Unmentionables. Laurie Loewenstein
her hand. “I’m sorry, I’m just not used to lying around. On the circuit, we’re constantly on the move.”
She flopped back on the pillow, trying to remember the last time she’d spent two consecutive nights in the same bed, the same town. For the past seven years, she’d traveled the circuit in the summer and, come fall, shouldered a merciless schedule of Lyceum appearances up and down the eastern seaboard, until June rolled around again.
Her traveling life had begun three years after her recovery from tuberculosis. As soon as she’d been strong enough, she’d thrown herself into the cause of dress reform. She made the rounds of the largest settlement houses in New York, evangelizing to the shop girls and garment workers who gathered, after exhausting days of labor, in basement classrooms. A regular at the outdoor rallies held by the National Woman Suffrage Association, Marian soon began writing articles for the National Suffrage Bulletin and a couple of small progressive publications. She was unable, however, to break into the leading ladies magazines, despite the flood of write-ups she poured into their in-baskets.
Meeting Placidia Shaw changed all that. It was during a suffrage parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue on a bright fall day. Marian managed to get herself assigned to the opposite end of a long banner carried by Shaw. An associate of the famous Chicago reformer, Jane Addams of Hull-House, Placidia Shaw was a well-known figure in her own right, most notably for her articles about slum conditions published in Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s. During the three-hour march, Marian discussed safe and hygienic dress so tirelessly that when they reached the end of the parade route, Shaw had agreed to help her get some of her articles published. Placidia had become her mentor. Marian’s career on the road began when the older woman secured her a place as a lecturer with her own employer, the Prairieland Booking Agency. Now, considering these exhausting years on the road, Marian thought that, perhaps, staying with Tula a few days wouldn’t be so bad.
Tula’s mouth was moving.
“What?” Marian asked.
“Would you like a nice plate of eggs?”
Marian brightened. “Yes, please. Bring on the eggs!”
* * *
Tula was melting lard in the frying pan when a short woman trudged up the drive pulling a wagon piled with bundles of soiled linens. Laylia did the wash for a half dozen of Emporia’s lesser white households. The town’s leading families used Mamie.
“I completely forgot this was wash day,” Tula cried out. “We’ve had unexpected company. Come on in and sit while I get the things together.”
Laylia sat heavily in the chair Tula offered. “Thank you, ma’am. Another hot one.”
“There’s cold water in the ice box. Help yourself,” Tula called as she hurried upstairs to strip Clay’s bed.
Laylia removed her black straw hat and fanned her face.
“So, any word on Emmett?” Tula asked when she returned several minutes later. She dumped her load on the kitchen floor.
Emmett, Laylia and Oliver’s twenty-one-year-old son, was registered for the army and waiting to be notified when he’d be shipped out.
“Not yet. He still working at the garage. All fired up. Can’t wait to get out. Just hope it’s not Texas.”
“Surely they won’t send him that far.”
“They got a colored regiment down there. But I read in the Broad Ax they had a riot. Colored soldiers and townspeople.”
Tula frowned. “No, you don’t want him in the middle of that.”
Laylia shook her head, then pressed her palms to her knees and pushed herself up. Tula handed her the bundle of dirty linen. “Be back Thursday,” Laylia called over her shoulder as Tula slid the frying pan back over the flame.
* * *
“Here we go,” Tula said, resting a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast on the ironing board. She spread a large table napkin across Marian’s chest. “I’m sorry Clay isn’t here to say hello but he had an early sitting. He has a photography studio and it takes a good couple of hours for him to set up.”
Marian put a generous forkful of eggs in her mouth, chewed and nodded. “These are excellent. I understand. Business comes first. That’s what puts food on the table.” She spread apple butter on a piece of toast. “Apropos of that, I hope someone thought to bring my things from the hotel.”
Tula’s hand flew to her mouth. “I’ll ring up the Lamoine right away.”
“And please, I need my lecture notes too,” Marian called to Tula’s retreating back.
Marian revised her talk daily, fiddling with the wording or adding a more current example. This late in the season, her typed pages were thick with penciled cross-outs and arrows pointing to scribbled sentences crammed into the margins.
Dress reform was no longer high on the list of issues pushed by suffragists. More and more, the cry focused on the vote. Younger women were already favoring a looser, more athletic clothing style. Some corset manufacturers had caught on and were replacing steel stays with elastic. Marian feared becoming irrelevant. Her reputation as a lecturer was built on an issue that was seemingly less and less germane. This fall, for the first time since she’d started, there was a five-week gap in the schedule before her first Lyceum booking.
A wave of anxiety washed over her. Can I afford to stay here all week, even if I want to? She pushed the plate with the half-finished eggs onto the bedside stand. The fork and knife clattered to the floor.
On her way to telephone the Lamoine, Tula heard the noise and hoped Marian wouldn’t try to retrieve whatever had fallen. That’s all I need—for her to topple out of bed, Tula thought.
There was a knock at the front door. Deuce strode in with a broad grin, the screen door slamming behind him.
“Sounds like your patient is up and at ’em,” he said.
“Just barely,” Tula said, flustered. For a moment, her bustling efficiency dropped away, but she quickly composed herself. “Take your coat off. It’s awfully warm.”
She put down the receiver. He turned to drop his boater on the coat rack and she reached on tiptoe over his shoulders, hooking her fingers around his lapels. He shucked off his jacket and it slid smoothly into her hands. The fabric was warm with the heat of his body. She hung it up with a private smile.
Two months ago, Deuce had asked if he could escort her to the Elks strawberry festival. The entire evening he’d sat under the elms, attentively at her side. Since then, he’d often joined her on the porch for a short chat after the workday; and once, he brought over a cutting from his peony bushes that she’d admired, and twice, took her to the moving pictures. Tula, who’d had a crush on Deuce since girlhood, could hardly believe that he might be “turning to her,” as they said, after all this time.
It had been thirty-four years since he kissed her, but the sensation of his lips, his cool nose brushing her cheek, was still fresh. Saturday evenings their crowd of bank tellers, shop clerks, and others not long out of high school, would blow into the Merry-Roll-Round, booted skates slung over their shoulders. Moving onto the wooden oval, Deuce and the other fellows would challenge each other to races while the young women linked arms in clusters of two and three. And all the while, Tula’s eyes followed Deuce, at that time working as a printer’s devil at Brown’s: the concentration on his face as he zipped past, his head thrown back in loud laughter at one of Clay’s off-color stories.
Then, one evening, as she’d skated arm-in-arm with Vera Driver, he’d darted up behind them, uncoupled their arms with a grin, and skated off with Tula. Round and round they circled. When her knees wobbled, he guided her to a bench beside the cubbyholes of street shoes and, without asking permission, kissed her. All that spring he’d skated by her side, walked her home, kissed her goodnight. Then Winnie Richards moved into town with little Helen, and Deuce had been swept away as