by Marge Piercy
Here everything was different—everything. When she woke in the morning, lying on a pallet on the floor of the airless kitchen pressed against Moishe, she did not hear the noises of home—the children calling, her mother at the hearth, the cows lowing in the attached stable, the baaing of sheep and the cackling of the hens, the rooster with his high rasping call, the crows, the finches singing. Here the noise never ceased. Yes, horses neighed and she could hear a rooster, cats fighting in the courtyard where latrines poured their stinking overflow between the tenement facing the street and the rear house, dogs barking, cows lowing. Hooves on the paved cross street struck on the stones, the metal wheels roared. Hundreds of wagons were dragged through the narrow dusty streets. All day long, all night, wagons passed loaded with everything that must be shipped in and out of a great city. Always a murmur of voices, a huckster yelling, a beaten woman screaming, a gambler cursing, a mother calling out a window or up from the street. The dark stinking hallway shuddered with footsteps up and down every time water was needed, every time somebody decided to use the latrine in the courtyard, every time anyone went to work or came back, went out to buy or sell anything, needed some air. Factories stood on every cross street and toward the river, slaughterhouses and rendering shops made the air heavy with grease and blood. Herds of cows were driven through the wider streets toward their death. Peddlers hawked their wares all day as loudly as their hoarse voices could carry, hot corn, used clothes, hats, chickens, fruit, vegetables, used shoes and boots, knives or scissors to be sharpened. Sometimes she thought her head would burst. The first nights, she simply could not doze no matter how exhausted she was. She began to sleep with a rag tied around her head to muffle the sounds.
Everything overloaded her senses. Signs hung from every building—the tenements usually had a business or a store on the ground floor. Every fence, every building front and side, everything that could be printed upon demanded attention, yelled at her to look, to do, to buy whatever that sign was selling. It was a visual explosion of demands and claims. Their tenements were lit only by candles or oil lamps, but if they walked to the Bowery or Broadway, gaslights were everywhere, hissing and yellowish and far brighter than any lights she had known before.
She was used to prostitutes back home, but they kept to their house on the river. When they went out, they were dressed much like other women and did their business of shopping, praying in shul, seeing the wise woman who tended to bodily complaints. On the Bowery she stayed close to Moishe, clutching his arm in the crowd of people such as she had never seen—Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Negroes, an occasional Chinaman, the Yanks themselves—what the others called narrowbacks—all stirred together in a strange smelly bubbling soup of desires and fears and curiosity. Prostitutes were everywhere garishly got up, exposing half their breasts and ankles, painted and showy under the gaslights like the paper flowers women made here. She did not mean to stare, but she could not help it. Moishe always tried to look away. They embarrassed him. Maybe they reminded him that before they married, he had frequented that house on the river some Saturday nights, when Shabbos was over and the workweek not yet begun. Maybe he was embarrassed by so much exposed flesh. They made love passionately, but in the dark. They went up to the roof to make love when the weather permitted. There was no privacy in the apartment. They could hear the Kuppersmiths whenever they went at it, and so could the children and the other boarder, Herman. They could tell when Herman gave himself pleasure, usually when the Kuppersmiths were busy in bed with each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night when snoring assured them everyone else was asleep, silently they coupled on their pallet. A moan or movement from one of the many sleepers stilled them at once.
The Bowery B’hoys and their ladies were everywhere, thrusting confidently through the crowds as if others were just water and they were swimming along to shore, in this case a saloon, an oyster palace, a dance hall, a concert saloon, a peep show, a gambling hell, a pawnshop, a flophouse, a dime museum of freakish things or a theatrical presentation. Moishe and she had no money to waste, but they enjoyed staring at people and what they could see from the sidewalks. In a big window, mermaids swayed with paper seaweed around them—bare-breasted women got up as fish below the waist. In store windows, men were being tattooed. A fortune-teller called to them, saying she could see a great destiny for Moishe. Sailors on leave, Chinese in pigtails, even toffs from uptown wearing silk top hats sauntered past.
THE BREAD BUSINESS was not good—sometimes it rained on their bread before they got a tarpaulin to protect it. Some days they made a little, some days almost nothing. The river iced over in the middle of January and they could not get to Brooklyn to buy the bread. Moishe got a temporary job cleaning up in a slaughterhouse and came home reeking of death. He only got the job because so many had died of a strange high fever that swept the Lower East Side and killed the weak, the young, the old with a terrible racking cough you could hear even with the windows shut. She began peddling aprons a neighbor made and notions—ribbons, thread, yarn, needles, pins. It was slow but she began to develop a clientele. Women needed those things in every season, to make do, to repair clothing and make new clothing out of old. She called her wares from the street.
The job at the slaughterhouse ended in the spring, but Moishe got a better job hauling barrels. He was strong and he could lift and carry more than most men his size. A drayman who owned a heavy wagon pulled by two great bay horses hired him. They worked six days a week hauling beer barrels, nails, molasses, vinegar to groceries, grog shops, the docks, to and from railroad yards. Moishe began to build a map of the city in his head until he knew it like a native. They moved into their own flat and rented to three young men who slept on their floor. Moishe and she had a bedroom with a door that shut. It was dark and airless, only big enough for a bed and a chair, but they had privacy at last.
