Stories from Suffragette City

by M. J. Rose

  She was about to leave when her mistress waved a hand at her.

  “Stay. I might have something for you to do. An errand to run maybe.”

  Marjory waited. She watched as the first bite of cake was ingested. Then a biscuit was consumed and several spoonfuls of the cherry compote topped with cream. As the compote was still being swallowed, a second cream puff disappeared into the mouth, and Marjory thought how her employer’s jaws resembled a powerful machine that one might see in a factory, mashing to a fine paste whatever entered it.

  She thought, as she refilled cups of chocolate, how grotesque her mistress looked. Mrs. Belmont was a woman of mature years—old with a mean face, like an embittered bulldog. You could tell, just by casting your eye over such a face, that she was a woman hard to get along with and who was used to having the rest of the world see things her way. It didn’t matter that she was dressed, at the moment, in the latest creation tailored by Madame Paquin herself from Paris. Or that she wore, pinned in the center of a wide and ample bosom, a brooch of rare purple stones. There were still cake crumbs lodged in the corner of her mouth, still a dab of clotted cream stuck, like a white mole, to the front of her chin. And the lips, when they caught the light, were oily with the stickiness of the compote. The syrup from the cherries had colored her mouth a dark shade of crimson, and if one looked quickly enough, it was easy to mistake the reddish outline for fresh blood.

  She had heard at breakfast that Mrs. Belmont was in a foul mood. The tray of sweets was offered as a palliative, meant to cool the breath of her fiery temper.

  “Of course she’s against it,” Mr. Riggs had said. “You can’t really see her supporting such a demonstration, can you? It’s against all her sensibilities.” And he enunciated the syllables of sensibilities as though they were separate words strung together.

  “It’s just a parade,” Janey put in. “What’s the harm in it? A lot of women marching up a few blocks?” She shrugged.

  “I hear there’ll be men as well,” Mrs. Trevor said.

  “You know she’s only upset,” Richard said, “because she isn’t in charge of the whole damn thing.”

  They had laughed at this, and Richard, thinking himself extremely clever, added, “If they could only put her on top of a float with a crown on her head and a scepter in her hand, you know she would just love the idea.”

  “So long as it’s her idea,” Mrs. Trevor said, since the mood at the table called for a little impropriety.

  “Mrs. Belmont won’t be there, then?” Janey asked, cutting up the rest of the egg on her plate. “She won’t walk with the other ladies today?”

  “She’ll be there,” Mr. Riggs said. “Don’t be fooled by her blowing all hot and cold now. She couldn’t let something happen without her in this city. It’s not her way.”

  “Parlor entertainments,” Mrs. Trevor said.

  * * *

  When Mrs. Belmont rose from her chair and left the room to go out, Marjory did not take the depleted tray and its contents through the corridors and down the stairs to be washed. Instead she lingered. She looked around her, as if seeing the walls, the furniture, and the Sargent painting for the first time. She touched the Louis XVI table by Roentgen and sat, for a few minutes, in the soft velvet side chair, to rest her feet, which were sore from standing. The soles of her boots brushed against the hardwood floor, and she tapped her heels in a cheerful rhythm, listening to the music she made, of which she was the only audience.

  She didn’t take the tray with her, even as she traveled through the rest of the house. It was still early in the afternoon, in the lazy hours between luncheon and dinner, and she knew that everyone would be downstairs, chatting about the demonstration and Mrs. Belmont’s bad mood.

  The double doors of the library creaked when she opened them. The sight of books, of so much learning and accumulated knowledge contained within rows of neatly bound volumes, moved her in a way she couldn’t explain, as her fingers slid over the spines, pulling out ones of interest. She caught bits of phrases she thought lovely, like a line from Catullus, and the wing span of the butterfly Aporia crataegi. She opened a volume of The Mayor of Casterbridge to a random page and lifted the book to her nose so that she could inhale the smell of leather, ink, and fine paper. With Middlemarch she did the same, and she walked all around the perimeter of the room, a copy of Robinson Crusoe tucked in the crook of her elbow, while she stroked the backs of the armchairs and touched the head of a marble bust of Horace.

