by Susan Wiggs
Lucy had never seen her mother in such a disheveled state. She wore a dressing gown and her hair hung loose around her face. Holding her arms clasped across her middle, she rocked rhythmically back and forth, taking in little sobs of air with the motion.
“Mama!” Lucy hurried over to her. “Are you all right? What happened to the Colonel?”
The doctor stood up, pinching the bridge of his nose as if trying to hold in emotion. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “So very sorry.”
“Lucy, my dear Lucy,” her mother said, never taking her eyes off her husband. “He’s gone. Our dear dear Colonel is gone.”
Lucy’s arms tightened around the child, who had stopped crying and was making soft cooing sounds. She pressed close to the bed.
Colonel Hiram Hathaway lay like a marble effigy, as handsome and commanding in death as he’d been in life. In flashes of remembrance, she saw that face lit with laughter, those big hands holding hers. How could he be gone? How could someone as strong and powerful as the Colonel be dead?
“He went out to fight the fire,” Patience said. “You know your daddy. He’d never sit still while the whole city was on fire. He was with a crew of military men, knocking down buildings with dynamite. They brought him home an hour ago. Said he got hit on the head. He was unconscious, never even woke up, and right after we put him to bed he just…just went to glory.”
A choking, devastating disbelief surged through Lucy as she sank to her knees. “Oh, Colonel.” She used the name she’d called him since she was old enough to speak. “Why did you have to be a hero? Why couldn’t you have stayed safe at home?” She freed one hand from the baby’s blanket and gently touched the pale, cool cheek with its bushy side-whiskers. “Oh, Colonel. Were you scared?” she asked, her hand starting to shake. “Did it hurt?” She couldn’t find any more words. What had they said to each other last time they were together?
She couldn’t remember, she realized with rising panic. “Patience,” she whispered. “I can’t remember the last time I told my father I loved him.”
“He knew, honey,” Patience said. “Don’t you worry about that. He just knew.”
Lucy wanted to throw herself upon him, to weep out her heartbreak, but a curious calm took hold of her. Resolution settled like a rock in her chest. She would not cry. The Colonel had taught her never to weep for something that couldn’t be changed. No tears, then, to dishonor his teachings.
“Good night, Colonel,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his cold hand. He still smelled of gunpowder.
Her mother sat devastated by shock, rocking in her chair. “What shall I do?” she said. “Whatever shall I do without him?”
“We’ll manage,” Lucy heard herself say. “We’ll find a way.”
“I shall die without him,” her mother said as if she hadn’t heard. “I shall simply lie down and die.”
“Now, don’t you take on like that, Miss Viola,” Willa Jean said. She had a deep voice, compelling as a song. But it was a small, bleating whimper from the baby that caught Viola’s attention.
Lucy’s mother stopped rocking and stared at the bundle in Lucy’s arms. “What on earth— Who is that?” she asked.
Lucy turned so she could see. “It’s a baby, Mama. A little lost girl. I rescued her from the fire.”
“Heavenly days, so it is. Oh, Hiram,” she said, addressing her dead husband while still staring at the child, who stared back. “Oh, Hiram, look. Our Lucy has brought us a baby.”
Part Three
A woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.
—Victoria Claflin Woodhull
Six
Chicago
May 1876
“Where do babies come from, Mama? Really.”
Lucy looked across the breakfast table at her daughter and smiled at the little face that greeted her each morning. Having breakfast together was part of their daily routine in the small apartment over the shop. Usually she read the Chicago Tribune while Maggie looked at a picture book, sounding out the words. But her daughter’s question was much more intriguing than the daily report from the Board of Trade.
“I know where you came from,” Lucy said. “You fell from the sky, right into my arms. Just like an angel from heaven.” It was Maggie’s favorite story, one she never tired of hearing—or repeating for anyone who would listen.
The little girl stirred her graham gems and frowned. She was stubbornly left-handed, a trait that often reminded Lucy of the mystery surrounding her. “Sally Saltonstall says that’s an old wives’ tale.”
