Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  I didn’t have to know how wrong I had been about William. No one made me confront him about the dead girl, or Mr. Dryfus about the letters. I didn’t have to know, and now I could not unknow.

  “Don’t read it now. Wait.” He didn’t say for what and I had no chance to ask because every eye in the room rose to the balcony above the gallery.

  A man in a top hat and jerkin, wearing a ceramic mask with a bulbous nose and sneering pink mouth, glowered down at us. Holding Mrs. French’s pointer under one arm, he turned and with stiff military posture descended the stairs, parted the crowd, and took the stage. With a slicing movement, he opened the pointer, raised it toward the servants’ door, where a woman veiled in white satin appeared behind the houseboy, Tom. Tom wore his dress blacks. He carried a wooden pedestal. Slow, with ceremony, he preceded the woman to the stage, placed the pedestal, and helped the woman to stand upon it. Then with an exaggerated flair, he stripped her of the veil.

  A woman beside me gasped. A plate clattered to the marble floor. There stood Violet in little more than a chemise, her bare arms aloft in heroic pose, nipples pert beneath the sheer fabric. She stared with a statue’s blindness into the audience. And the man with the pointer—I realized as intrigue shuddered through the crowd—the man with the pointer was Miss Rose.

  “Le Masque,” she sang out, “by Charles Baudelaire.” The oboe player began a soft moaning accompaniment. “Behold! This prize of beauties wholly Florentine. This luminous visage framed and veiled, whose every dainty feature boasts:”

  “Lo!” cried Violet, raising one hand gracefully into the air. “Pleasure calls me and Love crowns my head!”

  “This. This creature,” Miss Rose sneered. “Vested with such majesty. See what tasty charms her mane suggests!” She lowered her voice. “Let us draw close to her beauty, tour around.” Miss Rose toured. “O, yes. O, blasphemy of art! That body promising rapture rare transforms at the top into a two-faced freak.”

  Violet turned and a grotesque mask smiled hideously from the back of her head. The crowd shuddered.

  Miss Rose rapped the mask smartly with her pointer; the audience came to order. Then, in the hush, Miss Rose turned Violet around again and pressed the tip of the pointer to the girl’s bare forehead. “No! This . . . this is but a mask. A decorative snare. Poor visage lighted by a delicate grimace!”

  Miss Rose paused. “But ‘Why is it she weeps,’ you ask?” No one said a word. “Why weeps she whose love brings mankind to his knees? What ill gnaws her athlete flanks?”

  Miss Rose tucked her pointer beneath her arm. Both of them leveled their gazes to meet the masked faces of the crowd. Together they chorused: “She weeps for having lived, and for living, yet what makes her body tremble head to toe is that tomorrow she will have go on living, and all tomorrows after—like ourselves!”

  Masks, for a moment forgotten, slipped from faces infant pink and raw with heat. Miss Rose bowed, held her hand for Violet, whose curtsy was as coy as her smile. Beautiful, vile Violet. The clock struck the quarter hour. The music began again, and then the dancing, and the warm breeze through the entryway chilled me.

  He was gone. I didn’t need to look. I felt him go, and turned now to see him slip for the last time out the conservatory door and drop his mask on the wicker table. I followed only as far as the table. Then tracing the feathered rim of my own mask, lifted it from my face and set it atop William’s.

  The cool air, a touch. The gardens opened, a panorama of backlit clouds and rustling sycamores, and near at hand the traipsing shadows of the dancers spilling with the lamplight across the porch planks. So clear, the smell of roses, the rumbled stomp of dancing feet through boards, and then Mama’s presence in the doorway. I sat dry-eyed on the steps, hugging my knees. Mama sat down beside me. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. A reel. Laughter. Far below at the docks, the scream of the ten-o’clock steamer leaving Reliance; with it I felt the weight of false hope lifting, and the gasping ache rushing to f ill its place was, frankly, a relief.

  “Is that from William?” Mama asked. The letter, the only letter I would ever receive from him, was still in my hand.

  “You want to read it? You want me to go?” A man and woman tripped, laughing across the lawn; Mama shifted as if to stand, but I held tight to her arm.