  In the bedroom of Mrs. Belmont, she opened bottles of fragrance from Poiret and dabbed a little of one that she liked on her wrists. Before the mirror, she straightened her cap and apron. Her hands drifted to the panels of the immense rosewood wardrobe and, flinging them open, embraced the line of furs that hung there as if they were old friends. Sleeves of mink and fox caressed her cheeks. She felt giddy, weightless. She thought if anyone, Mrs. Trevor, Janey, or Mrs. Belmont herself, stepped into the room at that very moment, they wouldn’t be able to see she was there. She would be like a ghost to them, and they would feel only a slight chill in the room where she had passed over the carpet.

  Her head was full of useless things. As she moved through the halls, she considered that Mrs. Belmont had had three children by her first, loveless marriage, and that the children were named, in sequence of birth, Consuelo, William, and Harold. Mr. Harold Vanderbilt sailed a yacht named the Vagrant, and Consuelo had cried the night before her wedding to a duke from a place called Marlborough. When she visited, she liked a blue Ming vase of Provence roses to be placed on her dressing table. Everyone who met her said she was beautiful. Her portrait had been painted in Europe sixteen times, Helleu and Sargent among the artists.

  She had learned that furniture must have names like George or Louis or Charles to be considered of value, that it didn’t matter if a string of pearls Mrs. Belmont wore had been previously owned, because the owner happened to be the late empress of Russia (Catherine the Great). There existed a particular fork for the eating of terrapin soup, just as there existed a spoon with a serrated tip for piercing the pulp of an orange. As she wandered through another corridor, in a part of the house she didn’t know, she heard again, like a whisper, the ghoulish cackling of the servants who had laughed at her in the kitchen.

  In all this, there was no room for her own thoughts. For grief. No room for the recollection of how her left boot had inadvertently stepped in a palm-sized pool of blood or the bottle of dark glass, still full, because she couldn’t bring herself to drink.

  The irony of what had happened three days ago didn’t strike her until she nearly collided with her employer in the entrance of the house.

  “Here,” Mrs. Belmont said, shoving into her arms a heavy coat.

  “Ma’am, you’re back already?” Marjory asked, taking the garment from her.

  “I am. Where is everyone? Where’s Mr. Riggs?”

  She heard herself answer and Mrs. Belmont huff away, up the main staircase to her room. If the earth swallowed her now, she wouldn’t resist. She would let herself be buried and the thousands of pounds of stone and dirt crush her from above. There was no afterlife, she thought. She needed none.

  I think you’ll agree, Father McKinnon had written, that some things one can’t escape knowing even from foreign shores … 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 …

  The door to the street was still open. As she turned away, a sound came to her from outside. It was familiar—deep and resonant, an echoing, cyclical rumble.

  The sea! she thought. The sea!

  She was in the road, no longer a road but a grassy path scattered with wildflowers in a green land. Her mother had told her, in times of trouble, that she must listen for the sea. The sea will save you, she’d said. And it was here—finally, it was here. It had arrived when she most needed it. A cold wind touched her back, and the coolness felt pleasant to her, even as she shivered. The sound of
the current, of chanting and singing and laughing just ahead, sent her heart turning with joy.

  She saw waves of white, of rows and rows of angels riding the waters, arm in arm. A garlanded float, like a massive ship, followed close behind, and she saw there were more angels to come behind the ship, that banners decorated with purple and green streamers fluttered over all their heads.

  In the distance, the blast of a trumpet thundered like cannon fire. The sound would signal her crossing into heaven, she thought. She shut her eyes and waited.

  “Come on!” a voice shouted, and she felt a hand smooth as marble grip her arm, leading her forward. “Come on now! Don’t be afraid.”

  A sob choked her throat as she left the pavement behind. There was no going back, no time even for good-byes.

  “You can open your eyes,” the angel said into her ear. “You’ll crash into a lamppost going this way.”

