Nora found the argument depressing and ironic. These women were fighting for equality, demanding that they be recognised as human beings with every right of any other to the determination of their own destiny, and yet some women managed, without any recognition of their own hypocrisy, to find themselves more equal than others. Perhaps this was what William meant about fighting the same fights over and over again.
Coming late to the discussion, and a Briton in the bargain, Nora kept her thoughts to herself and watched the dispute play out. Eventually, the compromise was enacted, but on the day of the procession, Nora was glad, and not at all surprised, to see Miss Wells and others marching wherever they wished in line, ignoring protests of some white women.
What surprised her was the sheer scope of the procession. Thousands and thousands of women marched, from all over the world. They carried signs and banners. They wore sashes and medals. Many wore white. As she did at all suffrage events, Nora wore her hunger strike medal and her white silk Kensington Rose brooch.
There were floats and horses, chants and songs. And the crowd grew and grew.
For the most part, the crowd, from what Nora saw, was male, and for the most part, those men were not there to cheer the women on. As Nora, Angelica, and Adelaide walked at the head of the California delegation, Adelaide holding the state sign, Nora saw indications she recognised, from nearly two years before: the crowd pressing in, growing angrier, losing patience with simply shouting, beginning to interfere with the marchers.
A man leapt out and tried to wrest the sign from Adelaide’s hands. She resisted, and Angelica helped her. Another man knocked Angelica back, and she fell into Nora’s arms. Nora was smaller and caught off guard, and both women fell to the street. Other women helped them up, and once they determined that they were upset but not injured, they pressed on, determined not to be dissuaded. Nora’s heart screamed for her to run, to get away before she was arrested or beaten, but she clenched her jaw tight, held on to her mother-in-law, and pressed forward.
There were police everywhere, but they only watched, without protecting the marchers. Nora wondered if police anywhere were ever there to help the people being attacked, or if they only protected the people in power. In her experience, it seemed most often to be the latter.
As they pushed through the increasingly chaotic throng, Nora was pulled away from Angelica, and a strong arm suddenly closed around her shoulders. She tried to spin away, but it was William. He had his mother in his other arm.
“Are you all right?”
Nora nodded, and William turned to his mother. “Mom? Adelaide?”
“I’m fine,” Angelica answered. “We’re fine.”
“I need to get you all out of here.”
Angelica’s head shook hard. “No! We can’t run. They win if we stop.”
He looked to Nora. “Darling? Can you go on?”
He understood what she was feeling. He knew that day at Parliament had come back into the fore of her mind with a vengeance. And he was here. He was with her.
She tucked herself more tightly under his arm. “I can.”
They finished the procession, and they held their speeches at Constitution Hall. Dozens of women had been hurt, however. But something important, something significant, had happened the day before Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President of the United States. A change in the wind. Virtually all the papers of the next day were appalled that the crowd had attacked, and that the police had done nothing until far too late. Front page photographs showed sneering men beating women and policemen standing by. Editors who’d been virulently against women’s suffrage now wrote about the outrage that peacefully marching women would be hurt and wondered what kind of a society they’d become.
“The conversation has changed. I can’t think of a better result.” Alice Paul settled comfortably back in her chair, pushing her plate and the leavings of her dinner away. She was a pretty woman, with lush dark hair and keen, lively eyes, and she dressed her trim body stylishly. She seemed almost delicate. And yet she had a confidence that shaped her physical presence into something Nora had never seen in a woman before. Even the way she sat in this chair: slumped back, her hands linked over her midsection, her legs relaxed. Nora had only ever seen men sit like that before.
William countered Alice’s claim. “But women were hurt.”
“Sometimes a bruise is the most powerful statement there is.” She looked across the table at Nora. “You know I’m right.”
It was beyond strange to be sitting, elegantly dressed, barely twenty-four hours after the procession, at a tasteful restaurant in Virginia, just beyond the madness of Inauguration Day, dining with Alice Paul and her friend, Bill Parker. Perhaps even stranger was the way William’s parents were spending their evening: at one of the inauguration balls. Though Henry Frazier supported his wife’s endeavors, he stayed out of sight of them. But Angelica was expected to be on his arm, in full view, when he needed her.
Equality was a hard thing to bring into being. Nora smiled at her husband, who was always at her side.
“I understand your point, yes,” she answered Alice. “And I agree, in large part. In general, men notice when women are hurt. It awakens the hero in them.” She saw William react to that, and she reached over and patted his thigh. He knew it was true, too. More than most, he felt the need to be a heroic protector. “But I think what happened yesterday is different to what happens in England. There, women know what to expect when they protest. Here, it was only a parade. The women who were hurt weren’t prepared to be.”
Alice leaned in, setting her elbows on the table. The men swiveled their heads back and forth, spectators of this debate. “Were you prepared for what happened to you?”
Nora flinched before she could control it. The past day had been wearing on her. The scar that had healed over her mind’s rift had grown sore with the abrasions of memory. “No, I wasn’t. And I still feel the pain of it. That’s my point.”