She got into trouble a couple of times with her peddling. Once she set up in a place by the curb on Orchard that a burly German told her was his own special spot.
“You got ownership papers? It looks like a public curb to me.”
He whistled shrilly and within minutes a group of tough young men had gathered around her, all wearing the same kind of stiff black hats. They knocked her pushcart over, spilling her merchandise and trampling it underfoot. Two of them punched her in the face and arms. Her nose was bloody and she had a bruised and swollen eye and lip afterward. She could not raise her arm for days.
“You come here again and we’ll break your arms and legs. You stay out of our territory, all along this block.”
Another time, she got too far into the Irish neighborhood over by Cor-lears Hook and again she got beaten and her merchandise stolen. She was learning which streets and which blocks she must avoid. Gangs controlled some areas more tightly than others.
By the next winter, she was sure she was carrying. The baby had not quickened yet but her breasts were sore and her time had not come in two months. She had not told Moishe yet because she wanted to be positive. She vomited occasionally and that was difficult to disguise. She thought Moishe must suspect something, but then men often didn’t know enough about the ways of women to guess until the wife’s belly stood out like a sack of potatoes. Neither of them spoke about it. She wondered if it were a superstition they held in common.
They sat in the front room the first night of Chanukah. Even though they didn’t go to shul, she lit candles in the chanukiyah she had brought from Vilna. The little candle and the shamesh candle were burning as they sat in their two chairs. Their boarders were still out. It was six but already night, with the moon shining between the buildings on the snow on cornices and patches not yet rendered into ice and mud. They sat close to each other, just their knees touching.
“For two people who just arrived here a bit more than two years ago, I think we’re doing not so badly after all,” Moishe said in Yiddish. “Nu, are you satisfied, wife?”
“I am very satisfied, Moisheleh mine.”
/> “Then is there something you want to tell me?”
“Can’t keep anything from you, you old woodcutter. Yes. I’m carrying.”
He gripped her hands. “Be careful now, be careful, Freydeleh. Don’t go on those blocks where the Irish gangs rule. Stay in Germantown. The Hungarians are safe. Just watch yourself. I wish you didn’t have to go out peddling.”
“I can’t sew a straight fine seam. I can’t embroider or make lace. It’s healthier than being stuck dawn till dark in a fetid factory bent over a machine or working at a table with men trying to paw you. I promise I’ll be careful. This life in me is precious—our first child.”
“First, but I hope not the last.” He held her hands in his big callused hands, warm and dry and powerful.
IT WAS A GRAY DAY in early February, a sharp wind off the East River. It had snowed hard three days before, then thawed briefly, then frozen again. The streets were paved with dirty ice stained with horse urine and droppings. She had come home from her peddling to cook a stew of chicken necks, gizzards and hearts, with potatoes, turnips and onions. With bread that would make supper for Moishe, the two boarders and herself. She was cutting onions, the tears running freely down her face as she wiped it with an old handkerchief of Moishe’s. She would have to wash it out afterward in the basin, for it was his only one. She wanted to tell him when he came home that she thought she had felt the baby quicken that afternoon as she was going along Mott Street with her cart. She wasn’t sure—she had never been pregnant before—but she had felt something. She wished her mama were here beside her to advise her if there were any special precautions she should take now, if there were herbs or simples she should be taking to help her baby along. She had always imagined that, like her older sister, Sara, when she had her first baby, Mama would be at her side, whispering in her ear, singing to her.
She heard running up the steps. One of the street kids came banging on the door. “Missus, you got to come.”
“What’s wrong?” She clutched her apron in her hands.
“It’s your old man. They’re bringing him up.”
Without even shutting the door she ran down the steps pell-mell in the dark of the staircase, round the first turn and down, round the second turn and down, round the third turn, and then she saw the men trying to carry Moishe up the steps. His head was all bloody. His arm hung at an angle and his leg was bleeding.
“Stop!” she yelled at them, and rushed forward. She missed a step and plummeted down toward them, banging on step after step to end up in a heap at the feet of the men dragging her battered and broken husband.
One of them helped her to her feet. “We bring him upstairs.”
“He’s hurt too bad. We have to take him to hospital.”
They carried him through the streets to the Hebrew Hospital with her limping behind them and Moishe still dropping blood in a trail on the dirty ice. One of the men told her what had happened: the horse was startled by a loud noise as they were almost done loading barrels of beer. The horse reared in the shafts. The wagon tipped. The barrels cascaded down on Moishe.
She had felt herself begin to bleed as she sat beside him in the hospital, beside his unconscious broken body. Before morning, she had lost her husband and her unborn baby. She had nothing now, nothing.
FOURTEEN
1847
WHEN ELIZABETH ELOPED with Henry, against her father’s wishes, he was a well-known speaker and organizer for abolition but otherwise unemployed. After clerking for her father, the conservative judge, for almost two years in order to mend fences with the family, Henry decided they should move to Boston, where he joined a law firm. Judge Cady bought them a comfortable house in Chelsea. She had three children by then, all boys—Neil, Henry and Gerrit (called Gat). With her firstborn, Neil, she had hired a nurse who swaddled him in tight linen, shut the windows lest the air infect him, and kept him quiet when he cried with laudanum—an opium derivative. After the boy became sickly, Elizabeth fired the nurse and shocked her family by tearing off the linen bands to let his limbs move freely, opening the windows wide and throwing out the laudanum. Neil thrived, and so in turn did her other babies.
