Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  “One sees the same orientation in certain medieval French sculptures, called vierges ouvrantes, or opening virgins,” Mrs. French added as an aside, then went on to describe, in detail and in the same tone of academic disinterest, the erogenous zones. “Which, you will notice, are distinct and separate in form and function from organs of purely reproductive purposes.”

  She ended with an explanation of the proper f it and application of the device.

  This assemblage of women did not normally associate. They might know one another through their children or various town functions or, in the case of Mrs. Hershal and Mrs. Shultz, through the singing club. Until that day, none had known that each had purchased a device in common; and after recovering from the shock, a carefully understated curiosity dampened the outrage they expected of one another. The next week, three more women joined them, including Mrs. Joshua Bennett and Mrs. Nicolas Walsh, who had attended Mr. Stockwell’s dinner party. That week, Mrs. French sent each woman home with a directive: “to explore for themselves those regions of their bodies from which life grows.”

  “I am not a doctor or a moralist,” said Mrs. French, “but I reject the assumption that ignorance preserves morality. Ignorance merely ensures woman’s subjugation. She is given directives when she might be given choices. I will therefore speak clearly, without flourish, and please, if you possess knowledge that would benef it the room, I invite you to share it. We speak about our health, ladies, and the health of our daughters, and one must not sacrif ice one’s health to propriety.”

  Mrs. French wore worsted skirts rather than bloomers on these occasions, so that only her words might incite scandal. Her authoritative manner of speech, which not even Mama seemed to distrust, necessitated no response. For several weeks, in fact, the women—nine, then eleven, then f ifteen in number—crowded around the library tables, sweets and teacups in hand, listening in silence as if they believed their voices, not their bodies, would place them def initively in that room. Until one day during a pause, Mrs. Biggs said in barely a whisper: “I touched it.” Red eyes blinked over her teacup. “The clitoris.”

  That admission f irst deepened, then cracked the silence into gasps. “Well,” said Mrs. Walsh. Mrs. Hobbs giggled. Nods of reluctant acknowledgment gave rise to more admissions (from everyone but Mama, who rarely said a word to anyone) and questions to which even Mrs. French hadn’t all the answers.

  Ovary. Fallopian tubes. Vagina. Womb veil. Pessary. Condom. French envelope. Woman’s companion. Such startling and detailed descriptions of parts and items I had not known existed, or had existed nameless or endured vaguely under veil of euphemism. Every so often, I’d catch Violet’s eye. Had Violet, like me, touched the fabled clitoris? Had Mama? The prospect enthralled as much as horrif ied me. Fat Mrs. Biggs, thin Mrs. Wells, Mrs. Smith with her long back and short little legs—all of us shared hidden parts! Parts that should, Mrs. French argued, bring us closer in strength and purpose, rather than “tearing us asunder by baseless conflicts grounded in nothing so concrete as physiology.”

  All told, there were six meetings of the Benevolent Society. They met at eleven every Tuesday and agreed, f irst tacitly, then by motion, that husbands need know nothing of the society’s true purpose. That husbands need not know was for many, I think, the prime advantage of the womb veil, which could in an emergency be explained, Mrs. French reminded them, bringing the last meeting to a close, as a method of correcting a prolapsed uterus. Feet shuffled. No one seemed eager to stand. A despondency fell, until Mrs. Biggs, glancing about, raised her voice.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait! That’s it? That’s all there is on the subject?”

  A roomful of heads turned to Mrs. French, but it was Miss Rose, lingering in the doorway behind who answered.

  “Well,” she said. “Well, there are other subjects.”

  My own awakening might well have colored that spring all by itself, and who am I to speculate about the intimate lives of senator, shopkeeper, and merchant wives? But I’m sure I witnessed discreet smiles on the lips of women as they passed on the street, a bounce, maybe even joy in their steps not present before. I do know, because it was my job to deliver them, that demand for French fashions increased dramatically.

  Still, of the f ifteen Benevolent Society members who crowded around Mr. Knowlton’s text, only f ive returned the next week for the f irst meeting of the Reliance Suffrage Society: Mrs. Smith, Georgiana Stockwell, Mrs. Hershal, Mrs. Biggs. And again, to my surprise, Mama.

