Mistress Suffragette

by Diana Forbes

  “On stage she’s magnificent,” I huffed. “But in back rooms, it’s a different matter.” I described in lurid detail how Verdana had loitered in the bathroom, close enough to pounce.

  “Are you sure she wasn’t just teasing?” Lucinda said, still panting to keep up with me. My friend’s detective faculties had failed her, but it wasn’t her fault. The Boston air must have scrambled her brain. The Harbor threw up its fishy odors late in the afternoon; and today in the heat it was difficult to concentrate on anything save for the smell. It didn’t matter that we were miles from the Harbor, in the fanciest part of town, lined with buildings sporting balustrades like architectural décolletage. The smell hung about everywhere.

  Yet somehow, in spite of this distraction, I needed to make my friend focus on my problem. Placing both hands on my hips, I turned to her. Behind me, competing horse-cars clanked and clattered. The city was congested—with horses, carriages, trolleys, and pedestrians all trying to ignore each other. It was bedlam.

  “Tell me something, please. Why—toward what end?”

  Lucinda’s eyes batted the way they did when she was combing through important matters of psychology. “To make you react,” she offered after some reflection. “To force you to find out more.”

  I clucked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I didn’t want to be lured. “She should lure you,” I said.

  I grabbed Lucinda’s arm as we crossed a busy thoroughfare where horses, pedestrians, and horse-drawn carriages all quarreled for the right of way. A horse pulling a carriage neighed at Lucinda, a stallion no doubt.

  “I’m already a believer,” said Lucinda.

  “Well, I’m not,” I said, once we were safely to the other side of the street. “So, why chase after the disinterested?”

  She stopped, laying her hand on my wrist. Her eyelashes did their magic trick, batting furiously as she battled to put her supposition into words.

  “You held the stage today.” She pumped her arms at me emphatically. “Don’t you see? She wants you—for your speaking abilities.”

  I laughed, relieved that was all she thought it was. I tried to convince Lucinda to accompany me. I had an inkling it would take both of us to make the argument that she was the one better suited for suffrage employment.

  “Thank you kindly,” Lucinda said. “I’m much obliged, but I can’t. I volunteered to hand out programs to a lecture on ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women.’” She tossed back her dark tresses.

  Just then a lady in a giant, plum-colored hat brushed by me, and I detected the scent of Linden Bloom perfume. A vision of Mrs. Daggers appeared before my eyes. All at once I was back at the Chateau-sur-Mer ball, venturing with her husband into that deserted room. A Church bell sounded, coinciding with a warning bell in my head: I should not visit Verdana alone.

  “Isn’t ‘Vindication’ a hundred years old?” I asked, questioning its relevance.

  “Older.” Lucinda paused and pointed to a horse-drawn carriage stopped a few feet ahead of us on West Newton Street. A spry, dark-haired man jumped from the carriage and held the door open with one hand while he helped a tall lady with magnificent posture into the main cabin with his other hand. While she gathered her long skirts to step inside, her hat, a narrow, high headpiece with crushed satin and ostrich feathers, flew off her head. He ran off to retrieve her hat, yelling for someone inside the carriage to hold open the door for her. A young boy jumped out to assist.

  Lucinda cupped her hand over her eyes to better follow the hat’s progression in the foggy glare. “But look how little has changed for us,” she pointed out.

  The feathered headgear landed on top of a fence.

  “He’s just being a gentleman,” I said, watching as the man gallantly rescued the hat from an intrepid woodpecker.

  “And she’s just being a lady who can’t run after her hat because her legs are trapped under yards and yards of tulle. If women don’t use their legs, then why do they have them?”

  “Lucinda, is that a riddle?” It sounded vaguely Darwinian.

  “More like God’s joke. He gives us legs, but doesn’t let us use them. Maybe we should all become fish instead. Women should evolve.”

  “Into fish?”

  “Into creatures who use their legs. That’s all Verdana is trying to get across in her own crazy way.”

  The man jumped back into the carriage. I watched it clatter away, then considered my friend so keen to join the Movement. Hand on my heart, I promised her I’d prevail: I would persuade Verdana to hire her.

