Mistress Suffragette

by Diana Forbes

  Panicked, Verdana and I raced back up to the shop. The youth volunteered to find a doctor in town and left the premises on bicycle. Up high on one of the shelves, Verdana spotted a large metal bowl that she filled with cool water from a sink in the back.

  “Do you see anything that looks like a rag?” she asked.

  “There must be,” I said, tapping my fingers against a wall and trying to avoid knocking into the hundreds of one-wheeled, two-wheeled, and four-wheeled versions of bicycles stuffed into the tiny space. We poked around, peeking in random cubbyholes and on top of shelves. There were hammers, wrenches, even an ax, but not a rag in sight.

  She pointed to my dress. “Excess fabric works as a rag,” she said, handing me a small knife that she found.

  I hesitated. I’d never be able to afford to replace the dress. Then I considered the young man whom Mother had toppled, no doubt badly injured. This was no time to fret about fashion. I tore the top layer of muslin from my skirt, and, using the knife, started to cut the cloth into strips. The material scratched and pulled. Both the fabric and me were being rent away from our former lives. I plunged the knife into the muslin and continued to tear away. With our hands full of fabric strips, Verdana and I dashed down the knoll and onto the short dirt road below to offer our assistance.

  As luck would have it, Mother didn’t have a scrape. She hadn’t even fallen off her quadracycle. But she’d knocked the young man onto the road and, oblivious to his pain, seemed to be in the process of interviewing him as my next potential suitor from her quadracycle perch.

  “So, you’re four years older than my daughter?” Mother rubbed the palms of her hands together.

  He grunted.

  “What brings you to Boston?” she continued.

  “Leave him alone,” I cried. “This isn’t a ball.”

  “The prodigal daughter returns,” Mother said, fixing me with a look. She pointed to her newest victim. “Penelope, meet Stone Aldrich.”

  Unfortunately, Mr. Aldrich lay crashed to the ground, safety bicycle by his side, with blood oozing from a nasty gash in his head. Along the crown, smaller scrapes had etched future scars. Near his hairline lay a jagged rock that I suspected had inflicted most of the damage. He wore rounded spectacles with iron rims, one of the lenses crinkled into an accordion fold of cracks and fissures.

  He held up his hand in a mock impersonation of a handshake. “Hello,” he murmured with a grimace.

  Verdana favored us with a quick update on the shop owner’s efforts to find a doctor. Until his arrival, she thought we should tidy up the patient. She gingerly removed his eyeglasses from his face and handed them to my mother. Squatting down on the dirt road, Verdana placed the bowl of water and strips of cloth near his head. Dipping some of the muslin into the water, she pressed the fabric against his forehead. The muslin strip quickly bloodied, and she laid it down on the dusty road.

  Mother dismounted from her quadracycle. “Let Penelope attend to him,” she rasped, shooing away Verdana. “Vertigo, be a dear, and take Mr. Aldrich’s bicycle and mine back to the shop.”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Stanton,” said Verdana with a smirk. “And it’s ‘Verdana.’”

  I approached the young man to take over the task. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “These ‘safety’ bicycles should be outlawed.” I told him all about my recent bicycle mishap, pointing out various leftover bruises. He tried to smile but winced.

  “Bruised and battered, you make a lovely pair,” Verdana offered with a chuckle. She picked up Stone Aldrich’s bike, set it upright, and started to roll it back up the knoll to the store.

  Mother pointed to Verdana’s retreating back. “She’s promised to my daughter’s fifth cousin, Sam Haven,” she said in a stage whisper.

  “I can hear you, Mrs. Stanton,” shouted Verdana without turning around.

  Stone Aldrich waved at her, then flinched. It was obvious that even the smallest physical movement pained him. And when I saw him lying there so helpless, I had the strangest desire to take care of him.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “A little dizzy,” he said.

  I crouched on the ground to offer my assistance. I suggested we move him up to the grass and out of the way of horses, gawking strangers, and the relentless onslaught of the so-called “safety bicycles.”

