by Colum McCann
Lily watched as Douglass lifted his head and glanced across as if in amusement. He held the hand of a white lady, guiding her into the carriage. His second wife. The shouts from the street grew louder as Douglass made a show of his manners.
He bowed to his wife and then came around to the other side of the carriage, dipped and turned sideways, then hunched his shoulders, got in. The horse was tall and elegant. It lifted its hooves and snorted.
Lily had the momentary thought that she should stride across, lean in the window, greet him, say her name, ask him to remember, but she stood instead in the shadows. What could she say? What further meaning might she get from saying her name? He might only feign recognition, or perhaps he would not remember at all. She had her daughter. Her sons. The lifting of ice.
Lily heard the jangle of the harness and a wheelcreak across the night. She ruffled the edge of her dress, and put her hand on Emily’s arm.
—Time to go home, she said. Come on.
1929
evensong
STORIES BEGAN, FOR HER, AS A LUMP IN THE THROAT. SHE sometimes found it hard to speak. A true understanding lay just beneath the surface. She felt a sort of homesickness whenever she sat down at a sheet of paper. Her imagination pushed back against the pressures of what lay around her. Emily Ehrlich survived not by theory, or formula, but by certain moments of ease when she felt herself at full tilt, a sprinting, hurdling joy. Lost in a small excelsis.
The best moments were when her mind seemed to implode. It made a shambles of time. All the light disappeared. The infinity of her inkwell. A quiver of dark at the end of the pen.
Hours of loss and escape. Insanity and failure. Scratching one word out, blotting the middle of a page so it was unreadable anymore, tearing the sheet into long thin strips.
The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.
THE FIRST-CLASS CABIN was small and white. Two beds. A portside view. Fresh flowers in a crystal vase. A welcome note from the captain. A chandelier that had been designed not to sway.
Announcements shot through the static of the loudspeaker, a steward’s nasal whine: dinnertimes, sunburn warnings, club alerts.
THEY HAD NEVER cared much for appearances, but on the first evening mother and daughter helped each other get dressed.
The water was calm, but even in the small pitch and roll it was difficult to comb each other’s hair. Emily propped a small round mirror in the porthole window. Her hair had gone gray. Lottie’s had been cut fashionably short. Beyond their own reflection, they could see the lines of moving shiplight on the sea.
The weight Emily carried dragged her down to the ground. She was fifty-six years old, though there were times the mirrors suggested a whole other decade on her face. Her ankles were permanently swollen, her wrists and neck, too. She wore her shoes two sizes too big. She walked with a cane. A dark blackthorn wood. A small knob of silver at the handle. A sleeve of rubber at the bottom. It had been fashioned for her by a craftsman in Quidi Vidi. She had a shy walk, conscious of the space she took, as if her body were waiting to acknowledge her discomfort, the space she took up.
Lottie—tall, redheaded, confident—wore a long taffeta dress, a baubled necklace against the curve of her throat. She was twenty-seven, with an air of earliness about her: she seemed to arrive ahead of herself. Mother and daughter were seldom apart. Caught by an orbit. Stitched together in opposites.
They sidled towards the dining room, Emily resting on her daughter’s arm. They stopped a moment in the entrance, surprised by the sight of a curving balustrade. Flowers were wrapped around the banister. A spectacle of wealth all around. Young men in dark suits and fly-collar shirts. Thin women with feathers in their hair, their necks strained, their arms outstretched. Businessmen gathered in groups, cigarette smoke swirling above them.
A bell rang and a cheer went up. The boat was far enough out to water. An opera of anti-Prohibition toasts unfolded. The air itself seemed to have already drunk several glasses of gin.
They were led to a table to sit with the ship doctor. A handsome Canadian with a curlicue of dark hair down the center of his forehead, his face lean and laugh-lined. In a well-cut shirt and arm garters. He leaned across the table towards them. The talk was of Lomer Gouin and Henry George Carroll, of a slight wobbling in the Stock Exchange, of corn prices, of anarchists in Chicago, of Calvin Coolidge and his fondness for robber barons, of Pauline Sabin and her call for repeal.