“I’m not an old wife.” Lucy gave a bemused chuckle. “I’m not even a young wife. I’m not anyone’s wife.”
“Sally says you can’t be my mama if you’re not nobody’s wife.”
“Anybody’s wife. And Sally is full of duck fluff for telling you that.”
Maggie passed Lucy the stereoscope she’d received for her birthday last fall. They didn’t know her exact birthday, of course, so they had chosen October 8, the date of the Great Fire that had changed so many lives. Each year, Lucy gave a party for Margaret Sterling Hathaway, commemorating the night they had found each other.
“Look at the picture in there,” Maggie said. “It shows a family, and the mama has a husband called the papa.”
Lucy obliged her daughter by peering into the two lenses of the stereoscope. The shadowy, three-dimensional image depicted an idealized family—the mother in her demure dress, the upright, proper, bewhiskered father in boiled collar and cuffs and two perfectly groomed children, a boy and a girl.
“These are just strangers dressed up to look like a family,” she said, ignoring a nameless chill that swept through her. “We are a proper family. I’m your mother, you are my daughter, forever and ever. Isn’t that what a family is?”
“But the papa’s missing.” Maggie thoughtfully wiggled her top front tooth, which was very loose now and about to come out. “Could Willa Jean be the papa?”
Willa Jean Washington, the Hathaways’ former maid, now worked as the bookkeeper of Lucy’s shop.
Lucy shook her head. “Traditionally the papa is a man, darling.”
“But you always say you’re rearing me in a nontraditional way.”
Lucy couldn’t help laughing at the sound of such a sophisticated phrase coming from her young, precocious daughter. “You know, you’re right. Maybe we’ll ask Willa Jean if she’ll be the papa.”
“Do you think she knows how?” Maggie asked. “What does a papa do, anyway?”
With a gentle bruise of remembrance, Lucy thought of her own father. The Colonel had issued directives. He’d demanded obedience. Insisted upon excellence. And in his own commanding way, he’d loved her with every bit of his heart.
“I suppose,” she said, “that a papa teaches things to his children, and loves and protects and provides for them.”
“Just like you do,” Maggie said.
Lucy felt a surge of pride. What had she ever done to deserve such a wonderful child? Maggie truly was an angel from heaven. Lucy set down the stereoscope. “Come here, you. I have to get down to the shop, and you and Grammy Vi have sums to do this morning.”
“Sums!” Her face fell comically.
“Yes, sums. If you get them all correct, we can go riding on our bicycles later.”
“Hurrah!” Maggie scrambled into her lap and wrapped her arms around Lucy’s neck.
Lucy savored the sweet weight of her and inhaled the fragrance of her tousled hair, which had darkened from blond to brown as she grew. It was hard to imagine that there had been a time, five years before, when Lucy hadn’t known how to hold a child in her arms. Now it was as natural to her as breathing.
The Great Fire had raged for days, though it had spared the block of elegant houses in the Hathaways’ neighborhood. Hundreds of people had shown up for the Colonel’s funeral, and Viola had received a telegram of condolence from President Grant. The day after
they had buried the Colonel, Lucy had taken the baby to the Half-Orphan Asylum.
She shuddered, remembering the bilious smell of the institution, the pandemonium in the rickety old building, the cries of lost children and frantic parents searching for one another, the stern wardens taking charge of those without families. She’d hurried away from the asylum, vowing to find a more humane way to look after the child.
In the weeks following the fire, Lucy and her mother had been forced to flee the city to escape an epidemic of typhoid brought on by the lack of good drinking water. Even from a distance, Lucy kept sending out notices to find the child’s family, to no avail. No trace was found of the woman who had perished after dropping her bundled child from the window. Despite advertisements Lucy had placed in the papers and frequent inquiries at the asylum and all the churches and hospitals in town, she’d found no clue to the orphaned baby’s identity.
