Mistress Suffragette

by Diana Forbes

  “Uh—thank you, Amy,” I murmured.

  Chapter 31

  The Windermere

  Friday, August 18, 1893

  After much quarreling and bickering, not to mention outright yelling matches, the Movement leaders finally made a decision. I was dispatched, with blessings from both Amy and Verdana, to visit with Katharine. While the stated purpose of my mission was to find out how she was faring after the vicious parade attack, a secondary purpose was to learn if her magazine would be open to hiring a suffrage reporter. It was to be the most casual of inquiries, and I should suggest no one in particular.

  Katharine lived in a high-rise monstrosity called The Windermere on 57th Street and Ninth Avenue. The Windermere was, in fact, three buildings, all rendered in the same architectural style, a cross between rococo and completely tasteless. Arched windows and a tan diamond motif lining the red brick face provided the only relief to the fortress-like exterior.

  As I entered the massive brick edifice, every woman I passed looked like she worked in an office. There was not an Orchard Street-style, old woman in sight. Apparently, the Windermere was headquarters to this new breed, the so-called New Woman. And the residence was large enough to house an army of them, all disgorging as if smoke from a train, uniformed in dour workday attire with no bustles, shape, or the swishing sounds of costly silk.

  An elevator carried me up to Katharine’s seventh floor apartment in the second building.

  “Good morning,” I said to the tall but stooped Negro elevator man who looked to be about eighty years old. His eyes widened, as if he wasn’t used to courteous passengers.

  “Mornin’, Miss,” he said slowly.

  “Seven, please.” I removed a purple circular from my bag. The notice was about enfranchising black men. “You might find this of interest,” I said, offering him the sheet.

  He smiled at the notice, squinting at it, but handed it back to me. He shook his head. “Can you read it to me? I musta forgot my glasses today, Miss uh—”

  “Penelope.”

  As the elevator ascended, I read the announcement aloud. It concerned a special meeting to take place in Amy’s parlor in a few weeks. Amy and Verdana had disagreed vehemently about whether or not to host the meeting, but eventually one of them had prevailed. I just wasn’t sure which one. Verdana had refused to completely kowtow to Amy’s decrees; and whether out of respect or exhaustion, Amy had not pushed Verdana out. Constant battles ensued over turf, philosophy, and execution. We were all becoming frustrated.

  “Why do you care if I vote?” he asked, rolling up one of his sleeves as the elevator paused.

  I breathed in and out. Some of the Movement leaders didn’t care, and rumors of a split abounded. But I did. Weren’t we all equally powerless, and didn’t that need rectifying?

  “Women’s suffrage supports Negro suffrage. The two go hand in hand.”

  Slowly he turned around as the elevator came to its final creak. “Is women’s suffrage goin’ to ’splain to my employer why I need to miss work for some meetin’?” He looked annoyed—splashes of pink rising just under his skin—though I had no idea why.

  “You can get off,” I pressed. “Just call in sick.”

  He scratched his temple, and I could almost feel him weighing the possibility in his mind. His eyes grew large and dubious.

  “You’ll meet others interested in the cause,” I continued hurriedly. “Plus there’ll be free crumpets for all.”

  He chewed his cracked lip.

  “And Shepherd’s Pie.” I’d force Amy to serve it, dammit—if I could just convince this man to come. I couldn’t understand why he was so resistant. Didn’t he realize we were only trying to help?

  He looked down at the elevator floor, refusing to meet my eyes.

  “You deserve to vote,” I cried.

  “And what about you?”

  “We all do. Each and every one of us deserves to.”

  He pulled on the heavy elevator gate, but it snagged. “What if there’s a lit’racy test?” he asked sharply.

  My tongue felt like chalk. He was right. They’d started to insist on these stupid tests as a way of keeping black men from voting. There was no use in denying it. I folded my arms across my chest and sighed. “Then we’ll fight that, too.”

  “You can’t fight everything,” he said, crossing his arms in defiant imitation of my pose.

