CHRIS BOHJALIAN
She no longer dreamt in Armenian. She dreamt now in English.
And so, as a language teacher, she knew there was a difference between a scream and a shout, just as there was between a groan and a purr. But a moan? In this tongue, once her fourth but now her first, it could be an exhalation of ecstasy or despair. Of pleasure or pain, of longing or lust.
The transformation had taken barely half a decade.
Initially, she interpreted the sound as screams, not shouts, and her head had whipped around reflexively, her mouth open, her eyes wide. It was Adana again, six years earlier, the neighborhood two blocks distant from the mosque and the staging area for the Ottoman soldiers, and the screams had preceded the gunshots by seconds. Seconds. But then the screams had continued—as had the shots.
But these were shouts (and mere shouts, she thought, only shouts) and she brought her fingers to her mouth to warm them, and closed her eyes for a moment in relief. She wished that she had remembered her gloves, threadbare as they were, and her breath felt good on the skin by her nails. When she opened her eyes, she studied the women who’d shouted: there were easily a dozen of them, and they were shouting in glee because they had found one another near the arch. She guessed they were her age, late twenties, and she could see by their shoes and their furs—yes, three of them were wearing fur shawls—that they all came from privilege and wealth. Some had sashes across their chests that boasted they were from New Jersey, and at least one of the sashes was hanging awkwardly beside the face of a dead fox against the woman’s rib cage. Others were from Connecticut. She wondered how they all knew each other, and imagined a ball. A cotillion. Had these women once upon a time been … debutantes?
They were wearing white dresses now—she was, too—but these were not gowns. For a moment, in her mind, she saw them in gowns. Elbow-length gloves of the sort she’d studied in the magazine drawings. The advertisements. They were being presented to their suitors, the appropriate and eligible bachelors in their tuxedoes.
Mostly, she was happy for them: they were so delighted to discover one another that they had literally shrieked when their paths had crossed in this crowd. But a small part of her pondered how much of this was but a parade for them. A social gathering as meaningful as a picnic or, yes, one of their galas. No, that was unfair. This was a parade, yes, but no woman (or man, because there were men here, too) had ventured to this arch and this park just for fun.
“Ani?”
She smiled at her friend.
“You looked like you’d seen a ghost,” Catherine was saying.
She nodded in the direction of the women whose shrieks had caused her to turn. “It was them. They surprised me, that’s all.”
Catherine raised an eyebrow, and in the shadow cast by the bill of her straw hat, Ani could see the worry in her friend’s gaze.
“Don’t fret,” she added, and she rested a hand and her chilled fingers on Catherine’s forearm. “I’m fine.”
She looked beyond the women to the arch. Someone had told her that the monument had been built in 1892. That meant that it was six years younger than she was. The marble on the south side reminded her of the marble wall of the mosque in Adana, and that instantly conjured an image of the reeking dead in the pile down that block. But this city was nothing like Adana, nothing at all. The buildings spread in all directions, and a mere twenty or so blocks from where they had gathered was that magnificent Metropolitan Life Tower, an edifice an astonishing seven hundred feet tall with a gold beacon at the pinnacle. There were elevated trains and some that ran in tunnels under the ground. There was also water: the city (at least the part where she lived and worked) was a slender island surrounded by rivers and then that harbor with its great statue of the woman with her torch. Yes, Adana had the Seyhan River, and it was beautiful, but mostly Adana had dust: it was a city built at the edge of a desert.
And, of course, the differences between then and now, between here and there, were built as well on what was nowhere to be found in New York City. There were steeples here, plenty of steeples. And there were plenty of statues, including the one of George Washington on the north side of this very arch. But there were no Armenian domes, because there were no Armenian churches. Not a single one.
“There won’t be any violence,” Catherine was reassuring her now, and Ani tried to focus on what her friend was saying.
“Tell me something,” she said.
“Why certainly!” Catherine agreed cheerfully.
“What did William decide?” she asked. William and Catherine were going to be married in a month. He disapproved of this march, Catherine said yesterday at the school, and thought the idea of women voting was ridiculous and would lead only to greater absurdities: women wanting to be soldiers or firemen or (a particular peeve of his, apparently) baseball players. She had met William; Catherine had introduced the two of them. He was a foreman at a bakery that turned out thousands of loaves of bread each and every day. His hair was just starting to thin, and he was wide-necked and broad-shouldered: he stretched the fabric of his coats. She could see in those magnificent blue eyes of his just how dismissive he was of this whole idea. He had a big laugh, but still he frightened her a little bit. He took none of this seriously: it was all an absolute waste of everyone’s time, in his opinion, and perhaps even unseemly.
