by M. J. Rose
When Emma submitted it for the contest, she was no longer fixated on the prize money. She felt she had given a voice to her mother and to Fanny. That was the wonderful thing about art; it had the capacity to transcend time and even defy death. Looking at her drawing, she felt she had not only resurrected a part of Fanny, but had given three distinct faces for the cause. That was what drew Emma to a creative life, the ability to believe that anything was possible.
* * *
Weeks later, Milly and Emma took the subway down to the journal’s office for the grand unveiling of the winning submission. Emma had invited both her parents to attend, but she discouraged them from undertaking the special journey.
Don’t make the trip or special arrangements for coverage at the inn, she had written her mother. There are so many talented artists submitting entries. It’s doubtful I will win.
Her mother had written that she would try to figure out a way to come. Your Papa has his hands full with the guests, as you might imagine, but how I would like to come and support you, my darling, her careful writing scrolled on the page. But the following day another letter arrived saying they wouldn’t be able to make it. How I wish I could be with you when the winner is announced, her mother lamented, but you know how he doesn’t like me to travel without him. In his mind, Manhattan is teeming with pickpockets and other menaces … Emma had read the last letter quickly and then placed it in the back of her desk drawer.
On the day of the awards ceremony, Emma and Milly entered the office and discovered nearly a hundred people standing in the long, narrow room. Many of them were familiar faces, fellow suffragists who came in frequently to assist with the journal, but there appeared to be family members of some of the artists she recognized from the league. She told herself that her parents would have been far too uncomfortable in such a crowded space, but when Milly’s parents surprised her by attending the ceremony, she felt her heart sink. Even though she’d told her mother she didn’t need to come, she now wished she had.
“Attention, everyone!” Ida stepped to the podium. “I am so thrilled to be here this afternoon to announce the winning submission.” She pointed to an easel draped in a heavy dark cloth. “Beneath that veil is our winning image!”
The crowd rustled with anticipation.
“This has been such an honor to have so many artists enter our contest. We at The Woman Voter wanted an image that would unite the generations fighting for the vote, and I believe we found just the right one.” She took a deep breath and smiled. “Thank you, Miss Emma Kling!”
Ida pulled away the cloth and revealed Emma’s detailed drawing. As the sound of clapping permeated the room, Emma’s head spun. She was incredulous Ida had announced her name. Milly threw her arms around her. “You won! You won!”
Emma walked to the stage, her heart beating loudly within her chest.
Ida handed her the prize money and whispered in her ear, “Aside from the prize money, know there is a part-time job as a junior artist on staff at the journal open to you, too.”
That night, as she came home to her boardinghouse, she was able to use the public telephone to call home and tell her parents the news. She could hear the disappointment in her mother’s voice that she had not been there to witness her daughter winning the prize.
“I’m so proud of you,” her mother said, her voice breaking with emotion. “And knowing Fanny is part of your image makes me think you’ve given new life to her.”
“Thank you, Mama,” Emma answered. She still felt dizzy from the news.
“Before I put your father on, please tell me where I can send a note to Ms. Proper and tell her how grateful I am for recognizing the talent I’ve always known was inside you.”
Emma gave her mother the address of The Woman Voter, then straightened her back in anticipation of speaking with her father. When he finally got on the phone, Emma made sure she not only mentioned the fifty-dollar prize money she had been awarded, but the new part-time job as well. Sharing with him the news of her newfound employment, something that was a direct result of her artistic skill, made her latest victory that much sweeter.
* * *
Emma’s real triumph, however, was witnessed by no one besides herself. With her new job at the journal, Emma could now do what she had been dreaming about doing for months. She walked into Speyer’s office the next morning and told him that she was quitting.
“I wanted to give you notice,” she explained with a confidence that caught him off guard. “I will no longer be working here as of today.”
His face fell into a scowl. “You can’t just leave. We have three drawings due tomorrow! You promised them to me last week!”
Emma folded her hands in front of her. “I don’t owe the client anything, sir. You do.” Her face lit up in a smile. “It’s your name on the drawings, Mr. Speyer, not mine.”
His face matched the flame of his cigar. “Get out!”
* * *
“Out!” he had cried at her, and the sense of liberation she had when she left Speyer’s office for the last time was now extended into the exhilaration she felt as she walked toward lower Fifth Avenue to meet Milly and her other friends who were marching in the afternoon suffragist parade. The crowd had begun to fill the streets, and the music of marching bands filled the air. One could sense the excitement lifting off the skin of everyone who had come out to show their support.
Hundreds of people were lined up already for the parade, and thousands were expected to witness as spectators. Emma saw groups dressed like Grecian goddesses with gold leaves woven into their hair and sandals on their feet. Others from the Women’s Trade Union League wore washboards across their chests emblazoned with the call for the vote. Women who looked to be around Emma’s mother’s age wore suffrage slogans printed on their aprons, and younger ones pushed baby strollers with their infants tucked inside draped in the suffrage movement’s banners. Flags were hoisted into the sky, and row after row of handheld banners called for women’s suffrage. Emma was surprised by all the men who had also begun to fill the streets in anticipation of the march. She passed one with his daughter on his shoulders waving a sparkler.
