by M. J. Rose
When she had been deciding that week whether to march or to watch, as she was reading the arguments in the newspaper both for and against the idea of women voting, she’d come across one essay that suggested women should vote because they would civilize the voting process: because they were the “fairer sex,” their votes might lead to the election of more civilized officials.
The writer didn’t say whether he thought that America had a long history of electing uncivilized officials. And Catherine and Rose had both been annoyed by the argument that women should vote because they were gentler or kinder than men. “We should vote because we’re grown-ups, pure and simple,” Catherine had told Ani.
But a thought lingered in Ani’s mind, like a dark plume rising up from the smoldering ruins of Adana: Men did that. Men. Not women. The endless sea of cadavers beside the railroad at Merkedjle? Men did that, too. Not women.
No, at this moment, Ani could be neither gentle nor timid. She could not be the sex that was fragile and delicate. Fairer was one thing; fair was another. Words and their nuanced distinctions were everything; they were all that she had.
If she wanted to transcend fairer and reach fair, one small step was retrieving Catherine. Telling William that what he and his friends had done was no laughing matter. It was unacceptable. If Catherine wanted to march for the vote, she should.
* * *
The side of the park adjacent to Fifth Avenue was packed with spectators standing five and six and seven deep but was less congested once Ani was behind those who were there to cheer or, in some cases, to gape. Or throw apples. Nevertheless, she had to press between people milling about on the concrete walkways and the grass, already an autumnal brown, her eyes scanning the direction in which the men had been moving when they had taken her friend. She called out Catherine’s name once, twice, but her voice was lost in the cacophony from the crowds and the parade—someone was tooting the horn on his automobile, someone else was banging cymbals together—and so she simply pressed forward, her neck craning as she stretched as tall as she could.
And there they were. The three men had Catherine surrounded, but they were no longer clutching her arms and carrying her as if she were a recalcitrant child. The small group was leaving the southern corner of the park, crossing the avenue there and continuing east. And so Ani hitched up her skirt and ran, pounding across the grass and then the street, catching them as they reached the far side of the avenue.
“Catherine, wait,” she heard herself pleading, and the four of them stopped and turned.
“Ani,” Catherine said. “It’s fine.” But she had been crying. Her eyes were red and her voice quavered when she said Ani’s name, and with the back of her gloved hand she wiped at her nose like a child. Like one of their youngest students.
“This isn’t your concern,” William told Ani. His glee at what he had done had apparently been soured by Catherine’s tears. “Go on now.”
“Maybe it isn’t my concern,” she replied. “But neither is it yours.”
William’s friends, both stocky, probably worked with him at the bakery. Perhaps they worked for him. They looked back and forth between Ani and William, and Ani had the sense that one of them wanted to strike her, to lash out, and she recalled what it had been like to watch the gendarmes beating a pair of young mothers six years ago, and how reflexively she had tried to shield them from the rifle stocks. Her shoulder and back would be sore for weeks as she scrounged for wood and watched her mother die, because then they had beaten her, too. She had tried to use her back as a buffer as she curled into a ball, her hands a hood upon her skull, but still one of her eyes was blackened and swollen shut, and one of her fingers was broken.
“Not my concern?” William asked rhetorically. “This girl will be my wife in a month. My wife.”
“That doesn’t mean you can stop her from marching in a—”
“Who is this, Bill?” one of his friends asked, cutting her off.
“Some darkie from the Middle East who works at Catherine’s school,” he told him.
“Washerwoman?”
He scoffed. “If the school had any sense, yeah. But, no, she’s a teacher.”
“No shame in washing clothes,” she told them both. This she knew for a fact. “Nor is there in baking bread.”
“Ani, stop,” Catherine begged. “Really, I just want William to walk me home now. That’s all I want. I don’t even want to go back now. Really, I don’t.”
“There you go,” her fiancé said. “Now, be gone. Shoo. Skedaddle.”
“No.”
“No?” he asked. “Do you really think you can bully me into—”
“I’ve lost more than you’ll ever have,” she said, this time interrupting him. “Catherine, if you can look me in the eye and tell me that you honestly don’t want to come back and rejoin the march, I’ll leave. But if you want to return, speak now and we will.”
The question hung there, floating milkweed, and for a moment the other schoolteacher glanced back and forth between her fiancé and her friend.
* * *
The Irish thought she was Italian and the Italians thought she was Polish and the Polish thought she was Persian. Some of her neighbors on the Lower East Side saw her on the street and wondered if her parents might have been slaves. No one, when they met her, could pronounce or spell her last name, though a few had at least heard something (though they could never recall what, precisely) about Armenians being massacred. Hadn’t that nurse, that saint, Clara Barton, worried about them fifteen or twenty years ago?
Ani actually had been a washerwoman when Catherine first brought her to New York City. She’d worked in a plant that cleaned the bedding and the towels and the table linens of Manhattan’s upscale hotels until Catherine had been able to convince the school’s founder that Ani could replace the married French teacher when she left because she was going to have a baby.
