Stories from Suffragette City

by M. J. Rose

  “Now, it’s more difficult to leave quietly,” Janey continued, “when you’re stooping or washing the floor. If that happens, all you have to remember is to stop and turn away. Stop and turn away.”

  “Stop and turn away,” Marjory repeated, and Janey nodded.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though,” Janey said cheerfully, as a conclusion to the day’s lesson. “Mrs. Trevor is a wonder at timing all the errands. She’s so good at arrangement and things like that. And it’s like Mr. Riggs said. If we’re lucky, Mrs. Belmont won’t even realize the old Marjory’s married and gone.”

  So, though she knew that they were all three of them staring at her on the steps, waiting, Marjory set aside her dustpan and looked in the opposite direction toward the servants’ quarters. Her posture, as she folded her hands across her lap, suggested, she hoped, the discretion of the good servant who is patient but eager to resume her duties.

  “Ask her,” the girl repeated. “It is only water.”

  “No, no,” her sister said, talking loudly. “You think it is only water to them? No.” Her voice betrayed the frustration she felt. Embarrassment had moved her finally to anger. She broke into Italian, and a steady stream of foreign vitriol filled the hall.

  By the time they reached the last stair, the grandmother’s thick voice had taken turns admonishing first the one, then the other at her arm. The younger girl was sobbing. Their steps quickened, and with the alacrity of thieves, all three drew toward the door that led out onto the street, as if they couldn’t bear a moment longer to stay inside the house.

  She looked up too late. The door had shut, and seemingly on cue, Janey emerged from the kitchen.

  “Oh, I would have given them a cup of tea before they left,” she said, “if I saw them.”

  “I didn’t know if that would have been the right thing to do,” Marjory said, reddening. “I wanted to. I just didn’t know.”

  Stop and turn away, she thought. That’s what you told me.

  Janey shrugged, leaning against the spindles of the staircase. “No harm done,” she said. “And it saves us a cup, well, smashing three perfectly good cups, anyway. No knowing what diseases they might have in the factories. Not everything kills you instantly, I’ve heard, and it’s better to be careful.”

  “Did you see?” Janey asked, before she moved off. “No, I think you’d left by then, so you wouldn’t have. The old woman lost both her thumbs bookbinding. She showed all the ladies in the drawing room.” Giggling maliciously, she looked over her shoulder at the door. “They think they’re better than us anyway, those factory girls.”

  “Us?”

  Janey gave her a look. “Servants. We’re what’s holding back the modern age, aren’t we?”

  IV

  The next morning, Marjory unfolded a letter. The paper was a cheap, yellowing, and waxy type, as if it had been stored and archived for years before being mailed as an afterthought.

  “Is that where you’re from?” Janey asked, peering over her head. “How on earth do you pronounce that word?”

  “There are all kinds of words like that where I’m from,” Marjory said, trying hard to keep the edge out of her voice.

  The letter, from a Father McKinnon, was only a few lines long. Her mother was feeling poorly. Please send, if feasible, more funds in order to settle some outstanding debts and for a doctor to visit her at home.

  “Is that how your name is spelled?” Janey inquired. “Your real name?”

  Holding the letter in both hands, Marjory placed her right thumb over the word in question. Then she turned her thumb downward so the sweat of it would smear the ink and she wouldn’t have to look at the word again. She collapsed the paper as it had been, into thirds, and slipped it under her pillow.

  “So?” Janey hissed. “What are you going to do?”

  She watched as her friend’s eyes traveled to the end of her mattress. With a pocket knife, borrowed from the head footman one evening three weeks ago, they had cut out a small compartment after everyone had gone to bed. And inside that compartment, a bottle of dark glass still remained sealed.

  “Did you or didn’t you?” Janey asked, and Marjory, a numbness taking over, shook her head.

  “Jesus,” Janey cursed, a vein in her neck throbbing to the surface. She looked like she might be sick. “Jesus! What are you going to do?”