As she straightened the kitchen and took off her apron, she reflected on how much their lives had changed since the fire. Every aspect of their world was different. It was as if the hand of God had swept down and, with a fist of flame, wiped out their former lives.
After the smoke had finally cleared and a desultory, unreliable rain shower had spat out the last of the embers, Lucy, her mother and a fretful baby had gathered around a table with the bankers and lawyers, to learn that the Colonel had left them destitute. The fire had not only taken the Colonel, but his fortune as well, which had been invested in a Hersholt’s Brewery and Liquor Warehouse. Uninsured, it had burned to the ground that hot, windy October night.
Her mother was lost without her beloved Colonel. As much as Lucy had loved her father and grieved for him, she’d also raged at him. His love for her and her mother had been as crippling as leg irons. He had willfully and deliberately kept them ignorant of finance, believing they were better off not knowing the precarious state of the family fortune. His smothering shield had walled them off from the truth.
For days after the devastating news had been delivered, Lucy and her mother, burdened with a demanding little stranger, had sat frozen in a state of dull shock while the estate liquidators had carted off the antiques, the furniture, the art treasures. Lucy and her mother had been forced to sell the house, their jewels, their good clothing—everything down to the last salt cellar had to go. By the time the estate managers and creditors had finished, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs and a box of tin utensils. Viola had taken ill; to this day Lucy was convinced that humiliation was more of a pestilence to her than the typhoid.
There was nothing quite so devastating as feeling helpless, she discovered. Like three bobbing corks in an endless sea, she and her mother and the baby had drifted from day to day.
Lucy had found temporary relief quarters in a shanty-town by the river. She would have prevailed upon friends, but Viola claimed the shame was more than she could bear, so they huddled alone around a rusty stove and tried to bring their lives into some sort of order. Not an easy task when all Viola knew in the world was the pampering and sheltering of her strong, controlling husband; all Lucy knew was political rhetoric.
It was providence, Lucy always thought, that she’d been poking through rubbish for paper to start a fire, and had come across a copy of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, published by Tennessee Claflin and her sister, Victoria Woodhull, known in those days as The Firebrand of Wall Street. Since she’d appeared before Congress and run for president the year of the Great Fire, the flamboyant crusader had captivated Lucy’s imagination and inflamed her sense of righteousness. But that cold winter day, while huddled over a miserable fire, Lucy had read the words that had changed the course of her life. A woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.
Suddenly Lucy knew what she must do—something she believed in with all her heart, something she’d loved since she was a tiny child.
Everything had fallen into place after that epiphany. In the fast-recovering city, Lucy had taken a bank loan, leased a shop in Gantry Street, occupied the small apartment above it and hung out her tradesman’s shingle: The Firebrand—L. Hathaway, Bookseller.
Running a bookshop hadn’t made her a wealthy woman, not in the financial sense, anyway. But the independence it afforded, and the knowledge that she purveyed books that made a difference in people’s lives, brought her more fulfillment than a railroad fortune.
The trouble was, one could not dine upon spiritual satisfaction. One could not clothe one’s fast-growing daughter with moral righteousness. Not during a Chicago winter, anyway.
Silky, the calico cat they had adopted a few years back, slunk into the room, sniffing the air in queenly fashion. Maggie jumped down from Lucy’s lap and stroked the cat, which showed great tolerance for the little girl’s zealous attentions.
“Run along, then,” she said, kissing the top of Maggie’s head. “Tell Grammy Vi that I’ve gone down to the shop.”
“And bicycles later,” Maggie reminded her.
“Bicycles later,” said Lucy.
Tucking the paper under her arm, she took the back stairs down to the tiny courtyard behind the shop. A low concrete wall surrounded an anemic patch of grass. A single crabapple tree grew from the center, and just this year it had grown stout enough to support a rope swing for Maggie. The tiny garden bore no resemblance to the lush expanses of lawn that had surrounded the mansion where Lucy had grown up, but the shop was just across the way from Lloyd Park, where white-capped nannies and black-gowned governesses brought their charges to play each day. When the weather was fine, Maggie spent hours there, racing around, heedless of the censorious glares of the governesses who were clearly scandalized by hoydenish behavior.