Had her world in Adana not unraveled—no, it hadn’t unraveled, it had been burned to the ground—she most likely would be married now, too. She would no longer be teaching, because she’d have a husband and children. There were men who were interested in her and whom she, in turn, fancied. There were matches that her family and theirs would have encouraged. Facilitated, in fact. She would be managing a house, and it would be a house with a servant to assist her. Would her husband have been Armen or Antranig? Both men intrigued Ani. Both died in the first hours of the rampage.
Of the two, Armen would have been more comfortable with the notion of her voting. He might even have seen the logic and reasonableness of the idea. But not Antranig. He would have thought it totally unnecessary, since women were married to men and men could vote. But he also wouldn’t have stopped her if the law had changed. He wouldn’t have physically prevented her from marching in a parade like this, the way William had kidnapped Catherine.
But there would never have been a parade like this in Adana. Not in Adana or Dikranagerd or Constantinople. She could count on one hand the nations today that permitted women to vote, and there was certainly no reason to believe that the Young Turks would ever allow such a thing. They had shown their true colors that spring and summer when they initiated the massacres that already dwarfed even the firestorm of Adana.
And her mother, what would she have said about a march such as this?
She would have been perplexed. But, in the end, she would have wanted her only daughter to vote. She might even have voted herself.
* * *
And just as her voting would not have compromised her marriage to a man such as Armen or Antranig, she liked to believe that if she ever found a man in America, he would not be the sort who would oppose her voting here. But as her eyes took in Catherine and William and the man’s two coworkers or friends, the radical subversiveness of what she was doing on this corner grew painfully real. Not the marching: retrieving Catherine. It was, arguably, too subversive. Too radical. She had gone too far and may have risked digging a chasm between these two people wh
o were betrothed. What right had she to force her friend to make this decision?
None. She had no right at all.
The fact was, whenever she had attempted to transcend her natural timidity and what may (or may not) have been the natural order of things, it hadn’t ended well. She would carry inside her forever the scars from Adana: her heart was racing now. A part of her wanted to say her friend’s name, this time apologizing—to her and to William—because she had overstepped her place and her right. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She had come too far. They all had.
And in the vacuum, Catherine spoke.
“William,” she said, her voice huskier than usual, a little hoarse from crying. “I know you think this is funny. I also know you don’t want me here. But, please, let me do this. Let me do this anyway.”
“Catherine, why?” he asked. “Why?”
“Because you love her,” Ani answered quickly, speaking for her friend, hoping this was true. “And because she wants to.”
“Well, there are many things I want—”
“And because you’re a man, you’ve a better chance of grasping them,” she told him.
The baker’s two friends looked at her. She was responsible for this confrontation, even if now a part of her feared her presumption was going to have ramifications. Then they looked at William. He was wearing a tweed cap and he removed it and held it in his hands, staring inside it as if the solution to his soon-to-be wife’s rebelliousness was right there in the lining.
“She takes such good care of me here,” Ani told him. “Since I came to America. And, every day it seems, at the school. If you’re worried about her safety, William, I’ll be beside her.” Her voice was as soft as she could make it, as she fabricated for him a reason for his behavior that he could look back on and justify. I was worried you might get hurt, Catherine, that’s all. I was worried.
“You,” he said, looking up. He smiled ever so slightly, but it was not a withering, angry smile. It was bemusement. “You’ll protect her.”
“Me,” she said simply.
One of his accomplices glanced at him, realized that William was softening, and wanting to be on the right side of the man’s opinion, said, “It’s just politics, Bill. Right?”
“Politics is no place for a lady,” he muttered, but it was wholly without conviction.
“Then view it as a parade,” Ani offered. “Just a parade.”
“You want this that badly, Catherine?” he asked her.
“I do,” she said, and nodded. “Very much.”
“Girls won’t ever vote, Bill,” his other friend reassured him. “It really is just a parade.”
William returned his cap to his head. He sighed epically. “Then fine. Do what you want.”
“You mean that?”
He nodded. “Where does this thing end? Remind me.”
“The library. Forty-Second Street. The mayor himself—”
“I know. The mayor himself will be there. You told me. Fine. I’ll be there, too. East side of the avenue so we can get out of this madness right quick.”
For a moment, none of them moved. Then Catherine stood on her toes and kissed her fiancé on the cheek, before taking Ani’s hand and pulling her back across the street and toward the parade.
“I almost asked him to go to the arch or the back of the line, wherever it is now, and join the men there—the men who are going to march and bring up the rear,” Catherine was saying, as together they scurried west through the park.
“I think it was wise that you didn’t.”
“Probably, yes. Thank you, Ani.”
“You’re welcome.”
“He is a good man, you know.”
Ani did not know that, but she remained silent. She said nothing about the way he had plucked Catherine from the line and carted her off. That was mob behavior—mob mentality—and she knew where mob mentality led.
“And this is just a parade,” Catherine went on.
“And this is just politics,” Ani murmured, a hint of sarcasm in her voice, the intimation so slight that Ani doubted her friend caught it. But in the same way that she knew the difference between a scream and a shout, the way that words had particulars and distinctions, she paused on the word just.
