The Hope Chest

by Karen Schwabach

  “Violet! Miss Chloe! Mr. Martin!”

  “Calm down, dear,” Chloe suggested.

  Myrtle shook her head. “They've arrested Mr. Martin!”

  Chloe went pale. “Who?”

  “Agents,” said Myrtle. “They hit him and told him he wasn't an American.”

  “Violet, turn the car off and wait here,” Chloe said. She followed Myrtle, and both of them went charging off down Union Street.

  Violet watched them go. Should she follow them? No. She was worried about Mr. Martin, but whatever there was to be done for him, Chloe and Myrtle were going to do. Chloe had told Violet to wait here. But someone had to search the highway for Blotz and Credwell. The Suffs were counting on Chloe and Violet to do it.

  Could she do it? She'd only driven the Hope Chest once before, with Chloe sitting next to her to tell her what to do. Well, never mind—she could do it. She had to.

  It was a good thing the Hope Chest was still running, because Violet doubted she could have started the thing by herself. She moved over into the driver's seat. She sat as tall as she could so that she could see over the hood, and she stretched her legs to reach the pedals. She breathed in the smell of burning gasoline. She looked down at the pedals on the floor. R for reverse. She kicked the pedal. The Hope Chest gave an anguished cough, as though it was about to stall, and Violet grabbed the throttle and gave it some gas. The car shot backward. A horse whinnied in fear. Violet stamped on the pedal marked B for brake and grabbed at the steering wheel. Terrified, she turned and looked behind her. The horse was making good its escape, its rider clinging to its back, but she'd come within an inch of hitting a parked Hupmobile.

  Violet gripped the steering wheel so hard that if it had been alive, it would have screamed. Resolutely she stamped on the clutch to move the car forward and then, carefully, touched the throttle and gave it some gas. The Hope Chest lunged like a racehorse breaking from a starting gate. Several pedestrians scattered out of Violet's way.

  She didn't remember the car going this fast when she drove it with Chloe. But the paved street offered less resistance than the grassy field. The car surged down the street. Violet clasped the steering wheel tightly and concentrated on staying in the exact middle of the street. She knew you were supposed to drive on the right, but that looked too difficult. There were so many things a person could hit on the side of the road, cars and lampposts and people. She thudded over the trolley tracks. The thing was going much too fast, and she wasn't even touching the throttle. She half stood, trying to see the road better. She seemed to be hurtling at things and people on both sides, and each time she cranked the steering wheel to avoid something, something else sprang up in her path. She couldn't imagine why anyone would want to drive a car—this was horrible, like a nightmare.

  She was supposed to turn left up here, she knew, to get to the highway. But how did you slow down to turn? She cranked the steering wheel to the left and the Hope Chest veered wildly, rocking onto two wheels and then hitting the pavement again hard.

  “Reduce the spark!” a woman screamed at her from the sidewalk. Out of the corner of her eye, Violet noticed that a lot of people were staring at her.

  Violet looked down to find the lever on the steering wheel that controlled the spark, and the Hope Chest climbed up onto the sidewalk. People fled, screaming.

  “I'm sorry!” Violet yelled as she got the car back onto the road and got the spark down. Now the Hope Chest was much quieter and didn't seem to want to go as fast. It coasted slowly to a stop, coughed, belched out a cloud of burned-smelling black smoke, and almost stalled before Violet grabbed the throttle lever and it jumped forward again. This time she kept her eyes on the road and kept driving right down the middle.

  “I don't care what anyone says,” she heard a woman on the sidewalk say. “There ought to be a law against children driving those things.”

  She had the hang of it now. The important thing was to keep moving, because otherwise the Hope Chest might stall and she knew she couldn't start it again. And that none of the agitated crowd on the sidewalk would help her.

  “Which way to the highway?” she called.

  Several people pointed, and someone called, “Left at the corner and take your second right!”

  Behind her, Violet heard a bell clanging angrily. It was a trolley car. Violet was driving right down the trolley track in the middle of the street. She looked over to the side, where she was supposed to drive, but the space looked too dangerously narrow. Well, the trolley would just have to follow her.