  Mother shook her head. “Too dangerous. Now, watch what I do.” With difficulty, she arranged herself on the ground next to me. Then she took a muslin strip, soaked it in the water, and gently pressed it against his head. She clucked and fussed over him. “Mr. Aldrich,” she cooed, “we’ll get you patched up in no time, dear. There, there.” She watched the blood soak the fabric. “These are remarkably good rags,” she said, glancing at me. “See how well they draw blood? Wherever did you find these?” She stared at the torn bottom of my skirt. “Oh my goodness, Penelope, you didn’t.”

  I nodded and handed her another jagged muslin strip. “Verdana—”

  “Verdana? If she told you to cut off your head, would you?”

  “No.” I looked at him, all bloodied and bruised and in need of a woman’s care. “But if she tells me to cut my dress to help save a man’s life, why, I wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  “Thank you,” he gasped, looking as if he might pass out. “I really appreciate it.”

  Mother’s face brightened. Something akin to approval flashed in her eyes. “He is worth it, I suppose.” Glancing down at him, she said in an intentionally loud whisper, “He came barreling toward me on his bike, dear. I tried to move the quadracycle out of the way but couldn’t. These quadracycles are slower than elephants.”

  His face clenched. I felt badly for him, and reaching for one of his shaking hands, squeezed it until the trembling stopped. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll make this right.”

  Mother continued to apply the compress to his gashes, one of which looped down from his bloodied forehead to his eye, which was such a dark blue that it appeared almost black. As he leaned his head back into the ground, I noticed a tiny, older scar, long since faded to white, just under his chin. I wondered if he often took risks, and whether this was his first scrape with the streets of Boston.

  “Mr. Aldrich’s a famous artist,” gushed Mother with a significant glance. “He’s been telling me he shows his paintings in galleries. Galleries! And he works as an illustrator at the prestigious Harper’s Weekly magazine in New York City. Harper’s Weekly!” She flashed me her most radiant smile—the one that said the bicycle accident was her version of winning the lottery.

  Stone Aldrich groaned as she pressed the muslin to his head.

  “Mother, please don’t force this good man to exchange pleasantries when he’s in dire need of medical attention.”

  He smiled, and a dimple formed near his “good” eye. Even in his disfigured state, he looked striking. He had a broad, open face, round eyes that I imagined could see right through a person, and a strong chin. He had about him the air of a Russian intellectual, although I was certain I had never met a Russian in my life or, for that matter, an intellectual. His hair, worn too long to mark him as a businessman, reminded me of the ocean waves at high tide. A soft intelligence seemed to shine from under his skin causing a halo effect, and he almost resembled a pieta one might see in a museum. Bleeding, battered, and scarred, he seemed more personable than any of the fellows my mother had chosen for me back home. And it was all the more bizarre in that he had landed at her feet by accident. (Unless Mother had collided into him on purpose, of course.)

  The young store owner soon returned with a doctor, who anesthetized Stone Aldrich’s wounds and stitched them right there on the road. A bandage was carefully wrapped around the hapless victim’s head. The doctor asked if Stone felt well enough to sit up.

  He tried to. But he looked dazed and tentative, as if he might lie down again and never wake up.

  “We should hire a carriage and have it drive us to Penelope’s flat,” Mother declared. “You
can rest there until you feel better, son.”

  Son?

  “Mother, I’m sure Mr. Aldrich has better places to stay.” Dear Lord, I certainly hoped he did.

  “I’m in Boston only a few days,” Stone Aldrich gasped out. “In a small hotel up the road.” He struggled to point out its general location but quickly put down his hand, looking exhausted. It was then that I noticed a rainbow of paint colors lodged just under his fingernails.

  “There’s no reason to stay in a hotel where no one will take proper care of you when we have plenty of people to look after you ’round the clock,” Mother said, and I dropped a muslin strip on the ground in surprise.

  I leaned over her and whispered, “He’s a stranger.” Then, louder, “We need to take him back to his hotel. We can care for him there. Stand vigil. But it needs to be there.”