  * * *

  She had begged before. At the crossroads of the village, she could always count on a passing cart to take her to town, and then she would stand on the busiest thoroughfare, before the more upscale shops, and wait and watch. The trick was to discriminate, to fix on a kindly face or a drinker emerging from one of the better pubs who might have change to spare in his stout-induced good humor.

  But that wouldn’t work, not here. She couldn’t stand in front of Tiffany’s with her hand outstretched, blocking the view of a pair of gold vases or a peridot necklace set in diamonds. In New York, everyone moved with a purpose. It was impossible to stay still.

  In the way stray thoughts do, it had occurred to her without prompting one night that some exchange must have transpired in this city, which only the best families, perhaps that esteemed body of American gentility she heard tell of so frequently—the late Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred—secretly knew about and were in on together. It was a silly idea, to be sure, and she felt at once ashamed for letting her imagination run away with her. But she had wondered, even considered, for the few distracted minutes that she lingered beside a window after supper, whether a pact might have been made, signed, and sealed with blood early in the city’s relatively short history. Before her eyes rose the interior of a Neoclassical ballroom, walls brushed with gold, a five-tiered chandelier removed from its protective bag for the occasion and painstakingly cleaned. The curly heads of putti decorated the cornices like victims of religious sacrifice, while a tangled mural of angels, trumpets, and lilies of the valley soared omnipotent overhead. Everywhere, installed above the Palladian windows and hidden alcoves where lovers stole kisses on divans, loomed carvings in solid gold. Here, an eagle about to take flight. There, a sylphlike Diana with two hounds baying at her feet. She saw all of this and the procession of couples who entered one by one into the room with a kind of photographic clarity. And, at the opposite end, beneath a window illuminated by a high and full moon, stood a desk with a long scroll of thick legal paper, a heavy black pen placed at its head, and a silver needle mounted on a crude wooden stand. A caped figure wearing a top hat sat behind the desk, beckoning, and the couples, forming a line, went up to sign their names and prick their thumbs, which they pressed next to each of their signatures. At the end of the party, when everyone had had a turn, the figure rose from his seat. He thanked his guests for coming and removed first his cape, his white gloves, then his shiny top hat, and everyone saw, without any semblance of amazement, that it was not a man at all who had entertained them that night but a creature with horns and a pointed tail.

  “You will receive your wealth very soon,” the Devil said, rolling up the scroll, and by the following morning, certain families had been made rich and their rivals bankrupted or steeped in scandal. From the depths of the earth, the Met Life building had sprung overnight like a newborn, and New York was transformed from a stick-and-mud settlement of dilapidated farmhouses into a metropolis of steel and skyscrapers, suspension bridges and automobiles. The windows of the mansions on Fifth Avenue gleamed, and the Devil waited, patiently grinning, for the collection of the souls promised to him.

  How else, Marjory thought, could one account for all this finery? For Cartier clocks? For ivory-handled silk fans from Tiffany? Or vaults of Gorham silver, which made, every summer, a trip in chamois bags to mansions in Newport and then returned to sit in rooms finer than any Bayard Street tenement?

  She had walked the Ladies’ Mile and found the shops overwhelming. Everywhere, in the vicinity of where she lived, there was something pleasant to be spotted and taken note of: a woman’s easy laugh
, the click-click step of patent leather Oxfords on the pavement, a new window display to herald the changing of the seasons at B. Altman’s. She felt sometimes, her heart stirred by a strange longing, that there could be no place more refined, more ahead in the world than New York. She had only to look upon the red awnings signaling the opening of a steakhouse on Fifth Avenue or the triumph of the sprawling Waldorf Astoria Hotel to feel that, in gaining these innovations, this supremacy over the known universe, something unspeakable had also been lost to the city’s inhabitants forever. Beneath the veneer of agreeableness, as barely perceptible as a rising fog, there lay a stratum of unease and disquiet. The racing pulse of a criminal conscience rendered everything loud and fast. There was always the sound of construction, of engines screeching and steel rising or stone being blasted. Fresh finery was made, then purchased, and the cycle continued. Everyone talked a lot and spent a lot, and there existed no unhappiness or temporary spell of petulance that couldn’t be eased and finally resolved by the purchase of an ermine muffler from Bergdorf Goodman or the digestion of a dish of roasted squab drowned in sauce at Sherry’s.