“Nor was I, and so do I. My point is that none of us is prepared the first time it happens. You can’t conceive of the horror until it happens to you. So I’m sorry for the women who were hurt, I empathise with their pain, but I don’t feel responsible, and I will use it to further our cause. Their cause. Otherwise, their sacrifice will disappear when their bruises do.”
Mr. Parker picked up the bottle of wine and offered to refill their glasses. As Alice held her glass up, she continued, “We need to make the most of this time. This is when we should shift to a focus on a federal amendment, when we have this international event getting international attention.”
“Have you convinced Mrs. Catt?” William asked. “My mother remains skeptical.”
As she sipped her wine, Alice rolled her eyes. “No offense to your mother, William, but she and Carrie Catt do not control this movement. We’ve seen it with the procession. There are a lot of voices calling for justice. Louder voices than theirs.”
“Not only white voices,” Nora suggested, hesitant to bring up the issue, even here.
But Alice smiled and tipped her head as if she conceded the point. “You’re right. Ida’s voice is especially clear. I’ll tell you what I tell her. She has a perfectly valid complaint—there are injustices within our own movement. But we need to keep our eyes on our goal. We fight for the right of all women to have a say in the laws that govern them. We must win that right before we can have a say in any other issues, and we can’t win it without southern women.”
“Can we win it without Negro women?”
Alice looked her dead in the eye. “Yes. And so they need to wait.”
Nora thought about that, swirling her wine in her glass. All eyes at the table were on her, and they waited. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t disagree with any point you make. But the hypocrisy of fighting for equal rights whilst silencing voices of the most oppressed among us … Isn’t a victory achieved through injustice inherently unjust?”
“I don’t have time for philosophi
cal debates, Nora. I’m trying to win a war. Aren’t you?”
“Would Miss Wells consider this a philosophical debate?” William asked.
Alice whipped around to face him. Bill Parker chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, William. You’ve poked the dragon.”
Ignoring her companion, Alice set her elbows on the table again, crossing her arms, and leaned hard, toward William. “You consider yourself an ally in the cause, don’t you, William?”
“I do. I’ve worked with my mother for years.”
“Have you. Doing what, I wonder? Serve as her bodyguard, like yesterday? Post bills on lampposts? What a good boy.”
The derision had thickened with every word Alice said. Nora turned to William and could tell, by the set of his jaw and the straightness of his back, that he was insulted and angry. But his voice was calm. “I’ve also been her first audience for her speeches. And I’ve spoken for suffrage myself, you know.”
“To audiences who would be deaf to your mother’s voice. You’ve spoken for her, you mean.”
“No, Miss Paul. I’ve spoken for myself. I believe that we’re all better off if women have an equal voice in government.”
Alice leaned back again in her chair and grinned broadly, and the tense moment broke. “What you need to do is run for office. We need more men like you in the position to make the vote that will give us our victory.”
William gave a stunted chuckle in response. “I don’t know about that.”
Nora sighed quietly. She knew William wanted to be in government. This was about the time in his life when he’d thought he would start a career in politics. But since the Titanic and the anxiety that still occasionally rocked him, he’d set that idea aside. He thought he’d lost his edge. He didn’t feel as strong as he’d once been—even though he was every bit as strong as he’d ever been. Perhaps more, since he’d had more to overcome.
She reached out for his hand, and he clasped hers tightly. They didn’t need to say a word. They both understood.
THIRTY-TWO
William’s father shifted in the saddle and pushed his hat back to wipe at his brow. On this hill, they could just catch a lick of breeze off the sea. Marin County in the summer was usually pleasant—warm in the day but not hot, cool at night—but the past few days had been uncomfortably hot, and it was still May.
“The way I see it, the railroad’s gone about as far as it can. The last few years, we’ve been grinding gears, trying to get to the next thing, but not making any movement.”
Sitting astride his own horse, at his father’s side, William looked out over the same expanse of rolling yellow hills, dotted with grazing cattle, that made up most of the Frazier ranch. “Dad, the whole country travels by rail. We’ve never had more passengers than we have now, and the trend increases every year. Motorcars aren’t changing that. When people want to travel more than fifteen or twenty miles, they take the train.”
“I know. I’m not saying we’re out of business. Our books look better than ever before. But part of the reason the money looks good is our outlay is down. We’ve been maintaining for more than three years, William. No new thing. And I don’t see what the next new thing will be for rail. Even the Cruise Line wasn’t a new thing. Just a better thing. There’s no new place to go for rail.”
“What are you saying, then?” It was shocking to hear his forward-thinking father suggest that there was no more forward left.
“Motorcars will change travel. Just like trains, they’ll get better, go farther. When the bridge finally gets built across the Bay, it’ll be built for cars. And these aeroplanes—I think that’s the new thing.”
“A passenger train carries hundreds of people at a time. How is a Ford, or a little tin can flying in the sky, going to move people like a train does?”
Henry Frazier shrugged. “Mark my words, son.”
