Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  The consequences of the accident stayed with her. Whenever she went up or down stairs, that knee would give way. She had endured backaches during the last month of pregnancy, but once she had delivered, her back had always been fine. Now she had to sleep on her side with her knees drawn up. Her son Gat was living in Iowa, so she headed for him. His wife nursed and babied her. Six weeks later, she resumed her tour. It was winter now, and by the time she had talked to the last audience in the last town, she was running a fever. When she got home to New Jersey, her doctor said she had walking pneumonia and must get into bed and stay there. Five of her seven children gathered, hovering over her.

  “Mother,” Harriot said, assuming the role of family spokesman, “you must stop this incessant traveling. Not only do we scarcely see you, but you’re driving yourself into an early grave. You must spare your health and stay home.”

  Amelia said the same thing more bluntly. “Let younger women hit the trail. There be forty other women can lecture. Nobody writes like thee.”

  Susan was after her to go out on the circuit. Elizabeth resisted, writing, “I owe it to my children to spend more of what time remains to me with them. I want to get on with our history. I want to tackle another large project.” She was going to take on religion with a frontal assault. She was thinking of calling the new work The Women’s Bible. “Neil has moved back in after his divorce. To continue the marriage would have been absurd. They no longer cared for each other and their home had become a battleground. Why live like that? She has her own money. The Civil War and then his domestic war have sapped his strength, as all this traveling has sapped mine.” She was not above trying to provoke a little guilt in Susan for riding her all the time to run conventions, to go out on the lecture circuit, to write speeches for Susan to give.

  In truth, she did not mind staying home in the company of family and friends. She received as many visitors as she could endure. There were pleasant evenings playing chess with Neil, playing cards with whichever of her children were there. She performed their favorite songs on her pianoforte and everyone sang. She held conversationals as she had years ago in Seneca Falls; now they argued about Marx, economics, religion and politics and national character, the frontier. Matilda had brought the treatment of Indians to the attention of Elizabeth and Harriot, who was proving to be a suffrage activist. Matilda was writing about the history of treaties with sovereign tribes the government made and then broke at will. The conversations sometimes concerned Indians now as well as expansionist ideas that were current and, Elizabeth thought, masculine and pernicious. Take, conquer, grab. Call those who resisted uncivilized. Call them savage if they fought back.

  She wasn’t by any means confined to the house. She went to see electric lights installed in Manhattan. She picnicked with her daughters Harriot and Margaret in Central Park to see Cleopatra’s Needle just erected there. She tried out the new telephone and organized a meeting on the implications of the Edmunds Act, prohibiting polygamy in the territories. She even managed while in Chicago to see the building they called a skyscraper, ten stories tall, the Monadnock Building with walls thick as a fortress. She viewed the immense arm and hand of the Statue of Liberty in Madison Square, where it was on display. She visited Frederick Douglass to wish him well on being appointed ambassador to Haiti. She was aware that she was one of the few to fervently congratulate him on his second marriage. She didn’t see that it mattered that his new wife was white, since they were obviously suited.

  “I can please myself now as well as others. That’s the advantage of being an old lady—that is, one with means to support herself—that makes all the difference,” she told her daughters. “You have in the end only yourself You must never lose yourself for another. Love, but hold on to your own sweet values and your own ideas. Always remember what you need and what you want.”

  She and Susan had tried to vote in the 1880 election, again in 1888 and this year, but were turned away. Disgusted, she threw the ballot at the recorder and stormed out. Would she ever, ever get to vote before they buried her? She had begun to doubt it, but perhaps her daughters would have that constitutional right.