  He had a point. And yet, we were trying to. Wholly inefficiently, and battling among ourselves more often than not. Somehow we’d need to rise above our differences if we were to meet our goals.

  I raised my fist in the air. “We’ll win. It may take months. It may take years. But we’re on the right side, and right will prevail.” I felt as if I were delivering a sermon from his elevator pulpit. I knew we’d secure the vote eventually. After all of this effort, we just had to.

  He pried open the gate at last, then reached for a wooden cane with an ebony handle leaning against the corner of the wooden cabin. With effort, he moved aside to let me pass.

  “You’re young, Miss. You have your whole life to fight these battles.”

  “You’re old. What do you have to lose?”

  “I’ll come,” he murmured, “if—if—assumin’ I can get off work that day.”

  “Thank you,” I breathed. “You won’t regret it.”

  He looked at me as if unsure whether he would or wouldn’t. Then his eyes misted, and his breath heaved in his throat. “Bless you,” he said, voice choked.

  If I felt underwhelmed by the Windermere exterior, I experienced a complete turnaround after stepping inside Katharine’s cavernous abode. High, vaulted ceilings reminded me of a church. Sun streamed through the windows. My hostess, dressed in a pink kimono with her hair undone, looked fragile and tuckered out. She treated me to a tour. An octagonal parlor dominated the apartment center. Flanking the parlor sprawled a kitchen (easily four times the size of ours on Orchard Street) plus three airy bedrooms, all windowed. She shared the space with three other “working women,” just like her.

  “My goodness, what’s the rent?” I asked, envious. Could a single, working woman ever earn enough to live in this splendor?

  “$50 a month. Expensive, but worth it.”

  I whistled at the exorbitant sum. “Are the walls thick?” I asked, realizing I was departing from the carefully worded script that Amy and Verdana had mandated.

  “I don’t hear my neighbors. And quiet neighbors make good neighbors. Sometimes I hear my roommates with their beaus, though,” she offered with a wistful sigh. “That’s when I miss Stone the most. He helped me drown out the noise.”

  I cringed as the old feeling for him reared. I longed for some steady male companionship to ease the pervasive loneliness that was Manhattan. I stared out one of the arched windows facing north. The city looked more hospitable from this vantage point: the island didn’t appear crowded, cramped, or impossible to conquer.

  “I came to find out how you’re feeling after that outrageous attack,” I said. “Have you fully recuperated?”

  Her pale pink lips tightened. “I work in the business world where attacks on women are more subtle but just as vicious. It may take a while. But I’ll be all right.”

  Her answer sounded modern. But if she was so tough, then why had she frozen during the assault?

  “It’s terrible to be subjected to physical violence, though isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Back when I worked in a brothel, some of the men acted like animals.”

  “Oh, Katharine. I’m so sorry! I had no idea.”

  Katharine laughed. “I wouldn’t trade the experience for charm school. It’s how I met Stone. He frequented the establishment where I used to work.” Seeing something in my face, her eyes twinkled. “It’s probably why he never told you about me. He’s embarrassed by my roots.” She walked over to her mantle and pointed to a Stone Aldrich cityscape oil, again showing her as one of the people in the scene. “He won’t paint the degradation inside the b
rothels but instead uses his paintings to comment on the double standard in sex in society.”

  I studied the picture. There were perhaps eight people jostling each other outside a hairdresser’s window. “I don’t see his brother anywhere,” I commented.

  “He doesn’t paint his brother much. Stone believes his brother’s soul is impoverished, you see. When Quincy is in the paintings, it’s as an urchin. It’s a comment.”

  “Yet Stone doesn’t think you sold out, I mean, does he? Now that you’re a successful magazine executive?”

  “That’s different,” she said. “He helped me get the job, so he thinks he rescued me.”

  I thought back to my mother’s theory that men didn’t want mothers but mistresses. Maybe all they really wanted was to rescue a girl.

  Following directions, I asked Katharine if her magazine would consider hiring a reporter to cover suffrage causes. Katharine pursed her lips as she joined me at the large bay window. Together we peered out over massive 57th Street.

  “This thing we’re both involved in…. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?” she said.

