The Hope Chest

by Karen Schwabach

  An advertisement painted on the side of a brick building showed two colored children of indeterminate sex, both wearing full skirts and nothing else. They had round white eyes and bright red lips. Between them was a sink full of soapsuds, and they were both holding up freshly scrubbed dishes that shone like diamonds—painted rays surrounding the dishes to show how much they were shining. More glowing dishes hung behind them. Beside one child was a box of Gold Dust cleansing powder. Underneath them were painted the words Your Servants, Ma'am!

  The sign reminded Myrtle of the Girls' Training Institute, and she felt instantly depressed. “I don't want to ever be anybody's servant,” she said.

  “I agree,” said Mr. Martin. “Don't be. Excuse me, sir.”

  The colored man Mr. Martin called to looked surprised at being called sir. He touched his hat deferentially and gave Mr. Martin directions to the address the desk clerk had written down. Mr. Martin touched his own hat in return. Myrtle thought the two men were making each other very uncomfortable.

  It got worse when they got to Dead Horse Alley. They had run out of brick houses and stone streets by then. There was a smell of outhouses and rotting food on the hot air, and foul water ran down a gutter at the side of the street. The houses were made of wood, mostly unpainted or painted so long ago that you could no longer tell what color they were supposed to be.

  “I guess this must be Dead Horse Alley,” said Mr. Martin. “According to those directions that fella gave me.” He sounded doubtful. Myrtle could see why. It didn't look like an alley. It looked like a dry gully cut by a rushing creek that would be back again the next time it rained. It wasn't even flat. There was no way you could have driven a wagon up it, even if it had been wide enough.

  A woman was sitting on the stoop of what looked like a cowshed, sewing. “Yes, this is Dead Horse Alley,” she said.

  “Can you tell us where we might find Mrs. Eugenia Ready, ma'am?” Mr. Martin asked.

  “I'm Mrs. Eugenia Ready,” said the woman. She stood up. She was older than Mama would've been, Myrtle thought, but not really old. She wore an old-fashioned blue dress that came to her ankles and had her hair done up on top of her head but not straightened. Mama had never straightened her hair either. But this woman was looking at them both a little suspiciously, and she got more suspicious when Mr. Martin explained that they were looking for lodgings.

  The problem, it seemed, was that Mr. Martin wanted to stay there too. Mrs. Ready was uncomfortable with that. She seemed to be thinking that if Mr. Martin wanted to stay in a place like Dead Horse Alley, he must be on the run from the law or something. Mr. Martin's evil-looking scar probably encouraged her impression, which, Myrtle had to admit, was correct. She quoted a high price, two dollars a week, but Mr. Martin accepted it without demurral and she seemed to feel she had no choice but to let them inside.

  The house really had been a cowshed at one point; Myrtle was sure of it. A wooden floor had been put down, and the place was scrupulously clean, but it still smelled faintly of cows. The two partitioned-off bedrooms reminded Myrtle of stalls. One of them was clearly Mrs. Ready's room. The other one she supposed Mr. Martin would get, and she'd have to be in the kitchen. The kitchen had a wood cookstove, a dry sink, and a table covered with a checkered oilcloth. A treadle sewing machine stood against the wall. There was a shelf with a Bible on it and a wedding picture of Mrs. Ready and some fellow who must be Mr. Ready. Next to it was a picture of a serious-looking young colored lady with round glasses. Next to that was a yellow rose stuck in a bottle.

  “The girl is my daughter, Rosalie. She's in preparatory classes for Fisk University. She aims to be a doctor. There's a colored medical school, Meharry, in Nashville,” said Mrs. Ready. “The gentleman is my husband, Walter. He was killed in the Dutch Bend train derailment in 1918.”

  “I'm sorry, ma'am,” said Myrtle.

  Mr. Martin looked like he was thinking of saying something Bolshevist about railroads and thought better of it. Myrtle had learned on their travels that he thought railroads were all run by robber barons who didn't care if their workers and passengers died. “I'm sorry to hear it, ma'am. Does that yellow rose mean …”

  “Yes, I'm a suffragist,” said Mrs. Ready defiantly. “And I support the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.”

  “So do we,” said Myrtle.