  “You’d do that?” Lucinda asked, looking elated.

  “I will sing your praises to the moon,” I shouted, flinging my arms into the air, “if it will convince her to hire you over me.”

  Chapter 10

  Fifth Cousins

  Wednesday, June 7, 1893

  Verdana lived in that section of Boston’s South End where artists, social Christians, and radicals were tolerated, if not downright embraced. As I reached her decrepit alley, I hesitated. The buildings on her block looked narrow and squeezed together. Perhaps Mother was right about the suffragettes. When people lived in close proximity like this, maybe dangerous notions spread faster—like cholera.

  Why was Lucinda so besotted with this Movement, I wondered? And if she was, shouldn’t she have come here with me? Warily, I knocked on the thin, wooden door. No one answered. I rapped a second time. Again, no response. Picturing how crushed she would be if I turned around and left, I simply twisted the knob and let myself in. I heard murmuring sounds and wondered why Verdana hadn’t told us this was a party.

  A smoky fog of pipe tobacco and burnt bacon clouded the foyer. But peering down through the haze was a face I’d recognize anywhere, and it didn’t look pleased to see me.

  “Sam Haven?” I stared straight into my cousin’s eyes. I saw my own astonishment mirrored in his stricken face. My mind went blank, empty. We both stood for a second, taking in the other.

  He looked taller and harder, as if someone had sculpted from the old Sam this newer, crueler model. Grudgingly, he let me inside and closed the apartment door.

  Pale blue eyes glared at me. “At least I told you I was headed to Boston,” he said. “But your whereabouts are apparently a mystery.”

  Dear Lord, would Sam chastise me for not telegraphing him about my every move? If he wanted all the mundane details, he should have married me.

  He stooped over me and gently shook my shoulders. “Your vanity never ceases to astound. I’m interested in our family.”

  “You stay away from my family.” I shrugged off my silk stole and handed it to him to hang in the nearby coat closet. Ever since the incident with Edgar Daggers, I was reluctant to venture near any sort of enclosed space, even in broad daylight.

  Sam stared at my stole as if it were a loathsome animal, but slung it over a closet hook.

  “And this.” I pushed my pink silk hat into his bony hands.

  He frowned at the hat—maybe pink wasn’t his color—and tossed it onto a closet shelf. Looming over me with his pomaded hair and derisive smirk, perhaps weighing whether or not to let me further inside, Sam clucked his tongue against his teeth, a new, and most annoying, affectation.

  “Your sister assured me not two days ago,” Cluck, “that you were staying with the Daggerses.” Cluck. “Why aren’t you? Lydia told me they’d offered you a position as his secretary. And would pay you excellent money to attend to him.”

  I was most eager to change the conversational direction.

  “And how is it you know Verdana?” I asked.

  His eyes shifted to one side, avoiding mine. Cluck. “Uh—I met her at a speech. She’s one of the Movement’s leaders.”

  Yes, all true. But what was he doing here—in her apartment? “Are you part of the Movement?” I prodded.

  His eyes focused on an invisible speck above my head. “Yes,” he answered, his strong voice reduced to a whisper.

  I crossed my arms. “Really? You care de
eply about Rational Dress? Bustle, no bustle, or bloomer?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”

  Oh, how I disagreed! When bumping into a former fiancé, wearing a coat of sarcasm was most fetching. I tried to wedge past him into the narrow hallway that led to Verdana’s parlor. But, thin as Sam was, there wasn’t room to pass unless he chose to scoot out of the way. The bustle of my pink dress was small, but still too large for the narrow passageway. I swished to the right, then to the left, but Sam seemed disinclined to move.

  He licked his lips. “Er—Lydia said—”

  “Lydia?” I echoed, furious. “You seem to be talking to my sister a lot then. Still hanging around, Sam, in case my father’s prospects take a turn for the better?”

  Sam turned a shade of beet, but restrained any outbursts as proper decorum mandated. His mouth dropped open and his eyes started to blink rapidly, as if searching for the right set of admonishments with which to berate me. “I don’t love Lydia,” he sputtered. “I’m with—”

  “Verdana!” I cried, suddenly spotting her short red hairdo bobbing behind him.

