by Diana Forbes
“Don’t bother,” I told him.
And yet, as he and Verdana stood together, arms entwined, I felt her colorless eyes peruse my face, studying it with a ferocity that made me squirm.
“Perhaps you’d both be kind enough to visit me together,” I chimed, thinking that if only the Daggerses had stayed together at the ball, I would not have been the unwitting victim of Edgar’s sexual appetite.
Couples should always stay together, like salt and pepper shakers.
Chapter 11
A Boston Marriage
Thursday, June 8, 1893
Naturally Sam ignored my one stipulation. He came alone.
Sporting a light gray summer frock coat with a red silk vest peeking out, he looked every bit the dandy. Where had he obtained the money to dress like a gentleman?
“Why, if it isn’t Beau Brummell of Boston,” I said, only half in jest.
Smirking, Sam handed me his gray bowler hat to put aside for him in the parlor closet. “Why are you here?” he asked, crinkling his short nose like a rabbit, “and living like this?”
His pale blue eyes flicked around the atrocious parlor. A water stain marred the light beige carpet, and he stopped in front of it to study the stain’s shape. This was exactly the sort of item I didn’t want him writing home about: The stain looked like a mangy cat, Mrs. Stanton.
I considered asking him to sit down and stay, but the words wouldn’t come. He tapped his foot. I stared at it. He tapped it some more. Were we destined to tap dance around each other for the rest of eternity?
Unrecognizable was the man who’d untangled my kite at family picnics, walked me home from Easter egg hunts at The Elms, and once rescued me from a riptide.
He folded himself into a sad wing chair. Realizing his visit might last for a spell, I resigned myself to the threadbare couch across from him. I needed to distract him from my own miserable situation, and what better way than to focus on his?
“You’ve been busy,” I said. “First you pretend to be engaged to me, and now to Verdana.”
He ran a nervous hand through the dark wire atop his head. “You and I were never affianced,” he said, and then went on to try and persuade me how attached he was to her.
“She’s a man, Sam.”
He assured me that she possessed feminine attributes where they mattered most.
Studying the breakfront behind me, Sam jumped up from his chair. Stretching his bony hands toward a high shelf, he removed the one item of intrigue in the room: a large wooden box Father had brought back from Turkey for me to give Lucinda before the Panic made gift-giving obsolete. Crafted of light teak wood, the box boasted a pretty ivory inlay running across its top.
Sam unfastened the small gold clasp, peeked inside, and gasped. He pulled out a Colt .45 and gingerly held it up and away from him.
“A gun? Really? Do you have any idea how to use this?”
“I know it doesn’t have a safety catch. So, if I were you, I’d put it down gently.”
Father had taught me the rudiments of gun safety, though I hated firearms and thought handguns should be outlawed. There was also the matter of the invisible gun in my mother’s hand. I hadn’t liked that either.
Grimacing, Sam slid the pistol back in the box then cautiously lowered himself back down on the wing chair. He whispered, as if speaking at a normal level might make the gun go off by mistake, “You shouldn’t have it in the flat. Are you crazy?” He scrunched his face, reminding me of a younger, sterner version of my father. Sam frowned at the teak box now monopolizing the coffee table.
“It’s mine,” Lucinda said, sweeping into the parlor. She placed her hands on her slim hips. Her pretty yellow dress belied how tough she was. “I brought it to protect us—two women alone in a strange city.”
I glared at my former fiancé. Maybe I’d mind less if Lucinda would show me how to use it. Sam stood, waiting for Lucinda to extend her hand to him in greeting. But as she neglected to, he plopped back down on the couch without acknowledging her. Always a gentleman to the letter of the etiquette code, while thoroughly ignoring its spirit.
Sam ticked his head back and forth between us like a metronome. “You should have a man living here to protect you,” he said to me.
“You mean, the way you do?”
He stared at me with a pious gravitas he must have mastered at the Harvard Divinity School.