Yes. This was indeed just politics. This was righteous politics.
That was precisely why they marched.
The Last Mile
FIONA DAVIS
“What a hideous hat.”
Mrs. Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont had been about to step off the curb and join the swarms of women in white marching along Fifth Avenue, when the man’s words stopped her cold. She turned to look at him, but now he was murmuring something to his friend—she couldn’t quite hear it—before they both burst into laughter.
Was he talking about her hat? She lightly fingered the brim. She’d bought it earlier this week, admiring the two long feathers that curved out from either side, after the mealy shopgirl told her it “framed her face.” It’d been seven years since dear Oliver had passed away, and Alva hadn’t been complimented, even once, since then. Something warm and small inside her had given way and she’d purchased it on the spot.
She really should have known better. Over the years, Alva had been compared to a bulldog and a frog, animals she respected for the way they stayed low to the ground, unyielding. Now, at sixty-two, Alva’s nose and mouth, too small to begin with, were slowly fading into the folds of her thickening jowls. Not that it mattered anymore. She’d never been one of those pretty girls, not like her daughter, who’d been painted for posterity wearing a vapid, ethereal expression that drove Alva mad. Consuelo was like a delicate vase you wouldn’t dream of putting flowers in, lest you ruin the finish, serving no useful purpose whatsoever. Alva still found it odd that such a gorgeous creature had sprung from her loins.
The cheering, the noise from the parade, the man’s nasty comment—it was all too much, and a tightness gripped her chest that had nothing to do with her corset. One could never tell when a terrible illness might strike, as with Oliver, dying six days after an operation for appendicitis, his body septic and ravaged. She shouldn’t proceed, not if she were about to fall dead. No, it was better to return home at once.
Alva stomped up the limestone steps to her Madison Avenue mansion, stopping midway to note that one was chipped. Was nothing done correctly anymore? They’d all be quite sorry when she died of a heart attack right here and now because she’d had to stop and examine the tread for cracks, instead of going right in and calling for the doctor.
On top of all that, the front door was ajar. She stepped inside and unpinned her hat, leaving it on the Calacatta marble side table. The feathers drooped like two broken wings. It was hideous; the shopgirl had known it and tried to trick her.
“Ma’am, you’re back already?”
Marjory, one of her maids, held out her arms to take Alva’s coat.
“I am. Where is everyone? Where’s Mr. Riggs?” Her butler was usually stationed at the front door.
“Sorry, ma’am, but he went off to watch the parade.”
“Did he, then? Taking advantage of my absence. I’ll dock his pay. The front door was left open; anyone could’ve come in.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ll watch it until they return. Are you not marching, then?”
“No, I’m not marching. They look like ladies of ill repute, out there gallivanting, letting men gape and gawk, just as I’d warned. I refuse to be part of the spectacle. Besides, I’m unwell.”
Marjory slid a sympathetic look onto her face, although Alva could tell it was devoid of true empathy. “Let me get you settled upstairs.”
“I will settle myself. The front door needs to be watched—have I not made that clear?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
It didn’t matter that Alva had promised to march, that she’d assured the committee members that she would lead a group of shopgirls who didn’t get off work until later in the afternoon. It wa
s simply not feasible, not at her age. All these women, acting as if tromping up Fifth Avenue in their pretty white day dresses would make a difference. No, if you wanted to change the world, you had to do it like a man. Pay off the politicians, get militant like the English, push and not be pushed. Had all her work since joining the women’s suffrage movement the year after Oliver’s death been for naught? So supposedly decent ladies could display their wares like common streetwalkers while men laughed and mocked?
This was not the way to get the vote.
“And have James look at the front steps. There’s a chip that must be fixed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Up on the second floor, Alva paused to catch her breath. Yes, it was certainly angina. No doubt in her mind. She hoped she could ring for the doctor before it got worse.
She was turning in to her sitting room when strange clanking noises came from down the hall, the sound of heavy metal on stone. Someone was messing about in the armory.
She considered calling for Marjory but dismissed the thought. Probably one of the maids was dusting a suit of armor too roughly. Alva imagined one of the steel arms yanked off, clattering to the marble floor, and her indignation spiked. Oliver had carefully curated the pieces over the years, and she’d created the room to honor his memory.
Opening the door, she stepped inside, and already her pulse settled. The diffuse gloom from the stained glass windows was offset by the soaring ceiling. At the far end, two coats of armor had been mounted on taxidermized horses, looking just as they had in medieval times, ready to storm a castle at her slightest command. The chain-mail suits embossed with gold work were her talismans, pieces of Oliver that remained behind after he died to protect her. As he had in life.
Rows of chairs remained in place from the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage meeting earlier in the week, when she’d tried to convince them that they must ride into battle like Joan of Arc, heckle and mock the politicians, prove to men that the world will no longer be arranged around their comfort and ease. Put a stop to the predation. The women had murmured uneasily among themselves. Not the response she’d hoped to elicit. In the end, they’d voted to march like ninnies up Fifth Avenue, and there was nothing Alva could do to convince them otherwise.