She gave a laugh. “They say a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Sometimes I think I should hire someone to mug my father, the king of the anti-gun crusaders.”
“You know the king. I know the queen. She’s just been kidnapped.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right.” Kate raised her bottle. “Cheers.”
Peter took a swallow. It was ice cold and felt as good as it tasted. Her large presence felt good, too. She gave off an aura. Relax. Come to Mama. It will be all right.
She led him over to the sofa in front of the woodstove.
“It heats the whole barn till Christmas,” she said. “But come New Years’s we make for Florida. Much easier to carry concealed in Florida. Just ask those militia types who scooped your girl.”
“You know them?”
“I know they read my catalogue. I know they’re collectors in addition to shooters. I know that by nine o’clock, they’ll be so far into the Maine woods a squadron of Blackhawk helicopters couldn’t find them.”
“You know a lot. Do you know why the judge wanted me to come here?”
She gave him a grin. “I’m just a target-shootin’ dyke come to Vermont to mind my own business and live my own private marriage.”
Peter took another swallow of beer. “Are you looking for the Constitution, too?”
“I’m looking to protect it. If people get in the habit of changing the amendments we have, they might start writing new ones, too, against people like me.”
Just then there was a crunch of tires on the gravel.
Peter half rose from the sofa.
“Relax,” said Kate. “It’s a friend.”
Footfalls followed, the door swung open, a woman called, “Katie? Are you here?”
That voice. Peter recognized it instantly. Deep, seductive, with a prep-school accent so upper-crusty, it was a wonder that all those simple folk out in radio land could stand listening.
And in she walked, a blonde with strong jaw and long legs, the right-wing Carly Simon. Kelly Cutter herself.
She seemed much less formidable in person than the harridan on television, especially as she smiled and offered her hand. “Peter Fallon? The famous antiquarian? I’m speechless.”
“I doubt that,” said Peter.
EVANGELINE COULD TELL nothing except that they were moving. Her captors said little enough to each other and nothing to her. And every time she thought about saying something, she let the bruise on the side of her face be her guide.
After an hour, the road turned into a roller coaster, up and down, down and up, bend to the right, twist to the left. After another hour, the pickup slowed, turned onto a dirt road. They went a mile … two miles … turned, went another ten miles, with the high beams bouncing and flashing ahead.
Finally, they jerked to a stop.
Evangeline stepped out.
Then a shaft of light struck her. A tent flap had just been pulled back. A big man was walking toward her. In the darkness, she could see only shadows.
The man removed her blindfold. It was Jack Batter. He looked at her a moment, as though waiting for her to react. Then he said, “You’re our insurance policy. We get the draft, we drive you back. Or you can go right now.”
“Go?” she said. “Go where?”
“Out there. We’re not kidnappers. Good night, Miss Carrington.”
But they were so far from civilization that the sky seemed brighter than the pine forest around them, a luminous arc of stars in the blackness.
PETER HAD DINNER with Kate and Kelly in their farmhouse.
It was two centuries old and filled with oak antiques, a shrine to the hardworking history of the place, except for the kitchen, which was tricked out like a twenty-first-century hobby cook’s funhouse, with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and a big blue Aga stove in the corner.
Peter felt guilty to be sipping a Zaca Mesa Chardonnay when he should have been doing something to save Evangeline. He also felt guilty to be sitting there with Kelly, who would get Evangeline’s vote for Princess of Darkness.
But as Kate set the table, she told him again that Evangeline would be safe.
And as Kelly cooked—chicken breasts sauteed in shallots, garlic, and capers, with a finish of white wine and lemon—she described the details of her life. She said she had tried to go straight but had married an abusive man, the kind who “could turn a nymphomaniac into a nun.” After her divorce, she went into radio, first as a disc jockey on an FM station, then as a weekend fill-in on a local talk show. That was in ‘92, the year Bill Clinton was elected president. So she followed the principle set out by the rising stars of rightie radio, that no Democrat could ever have the best interests of the republic at heart, then she started beating it and beating it and beating it to death.