  “No, Mama, please stay.”

  37

  I already knew what that letter said and much of what it did not. I knew William cared for me, in his way, but not as much as he cared about protecting himself. I knew the baby had been his, and that Aileen had killed herself to escape the same disgrace that made me. I knew how guilty William must have felt. How after f inding her dead, he’d committed the only kindness he could. He cut her throat. A kindness, yes.

  I learned when Mr. Stockwell arrived the next morning with the constable that Georgiana had run away with William on the ten-o’clock steamer. I knew Miss Rose considered this desertion, as much as the masked ball, her victory over the man. And I knew, before I was beckoned to her bedroom later that week, and found her again a bald, old woman in an armchair, staring out the window at the river below, Miss Rose was leaving, too.

  The japanned tallboy gaped open. Two wigs lay like slaughtered animals on the floor. Then I saw the pages of our manuscript curled brown in the f ire.

  “Miss Rose, what are you—”

  “Leave it,” she said.

  “But.”

  “Leave it!”

  Wind through the open window scattered white tufts of hair across her scalp. She looked so shriveled, so diminished as she watched the blackened pages dissolve to ash. Then I could see nothing for the tears in my eyes.

  “I have heard the Mississippi called an old man.” She pulled a raveled lavender string from her dressing gown, cast this, too, into the f ire.

  “But old men, have you noticed, become petrif ied in time. Only memories move them. And the fear of any change that might sully those memories. Their ears and noses grow larger as their minds shrink. Have you noticed? Every opinion is loosed as wisdom and truth, when it is no more than romance.

  “What do you prefer, my dear?” She turned to look at me. “History or romance? Don’t say. Romance. Rubbish. As soon as histories are properly told, there will be no more need of romances. And who will tell these histories? Who will tell my own? You? And what will you say then?”

  I didn’t know. I still don’t know what to say about Miss Rose, what def initive opinion would please her, how to begin. Perhaps I never will.

  I do know what people said when creditors came to gut the manor of its furnishings. Such extravagance. Such a shame. Serves her right, they said, even as the whole town turned out to see her board the Geneva Queen, with Mrs. French, Mrs. Hardrow, and Violet. Alby ran away without me two weeks earlier, with six silver spoons. The other servants had been let go.

  But Miss Rose, her wig a towering masterpiece of braids and curls, let it be known she was on her way to Philadelphia for the Centennial celebration, the nation’s biggest stage, to argue for the franchise. Had Mrs. Stanton invited her to speak, as Miss Rose implied? Had she invited herself ? I wasn’t sure. I felt betrayed, abandoned, bitter, but no more so than when she stepped from the hansom to the steamer dock with Violet by her side.

  I went back to the print shop, back to that little attic room. I learned to set type and walked with Hanley by the riverside, hung my feet in the cool black water of the millpond reading aloud the Metamorphoses. How crudely Ovid speaks of love and transformation. Each love a threat. Each transformation a death. Woman to tree. Woman to cow. Some salvation. I was nearly f ifteen and distrusted any thought of the future. I held my stained face up, looked everyone in the eye, aware I was eddying purposeless. Until one day, Mama knocked on the composition-room door to say I had a visitor. William? But this habitual thought was no longer a desire. Mrs. French waited with her brisk posture and gray head, in a
hired brougham.

  This was late October, the weather changing, the air tart with the breath of winter. We passed the courthouse green and Oak Hollow and Millionaire’s Row. Had I kept up with my reading? With my German and French? Why not?

  “What are we doing here?” I asked her. “What do you want?”

  The overgrown driveway, and then the abandoned manor rattled into view. A freshly carved sign, yet unpainted, hung on the wrought-iron gate: Werner Girls’ Academy.

  “I’m not done with you yet,” she said.

  “How did you? Miss Rose?”

  “Miss Rose and William agreed.”

  The town had taken great delight in the flight of Stockwell’s oldest with William. Stockwell blamed his wife as much as Miss Rose. She, too, soon left him to visit family in Chicago, an extended visit, it appeared, for she took Abigail, her heirloom quilt, and most of the money he’d married into. He accepted a position as postal inspector for the Western Society for the Suppression of Vice and moved to Saint Louis, losing four bids for state senate before declaring himself a man above political seats, a man seated in the moral authority of God.