  “Hallo, hallo, hallo,” Verdana shouted happily, as she galloped down the passageway to join us amid the clip clop sounds of her heavy boots. Wearing unflattering white bloomers that ballooned from her hips to her ankles and a giant shapeless tunic over the monstrous pants, she looked like a fat, red-haired Greek god. Her colorless eyes seemed to grow each time I beheld her.

  Verdana turned to him. “Sweetie, this is the woman I told you about.”

  Sweetie?

  Sam chewed his lip as if it were a wad of tobacco. “Don’t believe a word she says, lovey.”

  Lovey?

  Verdana gently elbowed him to mind his manners, then leaned over and whispered in his ear something I could almost make out, involving Penelope, escape, Boston, and a man.

  “Pshaw!” said Sam. “She concocts a man to assuage her bruised feelings.”

  “Sam, please,” Verdana said. Her voice sounded like cigarettes, toasted and warm with a slight tickle in the throat. She jovially placed her plump arm around his thin waist.

  Sam said, “I was with Penelope a week ago at Chateau-sur-Mer. She was there without a prospect in sight.”

  “My cousin exaggerates,” I said drily.

  “You two are cousins?” Verdana playfully punched him on the arm. “You never told me you had such a delightful cousin. What a funny man you are, hiding her away.”

  “She’s only a fifth cousin,” Sam mumbled.

  Glaring at him, I crossed my arms.

  “But she’s a good fifth cousin,” he added hastily.

  Verdana’s face brightened like the sun. “Fifth cousins? I declare, what will they think of next?” She smiled at Sam. She turned to me, stretched out her left hand, and stared at her stubby fingers. They looked like short, white sticks. “Penelope, Sam’s my beau. We may have some big news to share soon.”

  Beau? Dear Lord.

  Had he been secretly attached to her while openly engaged to me? Or had he just made a new plan once my father’s business had crashed? Surely, the latter. And yet he’d seemed almost too relieved to be done with me. I thought back to the afternoon he’d called on me in Newport—only a few days after breaking my heart.

  Only the slow ticking sounds of the mantelpiece clock punctuated the silence in the White Room. At length, he asked if I’d read about the Panic in any of the newspapers.

  “Mother would prefer for us to read the Ladies Home Journal,” I said.

  “That’s charming, Cousin,” said Sam. “But each day there’s some new invention, a fire, a strike, or some change in the railway system which it behooves us to know.”

  “Us? There is no us anymore.”

  He said, “Our parents would bind us under a certain set of assumptions—all of which turned out to be false. But now we’re both free. Seize your freedom, and I’ll seize mine.”

  “What news?” I whispered, terrified to hear the answer I already knew in my heart. My cousin was the last person in the universe who should be enrolled in a Divinity program. What did they teach him at Harvard: how to lie and cheat?

  “We’re engaged,” Verdana squealed. “Ooh, but it’s secret,” she said, bringing her hand up to her mouth and glancing sideways at Sam. “We’ve been waiting for Sam to graduate before announcing it. I proposed to him last October, but he just accepted two weeks ago.” She clasped my hand. “Oh, I know I just met you, darling, but you have such a spark, I had to tell you.”

  I threw back my shoulders and tossed my hair away from my face, hoping I could shed my bruised feelings as readily. I would have traded any hardship—my sister’s cruel jokes, even being spurned at the ball—to avoid this one moment of abject humiliation. He might have used me, but I would be damned if I’d let him use her. “Tell me, Verdana,” I said, taking great care to draw out each word. “Does your father happen to be a banker by any chance?”

  Sam gasped, turning quite white.

  Verdana’s childlike eyes beheld me with wonderment. Still clutching her so-called fiancé on the left, she drew me toward her on the right and kissed me full on the lips. Her mouth, laced with a hint of tobacco, felt softer and less urgent than Edgar Daggers’s, more like a butterfly’s wings fluttering against the surface of my lips than a real kiss. The sensation was not altogether terrible. But, as I started to move my lips away from hers, I felt her lips clamp onto mine ever so briefly, and I felt trapped.

