“Circumstances make all the difference.”
“Mother, she went to jail.”
She and Consuelo marched near the head of their procession, which would take them past the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing, then onward into St. James’s Park, along past Buckingham Palace, the Wellington Arch, and finally into Hyde Park. As they walked along a route lined with onlookers—older men, most of them, some of whom scowled or spat—Alva said, “I do feel rather liberated wearing a color other than black. Black is so severe—it drains one of vitality. Why should one appear as if one’s own death is imminent? The armband suffices.”
Alva may have been favored by her white dress, but Consuelo was a vision in hers. Consuelo was a vision in any color. Alva thought she had never seen her daughter as beautiful as she’d become at age thirty-one. Her features had the quality of having been arranged by angels. Her coltishness was gone, and in its place was the slender confidence of the gazelle. That doctor who’d prescribed the rod and straps, medieval as the contraption may have been, had known a thing or two about looking to a lady’s future interests.
Consuelo said, “We do restrict ourselves with so many stringent social rules. Men restrict us further, and will, for as long as we allow it.”
A woman beside them cried, “Hear, hear!”
Alva said, “When Oliver was in Congress, I gave a dinner party at which the sisters behind Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly were my secret special guests. Victoria Woodhull once put herself on the ballot for U.S. President, did you know? I was, what, nineteen at that time? I hardly paid it any attention; I needed a husband, I didn’t care who lived in the White House! Anyway, she and her sister gave us an engaging lecture in favor of women getting the vote. The congressmen were quite put out at being confronted this way—which may be why I thought it was a marvelous evening.”
Consuelo laughed. “Have you always been a rebel?”
“Yes and no. I did try to conform. I was never very good at it, though.”
“I’m not comfortable being aggressive. I’m more like Papa.”
“You think your father isn’t aggressive?” Alva said with a laugh. “I suppose with you he’s still some combination of St. Nicholas and a basset hound.”
“At any rate,” said Consuelo, “all of this … passion…” She gestured around them. “It makes me anxious. Why is it necessary? We’ve been making progress—”
“My entire life, Consuelo. That’s how long women have been patiently speaking on this subject to one another and to the men in charge—who take advantage of our habits of being polite and cooperative while censuring every opposite behavior. Men only respect power. So we must be powerful.”
Again the woman near them shouted, “Hear, hear!”
Alva said, “I count myself among the guilty. I’ve given little more than lip service to suffrage before now. You’re making a good example—as is all of this.”
All of this—that is, their procession of hundreds—was impressive to be certain. But the sight that greeted them as they arrived at Hyde Park made Alva catch her breath. Hyde Park in June under ordinary circumstances was a vast verdant space not unlike New York’s Central Park. Today was not ordinary. Today, the open spaces were aswarm with all manner of persons. Women mostly, but children, too, and a good many sensible men, all of them come to impress upon the English government their support for women getting their due. There was not a patch of grass in sight. Along the sidewalk were food carts and numerous tables featuring pamphlets and assorted items done in the battle colors. Nearby, a brass band played a march.
Alva was heartened by the display. As was true with American women, for more than fifty years Englishwomen had been petitioning for equal rights, and for more than fifty years they’d been told that catastrophe would befall society if men permitted those rights. Permitted! As if rights were kept piled in bank vaults and men got to distribute them only as they saw fit.
The older Alva got, the more ludicrous the situation seemed to her. She had more wit and intelligence and capability than almost any man she’d ever met, and while she could not say that every woman she’d known would do a better job running things than the men who adjudicated their lives, they certainly wouldn’t do worse. If England changed its laws, other countries might well follow suit. She hardly knew an American gentleman who didn’t revere his English counterpart and want to be like him.
Alva said, “Those roasting nuts smell heavenly. Shall we get some? And look—there’s a cart with sausages. I’ve hardly eaten since…” Gazing up into the vivid blue sky, she said, “There, I’m hungry. You needn’t worry I’ll waste away.”
“Mother?”
“The sausage might be a bit of a mess to eat. Just the nuts, then.” She left her daughter staring after her, though whether in concern or amusement she didn’t know. Well, either was fine. Let any of them judge her as batty; until they’d lost their own loves, they couldn’t know the comfort of conversing with ghosts. Which was not to say that she wholly believed in ghosts herself, only that she didn’t not believe, and in fact she rather liked the way the impulse to converse with Oliver had struck her just now. It felt as though he were there keeping her company, much as he would have been if they’d made this trip as they’d planned.
Distributed throughout the park were twenty platforms, each of which would host notable figures of this country’s woman’s suffrage movement. It was the stage that was soon to feature Emmeline Pankhurst, however, that most interested Alva, and this was where she and Consuelo went. Five rows of folding chairs designated for special guests and dignitaries had been positioned before the platform, cordoned off and tended by bobbies. As they found their seats, Consuelo introduced Alva to several distinguished women who, like Consuelo, had been giving their time to the women’s rights cause. Behind them, the crowd pressed ever closer as the appointed time for Mrs. Pankhurst’s speech approached.
