William’s new campaign manager nodded and looked out over the ranch landscape. “We need to put our finger up and see which way the wind’s blowing on that. Could help you, could hurt you. It’ll help you if we get the ladies out to vote.”
The screen door opened, and William’s mother came through, with Nora right behind her. The three men on the porch all stood at once.
The women were dressed alike, wearing tidy plaid blouses, leather gauchos, and tall boots—what passed on the Frazier ranch for ladies’ riding habits. He didn’t think his mother had ridden sidesaddle ever in her life. William saw his wife, glowing with happiness, her wavy blonde tresses wound in a loose braid, a flat-crowned cowboy hat hanging on her back by the leather thong at her throat, and he went hard at once. Nora was beautiful in anything she wore, but she looked best in clothes in which she felt comfortable, like these.
“The ladies will vote, Harrison, you can rest assured,” William’s mother said. “And will you please put that reeking thing out, or at least take it away from my porch.”
Harrison Mulholland was a hard-dealing, hard-living lifelong soldier on the battlefield of California politics. At Angelica Frazier’s rebuke, he blushed and cast his eyes about for a place to stub out his cigar. “Sorry, ma’am.”
William’s father laughed and kissed his wife’s cheek. “Going riding, I see. Got a destination?”
“We thought we’d just amble around the ranch a bit, get Middy used to his new home.”
Chris had shipped Nora’s horse to her from Tarrindale. The gelding had been fairly traumatized by the long journey, skittish and suspicious of his new surroundings. Their vet had suggested they keep him isolated and ease him gently into his new life. Both William and Nora had understood the horse perhaps better than most humans could. When Nora had wanted to spend the first few nights after Middy’s arrival sleeping in the stable with him, William had made a place for them both to sleep just outside the horse’s stall.
For the past week, she’d been riding him again every day, but only in the paddock. If they were going out onto the open ranch, William wanted to be with them.
So did his father, apparently. “You want company?” he asked.
“Aren’t you busy plotting your takeover of California’s First Congressional District?”
“Yes, we are,” Mulholland interjected.
“It can wait,” William said. “Let’s ride.”
“Go on inside, Harry.” William’s father led the man toward the door. “You can work in my study. We’ll be back in a couple hours.”
“You’re welcome to stay for dinner, Harrison,” his mother said with a subtly smug smile. “Adelaide will be here by then.”
Harrison Mulholland, a large, beefy man, reacted to that news by taking off his hat and smoothing down his hair, as if the lady in question had stepped onto the porch before him.
“Thank you, Angelica. Don’t mind if I do.”
William chuckled to himself. Mulholland had about the same chance of catching his aunt’s eye as he had of sprouting wings and flying to the top of Mount Tamalpais. His elegant mother had some twist in her steel. She liked to keep men like him off balance, and she wasn’t above a little foul play to do it.
But that was Mulholland’s problem to work out, and William had better things to do. He took his wife’s hand and said again, “Let’s ride.”
Lupe set a plate on the table before Nora, and she gasped quietly and put her hand to her mouth.
William set his hand on her knee. “All right?” She’d seemed a bit flushed, but they’d been out in the summer sun all afternoon.
Actually, now she was pale. “Nora?”
When Lupe left the room, Nora pushed her plate aside. It was one of her favorite dishes—tamales and red beans, a typically tasty, unpretentious meal on the ranch—but as William watched, her complexion became positively pasty.
She cleared her throat. “You know, I’m not feeling very well. Ex—excuse me!” She jumped up from the table and was out of the dining room before the men could rise to their feet.
“Excuse me, too,” William said, intending to go after her.
“Wait, William. I’ll go,” Adelaide said.
“You think she’s truly ill?”
His aunt only smiled and left the table.
William let her, and the men sat down. When he looked to his mother, seated at the end of the table, he was stunned to see her grinning like the Christmas when his father had given her Columbia, her Thoroughbred mare.
“What?”
His mother stood up, too, and all the men got up again. Still grinning like a teenager, she hurried from the room without bothering to excuse herself.
William stood and gaped at the doorway. “What the hell is going on?”
Behind him, his father chortled. “Son, for a man of the world, sometimes you’re thick as a barn door. Have you been trying to make your mother happy?”
He turned to face his father. Now everybody in the whole damned house was grinning, including Harrison Fucking Mulholland, who was at risk of finding himself with a mouthful of William’s fist. “What?”
“William,” his father sighed. “They think she’s expecting. In the family way.”
“Oh. Oh.” He turned back to the door as the wave of understanding crashed over his head. “Oh, shit. I need … I should be there.”
His father had come around the table; now he set his hand on William’s shoulder. “You should wait until the women do what women do. Addie will come for you when you’re wanted. That’s the way of these things. Your part is over except for the waiting. Best get used to that.”
His father sent Mulholland away, without the chance to eat his dinner or press his suit with Adelaide. Then the Frazier men sat on the porch in the twilight and waited.
It was his mother who came to find him. William jumped from his seat as soon as the door creaked open.
“Is she … How is she?”
Her grin had become positively beatific. “She’s good. And Adelaide says yes, she’s about six or eight weeks along.”
Eight weeks ago, they’d been on their way home from England. William recalled the explosion of joy he’d felt when Nora had asked him to fuck her, and to come inside her. Had he made her pregnant on that very night?
Maybe—or almost any subsequent night since. He should have known what everybody was grinning about; they’d been trying hard enough to make it happen. But he’d spent a long time not thinking of fatherhood at all, and the past couple of years trying not to think about the children he wanted to have with Nora. He’d gotten good at it, apparently.