  The exodus outraged Miss Rose.

  “Perhaps they were not properly grateful for her hospitality,” Mrs. French admitted. We were walking the river side by side, a windless, overcast day. She wore trousers. I wore a pair of her old bloomers, rolled at the waist, and carried her collection basket like a squire. “Even if they were, I’m not sure how she expects them to show it. Four of those women are wives of men in Stockwell’s Sin Society, Madelyn. Their very attendance at an event in which the body is so plainly discussed, with texts their husbands would sooner burn, was a bravely subversive act.” She said this with admiration and held back a tree branch as I stepped under. Her explanations were more candid and generous outdoors. “They are not reformers. They are wives and mothers who desire some measure of control over their lives. But they mostly love their husbands, I imagine. They love their children and have little wish to change a world they have a reasonably privileged place within.”

  Her voice trailed off, but I thought nothing of it until, walking on a few steps, I looked back to f ind her still at the water’s edge, staring west over the river, her sturdy frame dark against the silver sky.

  The great sadness I felt in her, even at that distance, scared me. She appeared so self-contained, so conf ident, especially these last several weeks lecturing with her diagrams and pointers. I’d come to expect nothing else, though I knew little about her. She never spoke about herself. It was Miss Rose who told me how the two of them met, during the war in Chicago, working together on the Sanitary Fair with Mrs. Livermore. From Miss Rose I’d learned how alone Mrs. French was in the world: her boys, twins, killed in the war; her husband, Herbert, dead in the Chicago f ire.

  I can’t say if it was their memory arresting her there by the river. I only know that, as if I were looking through a stereopticon, the rather f ixed and flat picture I’d had of her rounded into life, and I felt a devotion so unexpected and acute, the memory brings tears to my eyes.

  “Mrs. French?” I called when I found my voice. But she had roused herself, reaching me in two strides.

  “They are not like you and me, Madelyn.” She laid her hand on my shoulder, and we walked on. “They think they have too much to lose.”

  Of course, I didn’t understand what she meant. Neither did Miss Rose, I guess. Didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t. At any rate, it was just after this, with the election, that real trouble began.

  30

  “Concerned Citizens—sign it Concerned Citizens of Reliance. Now read it again.”

  Miss Rose, pointing over my shoulder, stood back to listen. It was an afternoon in March, three weeks before the municipal election, and though cold still held nights tight as a collar, days were warmer, longer, the air ripe and green. I ached to be outside with Mrs. French, breathing in the season, but Miss Rose was still unsatisf ied with her editorial.

  “Again, Madelyn.”

  To the voters of Reliance County:

  As concerned citizens of Reliance, we have not discovered, among current candidates, one man with the character necessary to lead us out of the economic upheaval and corruption that has plagued this city, indeed this country, for more than a decade. We therefore call upon a proven leader to enter the fray, a leader dedicated to the defense of the rights and freedoms of all citizens, a visionary capable of steering us away from the treacherous sandbanks of corruption into the clear deep water of prosperity. A leader . . .

>   I sensed Miss Rose’s attention waver and looked up to f ind Mrs. French, arms crossed, in the doorway.

  They had had a row the night before. Not unusual. Argument was a kind of rough play to them, a contest of wits and wills they could draw out for hours, sometimes days. Mostly the arguments ended well, but for several weeks, really since the Suffrage Society formed, the women’s voices had held jagged edges I was unused to. Nettle blamed their mood on springtime, when everything bursts forth, spirits and plants and passions alike; but I knew those edges had everything to do with the election and probably with Mrs. Livermore’s visit, as well.

  I’m afraid any description I might offer of the woman who had extracted herself from the carriage two days before would seem an exaggeration, as would any description of Mrs. French’s exuberance. She all but bounded like a girl from the manor to meet her.