  The face that greeted her, wide and framed with curls, came slowly into view. A week ago, she had thought that such a face would do well behind the counter of a store. And for a moment, they blinked at each other, divinity and human, before the current of bodies forced them on ahead.

  “What’s your name?” the Irish shopgirl asked.

  “Marjory,” she answered quickly.

  “Your real name, I mean.”

  She hesitated. “What, don’t you know your own name? Forget it?” the girl teased.

  All around her, as she looked, there was beauty. Those who passed her noticed her and smiled, and she did not feel that they were laughing at her or smiling because she still wore a maid’s cap on her head and an apron around her waist. From behind, a woman she didn’t know placed a gloved hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “A wonderful turnout, isn’t it?” the stranger whispered, before moving on.

  When she looked back, her friend was still waiting for her reply.

  “Siobhán,” she said. “My name is Siobhán.”

  Inside, there was so much that was raw, that hurt and was painful to think about. Yet as the sound of the sea filled her ears, as waves of angels continued to stream past them and the purple flags on the top of the grand ships rippled in the wind, she felt that this, all of this, would be enough.

  Yes, she thought, it was enough.

  The Runaway

  CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE

  Standing on the wide front stoop of the Children’s Aid Society with the others, clutching her valise, Kira gazed down the empty street.

  The plan was to walk a mile uptown to Grand Central Station, where the children would board a train headed to small towns and cities in the Midwest. They were wearing their Sunday best, gray coats over white dresses for the girls and neat shirts for the boys, white socks and brown lace-up shoes. Each of them carried a change of clothes and a Bible in a small brown traveling case. But now they waited. The matron’s attention had been diverted by strange sounds in the distance: a staticky noise like the roar of the ocean, the faint blaring of horns.

  The matron sighed, shaking her head. “The parade. I’d forgotten it was today. They’ll be upon us if we don’t make haste.”

  “We can avoid it,” her assistant said. “We’ll go up Park instead of Fifth.”

  The matron nodded. Turning to the children, she waved a cupped hand in the air.

  The kids, a dozen in all, surged forward, trailing the women from the stoop to the sidewalk like a brood of ducklings. The assistant walked at the front with the matron, conferring about directions. Kira—at age twelve, one of the oldest—hung back. When the last of them disappeared around the corner, she hurried down the steps and broke into a run in the opposite direction, down the avenue toward the sound of the crowd.

  * * *

  Maybe she had always been running. Most days it felt that way to her.

  Her earliest memories were of foraging through rubbish bins in Shannon for a heel of bread and scrabbling for nibs of coal at the gates of the coal yard. Her heart beating in her ears, her breath fogging the air. The gates were chained, but sometimes chunks slid to the ground from the heaping piles on the trucks that left twice a day. She fought other desperate children for them, fumbling in the dirt with coal-black fingers, trying to avoid the kicks and shoves. Running home with weighted pockets, one ear cocked for the bobby’s whistle.

  She would never forget the damp, burning scent of the coal yard, the haze of yellowish smoke, sloppy rainfall splashing in puddles.

  All of them were cold and hungry. Her worn-out mam and her angry dad. Her sister and two brothers. Arguing over a scrap of blanket in the dark, grabbing the last sliver of cheese on the plate. It seemed to her that her parents existed in two states, sodden silence and rage. They fought constantly, screaming and throwing things, breaking the few odd pieces of china they possessed.

  Kira was a watcher. She was the fourth child, the afterthought. Her parents had little time for her. Her brothers ignored her. Her sister let Kira follow her around but was indifferent. Kira had never met her grandparents: her mother’s parents were dead; her father’s family was up north—“a brutish clan,” her mother said, shaking her head in disgust, “not a decent human in the lot. Including your da.”

  The glimpses Kira had of other lives—a mother’s protective arm around a daughter’s shoulders at the fair, a father, pipe in his mouth, striding down the cobbles with a laughing baby on his shoulders—made her wonder. She knew from the Bible that she should love her parents, but she didn’t think she did. She wondered what was wrong with her, why she couldn’t love them. Maybe she was incapable of it. Maybe she would never love anyone.