Lucy allowed herself a wicked smile as she thought of this. She was raising Maggie to be free and unfettered. No corsets and stays for her daughter. No eye-pulling braids or heat-induced ringlets. Maggie wore loose Turkish-style trousers, her hair cropped short and an exuberant grin on her face.
But sometimes, when she wondered about where she’d come from, she asked hard questions.
Lucy took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and walked into the shop. The bell over the door chimed, drawing the attention of Willa Jean.
“Good morning,” Lucy said cheerfully. No matter what her troubles, the very sensation of being in the middle of the bookstore, her bookstore, lifted her heart. There was something about books. The smell of leather and ink. The neat, solid rows of volumes, carefully catalogued spine-out on the shelves. The lemony scent of furniture oil on the tables and the friendly creak of the pine plank floor. The gentle hiss of gaslight, the scratching of Willa Jean’s pencil. Most of all, Lucy supposed, she loved the sense that she stood in the middle of something she’d built, all on her own. She’d spun it out of a dream, dug it out of disaster and lavished her love upon it the way many women did when building a home.
This was her home. And if, from time to time, she felt an ache of loneliness that not even Maggie could fill, she still told herself she had more than most women could expect in a lifetime, and she should be grateful. Those secret yearnings shamed her. She was supposed to be a New Woman, fulfilled by her own industry.
The one thing she couldn’t figure out was how a New Woman dealt with needs as old as time. In certain quiet moments, the old loneliness stole over her. With veiled envy she watched young couples strolling together or stealing kisses when they thought no one was watching. Too often, she caught herself yearning to know a man’s touch, his affectionate regard and his passion. The one drawback to free love, she’d discovered, was that with so many choices available, no man seemed likely to choose her.
“’Bout time you got yourself down here.” Willa Jean peered accusingly from beneath the green bill of her bookkeeper’s cap. “We got to go over the figures for the bank.”
A cold clutch of apprehension took hold of Lucy’s gut. She’d had the entire weekend to prepare for this, but in fact she�
�d tried not to think about it. Perhaps that was a bit of her mother coming out in her. If she didn’t think about troubles then they didn’t exist.
But here was a problem she couldn’t wish away.
“All right,” she said. “Show me the books, and tell me exactly what I should say to the bank.”
Willa Jean flopped open a tall ledger on the desk in front of her. Willa Jean was as clever with numbers as her sister Patience was with scripture. Willa Jean was gruff, blunt and usually right.
This morning, her bluntness was particularly apparent. “If you don’t get an extension on your loan, you’ll default and lose the shop,” she concluded.
Lucy pushed her hand against her chest, trying to still the wing beats of panic there. “I don’t expect the bank to cooperate. Our loan was sold to the Union Trust three months ago.”
“All banks are the same, girl. They want to make money off you. Your job is to prove you’re a good risk.”
“Am I a good risk, Willa Jean?”
A bark of laughter escaped the older woman. “A bookseller? Honey, it ain’t like you’re selling grain futures here.” She gestured around the shop. “These are books, see? People don’t eat them, they don’t manufacture furniture out of them, they don’t keep them to increase in value. They read them. And who has time to read? Everyone’s so all-fired busy trying to make a living, they don’t read anymore.”
“So my job is to convince a strange man that I can make a profit in a dying enterprise.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Remind me. Why did I get up this morning?”
Willa Jean held out an appointment card. “There’s the name of the person you’re to see. It’s the bank president, girl. At least that’s something.”
Lucy glanced at the card, then froze in amazement. She was looking at a name she hadn’t seen in a very long time, but one she had never forgotten. Mr. Randolph B. Higgins.
Seven