Emma felt that the joy on the little girl’s face was contagious. She eyed her watch, as it was already nearly two and she knew she was supposed to meet some of the other women from The Woman Voter near Washington Square Park.
She had one last flyer left. “Can I have one, miss?” one of the men on the sidewalk hollered out to her.
Emma went over to him, happy to give one out to another man who wanted to give his support. As she approached she could smell alcohol on his breath. His face was yellow as a wax bean.
“Aw, girly, thanks ever so much,” he said, and winked at her. She went to walk away, but he interrupted her movements. “Wait! Hold on a second!” His voice was slick and oily. “Watch this!” he announced loudly.
With a great, exaggerated flourish, he raised the flyer in the air and tore it straight down the middle.
“Good luck today!” he muttered. A gap-toothed grin spread across his face. Before Emma had a chance to walk away, another one of his friends stepped forward and added: “Stupid women should keep their mouths shut and their hands off the ballot!”
“Tear it all you want! We’re still going to get the vote!” Her anger flared. She went down to pick up the torn pieces of paper before they tumbled ahead.
A teenage girl knelt down to help her. “Don’t get too upset. We’re the majority here. Not them!”
A group of teachers with sandwich boards that read Women teach little boys to read. Grown men owe us the right to vote! were walking in front of her. With each passing minute, the streets were growing more crowded and harder to navigate.
Emma glanced at the large clock above a bank entrance. It was nearly two p.m., and she still had fifteen more blocks to walk until she got to Washington Square Park to meet the others before they officially began marching.
Emma looked enviously at the women wh
o were sitting on large floats and the rare group on horseback. Her feet ached. Her outfit that she had been so proud of when she set out that morning was now soaked with perspiration. She had been walking for what seemed like hours, and she wished she could have taken the subway, but the lines were so long, it would take hours to even enter the station. Why hadn’t she left for the parade earlier that morning? She was irritated at herself, but she could have never imagined so many people outside at one time.
Finally, when she approached the meeting place for all the women from The Woman Voter marching together, she thought she was witnessing a mirage.
She saw Milly and some other women holding posters with her image printed on it. But what truly amazed her was the beauty of their costumes. The twenty women were wearing sumptuous silk capes in the most radiant jeweled colors. Deep violet. Forest green. Blue and gold.
As they congregated near the park’s fountain, the hems of their cloaks lifted off the ground and fluttered like the wings of exotic birds. They looked majestic. And Ida looked like a queen in the center as she held aloft a gold banner of the American Woman Suffrage Association.
But it wasn’t just the banner that took her breath away. Nor was it the sight of a woman marcher raising a poster with her winning illustration. It was the sight of someone Emma never expected to see there, marching arm in arm with Ida.
Beneath a garland of green leaves in her hair was the shining face of her mother, who was resplendent in a purple dress.
Elsa left the others and raced over to greet her beaming daughter. She took the crown of verdant ivy off her hair and placed it atop Emma’s head. “I made this one just for you.”
Just Politics
CHRIS BOHJALIAN
She no longer dreamt in Armenian. She dreamt now in English.
And so, as a language teacher, she knew there was a difference between a scream and a shout, just as there was between a groan and a purr. But a moan? In this tongue, once her fourth but now her first, it could be an exhalation of ecstasy or despair. Of pleasure or pain, of longing or lust.
The transformation had taken barely half a decade.
Initially, she interpreted the sound as screams, not shouts, and her head had whipped around reflexively, her mouth open, her eyes wide. It was Adana again, six years earlier, the neighborhood two blocks distant from the mosque and the staging area for the Ottoman soldiers, and the screams had preceded the gunshots by seconds. Seconds. But then the screams had continued—as had the shots.
But these were shouts (and mere shouts, she thought, only shouts) and she brought her fingers to her mouth to warm them, and closed her eyes for a moment in relief. She wished that she had remembered her gloves, threadbare as they were, and her breath felt good on the skin by her nails. When she opened her eyes, she studied the women who’d shouted: there were easily a dozen of them, and they were shouting in glee because they had found one another near the arch. She guessed they were her age, late twenties, and she could see by their shoes and their furs—yes, three of them were wearing fur shawls—that they all came from privilege and wealth. Some had sashes across their chests that boasted they were from New Jersey, and at least one of the sashes was hanging awkwardly beside the face of a dead fox against the woman’s rib cage. Others were from Connecticut. She wondered how they all knew each other, and imagined a ball. A cotillion. Had these women once upon a time been … debutantes?
They were wearing white dresses now—she was, too—but these were not gowns. For a moment, in her mind, she saw them in gowns. Elbow-length gloves of the sort she’d studied in the magazine drawings. The advertisements. They were being presented to their suitors, the appropriate and eligible bachelors in their tuxedoes.
Mostly, she was happy for them: they were so delighted to discover one another that they had literally shrieked when their paths had crossed in this crowd. But a small part of her pondered how much of this was but a parade for them. A social gathering as meaningful as a picnic or, yes, one of their galas. No, that was unfair. This was a parade, yes, but no woman (or man, because there were men here, too) had ventured to this arch and this park just for fun.