  “Well, just stay out of sight, child,” said Mrs. Ready. “That's our job this week.” She sounded bitter.

  “I can always stay out of sight, ma'am,” said Myrtle. “I can turn invisible.”

  “Child, we can all do that,” said Mrs. Ready.

  Chloe had thought Violet's idea of being a spy was an excellent one. “And you can report to me several times a day,” she said. “You can come down to the Tulane, or I'll go up to the Hermitage.”

  “No, that won't work,” said Violet. “Everyone knows the Tulane's a Suff base, so I can't go in there with my red rose on, and I can't be seen talking to Suffs at the Hermitage.”

  They'd agreed to meet instead at Max Bloomstein's Pharmacy for lunch at noon each day, neither of them wearing Suff or Anti symbols. Violet thought it sounded exciting and spylike. Like something from the movies.

  Going back to the Hermitage was less exciting. The ninth floor of the Hermitage was somehow hotter than she remembered. When she turned the key and opened the door to room 907, she saw that the clothesline full of nankeen bloomers had been taken down and their occupant was in possession of the room.

  “Oh!” said the woman, startled.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Violet. “I'm Miss Violet Mayhew; they, um, gave me that other bed.”

  “Oh!” The woman's mouth was shaped like an O, so maybe it was the easiest sound for her to make. She was stout, and not much taller than Violet, and about thirty years old. She had brass-colored hair, piled up under a spreading pink hat, and round, startled blue eyes. She was wearing a flouncy pink dress that Violet would have considered too babyish for herself.

  “I'm Miss Annasette Escuadrille,” she said. “I was just getting ready for the thing tonight.” She nodded at the bedside table, and Violet saw that the electric curling iron was now plugged in. How anyone could want more heat on a day like this she couldn't imagine.

  Still, she might as well get right to spying. “What thing?” she asked, sitting down on her bed. “I mean, I know there's a thing, but I forgot.”

  Miss Escuadrille untied the ribbons that held on her hat and began unpinning her hair. “I don't know, some thing at the capitol? Miss Charlotte Rowe is going to speak; have you met her?”

  “Yes,” said Violet. “I met her at the train station.”

  “She's so clever,” said Miss Escuadrille. “And Miss Josephine Anderson Pearson will be there, and Senator Candler, of course, and Mrs. James S. Pinckard … and some Suffs too, I suppose.”

  “Are they going to vote on the amendment?” said Violet.

  “I don't think so,” said Miss Escuadrille, opening the metal clamp on the hair curler, rolling a lock of brass-colored hair around it, and snapping the curler shut. “I don't really understand all that part of it. It's just some sort of meeting. There'll be speeches.”

  A dreadful smell of burned hair filled the room.

  “Do you want to use this next?” Miss Escuadrille asked.

  “No, thank you,” said Violet, who couldn't imagine putting hot metal next to her face in this heat. Besides, her hair wouldn't hold a curl anyway. She wondered if Miss Escuadrille would mind if she turned the fan on.

  “I just think we all need to look really nice,” said Miss Escuadrille, looking at Violet's plaid dress with the horrible patent leather belt. “Because you know the Suffs are going to look like frumpy man-hating witches.”

  Violet felt moved to retort that at least the Suffs didn't wear flouncy pink dresses better suited to a four-year-old, but she remembered that she was supposed to be an Anti and kept her mouth shut.

  “I was on duty at the telegraph offices all morning,” said Miss
Escuadrille. “Every time a Suff goes in to send a message, I go look at the desk after she's sent it and see if I can read the impressions the pen has left on the blotter.” She shrugged and reached for another strand of hair. “Then whenever a messenger boy heads out with a telegram, I try to catch him before he gets on his bike to bribe him to show me the message. But I can't catch them.” She shrugged again. “They move so fast.”

  “Would they really show you the telegrams for money?” Violet asked, surprised.

  “Supposed to,” said Miss Escuadrille. “And then if it's addressed to a Suff and you don't want them to get it, they're supposed to give you the telegram for more money.”

  Miss Escuadrille was either the stupidest adult Violet had ever met or just didn't know what “supposed to” meant, Violet thought.

  “Don't you have another dress you could wear?” said Miss Escuadrille.