  “Oh, you dear Big Livermore!” she cried and threw her arms around the tallest woman I’d ever seen, with broad shoulders she didn’t care to hide beneath a shawl. From what little Miss Rose had said of Mrs. Livermore, I’d imagined a trumpeting tyrant, short and fat, with a witch’s scowl and a stubby and perpetually wagging f inger. Instead, an inviting smile lit the woman’s long oval face. Her red-blonde hair, parted in the middle, swirled in cheerful disarray.

  “Darling, Mrs. French,” she said. “Where on earth have you been stowing yourself ?”

  Her eyes, glancing critically about, darkened at the sight of Miss Rose, who greeted her in kind; and there was nothing pleasant about the pleasantries exchanged in the parlor. Oh no, she could not stay for dinner, had to rush to make the two-o’clock steamer—a lecture in Saint Louis. She was in such great demand in the West, you know. “But I had hoped for a word with Lorena,” she said. “A private word.”

  For the next half hour, the two walked the grounds arm in arm, and even before I heard what Mrs. Livermore said upon departure, a nugget of quiet dread planted itself in my heart.

  “Don’t say no, my dear Lorena,” she said, folding her great frame back into her carriage. “Consider my offer.” And then, a comment I’m sure was aimed as much at Miss Rose on the porch as at Mrs. French: “Your talents are wasted here, I think.”

  Miss Rose remained until the carriage was a dust trail up the drive before she stomped into the manor. I, pretending to read in one of the woven deck chairs, sidled up to Mrs. French.

  “Mrs. French?”

  “Hmm?” she said, staring after the carriage.

  “What did she want? What offer?”

  Mrs. French put her hand flat on my head. “My dear, do not make yourself miserable about what is to come or not to come,” which told me, as clearly as her embattled posture now, that I had reason to worry.

  “I thought we discussed this,” said Mrs. French, striding past me in mud-streaked trousers. “I thought we agreed.”

  “Well, I changed my mind, didn’t I?”

  Should I leave them alone? They seemed to have forgotten me, and I wasn’t sure it wise to remind them.

  “Run for mayor,” said Mrs. French. “By all means run. But do so honestly. Under your own name. No subterfuge, no trickery. We have scoured the municipal code. You are within your rights to run, even if you may not vote, so why would you—”

  Mrs. French’s nose scrunched as if a sharp smell had passed. Miss Rose smiled.

  “Because, Mrs. French,” she said. “Because I plan to win. I have managed theater companies on both coasts, organized tours, handled budgets, hired and f ired men more substantial—and godly—than Mr. Stockwell will ever be. I can manage a town of this size.”

  “That is not the issue, Rose. You know it’s not. This cannot end well. It might even damage the cause.”

  Miss Rose’s smile fell, then her words, like stones. “Your cause.”

  “Our cause, Rose—yours and mine. And yes it may.” Mrs. French gathered herself. “It is fraud, Rose. Election fraud.”

  “How? My name is R. S. Werner. Rose. Sharon. Werner.”

  “Was—” said Mrs. French, but Miss Rose spoke over her.

  “And who else is there to challenge Stockwell? Tell me that. Who is to show that man he does not own a mandate over this town? Doolittle is a fool to run on prohibition; the Irish vote won’t amount to a majority for a hard-money democrat like Donovan. And we’re left with Melborn Stockwell, the best of three bad options. Thinks he can gain, through fear and condemnation, the same respect true leaders gain by strength and substance. You think he inspires from his moral high ground? Bah! He simply makes anyone who opposes him ashamed to disagree. Anyone who opposes him is not just wrong, but immoral.

  “Well.” Miss Rose crossed her arms, raised her chin. “I don’t for a second imagine Melborn Stockwell to be as pristine as he likes to pretend. A moral man’s virtue is not so easily threatened that he must impose his views on others. Thank the stars you are not his wife. Or his daughter.”

  Mrs. French looked up at this, but said nothing. Miss Rose spoke as if she had.

  “He will not stifle that girl, Lorena. He will not.”

  I’d assumed Miss Rose’s interest in Georgiana was just a way to get back at Mr. Stockwell for writing to her nephews. I wasn’t sure anymore. They lunched and walked the gardens arm in arm every Thursday, after suffrage meetings (when Georgiana was supposedly attending a sewing circle with Mrs. Smith). Twice Miss Rose had posed for a portrait, which would have been f ine, except after praising the work to William, she’d asked him to pose the next week.