  I nodded, recalling Stalker’s mischief. I thought back to the railroad magnates’ wives hurtling tomatoes at me. One had to be a warrior, not just a rebel. One also needed a deep reservoir of patience. Every two steps forward mandated one step back.

  She grabbed a tortoiseshell comb from atop her fireplace mantel and started smoothing her locks. The sun lit her platinum hair, creating the illusion of a halo, and I immediately forgave Stone for falling in love with her.

  Chapter 32

  Vive La Revolution

  Monday, August 21, 1893

  There was a war going on, but so far only women realized it.

  The mammoth department stores I passed on my trek to Amy’s mansion each day advocated the downfall of dressmaking, as we knew it. Down with custom tailoring, the stores brazenly sneered. Long live machine-made fashions!

  B. Altman’s on 18th Street now brought seamstresses and piece makers together under one roof so women no longer had a reason to make their dresses at home.

  Perhaps it was because I lived down on Orchard Street where tenants were poor, but everywhere I went I noticed these horrible “ready-made” dresses with fewer flounces and ruffles. Outfits that wouldn’t have been considered acceptable riding gear back home were worn as office wear in New York: mannish jackets and slightly tapered long skirts often in the cheapest of fabrics and in colors so somber, they’d look fitting in a funeral procession.

  Vive la revolution—the Industrial Revolution.

  I was pondering these thoughts over my morning constitutional—the long walk from Orchard Street up to Amy’s home—when I caught my reflection in one of the windows of the grand Waldorf hotel on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. My pale green dress, sewn by my mother’s dressmaker only a year earlier, looked frayed. This was a hard city on clothing.

  The heat played havoc with my hair, and red pieces spiraled out from their coils. I glanced at my eyes: there was something flinty about them I had never noticed before. I had become what my mother had specifically instructed me not to: a dyed-in-the-wool suffragist.

  Then again, maybe I am more of a dyed-in-the-muslin suffragist, I thought.

  A breeze along 43rd Street wafted the smell of horses in my direction. I took a sharp breath as I remembered galloping up to the Newport cliffs, the ocean breeze blowing back my hair. Following the scent, I decided to take a slight detour at the scene of the parade disturbance. At 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, I turned west, off of Fifth, and walked past the new St. Nicholas Club, whose Dutch facade was almost complete. Then I continued past the stately Harvard House, whose construction was also almost finished; then past the Brooks-Phelps stable, toward Sixth Avenue. This street, with its many stables and the omnipresent smell of horses, made me long for home.

  Just ahead, a very tall, dark-haired man emerged from one of the stables. There was something familiar about the back of his head and the way his hair shone. It had to be a mirage. He proceeded to walk westward toward Sixth Avenue at a steady clip. Even from this distance, I could tell that his hands were quite large.

  Stop walking, I commanded myself. Turn around right now, and he never has to know.

  Unfortunately, it was as if he heard my thoughts. He spun around. And there we were again.

  “Penelope?” His dark eyes widened, and he cocked his head at me uncertainly as if I might be holding a giant tree branch behind my bustle.

  I could barely breathe. “Hello, Mr. Daggers.”

  I had worried that I’d bump into him in Manhattan, but it was a sprawling metropolis—surely too big for chance meetings. Yet here he was, not five feet away from me.

  Tentatively, I waved to him. He waved back. I remembered the last time those hands had caressed my face.

  Something was different about him. He looked more drawn, older somehow. He lightly coughed; his hand flew up to cover his mouth. “I’m sorry I behaved like such a beast last time.” He formed a fist and pounded his chest with it. His face looked ashen.

  “Are you feeling all right?” I asked, frantic. What if he had tuberculosis? What if he died? I’d almost lost Lydia. I couldn’t lose him, too.

  “Allergies,” he mumbled. “Yes, I’m fine.” He stepped toward me. “Penelope, I’ve always been fond of you and didn’t mean to upset you that day on the cliffs. I hope you’re doing well. Where are you living?”

  “Orchard Street,” I answered, instantly regretting it. What if he tried to accost me again?