Alva knew a little about the woman. Mrs. Pankhurst was five years younger than Alva. She’d been widowed after a happy marriage to a progressive gentleman. Her involvement in this effort dated back some thirty years, but in losing patience with the slow pace and ineffectual tactics of her colleagues, she’d broken with them to form a new, more assertive organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union or WSPU, as Consuelo had referred to it. She was tough-minded and unafraid.
A group of bobbies surrounding several women moved through the crowd toward the platform at stage left. From the group, a woman of Consuelo’s age (but with none of her gracefulness) ascended the steps to the platform and put her arms up, then stood waiting for the crowd to quiet. Pinned onto her white dress at the breast was the same green, white, and purple ribbon many of the others were wearing.
“On this historic day,” she shouted, “I am privileged to introduce a woman whose tenaciousness and wisdom will forever mark her as superior. Her indefatigable effort and commitment to our rights make her an example to us all. I give you Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst!”
As the crowd cheered, Emmeline Pankhurst replaced the young woman and stood before the sea of people with a calm, matter-of-fact expression on her face, her hands clasped before her. She wore a sash that read Votes for Women.
Calm though she was, her face had a magnetic, dramatic quality more often seen on women of rank. She had a long, patrician nose and deep-set eyes, with chestnut-brown hair upon which she’d pinned a gleaming white hat. Her white dress gleamed as well. She let her hawklike gaze sweep the crowd: women in Sunday dresses, women in torn, stained clothes; in hats and hatless; hair blond, black, brown, red, silver, white. Women with babies in their arms. Women with daughters leaning against their legs. So many women tired of having no say in their government but not too tired to use the one day they had off from whatever work they did to come here and stand for hours in Hyde Park until this singular woman took the stage. Now they cheered Mrs. Pankhurst as though she would deliver them from their bondage the way Cyrus delivered the Jews from Babylon.
Alva tilted her head and looked skyward. The sky was so crisply blue, so unusual for London. A person could dive into it and drown.
Mrs. Pankhurst stepped closer to the front of the stage. The crowd quieted.
“Deeds, not words!” she yelled.
The women cheered, louder than before. They stamped and screamed. Alva stood up so that she could see them en masse. Tears filled her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. So much passion. So much righteousness. Because they were right!
What if she could inspire such passion? What if she could invigorate the American women’s suffrage fight, be a force to help win that war? Wouldn’t Oliver be proud of her. Wouldn’t she be proud of herself!
She was no Emmeline Pankhurst, but she had other tools: connections and political experience and lots and lots of money. Money’s no fix, she had once been told, a truth she had learned repeatedly. Fortunately, she had more than money. She had ideas and talents. She had ambition and passion. She had time.
All her life, she had so often tried to make things different. Society loved her when she was advancing its causes, then castigated her when she was advancing her own. Yet, were not the two ever entwined?
Life was contrast. Light and dark. Comedy and tragedy.
She looked out across the crowd and thought she saw a familiar face …
Alva Smith and Consuelo Yznaga. Alva Belmont and Consuelo Montagu.
End. Beginning.
Author’s Note
From the moment Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont was first inspired to devote her considerable resources to the American women’s suffrage cause, she was unstoppable. She went on to form alliances with the movement’s leaders, and when she grew frustrated or impatient with the practices of some of those leaders, she formed her own organization: the Political Equality Association (PEA), opening her headquarters in Manhattan and establishing satellite locations throughout the boroughs, including the only such office in Harlem. She was one of just a few suffragists who very deliberately encouraged and included African American women’s involvement in the fight for the vote. Although Mary Smith Taylor is an invented composite character in this novel, she demonstrates Alva’s real experiences with and concerns for African Americans at a time when many people (including those within the suffragist movement) and most states were pushing for the formalization of racial discrimination through Jim Crow laws.
Alva’s association sponsored lectures on a wide variety of subjects, all aimed at educating women so that they could be empowered to make choices that were good for themselves and their children. It also operated a Department of Hygiene, wherein women took classes about health that included information on reproduction and contraception, which they could not get from most physicians in that era. The Department of Hygiene sold everything from cosmetics to devices for treating uterine prolapse—a common problem for women who had multiple pregnancies over a short span of time. Alva also created a farming work-study program at her home, Brookholt, on Long Island for women who had an interest in rural-based occupations. She was determined to improve the lives of working-class women in every way she could think to do it.
Among the accomplishments of her years working for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment is the stage play Melinda and Her Sisters, a satire she wrote that was staged as a fundraiser in 1916. Emulating the efforts of Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, she commissioned a variety of Votes for Women products produced at low cost and sold to the public to raise funds for the cause. She wrote essays and letters of opinion for publication in newspapers and magazines nationally. She hired a lobbyist and met repeatedly with lawmakers to encourage both a state (New York) and a national women’s suffrage amendment. She secured a building in Washington, D.C., so that the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which she had cofounded with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, could have its headquarters there. The Alva Belmont House, now the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, is a museum and the first national monument to women’s history in the United States.
