by Nancy Horan
IN THE RESTAURANT, Frank was actually smiling. “Give us the full treatment,” he said when the waiter arrived. Frank pointed to all the selections on the menu. The young man returned with cereal, cheeses, hard rolls, and a platter of thin-sliced marbled meats.
“We can stop off in Potsdam first. I want to see it. And then on over by train to the Rhine. It’s not the best weather, but Dorn says we should experience it. So, we boat down from Cologne to Koblenz. I want to take a little detour over to Darmstadt to see Olbrich, if we can. I’m told his work is worth seeing. Then on to Paris.” Frank dove into his breakfast with gusto.
She stared at him in disbelief. Frank was talking of their departure from Berlin as if they were going on a jolly holiday.
Frank raised a glass of orange juice to her. “‘Truth against the world,’” he said grimly, quaffing the juice. “Handy motto, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 22
December 1, 1909
Nancy, France. I am sick at the stomach with what Frank takes to be the flu. I know better. This is what despair makes of your belly. He says we will move on to Paris in a few days when I am feeling well. Then we can decide what we, each of us, will do. But how will I ever feel well again?
Frank’s mother wrote in her letter that young Catherine has been dismissed from the high school because of the “scandal.” Frank’s anger is murderous. He is wounded by this mess, yet there is something in him, a rock-hard core, that allows him to move forward. His work is his refuge.
Last night I lay awake, desperately worried for the children. How I wish I could simply go back and hold them. How I wish none of this ever happened. I pray Louise holds fast now. There is no fiercer gatekeeper.
I take one hour at a time and wonder at how quickly courage has forsaken me.
“GHASTLY,” FRANK MUTTERED. “Sentimental, degenerate crap. What is the matter with these people?” They had been walking the streets of Nancy after a silent dinner, looking at Jugendstil architecture. Now they stood in front of an ornate art nouveau house, the façade of which, with its curving window tops like drooping eyelids, reminded her of the face of a gnome.
A strolling couple paused to see what Frank was looking at as he tapped his cane on the walk indignantly, then jabbed the air as he pointed toward the house. “Dog waste,” he sneered.
The man looked at the house, confused, then back at Frank. But the woman clearly understood as she drew her collar up and pulled her husband along.
Mamah was glad for the appearance of the ugly house, for it was taking the full brunt of Frank’s outrage. There was a time she’d been mortified when Frank had stood outside someone’s expensive Chicago home and declared it trash. How quaint that sort of embarrassment seemed now.
She walked on and he followed, his eyes panning the street, daring another visual assault. Mamah caught sight of a flyer attached to the side of a newsstand. The words “Ellen Key” appeared in large print at the top. She knew the name; she’d read a book by the Swedish feminist some years before, though she couldn’t remember the title.
Mamah pulled the flyer off the shed. “She’s speaking here Wednesday night.”
“Who’s Ellen Key?”
“She’s important in the Woman Movement over here. Let’s see. She’ll be talking on…” Mamah translated with her lips moving, her finger following the words on each line. “The morality of woman, love’s freedom, free divorce, and a new marriage law.”
“Do you suppose she knows we’re in town?”
Mamah tried to smile. “I want to see if I can find any of her books.”
At a bookstore not far from their hotel, she came upon just one, Love and Marriage. Editions in French, English, and German were stacked beside one another. Browsing through them, she could see that, in any language, it was heavy going.
She found Frank among the art books. “The text is very dense in that woolly, scholarly sort of way,” she said. “But listen to this.”
Frank leaned against the bookcase where they stood, his head down in concentration, while Mamah read from the English version.
“‘Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life’s gracious gifts to the elect. There can be no other standard of morality for him who loves more than once than for him who loves only one: that of the enhancement of life. He who in a new love hears the singing of dried-up springs, feels the sap rising in dead boughs, the renewal of life’s creative forces; he who is prompted anew to magnanimity and truth, to gentleness and generosity, he who finds strength as well as intoxication in his new love, nourishment as well as a feast—that man has a right to the experience.’”
She glanced up to find Frank’s eyes on her.
“Have I ever told you that?” His gaze was tender.
“Told me what?”
“Finding you was like finding a safe place to think again. Before I met you, I felt I could soar at the drawing table, but I always came back to the most static prison in my marriage. It set me free to find you, to think that there was the possibility of something more expansive. You make me want to be a better man. A better artist.” He put his hand in hers. “I’d be such a sad person if it had never happened.”
“Thank you.” She put his hand to her face and brushed it across her lips.
“Which version will it be?”
“English, I suppose. Are you buying it for me?”
“Yes.”
At the hotel, she sat in the room for hours, reading Love and Marriage. So much of what she believed was right there on the page. From the beginning of the book, she sensed that Ellen Key wouldn’t be pigeonholed. The woman didn’t bother herself with the vote, like other feminists; that was a right she expected without remark. She wasn’t an Emma Goldman, or a Socialist-style feminist like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or a firebrand like Emmeline Pank-hurst. Nor was she a subversive saint like Jane Addams. Ellen Key seemed to be something else entirely.