  Susan went to every convention. The younger women gave her scarves and jewelry, which she seldom wore. They bought her gloves and sachets. They fawned on her, kissed her, fussed over her. Sometimes Elizabeth felt a pang of jealousy but it was gone in an instant. Susan, when they traveled together, had been known to exhibit jealousy of the greater attention Elizabeth’s manner and delivery brought her. Susan complained that when she was on a stage or in a room of strangers with Elizabeth, nobody listened to her. She was overshadowed and ignored. Elizabeth also knew that she had not Susan’s patience with the young things. Susan adored them back. Aside from her sisters, Susan had no family ties and was all theirs. She was cool to Elizabeth’s heat, thin and precise. She was the perfect aunt, and the younger women were comfortable with her.

  Never before had Elizabeth had enough time to write. Some writers complained of the agony of production. Not her. Up in her room, remembering the days she had written at a table in the nursery, she gloried in the hours she had to read, to study, to write and write. This was the sunset of living. A few aches and pains were nothing compared to the freedom of her mind.

  In early November news came that Lucretia was ill. Elizabeth was packed and ready to be taken to the train when a telegram came. Lucretia was dead. She wept and repacked for the funeral. They had been friends for forty years—longer even than Susan and in some ways more harmonious, probably because, she admitted to herself, Lucretia and she did not usually work together. She had loved Lucretia unstintingly for her sweet disposition, her clarity of mind, her steadfastness of purpose. She remembered standing on the bridge watching ducks in St. James’s Park in London, Lucinda holding her hand while she absorbed Henry’s betrayal. She remembered the afternoon in Seneca Falls when they had plotted the first woman’s rights convention. She remembered Philadelphia, torrid heat and petty squabbles, then Lucretia riding in with cold chicken from her farm. She would never taste Oolong tea without thinking of Lucretia.

  Among her many regular correspondents was Victoria, living in London, as was her sister—but they were not together. Victoria had brought over her parents and set them up, but she lived only with her children. She emphasized that although she had renounced some of her earlier radical causes such as free love, she lectured on and was still committed to woman’s rights. She had fallen in love with an Englishman from an old and respectable banking family. A certain amount of scandal had followed her, but mostly she had been able to quash it with a lawsuit.

  Elizabeth asked her what had happened to Colonel Blood. Victoria wrote that he had moved to Maine, married an heiress and gone off to South Africa to prospect. She knew nothing else nor did she wish contact with him. Her ex-husbands had gotten her into considerable trouble, and she was not looking for additional scandal.

  Elizabeth heard from Isabella that the sisters were not as close. Tennie did not give a fig about the respectability Victoria was wooing so industriously. She had taken up with a multimillionaire, Francis Cook—Viscount of Montserrat—who owned palaces in Portugal and overlooking the Thames on Richmond Hill. He collected art by Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, so Tennie had taken up a passionate interest in art. Isabella also wrote, with her usual lack of discretion, that Victoria was moving heaven and earth to get her lover, John Martin, to marry her. Recently she had twisted his arm long and hard enough so that he finally introduced her to his family, who lived on an ancient estate.

  Elizabeth followed Victoria’s career with interest, especially since she was starting a periodical. When an English suffragist had written to query Susan about Victoria, Susan had told them to avoid contact with her. Elizabeth was sorry about that, but they had not asked her. Victoria was thus denied entrance to the woman’s movement in England. They were afraid of her reputation, however she tried to conceal it. Elizabeth did not think Victoria had done anything to b
e regretted, however badly it turned out for her and for the movement. Victoria had been forced to retreat from her more radical positions, because she actually lived them. Elizabeth agreed with the free love position, but it got her in less trouble because she was such a respectable wife and mother. It was her anti-religious views that were beginning to heat the atmosphere. Well, she was old enough to weather any controversy. She had little to lose, besides the good opinion of people she did not respect.