“Can I see her?”
“That’s why I’m here. She wants you.”
As he walked past his mother toward the door, she grabbed his arm. “Hey.”
He turned to his mother, and she lifted her arms. William stepped into them and held on. “You two are going to make the most wonderful family,” she whispered at his ear. “I can’t wait to watch it grow. So much good is in store for you, my sweet boy.”
Before he went to see her, William went out to the garden. He found the perfect bloom and clipped it.
She was in bed, propped up on pillows, dressed in a blue nightgown that he especially loved for the way it brought out the unusual color of her eyes. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, and she was beautiful, even with the pallor of faintness flattening the usual glow of her complexion. Her bright smile brought a glow of its own.
He sat on the bed at her hip and handed her the stem he’d clipped—a blooming white rose, with a tiny white bud from a slender shoot below it. “For you. Mother and child. My Kensington Roses.”
Her eyes glittered as she took it and put the bloom to her nose.
“Do you feel any better?”
“I don’t think I’ll be eating beans for a while.” She shuddered. “Even the thought of them makes my stomach clench. But yes, I feel better. Just tired.”
“I think Mom’s already sta
rted knitting.” He set his hand on her belly. “There’s a little Nora in there?”
“Or a little William.”
“I hope it’s a girl. I want to see you shape a woman for this world and give her everything you fought so hard to have yourself.”
Nora laid her hand over his. “If it’s a boy, we’ll raise him to be man like his father, who can love a woman who stands at his side and not behind him.”
William stared at their hands, resting on her flat belly. In the quiet peace of this moment, while his heart swelled at the idea of their child, his mind flashed the past three years before his eyes—not as if in the certainty of his death, but in the hope for his life. He remembered the naïve, lovely young lady he’d met that summer day in Hyde Park, the keen wit and sharp pain that glittered in her turquoise eyes. The woman she’d become, the one she’d wanted to be, lay before him now, in their shared bed. Between that first moment and this present one, a mere three years, they’d lived more life, endured more trials, than any one lifetime should hold.
And it had all brought them here.
“My God, Nora,” he whispered; he felt nearly like he was praying. “Look where we’ve come. After everything, look where we are.”
“Home,” she whispered.
EPILOGUE
Tuesday, 2 November 1920
The Nineteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution was adopted on the eighteenth of August 1920, when the state of Tennessee ratified it, thus achieving the threshold of three-fourths of the states ratifying. All women of the age of twenty-one had the same right to vote as any man, and in the presidential election of 1920, they were exercising that right in droves.
Two years earlier, in 1918, Englishwomen thirty and older earned the right to vote. If Nora had stayed a British citizen, she still would not have been enfranchised. But she’d become a US citizen in the summer of 1914 and, as a resident of California, had been able to vote since the midterm elections that year. She’d hoped to be able to cast her first vote for William, but he’d lost the primary that year to the incumbent.
Undeterred, he ran again in 1916, and that year, he made the ballot—and then he’d won. He won again, as the incumbent, in 1918. They’d been living primarily in Washington, D.C. for four years, but they came home as often as they could, and always in November, to vote.
When she voted, Nora always wore her hunger strike medal and her Kensington Rose.
This year, she waited at their polling place while William spoke with the press. She didn’t mind standing behind him and smiling sweetly while he wove his verbal tapestries, but little John Henry did. At three years old, he knew only that he was being restrained, and he wasn’t having it. He squirmed and fussed until finally Nora set him down.
“Eve, take your brother and go to Gampa.”
Henry had already voted and was sitting out the clamor of the press on a bench across the room. Angelica and Adelaide had voted when the polls opened and then driven back to Presidio Heights, to prepare for the usual onslaught of campaign workers and well-wishers.
Eve sighed and tossed her dark curls. “Oh, Mama, why must I?”
At only six, she had the theatrical inclination of Lillie Langtry. This was the first time they’d brought the children to their polling place, and Nora had cause to regret it. There were too many people around, strangers who wanted time with William and with Nora, and too little for children to do.
But Eve was six, and old enough to understand how momentous this day was—not only because her father might be a United States Senator by bedtime, but because it was the first election in which all American women were enfranchised. Eve would grow up and could live anywhere in the country, and her right to use her voice was assured.
Now that the fight for suffrage had been won, Nora intended to continue the fight for women’s rights. She meant to ensure a better world for her children.
She could hardly wait to watch Eve grow up into a world that would make way for her. Perhaps she wouldn’t even have to push. Perhaps she might even follow in her father’s footsteps and hold elected office herself.
Nora was about to explain why she needed Eve’s help when William finished with the reporters and turned around, sweeping John Henry into his arms and bending close to kiss Nora’s cheek.
“Are you feeling all right?” He breathed the words at her ear, then brushed his nose over her cheek and kissed her lips lightly, an alluring caress full of promise, here in the sight of all those cameras.
Shielded from the press by William’s body, Nora patted her belly. “I’m a bit tired, but otherwise, I feel fine.” They’d known about this new baby for only a few weeks and hadn’t told anyone but close family yet.
“Well, let’s do our civic duty and get you home. Mom’s got the Presidio Heights army mobilised, so we can relax and let the rest of the day happen as it will.”
Nora held out her hand to her daughter. “Come, monkey. Let’s go vote for Daddy.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Fanetti is a Midwestern native transplanted to Northern California, where she lives with her husband, youngest son, and assorted cats.
She is a proud member of the Freak Circle Press.
Susan’s website: www.susanfanetti.com
Freak Circle Press blog: www.freakcirclepress.com
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