for each of you to know what the other was feeling. Anyway, I simply asked that if his intentions were to propose marriage that he wait and do so after the war. He would have to go fight at any rate, and risk leaving you a widow with children. You had enough of your own battles here with marching, petitioning, weeks on the road. I wanted nothing to interfere.”

  I stood there, a statue of reproach staring down at her. So many emotions were bubbling but the strongest, anger, rose fastest to the surface and popped. “What’s all this talk then about choices, when you took one of mine away?”

  Mama grasped my folded arms, her eyes pleading. “I was only asking that choices be delayed. I rationalized that while he was fighting the men’s war, you could be fighting the women’s war. He showed me the wedding rings he bought.”

  My shock must have shown clearly, for then she said, “He didn’t tell you.” She looked distant. “He said he never disobeyed his mother and I was close to becoming his second one.”

  Another emotion arose and I giggled before my hand covered it completely. I scolded myself that I should remain angry, terribly angry, but instead I felt glad knowing that Billy loved me once. And I felt relief that I didn’t marry him. In spite of everything, he would have met and most li
kely loved Christina while so far away in England. I might have been with child … who knows the regret we might have carried? As it was, I had the freedom to go work for Thomas, fall in love and share a much deeper relationship. As it was, I had no regrets.

  I only had disappointment in Mama. But perhaps she had paid her dues as an adulterer, in having to instead look after Papa these last ten years. I would have to do my own interfering, starting with a letter to Tennessee. I knew how to find him.

  But not so fast.

  Perhaps not right away. After all, we have plenty of time. And now for the first time Mama can give one hundred percent to our cause – they must do away with the Comstock Law and allow distribution of birth control methods. If I bring Jere back into her life right now, she’ll be useless again. In her own words, “nothing should interfere”.

  “Mothers are such powerful beings,” I said. “I saw that myself in Tennessee with Mr. Harry Burns’ mother. She won us the vote!”

  August 26th, 1921: Dear Diary, I’m sitting at my desk and have finished my speech with a flourish.

  Therefore, we must do away with the wording of the Comstock Law of 1873 that declares distribution of information about contraception is obscene and therefore illegal. Birth control is not obscene. Obscenity was helping deliver my aunt’s tenth child and the weakened uterus remained outside her body. To declare this information as illegal has deteriorated the quality and quantity of birth control methods and devices, and has frightened many who would otherwise seek help, especially after seeing Margaret Sanger and then her husband, arrested for just such distribution.

  Unlike animals, humans do not mate seasonally. Intimacies between a husband and wife are designed to bring pleasure, beside procreation.

  I’m quite pleased with that last line. Out of habit, I straighten my heroine’s photograph nailed on the wall next to me. My eyes look more like hers now; deeper set in determination and sorrow. It’s been a year since we won the vote that she had paved the road for. What a year of awakening! I am still amazed I was elected President of our local chapter of the American Birth Control League. Mama said she had expected no less from our members. Of course I think her influence and vote and that of Pearl’s helped the election quite a bit.

  The letter from a lawyer in Pickerville is tucked in the roll-top desk’s cubbyhole. It secured my family’s future. My beloved Thomas had willed to me the Lighthouse and the Duesenberg, if I ever find the means to motor it back up north. The Pick Plantation is a more complicated matter, first willed to Joe until his death … and then who’s next in line? Once we’re rid of him, Pickerville … Savannah … more branches to reach more women. Only time will tell.

  But I have little time to dwell on it. I’ll soon be on the train heading to the United States Capitol. We members of the National Woman’s Party are angry indeed. Word came down that statues of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and my heroine, Susan B. Anthony, had been stored away in a filthy storage closet. So with buckets, brushes and soap, our ‘mob’ as Pearl calls us, is going to descend on our Capitol with a capital ‘E’ for Enough! No more hiding women’s contributions. As Mama wrote in her song, women are people too. It’s time to bring out our foremothers and let them shine. The next generation must know and honor our pioneers and must be taught that our fight is not over.

  After all, I have a little one coming into the world. I think I’ll name her Katydid.

  I cry anyway. After all, William had become my friend. It hadn’t all just been the Swing and booze scene. We’d gone to five picture shows together, he’d taught me how to use a slingshot, had some great laughs. Ate a great deal of malted milk balls, drank a great deal of Pepsi-colas. If he was fresh from the latest movie, he could quote practically a whole scene.

  “With your memory to he says/she says, you should become a reporter,” I said once, wiping away laughing tears.

  “Daddy says our family doesn’t need another – that is – a blabbermouth.”

  He referenced his father like he was right under his skin. I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or out of worship. Reverence requires both, I guess.

  “You really love your papa, don’t you?” I asked.

  “‘ If there was a law he’s workin’ with maybe I could take it, but it ain’t the law. He’s workin’ away my spirit, tryin’ to make me cringe and crawl, takin’ away our decency’.” William had quoted this scene from Grapes of Wrath with such passion, he could’ve replaced Henry Fonda himself.

