by Marge Piercy
The great day arrived when Maggie was taken abed to deliver his first child. He rushed home but the doctor threw him out. He paced the streets, then took refuge at the Clinton Avenue Church, where Budington consoled him and they prayed together. After several hours, Anthony went home, where Maggie’s mother had arrived, but the doctor again shooed him away. Maggie was still in labor. He could hear her screaming. He was terrified and knelt on the porch begging the Lord to deliver her. Then he rushed back to the church and Budington joined him in a prayer vigil through the night. In the morning, Budington sent a boy to see what was happening. Nothing. Maggie was still in labor. The doctor feared for her life. She had been trying to deliver the child for more than thirty hours.
Budington bid the boy stay on the porch of the house until there was news. Finally, at noon, the boy came. Maggie had given birth to a baby girl. Anthony got to his feet shakily. He had been kneeling for so long he could scarcely stand, but he stomped his feet and then set out for the house, after tipping the boy.
Maggie lay pale and listless. He was afraid, for she looked like his mother as she was dying, but the doctor slapped his back. “It’s just the way of women. She’s narrow in the hips. It was a hard birth, but I got the baby out safely. She needs a long rest and she’ll be as good as ever.”
Mrs. Hamilton, his mother-in-law, was muttering to herself. “Should have had a midwife, not a doctor. They know what to do. Look at the marks on the poor baby from his nasty devices, yanking her out.”
He ignored the old woman. Doctors were the modern way. Midwives he did not trust. It was said they could help women avoid pregnancy and even to abort. Doctors were on the side of the father. He thanked Mrs. Hamilton politely for having attended his wife and tried to pack her off, but she resisted. Maggie begged him in a tiny voice to let her mother stay. He agreed reluctantly. Gingerly he touched the baby. Her head was creased and she was red and blue and bruised, but she had everything, little fingers, little toes, a little nose, a rosebud mouth. Lillie, he would call her, after his own mother. She was an angel come to earth to be his sweet child. “Lillie,” he said aloud. “Our dear Lillie. My first child.”
The doctor took him aside. “I wouldn’t be in any hurry for a second. Your wife is very weak. Childbirth is taxing for her. Give her time to recover.”
Anthony agreed. He would sleep in the child’s room for a period of weeks while his dear Maggie recovered her strength. Maggie must not die. He would protect her. Maggie had the same long face and long-fingered hands as his mother. Her hair was even the same light brown with a slight curl. They were both such good women, but unlike his father, who had made his mother bear ten children, five of whom died too young for him to remember them, he would not force Maggie to bear more than another couple of children. A Christian man should be able to control his base appetites. Although they were bidden to be fruitful and multiply, the Scriptures did not say a man must force his wife to bear more children than she had the strength for. In the meantime, he had an adorable little baby daughter.
Outside the door, he had to be hard, to compete. Outside the oak door of his narrow but ample house, he fought for a living and to create a world fit for his children and other people’s—the clean upstanding people who counted. The city was flooded with dirty noisy immigrants who let their children run in the streets like packs of wild dogs. They cursed, they drank, they brought unhealthy and primitive customs with them like their smelly ill-cooked food. They brought diseases that flourished in their filthy slums, whose pestilence crept like a sewer fog through the city, into the houses of those who tried to live upright, virtuous lives.
He closed his eyes, sitting at the bedside of his precious Maggie, who loosely held the baby in her arms as she dozed, her mouth fallen open, her cheeks pale and sunken from loss of blood. The room still reeked of blood, but he did not want to open a window for fear she would become chilled. He wondered if she would mind if he removed his black suit coat. He hung it carefully on the back of the chair, for she told him he was always rumpling his clothes. He was a big man and a strong one. Strong enough for both of them. Strong enough to fight the fight for Jesus every day. He closed his eyes again, perhaps he dozed too, sitting in the chair keeping vigil. Perhaps he dozed or perhaps he didn’t, but he saw a vision.
