Stories from Suffragette City

by M. J. Rose

Lucy shook her head. It was all so clear to her suddenly. “I should have lived in a gypsy caravan.”

  Edwin’s expression was pained and fearful. “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

  Lucy felt great sympathy for him, suddenly, but even more for herself. “I’ve been so afraid. I see that now.”

  Before them, the thylacine made a noise in its throat that was so strange, so specific, Lucy couldn’t have described it to anyone. She felt something turn in her, the great flaming wheel of her courage, or her soul.

  “I’m going to be late,” she said to Edwin.

  “What?” His eyes had grown more and more bewildered, but there wasn’t time to try to explain. There were miles and miles between the Bronx and Washington Square Park, where the marchers had already begun gathering. There were miles and miles to go for women. Suffrage was sixty-seven years old—an old woman, and yet an infant, too.

  So many changes lay before and behind all women, for every living thing. There weren’t words for any of it, and no time at all for anything but running, which is exactly what Lucy Cuthbert did that day, there at the end of one world and the beginning of the next. Through the park, past the laughing children, past the tortoise and the fountain, feeling breathless and new again. She ran until her feet failed her, and then she flew.

  Siobhán

  KATHERINE J. CHEN

  I

  In her free moments, she remembered home, as it had been. About five miles from the squat, one-room cottage she was never, in her youth, ashamed of, a grassy path fitted with wildflowers led to a stunted hill, and from the hill, a view of the horizon and the sea. She used to lie on her stomach in this place, bony knuckles propped under a pointed chin, and look out from gray eyes to the foaming crest of blue-green waves, rising, falling, tossing with the abandon of children splashing in a large puddle the smooth film of water that rippled and never ceased to move. A trick of the light, she knew, was why the sea on a sunny day could become a mine of glittering treasure, of winking sapphires and drifting diamonds, which blinded as much as beckoned to whoever looked upon its face. And when she’d had her fill of the view, when she felt dizzy from both the height and the smell of clean, solid earth packed tight beneath her, she would roll onto her back and lie motionless in that spot for close to an hour, eyes shut, listening.

  Her mother had said to her, as a child, to bend her ear to the sea when there was trouble. Here or here, and she would indicate first her head and then her heart, as the source of one’s difficulties. Later, in the years after her father’s passing, when three meals became two, then finally one or none, her mother would add to this demonstration, from head to heart to stomach. It does wonders, the sea, she would tell her and her younger sisters, and she hadn’t deceived them. The sound of this natural turbulence, a symphony of gurgling, roaring, and hissing chaos, as the spray flung itself and broke against a jutting point of rock, smoothed over whatever ache she happened to feel, occasionally for her father, sometimes, as was only natural, for a boy she thought herself in love with, but always for food, for bread and the taste, no, the memory of meat, of melted bacon fat in a coal-black pan held close over the fire.

  The sea will save you, her mother told her, out of the hearing of her sisters one night as they slept. She remembered, too, her mother’s face, not as clear as it was in the brightness of day but half-hidden, half-alive in the twitching flame of a solitary candle. A pouch of coins fell into her lap, and she knew, without meeting the eyes carefully watching her, that many a breakfast and supper had been missed for the realization of this moment; that it was a hard thing, perhaps the hardest thing, for a proud woman to have to borrow and to beg from neighbors and relations who had long ceased to visit in order to send away her eldest child. She weighed the coins in her hand in silence, and neither of them spoke, for they were craning their ears, listening to the deep-throated rumblings coming outside from an angry water. The scream of a migrant seagull caught in the storm chilled them, and she had felt a tremor in the hand that held the money.

  II

  Where she lived now—not her home—there was no trace of the sea, except in imitation. Nimble fingers, aided by machinery, had stitched the froth of waves into a delicate netting of lace that decorated sleeves and collars, or ran in neat, parallel fringes down the fronts of dresses from Worth and Doucet. Like water slipping across sand, the silken train of a lady’s gown receded noiselessly over carpeted floors, leaving no sign it had ever disturbed the ground or even paid a visit. Birds abounded, though not in clouds. Their feathers reached skyward from the latest fashions pinned to a gathering of poised, exquisitely covered heads, and the stones—the emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds—these shone in their gilded settings and were none of them illusions dancing across the water.