  You could not stand on a street corner and beg, like a clown.

  * * *

  She was aware, with a great sense of irony, that it was she in the end who had made a pact with the Devil. It was she who crept, concealed behind a sheet of rain, to the scratched red door of a four-story brownstone on her evening off. Her hand, slippery and cold, gripped a door knocker shaped in the curling horns of a ram’s head. She pounded twice, then three more times before the door finally opened. From the threshold, a small woman, dark-haired, with an angular jaw, blinked at her.

  “It is only natural that you should be nervous,” the woman said, as they moved from the hall to a dimly lighted parlor. “Poor Francis,” she added, and a finger casually indicated the direction of the entrance. “All my visitors abuse him terribly.”

  Money was counted, then counted again, before the woman asked, as if it were a question to be disputed, “This is just the first installment?”

  Marjory nodded.

  “I can be trusted. I’m employed,” she began, but the woman shook her head.

  “I don’t need to know specifics,” she said, secreting the first of what would be four payments into a pocket of her dress. From the same pocket, she produced a bottle of dark glass. “Here.”

  * * *

  Afterward, Janey had said, sitting on her bed, “My friend told me she’s a tiny woman. She thought she was the parlor maid when she answered the door. Is she small?”

  “She’s short,” Marjory replied. “Frail-looking. Bony,” she added, trying to think of how to describe her. “You couldn’t really remember her face. She looked away from you most of the time.”

  “Probably being discreet,” Janey said.

  “Yes, that’s likely.”

  It went quiet between them. Then Janey, smoothing a crease in the pillow, spoke. “Who was it that night? Was it the dark-haired one with the thick brows?”

  “No, he had light hair. Yellowish. Green eyes.” She almost smiled. “You had the dark one, remember?”

  “Yes, but we only kissed a few times on the mouth. At least, that’s how far I let it go.”

  The rebuke hit her like a slap.

  “Was he the first?” Janey asked kindly, perhaps feeling she had been cruel.

  She stuttered a little, shaking her head. “No,” she finally said. “There were two others. Back home, that is.”

  Janey’s eyes bulged. “Well!” she cried. “You can never tell!”

  “I thought I would marry the second one,” Marjory explained.

  “Well!” Janey repeated. “Still, I shouldn’t have taken you with me.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I didn’t think you had it in you, though,” Janey said, as if to discharge herself of any blame. “You were dancing so much. Spinning like a child’s top all the time with your hair loose over your shoulders. What were you thinking?”

  Marjory shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking. Perhaps all I wanted was to be seen.”

  V

  It was a few nights after the “monkeys from the factories” had given their talk that she had a dream.

  In the one-room cottage back home, her sisters discovered a mouse in a pail. The youngest screamed, pulling in fright at the ends of her own hair.

  “Ah, kill it!” they both shouted. “Kill it! Kill it quickly!”

  All four of them—she, her mother, and her two sisters—stared down at the intruder. It was a brown, furry creature with patches of hair missing from its back and a thin, flesh-colored tail that twitched every now and then like a worm. Bits of blood stuck to the claws where they had been rubbed raw against the wood.

  “How will we kill it?” her mother asked evenly.

  “Wring its neck,” one of her sisters said, without offering to do anything.

  “No, don’t touch it,” her mother said. “It might bite you, and then we’ll have more trouble on our hands.”

  “Beat it to death,” her other sibling suggested.

  “With?” their mother asked.

  They looked to her for advice.