  Soon Violet had left the trolley track and the city behind, and the Hope Chest was bouncing merrily along a rutted dirt road into the country. Violet could see why Chloe liked the Hope Chest so much. This was glorious. It made you feel free. As if you had no bonds at all. Nothing to hold you back from going wherever you wanted and doing whatever you felt needed to be done.

  She saw a car up ahead on the edge of the dusty highway. She took her hand off the throttle and slowed down.

  A cream-colored Oakland Sensible Six was stopped beside the road, and a man was kneeling in the dust beside it, staring at a rear wheel. Violet pulled up beside the Oakland and stopped the Hope Chest carefully, not letting it stall.

  The man looked up. He was in his forties and had rather the seedy look of a drummer, perhaps because he'd left his hat on although he'd taken off his jacket and pulled his sleeves up under his sleeve garters.

  “Are you Mr. Credwell or Mr. Blotz?” Violet called to him.

  “Beg pardon?” said the man, standing up and brushing dust off his knees. “You'll have to turn that thing off. I can't hear you.”

  With a sigh of regret, Violet let the Hope Chest stall. “Are you Mr. Credwell or Mr. Blotz?”

  The man tipped his hat politely. “Credwell. Got a flat. And me without a spare.”

  Well, that was one of the runaway legislators found, anyway. “Where's Blotz?” she said.

  “I don't know,” said Mr. Credwell, shrugging.

  #x201C;The committee's about to meet to vote on whether to send the ratification bill to the floor,” Violet said. “You're supposed to be there to vote!”

  “Oh, is it?” Mr. Credwell looked off into the middle distance. “I guess it was in my memorandum book, but I must've forgotten to look at it.”

  Violet almost pounded the steering wheel in frustration. Did this man have no idea how much his vote mattered to Chloe? And to women who had to wait in train stations for their son's coffins to come home from France and to a few million other people, including, now that Violet thought about it, herself? “Mr. Credwell, please come back to town at once.”

  Mr. Credwell shuffled his feet in the dust with the guilty look of a boy caught skipping school. “Sure. I was just headed back.” His car was pointed the other way.

  Mr. Credwell chivalrously offered to turn the crank to start the Hope Chest. Violet worked the levers. It took them quite a while to get the thing started, because she didn't have a good ear for it yet.

  “You know why they call it a runabout, don't you?” said Mr. Credwell.

  Violet had heard this one before, but they were all supposed to do their best to keep the legislators in a good mood, so she said, “Why?”

  “Because it'll run about a mile before it breaks down, ha ha!” said Mr. Credwell.

  Violet smiled politely. “Ha ha. Please get in, Mr. Credwell.”

  “Do you, er, mind if I drive, Miss, er …”

  “Miss Mayhew,” said Violet. “And yes, I do.”

  Mr. Credwell humbly climbed into the Hope Chest and permitted himself to be driven back into town. He asked Violet to stop at a garage so he could get a spare, so Violet did. But once he'd got it, she went right on driving back to the capitol.

  Miss Pollitzer had caught the other legislator, Blotz, trying to escape on the Interurban, the electric train system that connected cities from the East Coast to the Mississippi.

  That night the committee voted 10–8 to send the Susan
B. Anthony Amendment to the floor. Without Mr. Blotz and Mr. Credwell, Violet realized, the vote would have been tied.

  The next day, Tuesday, August 17, Violet did not see Chloe or Myrtle at all. Everyone thought the amendment would be voted on that day. Violet went to their usual noon meeting place at Max Bloomstein's Pharmacy, but Chloe did not show up. Violet slowly sipped a chocolate phosphate through a paper straw and worried. What if they had arrested Chloe too? Why would they, though? Chloe hadn't done anything. But then, according to Chloe, all Mr. Martin had done was speak out against the War, so who knew what people could get arrested for? And anyway, Chloe had been in jail before.

  The door jangled seventeen times before the last of the phosphate gurgled in the bottom of Violet's glass, but it was never Chloe. With a sigh, Violet got up and left. On the way back to the Hermitage, Violet heard a newsboy hollering that some baseball player had been hit by a fast pitch and killed. That would upset Mr. Martin, Violet thought. If he ever even heard about it, that is. Who knew where he was being kept or what was being done to him or to Chloe or to Myrtle?