  In one of the many drawing rooms of Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, at her Madison Avenue address, a meeting of this artificial sea had converged during the hour of luncheon. For the occasion, the chrysanthemum chairs with gold brocade had been uncovered, dusted, and arranged in four rows of five. A painting by Sargent, recently acquired, and which had hung in pride of place over the mantelpiece, was removed, out of consideration by the mistress of the house that the loveliness of the picture shouldn’t distract from either the speakers or, more significantly, her own person when she stood to address her audience. Food was to be served buffet-style on the most forgettable set of Wedgwood plates. “Nothing flashy,” Mrs. Belmont had instructed the chef, whom everyone, save the lady herself, addressed as “Monsieur.” “Let’s keep it low-key. Ordinary, even. They’re not here to gorge themselves.” The next morning, she approved the menu sent up to her on gilt-edged ivory cards emblazoned with her monogram. Thirteen dishes, none over the top, most discreet, and all admirably suited for consumption on small plates that would easily fit in a lady’s hand. There were the usual bluepoints and lynnhavens, Spanish olives, the chef’s signature lobster salad and his less-well-known crabmeat salad, as well as smoked tongue and smoked salmon, bite-size cucumber sandwiches garnished with dill and a peppery mayonnaise, followed by assorted desserts on trays, butter-suffused custard pastries, and fresh slices of melon. It was decided the offerings of dessert would be served along with three varieties of tea, and that the guests would arrive before the speakers in order to have plenty of time to avail themselves of this everyday fare.

  She was called Marjory now, which had been the name of her predecessor, a perfectly suitable name, everyone agreed. It was easier this way, she was told, her real name being unconventional, even strange. No one could be expected to learn it, not even the scullery maid, who was Swedish. The thin line of the butler’s mouth had curled into a grimace at the very sound.

  “No, no,” Mr. Riggs, the butler, tutted, which was his way of restoring order without raising his voice. “No, you’ll be Marjory. If we’re lucky, Mrs. Belmont won’t notice the difference.” And Mrs. Trevor, the housekeeper, had stifled a smile.

  “Marjory,” she repeated, as if it were a foreign word she was learning. “Marjory.”

  The luncheon being held that day was a private event with a social cause. Mr. Riggs called these social causes of his mistress “her parlor entertainments.” Suffrage, he would count off on his fingers, being first and foremost, women’s rights, then labor. And the last would send all of them, if they were collected together in the servants’ dining room, into a fit of polite but amused laughter.

  “She’s invited a veritable carnival this time,” Mr. Riggs said, stressing every syllable of the word veritable. “Monkeys, you know, from the factories, to tell their tragic tales to the ladies. That kind of thing.”

  “It’s more parlor entertainments, Mr. Riggs,” Mrs. Trevor said, using the language of her compatriot. “Just think of it that way.”

  “We’re never going to be serving them?” the head footman, named Richard, asked from the doorway, while chewing a biscuit.

  “What? The monkeys?” Mr. Riggs said in his most professionally s
tupefied tones, the same that could utter “Ma’am” while removing a bowl of cocktail sauce with a water bug in it, if the situation ever called for such an intervention. “You needn’t worry yourself. Monsieur only cooks for the ladies, and I do mean ladies. He would be offended if word got back to him, and you know how the Morgans have been trying to poach him for the last year and a half.” Shaking his head, he tutted.

  There’d been more than one occasion when Marjory couldn’t keep up with the discussion. She was still inclined to take references literally, and when Mr. Riggs mentioned the “monkeys from the factories,” she had instantly pictured a chimpanzee wearing gloves and a cloth cap operating the bottling machine of a molasses refinery.

  She had checked her disappointment at the back door when the “monkeys” turned out to be no more than an Irish shopgirl, a Polish seamstress, and an elderly Italian matron accompanied by her two granddaughters. She had been told to take their things and place them quite apart on separate wooden chairs, and while doing so, to hold whatever items she received, a coat perhaps, or a hat, at arm’s length, in no way touching or brushing against the wallpaper, any other furniture, cushions, dishes, much less cookware and appliances, along the way.