The food came out, served on elegant china plates. After a few drinks the doctor began to slur. A jazz note kicked out from the stage. A trumpet swayed. The piano wavered. Wolverine Blues. Muskrat Ramble. Stack O’ Lee Blues.
Emily scribbled a quick word in her notebook while Lottie returned to her room, searched for her new camera, a silver Leica. Emily hoped that her daughter would take pictures of the small galaxies of smoke through which the whole ship seemed to shimmer.
IT WAS THEIR first journey abroad. A six-month trip at least. Emily would send stories back for a magazine in Toronto, Lottie would take photographs. Europe was ablaze with ideas. Paintings in Barcelona. Bauhaus in Dessau. Freud in Vienna. The tenth anniversary of Alcock and Brown. Big Bill Tilden in the men’s tennis at Wimbledon.
They had packed as little as possible in their wooden trunk in the hope that they would be able to move easily from place to place. A few changes of clothes, some weather gear, two copies of the same Virginia Woolf novel, notebooks, photographic film, some medicine for Emily’s arthritis.
THE DAYS WERE lengthy. The hours drifted. The sea stretched a round majestic gray. In the distance the horizon curved. Mother and daughter sat on the deck and looked backwards as the evening sun flared red.
They read the Woolf novel in tandem, matched each other almost page for page. The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded. What Emily liked most of all was the appearance of ease that Woolf brought. The words slid so easily into one another. There was a sense of a full life being translated. It was, in Woolf’s hands, a display of humility.
Emily sometimes wondered if she, herself, lacked a true conviction. She had been writing articles for the best part of three decades. Two books of poems had appeared and faded, from a publisher in Nova Scotia. Her articles had created a good deal of interest, but she wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few. As if she had developed an immunity to depth. That she only, now, skimmed the surface. That she swam on an elaborate piece of glass. She may have upset the petty canons of expectation—an unwed mother, a newspaper journalist—but it hardly seemed enough. She had spent many years trying to carve out a place for herself, but she was so much older now, tired enough to wonder why it mattered. A heaviness on her.
There was something she wanted, just out of reach, but she was never quite sure what it could possibly be. She had a sense of something more, the turn of a page, the end of a line, the push of a word, a break in the structure of her habits. She envied the young Woolf. The command and promise the Englishwoman showed. Her profusion of voices. The ability to live in several different bodies.
Perhaps the reason for her trip was to unhem herself from routine. To throw an added pulse into her days. She and Lottie had been side by side in the Cochrane Hotel for so many years. The room was tiny but they would have been perfectly able to move around each other blindfolded.
ON DECK, THE badminton matches unfolded. Emily noticed the arc of the shuttlecock from a distance, the way it caught in midnight and hovered as if arrested by some magnetism that lay inside the ship and then, when hit in the other direction, lazed for a moment, woke to the possibility of wind, shot forward once mo
re.
Lottie came up from the cabin, wearing a long skirt, whisking a borrowed racquet through the air. A live wire. Always had been. No airs, no graces, but shot through with an electricity, a free-floating awe. She was not pretty, but it hardly mattered. She was the sort of young woman whose laughter could be heard around distant corners. She was quickly partnered up for mixed doubles.
A waiter patrolled the deck with a tray of drinks held high over his head. An old Serbian couple walked hand in hand: they were returning, they said, from their experiment of America. Two beautifully dressed Mexican men walked beneath the gloss of their hair. A marching band practiced at the bow. Emily watched the progress of the funnel shadow as it moved across the deck, slowly traveling from one side of the ship to the next.
It astounded her to think that her own mother had been on a coffin ship some eighty years before, a floating boat of fever and loss, and here she was, now, with her own daughter, traveling to Europe, first class, on a vessel where the ice was made by an electrical generator.
SHE LEFT THE dining room, her cane striking off the boards. Gradations of darkness over the water. No moon. Starlight skittered on the high waves. The lights seemed to rise from the ocean. In the distance the sea seemed so much blacker than the sky. The deck was wet with spray. Every now and then the engines calmed and the ship took on a running pace and the silence was immense.
