by Marge Piercy
Their opening here was an even greater event than the previous opening at the hotel. The street outside was so blocked with carriages, the police had to intervene. Of course the Commodore came, taking center stage and beaming at the sisters. Fortunately he had left by the time Josie brought in Jim Fisk. “So this is the little lady who outdid us in gold,” he said, patting Victoria’s arm.
She removed herself slightly, smiling but keeping a distance. “The spirits gave me counsel, Mr. Fisk.”
“Good spirits own lots of railroads too.”
“No, Mr. Fisk. It was I who advised our patron to sell—not vice versa.”
Even Boss Tweed came. She greeted him effusively, although he made her nervous. He was a gross man—obese, looking as if he were rolled in oil—but immensely powerful. He had gangs of thugs at his command; he controlled the Irish vote and the mayoralty, all public works in the city and many private contractors as well. He bought and sold politicians as another man might buy up a carload of overshoes. She knew little about his private life except that he had put on a lavish wedding for his daughter, fit for a princess. The rooms were mobbed now. Actresses came, actors and producers, opera singers, lawyers, journalists, editors, merchants, they came to drink and eat the pastries set out, both savory and sweet that Tennie had arranged, and to gape, yes, to gape.
Her office and Tennie’s were much as they had been in the Hoffman House, except that instead of the hotel furniture, Victoria had desks made for them with Greek key details, to honor her spirit guide. Another difference was a special entrance for women, who could skip the front office with Colonel Blood and the clerk who screened callers. In a parlor by Victoria’s office, women could feel comfortable and private. No men were allowed into this part of the office, not even James.
That device was an immediate success. The professional women Victoria had hoped to attract came, not only singly but often in pairs or small groups to give each other confidence. Women felt that this firm had been created for their benefit. Not only proper ladies came: madams spread the word through their grapevine that Tennie and Victoria would receive them graciously and treat them and their money with respect. Victoria’s web of informants now extended through a number of the better brothels. She reduced her commission for any madam who passed on useful information from her girls and their clients. That too pleased the madams, who recognized a good deal.
One afternoon, Josie swept in, resplendent in a scarlet satin overskirt partly covering a gold brocaded underskirt, all arranged over an extra large bustle, under a fur cloak against the cold of a snowy day in late February. She threw back a hood lined with ermine. On her large bosom, a great emerald brooch sparkled, echoed by her earrings, gifts from Jim Fisk.
“What brings you by, Josie? I’m delighted to see you. Would you care for some sherry?”
“Don’t mind if I do… But this is a business call. You’ve been telling me for years I ought to invest. I’m not going to let Jim keep me in a cage the rest of my life, so I’m taking your advice. I mean to have my own money now. I want you to make it happen. I’ll give you some money and you make it grow like Jack’s beanstalk.”
“This is a wise move, Josie. Every woman needs her own money, her own independence. Then you can choose whom you will love and whom you will not.”
“Exactly!” Josie squeezed her hand through fine kid gloves, dyed green. “You’ll set me free.”
“I will. Now would you prefer champagne or sherry? And we have some delicious chocolates from Belgium.”
Most days the Commodore dropped by to offer advice and collect their information. Whenever he appeared, Victoria and Tennie stopped whatever they were doing and saw him in Tennie’s office, where Victoria could leave them alone together in case the Commodore had something more than stocks in mind. Tennie was always ready to roll up her sleeves and give him one of her special massages. She confided in Victoria that he needed release less often, as his new wife Frankie was giving it to him once a week. He was thrilled with his marriage. He had been hangdog with Tennie at first, but now he was assured she bore him no ill will.
When he left, Tennie smoothed down her newly shorn locks. They had both decided to wear their hair shorter. Perhaps they would start a new fashion. It was part of looking more severe for business. “It’s more work than it used to be.”
In addition to the brokerage business, Victoria was busy furnishing the new house leased just off Fifth Avenue in a fashionable section, Murray Hill. She could not trust Roxanne, Utica or Buck to get involved with decorating the house, as their taste was lurid. Roxanne loved religious pictures, the more lugubrious the better. Buck liked large florid nudes. He would have been crazy about Josie, but Victoria had taken care never to let him meet her. Her family spent money amazingly fast. Buck liked horses and he liked to gamble, two ways of making piles of greenbacks disappear.
The house must be impressive without being gauche. She was going to have a salon. Now that she was rich and becoming famous, she needed men and women of advanced political ideas to stimulate her mind and teach her about history and politics and economics, as James had begun to do many years ago. Now she wanted more stimulation, vaster vistas than James could provide, new European notions. She longed for intellectual excitement after all the time she spent with the Commodore, who had never met an idea he had noticed.
She filled the house with mirrors that multiplied the light and scattered it. The salon had a colored glass dome through which the light beamed down prismatically, bathing the room and its occupants in magical hues. She loved velvet. Purple velvet downstairs, green velvet in her bedroom. Tennie chose lilac velvet for hers. Victoria had blue wallpaper hung in Byron’s room, where his new caretaker slept. Zulu Maud, nine now, got warm pink. Occasionally Victoria brought Zulu along to the brokerage offices, to see what her mother did for a living and be inspired. She kept her daughter close. Zulu was going to have the kind of sheltered, pampered childhood she had not even been able to dream of as a young girl. No one was going to exploit her. Ever!
