Nora had spent most of the winters of her life in Kent—also generally grey and gloomy in winter, but her home, and expansive, and easier to take for that. Here in the city, everything was too close, too hemmed in. By January, with the cheerful excitement of the Christmas holidays over, the drear had begun to weigh on Nora, and had brought with it her first real case of homesickness.
She’d have been happier at the ranch, her favourite of the Frazier homes, with all the room around them, and the more casual atmosphere, but she couldn’t take the time. She and Angelica had been hard at work since early November, planning their whistle-stop speaking tour, to Washington D.C., for the March inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.
On her mother-in-law’s suggestion, Nora had selected almost exclusively bright colours for her winter wardrobe, and she’d found a bright yellow umbrella in Chinatown, which William said was like the sun following her everywhere she went. It helped a bit, to be a bright spot in a gloomy world.
William held that sunny shield over her head as he helped her from the car and walked her to the door of the Cliff House, where she was meeting Angelica and Adelaide, and a guest, for luncheon.
Rain pattered over them as he leaned in and kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you Saturday.”
She grabbed his coat before he could pull away. “I need a better goodbye than that to hold me for three days.” He was traveling to Los Angeles for business; he and his father were still in search of the next big project for Scot-Western. William’s heart wasn’t in the work, and hadn’t been in the months she’d lived in California, but he was loyal to his father and felt a keen sense of duty.
Grinning, he hooked his arm around her waist and covered her mouth with his, claiming her fully, his tongue meeting hers. He bent her back so she had to clutch his shoulders to keep her feet.
Two and a half years after they’d met, nine months after they were married, when William kissed her like this, Nora felt as she had the very first time, in the hedge maze of the Tarrindale garden. Her heart slammed into her throat, her belly fluttered, the core of her grew wet. She understood all these feelings much more completely, of course, and wished fervently that there was a nook somewhere she could draw him off to for some privacy.
He was her husband. This was her life. Even on dreary days like today, Nora felt that blessing all around her.
When he pulled away, she was breathless, and he was grinning again. “Will that do?”
She reclaimed her balance and smoothed his coat. “I suppose it will have to.”
“I’ll put my back into our reunion, I promise. If you ladies haven’t effected the end of civilization as we know it in the meantime.” He opened the door and ushered her into the restaurant.
She laughed and took her closed umbrella from him. “It’s a goal, obviously, but I think we’ll need more than three days to realise it.”
“I love you, wife.”
“I love you. Now go, before you’re soaked.”
He tipped an imaginary hat—even in rain, the man refused to wear a hat—and trotted back to his car.
Nora stood at the door and watched him, feeling that homesickness settle back on her head.
Well. Work held it at bay. So she shook away that creeping malaise and turned to the maître d’ of the Cliff House. He was waiting to have her attention, and smiled at once. “Good day, Lady Nora.”
“Good day, Jeff. I’m meeting Dr. Linville and Mrs. Frazier today.”
“Indeed. They’re at the usual table, with your guest. Right this way.”
He led her to a table at the far side of the restaurant, beside the wall of windows. The Cliff House was right on the water, and the expanse of Pacific Ocean stretched before them. Nora didn’t struggle with the same anxieties that William still fought off, but she always felt a whoopsie little tumble in her belly when she was near the ocean. It was more pronounced, oddly, when she saw it from a boat or a place like this, with a layer of remove. She could stand on the beach, or near the edge of a cliff, and look out over the waves to appreciate their beauty. But when her feet were on a floor, even one like this, on a solid foundation, and she saw the ocean, the memories poked around at her insides.
So she preferred Angelica and Adelaide to take the seats nearest the windows. They knew it, and they’d taken those seats already. Their guest sat beside Angelica, so Nora took the last empty seat, beside William’s aunt.
She shared kisses on the cheek from Adelaide and squeezed Angelica’s outstretched hand. “Sorry I’m late.”
Adelaide patted her arm. “No matter. We’ve ordered for you.”
That was fine; by now, they knew what she liked here, and in any of their preferred restaurants.
Though they were family, and older, Nora thought of these women as her friends above all else, and never had she had friends so fierce and true as they. As much as she loved her own aunt, the women of William’s family understood her on a deeper level, and appreciated who she truly was. They made room for her as she learned and grew, and they loved her unconditionally. They were the midwives of her becoming.
“Is William off all right?” Angelica asked.
“He was on his way to the station from here.”
“Excellent. Well, Nora, let me introduce you to our good friend, Carrie Catt.”
“It’s a great honour, Mrs. Catt.” She held out her hand.
The woman sitting across from her took it and gave it a squeeze. “And a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Frazier. Your mother-in-law speaks glowingly of you, always. And of course I’ve very much enjoyed your essays.”
“Thank you.”
The first time Nora had ever heard the name Carrie Chapman Catt, William had described her as America’s version of Emmeline Pankhurst. The analogy was apt. Both women were the most prominent faces of the women’s suffrage movement in their respective countries. Both women were of similar means—comfortable but not affluent, educated and cultured but not elite. Both were powerful speakers and writers who had coalesced long years of activism into coherent movements making progress toward their goal.