  Violet unwrapped her bundle and showed Miss Escuadrille the other dress that had been cut down for her in Washington. It was a brown-and-black houndstooth check and looked as if it was meant to subdue whoever wore it into a deep and prolonged state of melancholy.

  “Huh,” said Miss Escuadrille. “That won't do. Makes you look like a Suff. Or a Bolshevik. I'll see if we can round up something better. I'm sure Mrs. Pinckard can find something. Or buy it if she has to—we have plenty of money.”

  “Why do we have plenty of money?” Violet asked. She had been wondering this since the meeting last night.

  “Because of the generosity and true chivalry of Southern men,” said Miss Escuadrille blithely. “They don't ever want women to have to vote. They know that Southern women were meant to be the queens of their households, so voting would be demeaning to us.”

  Violet took this to mean that Miss Escuadrille didn't know where the money was coming from. “But Miss Escuadrille, you're not even married,” she said. “So how can you be the queen of a household?”

  To Violet's dismay, Miss Escuadrille's eyes filled up with tears. “What a horrible, cruel, nasty thing to say to a person!”

  She sat down on her bed, which creaked alarmingly, and buried her face in her hands, sobbing.

  Violet dived for the curling iron, which had fallen on the rug. She missed the wooden handle and grabbed the business end instead, burning her fingers painfully. She unplugged the curling iron from the wall socket.

  “I'm sorry, Miss Escuadrille,” she apologized. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Horrible … not my fault … not married!” Miss Escuadrille sobbed.

  “I'm really, really sorry. I didn't mean it that way.”

  “How would you like it? To get to be my age and not even married!” Miss Escuadrille was getting more and more out of breath between sobs, and Violet wondered if she might be becoming hysterical. In books, when people got hysterical, you slapped them in the face. Violet didn't think she'd do that.

  Instead, she sat back down on her bed and went on apologizing every time Miss Escuadrille stopped sobbing long enough to hear her. In between apologies she sucked her burned fingers. She thought about the hatchet-faced woman in the train station in Chattanooga, waiting for her son's body to arrive from France. She was Southern, that woman, but she hadn't looked like the queen of anything.

  This spying was a lot less fun than Violet had thought it would be. She wished Myrtle were there.

  Max Bloomstein's Pharmacy

  MR. MARTIN HADN'T SAID ANYTHING ABOUT how long they were staying in Dead Horse Alley or where they were going afterward. Myrtle supposed that, like everyone else, they were waiting. They had been there for two days already, but Mrs. Ready had told them that no one was sure when the legislature would vote.

  Myrtle didn't know what they would do after the legislature voted. She had no plans. She didn't want to go back to the Girls' Training Institute, and she didn't want to stay in Tennessee, but she wasn't really sure what other choices she had. None, it seemed like.

  Myrtle would have liked to have gone and found Violet. It would have been fun to go exploring together, but she had seen enough of Tennessee by now to know that was impossible.

  Mrs. Ready had gone out to deliver some of the sewing she did for a living and then to visit her daughter. This was a relief. Myrtle felt she could have gotten along fine with Mrs. Ready if it wasn't for Mr. Martin, but Mr. Martin made the whole situation very uncomfortable. Mrs. Ready was always casting suspicious looks at him, trying to figure out what he was hiding from and why he was missing three fingers and why he had Myrtle with him.

  Myrtle had been trying to keep Mr. Martin inside and out of sight. He didn't seem to be taking the fact that he was a wanted man very seriously, and Myrtle felt somebody had to. She had gone out for newspapers to keep him busy, and for groceries—sardines and peaches and Uneeda biscuits. But now Mr. Martin seemed determined to go out. He announced that he had to go and talk to people to see if there was any news. Myrtle didn't see any way she could actually forbid him to leave, and she privately suspected which person in particular he wanted to see.

  Myrtle could see that the problem of Mr. Martin's future needed to be settled nearly as much as hers did. “Miss Chloe sure is pretty,” she commented.

  “Uh-huh,” said Mr. Martin, crawling under the bed to look for his socks.

  “You should tell her that you love her.”