  “Don’t be rash, dear. I have a very good feeling about him, and I’m never wrong about these matters. He could be another Joseph Mallord William Turner, for all we know, and Lord knows that painter did very well for himself. It’ll be only a few days. I almost killed him by accident, you know. He could sue us. We must try to be extra sweet to him.”

  “What if he’s a murderer?”

  “You’ve been reading too many novels, dear,” she said. “Please stop. It’s a useless pastime. We wouldn’t want your imagination to run away from you, now would we? Imaginations are notoriously hard to rein in once they’ve escaped.” She pressed another compress onto his head. “A hearty lobster bisque will help you feel better in no time, son.”

  “I don’t eat lobster,” he said.

  “Oh, tomato then,” she said brightly.

  Moral: Don’t allow your mother near a quadracycle unless you’re in the driver’s seat.

  Chapter 13

  The Ash Can School

  Wednesday, June 21, 1893

  For the next few days, Stone Aldrich and I were on alternate sleeping shifts. Whenever I was awake, he was asleep and vice versa. My shoulder felt quite healed. Taking Bayer Heroin pills, I’d almost forgotten my injury, but for some reason I felt groggy all the time. But his head injuries made for a slow recuperation, and Mother sent for his things from the hotel, which included an artist’s easel, two boxes of charcoal, oil paints, seven paintbrushes sporting boar bristles of various thicknesses, and a twelve by twenty-inch canvas displaying a half-finished painting of a Manhattan street scene.

  The painting was rendered in a rough, gritty style quite at odds with the pictures hanging in my father’s den, which all portrayed idyllic scenes of ships disembarking in calm waters. I was certain Mother must have peeked at Stone Aldrich’s canvas as well, and I had great difficulty believing it agreed with her sensibilities! The scene showed poverty in all of its candid ugliness: a street urchin and a woman—whose scanty dress suggested that she could only be a prostitute—deep in conversation. The two figures hunkered against a backdrop of moldering buildings under an elevated railway track. This art put up a mirror to the human condition rather than most of the paintings I’d seen displayed in the mansions on Bellevue Avenue, which quickly whisked the viewer into a fantasyland of boats, parks, and women sporting parasols.

  His art wasn’t Impressionist, but it left a deep impression. He was either a genius to paint subjects so at odds with the fashion or, in Mother’s parlance, a rabble-rouser, but either way I thought he was worth exploring more in depth.

  Meanwhile Mother behaved like a human tractor. With me unable to defend the status quo on the home front, she plowed through the flat, turning it upside down with complicated sleeping arrangements. My bedchamber was handed over to our guest without my consent. Mother moved into Lucinda’s room. Verdana retreated to the relative comfort of her own flat and Sam’s arms.

  I was relegated to lesser quarters and slept on the tattered green couch in the parlor.

  Since I was asleep more hours than not, Mother coerced Lucinda to rearrange the parlor furniture. Now both mossy wing chairs were poised like arms around the pitiful end table, and the breakfront was flush against the wall abutting the kitchen. Stone Aldrich’s items were all neatly tagged with his name and bunched in one corner of my bedchamber.

  By Mother’s decree, the disturbing painting of Manhattan was mounted on the easel, but promptly hidden from view under a flowered bed sheet.

  Once Lucinda took away the pain pills, I felt decidedly better.

  Thinking I was alone in the flat, I wandered into my bedchamber. I glanced at the rumpled sheets on my bed, piled high over a mound of pillows. A stale smell permeated the dark room. It had been days since I’d bothered to dress, and even longer since the room had been aired out.

  In the room stood a tall, wooden cabinet with a mirrored door. As I opened the compartment to choose a dress, I studied my wounds in the glass. The purple bruises on the left side of my face had faded to a dull, yellowish-green. My hair was so dirty that it stretched across my cheeks in limp, red cords. “I look dreadful,” I said aloud.

  “You don’t look all that terrible,” claimed a muffled voice that seemed to rise from between my bed linens.

  I jumped. “Mr. Aldrich?”

  “Guilty,” he said.

  Through the looking glass, I watched him kick off the sheets and sit up in his bathrobe. A giant bandage covered his left eye and wrapped diagonally around his head like a turban gone askew.