“I’ll go make tea,” Lucinda offered, bowing out to busy herself in the kitchen. The walls of the flat were so thin that I could hear her puttering around the small quarters, boiling water, trying to locate the cups and not sound as if she were listening to every word.
“Half the time, Verdana seems to be after me,” I told him.
“She’s just being playful.”
“She touches my corset in brazen places.” I ran my hands up and down my blouse, trying to shock him. I pantomimed her hands roaming my body in an intimate fashion. “What is that type of a relationship called here?”
“It’s called a ‘Boston marriage,’” he said, curling his upper lip, exposing one crooked tooth I’d never noticed before. “But that’s only once the two women are living together.” He cupped his hand to his mouth and deliberately raised his voice. “You and Lucinda should take care not to go everywhere together, or people will assume the two of you have formed this type of arrangement.”
“We haven’t,” she shrieked playfully from the kitchen.
By the incessant clanking of china cups, I knew she hung by the open door and eavesdropped on every word. I didn’t blame her. The whole gender mix-up situation in Boston was highly irregular. It was in the air—even the stuffy air of the cheapest flat on an expensive block.
I stared at my cousin. “I wish you and Verdana every happiness,” I said stiffly.
Sam’s lips settled into a half frown. He recited for me in rather excruciating detail the fact that her father provided her with a handsome allowance in addition to the living she earned from her speeches. He removed a magazine from the coffee table and fanned his square, disapproving face. “She would support me in a pleasant style,” he added.
“Tell me, Cousin, is there anything preventing you from supporting yourself? Are you sick or incapacitated? Has a head trauma stopped you from performing your ordinary functions?”
Lucinda poked her head into the parlor and managed a cheery “Hallo, there.” She carried a scuffed tray that held a green, chipped ceramic teapot, some cups, and a plate of ginger snaps. She arranged it all on a rough wooden end table. She held up her hand.
“I’m off to the Rational Dress Store to see if they need a new worker,” Lucinda announced. “I know I’m dressed irrationally, but that’ll change if they hire me!” Winking at us, she scurried out the door.
Sam started clucking at me. “And what about you, Cousin?” Cluck. “How do your employment prospects look now that you’ve turned down Mr. Daggers’s most generous offer?”
“I have no prospects.”
According to Sam, that would not deter my family from expecting my paycheck.
Looking into his eyes to make sure he understood, I explained that my father would need to wait for a long time. I’d set aside a little money to pay rent for a few months, nothing beyond. “I’m not working yet, and I won’t accept any position that’s untenable.”
“You have too much pride,” he said.
“And you don’t have enough.”
“I don’t need pride. I have Verdana.” He sipped his tea then bit into a ginger snap. He chewed the cookie greedily, then grabbed three more. He was an opportunist about cookies.
I set my cup on the shabby coffee table and stood, signaling our conversation was over.
“May you never need me to protect you,” he said.
I eyed Lucinda’s teak box. “Don’t worry. I aim for self-reliance.”
I was showing him out the front door when I spotted a shock of red hair three steps below. Verdana sprawled casually on the stoop, her large, rounded back
to us. Next to her stood a bottle of fish glue and an enormous stack of circulars in the same purple shade as some of the suffrage posters lining her parlor walls. Insufferable purple, Mother would have called the color. (Actually it was lilac.)
Looking across the lowly stoop, I noticed a purple circular affixed to an elm tree. I was like the elm, struggling to look natural under a label that didn’t fit. The sheet flapped in the breeze.
Verdana swiveled her boyish head, then stood up, wedging herself between Sam and me on the landing. Her shoulders were muscular while her body was rather square and compact, giving her the appearance of a redheaded box. She lunged her thick body toward me as if to kiss me again.
“Not today,” I said, waving her off. “I’ve come down with a cold.” I feigned a half-hearted cough.
“Dear girl, whatever you’ve got, I want it.” Verdana playfully slapped me on the buttocks, which shocked me even more than her kisses.
“Don’t mind Verdana,” said Sam, stifling a laugh. He massaged her shoulder. “She’s just friendly.”