But the analogy had its limits as well, particularly in philosophy. Mrs. Pankhurst had given up rhetoric as the sole, or even primary, strategy of the English movement and embraced civil disobedience. Mrs. Catt continued to advocate in America for a diplomatic resolution. To hear that she ‘enjoyed’ Nora’s essays, all of which venerated the women in England who’d put their bodies on the line, and several of which Mrs. Catt had directly critiqued in her own writings, put Nora on her guard. She despised the coded language of polite society, the way a seemingly harmless word could be carefully selected and deployed to become an insult.
But she did admire Mrs. Catt very much, so rather than silently seethe and dig around in the woman’s every sentence during this meal, looking for more insults, Nora settled her napkin on her lap and confronted the question directly. “I imagine you do enjoy my essays, madam. You certainly seem to enjoy picking them apart.”
In the edge of her vision, she caught suppressed grins from her aunt- and mother-in-law. Mrs. Catt lifted her grey brows. She was about the same age as Adelaide and Angelica, but the Linville women had both retained their youthful looks and figures. Mrs. Catt was more typically matronly.
“Not picking them apart. May I call you Nora?”
“Of course. May I call you Carrie?”
“You may. I think you’re an excellent and passionate writer, Nora. I’ve heard that your speeches are even more rousing, and I’m pleased that you’ll be traveling to Washington. But yes, I am concerned about your advocacy of certain tactics.”
“Might we wait for our meal to arrive before we begin arguing?” Adelaide complained.
“Not arguing, I hope.” Nora smiled at Mrs. Catt. “Discussing. You think I advocate dangerous tactics?”
“I do, yes. And I think your own experiences, about which you write so eloquently, bear out my concern. Would you wish what happened to you on others?”
“Of course not. It’
s inhuman, what happens to women imprisoned for the cause, and it’s abhorrent that women whose only criminal act is destruction of property are treated more brutally than the foulest murderer. But women have been writing and speaking for suffrage for decades, to no avail. At some point, words are not enough. We see it in England: since women have taken to the streets, since they’ve begun to fight for their rights, the conversation has changed. Women can no longer be ignored. It’s a constantly prevalent topic, in every direction.”
“And the backlash against the movement is more organised and effective as well. The cause has lost the high ground in your country, Nora. Now your ‘suffragettes’ are dismissed as criminals. Whereas here, we make strides every year. Nine states have granted women the right to vote, and the territories of Montana and Alaska as well.”
“’Granted’,” Adelaide scoffed. “As if it’s a gift men have bestowed on us.”
“We can’t do this without men, Adelaide,” Angelica countered. “In England and America both, it’s men who’ll ultimately decide this, and there’s no way around that fact. If they need to think it’s a gift they’re giving us, let them think it!”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Catt agreed. “We need men as our allies, not our adversaries.” She turned back to Nora. “That’s my only concern. We cannot see this as a war, because we cannot make men our enemies.”
Nora sipped at her tea and sorted her thoughts. Anger had warmed her blood, but a calm breed of it. In this new life, she wasn’t proscribed from speaking her mind, and, thus freed, she’d learned how to speak it to greatest effect, rather than simply pop off like a kettle left too long to boil.
“The men who beat me, who strapped me down and forced a tube down my throat, who committed me to Bedlam—those men are my enemies, Carrie.”
“The men who will vote to, yes, grant women suffrage cannot be, Nora. In diplomacy, we must set aside our personal animus for the greater good.”
“And yet you do want me to tell my story. You’ve asked me to Washington to do so.”
Carrie Chapman Catt inclined her head. “Yes. It’s a powerful story, told powerfully. And it should be told often.”
“But you wish me not to advocate for protests like the one at which I was arrested.”
“I do think it’s both dangerous to our women and counterproductive to our cause, yes. But your story, Nora, garners great sympathy, and that we can use.”
“Do you understand that, if you ask me to elicit sympathy, but you silence my call to fight, you make me a victim, when I would be a warrior?”
A single blink told Nora that her blow had struck true. But Mrs. Catt was a consummate rhetor, and she didn’t miss a beat. “I admire your passion, Nora. But you are young, and you are inexperienced in these negotiations. You’re only a victim if you see one in yourself. There are many ways to be a warrior. There’s great wisdom in the adage that we should pick our battles.”
“And I have chosen mine.”
Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Catt rescinded Nora’s invitation to speak at the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s event during the presidential inauguration in March. Their lunch had transpired with a cordiality that wasn’t quite chilly, but certainly wasn’t warm, either, and Nora had left the Cliff House expecting the carefully worded telegram she received a few days later.
Mrs. Catt controlled the agenda of the NAWSA event, but the whistle-stop tour was Angelica’s, and, though she was personally more inclined to agree with Mrs. Catt, she encouraged Nora to come to Washington and tell her story on the way, exactly as she wished to tell it.
And then, the day after Nora’s invitation to speak at NAWSA was rescinded, she received another telegram, this one from Alice Paul.