“Ani?”
She smiled at her friend.
“You looked like you’d seen a ghost,” Catherine was saying.
She nodded in the direction of the women whose shrieks had caused her to turn. “It was them. They surprised me, that’s all.”
Catherine raised an eyebrow, and in the shadow cast by the bill of her straw hat, Ani could see the worry in her friend’s gaze.
“Don’t fret,” she added, and she rested a hand and her chilled fingers on Catherine’s forearm. “I’m fine.”
She looked beyond the women to the arch. Someone had told her that the monument had been built in 1892. That meant that it was six years younger than she was. The marble on the south side reminded her of the marble wall of the mosque in Adana, and that instantly conjured an image of the reeking dead in the pile down that block. But this city was nothing like Adana, nothing at all. The buildings spread in all directions, and a mere twenty or so blocks from where they had gathered was that magnificent Metropolitan Life Tower, an edifice an astonishing seven hundred feet tall with a gold beacon at the pinnacle. There were elevated trains and some that ran in tunnels under the ground. There was also water: the city (at least the part where she lived and worked) was a slender island surrounded by rivers and then that harbor with its great statue of the woman with her torch. Yes, Adana had the Seyhan River, and it was beautiful, but mostly Adana had dust: it was a city built at the edge of a desert.
And, of course, the differences between then and now, between here and there, were built as well on what was nowhere to be found in New York City. There were steeples here, plenty of steeples. And there were plenty of statues, including the one of George Washington on the north side of this very arch. But there were no Armenian domes, because there were no Armenian churches. Not a single one.
“There won’t be any violence,” Catherine was reassuring her now, and Ani tried to focus on what her friend was saying.
“Tell me something,” she said.
“Why certainly!” Catherine agreed cheerfully.
“What did William decide?” she asked. William and Catherine were going to be married in a month. He disapproved of this march, Catherine said yesterday at the school, and thought the idea of women voting was ridiculous and would lead only to greater absurdities: women wanting to be soldiers or firemen or (a particular peeve of his, apparently) baseball players. She had met William; Catherine had introduced the two of them. He was a foreman at a bakery that turned out thousands of loaves of bread each and every day. His hair was just starting to thin, and he was wide-necked and broad-shouldered: he stretched the fabric of his coats. She could see in those magnificent blue eyes of his just how dismissive he was of this whole idea. He had a big laugh, but still he frightened her a little bit. He took none of this seriously: it was all an absolute waste of everyone’s time, in his opinion, and perhaps even unseemly.
“He decided the world didn’t need him standing around on a street corner gawking at a bunch of women asking for things they don’t need,” she replied. “Which is fine. The world doesn’t need him here if he isn’t interested.”
“Are you disappointed?”
She chuckled. “No. I think I’m relieved,” she said. Then she leaned in to her and continued. “No one’s going to hurt you, Ani. No one’s going to hurt any of us. This is just politics. I promise. That’s all. We’re just marching for something we deserve.”
“No. I know that,” Ani agreed, and she smiled ever so slightly, though she could hear her heart thrumming in her head and wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d glanced down at her hands and seen they were trembling. Because she didn’t know that no one would hurt her, she didn’t know that there wouldn’t be violence. She didn’t know that at all. Her brothers, both of them, and her father were killed because of politics. Just because of politics
. She saw one of her brothers in that great, awful mound—decomposing carrion for the birds—and she saw her father’s corpse as it dangled by a noose with four other men’s bodies like the strands of a beaded curtain. Just politics. There had been a new government in Constantinople, and her father and her brothers believed that the new regime was going to change the laws that relegated the Armenians to second-class citizens. There was even talk that Adana’s corner of the empire on the Mediterranean Sea might once again become an independent Armenian nation. She would never know precisely what triggered the massacres that nightmarish April, but by the end of the month, thirty thousand Armenians were dead and the Armenian quarter had been reduced to rubble or burned to ashes that looked, when it was over, like firepits the size of whole blocks. The Ottoman authorities would call it an insurrection, but she knew that most of the Armenians had been unarmed. Everyone did. No one was rebelling. No one was doing more than …
This. Gathering.
In fact, it was dramatically less than this.
No one in Adana was asking that women be allowed to vote. No one.
In the Armenian school where she taught, the most subversive gathering they’d held was the April seventh production of Hamlet. The students knew Shakespeare, but the conservative Turkish officials who came to the production did not. It was clear they regarded Hamlet’s uncle as some sort of stand-in for Sultan Abdul Hamid II. When the king’s throat was cut onstage—the cast had used a gleaming letter opener—they actually viewed it as a political threat. A warning.
Catherine had insisted all week when they discussed it that nothing like the Adana massacre would happen here, because this was America. But Ani had done her homework; she always did her homework. Two years ago, at a march just like this in Washington, men had stormed the women to block their way, and at least a hundred of the protesters had been hospitalized. Just last year, nineteen coal miners had been killed in Colorado when they went on strike to protest their working conditions. It was but a quarter century ago that somewhere between one hundred and three hundred Sioux—perhaps half of them women and children—had been slaughtered by American soldiers at Wounded Knee.