  Turning these worries over in her head, Violet walked across the sweltering lobby of the Hermitage and heard someone calling her name.

  She was surprised to see it was Mr. Hanover, the non-Bolshevik Jewish lawyer from Memphis who was leading the House fight. Imagine him remembering her name. She was glad (and slightly proud of herself) to see that Mr. Hanover had no bump on his head and had not been locked in the hold of a slow freighter heading south out of New Orleans.

  “How do you do, Mr. Hanover?” she said politely. She looked curiously at the enormous blond man standing just behind Mr. Hanover's shoulder. Governor Roberts had indeed gotten Mr. Hanover a bodyguard—a huge one.

  “Fine, fine,” said Mr. Hanover. “Actually, I think I'm getting an ulcer, but that's neither here nor there. Listen, could you tell your sister that she doesn't need to bother with Mr. Ezekiel? I heard she was looking for him, but Mr. Ezekiel's ours. In fact, I'll tell you a funny story—”

  Violet had already heard from Myrtle the story of how Mr. Ezekiel had told Mr. Hanover the Antis had offered him $300 for his vote and had tried to get Mr. Hanover to offer him more. But she hadn't heard it from Mr. Hanover, so she laughed politely. Mr. Hanover was a nice fella. In spite of his baldness, he really wasn't much older than Chloe. About Mr. Martin's age, maybe. Violet suddenly felt that there was something really good about people who fought for the rights of other people, and she wished there was some way she could tell Mr. Hanover that.

  “Mr. Hanover, I'm not really an Anti. And thank you.” She unpinned the red rose from her dress and handed it to Mr. Hanover (keeping the pin because it would ruin the gesture if she stabbed him in the hand).

  She supposed Mr. Hanover must've known she wasn't an Anti or he wouldn't have told her the story. But she felt better for saying it anyway. She wondered why Mr. Hanover thought Chloe had been looking for Mr. Ezekiel … she couldn't remember ever seeing a question mark next to Mr. Ezekiel's name.

  She went back up to her room. It was sweltering hot. Miss Escuadrille was laundering her bloomers in the washbasin. Violet turned on the fan—she didn't care whether Miss Escuadrille minded or not—and flopped down on the bed.

  “There you are.” Miss Escuadrille came out of the bathroom and hung a pair of black bloomers on the line she'd strung. “You know the House might vote today? We're all supposed to go up there and show the colors. Where's your rose?”

  “I'm not wearing it anymore,” said Violet. “I'm for woman suffrage, Miss Escuadrille.”

  Surprisingly, Miss Escuadrille took this in stride. “You know, I'm beginning to wonder if I might be too. I was saying to myself, you know, Annasette, you're not even married, so all this queen of the household apple-sauce doesn't really apply to you anyway—”

  “You didn't say that to yourself, I said it to you,” said Violet irritably.

  “It's not only that, you know,” Miss Escuadrille went on as if Violet had not spoken. “There are probably lots of women who are married and they're still not queens of the household, or maybe the household they're the queen of is some one-room shack with no floor beside the railroad track, and maybe it's really not my business to decide whether they should vote or not. And anyway, who's to say I wouldn't do a good job of voting once I set my mind to it?”

  Violet stared at Miss Escuadrille as if she had sprouted horns.

  “Did you just change sides?” she asked Miss Escuadrille.

  Miss Escuadrille gave her a bewildered look. “You know, I think I did.”

  She shook out another pair of bloomers and hung them up.

  In the evening there was an Anti party on the mezzanine. The Antis were celebrating because the North Carolina legislature had rejected the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Violet went for the refreshments. But she didn't wear a red rose, and she didn't bother to pretend she was an Anti anymore. She went as herself.

  “Here's to North Carolina!” Miss Josephine Anderson Pearson cried, lifting a glass of grape lemonade high beside the Confederate flag on the wall.

  “Hear, hear!”

  “May Tennessee follow in her footsteps!” said Mrs. Pinckard.