Her style appealed to Mamah—cool and logical, in a scattershot sort of way. She would introduce an argument in one spot and take it up fifty pages later, trusting that those readers who were still with her were the ones she wanted along. She made you travel the paths that her own reasoning took, knocking off one objection after another to her radical views, so that by the time you got to her conclusion, you agreed with her.
Mamah traveled through evolutionary science, Church history, sociological studies, anthropology, Swedish folk customs, critiques of George Sand and other novelists. There were moments during the long afternoon and night of devouring Love and Marriage when she felt as if she were a boat pushing through high waves. Just when she reached the top of one line of reasoning, she was plopped down at the base of another.
“It’s funny,” she said when Frank brought in dinner. “This woman is conservative and wildly radical at the same time.”
“How is that?” He was setting up a picnic dinner on the floor. He had gone out and bought a baguette, ham, and a chunk of cheese that he was laying out on butcher paper. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, with his wavy brown hair grown longer since they sailed over, he looked like a young man just then.
“Well,” Mamah said thoughtfully, “on one hand, she says women’s natures are best suited to raise children, but then she argues that they should be paid for it because it’s society’s most important job. What I like is that she champions a woman’s freedom to realize her personality. For the longest time, it seems there’s been almost no discussion of individualism in the Woman Movement. But here is a woman getting at the deeper question of what a woman is and what she can be.”
“You look so much better.”
“Thank you, my love. I do feel better. Probably because this book is telling me precisely what I want to hear right now.”
“Such as?”
“She says that once love leaves a marriage, then the marriage isn’t sacred anymore. But if a true, great love happens outside of marriage, it’s sacred and has its own rights. She says each fresh couple m
ust prove that their love enhances their lives and the human race by living together. Here, listen. ‘Only cohabitation can decide the morality of a particular case.’”
Frank was slicing the bread with a small knife. “You mean we’re doing this for the human race?”
“Oh, there’s a lot of eugenics in here, to be sure. She claims that as people perfect a culture of love, the human race will evolve to a higher plane where there won’t be a need for laws regulating marriage and divorce.”
“So if we can just hang on for a millennium or two, it’ll all work out.”
“You’ll like this part. There are some people today—mostly artists—who can handle the freedom of living honestly. Listen: ‘Without “criminal” love, the world’s creations of beauty would be…not only infinitely fewer but poorer.’ In fact, artists have a responsibility to show others how to live truthfully.”
She found his eyes. “Frank, I want to stay to hear this woman.”
“Do you think it would help?”
“How I feel? I don’t know if anything can help for very long.” She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“How would you feel if I went on ahead to Paris and met with Wasmuth’s contact there?”
“I’ll be all right by myself.”
Frank looked doubtful.
“Truly,” she said. “I will be there in a few days. Just wire me when you get a hotel. I’ll find you there.”
MAMAH READ ON INTO the night, with Frank sleeping beside her. There were moments when she came upon a sentence so true she wanted to shake him awake. But she couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t take the time to tell him about it. There would be hours and days for that later. When she got to the chapter on free divorce, she felt as if Ellen Key had interviewed her for the book: Why is the heart that is broken considered so much more valuable than the one or the two who must cause the pain lest they themselves perish?
Mamah put down the book sometime before dawn. The only sound that penetrated the walls of the little hotel was the creaking of pines outside their window. In the dark, she could see the giants, their snow-laden branches moving almost imperceptibly in the wind. She pulled the layers of quilts over her face.
Edwin didn’t know where she was. Her sister didn’t know, either. She had disappeared into a part of Europe that no one’s finger would be drawn to on a map. She felt a sense of relief. It was as if Mamah Cheney, the troubled woman in the headlines, had ceased to exist. For the first time in many days, she didn’t cry before she slept.
CHAPTER 23
Ellen Key spoke faintly at the front of the room. She was jowly, grand motherly, her thin gray hair parted in the middle and pulled down over her ears into a small bun. She wore a loose dress than hung from her round shoulders like a surplice.
Mamah stared at the nunlike character behind the lectern who was talking, incredibly, about erotic love. She tried to imagine her as a young woman, fresh-faced and infatuated. But there was nothing about Ellen Key to suggest that she had ever lost her senses about anything, least of all a man.
“Love is moral even without legal marriage.” Ellen Key’s voice rose and broke through the sound of rustling skirts. “But marriage is immoral without love.”
The skin on Mamah’s arms tingled as she leaned forward in her chair.
“A marriage consummated without mutual love, or continued without mutual love, does not elevate the personal dignity of man or woman. It is instead a criminal counterfeiting of the highest values of life.
“In the new morality, everything exchanged between husband and wife will be a free gift of love, never demanded by one or the other as a right. Such demands are merely a crude survival of the lower periods of culture.”
Mamah strained to hear each sentence, her brain fairly twitching. If I could get to that seat at the front, she thought. Around her, the women’s faces were attentive, but she saw no glimmer of what she felt. Was she the only one being dragged forward by Ellen Key’s words, an affinity fool for all to see? Mamah stood, gathered up her coat and bag, and climbed past the knees in her row. She felt her body propelled forward as she swooped down to the front of the auditorium and took the empty seat in the first row.