Her whole family moved in, not only Roxanne, Utica and Buck but their oldest sister Margaret Ann with her three children, sister Polly, her daughter Rosa and Polly’s brand-new husband Dr. Sparr, who did mesmeric healing in the parlor downstairs two afternoons a week. Utica and Roxanne spent most days getting drunk or wheedling money to buy clothes. Fashion magazines lay all around the salon until Victoria gathered them up and dumped them in Utica’s room. She did not want her house to appear frivolous to the visitors she was beginning to invite. She wanted them to take her seriously. Not “The Bewitching Brokers” but someone with ideas, heft, destiny.
She was choosing her lovers carefully. She had become involved with an older freethinker, Stephen Pearl Andrews, an extremely intelligent man, lean and still in good shape. He had been a follower of Fourier and had started a phalanx, a small utopian community, on Long Island, but it had not lasted long. He knew many of the leaders in woman’s rights and promised to introduce her. Their relationship was occasionally sexual but primarily intellectual. She was the student and he the teacher, but they argued frequently. They enjoyed debating. He critiqued her writing and encouraged her plan to start a paper with Tennie.
Her other new lover had been a general in the Civil War and now was a senator from Massachusetts, Benjamin Butler. She had met him when she went to Washington to sit quietly in the woman’s rights convention, to size up the leaders and study the lay of the land. She did not attempt to meet any of them yet, but she liked what she heard. She set out to learn from Butler how government worked. He indicated he would mentor her if she was willing to become his lover. She did not hesitate. He was a dynamic, almost flamboyant man, brave and well connected in Washington although resembling a pug. He was sympathetic to woman’s rights and willing to champion her. By and by, she would need his influence if she was to accomplish something great and good. After her early experiences, sex came easily to her. She took precautions—the same ones they sold t
o the madams. She saw no reason to discontinue that business, although she had passed on some of the deliveries to Utica and Buck. The way they spent money, they might as well make a little for the household. She still went in person to take the orders, as madams were a precious source of financial information. When she was with one of her lovers, she thought only of him. She focused on him exclusively. She never spoke of the others. James welcomed the good connections she was making. He especially liked Stephen, who often stayed in the household overnight, sometimes with her, sometimes in the guest room.
She was still casting about for the right way to stake a claim to her new proposed identity when one evening of penetrating cold in late February, a gentleman appeared at the door and was announced by the downstairs maid. “Dr. Canning Woodhull, Esquire.”
He stumbled into the salon where Victoria was hearing Zulu’s lessons. He was emaciated, his scraggly beard unkempt, his hair matted. He stuttered when he spoke and it took several minutes for him to address her coherently. She sent Zulu upstairs. He had not even looked at his daughter, perhaps had not guessed who she was.
“What is it, Canning?” She could not bring herself to address him in a more distant way. After all, he was the father of her children.
“I…I think I’m dying…”
“Of what?” She had a moment of fear that he might be contagious, might infect her daughter.
“Look at my hands.” He held out both bony hands before him. They were shaking so violently he could not unbutton his tattered coat.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“It’s the curse I bear.”
His pupils were dilated. He was on some drug as well. He sank to the floor and knelt there. “Wait.” She rang for the butler. Tennie and she had a staff of twelve, including the coachman, the cook, Byron’s caretaker, various maids. “Tell cook to prepare some broth. Then help me get this gentleman upstairs into the third-floor guest room.”
“Where’s my son?” Canning asked as they half carried him up the stairs between them.
“He’s in his bedroom playing with blocks. He can’t read the letters on them, but he likes to pile them up and knock them down.”
“Can I see him?”
“In the morning. We’ll get you cleaned up and into bed.” She called Tennie.
“Is that Canning? Oh my god. He’s a bum.”
“Drugs and drink. But I can’t turn him out. He’ll die in the street.”
“But he can’t stay here!”
“Why not? Everybody else in the world does.”
They got him bathed, then into bed. Victoria felt false modesty was ridiculous. After all, she had been married to the man for years. Hard years, yes, but once she had loved him. She felt little more toward him than as if he had been a dog she had owned for a pet who had run away and then been found starving and injured in the road. She would see he got proper care. She spooned broth into him.
“My darling Vickie,” he mumbled. “You’ve always been so good and kind. My wife…”
“I’m not your wife and I’m not your darling. I’m with Colonel Blood and you would do well to remember that if you wish my help and my protection. You’re the father of my two children—”
“Two?”
“The little girl who was doing her multiplication tables when you arrived—she’s Zulu Maud, your daughter as well as mine.”
“Is she…slow?”
“She’s bright and lively and sweet.” She stood. “She calls Colonel Blood ‘Father’ and you should leave well enough alone. Claim Byron, but you may not claim Zulu Maud.”