  If only he were the hypocrite Miss Rose believed him to be! It would have been so much easier to hate him for his intolerance. But he was merely a zealot, blind to the various shapes and colors of lives beyond his own. Too bad, really. He was hardly a worthy adversary for Miss Rose; he had simply been the only adversary on hand. Sure, he fancied himself a leader, a “good man,” but when he died thirty years later, he died alone, forgotten.

  But then, so did Miss Rose, though she spent the next four years touring the United States, giving readings and lectures on suffrage, contraception, motherhood, hydrology, the education of girls, even home economy—a grueling self-imposed schedule, the money only part of it. She needed the stage, the admiration of an audience far enough away to miss the careful movements of her head and the age lines trenching her eyes.

  Over time, I would f ill in a few more of the gaps in the glorious past she related to me. I learned of the libel suits, the annulments, the divorces. I learned she had had a child, a son, named Charles, but his father had taken him and divorced her, and the boy, now a senator in North Carolina, never acknowledged her. And when a letter arrived from Violet, f ive years after she left, Mrs. French and I learned that Miss Rose, too proud to ask for help, had died penniless and alone, in New Orleans.

  Thanks to Hanley, I discovered, soon after she left, what had happened in New York before Miss Rose came to Reliance. Part of what happened, at least. He’d been picking through a long-discarded stack of newspapers in the print-shop attic when he saw an article in the Times, September 2, 1873, two inches long, one column wide. It announced the conviction of a young woman, Miss Floyd, a costume mistress in the Aurora Theater Company, owned by a Miss Rose Werner, for the murder of Senator Saulder.

  “Miss Werner’s claims that the senator, a much respected man in the state legislature, raped Miss Floyd, as well as other young ladies in the theater district, were never corroborated, and Miss Floyd was duly sentenced to death.”

  Miss Floyd, Mrs. French conceded, when I confronted her with this scrap, was Violet’s older sister, her only living relative. Miss Rose promised her that she would take Violet in, but her efforts to overturn the verdict proved futile and costly.

  “Is that why Miss Rose left New York?”

  “One of the reasons.”

  Mrs. French never told me the others. Such was her loyalty. Such was her gratitude to the woman who gave her license to write and speak with her own voice, under her own name, and gave the manor, where Mrs. French was to live out her days, its new academic purpose.

  Mrs. French raised money, designed curricula, and hired teachers—liberal-minded women who read novels, wrote articles, wore bloomers when it suited them, and encouraged their charges to do the same. She hired Hanley’s sister, Muriel, to cook and clean. Before its reputation grew, the students were mostly wards of the Wayward Home, immune to the early gossip surrounding the place. The manor became a ghost of its former self, the accommodations spare but comfortable, as was the food, much of which we grew in the kitchen garden. I remained four years, f irst as a student and prefect of sorts to younger girls, who looked upon my mark as a badge of authority, and then as a teacher, hearing Mrs. French’s phrases resurrected from my mouth. “If your convictions are to be taken seriously, Emily, you must state them with conviction.” Sometime in that f irst year, I made myself a darkroom in the cellar and began taking portraits with the camera William left behind.

  Miss Rose, Mrs. French, and this craft were the real gifts he gave me, though I persist even now in remembering him with a fond, youthful fancy. I have never entirely given up my infatuation. Watching my girls, I realize I’m not so different in this, not so unusual after all. Loving someone like that, or imagining you do, it’s kind of a cockeyed way of learning to love yourself. I still wear his charm, though I like to think I do so in memory of a dead girl named Aileen.

  I never went to university to study classics as Mrs. French wished, but I did f inally go west. Mr. Edward Dargie offered Hanley the chance to run the Saturday edition of his paper in a place called Oakland. I went along to open my own photography studio, but alone there together, the fondness I’d always felt for him grew slow and strong into what I now call love. We married at city hall. Mama joined us to open a dress shop a few years later, after Little John went east and Mr. Dryfus passed (very soon after Clara). It was here, in our house on Harrison and Tenth, where, along with my f irst daughter, Sophie, the latent suffragette in me was born.