It was like something from the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle. It was a great red beast with the face of a swarthy man with black shining eyes and many long pointed teeth, a huge beast like a bull. One of its horns was red and one of its horns was black. It was trampling through fields of young corn that were really young boys growing up green and straight, but now trampled into the muck beneath the cloven hooves of this great red beast. A voice like that of an angel spoke loudly to him and said, “And the one horn was Drink and the second horn was Smut.” The beast was thundering toward him trampling the fine boys under its hooves, and it was chanting about freedom and free love and free lust and bad women as it stomped the youth, their blood mixing with the mud. He rose up and stood to meet it. He was going to stop the beast, to wrestle it to the ground like Samson. The beast rushed toward him snorting. Anthony stood his ground, then woke with a start, staring around him.
Maggie was still sleeping, but she looked better. He touched her forehead. It was clammy. He would make broth. He knew perfectly well how to make beef broth. He had many good household skills acquired growing up in a motherless house, before he went away to school. He would cook a healthy digestive broth for her and bring it to her on a tray. In all ways, he was a much better husband than his father had been. He would have kept his mother alive if he had been her husband. He would have coddled and cosseted her as he did his Maggie.
There was a case in the papers of a young fair-haired woman whose naked body had been found in a trunk shipped railway express from New York to Chicago. It was a sensational murder, for she had clearly bled to death from an abortion. Her body was put on ice at Bellevue. Hundreds of men filed by to look at her, the picture of tragedy, purity defiled and then vilely killed by a dirty abortionist. It was the moral outrage of the entire metropolitan area, on the front page of every paper. MAIDEN BETRAYED.
The police soon arrested a Polish Jew named Rosenzweig, although he called himself Dr. Franklin to disguise his origins. His family all lined up in court and insisted he had been with them and had never done such a thing. He just dispensed pills and powders and in Poland he had been a doctor, they said. Anthony followed the case and one day he stole away from his sales rounds and went to court. He had to arrive very early because crowds of men attended the trial every day. It was the sensation of the month.
The men’s sporting papers ran huge stories clamoring for the Jew to be hanged. Anthony despised the sporting papers because they played to the young men who came to the city, ignorant of what could happen to them. They lauded prostitution and ran lascivious ads, but they did oppose abortionists and called for their prosecution. They got one thing right with all the evil they did.
Anthony watched the prosecutor carefully. He was earnest but not forceful enough. He used too much legal language and didn’t make the jury feel outrage. Anthony could do a better job. It should be him going after the scum of the city. It should be him shouldering the weight of justice. That was what he had been born for. A destiny awaited him, but how to break through to it? Not by selling notions.
The murdered girl was Alyce Bowlsby. Her murderer spoke with a strong accent that the newspapers made fun of. He kept saying Alyce had threatened to kill herself. A handkerchief with her initials had been found in his office. The defense tried to call a woman friend of Alyce’s. However the judge would not let the witness be sworn in. The judge exhibited, Anthony felt, an appropriate sense of decency. No female ears should hear of such a subject.
The miscreant was found guilty and taken away to prison. But still, Anthony did not feel satisfied. He wanted to punish Rosenzweig in a way that would crush him and deter others. He should be publicly flogged; he should be h
anged in Union Square. Anthony could have handled everything more powerfully. He ought to be up there prosecuting evildoers. He ought to be out catching them.
Maggie finally recovered enough to get out of bed. They had to use a wet nurse, as she hadn’t enough milk. However, she was her cheerful self and once again providing him with a home that was a haven from all the ugly things in the city and the hardness of the commercial world. She was the angel in his house, frail still. He wondered if it was time to move back into their shared bedroom. The baby cried sometimes at night and woke him. That also woke Maggie, who would carry the baby to bed with her. After a week of this, she simply took Lillie into her bed for the entire night. Anthony began to sleep through again. Perhaps it was a little soon to return to Maggie’s bed.