“He decided the world didn’t need him standing around on a street corner gawking at a bunch of women asking for things they don’t need,” she replied. “Which is fine. The world doesn’t need him here if he isn’t interested.”
“Are you disappointed?”
She chuckled. “No. I think I’m relieved,” she said. Then she leaned in to her and continued. “No one’s going to hurt you, Ani. No one’s going to hurt any of us. This is just politics. I promise. That’s all. We’re just marching for something we deserve.”
“No. I know that,” Ani agreed, and she smiled ever so slightly, though she could hear her heart thrumming in her head and wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d glanced down at her hands and seen they were trembling. Because she didn’t know that no one would hurt her, she didn’t know that there wouldn’t be violence. She didn’t know that at all. Her brothers, both of them, and her father were killed because of politics. Just because of politics. She saw one of her brothers in that great, awful mound—decomposing carrion for the birds—and she saw her father’s corpse as it dangled by a noose with four other men’s bodies like the strands of a beaded curtain. Just politics. There had been a new government in Constantinople, and her father and her brothers believed that the new regime was going to change the laws that relegated the Armenians to second-class citizens. There was even talk that Adana’s corner of the empire on the Mediterranean Sea might once again become an independent Armenian nation. She would never know precisely what triggered the massacres that nightmarish April, but by the end of the month, thirty thousand Armenians were dead and the Armenian quarter had been reduced to rubble or burned to ashes that looked, when it was over, like firepits the size of whole blocks. The Ottoman authorities would call it an insurrection, but she knew that most of the Armenians had been unarmed. Everyone did. No one was rebelling. No one was doing more than …
This. Gathering.
In fact, it was dramatically less than this.
No one in Adana was asking that women be allowed to vote. No one.
In the Armenian school where she taught, the most subversive gathering they’d held was the April seventh production of Hamlet. The students knew Shakespeare, but the conservative Turkish officials who came to the production did not. It was clear they regarded Hamlet’s uncle as some sort of stand-in for Sultan Abdul Hamid II. When the king’s throat was cut onstage—the cast had used a gleaming letter opener—they actually viewed it as a political threat. A warning.
Catherine had insisted all week when they discussed it that nothing like the Adana massacre would happen here, because this was America. But Ani had done her homework; she always did her homework. Two years ago, at a march just like this in Washington, men had stormed the women to block their way, and at least a hundred of the protesters had been hospitalized. Just last year, nineteen coal miners had been killed in Colorado when they went on strike to protest their working conditions. It was but a quarter century ago that somewhere between one hundred and three hundred Sioux—perhaps half of them women and children—had been slaughtered by American soldiers at Wounded Knee.
Since the end of April this year, she had read almost daily yet another story in The New York Times about the butchery—race killing, some reporters were calling it, an attempt to exterminate the Armenian race—that was occurring in places in her homeland most Americans had never heard of and needed the maps the newspaper provided to pinpoint on the globe. Places like Bitlis. Erzurum. Kharpert.
Her beloved Adana.
Someone banged a pair of cymbals together and a small band—all men, in this case—began to gather. A French horn and a tuba glistened in the early afternoon sun. The men wore red-and-blue uniforms and stood out like flowers against the sea of women in white.
“This will be fun,” Catherine was saying. “Besides, you should have the same rights as those men. We should have the same rights. We’re smarter—at least you are.” She was giggling when she finished.
“I understand,” Ani murmured. “I do.”
“Come on, then, let’s find the others. They’re about to start.”
Two policemen on horseback were watching them. Watching all of them. Ani couldn’t meet their gaze, and so she looked down at her boots. Pigeons were clamoring about her feet. Then she looked Catherine in the eye, wondering how in the name of God her friend wasn’t terrified.
Ani hadn’t planned on marching. She had thought she might attend as a spectator: she imagined herself standing on the sidewalk somewhere on Fifth Avenue and watching the women in white and the floats and the bands as they marched north. But she would be sure to be near a corner with a cross street, so she could run if it ever became necessary. So she could flee if they started shooting.