“Do you believe it?” asked Peter as they sat to dinner.
“It doesn’t matter if I believe it,” she said. “Look at the ratings. Look at the growth of the Cutter network from one station in New Hampshire to three in northern New England to a hundred and thirty in twenty-eight states.”
“And she does it all,” said Kate, “from her own studio in St. Johnsbury.”
“That way,” said Kelly, “we get to live the Vermont dream.”
“Do your listeners know”—Peter cut into his chicken—”about your unorthodox relationship?”
“I’m a right-wing lesbian living in the state where civil unions were born,” said Kelly. “So what?”
“It’s just that—”
“Don’t forget,” said Kate, “the classiest radio talker of them all was a Boston libertarian named Brudnoy, who also happened to be gay.”
“But he always brought civility to the debate,” said Peter.
“We can’t afford civility anymore,” said Kelly.
Peter sipped his wine, measured his words. “No ratings in it?”
“My listeners don’t want this.” Kelly poked her fork into her chicken and held it up. “They want red meat.”
“You weren’t feeding them when you read the judge’s letter over the air.”
“I read it because he asked me. And I respect him. He knows we’re all Americans. And we don’t always come in pretty packages.”
“Right,” said Kate. “Just look at us.”
He did. From face to face, two handsome women, but he still wasn’t sure what they had to tell him. “Your listeners don’t know about you. What about your friends and financial supporters. What about”— And here he paused to gauge their expressions—”someone like Clinton Jarvis?”
Kelly said, “Jarvis is a sophisticated man. He knows how the world works.”
“What does he want with a first draft of the Constitution?”
Kelly looked at Peter, as if trying to decide how much to tell him, then said, “I don’t think he wants it.”
“Everybody who knows about it wants it,” said Peter.
“I don’t think he wants it,” she said, “because he has it.”
“Has it?” Peter stopped cutting, stopped chewing, almost stopped breathing.
Kelly looked at Kate, then got up and went to the computer table in the corner. A pile of books sat beside it, as if Kelly used them for reference. She dropped an advanced reader’s copy of Jarvis’s book on the table. “Read the introduction.”
As he reached for the book, Peter’s cell phone rang and they all jumped.
It was Antoine: “I have info on a B and M conductor named Michael Ryan … and his sister, a maid in Newport….”
TWENTY-ONE
June 1919
ROSEMARY RYAN AWOKE IN the maid’s quarters of the Perkins cottage, kicked off the wet sheets clinging to her legs, and wiped the perspiration from her upper lip. A June heat wave was baking New England, so the little room under the eaves felt as stuffy as a nun’s cubicle in a convent.
Rosemary had been taught by the nuns at Notre Dame Academy in Roxbury. They had taught her to diagram sentences so that she c
ould express herself. They had taught her to do equations so that she could calculate what portion of the world’s weight she would carry. And they had taught her the faith so that she could understand her existence.
What more did a girl need? A husband, a child, a home … perhaps a convent….
When Rosemary’s father fell drunk from a Boston dock, the nuns promised to pray for his soul. When the influenza swept through her South End tenement, took her pregnant sister-in-law, and left her brother a drunken wreck, the nuns promised to pray for their souls. And when she sat for weeks at the bedside of her dying grandmother, reading to the old woman and listening to her stories, the nuns promised to pray for her soul, too.
The serenity that the nuns derived from their confidence in Christ’s love inspired many a young girl to join them in their world of prayer.
But Rosemary preferred women who made their way. It was a habit she inherited from her grandmother, who had begun as a loom girl in the Pike-Perkins Mill and ended as a union organizer in Boston. Rosemary kept a photograph of her on the wall in the tiny bedroom, next to a photo of the famous suffragist, Maud Wood Park.
As Rosemary put on the maid’s uniform, she recalled the day that she saw Mrs. Park, the most memorable day of her life.