  I pulled away, tracing my index finger over my lips, trying to soothe them as if they had been burned. How very wrong Lucinda had been about her! Verdana certainly had tried to kiss me down in the baths.

  “Why, you brilliant thing,” she bubbled. “Not only are you a gifted public speaker, it seems you’re a psychic.” By her cheery grin, I suspected her father worked at one of the few banks still thriving during the Panic.

  I cast a glance at Sam. He looked as unruffled as a statue.

  Taking me by the hand, Verdana led me into her parlor, which resembled a tiny, cramped museum. Framed suffrage mementos lined the beige walls, including cartoons, yellow ribbons and sashes, a humorous card featuring Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s face on a giant neck bearing a shield with the legend Women’s Rights, an old poster of Belva Lockwood’s bid for president, and something resembling sheet music. The room’s moldings were painted purple—a color I’d come to associate with the Movement.

  The vibrant parlor held twenty chairs, arranged in rows with a short aisle, in the lecture house manner. Perhaps ten of the audience members were the same bonneted women from Verdana’s previous talk, but there were several new recruits as well. Four men also graced the room.

  Verdana lectured the small group about the evils of ladylike dress and then called on me to defend the blasted dress code, the better to demolish my arguments later.

  I strode to the front of the room and said, “The way a woman dresses is not a reflection of her character. Just because a corset cinches a woman’s waist does not mean she dresses solely to gain a man’s approval.”

  My eyes traveled around the room, focusing on each face, stopping cold at Sam’s.“Rather than fretting about Irrational dress,” I pressed, “we should concern ourselves with what is irrational in our society, which to me is that all the men seem to earn a living while all the women sit at home fussing about whether their parlors will pass inspection. We’re taught to want nothing more. A woman who reads Milton is considered undesirable. She can’t even have a mind. We’re at men’s mercy. But how often do they protect us…when, say, there’s a Panic? No, then we’re supposed to protect them.”

  I pointed to Sam and raised my voice. “Some men will do anything for money during this economic Panic, seeking to use women for their connections to the banking industry, for example. And that’s just plain wrong.”

  Everyone in the tiny parlor clapped except for Sam. His face turned as purple as the moldings on the parlor walls as he became preoccupied with cracking the kn
uckles of his right hand. It felt so very good to shame him.

  As the audience continued to express its appreciation, I felt a surge of energy—as if I could run a mile and not lose a beat. A smile pulled at my cheeks. Somehow, taking the stage had given me a voice that had been mute. Give me a stage, and I could air my frustrations, humiliate the man who’d trodden on my feelings, and rail against the Panic—all while defending my beloved corsets. Give me a stage, and I could rise above life’s jolts and maybe even impart that resilience to others. I truly felt free to say anything. And I had a lot more to say, but remembered that I’d been told to leave them wanting more. I hadn’t intended on enjoying public speaking at all, and wondered—now that I’d finally warmed to it—if I should be quite so quick to give it up. Why search for employment in a foreign city if I could do this, be good at it, and get paid for it?

  I wandered into the dining area, collecting a plateful of burnt bacon. On the windowsill sat an ashtray with the Votes for Women motto. Verdana and Sam approached, arms linked, looking for all the world like two men in love. He—his callous disregard for my feelings was infuriating! But what if Lucinda had been right about Verdana? What if she had kissed me only to lure me to the cause?

  “You were wonderful, dear girl,” Verdana said, a grin spreading over her face. She promised she’d call on me within a day or so to tell me how I might help the Movement.

  Curtsying, I thanked her for giving me the opportunity and told her my address. But as I straightened my knees and lifted my head, I suddenly remembered my earlier promise. Could this fledgling Movement support us both? I had a feeling not. Still, a promise was a promise. And unlike Sam, I honored mine. I urged Verdana to spend more time with Lucinda, by all accounts the most passionate suffragette I had ever met. Verdana listened politely, but didn’t appear to be all that interested in my friend.

  “I, too, will see you on West Newton Street,” Sam said.