  Victoria had been knocked down and almost out by attacks on her. Elizabeth did not blame her for seeking shelter. So long as she advocated woman’s rights, Elizabeth would support her positions and even her attempt to rewrite her own past. Colonel Blood had been a handsome man, an able and brave soldier, but he had been of no use to Victoria that Elizabeth could see. She hoped Victoria’s new lover would prove more of an asset. As for Tennie, that ship would float on any tide. She was a woman whose sensuality was obvious, yet not vulgar. Something about her was natural and powerful. She could also write, when she chose to. Her articles for the Weekly had been pungent, with a clarity of thought and writing that surprised Elizabeth at the time. Yet she doubted that Tennie took much pride in that fluency. Probably she would live out her life happily without ever writing more than a note to a friend or relative. Susan had never trusted Tennie, but while Elizabeth did not admire her as she had Victoria nor find Tennie someone she could make into an intimate friend, she enjoyed her energy and her honesty. She was what she was, no apologies, no pretense. That was so unusual in a woman that Susan had never understood it.

  The years seemed to move faster and faster. Elizabeth enjoyed a constant round of visitors, including her children and their friends and fiancés and then their spouses and, by and by, their children. She reached a friendly understanding with Henry: they could spend time with their children, have Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays together. She refused, however, to celebrate their anniversary, no matter what Henry or the children might suggest. It had been two decades since they were husband and wife. The legal fiction of marriage was comfortable, and so were the old folks’ gossips they had. He was her best source on party politics and electoral contests. He had met Grover Cleveland and liked him. She enjoyed quizzing him about names in the news, and he relished his superior knowledge of local politicos. He loved to hold forth. When she grew weary of his stories, she would simply excuse herself, go off to her room in the Manhattan flat, shut the door and read. Her writing had a harder edge, she was well aware of that. In her old age, she was growing ever more iconoclastic. She could not take more than a few of the younger women with her, but those few were great company.

  FORTY-FIVE

  CORLEARS HOOK WAS an old part of the city, more dangerous than their neighborhood—dirtier, just as crowded, streets muddy with sewage and offal, dead cats, rats, pigs, dogs and horses stinking and rotting as people simply walked around them. The gangs here were notorious. Just last week, the American papers that Sammy read told of a double murder, victims’ throats slit. Freydeh was nervous and Sammy kept fingering the knife in his belt. After querying neighbors and handing out more little bribes than they could afford, they found the house. The slattern who was keeping Reba, along with three other children farmed out by prostitutes, lived in a crooked old wooden house in a yard behind a tenement. The smell in the yard was intense, for not only was the privy overflowing right next to the well, but someone was keeping pigs there as well as chickens and a goat. Freydeh gagged as they waited for the woman to answer the door.

  “So you say you’re her aunt and her mom is dead. Why should I believe you? Little girls like her go for a pretty price.”

  “You will not sell her to any pimp or madam, or I’ll kill you.” Freydeh seized the woman’s shoulder and squeezed. She was all bones. “What do you want for her?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “Fifteen,” Freydeh said. “We’ll take her off your hands. You’ll never hear from that bastard Kumble again, believe me. He’s gone.”

  “Eighteen.”

  Freydeh didn’t have the stomach for more haggling. “We’ll come back with it.”

  “If she isn’t here, your life will be forfeit,” Sammy said. Where did he get language like that? Probably from those yellow adventure books he loved.

  “Where are we going to get eighteen dollars?” he said to her once they were in the street again. “I know you saved up five, maybe six.”

  “You brought that pillowcase full of Shaineh’s things?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t know what else to do with it. I thought maybe we’d bury her in something from it.”

  “They’re washing the body right now. They won’t bury her in any of that whorish stuff. She’ll be buried in a plain white shroud.” Freydeh walked on, thinking of Shaineh’s poor body with the burial society women preparing her. “We’ll go to a couple of madams and see if they want Shaineh’s clothing, her lingerie, her wrappers. You take the jewelry he gave her and try to pawn it. We might get a few dollars. I thought I saw gold in there.”

  By late afternoon, they had disposed of what they could sell, and it was time to rush to the little cemetery, across the river in Brooklyn. The whole family went on the ferry with Shaineh’s body, along with horses, a cow, a wagon heaped with bricks, two empty produce wagons and a wedding party. Asher said, “I never told them she was a cuervah. I told them a man was trying to rape her and she got pushed down the steps of a boardinghouse. Don’t tell them different. It’s a true shame on the family.”