Budington, who kept up on everything important going on in the causes they were both passionate about, told him that Jesup was appointing a committee on Obscene Literature. Anthony was burning to be part of this new crusade of the YMCA. Who knew more about that subject than himself? He needed to reach these men and offer himself to their cause. The time was ripe. He had to prove to them that he was the man to prune the tree of evil and protect the young men from their worst enemies, the forces that summoned them into vice. He had only to reach these important and wealthy men to get them to make him their deputy.
THIRTY
THE TIME HAD COME, Victoria was sure, for her to move into the larger world and accomplish the great tasks Demosthenes and her spirits had long promised would be her destiny. Society needed her. She knew what it was to grow up ignorant of her own body, to bleed her menses and think she was dying because her crazy hyperreligious mother could not bring herself to discuss sex. She knew what it was to be exploited as a child, helpless as a woman, to be forced into sex without her consent. She knew what it was to be yoked with a drunkard in a hideous travesty of love, to bear a child alone in a tenement and almost bleed to death. She knew what it was to have to support not only herself but a child, and then a drunken drug-addicted husband, and then, with Tennie, the entire Claflin clan plus Canning again. She could not be cruel to him, although she kept him at a distance from herself and from Zulu Maud. Canning spent most of his days taking care of the boy, seeing he ate, got cleaned up, dressed and had some exercise. Canning and Byron seemed able to communicate, both broken souls but hardly devoid of feeling.
Tennie and she had started Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly to promote their ideas about woman’s rights, labor rights, economic reform, whatever struck them as important, and whatever Stephen Pearl Andrews and James wanted to write. It was smartly done, sixteen pages with easy-to-read type—unlike most papers—good layout and clear writing. Tennie had a sense of style, and their paper looked like quality but with a certain raci-ness. Victoria strongly supported women’s education and equal pay for equal work. She ran a Washington column every issue and solicited reports on movements in Europe. She herself wrote a story about a nursing home in Brooklyn where alcoholism was being appropriately treated as a disease. They covered the stock market and financial news, as well as the arts. They always had a couple of poems and book reviews. They even covered sports, fashion and yachting. In the first issue, they began serializing a translation of a novel by George Sand, with whom Victoria felt a kinship. From the beginning, they had plenty of advertising, and every issue afterward brought more. Tennie had taken it upon herself to rope in advertisers before they started, but soon no persuasion was needed. Then they handed off subscriptions and ads to an agent, who did it all professionally.
It was time to go to Washington again. Tennie and James could run the brokerage firm in her absence. Victoria was careful to stroke their clients and make sure they felt personally cared for before she packed up three trunks and left on the train. Benjamin Butler was delighted to see her. He came to her hotel, and before and after their lovemaking, brought her up to date on what was going on in Congress. Victoria and Tennie had been supporting the Sixteenth Amendment to give the vote to women, but Benjamin told her it was a dead horse. Voting it into committee was a way to kill it. She should seek a different path to victory. He suggested that she focus on an argument that the Constitution gave the right to vote to all citizens, and women were citizens. She wrote an essay to that effect for the Weekly, and then followed it up two weeks later with a closely argued document based on constitutional law which Butler wrote and she went over, changing some of the language, then signed and sent on to New York.
He was a man who liked nudity. He liked her to leave her robe off while they were talking. Victoria viewed modesty as hypocrisy. If she was intimate with a man, why pretend to shudder if he wanted to look at her body as well as touch or enter it? The sight of a man’s naked body meant little to her. Mostly she was attracted to a man’s personality, his knowledge, his ability. A dynamic man who could teach her something fascinating and useful excited her. Such a man was worth knowing on every level. Butler was almost bald, but he had lush whiskers. His eyes were dark and piercing in their gaze. No one would ever call him handsome—he was short and resembled a pug—yet when he walked into a room, everyone knew he had arrived, men and women alike, and they turned to him. He exuded an energy that was electric.