In 1926, Alva’s daughter and the Duke of Marlborough, who had formally divorced in 1920, decided to pursue annulment as well. As Consuelo writes in her memoir The Glitter and the Gold, in order to grant the annulment, the church needed to believe Consuelo had undertaken the marriage completely against her will. Alva gladly testified that she had forced her daughter into the union, making her behavior sound far more severe than it was. The proceedings were supposed to be private, but news leaked and Alva was once more in the headlines, portrayed again as being selfish and cruel. Accounts of Alva’s life almost always define her by these stories. None discuss the broader context, nor how close she and Consuelo were throughout Consuelo’s adulthood—so close, in fact, that Consuelo often rented homes near wherever Alva was living at a given time, so close that when Consuelo built a home in Manalapan, Florida, she named it Casa Alva.
One of the reasons I was compelled to tell Alva’s story (and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s in my previous novel, Z) is to combat the way notable women in history are too often reduced to little more than sensationalized sound bites. Strong women—especially if they elect to lead lives outside of the domestic sphere—are often depicted without appropriate context, are made to seem one-note (as if any of us could be defined by a single act in our personal history or a single aspect of personality), and are described with sexist labels. An intelligent, ambitious, outspoken woman is called “pushy,” “domineering,” “abrasive,” “hysterical,” “shrill,” etc., most often by men but sometimes by other women as well.
Alva is regularly framed this way, said to be motivated solely by a desire for the trappings of wealth along with social prominence and power. Oliver’s role in national politics is absent from almost every attempt to depict her (and him, for that matter). So it’s no surprise that those who’ve written about her have found themselves unable to explain why she went to such lengths for the women’s suffrage cause. Boredom is the theory most often advanced, if the matter is addressed at all. As for her support of African American women’s rights, I’ve found no account that has attempted to address this.
* * *
It’s worth noting that in Alva’s point of view and dialogue I have used girl as interchangeable with young lady deliberately in keeping with the habits of nineteenth-century conventional usage. While I am a modern feminist, this book is an emulation of a nineteenth-century novel, with nineteenth-century characters and narrative style. I trust that when contrasted against our contemporary ways of thinking of feminist matters, this choice makes its argument without my forcing modern sensibilities on the work.
* * *
After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Alva (with the NWP) turned her attention to campaigning for equal rights, a far more complex matter than suffrage but one she was passionate about. She did not forsake her other great passion, however: she spent the remaining years of her life building and buying and renovating homes in Paris and the South of France, as well as a coastal mansion on Long Island called Beacon Towers, thought by many to have helped inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
A stroke in the spring of 1932 debilitated her, and she died in early 1933 at her home in Paris, having just turned eighty years old. She was interred beside Oliver in the Woodlawn Cemetery mausoleum she had designed and built after his death. Her funeral was an impressive event, attended by more than fifteen hundred mourners. Her pallbearers, at her request, were all female. On her coffin was draped a picket banner that stated Failure Is Impossible.
Acknowledgments
A work of biographical fiction owes a lot to the historians and biographers whose primary research informs the materials the novelist makes use of. Key among the numerous publications I consulted are: The Vanderbilt Women by Clarice Stasz; Alva Vanderbilt Belmont by Sylvia D. Hoffert; Fortune’s Children by Arthur T. Vanderbilt; A Season of Splendor by Greg King; Victorian America by Thomas J. Schlereth; When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan; The Gilded Age in New York by
Esther Crain; and the Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan memoir The Glitter and the Gold. In addition to these texts, however, I consulted many other books and articles that relate to the history, the places, and the people in this novel. The fiction of Edith Wharton and Henry James also helped to inform the story; they were there, after all.
The Vanderbilts as a family have not been the subject of as much scholarly research as I might have liked. This means that accounts of the individuals and their motivations vary widely from source to source, based, as most of them are, on anecdotes and apocryphal stories and newspaper articles that are often riddled with inaccuracies. I stuck to the facts inasmuch as fact could be determined.
It’s my good fortune to have the support of the fine people of St. Martin’s Press, and in particular, Sally Richardson, George Witte, and Hannah O’Grady; their hands-on participation in getting this book to press in this form is very much appreciated. I’m grateful to Jessica Lawrence, my publicist, and publicity head Dori Weintrab; Paul Hochman and Martin Quinn, marketing gurus; and the entire team of publicity, marketing, art, and sales folks who work behind the scenes. Also to Lisa Senz and Jennifer Enderlin, who have an important hand in things as well. Most especially I want to thank my editor, Hope Dellon, for patiently guiding this project from concept to completion, steadfastly supporting my vision for what the book would ultimately become, and for helping me see the ways it wasn’t quite there—until finally it was.
Tremendous thanks go to Wendy Sherman, my literary agent, my friend, first reader, and the voice of clarity and reason in this murky, sometimes maddening business of writing and selling books. Also to Jenny Meyer, shepherdess of my foreign rights sales and second voice of clarity and reason. And while we’re talking agents and business, my thanks to Lucy Stille for getting this book placed for television adaptation (may we see that tree bear fruit!).
I’m pleased and grateful to once again be partnering with Lisa Highton and Two Road Books for publication and distribution throughout the UK, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and all the other places outside of North America where folks buy books in English.
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