  “At least you have a daddy,” I said. I thought any dad was better than no dad at all.

  “I’d be your daddy if you’d let me,” he said with a mischievous wink. I couldn’t get him to talk any deeper than that.

  Subsequent to the night he’d made the backseat of my car into a Struggle Buggy, and up until that last night that I left him stranded at the dance hall, he’d minded his manners. I’m talking a few weeks of good behavior here. His only method of coming on stronger was through another one of our movies, Casablanca. Outside the theatre that night, he took me in his arms in a slow dance, and with people gathering around with an ain’t-that-sweet-smile and him loving the attention, he sang, “‘You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss / A sigh is just a sigh / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by. / And when two lovers woo, / They still say I love you / On that you can rely / No matter what the future brings-’”

  Two could play that game. I stopped him with an animated shake of my head and open palms on his chest, and said (in my most sultry Ingrid Bergman voice), “‘ You know, Rick, I have many a friend in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust.’” I loved that line.

  “Ugarte said that, not Ilsa.”

  “I knew that,” I said, trying to cover up.

  “Sure you did, kid,” he said in his Humphrey Bogart voice.

  So I cry and I miss the banter, the back-and-forth, the addictive challenge. He kept me on my toes and now I find myself flat-footed. I figure not even Papa’s journal can let me down this low. I pull it from its hiding spot and clutching it to my chest, crawl into my feather bed sniffing and feeling lonely.

  August 1, 1921: I was reading over my last entry and boy did I get on a tangent about the Prohibition and the women’s vote, completely forgetting about my problem with my brother Joe. If Bess knew, she’d tell me to ‘refocus’, her favorite word these days, like I’m just staring off into nothing. It’s not nothing; I just can’t tell her what I’m looking at. It’s a mess. Like I said in my last entry – and before I got sidetracked on the eighteenth and nineteenth Amendments – my cousin, Jimmy, telephoned the other day. Jimmy’s got a whole set of problems of his own and he’s trying to dole them out like I need some. “Keep it in the family,” he said. Hell, yes, keep it in the family. Or see a good number of family change residence to the local jailhouse. Puts a whole new meaning on ‘family reunion’ and frankly I think it’s all wet baloney. God bless Pickerville Georgia.

  Jimmy and his daddy – my uncle Willy – are involved in two things, and I’m split in two about it. One I’m one hundred percent against, one I’m one hundred percent for. The complication here is that one caper pays for the other and that doesn’t sit well with me and my conscious. Yes, that’s right, Dear Diary, I said ‘caper’. Yours Truly has become a criminal of sorts. I even hesitated in writing that here but as I told Bess, if you can’t say it, then write it down. Writing takes a load off the mind. It’s the universe’s way of giving you absolution.

  Which is why newspaper editorials are so popular and why I was Edrite Formen.

  Jimmy telephoned to say he needed my help. Seems that Joe has borrowed a chunk of change and has no way to pay it back. When the cotton crop went down with the boll weevils, Joe decided to invest in automobiles and use his barren cotton field as a sales lot. He claims this new venture made him busier than “a farmer with one hoe and two rattlesnakes”. Turns out, he’s not so busy. Brother or not, I have to say this: If
Joe’s brains were gunpowder, he wouldn’t have enough to blow his hat off. His plan didn’t pan out and he went all around Robin Hood’s barn as to why, from blaming it on the locals who move too slowly to change, to blaming the stink coming from Harriet’s chicken coops. I reminded him that it’s Harriett’s feather ticks and pillows business that’s bringing their money in, so stop looking the gift horse in the mouth.

  The scariest part of all I’ve just written is that I’m starting to talk like him. To quote my hero, Mark Twain, ‘Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them, the rest of us could not succeed.’

  Speaking of fools, there’s Jimmy’s little brother nicknamed Slingshot. He’s a five-year old live wire that earned his nickname by killing every bird or squirrel that comes within fifty yards of their house. I’d forgotten about the pipsqueak until I was almost killed by him. I’d gone over there to talk business with Uncle Willy and Jimmy and there’s Slingshot standing on their second floor balcony that extends across the front of the house above the veranda. “Take another step and you get it between the eyes,” he said steadily, sounding overly menacing and convincing for his age. His dress shirt and suspenders added to his midget appearance. His slingshot stuck out between two railings and aimed at me. On the ground beneath the oak tree beside me, lay two dead Bluejays. How he could kill them in all that tree’s droopy Spanish moss was an impressive mystery but it seemed rather sadistic. He always was an unpredictable brat and the rock remained in the sling and pulled back, aimed at my head. Admittedly I broke out into a sweat. I raised my arms and said, “Okay, David, Goliath surrenders.” We stood there staring each other down until his mother came to the rescue.