  By the time the speakers were led into the drawing room, the sea nymphs had already settled in the chrysanthemum chairs with their plates. Introductory remarks came after, and an encouraging round of applause succeeded only in making the faces of the honored guests, who stood at the front of the room, blaze redder than a basket of ripe cherries.

  It was considered a step up that Mrs. Trevor had asked her to serve during the talks. Marjory held the tray, while another maid, named Janey, poured.

  The Polish seamstress went first, talking in high-pitched, plaintive tones. She was fair-haired and tall, with well-built shoulders and long arms that stretched outward when she grew excited. It was somehow evident, without anyone remarking on the fact, that she had worn her best dress for the occasion and that in all likelihood she had labored in the morning over the immaculate polishing of her shoes. Her boots shone brighter than the small gold cross that glinted from her chest.

  “I wish I could say more has changed since Triangle…” she began, alluding to the fire at a well-known shirtwaist factory that had taken place over four years ago. “I wish…” she repeated, as the light-blue pupils of her eyes moved dramatically over her audience.

  At that moment, Marjory’s own eyes settled on an image of genteel loveliness. A single finger had made itself known to them at the other end of a row, and they had hurried to oblige the call for more tea.

  Slowly, as she approached, the speech of the seamstress slipped away from her. Slowly, and with relish, Marjory witnessed the last tuft of crabmeat disappear between two pink lips, exposing a bottom line of endearingly crooked but pearly teeth and the moist surface of a tongue. This, surely this, was what we all aspired to, she thought to herself, and she marveled at the subtle working of the jaw, which betrayed no hunger, no eagerness to consume. It was a languid, subtle chewing, accustomed and therefore unimpressed by the supply of tender, fresh meat from the sea. It was a beringed hand of very white fingers that balanced, at its tips, the least impressive of Wedgwood plates and the remains of what had been consumed: three shrimp tails, two pieces of lettuce, the shells of oysters. She counted two bluepoints and one lynnhaven, gracefully, even artfully, set aside, like the border of a garden.

  When tea was poured, she marveled at the ease of the hands that lifted the steaming cup to the mouth. A large stone of vibrant cerulean glinted from the right forefinger.

  “The needle of the machine,” the Polish seamstress said, “sliced through my finger. It simply slipped. Blood everywhere.”

  And the eyes that had transfixed Marjory to the spot, which made her breathless with an inexplicable wonder, raised themselves and seemed to say, questioningly, Oh, really? Did it? before the neck bent to sip again from the delicately flowered tea.

  She knew of the suffrage and labor movements only what had been told her by Mr. Riggs and Mrs. Trevor at the dining table.

  “It doesn’t involve us,” Mr. Riggs, who had worked in the early part of his career for the Goulds, explained with his usual authority. “Even in labor, we’re servants, you understand. It isn’t considered labor to them, not to the unions or even the women. We’re domestic and therefore off-limits, you see. But I don’t mind that. Do you, Mrs. Trevor?”

  “No, I can’t say I do, Mr. Riggs,” Mrs. Trevor replied. “We handle things our own way—privately. You won’t ever find me in a ballot box.”

  “Oh, the thought of it, Mrs. Trevor!” Mr. Riggs said, turning red with laughter, before Mrs. Trevor herself joined in on the gaiety.

  And Marjory, though she didn’t laugh, had smiled, too, because it seemed right that she should. In the eight months she’d lived in New York, the household staff of Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont comprised her limited circle of acquaintances, and, to the extent permitted, persons she trusted. She recalled, even now, the first time she had set foot in Monsieur Arnault’s kitchen, all the servants crowded around at the center table, and Mr. Riggs, flaunting his showmanship, theatrically offering her an orange.

  “How would you eat this?” he’d asked, and then inclined his head to the table where dazzling lines of silverware awaited her.