Over the next week, Canning began slowly to regain his health. Soon he was out finding opium and morphine again, shutting himself in his room, but he made himself useful with Byron. Byron didn’t care who this ragged man was. He was happy as a puppy with the attention. Canning had little else to do but take care of Byron and play simple games with him, as one would with a child who had not yet learned to speak. She let one of the caretakers go, the one she did not trust, for she had found bruises on Byron recently that she did not believe came from clumsiness, as the man insisted. Canning could share the care of Byron with the stout lady of late middle age who came in every day but Sunday to be with him.
When Zulu Maud asked her who the funny old man was, she said he was Byron’s father. “I was married to him many years ago—but you can see why I left him. Your father is a great improvement, don’t you think?”
“Daddy is smart and handsome and he goes to work every day.”
“Absolutely.” Victoria ruffled Zulu’s hair. “And we like all that. We like it very much. We wouldn’t mind if everybody in the house did the same—like your Aunt Tennie and me.”
“When I grow up, I’ll go to work every day too.”
Victoria kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “Perhaps you’ll work with me. That way, we’ll always be together.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
ELIZABETH WAS ASTONISHED and pleased by how efficient Isabella was proving to be. She put on the Washington convention, sparing Susan a lot of hard work. She had the same organizational gifts Susan had—the ability to stage an event, keeping the details that must be delegated on some vast list in her head and checking them off as they were done or reassigning them if a problem or delay arose. Just as Elizabeth appreciated Susan’s abilities, she was delighted with Isabella, although that delight did not prompt her to go to Washington.
Today Elizabeth was working on a speech about raising daughters, for even committed suffragists seemed uncertain what they should tell their daughters and what they should permit or urge upon them. She had raised two, which gave her credentials. She was grappling with the organization of the talk when Susan came in, breathless from walking from the train. Obviously she had been in a hurry, rushing over the icy sidewalks. It was March but still wintry. Susan cast her simple bonnet and gloves on a chair, where Amelia promptly seized them and stashed them away. Amelia stood in the doorway then, as eager as Elizabeth to find what had given the flush to Susan’s cheeks and caused her to rush from the station to the Tenafly house.
Susan knew she had an audience, so with a glint of mischief she proceeded to say how much she needed a bit of tea to warm her.
“Thee don’t look cold to me,” Amelia muttered, but she went to make tea while Susan patted her hair into its bun and then had her tea with a buttery scone Amelia had baked. Elizabeth was ready to pour the tea on Susan’s head by the time she relented. “You will never guess where I went today.”
“To hell, if you don’t stop playing with us,” Elizabeth snapped.
“I visited the offices of those women brokers the papers have been full of, Woodhull and Claflin. I met Victoria Woodhull.”
“What do you think of her? They say she and her sister are both Van-derbilt’s mistresses.”
“She struck me as intelligent, charming. She isn’t a floozy, Mrs. Stanton.”
“How would thee know?” Amelia snorted and turned half away but did not leave.
“The offices are well appointed but businesslike. She has a separate entrance for women—”
“Like a concert saloon,” Elizabeth said.
“No, Mrs. Stanton. Hear me out. It leads directly into a cozy parlor right by the sisters’ offices. Tennie, the younger, was with a client when I arrived, but Victoria joined me. Men have to enter through the front and are grilled by Victoria’s husband, Colonel James Blood, who was wounded six times in the Civil War on the Northern side. After our tête-à-tête in the women’s parlor, Mrs. Woodhull introduced me to him and his brother. There’s even one of those machines that spits out prices of stocks minute by minute.”
“Is Vanderbilt behind them? I dislike that man. He runs his railroads efficiently by squeezing his workers.”
“Mrs. Woodhull told me that the money behind the brokerage is hers and her sister’s, money they made on Wall Street. Vanderbilt has accepted stock advice from her and gives them tips in return. She says she has s
erved as his financial adviser. She comes from poverty, a large family in Ohio. She was blunt and open with me. She has brought her entire family to New York to keep them in comfort. She said she and her sister already made seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and were prepared to help other women invest as successfully as they have.”
“Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars? I can’t imagine that much money. Did you believe her?”
“I did. I want you to meet her, Mrs. Stanton.”
“To what end? With my children in college, I have little to spare and nothing to invest.”
“I spoke to her about woman’s rights, and I found not only was she fascinated but she’s been thinking about the situation of women. She believes that ours is the cause she was born to serve, and that once she has established herself in business, she can aid our movement.”
“Oh, we could use an angel, we surely could. A woman who made her own money and wants to give us some! Susan, I share your excitement.”
“Be careful with this woman,” Amelia said. “She may be no better than she should be. They say she has been divorced.”
“If she makes a commitment to our cause, I don’t care if she’s had twelve husbands. Every woman is entitled to a few mistakes in that line,” Elizabeth said with a wince. “If women were free to have affairs as men do, many foolish marriages would be avoided, and the sum of pain in the world would diminish.”
“Mrs. Stanton! You don’t really mean that.” But Susan was amused, Elizabeth could tell from the crinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“We’ll never know, will we? I’m past the age of more than polite flirtation.”