She slowly negotiated the staircase towards the cabin. A steward accompanied her. She bid him good-bye, ached her way into bed. Later in the night she heard voices in the corridor. They drifted and merged, faded and reappeared. She could hear a smatter of laughter and then there was silence for a moment, the sound of closing doors, a distant thump that seemed to come from up on deck, like dancing, a smash of a glass, and voices drifting on the air. She turned the pillow, tried to find the cool side.
The lock on the door finally turned. The breathing slowed. Lottie had been drinking. Emily heard her dress fall exhausted to the floor. The opening of the trunk. A bare foot righting itself on the floor. A slight giggle.
Emily watched her daughter slip into bed.
SHE HAD NEVER been party to love herself. Not even a husband. Just a man who had come along and eventually disappeared. Vincent Driscoll. A newspaper editor in St. Louis. A sheen to his high forehead. Ink on his fingers. He was forty-two years old. He kept a picture of his wife in his wallet. Emily was a secretary in the advertising division. High-buttoned blouses and an amethyst brooch. Twenty-five. She harbored ambitions. She submitted an article about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She knocked on the editor’s door. Driscoll said she had a feminine style. Florid and overwrought. He himself spoke in hard, clean, clipped sentences. He put his hand on the low of her back. He seemed to take some cynical pride in the way she allowed the hand to remain.
He took her to the Planters House Hotel. He ordered fried oysters, saddle of antelope, a Gruaud Larose. Upstairs, straps fell lightly from her shoulder. The damp white loaf of his body shuddered.
She wrote another article and then another. He took a pencil to them. He said he was grooming her. The spring floods of the Mississippi. A boiler explosion on Franklin Avenue. The shooting of a bear in Forest Park Zoo. Tom Turpin and his Harlem Rag, the Negro music down on Targee Street. He edited the stories closely. She opened the paper one day in 1898 to see her first-ever article there: a meditation on the legacy of Frederick Douglass, dead three years. She had written every word herself. The byline read: V. Driscoll. She felt hollowed out. She swayed. In the hotel, Driscoll pushed against his expansive white suit. His jacket never buttoned without obvious strain. His bottom lip twitched. The appearance of the article in the paper should have thrilled her. How dare she. She should thank him. He was allowing her his name. Their collaboration alone should have been enough. She wandered along the riverfront under a red sky. She heard the newsboys shouting out the name of the paper. Her own words within. She walked to her rooming house on Locust Street. A tiny room with an enamel washbowl and a wooden towel railing. Her few clothes hung lifeless in a carved wardrobe. A small desk folded down from the wall. She made a table entirely from books. She struck the nib against the paper. She would bide her time.
She climbed the stairs of the newspaper office once more. Slid her copy across his desk. He looked up at her and shrugged. V. E. Driscoll, he said again. His concession. The E for Emily. Their secret.
Fireworks shot up over St. Louis. The twentieth century was an explosion of color. In the hotel room she eased her ankles around the back of Driscoll’s knees. He raised the bed sheet as if it were a white flag. She attached the word spread to his life: his forehead spread, his waistline spread, his fame, too. She waited. She was not sure for what. It sickened her. His control. His bearing. The way she allowed it. On the street the Driscoll name was called out by newsboys. Emily walked away. She felt a stirring. A sickness in the morning. She began to carry. It stunned her. She thought briefly of visiting a doctor, decided against it. There would be no father, she was a woman beyond her times, she had suffered for it but she did not care, convention didn’t enthrall her. The dampening of love had shed more light on its nature than any actual experience of it. All she wanted, she said, was her name. Her real name. There was no room for a woman writer at the paper, he said, not beyond the society page. Never had been. She touched her stomach. She mentioned a pregnancy. He blanched. The child might, she said, have real lungs for the world. He spread his palm gently on his giant wooden desk, but his knuckles were white. It was, he said, blackmail. She sat demurely. She moved her fingers in the well of her dress. A portrait of his children sat on the desk. He tapped his pencil on the edge of it. Initials only, he said. She would have to continue to write under Driscoll and then she would have a second column, E. L. Ehrlich. It had enough of a male ring to it. She could live with that. It was hers alone. The L for Lily.