  I’d wished to God I could draw then!

  As often as not, he—always groomed and dressed as the gentleman—came for lunch on Thursdays with Georgiana and saw her off again. I’d watched him enough to know he wasn’t really interested. He was too stiff and polite, not himself at all. I, on the other hand, felt drawn to Georgiana in that awkward, heart-fluttering way younger girls are drawn to older girls. Maybe William’s presence attracted me, or maybe I recognized in her desire to become a painter my own as yet unconscious desire to become, not someone new, someone else, but whoever I was, and to be loved for that.

  Whatever the case, the attention Miss Rose and William paid Georgiana did not please me.

  Evening was falling, light through the window turning gray.

  “And as for the election,” Miss Rose continued, “you can’t tell me Stockwell hasn’t already bought Mr. Haxby’s votes at the brewery and Mr. Mason’s at the glassworks and thus the votes of every man who works for them. Fraud, indeed!”

  “That’s not the point, Rose.”

  “Good. Why don’t you come to the point, Mrs. French? On second thought, never mind. I don’t believe I need your opinion on the matter. And if you feel,” she searched for the word in the crown molding, “wasted here, maybe you should—”

  “Rose, stop. I’ve made no decisions about that.”

  “Fine.”

  Miss Rose turned her back; Mrs. French, poised to speak, thought better of it, and when she left the room, I felt as though half of me left with her. Violet was troubled, too, or she would not have stuck her head from the music room after Miss Rose dismissed me.

  “Well?” she said, concern tempering the contemptuous expression I was used to. “What’s wrong with them? What happened?”

  That she had to ask me this question might have been as distressing to her as the situation itself, but I didn’t have the heart, now, to lord this over her, nor did I entirely understand what was going on. “It’s this election,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  But I was, and Violet’s concern left me more worried. When the light had faded and swallows were thrilling the eaves, I sought Mrs. French in the conservatory. I didn’t want her to leave me.

  Pearls of condensation fattened and dripped down the glass walls. Mrs. French’s collection basket lay abandoned by the door with her net; she slumped before her ea
sel, paintbrush in hand, staring at a half-f inished painting of blue phlox. Her hair gleamed silver in the evening light. Worry scored her forehead. I wasn’t sure I should disturb her until, looking up, she patted the wicker chair next to her.

  “It’s bad?” I asked. “What Miss Rose is doing? Running for mayor, I mean?”

  “No. Well,” she said, a great weariness in her eyes, “it is not, strictly speaking, against the law.”

  But, Mrs. French had expected her to campaign as a woman, to argue her position publicly. Mrs. French had been preparing these arguments for weeks. Now that Miss Rose decided, without consulting her, to run under initials she shared with her father, Russell Stone Werner, she wasn’t even going to announce her candidacy. Instead William, Hanley and his buddies, and the bookshop owner’s sons would paper outlying precincts the week before the election, and the green on the day of, with ballots. (Mrs. French explained that it was the candidates’ responsibility to print and distribute their own.) Miss Rose would make arguments after.

  Mrs. French did not say, “after she won.”

  The advantage, from Miss Rose’s perspective, was that if no one knew she was running, no one would try to stop her.

  “That’s a good thing, right?” I said.

  “Not to my mind, no, Madelyn. You see, to many a nostalgia-glossed memory, the name R. S. Werner will call to mind a younger incarnation of the man upstairs, the man who founded this town and served three terms as mayor—back when the pig was fat and times were good.”

  I was not used to sarcasm from Mrs. French.

  “A good number of people who vote for R. S. Werner, you see, will be voting in ignorance for a memory, not deliberately for a woman. Rose Sharon. Miss Rose.”

  “And . . .” I said, still unsure. “That’s bad?”

  “Well, it’s certainly not honest.” But here a smile lit her direct, serious eyes. “Of course, we are speaking of politics, are we not?” She nudged me in the shoulder. “What do you think Mr. Clemens would say if he knew his remark about the witless voting public would be tested with such purpose?”