But Catherine had talked her into it. Catherine taught history at the girls’ school on Forty-Eighth Street, while Ani taught French. Without exception, the students in their classes came from the city’s most prestigious families, and at least six of their mothers were going to march in the parade that coming Saturday, as well as three of the teachers—including Catherine. The mothers and the teachers would not be marching together: the mothers represented one class of society and the teachers another, and they all understood this unspoken distinction. But if Catherine was going to do this and wanted Ani to join her, then, in the end, she would. Catherine had taken Ani under her wing when they’d met at a speech in Boston soon after Ani had arrived in America in 1909.
She was also inspired by these suffragettes, because she would always associate them with the women and men in this country who cared about her people back home. Ani had cousins in Boston who had immigrated to Massachusetts soon after the Hamidian Massacres began in 1894, and they were her sponsors and took her in when she arrived. A woman named Julia Ward Howe was at the speech in Boston that night, though she was ninety years old, as was Clara Barton, who was about to turn eighty-eight. Barton had traveled to Constantinople after the Hamidian Massacres, helped to found the Friends of Armenia, and—along with Ani and her cousins—was one of the only people in the hall who’d ever set foot in the Ottoman Empire. The two old women didn’t speak at the event, but their presence had inspired the other Americans who were there.
When Catherine learned that Ani spoke French as well as English, needed work, and had survived the savagery in Adana, she brought her to Manhattan and lobbied for months to get her a job at the school. Ani understood that the woman who had opened the school and her board viewed her as an exotic curiosity, but the founder also saw that she was well-mannered and pretty—if a bit darker-skinned than the headmistress might have preferred, her eyes shaped too much like almonds. And she was (in the founder’s words) “a clever girl.” No one was going to need her to speak Armenian or Turkish at the school, but the fact that Ani could had impressed the founder, and so she’d been given a chance and now, five years later, was still there. Her timidity, born after a massacre had sent her as a refugee into a new country on the other side of the globe, was deemed an asset by the school’s board. She was well behaved and demure. Unlike some of those other young teachers—or, dear Lord, unlike some of the students’ mothers—she wasn’t ever going to cause any trouble.
It was striking how most of the women and men and children lining the streets seemed to be dressed in dark clothing; it was such a stark contrast to the suffragettes in white. There were women who were very old walking with canes—in some cases, still moving at a pace that was brisk—and babies in prams and, walking beside their mothers, some of their own school’s girls. There were women who had their dogs beside them on leashes, including a massive Great Dane with a sash that read Leading My Lady to Vote.
She had been marching fifteen minutes, and Catherine and the teacher who taught domestic science, a woman named Rose, nearing fifty, who was much harder on the girls than the younger faculty, were pointing at two little boys atop their fathers’ shoulders who were clapping. The other women speculated that their mothers must be somewhere in the throng that stretched on forever: the group from the school was somewhere in the first quarter of the march, Ani guessed, and she presumed that there were still marchers assembling back at the park by the arch, even now. The crowds along the sidewalks were extraordinary: mostly they were cheering or smiling, rather like those two boys and their fathers. There were people watching from the windows and balconies. This was a parade. Yes, it was a parade with a purpose. But it was still just a parade. Ani was beginning to think this would all be fine. The sun was high, and the biggest problem (and it was a small one, it really was) was the havoc that the wind was causing: it swelled their skirts, it pulled at their hats, and it caused the banners to billow like sails.
It was then, however, that she heard the thud, followed by the—and here was that word—scream. A scream. She turned and saw Catherine falling to her knees and bringing her hand to her cheek. But it wasn’t Catherine who had screamed: it was a woman behind them. Had there been a gunshot and she hadn’t heard it over the sound of the bands and the cheering and the applause from the spectators along the sidewalk? That was her first thought. A gunshot. It was all about to begin, the violence, the slaughter.
And yet when she turned to aid Catherine, the woman was pulling her fingers from her cheek and Rose was lifting a piece of fruit off the street.
“One of those rascals threw an apple at me,” Catherine was saying to Rose. She sounded more surprised than alarmed.
“I should paddle him,” Rose said, and she pointed at a pair of teenage boys trying to work their way through the crowd to the escape of a side street. “You’re going to have a bruise, my dear.”