  I have been called the Painted Lady and all kinds of suggestive and derogatory names that no longer rankle me as they do Hanley. Miss Rose was right, after all. I am a Janus-faced f iend. One face staring forward into the future I wish for my girls, the other forever looking back. The public face I put on now, rigid with conf idence and purpose, and a private face Hanley sees when the mask becomes too heavy. Few others see this private face. My mark protects me. I have come to depend upon it, for I have never possessed the magnetic presence of Miss Rose, nor the raw, intuitive intelligence of Mrs. French. Instead, I have learned to speak to the washerwoman, the shopgirl, and the senator’s wife, each in her own language, and have taught my girls to do the same.

  That is Sophie I hear now as I write these last lines. Sophie slamming through the front door with her sister, Rose.

  “Mama!”

  Through my study window, I can see ladies, two dozen of the hundreds who will march today, Mama there among them, gathering amid the fallen leaves on Harrison Street, adjusting their suffrage sashes and hatpins, holding their banners strong in the breathless August heat.

  Such enthusiasm saddens me some, yet as Rose—my dark-eyed, demonstrative Rose—pitches into the room and tugs my arm, I feel also the haunting presence of two women in the host who came before me. Look around you. Look back. This is what I want to tell my daughters, the message I wish to leave behind. Be grateful, but not too grateful for fragments of the rights due all persons. Remember, justice and change comes hard and slow. Remember, you will have many mothers in this life besides me, all of them flawed. Judge them, judge me, but not too harshly. Carry on, my girls, but guard yourself against the irrational defeats that may yet come.

  But I don’t say anything. I put down my pen, close the pages of my scrapbook. “Come on, Mama!” And I am f illed again with a familiar, stubborn, and obligatory hope.

  August 27, 1908

  Acknowledgments

  On August 26, 1926, Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel. What I call attention to is not the fact that she was the f irst woman to accomplish the feat, or that she did so in fourteen hours and thirty-four minutes, two hours faster than the fastest man. Nor is it my intention to paint a heroic solitary f igure, head in a white cap, arms rising and falling with dogged regularity in choppy gray seas. In
stead, direct your eye to the tug boat behind her, for it is full of the people who made such a mad attempt possible.

  I don’t claim to be, like Gertrude, the f irst or f inest at anything. But I am a writer practicing the novelist’s mad craft, and I too have a boat full of people behind me who have made this attempt possible and to whom I am endlessly grateful.

  For time and space to work, thank you to the Vermont Studio Center and to Nancy Nordhoff for creating a place like Hedgebrook. Nancy, it was under the influence of your radical hospitality that this novel was reborn.

  Thank you to scholars and writers like Andrea Tone, Donna Dennis, Barbara Goldsmith, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Wendy Hamand Venet, Norma Basch, Richard Franklin Bensel, and Janet Farrell Brodie, whose work brought the social concerns of the time alive for me. Any mistakes or liberties taken with history are entirely my own. Thank you to my students and colleagues at Saint Mary’s College who continue to inspire and sustain me. For your honest and heartfelt responses to the work in progress, thank you to Chris Kilgore, Sandra Grayson, Rashaan Meneses, Michelle Dicinoski, Nicholas Leither, Nancy M. Williams, Koko Petitt, Stephanie Miller, Norman Partridge, Helen Bonner, Glenna Breslin, Casi Kushel, Bridget Hanna, William Newton, and Carol Lashof. Thank you to Naomi Schwartz who read and reread with such care and kept me writing when my faith deserted me.

  Thank you to agent extraordinaire, BJ Robbins, and to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers for introducing us. Thank you to Bronwen Hruska of Soho Press for your patience and unwavering enthusiasm, and to my editor, Mark Doten, for his brilliant insights. Thank you to Rachel Kowal and the whole Soho team for your steadfast support. Special thanks to Cathy Volmer, my mom, my lending library, my f irst and last reader, my friend and guide in all things.