American Follies

by Norman Lock

  He was referring to the stampede on Decoration Day, 1883; two opposing juggernauts of pedestrians in their thousands met midway on the span. Twelve people were trampled to death, and many others injured in the panic incited by a woman who screamed, “The bridge is falling down!”

  Barnum rang his crystal goblet with a gold spoon smeared with sherbet and invited us to toast America. “The woebegone and the small-minded say that America is nearly finished; her imperial days are fast coming to an end. We had our moment, and the moment has passed. In the future, it will be said of us that we were alive in the age of America’s greatness and fortunate to have been so, for that age and that greatness are like a book closed forever and shrouded in dust.

  “My reply to the skeptics and cynics, the defeatists and naysayers, is that America is only beginning, that a continent is waiting for us to conquer and bestride. Do you believe that the frontier is closed because a few scholars say that it is so—men who have ventured no farther than the margins of their books? Do you believe that the American character will content itself with land north of the Río Grande, when the whole of Mexico remains an unplucked fruit? We will take Mexico, and hardly stopping for breath, we will take all the territory south of it that is worth having. The more we take, the larger our appetite will become, until the land beyond the Great Lakes is absorbed into the nation’s growing body. Natural science tells us that the more massive an object, the more powerful is its sway over lesser objects. America will possess that massiveness, and she will exert a force far stronger than that of any foreign power. We will take Cuba. We will take the Philippines. We will take Hawaii and the other islands of the Pacific and the South Atlantic. We will take Japan and China. America is destined to be the Greatest Show on Earth. Our borders will be boundless, our wealth incalculable; and our end will come only when the Earth itself has perished. Ladies, I give you America!”

  I could tell that Elizabeth and Susan were reluctant to drink to the health of a country so much at variance with their principles. Susan opened her mouth, no doubt to ask Barnum what place women would occupy in the glorious epoch, but she said nothing. I wish I could say that we refused to toast the America that Barnum, in his megalomania, foresaw. We were weary of argument. I wanted to take Martin home to Maiden Lane and wait for news of Franklin. I hoped he was on his way from San Francisco with the promise of a job and not in Sing Sing, taking an icy shower as punishment for a violent act of anarchy, or on a cold mortuary table in the Dead House on First Avenue. We emptied our glasses but forbore to break them against the bulkhead in emulation of the showman’s bravado. At that moment, our nerves would’ve given way at the sound of shattering glass.

  Leaning back in the captain’s chair, Barnum confided in us his grand ambition: “I dream of a circus without tents or high wires, elephants or chariots, scientific fencers or contortionists, bareback riders or trombonists, peanuts or eccentrics—all but mon petit chou Margaret, who is indispensable to Barnum.” She nodded her head in acknowledgment. “A circus that originates in the brain of Barnum, whose thoughts Madame Singleton and Eugenia Roux would transmit to impressionable minds throughout the universe. Barnum would sit in his Moorish palace, which exists, though it was reduced to ashes almost thirty years ago, and astonish the world with a spectacle beyond the wildest dreams of Manius Valerius Maximus or Tarquin the Proud. The Rape of the Sabine Women at Circus Maximus was small potatoes compared to what Barnum can conceive.”

  “Women have made little progress since the Romans lorded it over the ancient world,” said Elizabeth with something akin to dejection in her voice, rare for one of the great optimists of the age.

  “Ah, but Barnum adores women, and in his dreams, he will exalt them!”

  At the heart of the submarine, the great engine spun a silver thread of sound into a radiant cocoon bathed in Pythagoras’s music of the spheres. I closed my eyes and opened them. Had the ravaged oyster shells and the puddles of lemon sherbet in the spoons not been replaced by ham and eggs, I could’ve sworn that I had merely blinked. We women sat and rubbed our eyes and gazed in wonder at the table set for breakfast.

  “I must have fallen asleep,” said Susan groggily.

  “My watch stopped,” said Elizabeth, winding the stem.

  “You were saying,” said Barnum, his head turned to Margaret.

  “What news of my friends?”

  He put down his fork. “Mrs. Stoner has a new snake. Miss Etta has a new trick. Poor Mattie Elliott dislocated her hip. Eugenia Roux’s cold is no better. Mr. Dode is in Bellevue, suffering from delusions.”

  “And Gallagher?” asked Susan, showing her teeth.

  “Sacked.”

  “Good!” said Susan.

  “He was overzealous in his duties.”

  A boatswain’s whistle shrilled.

  “We’ve arrived in New York Bay. Shall we go up on desk?”

  We stood in the bow, grateful to breathe fresh air. I licked my lip and tasted brine. How delicious! I thought. We steamed past Castle Garden, where emigrants waited with their trunks to be admitted to a much greater and graver circus than any hippodrome, one that will require them to jump through hoops of fire, snatch a living with their teeth, and walk a tightrope high above the most desperate straits.