She was so friendly that it gave me a new admiration for hermits. But at least she managed to make him tolerable. It was as if her good spirits rubbed off on him the way good luck rubs off an amulet. As he grazed her lips with his mouth, I got busy fidgeting with my puffed sleeve.
At last, Verdana stepped away from her paramour and directed her gaze at me. “You should come lecture with me about Rational and Irrational Dress,” she said, running her hand over my corseted bosom. “Wow. Feel that boning. I can’t believe you can breathe in there. Can you?”
She playfully “knocked” on the boning structure of my corset.
“It’s called a corset,” I said coldly. “It’s not a front door.”
Edging away from her, I counseled myself to keep breathing. Of course, corsets made breathing difficult. If I took too deep a breath, the stays from the corset would chafe against my torso. That’s what the Rational Dress Movement was trying to prevent.
I gripped the staircase railing, praying she’d keep her distance.
“And you like corsets a great deal, don’t you?” she asked, smiling.
Watching her bloomers waffle this way and that in the light breeze, I defended corsets’ best feature. “They make clothing lie right,” I said.
She laughed. “You say they’re practical. I say they’re unhealthy.” She clapped her plump hands together. “Ooh, we’ll be a sensation—you were great yesterday. We should continue to speak in Boston but also export our talk to stages across the country.” With her right hand, she drew an imaginary map in the air and pointed to various places on it. “You’ll get paid, and together we’ll be the eye of the suffrage storm.” On her air map, she identified a spot that looked like it was on the opposite coast—California? “That you and my betrothed are cousins makes the plan even better,” she said jovially. “We’ll be like the three musketeers.” She clasped her hands together and placed them over her heart. “The lecture circuit gives you many opportunities for your voice to be heard. You can expose the vile man who had his way with you.”
I paused. I had to set this matter straight. “No one had his way with me. He may have wanted to, but he failed.” I noticed Sam staring at me. Did he finally realize what had brought me to Boston? “Besides,” I said, “I fear that exposing him would bring down my family.”
“You give them too much credit,” Sam said, kicking a dust ball off the stair. “They don’t have far to fall.”
“Even so, since you profess to care so very much about our family, perhaps you could refrain from doing anything that would cause them further pain.” I softened my tone, pleading with him as best I knew how. “For instance, could you please keep my whereabouts to yourself?”
“Oh don’t worry, he will,” Verdana said, gently stroking his arm.
At this, Sam lifted his bowler hat at us, bowed stiffly and walked down the five steps to the dirt road below, leaving Verdana and me alone.
“He’s in a mood,” said Verdana, raising her hand vertically and waving him off with a slight twist of her wrist. “What do men really know about the cause, anyway?” She urged me to keep an open mind about corsets. She was certain my high opinion of them would plummet once I understood the Movement better. “But for now,” she continued, “if you travel the circuit with me and we debate Rational Clothing, I’ll split my earnings with you one-third; two-thirds. That is, I’ll make one dollar for each speech, and you’ll earn a half-dollar.”
I recalled the glow I’d experienced after my two speeches. Still, Lucinda was the one who truly cared about the cause. Couldn’t we both work for the Movement? It needed women, did it not? And here we were.
I said, “Actually, I recommend my friend, Lucinda, if you want a really passionate suffragette.”
“I don’t want Lucinda, I want you. And it’s suffragist.” Apparently the ‘ette’ was considered a grave insult.
“Suffragette, suffragist—I should think it’s an insult that you are Sam’s meal-ticket.”
She licked her lips as if her paramour’s weakness was a positive attribute.
I fixed her with my eyes. “How many posters did he help you put up today?”
She shrugged her large shoulders.
“Oh, that many,” I said.
“And how many speeches did Lucinda help you write?” Verdana asked.
I sighed.
“Oh, that many,” Verdana quipped.
I walked down a few steps, grabbed the bottle of glue and a purple sheet from the top of her pile and affixed the paper to the trunk of an elm tree, ignoring the grimace of a woolly-haired man passing by.
Now two adjacent trees were dressed in purple.