  “You have my condolences. I hear there are a thousand people an acre down there.”

  “It seems crowded.”

  “A more foreign ambience than you’re used to, perhaps?” His dark eyes glimmered, and I got the distinct impression all over again that he could see right through me.

  “Quite.”

  His eyes softened. “Hopefully you’ll look back on it later as a learning experience. I know you’re a good teacher, and being open to learning is part of teaching.”

  I felt my breath catch. The words squeezed out of me slowly. “As you say.”

  Down the street, I heard the whirr of construction coming to life: builders, stone masons, and brick layers shouting directions as they resumed work. I also heard hammering—just wasn’t sure if it was all outside.

  He perused my face. “I know I’ve learned my lesson. Are you, uh—have you forgiven me?”

  I paused, trying to find the words to stay strong. Pretend this is a speech, I counseled myself. Tell him you don’t need him. Tell him you overcame the humiliation, and nothing will force you back. Tell him that, as lonely as you are, he’s the last person you need in your life.

  I looked at his eyes. They seemed to fill with humility. He looked so earnest, and didn’t every sinner deserve a second chance?

  I made the sign of the cross at him with my fingers the way a priest would. “Yes, Mr. Daggers. You are hereby absolved.”

  His eyes shone, locking with mine.

  “But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten,” I said, pointing at him. “I’ll never forget. And if you ever try anything like that again, then I’m afraid I’ll have to…” I brandished an imaginary tree branch at him like a sword.

  He stepped a foot closer to me. And that’s when some of my suffrage armor melted. He looked so forlorn, and I felt so lonely. And I, after all, had been the one who had hit him over and over with a tree branch. That wasn’t terribly Christian of me. I scanned his face. He still looked exquisite, like a man who had amassed an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge about women during his brief time on Earth. There were no scratch marks left on his forehead from the branch. Wounds fade with time, or his had. Mine, I wasn’t sure about.

  He inched closer to me. The familiar scent of sandalwood tickled my nose. He smelled clean, like he bathed often. I didn’t bathe nearly as often as I’d like now that bringing water upstairs was such a chore. I wondered if I smelled dirty. What if I smelled rep
ugnant to him? Then I pictured him taking a bath. My heart started pumping fast, and I felt faint. He stepped forward to steady me, then clasped my hand. He held it up to his lips.

  “I know, I know…” he murmured, kissing my hand. “You’re the most important person in the world to me,” he said, still holding my hand. “I wanted to protect you, and instead I scared you off. I was a fool to treat you so poorly.” He caressed my hand in his. My hand felt worshipped and adored.

  His eyes spoke volumes, looking both remorseful and filled with yearning. “I’m sorry, Penelope. I feel terrible about everything that happened. I promise I’ll never hurt you again.”

  Words tangled in my throat. “Thank you, Mr. Daggers. I appreciate the sentiment.” I turned around to leave.

  But he wouldn’t release my hand. I turned toward his hand, then away from it. I felt my whole body twist in the breeze.

  “Come, now,” he implored. “Must we be strangers? You know I can’t live without you.”

  I twisted toward him again. His grip tightened. I felt like a kite tangled in a tree branch, flapping this way and that with nowhere to escape.

  “Perhaps we don’t have to be complete strangers,” I said. “But we certainly can’t be friends the way we used to be.”

  He clasped my other hand. “Even passing acquaintances know where they might find each other.” He stared into my eyes. “It would be wonderful if we could start over.”

  He drew me close, and once again I felt my worries fall away. Then he kissed my cheek. He seemed so gentle.

  It’s been said that if women could remember the pain of childbirth, we’d never have more than one child. And maybe my feelings for Mr. Daggers were like that, too. All I knew was that I was so damned happy to have him in my life again that the earlier pain was almost erased.

  As he grazed my cheek again with his lips, I surrendered. I gave him my address—then felt his dark eyes pierce me as he finally released me. Abruptly, I turned east and walked toward Fifth Avenue.

  “Meet me at The Lantern tomorrow night, 7 p.m.,” he said.