  We disembarked at Canal Street and were free to take up our lives once more (as free as women could be, which was hardly at all). We had one last duty to perform for our benefactor: to ride in his parade across the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d saved us, and we couldn’t well refuse him. I remembered his prophecy of the American century to come as a dream that dissolved on the morning air.

  On Saturday, May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum, having exchanged his commodore’s uniform for that of a ringmaster, kept his promise to his public and led a menagerie from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Jumbo, together with twenty lesser elephants, and a caravan of camels sauntered across the Roeblings’ magnificent bridge, followed by Robinson’s Celebrated Band. Elizabeth, Susan, Margaret, and I sat regally on the backs of four Indian elephants. Elizabeth had bought a turban and commissioned a pair of Turkish pants for the occasion. From on high, she nodded graciously to the spectators, who cheered her lustily, as if, for more than thirty years, she had not been the object of their scorn. Less flamboyant, Susan wore her gray dress and scowled at the multitude from the shadow of her coalscuttle bonnet. Draped over the side of her elephant, a red banner demanded VOTES FOR WOMEN. Having shown great courage, my suffragists had a right to their eccentricities. Sober-sided Emerson had enjoyed pulling pranks, and in his day, clodhopper Thoreau would dance like a man visited by a fit of ecstasy.

  Midway across the prodigious span of steel and stone, I seemed to see Herman Melville and Mr. James standing arm in arm.

  As we crossed into Brooklyn, Edison photographed the spectacle from the roof of the old ferry house. Look closely at the picture, and you’ll see four women perched on lumbering pachyderms. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is singing the women’s anthem “Daughters of Freedom,” Susan B. Anthony is pretending to be displeased by Barnum’s folly, Margaret Fuller Hardesty is blowing kisses to the crowd, and Ellen Finch is gazing at little Martin asleep in the crook of his father’s arm.

  One Last Shuffle & Good Night

  MAY 2, 1904, THE PRESIDIO, SAN FRANCISCO

  Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.

  —Dr. Charles Meigs, obstetrician,

  Jefferson Medical College,

  at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, I LOST MY WITS to childbed fever, much less common now that the nabobs of medicine have acknowledged Pasteur’s discovery that pullulating matter and not miasma spreads infection. At the time of my lying-in, obstetricians delivered one baby on the heels of the next, their hands unwashed and their frock coats stiff with gore. Women might have been laboring in a sty instead of a hospital. In one, I was delivered of my own small vitality, squalling with pent-up rage against the assumption of an existence that was doomed to end. I ex
pelled my child into a pair of gentleman’s hands rudely tugging at my womb, a violence that caused it to wander into hysteria and madness. (I never mentioned my wandering womb to Mr. James, who would have bullied me into describing every nuance of sensation that I had experienced, for the sake of his literary ambition.)

  This recounting I have undertaken, like the agony attendant on creation, with its elements of shame and folly, is for my lost son. Martin, I never saw you! For all I know—or care!—you were a mulatto babe gotten on me by one of God’s black angels. All this long time, I have been yearning for you. The cards are against us, shuffle them as we will! I have been apostrophizing a ghost.

  I look out the window onto Golden Gate Park. Beyond its green sward and eucalyptus trees, the ocean wets the Orient’s ragged hem and our own. Its contrary motions are regulated by the moon, which is said to be feminine. The resolution of contrarieties in nature comforts me.

  I hear your father at the door. With an ink-stained hand, he will take one of mine and quietly—he is a silent man—wait with me by the window for the coming of the night.

  A Note to Readers

  I DO NOT CLAIM TO HAVE WRITTEN A NOVEL about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, great and necessary American women as they continue to be. Although they are alive in every page of the book, they are no more its subject than Henry James, P. T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Jacob Riis, or Alma Bridwell White, figures in Ellen Finch’s dream of late-nineteenth-century America. I wrote of the nightmare that was, and is, America for the disenfranchised and powerless. How better to describe it than from inside a febrile mind? Ellen saw through a glass darkly and knew it to be the truth. How better to portray race relations in America in her day and ours than as a minstrel show? The section headings “Overture,” “Cakewalk,” “Intermission,” “Olio,” and “One Last Shuffle & Good Night” are intended to suggest that detestable, but hugely popular, theatrical form of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, which did much to engrain racial stereotypes in the national consciousness.

  I ask the pardon of students of, and activists in, the American woman’s movement for sometimes finding comedy where none was to be found. One of my purposes in writing the books of the American Novels series (American Follies is the seventh) is to humanize those who have left the turbulence of public and private life behind them and gone into the silence where great women and men can become mere reputations, legends, and sacred emblems. Humankind is best served by human beings—glorious and inglorious.