Next I rescued a purple broadsheet that had tumbled to the ground. Smiling, she gathered up her purple pile, and we started to weave our way through the neighborhood. Every five trees or so, we’d stop and paste a purple sheet to the trunk. The sheet announced a meeting of the New England Women’s Club to take place in a fortnight.
Verdana ironed a purple broadsheet onto a tree with her hand. She stopped to survey our progress. The stretch we’d canvassed looked very purple. “Let’s be honest,” she said, grabbing my arm with her iron vise. “It’s not every man who can tolerate a strong woman, but Sam can. He doesn’t flinch at my speechmaking or my crazy schedule. We have an untraditional arrangement.”
What did that mean, precisely? Did Verdana entertain secret friendships with women while he took ruthless advantage of her hospitality and her father’s money? Maybe Sam and Verdana were the ones with the Boston marriage!
I remembered when he’d told me he viewed our potential marriage as an alliance. But the moment my country’s treasury was empty, he’d formed a new treaty with another country. Even if they were perfectly suited for each other, I wanted the treaty between them dissolved.
“Marriage is for better or worse,” I said, pressing my shoulder against a stubborn circular that wouldn’t stick. “He’s only for better. Doesn’t that frighten you?”
She sighed. “Penelope, women like me don’t have many options. Before Sam, men avoided me…” she jabbed her thumb at her boxy, windowpane jacket, “due to my appearance. And women…” She stared at me for a long moment. “Society turns up its nose at alternative arrangements.”
She winked at me with one of her large colorless eyes. It was as if all of the color had drained out of them and flooded into her personality.
I crossed my arms. “You do know that until last month he was engaged to me?”
“That only proves he has impeccable taste in women,” she said with a laugh. She latched her hand onto my arm and leaned her mouth to my ear. “I didn’t mean to tease,” she whispered. “Sometimes a woman like me needs a man around to quell doubts.”
I made a chopping motion with the side of my right hand against my left palm to show we need not pursue this further. “He just left me for a better arrangement. I feel no ill will toward you, only him.”
>
Verdana gave me an awkward hug. “I’m sure it must hurt, but I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Work with me, and you’ll have a speaking career and help hundreds of women find their power.” She lavishly complimented my oratory skills, then ran her fingers through her short locks. “Plus we both have red hair—an asset that will be difficult for audiences to ignore.”
“Yes, but Lucinda has passion for the cause.” I held up one of the leaflets like a flag and marched a few steps like a toy soldier. “Surely one’s heart is more important than one’s hair.”
“What a spark you have.” Verdana nodded her boyish head at me. “You have a wonderful gift—one that can’t be taught.”
Verdana was brilliant at improvisation. When we reached a neighbor’s row house without a tree, she tacked a purple notice onto the fence. When we passed a building without a tree or a fence, she pasted the notices onto the hand railing. When a lady walked out of a building without a railing, Verdana insisted we follow her for five blocks until she turned around. Then Verdana handed her the purple sheet and asked her to come to the meeting. Verdana was the one with the gift.
We papered the neighborhood in purple. As the pile of sheets in her hands dwindled, she tapped me on the shoulder and urged me to consider her offer. I promised her that I would. And fortunately, that promise was not sealed with a kiss.
That night, a rattling sound in the parlor woke me. Was it the front door? Was it being jimmied open? I held my pillow up to my chest. There was a loud click, and then the door creaked. Heavy footsteps battered the parlor floorboards. I leapt from my bed, crept the five steps to my door, and pressed my ear against it. The wood felt cold to my ear. My breath caught in my throat as I recalled Lucinda’s gun without the safety catch. Why hadn’t I thought to stash the weapon in my room? What if he found the gun and murdered us? We had a burglar, and now we’d both be killed.
Soundlessly, I cracked open the door to my chamber to assess the activity in the adjacent parlor. By the sliver of moonlight glancing through the window, I could identify that the intruder was male. I was perhaps four feet away from him and prayed he’d keep his back turned to me.