Ani could feel the women marching ahead, streaming beyond her and her friends as if the three of them were but rocks in a river, when she realized that Catherine was fine. It was just a scallywag, someone was saying. Just a scamp.
“Why, Ani, you’re shaking,” Rose said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “I should have worn gloves.”
“Yes, you really should have.”
Catherine stopped rubbing her cheek and took the apple from Rose. A side of the apple had caved in, either from Catherine’s cheekbone or from where it had bounced on the ground. She showed it to Ani and said, “It’s nothing, Ani. It’s silly. A couple of—”
“Rotten apples,” Rose said, finishing the sentence for her. “Just a couple of rotten apples.”
Catherine laughed and locked her arm through Ani’s, their elbows linked Vs. “Come,” she said. “It’s a parade, which means we march!”
Ani might have stayed in Adana after the slaughter if her mother hadn’t died four weeks later. Typhus. Ani had nursed her in the ruins of their home—a mob of Turks and Kurds had set all the houses in that part of the Armenian Quarter on fire, using the kerosene the military had given them—but only half of their home had burned. The second story had collapsed, but a part of the living room remained livable, if you could endure the stink of the accelerant and the smell of the ash. Ani used the divan as her mother’s bed. She took the latticework from the upstairs windows that had fallen into the rubble but hadn’t been part of the conflagration, and burned it in a pit she dug in the small courtyard in the back so she could boil water for tea, but soon there was neither wood nor tea. She honestly couldn’t recall anymore which had run out first. Then she had scrounged among the wreckage of her neighbors’ abandoned homes, burning the legs of tables and whatever brush she could find so she could have hot water for the sponge baths she gave her mother and so they would both have clean water to drink, but soon the quarter was nothing but the sooty rubble of timbers and crumbling white brick and stone, and there was nothing left to feed the small fire.
By then the children were gone. Long gone. Her students. They were in the orphanage with the missionaries or wandering aimlessly like packs of wolves in the night, invisible during the day. They, too, were going to starve.
Her mother did die, and so Ani emerged from the house and might have walked into the desert to die, too. Didn’t other animals do that? But instead, as she wandered aimlessly amid the ruins, looking for a familiar face among the living who hadn’t fled, she was spotted by a small group of well-dressed women and men from Constantinople, Armenians who had journeyed to Adana specifically to assess the carnage and see how they could help—what could be done. One of them was a writer, and when the woman learned that the only family Ani had left lived in America, she paid for her passage there. The writer’s parting words to Ani before she left Constantinople for Boston and the writer left for Paris? “Our people have no future here, none at all, so don’t look back. It’s only going to get worse.” Then she embraced Ani and sent her up the sloping gangway of the ship.
It was when she was a block west of that magnificent Metropolitan Life Insurance Company building with its numinous tower, at Twenty-Fourth Street, that the three men barged into the parade from the park on the east side of Fifth Avenue and grabbed Catherine. It happened with such speed that the violence was almost secondary. One second, Catherine was on her right, Rose on her left, and then the men were whisking Catherine from the parade and toward the trees, and she was yelling at them to stop, to let her go. She was not wailing; Ani had heard wails. She could parse the fine distinctions between the wails of the terrified and the wails of the grieving, and this was neither. Catherine was furious, not fearful. She was indignant. And it was then that Ani realized that one of the men was William. The woman’s fiancé, the bakery foreman. He and another fellow had each taken one of Catherine’s arms and hoisted her off the ground as they pulled her from the parade, her feet bicycling above the earth like a toddler’s, the third man walking behind them and scowling, daring any woman to follow. But William was laughing. He had been almost howling, he thought this was so funny.
“Let me go, William! Have you lost your mind?” her friend was saying, and it was the last thing Ani heard before Catherine was gone, separated from her by the marchers and the crowds. And all the while the bands played on, a horse whinnied, and the crowd continued to cheer. The spectators on the east side of the street parted for the men with their prey, some of them laughing, too, and William and his two accomplices pushed through them with his struggling fiancée. It was, to them, comical. Utterly comical. The woman’s outrage was a source of merriment, the most uproarious thing they had seen today. Ani turned toward Rose, but it had happened so quickly that the older teacher hadn’t even noticed: she was chatting with the woman to her left and waving to the people on the west side of the broad avenue.
“They’ve taken Catherine,” Ani told her. “William—her fiancé.”
