American Follies. Norman Lock
| GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3562.O218 A83 2020 (print) | LCC PS3562.O218 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030396
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030397
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Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition
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paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-48-1
ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-49-8
To Carol Edwards & Jerome Charyn
Contents
Gentlemen, be seated. We will commence with the overture.
—Mr. Interlocutor to Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones
Overture
We live in hard and stirring times, Too sad for mirth, too rough for rhymes.
—Stephen Foster
WHY, DR. GARMANY, just look at the state of your hands! And you have blood and cigar ash on your coat.
Yellow primroses! Mr. James, you are too kind. And in this rain! For goodness sake, water is dripping from your hat! Put it in the bedpan, please; I have not used it. They say my womb is wandering, but they will not tell me where. Mr. James, please be acquainted with Dr. Garmany, who will be presiding. You have time to buy a ticket, but only just, for he has already called for the overture. Do say you will! I shall be performing a tragic farce on the Sholes & Glidden. My husband, Franklin, you know. He was grateful for the shaving mug you sent him at Christmas—all the way from London, where the queen is in mourning for us all.
The bedsheet is white, the nurse no taller than a girl. Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, O, how you shuffle! On, off. Just look at the horses’ fancy plumes! Gentlemen, I am dying underneath the heavy odor of chloroform. Black night is falling fast. Franklin, do not let go of my hand!
Cakewalk
SEPTEMBER 1883–APRIL 1884
… how small the sons of Adam are!
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Declaration of Sentiments
MRS. LANG’S SECRETARIAL BUREAU had arranged for me to stay with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at their boardinghouse in Murray Hill. They were in New York City to collaborate on the third volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage. Miss Anthony had traveled from her home in Rochester for the purpose, Mrs. Stanton from hers in Tenafly. They required a stenographer and typist. I arrived in a hackney driven by an Irishman with a put-upon expression and a grizzled beard stained by tobacco juice. As I entered the ladies’ sitting room, followed by the cabman, who had grunted and grumbled up the stairs with the bulk of my Sholes & Glidden in his arms, I was struck by its cheerfulness. Aware of their militant reputation, I had expected to find Spartan quarters devoid of the follies that often encrust the rooms of elderly ladies. But my suffragists, as I would come to think of them, did not scorn a so-called feminine weakness if the indulgence pleased them. They were as likely to meet an expectation based on gender as they were to defy it. Had I not been prejudiced by accounts of their warlike humor published in the sensational papers of the day, I wouldn’t have been surprised by the scent of violets emanating from Mrs. Stanton’s ample bosom or by the Henry Maillard bonbons they nibbled from a plate, as if the two most formidable women of the age were a pair of schoolmistresses whose delight was to needlepoint sentimental mottoes on fine linen for the adornment of walls papered in the color of dried blood. I was glad no such homely artifacts were displayed and that the walls were enlivened by a pattern of tea roses. A Persian carpet lay on the shellacked floor. Strings of glass beads hung from a gasolier, unlighted at that hour, and the walnut cornices were free of the dust that swayed from the ceilings of my own rooms like tiny trapezes. The apartment declared Mrs. Cady Stanton’s Dutch ancestry and Miss Anthony’s Quaker devotion to cleanliness. (Later, I would be introduced to Miss McGinty, who came on Tuesdays to do the actual cleaning.)
“I presume you’re acquainted with our work,” said Mrs. Stanton. She was the plump one of the two, whose white hair was dressed in ringlets.
“I am,” I said brazenly.
I knew the story, in its outline, of their long, tempestuous life together more than the particulars of their work, which was denounced by clerics as impious and by politicians as contrary to the self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence. At the time, I had no opinion on woman’s suffrage. Had I operated a sewing machine in the Garment District instead of a typewriter, I would have been more mindful of the cause to which the two women were devoted. As it was, I considered myself fortunate in having a profession and did not think my situation could be improved by the election of this man or that one, even if I had had a ballot to cast for either. One can find Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln on a map of the United States, in the names of its towns and streets, but men of their sort are scarce in the seats of government.
“Would you have any reservations about aiding us in our work?” asked Mrs. Stanton.
“I would not—ahem.” I had let the sentence “hang fire,” as Henry James would put it, uncertain as I was of how to address a suffragist who at one time in her long life had worn pants.