She gave birth to the child in the early winter of 1902. At night, when the baby slept, she wrote again, meticulous with each sentence. She wanted her articles to have the compression and rhythm of poems. She pushed the words towards the edge of the page. Worked and reworked. The cutting contests in the Rosebud Café, where the musicians pounded hard on the piano keys. A meeting of anarchists in the basement of a tenement in Carr Square. The bare-knuckle boxing fights down near the newsboys’ home on Thirteenth Street. She was in the habit of writing at tangents so there were times that she would stray into a treatise on the patterns of bird migration along the Missouri, or the excellence of the cheesecake that could be found in the German diner on Olive Street.
She liked her aloneness. At times, over the years, she had met men who showed interest in her. A vendor of Persian carpets. A tugboat captain. An elderly survivor of the Civil War. An English carpenter who was creating an Eskimo village for the World’s Fair. But she gravitated to aloneness. She watched the back of their jackets as they left, the creases made by their shoulder blades. She was left walking with her daughter along the riverbank. Their breathing melded. Their dresses moved harmonically. She found herself an apartment on Cherokee. She splurged on a typewriter. It clattered through the evening. She wrote Driscoll’s column. She didn’t mind. She even enjoyed inhabiting his narrow mind. For her own column she felt as if she were stretching every cartilage. A happiness came over her. She combed her daughter’s flare of hair. There were days of great release: she felt as if she was hauling herself from the depths of the well.
In 1904 Driscoll was found slumped over at his desk. A massive heart attack. His third in a row. She thought of him shuddering in his tight white waistcoat. The funeral was held in the bright St. Louis sunshine. She arrived in a wide black hat and long gloves. At the back of the mourners, she held Lottie’s hand. Later that week she was called into the newspaper offices. Her heart hammering with expectation. She would now be given her full name, her byline, her right. She had bided her time. She was thirty-one years old. This was her chance. So many stories. The World’s Fair had made the cit
y shimmer. The skyline was stepping upwards. So many accents on the streets. She would capture it all. She walked the stairs. The newspaper owners sat with hands folded, waiting. One of them absently probed the stem of his spectacles at his earlobe. He grimaced as she sat. She began to speak, but they cut her off. Driscoll had left a letter for them in his desk drawer. She could feel her lip tremble. The letter was read out. He had, he claimed, written her articles all along. Word for word. Every small swerve. It was his parting gift. His face slap.
She was stunned by the industry of his revenge. She would never, said the owners, be allowed to work again. She tried to summon a word. They closed the folders in front of them. One stood up to open the door for her. He looked at her as if she were nothing more than a passing horse.
She walked along the river, her face hidden underneath her wide hat. Her mother had walked along here, too, years before. Lily Duggan. Water carried on water. Emily went home to the apartment on Cherokee. She threw her hat away, packed a bag with their things, left the typewriter behind. They moved out from St. Louis to Toronto, where her brother, Tomas, a mining engineer, lived. A room for two months. His wife balked. She did not want an unwed mother around. Emily and Lottie took a train to Newfoundland: the sea did not ice.
They rented a room on the fourth floor of the Cochrane Hotel. Two days later she knocked on the door of the Evening Telegram. The first article she wrote was a portrait of Mary Forward, the owner of the Cochrane. Mary Forward walked around under her storm of gray hair. Her bracelets slipped down her forearms as she lifted the hair from her neck. The hotel itself was captured in quick sharp strokes. The newlyweds—farmboys and farmgirls, their fingers thick and nervous—sitting in the breakfast room. The piano that sounded out at all hours. The banisters that curved into a question mark. Mary Forward liked the article so much that she framed the page in the doorway of the bar. Emily wrote another. About a schooner caught on the rocks. Another about a harbor master who had never been out at sea. She was allowed to use her full byline. She slid into the skin of the town. She felt comfortable there. The fishing boats. The small bells sounding over the water. The threat of storm. She caught the palette of color along the quays. Reds, ochers, yellows. The constant search for the better word. The silences, the blasphemies, the quarrels. The locals were wary of newcomers, but Emily had the texture of old weather and she dissolved amongst them. Lottie, too.