  “They didn't actually vote it down,” a woman near Violet said conversationally. “They voted to table it till next year.”

  “Oh, really?” said Violet politely, eating her pineapple ice.

  “We might do the same,” said the woman. “If it looks like we're going to lose, which just between you and me and the barn gate …”

  “I want the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to pass,” Violet said.

  The woman looked at her in surprise. “Young lady! That would be the worst thing that could happen to American womanhood.”

  “Why?” said Violet. “I can think of lots worse things that can happen to American womanhood. Like right now, when we're taxed but not represented, and we can go to jail for breaking laws we didn't pass.” She thought of Chloe, Myrtle, and Mr. Martin and wondered if they were all in jail now. If they weren't, why hadn't she heard from them?

  “That shows how much you know,” said the woman angrily. “Woman has a great deal more political power now than she'd have if she got the vote. Right now, when a woman goes to her congressman or senator and asks him for something, he knows that she's completely disinterested; she has no political stake in what she's asking for.”

  “It seems to me that would only work if he doesn't have any political stake in what she's asking for either,” Violet said.

  “Young lady! Did you just contradict me?”

  Violet thought about what she'd just said. “I guess so.”

  “You're a very badly brought-up young lady.”

  “No, I'm not,” Violet contradicted again. “I'm a very well-brought-up young lady, but I'm getting over it.”

  She started to lift her bowl to her mouth to drink the last melted bit of pineapple ice but then decided she'd better not lose all her manners at once. She set the bowl down on a table.

  “You know, when you think about it,” Miss Escuadrille was saying loudly nearby, “here it is 1920 already. I mean, doesn't it seem sort of, I don't know, crazy that women still haven't got the vote yet?”

  “Annasette, hush. You don't know what you're saying,” said Miss Pearson.

  “Yes, I do,” said Miss Escuadrille. “I may not be very smart, but I know when someone's trying to pull a fast one on me. We're women, so what are we doing fighting against women getting the vote?”

  Miss Pearson opened her mouth to answer, then shut it as a page boy rushed into the room (followed by an Anti who was guarding him to make sure he arrived safely) and thrust a note into Miss Pearson's hand.

  Everyone watched while Miss Pearson read the note. “The House is adjourned till tomorrow,” she announced. “So it will go on another day.”

  There were murmurs all around. This was not good news for the Antis, Violet realized. They had been expecting a vote today, and an easy w
in.

  August 18

  CHLOE AND MYRTLE HAD STILL NOT SHOWN up. It was Wednesday, August 18. There had been meetings all night long at the Hermitage, both Suffs and Antis, and the sound of the elevator running up and down had combined with the stifling heat to keep Violet awake most of the night.

  Violet could think of no way she could find out what had happened to Chloe and Myrtle and Mr. Martin. If she went to the police, would they even tell her? Would they arrest her and question her? Did those Palmer agents even have anything to do with the police?

  What if they never came back? What would Violet do? Should she write to her parents for help? Would they even help her? Violet had to admit, though she didn't want to, that they probably would. They might come to Tennessee on a train, full of fury, to rescue her. Or they might call the police and tell them to arrest Violet and keep her in jail till they came. Was that what had happened to Hobie the Hobo?

  Violet went down to the lobby, thinking about all this and about finding something to eat. But as soon as she stepped off the elevator, she was caught up in a tide of people surging toward Capitol Hill.

  “You'd better hurry or you won't get a seat!” a woman called as they climbed. Violet didn't know her and couldn't tell whether the woman was a Suff or an Anti. There were hundreds of people climbing up the hill. Violet looked around for Chloe, but she didn't see her. What if she never saw Chloe again?

  She spotted a yellow rose on the ground, and she picked it up and stuck it in her hat.

  “If they're going to vote, it means the Antis are sure they're going to win,” a woman near Violet said grimly.

  Violet turned around and recognized Miss Kelley from the train. “Good morning, Miss Kelley,” she said politely. “What do you mean?”

  “Seth Walker controls when the vote happens,” Miss Kelley said, panting as she climbed. “And the Antis own him. That's why the vote's been delayed so long; Walker's been waiting till he was sure.”