When Lucretia Mott came to Boston for a day, they spent it talking about woman’s rights and fantasizing about a meeting of women to start a movement. Except for her short stature, Lucretia was unlike her in appearance, strict Quaker dress, a wrinkled, slightly desiccated face and hands, an expression of calm and sweetness, but her mind was lively and her political sense passionate and shrewd. They were both tiny women who had borne children—Elizabeth so far, three; Lucretia, six. Elizabeth both loved her as a friend and admired her as a mentor.
Lucretia was twenty-two years older than Elizabeth, but Elizabeth had never been bothered by age. After all, Henry was eleven years older. The other love of her life, Bayard, her brother-in-law, was older still. He had helped raise her. Most pleasures of her adolescence had been due to him—he taught her to jump fences on horseback, he took her sisters and her to dances her mother had forbidden. He taught them to read widely and critically. He made sure the girls had a good education, arguing that Elizabeth must go to a girls’ school that was not a finishing school but something new, where real subjects were taught. But when she was twenty-one, he had proposed they run away together. He was madly in love with her.
She certainly had strong feelings for him, but not strong enough to betray her oldest sister, his wife, Tryphena. She refused, and never again did she permit him to be alone with her. She cared for him, and she could tell whenever she saw him at family gatherings that he still wanted to be with her. Temptations like that were useless. To give in to them would have ruined the lives of Tryphena and her family in widening circles of scandal and pain. Two years later, she met Henry at her cousin Gerrit’s and fell in love. He seemed a dark hero to her, a knight of the abolitionist movement, addressing hostile crowds, persuading people to consider the Negro a fellow human, operating on the Underground Railroad that passed fugitive slaves to safety. Her cousin Gerrit’s house was a station on the way to freedom.
Now she enjoyed Boston with its abundance of political and intellectual events. She met Emerson, Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller. She felt at home among the abolitionists and reformers. But Henry grew dissatisfied. He said the climate gave him chronic lung congestion, but she could tell that what it gave him was the inability to run for public office in Massachusetts. Lacking connections and Brahmin background, he could not compete with local candidates. He felt he would do better in upstate New York, so he chose to move them to Seneca Falls. He was the husband; it was his decision to make and he made it.
Judge Cady seemed to think this move a good idea—they would be closer to him—and bought them a house on two acres overlooking the river, over a mile from the center of town. That is, theoretically it overlooked the river. The actual view from the front of the house was of tanneries, a mill, a foundry and workers’ shacks. He warned them that the house had been empty for some years and was in bad repair. He challenged her to take charge of the work since she seemed to think women were so competent. She left her children and household effects—seventeen trunks’ worth—with her family in Johnstown. She became a general commanding an expensive army of carpenters and workmen painting, repapering with light, pleasant wallpapers, repairing the dilapidated structure, turning a ramshackle porch into a solid columned structure, adding a kitchen wing off the back. It had a central hall with a steep staircase going up, a large front parlor and a back parlor in which she had French doors installed. She replaced the windows with larger ones to let in more light and air.
Stuck in a house needing constant work, she felt isolated with only her children, an Irish servant girl and few companions with whom she could discuss the subjects—political, intellectual—that she cared about. The road was unpaved. With no sidewalks, it was a trek through mud into town, where she could find only a few groceries, bars and billiard parlors. Seneca Falls was a rough river
town with many taverns and many churches, not much else. She made friends with the neighbor women, although they found her forward and unconventional. She charmed them into liking her against their will, but she was lonely. Henry was gone more than he was there. He took the train to Albany and to Washington on a regular basis, to register patents for clients and to conduct business. He also traveled on political business—not so much abolitionist now as Republican Party politics. He wanted to run for some, any state office. He was intensely ambitious for himself but felt she should be satisfied being a mother and housewife. He had gradually lost interest in discussing ideas with her, and when he was home insisted she let him read the paper, smoke his pipe and that she keep the children from pestering him. Basically he came home to relax and be cosseted.
Everyone expected her to be absorbed by family life. What women did beyond that tended to be confined to church activities and perhaps a quilting bee or visits to sick neighbors. She missed the intellectual stimulation of Boston. She also missed all the support she had when they lived in her parents’ home, with servants and relatives to take the children off her hands when she wanted to read or write. She was responsible for the sole running of a house and a farm her father had decided they should oversee a few miles outside of Seneca Falls.
Slowly she identified and gathered people who took an interest in ideas and she began to hold conversationals in the parlor. She collected a dozen regulars, instituting Saturday evening discussions of everything from slavery to women in history, from Sylvester Graham’s ideas of the healthy regimen to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Emerson’s essays. She enforced a rule that no one could speak twice until everyone had spoken once. She was teaching the women and girls to voice their opinions, teaching them to be more articulate and forward.