  “She did what she had to, to survive.” Freydeh sighed, wiping her eyes. “It was as much my fault as hers.”

  “We can’t let him get away with this…this defilement and murder.”

  “It was an accident,” Sammy said. “They were struggling at the head of the steps. She was trying to get away from him and they fought.”

  “He defiled her. He soiled our family,” Asher said.

  Freydeh decided to ignore him. To find Shaineh and immediately to lose her, it was more than she could endure. The only thing keeping her going was that they must save the little girl. She had thought that Sara and Asher would adopt her, but listening to Asher, she didn’t want to give the girl into his care. He would take out on the daughter what he viewed as the shame cast upon him. What was one more child? A gift. Kezia could help care for Reba. If she could never have her baby sister back, she could have her sister’s baby. Her child to raise, like Kezia and Sammy.

  When they each threw a handful of dirt on the cheap pine coffin, the tears came. Had she tried hard enough? Was she too often distracted? She leaned on Sammy, taller now by several more inches, and wept. A waste. That was what she felt. Her baby sister was spent and wasted for nothing. The casual pleasure of a well-to-do man who cared for her only as one might for a fast horse or a beautiful spaniel. Who took her child from her and lodged that child in a squalid, falling-down house in a courtyard with pigs. She hated him but at least none of them need ever see his face again.

  The simple ceremony was over, the grave marked by a wooden number. In a year, she hoped they would have money for a stone. Now she and Sammy must go and get the child. Sara and she hugged, returning on the ferry. The wind on the East River cut into her bones. I’m getting older, she thought, and because of that momser Comstock, I’m starting all over again trying to get to a warm secure place for my family. Asher was withdrawn into himself. He stood at the rail muttering, davening. The other passengers pulled away from him as if he carried plague. Shaineh was not even his sister, and he was sullen and working himself into a state. It was not so much that he grieved as that he felt sullied.

  So much was different here in the New World, goldeneh medina that wasn’t at all golden, the hard strange life that made him feel lost. She could understand that. But you had to struggle. You had to be willing to change and change more and change until you felt as if you were on a rack with your arms and legs pulled from their sockets and your head was yanked until you thought your nec
k would just snap like rubber pulled too far. You had to fiddle with your sense of right and wrong. But you survived. If you pushed yourself hard enough and made the right choices, you might prosper. If luck was with you and momsers like Comstock didn’t break you. Freydeh sighed, hugging her sister and then Sammy, with Kezia clinging to her skirt as if she were afraid she might blow away into the river. Ever since she had come out of Blackwell’s, Kezia had clung to her, even in sleep. She sighed, ruffling Kezia’s thick black curls. “We’re going to bring you a sister, Kezia.”

  “Will you still love me?”

  “Always and forever. And she’ll love you too.”

  When they were all back in the flat, Sammy said, “We can’t go there tonight. It’s after dark. We’d never get out alive.”

  “But if we leave her there, that bitch might sell her.”

  “You can’t go,” Asher said. “We must sit shivah for her.”

  Sara had already covered the mirrors. Asher had made friends in his shul and the wives of his minyan brought food to them, what they could afford.

  Freydeh said nothing. She would simply walk out in the morning with Sammy and fetch the little girl. Asher was not her husband, and she had been on her own for so long she did not know if she could bring herself to obey any man. She had become something other than a wife. Sara obeyed Asher, but Freydeh wouldn’t. He was not the head of her household, whether he realized that or not. She gave Sammy a look that said, It’s okay.

  In the kitchen setting out dishes for everyone, mismatched, a few cracked, but dishes enough, she murmured to him, “We have the eighteen, right?”

  He nodded.

  “We don’t fight with Asher. In the morning, I go downstairs to the privy. Five minutes later, you follow. Just quiet and casual like.”