  She thought she would cry, but Mr. Riggs said gently, as her face showed the first signs of puckering, “You wouldn’t begrudge us a bit of fun, would you, Marjory? Not on your first day?”

  So, she took a knife, what later she realized had been a steak knife, and sliced the orange in half, then in quarters. With all eyes blinking at her, she took one of the quarters, put it in her mouth, and sucked. Noisily.

  “Ha-ha-ha!” everyone had cried, clapping.

  And what began, in that moment, as a vague feeling of inadequacy had, in the months since, evolved into certainty of her own ignorance. Her mind, at first resisting, in the end turned on her. Now she knew that she knew nothing, except what had been, at the address of 477 Madison Avenue, explicitly taught her. She realized, initially with a kind of horror, and afterward with resignation, that nothing could be more terrible than to confuse the coffee and demitasse spoons, to misname the patterns most common to flatware—that is, names like Olympian and Winthrop—and, most deeply ingrained in her soul, more than lines of memorized Scripture and prayer, remained the memory of the orange. To correctly digest an orange, she now understood, one must use a citrus spoon and apply its serrated tip to the pulp.

  * * *

  It was the Irish shopgirl’s turn to speak. Glancing toward the front of the room, Marjory caught dark, girlish curls framing a flat and sincere-looking face. She imagined that such a face would do well behind the store counter, and her own cheeks colored with the embarrassment that some, perhaps Janey or Mrs. Trevor, might assume she was being indirectly represented by an individual who was, after all, only a stranger to her. She hoped, if the stray eye of one of Mrs. Belmont’s guests caught sight of her that they would guess she was native-born, perhaps a migrant from the South or from a city called Philadelphia located in a state similarly named.

  When she returned to the buffet table where Mrs. Trevor stood, her flushed complexion attracted immediate attention from the housekeeper.

  “Ah, you did just fine, Marjory,” she whispered, more gently than was her custom. “I didn’t have cause to notice you at all.”

  She was told to leave quietly and to go clean the servants’ staircase.

  “Richard trails in all kinds of dirt,” Mrs. Trevor sniffed, referring to the head footman. But Marjory felt that Mrs. Trevor knew the truth of the matter, and this was, in fact, a small mercy deliberately bestowed upon a grateful supplicant.

  “I just want to be treated like a real person,” the Irish shopgirl implored, as Marjory was leaving. “I want to be seen. I’m not a tool or a part of a machine to be used and thrown away.”

  These were the last words she caught as she
hurried down the stairs to the familiar comforts of obscurity.

  III

  In bed, she reflected, as Janey snored across from her, that she hadn’t behaved at all well on the steps of the servants’ staircase earlier that afternoon.

  The Italians were leaving. From above, the heavy tread of the grandmother descended, followed by the light, dancing step of her two wards. Their language, as they whispered, resembled the faint, muffled chatter of birds, who out of necessity must speak to one another but have no wish to draw attention to themselves in the trees.

  As they passed the step where Marjory worked, the older woman coughed, and Marjory thought, with some distaste, that in addition to the usual scuff marks and dust to be found on the stairs, she must wash away an Italian’s spit as well.

  The younger child, who was no more than eleven or twelve, repeated in English, over her grandmother’s coughing, “Ask her. Ask her.”

  “Ask her, why not?” she said again.

  She had learned what to do on such occasions. In her first week, it was Janey who had enlightened her as to the steps that should be taken.

  “If you’re polishing something,” she said in her easygoing way, “you must stop without making a fuss about it and simply leave the room, moving straight to the nearest door. You must look ahead of you, and pretend like you didn’t know who had come in, and take away whatever things you brought with you to clean. I’m warning you now, don’t forget. A girl lost her job here once because she was stupid enough to leave a dust cloth on Mrs. Belmont’s marble table. The one shipped from Par-ee.”

  “What if I’m spoken to?” Marjory asked, thinking it an intelligent question.

  “Well, then you have to answer,” Janey said, and Marjory could tell from her expression that she had nearly rolled her eyes at her. “If they ask for something, you do it straight away. Or if you can’t do it yourself, you find me or Mrs. Trevor.”