“I know who William is,” Rose chastised her, as if that were the element of her news that mattered.
“She’s gone!”
“She’s not gone if she’s with William,” the older teacher said, and now they were nearing Twenty-Fifth Street. The parade was proceeding, and it was moving on without Catherine, and no one seemed to have noticed other than Ani. No one seemed to care.
“She didn’t want to go,” Ani continued. “They just took her away!”
Rose thought about this a moment, and then shook her head. “That’s disappointing and I expected better of him. But Catherine knew the risks. Some men are more enlightened than others.”
“He’s not her husband. He’s only her—”
“He’s going to be her husband,” Rose said, cutting her off.
“But she wants to be here.”
The woman beside Rose leaned over. She was tall, an English teacher at another elite girls’ school, who, Ani had learned as they started to march, only graduated from college last May. “Then go get her,” she said, her eyes playful and wide. “Retrieve her!”
Rose scowled at the younger woman and then at Ani, but Ani saw the logic in what this English teacher a good seven or eight years her junior had proposed. But she knew also there was a soundness to Rose’s reasoning: William was going to marry Catherine. Would she herself have disobeyed her husband, had she lived in Adana long enough to marry there? Of course not. It would have been unthinkable. And even here in America, Catherine was unlikely to teach once this school year was finished, especially if she were with child.
More important, Ani knew better than most of these women around them—maybe all of them—how quickly violence could escalate. A few minutes ago, Catherine was hit with an apple; now three men had forcibly taken her from the parade. What was next? The gendarmes, the army, the guns?
As they reached the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, in a reflex born of protectiveness—an impulse that trumped her natural inclination to lower her eyes and listen to Rose—she turned from the parade and ran southeast into Madison Square Park. Catherine had always looked out for her; now it was her turn to look out for her friend.
The past week, there had been another story in The New York Times. The headline, all capital letters, had taken Ani’s breath away for a moment when she first read it on the way to the school:
MASSACRES RENEWED, MORGENTHAU REPORTS
The very last sentence of the article was even worse: “The writer says that the American Consul was told that the Turkish Government intended to exterminate the Armenians.” And in between that headline and that sentence? The stories of, among others, the thirty thousand Armenian exiles dying or already dead by the train station at Merkedjle.
Thirty thousand. That was roughly how many people were supposed to be marching right now on this very avenue. A number so vast it stretched for miles. It was also the same number of Armenians massacred six years ago in the city where she grew up and expected as a child to live her whole life. (She recalled how so much of the Turkish and Kurdish mob, when they had joined the military to murder the Armenians back in Adana, had been dressed in white, too. They appeared wielding hatchets and axes and swords, with white scarves around their heads or wrapped like swaddling around their fezzes.)
Just politics? This is where “just politics” led. To the destruction of Adana, to the dead beside the railroad at Merkedjle. This was what men did. Not women—men.
She would never know whether the extermination of her people back home—the murder of her father and her brothers, the death of her mother as the city’s Armenian survivors one by one succumbed to disease within the rubble that had once been their houses—was in fact born of just politics or a deeper loathing. Religion was obviously a factor, but so long as the Armenians—as well as the Assyrians and the Greeks—had stayed in their place, mostly no one cared all that much. The Armenian school where she’d been teaching almost a year when the slaughter began was at the edge of the quarter, close enough to the mosque that she’d hear the beautiful call of the muezzin during classes, and some months she would stare up at the building’s magnificent minaret as she was walking home and the sun was setting.
The week before last, there had been an article in The New York Times that was even worse than this one. That headline?
800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED
Lord Viscount Bryce, the former British ambassador to the United States, told the House of Lords that “virtually the whole nation had been wiped out,” and that it had been “the deliberate and premeditated policy” of the Turkish government.
She had nearly fainted when she had read that story. She’d heard the reports. Everyone had. But a crime this hideous—a crime of this magnitude? How did one even begin to conjure the death of a nation?
She sighed. The idea of voting was an act that seemed at once so vast and so small. All the men she had met since landing in Boston could do it. If they wanted. Fifteen million men had voted in the country’s presidential election three years earlier. Did any one of those votes on its own matter? It honestly wouldn’t have occurred to Ani to vote if she were still living in Adana. But here? It seemed absurd to her that she couldn’t. (Perhaps it would have seemed absurd to her back home, as well, since only men could vote there, too. But how could one worry about suffrage when it was proving hard enough as an Armenian woman simply to survive in 1915, as the slaughter spread like plague across an empire, as their men were shot and their children starved?)