Returning briefly to New York, she worked on a memorial—a petition by a private citizen to Congress. Butler would know how to approach that body. She would argue as she had in her articles that the Constitution already gave women the right to vote as citizens, and no further legislation was needed to assure that right. She would petition Congress to pass an act declaring that women were citizens and thus had suffrage. She carefully prepared her speech, consulting James and especially Stephen. She went over it again and again, strengthening the legal arguments. She worked on the memorial until she thought she had something Congress would have to listen to—if she got the chance to stand before the lawmakers. For a woman to do this would be most unusual, and she would need every bit of Senator Butler’s influence and power to bring it off. Telegraphing Butler, she set off again.
The better hotels of Washington were watering holes for members of Congress, their wives and mistresses, the lobbyists who swarmed around them. The public rooms were thick with smoke while the men drank mint juleps and whiskey skins. Before each introduction, Benjamin would prepare her, feeding her information so that she could charm them. “He’s prouder of his hunting dogs than of his office or his children.” “He’s a fanatical operagoer. Adores Italian opera.” “He likes to think himself a great gourmet and an expert on wines.” “He loves to talk about his exploits in the Civil War—which were negligible. Flatter him.” “He imagines himself a great orator. Tell him you heard his last speech from the gallery and were moved to tears.”
She listened, she memorized, and she performed. Quickly her fame spread among the politicians: intelligent, beautiful and charming and unusually knowledgeable for a woman. She grew a little weary of Washington, where gossip was an obsession, a job, an amusement and a tool. She was spending more time with Butler than she had anticipated. As a winning general, he had occupied New Orleans, where he had been called “Beast Butler” because he ordered that New Orleans ladies who spat upon or insulted his soldiers in the streets would be arrested as prostitutes. He also ordered that every escaped slave under his jurisdiction was to be considered “contraband of war” and therefore immediately free. In the Senate, he was powerful and respected among the radical Republicans. He had led the unsuccessful attempt to impeach Johnson. He took her memorial in hand and went over it, reworking parts and making suggestions for other passages.
Benjamin told her that many women suffragists were in town for a convention Isabella Beecher Hooker was organizing. Susan B. Anthony had pleaded with one of the congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee to move the Sixteenth Amendment granting the vote to women out of committee and onto the floor of the House. He told her Congress had more important questions to consider than such silliness. She responded that when women had the vote, their qu
estions would gain importance at once. But Susan and Isabella were stymied, she heard from Benjamin, who knew them all.
“Never you mind, Vickie darling,” Benjamin said, squeezing her shoulder. “You shall address the Joint House and Senate Judiciary Committees the day after tomorrow.”
“Really? Are you serious? You’ve done it!” She hugged him hard. He was not a tall man, but he was solidly built, like a bull on hind legs. He had some other characteristics imputed to bulls. She could feel his erection. For the miracle he had created for her, he deserved to have it used. “Here,” she said, unbuttoning him. “Come and let’s see what we can do with this.”
Benjamin would only have sex with him on top. For a short man, he was heavy. Sometimes she felt as if he would squeeze the breath out of her. He was a rough lover, heavy-handed, passionate, impulsive. Once they were launched, the bed could have caught fire and she did not think he would notice. She was more accustomed to men like James and Stephen, whom she must take in hand and excite, whom she led through the act. With Benjamin, it was as if she stepped into a swiftly moving river and the current took her. She enjoyed letting go. Once he entered her, he went on and on. She had no trouble reaching orgasm once, sometimes twice with him. His prick was thick, like the rest of him. It was more like rutting than making love, but quite satisfying. She did not have to flatter him, to cajole or sweet-talk. He was about as sentimental as a spittoon. He did not speak of making love or joining; he simply called it fucking. He liked her body and praised it. He liked her without pretending more. She trusted him and his advice. They were allies.