“Do you want to get involved with that? Build aeroplanes?”
“Maybe. Start small, see if I’m right. See where it goes. But that’s not the question we came out here to work out, is it?”
No, it wasn’t. After his mother and wife had taken the Ford out on a jaunt to Mill Valley, William had gone into his father’s study and asked what he thought about William throwing his hat in for a state representative seat.
In the months since the inauguration, a flicker of fire had rekindled in his belly for politics. Seeing Washington through Nora’s eyes, watching her spar with the likes of Alice Paul, being told repeatedly that he could be doing more for the cause, he’d remembered the rush of it himself. But he didn’t trust his mind the way he had. More than a year after the Titanic, he still had nightmares. Scores of trips over the Bay since, and he still had to sit deep in the middle of the ferry with his arms clenched over his chest to survive the trip without making a spectacle of himself.
There wasn’t a large body of water between San Francisco and Sacramento, or Washington, for that matter, not one he couldn’t avoid, but it wasn’t simply about water. This ‘stress reaction’ that wouldn’t leave him made him question his mental fitness in general. What other anxieties lurked in his mind, waiting to be uncovered? The thought held him back.
Since the inauguration, however, and especially since Alice Paul had drummed her finger into the table littered with the remnants of their shared meal and laid out all the ways he could be effective in office, Nora had been pushing him to try, to start small and build his confidence. He’d countered by saying that his father needed him in the company. This morning, she’d wondered why he hadn’t talked it out with his father, and William hadn’t had an answer. So he’d gone to his father, who’d removed his glasses and stared up at him, then stood and asked him to ride.
Henry Frazier liked to move while he thought big thoughts. In the city, he walked. On the ranch, he rode. And here they were, perched on their mounts, overlooking the fruits of the Frazier empire.
William answered his father’s question. “No, it’s not. But if you want to investigate bringing aeroplanes into the fold, I guess I have my answer. There’s a lot to learn before we take on that challenge. A lot to do. This isn’t the time for politics.”
“It’s the perfect time for politics—but not state representative. Neither of us knows anything about these contraptions or how they work, and one of your trips to the library isn’t going to get us the knowledge we need. We need to bring someone in who already understands, someone we trust. I need you to do that legwork. But when we have a … Director of Aviation … then I need you in Washington, son. The next thing that’s coming at us is regulation. We see it happening already. With unions coming in all over, and transport companies becoming national concerns, after everything that came out in the Titanic investigation—Washington is getting its hands in our business. I’m not opposed to regulating travel and transport. I think we need it, but we need people who know what they’re doing making those decisions. People who’ve gotten their hands dirty. We need your hands in there, William. I think you should run for Congress. For the midterm, next year.”
William’s jaw sagged. “What? But I’ve never held an office.”
“Hardly the first time a novice went to Washington. You know the ins and outs of Congress more than most. And you’re a national hero. Not to mention a Frazier. If you want this, then take it, son. Make it happen. Stop making excuses why you can’t do it, and fucking do it.”
“Congress. You want me to run for Congress.”
“I want you to find your calling. It’s not Scot-Western, and we both know it.”
“Dad! That’s not true.”
His father turned and faced him. “You’re good as my right hand, William. You do what needs to be done to realize my vision, and you do it well. But I see the truth. I know it’s not what you love. And I don’t fault you for it. This—“ he stretched out an arm and arced it over the landscape—“is yours. Everything I have will be yours someday, whether you’re at my side at work or not. The company is part of you. But now is a good time, m
aybe even the right time, to think of what your place should be. We’re railroad men. That’s what we know. If there’s no next thing in rail, then let’s bring in somebody who can point our telescope where the next thing is, and let’s put you somewhere you can do some good not just for the family, but for the country.”
“Congress,” William said again, rolling the word in his mouth to get its taste.
“Congress,” his father agreed.
When they arrived back at the house that afternoon, the Ford was parked on the drive, and a Western Union truck was tooling away, plumes of gravel dust clouding the lane behind its tires. They dismounted and handed the reins over to Todd.
“When did the women get back?” William’s father asked.
“Ten minutes or so, Mr. Frazier. I was gonna give the Ford a wash before I put her up.”
“Thanks, Todd.”
William followed his father into the house and walked into an unexpected tableau. Nora and his mother stood right there, not ten feet in from the door, both still wearing their hats. Nora even had her little purse hanging from her arm.
She read the telegram that the Western Union agent had delivered, and his mother stood at her side with her hand on Nora’s shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” his father asked, before William could.
Nora looked up and straight at William. “It’s from Christopher. My father is dying. He wants me to come and say goodbye.” She came to William and handed him the telegram. Then she turned, walked down the hall, toward the kitchen. He heard the creak of the back door. She’d gone to the garden.
He read the paper in his hand:
DEAR NORA FATHER VERY ILL AND FAILING – STOP – NOT LONG LEFT I FEAR – STOP – ASKING FOR YOU DAILY – STOP – PLEASE COME PLEASE NORA – STOP – LOVE C
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