  “She’s your side of the family, not mine,” her da said, goading her ma. “Plain as soda bread. Serious as a sermon.”

  “It’s an honest face, though,” her ma said. “Perhaps that’s a good thing. Beauty is a curse.”

  When Kira scrutinized herself in the clouded glass in the outhouse, she had to agree. Skinny as an alder, ghostly pale, with brown hair that fell in strips around her face. Brown eyes and brown freckles. Too serious for her own good. She tried to hide it, but how could she? She was who she was.

  One by one her siblings drifted away. Her eldest brother, seventeen-year-old Niall, across the water to England to seek a better life, taking the family’s loaf for the day, promising at the doorstep to send money back. Aileen, sixteen, her stomach blooming under her dress, sent to a Magdalene asylum. Then Sean, caught shoplifting at fourteen, off to a boys’ home in Galway.

  A few months later, Kira’s mother took sick in the coldest February anyone could remember, moaning in the bedroom, spitting blood into a rag. Kira ran to get the doctor. Watched him frown, shake his head. “Too late,” he said.

  Nothing to do but watch as her ma sickened and died.

  After the funeral it was just her and her da. She was a nuisance to him, he made it clear, a drain on his wallet, a stopper in his plans. She crept around quietly, trying to be useful. Roasted potatoes in the hearth for his dinner, stood on a stool to wash dishes, swept the floor with a brush broom taller than she was. Pulled off his shoes when he came home drunk and collapsed on the bed, setting them neatly by the door.

  Even so, she saw him clearly—his glassy, red-rimmed, pale-blue eyes, one front tooth chipped in half from that time he’d fallen down the stairs. The way he bit his ragged thumbnail till it bled. His Adam’s apple bobbing as he drained pint after pint.

  “Stop looking at me like that, high and mighty,” he said.

  “I don’t need your judgment,” he said.

  She watched him count coins at the kitchen table from his job at the morgue, muttering to himself. Still youthful, he was, only thirty-four. Young enough to seek a better life. Had to get the hell out of this place before it killed him, too.

  A few days later she heard him clomp out into the hallway and ring the bell of the neighbor next door. She wouldn’t let him in. “What d’ye want, Mr. Kelley?” she asked, standing firm in her doorway. Kira listened as he asked in hushed tones
if she’d take his little girl; he couldn’t bring her where he was going, she’d be better off here in Shannon. And the neighbor’s pious rebuke: “Lord have mercy, Mr. Kelley, you’d abandon your own blood.”

  “Not abandon, no, Mrs. Marray, not at all. I’ll send money. And I’ll come back for her when I have me feet on the ground.”

  “Will ye, now? Like that no-good son of yours did, eh?”

  And then the shouting started, her da swearing up and down.

  “Nothing but a gombeen, just like his father,” Mrs. Marray said, to which he responded that she was a hoor and a hag and a dry shite, and she slammed the door in his face.

  The next thing Kira knew, her da was prodding her in the dark to wake up and they were stealing out the door, running down the street past the gas lamps, dim in the hoary gloom, and climbing into the back of a cart with a huddle of people she didn’t know, rattling and swaying all the way down to the pier.

  On the ship her da disappeared with a pack of men and boys, leaving her down in steerage, bedded between two crates. Her stomach roiled with seasickness. One night she woke to find a man’s knee between her legs. She shrieked so loudly, at such a pitch, that he stumbled off her, hands over his ears, and staggered away. She never learned who he was, but he didn’t try again.

  Cold potatoes. Stale bread. The occasional rubbery egg. Thin broth. A tumbler of lemon juice every few days from the ship’s doctor. Days and days of gazing out from the railing at the dark choppy water. She witnessed more than one funeral, shrouded forms splashing into the sea.

  As the ship neared land, an excited murmur ran through the crowd. The Statue of Liberty just ahead! But the day was cool and foggy; there was nothing to see. It was as if an old blanket had been thrown over everything beyond the deck rail. The crowd was quiet as they pulled up to the dock.

  Kira felt a pit in her stomach. Now, once again, she’d be reliant on her da.