  I glanced down at my nightdress, then reached into the closet, pulling out the nearest dress. Spinning around to face him, I held up the dress to cover me. “My mother… where is she?”

  Apparently she’d left to get his eyeglasses fixed and find a doctor. I hoped it wouldn’t take her all afternoon. These harebrained schemes of hers had to stop.

  “It’s kind of her to take me in, a total stranger,” he said. He fluffed a pillow and put it behind his back, then placed another pillow under his knees. He looked as if he expected to lounge there all day.

  I arched my back, trying to ease the kinks that had formed there during the last few nights with one hand while I pulled the dress higher up my body with the other. I took a step back and crashed into the wardrobe.

  I considered the long list of undergarments I had to gather as I continued to stare at the man monopolizing my bedroom. The room was small and he looked to be quite tall, so he took up a lot of space.

  “Would you prefer to change places with me?” he asked, studying me through his one “good” eye as if it were a monocle.

  “Unfortunately, that would involve convincing Mother,” I mumbled.

  “Would you prefer I talk to her?”

  I fixed him with a look. No one knew my mother until they were on the opposite side of her in an argument.

  One of the more superficial gashes in his forehead had started to crust over: not pretty, but at least a sign of healing. The soft light still shone around his face, giving him an innocent, fresh look in spite of his scars. Beads of sweat formed along the bandaged side of his face. While alluring, he appeared frail. I noticed that his soup bowl by the bedside was still full and resisted the urge to spoon-feed it to him.

  “You haven’t touched your soup. You don’t care for lobster?”

  “Don’t know. Never tasted it.”

  “You should. It’s the only thing she made this week that’s edible.”

  “My faith prohibits it.”

  “Oh. Are there other restrictions?”

  “No camel, rock badger, or pig. Although I’m not sure if the rules are as strict when you’re in another person’s home.”

  I offered to make him something. The man had to eat!

  “Your mother will bring something back. Hopefully, if it has cloven feet, it also chews its cud.”

  I stared at him. He laughed. The sound seemed to rise from his flat belly and emerge in short bursts, like smoke from a chimney.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you ever met anyone Jewish before?”

  I felt a flush spread from my cheeks to my ears.
No one discussed religion back home. It wasn’t very Protestant.

  “Newport has its very own synagogue, you know,” I said, coming to the city’s defense.

  “How open-minded of it,” he said with an indulgent chuckle. “Hopefully its residents are tolerant as well? I don’t have much experience with the insanely wealthy.” He chewed his lip in thought, which I wished he would stop doing, as it was the only area of his face unscathed by his accident.

  I squared back my shoulders. “Well, I’m not wealthy,” I told him. “And I do tolerate those with differing viewpoints. I speak out for the Women’s Movement. My employer, Verdana, wears trousers every day and prefers the companionship of women to men.”

  He elevated his free eyebrow at me, which required effort given the bandage clamping down half his face. “Ah! Forgive my impertinence. You must face a great deal of intolerance, then,” he said in a low, reverent voice. He waved his finger back and forth between us. “We share in that.”

  I noticed the top of my dress had flopped over my arm. It was the pink Afternoon Dress with the giant puffed sleeves. I turned to the mirror and held the garment up to my body. I felt lighter and gaunter, no doubt the result of sleeping through several meals in a row.

  “The dress will look splendid on you,” he said. “As an artist, I know all about color, you see. Because you have fire in your hair, pink flatters you, shining light on your soulful eyes.” He must have observed some change in my expression, for next he said: “I hope you won’t find me forward. I speak only as a humble artisan who spends his nights and days with paint.”

  I glanced at my reflection. I didn’t look in the pink of health, but I was much improved. Perhaps he could be my mirror and tell me what I most needed to hear—all of the little compliments that I never received from Mother. Or Sam. Or anyone else in the immediate vicinity. And perhaps I could be his nurse—his Florence Nightingale.

  Scanning the room, I tried to recall where I’d stashed my valise. Then I noticed that he was using it as a makeshift desk on the bed. His newspaper was spread out over it.