American Follies. Norman Lock
name on so short an acquaintance—or, for that matter, a lengthy one.
“Our notoriety does not give you pause?” asked Miss Anthony in a manner I interpreted as a challenge.
The death of my brother-in-law, whose salary earned as one of Herman Melville’s underlings in the U.S. Customs Service had been essential to keeping our small household on Maiden Lane afloat, obliged me to overlook the disapproval with which the two women were generally regarded. In truth, I would have kept the accounts for Mrs. Standly’s brothel in the Tenderloin until my husband, Franklin, could find employment in the typesetting trade out west, where I planned to join him.
“Not at all, Miss Anthony.”
“You may call me Susan,” she graciously allowed.
“And you may call me Elizabeth,” said the other, inclining her venerable head toward me.
“When would you like me to start?” I was eager to begin; I had a grocer’s bill to pay.
“That remains to be seen,” said Susan flintily. “You haven’t been examined.”
“I was given to understand that the matter had already been decided,” I said with what I hoped was an air of dignity and not one of indignation, which was slowly mounting in me.
I thought I caught a glint of malice in Susan’s eyes as she went on airily. “No doubt you have stenographic and typewriting experience in business correspondence.” By the way she had pronounced business, I understood that the manufacture of tinware or galoshes could be of little consequence when compared to the “work.”
I nodded in the affirmative, suppressing an urge to battery.
Susan continued: “Here, however, the dictation you would be called upon to take—”
“And the manuscripts you would be typewriting,” said Elizabeth, “putting in her oar,” as Melville might have said.
“From handwritten notes and scribbles on foolscap or the back of butcher paper—”
“Can be daunting.”
Having been a long time together, the two were in the habit of collaborating on each other’s sentences whenever excitement or agitation caught them up like an outgoing tide.
“Have you had anything to do with—Oh, homilies, for example, or treatises where the style of the prose and the difficulties of the thoughts expressed would’ve challenged you more than a feather merchant’s letter of complaint to the chickens?”
Apropos of her friend’s remark, Susan cackled.
“I am sometimes called upon to typewrite manuscripts for Henry James,” I said smugly.
“We are suspicious of Mr. James’s attitude toward woman’s suffrage,” retorted Elizabeth.
“We are indeed!” said Susan, her face having become as sharp as her tone.
“However, in that his prose is difficult—”
“At times, tortuous.”
“We believe you are qualified.”
“But she has not yet given us a demonstration of her skills!” objected Susan.
“That won’t be necessary,” concluded Elizabeth with the decisiveness of Caesar settling the vexatious question of Gaul.
“Did Mrs. Lang mention that you will be required to stay here?” asked Susan, relaxing her jaw muscles into the faintest of smiles.
“We do not keep regular hours,” explained Elizabeth.
“Yes, she did,” I replied to the space between the two women, since I was beginning to find it hard to tell them apart in spite of their very different appearances. One was fat and jolly, the other thin and caustic; together, however, they made an impression as disconcerting as the plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng in Dr. Mütter’s Museum in Philadelphia.
“You will find the situation a pleasant one, I think,” said Susan, whose hatchet-shaped face would eventually become endearing. “Elizabeth loves to bake, you know.”
“I have an Eccles cake in the oven right now. Do you accept?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. Now that my heavy machine and I were comfortably installed in a sitting room fragrant with pastry and currants, it would have been a pity to have had to look elsewhere. Besides, I was feeling sleepy; I remember that I yawned in full view of my new employers. Embarrassed, I reaffirmed my joy at finding so happy a situation: “I accept with pleasure!”
Neither woman raised an eyebrow. Consorting for so many years with those in whom ideas produce the greatest excitement would have inured them to the enthusiastic display of a professional typist—or her back teeth.
“Good,” they remarked in unison.
“We are pleased,” said Elizabeth, who favored the royal we. And then she astonished me by asking, “When is the baby expected?”
If I’d been a reader of romance novels or had laced my corset too tightly, I would have required smelling salts. But I was accommodating the baby’s need for oxygen by doing without stays. I was slender to begin with, and even then, in the sixth month of my gravidity (a word I had recently encountered in one of Mr. James’s drafts), only a practiced eye—or a prying one—could have detected the immanent presence of another human being underneath my voluminous skirts.
The two women apparently sensed my surprise and perplexity.
“We’ve spent our lives mostly among women and have helped many ‘unfortunates,’” said Elizabeth meaningfully.
“Are you married, Ellen?” asked Susan bluntly. “It makes no difference to us whether or not you are.”
Elizabeth nodded hopefully. “Not in the least!”
What dears! I said to myself. Bless them for their tolerance.
“I am married,” I replied. “My husband is in San Francisco, looking for a place on one of the papers.”
They received this piece of intelligence glumly.
“Is that so,” remarked Susan, disappointment evident on her face and in her voice.
“We can’t allow our work to be interrupted,” said Elizabeth, having stiffened. The rigor was provided by her own bones and not borrowed from a dead whale’s. “You understand, Mrs. Finch, that what we do must take priority over other considerations.” She had resorted to an ominous formality. “If your husband were to find a position in California and send for you, we would be very much at sixes and sevens.”
“Very much so!” said Susan, offering vigorous confirmation of her friend’s misgivings.
Sinking into the horsehair sofa, I beheld in my fancy the scuttling of the household—Franklin’s and mine—awash in debt. I watched as our best hope of rescue drifted among the wreckage like a seaborne spar or bobbing hogshead beyond salvage. I had not counted on the women’s single-minded ambitiousness. No, the word wrongs them and belittles the devotion with which they pursued the overthrow of a fraternity that deemed women unequal by law and custom and no more deserving of protection than a mule. Their altruism, then.
As if to clarify the importance of their efforts, Elizabeth remarked, “A negro man can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of two hundred and fifty dollars; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool. But women are voiceless and oppressed.”
“The Lord will admit a good and virtuous woman into Heaven, although during her life, she was made to wait outside the polling place while her husband cast his vote. By the law of coverture, his vote represented hers regardless of whether or not her opinion was considered in the matter!” said an indignant Susan, who had neither vote nor husband, but had been arrested