It was a snowy February afternoon. Rosemary was coming up from the subway, bound for her part-time job at Filene’s. As she emerged into the chilly air, she heard chanting, saw crowds and American flags and bobbing placards proclaiming VOTING RIGHTS FOR ALL! AMEND THE CONSTITUTION! and GIVE US OUR DUE!
Hundreds of women were gathered at the intersection of Summer and Washington, and Maud Wood Park was shouting through a megaphone, urging them to march on the State House: “Senator Lodge visits the governor today. Senator Lodge voted against us once. We must make him hear our voices every day until Congress sends the Suffrage Amendment to the states!”
Someone gave Rosemary a sash with the letters N.W.S.A, National Woman Suffrage Association. She put it over her topcoat. Someone else gave her a placard. And she was swept up in the wave of women marching up Winter Street to the State House, where they continued their chants: “Voting Rights Now!” “Give Us Our Due,” and one that probably struck fear into men everywhere, “No More Housework Until We Get the Vote!”
And a nineteen-year-old girl became a suffragist.
But to make her way in the world, a girl needed an income. So Rosemary had heeded the advice of her mother. When a position opened on the Perkins household staff, she took it, and it brought her to Newport.
She peered out the window and saw a biplane puttering through a pure blue sky.
It had already passed over the old town … over the waterfront, over the red brick buildings where the great Washington had dined and danced and done business with the French, over the narrow streets of wooden houses and well-kept storefronts, over the houses of worship, too—Catholic, Quaker, Jewish, Protestant—because old Newport had been born in tolerance.
But there was another Newport now, a town of outsiders. They were likely to attend one of the Protestant churches, but they worshipped at the altar of money. And the life they lived at the southern tip of the Aquidneck peninsula was one to show “the footstools” what heaven would be like.
“The footstools” were the locals.
The outsiders were the summer folk. Also known as the rich. Or the Filthy Rich. Or the Four Hundred, the sacred number determined by Mrs. Astor after she saw that her ballroom could hold no more.
Their Newport had been born in the 1850s, in a meadow overlooking the Atlantic, where four wealthy Boston families and eight from the south had built summer homes to catch the ocean zephyrs. And the great money migration had begun.
Now, a plane circling Newport passed over a playground as opulent as any on earth, over houses that looked like French castles, over a tennis club called the Casino, over beaches where only the rich—ladies in the morning, gentlemen in the afternoon—could cool their toes (the footstools had their own beach), and over a golf course where the rich could while away their five-hour rounds while the footstools caddied and cadged tips.
Rosemary’s employers had been among those first Boston families.
Arthur Perkins had made his fortune in New England mills. He put up a Victorian “cottage”—gray and Gothic, twenty rooms and a turret—in 1854. In time it had been dwarfed by the mighty stone “cottages” of the Belmonts and the Astors and their ilk. It was said that Newport was the only place where Arthur Perkins had not seemed to be pointing his nose in the air, because so many others could point theirs so much higher.
Arthur and his nose had passed on, as had his son, but his grandson, Magnus, had mortared the family fortune into a foundation of investment trusts, bonds, and securities, and had done it so well that now, on summer mornings, he could sit in knickers, argyle stockings, and matching sweater vest, in the breakfast room off the kitchen, in the bay window with the view of the Cliff Walk, read the paper, and complain.
Magnus Perkins was forty-eight. He had rowed with the Harvard crew and had stepped from school straight into the family firm. He still had a rower’s build and a jaw that sailed before the rest of his face like a bowsprit catching the business wind and bending it to his will. But the wider world did not bend so easily, which was why he complained so regularly.
Usually his wife ignored him.
Florence Perkins was five years younger, with translucent skin and a taste for summer taffeta well satisfied in the dress shops of Newport. She saw that the family social life—afternoon teas, lawn parties, dinners—proceeded according to plan. She saw that her children—a ten-year-old boy and a girl a year younger—were occupied every second of the summer day. And she saw that each morning one of the servants met the first ferry, which carried the early editions of the papers.