“The new morality has two types of adversaries,” said Ellen Key. “The first is the adherent of conventional morality who pursues something called ‘pure love’ untouched by sensuality. These people plaster fig leaves over modern art and ban erotic literature.”
Laughter rippled through the audience.
“The others, the so-called bohemians, espouse temporary unions that they mistakenly call ‘free love.’ These people have no idea what soulful devotion is.”
Ellen Key’s voice was precisely as Mamah had heard it in the book yesterday. The woman exuded the kind of enlightenment Mamah associated with swamis or monks. She was a mixture of wisdom and empathy.
“I want to talk to you today about the noblest type of love—the kind that joins the spiritual with the erotic. When both lovers yearn to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection, this is the highest form of love possible between a man and a woman of the same moral and intellectual level.
“To experience such love is to feel oneself doubled. Such feeling liberates and deepens the personality, inspires us to noble deeds and works of genius. When this great love happens—and it is but once in a lifetime—it has a higher right than all other feelings. The perfect love establishes its own right in a life.”
Mamah realized that a deep calm had descended upon her. Every part of her body was suffused with warmth. With love. The lurid headlines that had sickened her seemed to recede as she listened to Ellen Key. She felt herself to be in the presence of something bigger and more important than her little footnote of public shaming.
To have her deepest instincts understood—championed!—at this moment of all moments seemed to be a gift from a loving Spirit somewhere.
When Ellen Key finished, women swarmed around the podium, talking intently with the speaker. Mamah remained in her seat, calm. She knew she could wait forever, if need be. When the last woman had pulled away, Ellen Key looked straight into her eyes.
“Come out with it now,” she said.
Mamah rose and walked to her. Tears breached her lower lids as she took one of the woman’s hands into both of her own. “Thank you” seemed such an inadequate expression.
“Come along,” Ellen Key said, patting her back like a mother. “I have an hour before my train. We’ll get ourselves some tea.”
CHAPTER 24
“Does he give you good sex?”
Mamah’s eyes were on the teaspoons of sugar going into the Swedish woman’s cup. Three. Four. She looked up, took a breath.
“Frank Lloyd. Does he give you—”
“Yes. Of course, it’s much more than that.”
“It always is. But it is one measure of a man, if he takes the time.”
“He does.”
“Good.”
They had walked toward the train station from the lecture hall. In the space of four blocks, Mamah had opened her heart for inspection. She had spun the whole complicated web for Ellen Key, beginning with Frank. Frank, then Edwin, John, Martha, Jessica. Tiers of friends. Catherine Wright, too. All the threads that anchored her to a place called Oak Park in the middle of the United States.
The renowned philosopher Key was rummaging in her bag. She pulled out a tin of tea and shook some into the pot on the table. “Sinus cure,” she explained. The candles in the train station café were not yet lit, and Mamah squinted to find the woman’s features in the shadows.
“You love this man.”
“Utterly.”
“And his wife refuses him a divorce. Have you asked your husband for one?”
“Not yet.”
“What keeps you from it?”
“Uncertainty. If I ‘abandoned’ Edwin, I couldn’t have the children with me. But it doesn’t matter anymore. The best lawyer in the worl
d can’t help me now.”
Ellen Key sat up in her seat, her ponderous bosom like a pillow between her and the table’s edge. “I’ve never been a parent, but I was born to people who loved each other passionately until the last hour of their lives. They were full of joy and interested in everything. Their pleasure in each other nourished my little soul. Everyone has the right to that, don’t you think? People who live only for their children make bad company for them.” She drank the tea down in one long draft. “Don’t misunderstand me. Everything is more delicate in a divorce when children are involved.”
“Today you talked about the great loves,” Mamah said. “The loves that supersede all others. And you talked about the women—”
“Les grandes inspiratrices.” Ellen Key blotted her mouth with a napkin. “It’s not an ignoble path for a woman to be a muse. Are you his?”
“Not really,” Mamah said thoughtfully. “Frank’s drive comes from inside himself. Do I want to support him? Yes, of course. He’s like all of us—he longs for tenderness.” Mamah smiled. “But he has a muse already. Nature.”
“I have known you for an hour,” the woman said, “so allow me some latitude. It’s clear your Frank is not the only one on a spiritual quest here. You are seeking something, too. What might that be?”
Mamah was silent.
“Forgive my bluntness, but leaving a boring man for a stimulating one is only interesting for a while. In time, you are back where you started—still wanting. Better to find your own backbone, the strong thing in you. Clearly, you are educated. What work are you drawn to?”
“I’m not sure,” Mamah said. “I used to believe it was writing.”
“What do you write?”
“Observations. Essays. Stories sometimes. And little things in my notebook—quotes and such that inspire me.”
Ellen slapped the tabletop so the cups rattled. “Then write you must. Something more than little things.”