Miss Paul was a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with leadership duties. Nora had never met or corresponded with her, but she knew of her. Though she was American, she was famous in the English movement; she’d lived there for several years and had been active in the cause before Nora had even heard of it. She’d been arrested several times, enduring beatings and force-feedings as well. In America, as part of NAWSA, she told her story, but she followed the organization’s directives about tactics and strategy, and focused on diplomacy.
Her wire was quite brief:
HOPE YOU’RE STILL COMING –STOP- WOULD LIKE TO MEET –STOP- BIG PLANS –STOP- ALICE PAUL
“What do you think it means?”
William pulled the telegram from her hands and read it for the third time. “I think it means she hopes you’re still going, and she would like to meet, and she has big plans.”
Nora snatched the paper back. “You’re not half so amusing as you believe.”
He grinned and moved behind her to hook his arm around her waist. “Alice is a rabble-rouser. My guess is she has rabbles to rouse. She’s been agitating to give over the state-by-state fight and focus fully on a federal amendment.”
“Your mother thinks that’s folly, since the states would have to ratify any amendment anyway. Your politics are very confusing, you know that. I find myself constantly tripping over the difference between state laws and federal and which is more important.”
“As do we all. We fought a whole war over it.”
“Your Civil War.”
“The very one.”
“That wasn’t about slavery?”
“It absolutely was. But the states that seceded claimed the right to determine individually the legality of slavery, without input from the North. They would argue it was about states’ rights, even though the right in question was the right to own human beings as livestock.”
England had its history with slavery as well, but the idea still made Nora shudder. “But the Confederacy lost. Didn’t that decide the question for federal law as more important?”
Again, he laughed, and she looked over her shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being patronising. He could be, sometimes, when he explained something about American culture that she found incomprehensible.
“I’m not condescending, darling. I’m laughing because you would think the matter had been decided. But America’s a big place, with wildly different cultures and economies, and Americans are, as a group, not easily brought into line. So we fight the same fights over and over about who gets to tell whom to do what.”
“So you think the idea of focusing on a federal amendment is folly, too?”
“I honestly don’t know. Mom is a warrior, but she’s been fighting this fight for a generation. She and Mrs. Catt and the others of their time have made enormous strides. But Alice, and you, are younger, and you’ve seen different things. Maybe you see the next front. I think it would be interesting for you to meet her.”
Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration was scheduled for the fourth of March. The Women’s Suffrage Procession was set for the day before it. Nora would no longer be speaking at that event, but Angelica would be, and all three Frazier women meant to walk in the procession. They began their whistle-stop tour from Oakland to Washington, D.C. three weeks ahead of time, and stopped at nearly every station along the way, giving speeches from the back of the Destiny Car.
Often, those speeches were largely ignored, but for a few curious onlookers. Frequently, they faced hostile, heckling audiences. A few times, angry audiences threw mud or, once, rocks—William yanked Nora and Angelica into the car at once on those occasions and stood on the platform himself with a rifle until the train pulled away. But every now and then, often enough for Nora to keep hope and purpose alive in her chest, a group gathered and listened to what they had to say. Sometimes, a woman, or even, rarely, a man, would ask real questions and start a discussion. They always lingered at those stops and spoke at length to people who wanted to know.
In the evenings, on the train or at their occasional overnight stops, Nora pored over her speech, refining it, thinking about audience reactions or questions she’d been asked. Across the great breadth of the country, she’d found that the same speech didn’t work ev
erywhere. As William had said, America was full of wildly different kinds of people living wildly different kinds of lives. To get them all to listen, she had to think about to whom it was she spoke.
And at night, she and William made love and fell asleep in their usual curl. The homesickness that had taken Nora over in the dreary weeks after Christmas dissipated entirely while she rode across the country again in the Destiny Car. She was happier than she’d been since she was a girl, before her father had taken away the things that made her most herself.
She’d found her true calling in this kind of activism. A hostile audience excited her nearly as much as a sympathetic one. She’d been passive and lost in the crush of the march on Parliament that had sent her to Holloway and then to Bedlam, buffeted by circumstance, too naïve to understand. But standing on the platform, telling that story, decrying the injustice, arguing with hecklers, Nora felt powerful. She even felt that, should she be arrested while she gave a speech, she would be strong enough to face what might happen next. But suffragists had not been arrested in America in any great number.
Of course, they hadn’t yet really begun to fight with more than words.
All the work Nora had done in the ten months she’d been involved in the American women’s suffrage movement, all the events she’d attended and speeches and talks she’d given or assisted, none of it prepared her for what she saw in Washington on the day of the Women’s Suffrage Procession.
They’d arrived in the city two days before and attended some meetings and social events among the organisers. During those days, she began to get an inkling, or think she had, that the event would be truly significant. She also saw tensions and conflicts within the movement, especially between the primary organisers of the procession—including Alice Paul—and Negro suffragists like Miss Ida Wells.
Southern suffragists had refused to march if Negro women were allowed to march as well. As a compromise, Miss Paul had suggested that Negro women, as a group, be placed toward the back of the procession, behind the white men who marched for the cause. Miss Wells and others refused the compromise, and there had been some considerable consternation in the last day that the fate of the procession itself was at stake over the issue.
Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven Page 44