  There was a loud, metallic clang from under the bed and Mr. Martin emerged, rubbing his head. “Myrtle, that's crazy talk. Be quiet.”

  “You should get married,” Myrtle suggested.

  “I'm a fugitive,” said Mr. Martin, smiling thinly. “Do you know what a fugitive is, Myrtle?”

  “Of course,” said Myrtle. “So do your time, and then marry her.”

  “My ‘time’ is likely to be twenty years in Fort Leavenworth,” said Mr. Martin, tying his shoes with unnecessary vigor. “Unless they deport me, which would be if I was lucky.”

  Myrtle frowned. Twenty years was a lot. Miss Chloe, being so pretty, was likely to marry someone else in that time. More to the point, Myrtle would be very old in twenty years and wouldn't need a family anymore. “Maybe you should go to China,” she said.

  “It's a thought,” said Mr. Martin. “Myrtle, I'm going out, and I want you to stay here and wait. Can I trust you for that?”

  Myrtle ignored the question. “You could take Miss Chloe to China with you,” she said. “And then get married. And you might want to have a kid.”

  “Myrtle, will you stay here and not move?”

  “Not a baby, maybe,” said Myrtle. “Babies are a lot of trouble. But an older kid, you know.”

  “Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea. Now stay here, Myrtle, and I'll be back in an hour or so.”

  “Are you sure you would get twenty years?” said Myrtle. “I knew a fella in D.C. who cut another fella with a razor, and he only got three months.”

  “Isn't it amazing?” said Mr. Martin, half sarcastically and half seriously. “But I'm going to get twenty years. Most of my friends did. Big Bill Haywood did. And I will too.”

  A thought struck Myrtle that had not previously occurred to her. Maybe Mr. Martin had actually done something really serious.

  Maybe he had killed somebody.

  “Mr. Martin, why are those agents chasing you?” Myrtle asked.

  Mr. Martin frowned and straightened his soft collar in the mirror that hung on the wall. “Back in 1918, I spoke out against the War.”

  “Spoke out against it?” Myrtle said.

  “Yes. I said we shouldn't have been in it—that it wasn't our war.”

  Myrtle stared. “That's it? That's what they're after you for?”

  “What, you don't think that's enough?” Again Myrtle couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. “Keep it under your hat, all right, Myrtle?”

  “Of course,” said Myrtle, offended.

  “I'll be back in a bit.”

  The way you were dressed, Violet had noticed, tended to make you act a certain way. Violet was dressed the wa
y she had always hated, in a fluffy white dress with a violet satin sash and trimmings of violet ribbon.

  “We wanted to get some artificial violets for your hat to go with your name; wouldn't that have been darling?” Miss Escuadrille had said. “But the shops only have yellow and red roses.”

  There were also itchy white stockings and some wretched little patent leather shoes called Mary Janes.

  In this ridiculous getup Violet sat on one of the wire-backed chairs at a little round marble-topped table at Max Bloomstein's Pharmacy, feeling very ladylike but at the same time much younger than she was. She told Chloe everything she had overheard in the last twenty-four hours.

  “If the Antis do think they're going to lose,” Violet said, poking at the blob of vanilla ice cream in her grape ice cream soda, “they said there just won't be a quorum. What's a quorum?” She normally didn't like to ask what words meant, because it made her feel babyish, but in a costume like this, she had no choice.

  “A quorum means having enough members of the legislature there to have a valid vote,” said Chloe. “Sometimes dissenting state legislators will leave the state in order to prevent there being enough people to vote. It's an old trick. I'll tell Charlotte Ormond Williams we need to beef up the guard at the train station to keep them from escaping.

  “At least now we know what that surprise you heard mentioned yesterday was. The publisher of the Nashville Banner changed sides. He used to be a Suff; now suddenly he's an Anti.” Chloe shrugged. “Wonder how they got to him. Is there anything else?”

  Violet thought hard. She wished she'd taken notes, but of course that would have been too conspicuous. “I don't know. That Miss Escuadrille that I'm sharing a room with is a blithering idiot—”

  “Violet,” said Chloe reprovingly.

  “Well, she is—she really doesn't have a clue what's going on. She just believes all the applesauce they've told her about how women are too good to vote or too weak or something.”