That morning, the Boston Globe proclaimed that President Wilson was returning from France. It also reported on the heat wave that had sent families like the Perkinses to their summer retreats several weeks early.
But it was neither the heat nor the League of Nations that had Mr. Perkins complaining. He read the front page and shouted, “Good God, they finally did it.”
“Who, dear?” Mrs. Perkins glanced up from the Herald. “What did they do?’
“The Senate. They went and passed the Women’s Suffrage Amendment.”
At that moment, Rosemary was carrying in two plates of scrambled eggs. At those words, she almost dropped them.
“Fifty-six to twenty-five, I believe,” said Mrs. Perkins.
Rosemary set down the eggs and read over Mr. Perkins’s shoulder.
“At least Henry Cabot Lodge voted against it.” Magnus Perkins shook the paper as if to shake the words off it; then he gave it a noisy fold.
“Read about the Red Sox, dear. It’s better for the health.” Florence slid the sports page across the table. “They always win.”
“I don’t care about the Red Sox and that lout Babe Ruth.” Magnus raised his coffee cup, saw that it was empty, and simply held it in the air.
Rosemary heard her mother cough discreetly from the pantry. Their eyes met, and mother gestured toward the cup.
Maureen Ryan was a naturally nervous woman whose mouth was always drawn into a tight line of tension and whose slender body belied her skill as a cook.
“What do you think, Rosemary?” asked Mrs. Perkins.
“About what, ma’am?” The girl filled the master’s cup, glided around the table as soundlessly as her mother had taught her, and poured for Mrs. Perkins.
“About women getting the vote.”
Rosemary glanced again toward the pantry. She knew what her mother was thinking: Not politics. Mother of God, not politics. Then Rosemary said to Mrs. Perkins, “I think women should have the vote. It’s only right.”
Magnus Perkins looked over the corner of his paper. “And why do women need the vote? Look at what you’ve accomplished without it.”
“What’s that, sir?” asked Rosemary.
Mother Maureen bustled in with the coffee cake. “Here we go. Hot from the oven. Still gooey, just the way you like it, sir.”
Mr. Perkins ignored the cake and kept his eyes on Rosemary: “Soon men won’t be able to get an honest drink, thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment, which never would have passed without the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. When women get the vote, what else will they do to us?”
Mrs. Perkins smiled. “Just thinking about it is enough to drive a man to drink.”
“Nor funny, Florence.”
“Perhaps not, but whatever we do, it will be good for you.”
“Like the income tax amendment?”
“That wasn’t women’s work.” Mrs. Perkins dropped her eyes back to the paper.
“Not women’s work?” cried Magnus Perkins. “With all their talk about social justice? Women and Bolsheviks and Democrats. Newport isn’t anywhere near as much fun as it used to be. Smaller parties, fewer yacht races … Why? Because the government takes our money.”
“I thought it was the war that changed things.” Mrs. Perkins sounded calm and quietly amused.
“War … women … taxes …” Magnus Perkins leaned across the table. “Once we saw to the rights of the freed slaves, we didn’t amend the Constitution again for forty years. Now we get a tax amendment in ‘13, prohibition in ’19, and next year—”
“Women will vote.” Mrs. Perkins looked at her servants. “Won’t we, girls?”
“Oh, I don’t know, ma’am,” said Maureen. “These things is way above me.” She gave her daughter a jerk of the head: Follow me and get out of the line of fire.
Mrs. Perkins looked at her husband. “The amendment will be ratified.”
“Amendment. Assault, you mean.” Mr. Perkins went back to the paper, muttering, “What I wouldn’t give to know what the Founding Fathers would have thought about all this change.”
MAUREEN KICKED THE stopper from the pantry door so that it swung shut and all but hit Rosemary in the seat. Then she whispered through clenched teeth, “What’s the matter with you, sayin’ all that? Never tell them what you think.”
The Lost Constitution Page 40