  I have taken a novelist’s liberties with the biographer’s truth. For example, at the time of my story, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony were not in America. Also, while they worked on the early volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (aided by the radical suffragists Matilda Joslyn Gage and Ida Husted), they stayed at Mrs. Stanton’s home in Tenafly, New Jersey, and not in Murray Hill. I quoted from Stanton and Gage’s incendiary Woman’s Bible, which was not published until 1895 and resulted in the former’s being disavowed by many of her allies, who viewed the book as either a sacrilege or a distraction from the immediate business of obtaining rights for women. I allowed the two suffragists of my story greater familiarity than was the case; in public and even in their correspondence, Susan referred to Elizabeth as “Mrs. Stanton.” Frequently, I treated them as if their views on how the cause could be advanced were interchangeable; they were not.

  Although I have occasionally brought forward or pushed back events in Mrs. Stanton’s and Miss Anthony’s lives, to my knowledge I have not referenced historical events that occurred after 1904, the year of Ellen Finch’s narration. There are two exceptions: The Klan did not adopt the white robe and hood until the second decade of the twentieth century, when D. W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation and the advent of mail-order catalogues standardized the image that has come down to the present day. (While writing the Memphis section, I had in mind Philip Guston’s Klansmen paintings.) As for the second exception, Alma Bridwell White, founder and bishop of the Pillar of Fire Church in Zarephath, New Jersey, was a zealot of the Klan during the 1920s and 1930s. (At that time, New Jersey had sixty thousand Klan members, more than Louisiana, Alabama, or Tennessee.)

  In its telling, Ellen Finch’s story smacks more of Barnum and Mark Twain than Stanton and Anthony. Both of those men found a truth about our kind in the grotesque and the absurd. Ellen stumbled on it as the result of a postpartum infection following the birth of her son, Martin. (Whether he was stillborn or is a figment of Ellen’s imagination, I leave to the reader to decide.) Delirium is only another lens through which to view the world. What is seen and heard under its influence may have a dreadful significance—and truth—all its own.

  In “The Solitude of Self,” the farewell address to the movement she helped to found, Mrs. Stanton posed this question: “Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?” Although it was meant to admonish men to respect woman’s sovereignty, we can, from our vantage, reply that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dared to take responsibility for disadvantaged human beings. We can only admire their courage and compassion.

  Acknowledgments

  I RELIED ON LORI D. GINZBERG’S fair-minded and fascinating biography Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life for information concerning significant events in the American woman’s rights movement and, in particular, its two celebrities, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose complex personalities I have attempted to capture despite the exaggerations of a satirical novel. The words spoken in the novel by Stanton and Anthony are largely of my own invention. Stanton’s invidious comparison of women’s nonexistent right to vote with the rights of black, “lunatic,” and “idiot” males of the time is borrowed from one of her many writings on the subject. The second and third paragraphs of her otherwise-fictional letter to Julia Ward Howe were drawn from Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. The passage beginning “If a woman finds it hard to bear the oppressive laws of a few Saxon Fathers” is also hers. So, too, are her interrogatories to the New York State legislature concerning infanticide. Stanton’s and Anthony’s “last words” in New Orleans were taken from the former’s “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States.” Students of the woman’s movement may recognize—and pardon—other instances of my “appropriation,” which are on behalf of the continuing and universal struggle for equality.

  In addition, I consulted Laurie Robertson-Lorant’s Melville and David McCullough’s The Great Bridge. For the structure and vocabulary of a minstrel show, I referred to Brander Matthew’s A Book About the Theatre, published in 1916.

  I credit Emily Holmes Coleman’s extraordinary novel The Shutter of Snow (1930) with having made me aware of the complex delusional world created by puerperal fever and, because of her brave mining of her own temporary insanity, its literary and comic possibilities. (That remark would have infuriated Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony, were they still among us, and may well incense every living woman who has born a child. Having made it, I am no better than Henry James, who was curious about Ellen’s wandering womb!)

  I remain indebted to Bellevue Literary Press, especially to Erika Goldman, its publisher and editorial director, for having given a home to my American novels. My thanks, as well, to Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., founding publisher; Elana Rosenthal, former associate editor; Molly Mikolowski, publicist; Joe Gannon, production and design consultant; and Carol Edwards, my perspicacious copyeditor. My gratitude to my wife, Helen, is as constant as her support during the past fifty years.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NORMAN LOCK is the award–winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His most recent books are the short story collection Love Among the Particles and six previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a reenvisioning of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Scott Simon of NPR Weekend Edition said, “make[s] Huck and Jim s
o real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone”; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; The Port-Wine Stain, featuring Edgar Allan Poe, which was also a Firecracker Award finalist; A Fugitive in Walden Woods, a tale that introduced readers to Henry David Thoreau in a book Barnes & Noble selected as a “Must-Read Indie Novel”; The Wreckage of Eden, a story evoking the life and artistry of Emily Dickinson; and Feast Day of the Cannibals, featuring Herman Melville in a dark tale of ambition and the secrets of the heart.

  Lock has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

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