  “It’s such a small thing,” she heard herself say in a shy voice. “Such a small, stupid thing. Look at it trying to get out.” And they turned their eyes again to the creature, which was standing on its hind legs, scratching at the impenetrable sides.

  “It’s vermin,” her mother said. “It needs to be killed.”

  “We could let it go,” she said. “We could take the pail and just tip it over in a field. It would run away, and we wouldn’t have to touch it, not once.”

  “And come back,” they all said together. “It would come back.”

  “Mice always come back where there’s food,” her mother explained, and when she had said this, everyone looked down and away at the floor because they knew it wasn’t true. They had each of them only a slice of black bread that morning.

  It was her mother who decided, after considering, that a kettle of water should be heated, and when the water reached boiling, that she would pour the water into the pail. Her sisters thought this a good idea.

  “I’ll throw it out afterward,” her mother said. “The water and the mouse together.”

  And as they waited for the kettle to warm, she felt sicker and sicker at heart. Her sisters sat across from each other at the table, the youngest one drumming her fingers or scratching her nose until it turned pink. Her mother bent over the stove, rubbing the end of her lower back where she felt pain.

  As the first wisps of steam began to rise, she glanced again at the animal, and the sound of the scratching that they had all been forced to listen to, like the ticking of a clock, filled her with horror.

  The kettle emitted its high-pitched whistling, and from her throat, a scream came out, like a shot. A chair was knocked over, and in both hands, she scooped up the pail. When she ran, it was as if the wind was at her back, pushing her in the direction of the fields.

  She woke up, sweating, the sheets beneath her soaked through.

  * * *

  In the early hours of dawn, she sat on her bed, moving the bottle between her hands. With the nail of her left thumb, she unsealed the cap and peered inside the glass.

  The letter from the priest lay unfolded next to her.

  Dear––––––––,

  I am sorry to write with bad news, especially while you must still be adjusting to life far away. But I think you’ll agree that some things one can’t escape knowing even from foreign shores. Your mother is ill, and your sisters, though they try, have had a hard time coping on their own. I have given them what I can, but it isn’t enough.

  Your mother and sisters say the money from you stopped a while ago, four weeks, to be precise. They don’t understand why this is and hope you haven’t caught any sickness from the air in New York.

  Please write when you can and send what you can fea
sibly spare to the address enclosed. The doctor thinks your mother has a growth and that it is located somewhere in her spine. But he won’t visit her again until she pays for the first consultation, and there are other debts to be resolved at the grocer’s and chemist’s shops, to name just a few.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Father McKinnon

  It was many hours later, upstairs, that she felt a small tug at her stomach. From a crate, she had lifted the latest of a series of ancient bronzes ordered expressly from a dealer in Rome. She had clutched to her chest the bust of a bearded deity, metal curls brushing the bottom of her chin, as the first wetness touched the inside of her leg and slid down her ankle.

  VI

  The tray that Marjory carried into the drawing room was unusually heavy. Monsieur has outdone himself, everyone said, and Mrs. Trevor, sighing in awe, looked longingly toward the pyramid of cream puffs obscured in powdered sugar, which were her particular favorite. To the usual plate of almond and sesame seed biscuits was added that afternoon a dish of caramel éclairs, a silver cup of cherry compote with clotted cream, and a formidable centerpiece, a whole Neapolitan cake perched atop a crystal stand. A chocolate pot of porcelain, hand painted with green vine and periwinkle, towered in the upper left corner, while to the right, a damask napkin folded in the shape of a swan embodied the most modest of the tray’s offerings.

  In the drawing room, where the picture by Sargent had since been restored, Mrs. Vanderbilt Belmont waited.

  “What day is it?” Marjory had asked Janey that morning.

  “Saturday,” Janey said.

  “Is it Saturday?” Her voice was hushed like a whisper. How had three whole days passed without her realizing?

  “Arnault certainly knows how to please,” Mrs. Belmont muttered, as Marjory poured the chocolate. A set of chubby fingers wiggled toward the cream puffs.