If William could vote, shouldn’t Catherine? Although their school taught only girls, the city was filled with schools in which women just like her taught boys, or girls and boys together. If she were smart enough to teach, didn’t that, by logic, make her smart enough to vote?
When she had been deciding that week whether to march or to watch, as she was reading the arguments in the newspaper both for and against the idea of women voting, she’d come across one essay that suggested women should vote because they would civilize the voting process: because they were the “fairer sex,” their votes might lead to the election of more civilized officials.
The writer didn’t say whether he thought that America had a long history of electing uncivilized officials. And Catherine and Rose had both been annoyed by the argument that women should vote because they were gentler or kinder than men. “We should vote because we’re grown-ups, pure and simple,” Catherine had told Ani.
But a thought lingered in Ani’s mind, like a dark plume rising up from the smoldering ruins of Adana: Men did that. Men. Not women. The endless sea of cadavers beside the railroad at Merkedjle? Men did that, too. Not women.
No, at this moment, Ani could be neither gentle nor timid. She could not be the sex that was fragile and delicate. Fairer was one thing; fair was another. Words and their nuanced distinctions were everything; they were all that she had.
If she wanted to transcend fairer and reach fair, one small step was retrieving Catherine. Telling William that what he and his friends had done was no laughing matter. It was unacceptable. If Catherine wanted to march for the vote, she should.
The side of the park adjacent to Fifth Avenue was packed with spectators standing five and six and seven deep but was less congested once Ani was behind those who were there to cheer or, in some cases, to gape. Or throw apples. Nevertheless, she had to press between people milling about on the concrete walkways and the grass, already an autumnal brown, her eyes scanning the direction in which the men had been moving when they had taken her friend. She called out Catherine’s name once, twice, but her voice was lost in the cacophony from the crowds and the parade—someone was tooting the horn on his automobile, someone else was banging cymbals together—and so she simply pressed forward, her neck craning as she stretched as tall as she could.
And there they were. The three men had Catherine surrounded, but they were no longer clutching her arms and carrying her as if she were a recalcitrant child. The small group was leaving the southern corner of the park, crossing the avenue there and continuing east. And so Ani hitched up her skirt and ran, pounding across the grass and then the street, catching them as they reached the far side of the avenue.
“Catherine, wait,” she heard herself pleading, and the four of them stopped and turned.
“Ani,” Catherine said. “It’s fine.” But she had been crying. Her eyes were red and her voice quavered when she said Ani’s name, and with the back of her gloved hand she wiped at her nose like a child. Like one of their youngest students.
“This isn’t your concern,” William told Ani. His glee at what he had done had apparently been soured by Catherine’s tears. “Go on now.”
“Maybe it isn’t my concern,” she replied. “But neither is it yours.”
William’s friends, both stocky, probably worked with him at the bakery. Perhaps they worked for him. They looked back and forth between Ani and William, and Ani had the sense that one of them wanted to strike her, to lash out, and she recalled what it had been like to watch the gendarmes beating a pair of young mothers six years ago, and how reflexively she had tried to shield them from the rifle stocks. Her shoulder and back would be sore for weeks as she scrounged for wood and watched her mother die, because then they had beaten her, too. She had tried to use her back as a buffer as she curled into a ball, her hands a hood upon her skull, but still one of her eyes was blackened and swollen shut, and one of her fingers was broken.
“Not my concern?” William asked rhetorically. “This girl will be my wife in a month. My wife.”
“That doesn’t mean you can stop her from marching in a—”
“Who is this, Bill?” one of his friends asked, cutting her off.
“Some darkie from the Middle East who works at Catherine’s school,” he told him.
“Washerwoman?”
He scoffed. “If the school had any sense, yeah. But, no, she’s a teacher.”
“No shame in washing clothes,” she told them both. This she knew for a fact. “Nor is there in baking bread.”
“Ani, stop,” Catherine begged. “Really, I just want William to walk me home now. That’s all I want. I don’t even want to go back now. Really, I don’t.”
“There you go,” her fiancé said. “Now, be gone. Shoo. Skedaddle.”
“No.”
“No?” he asked. “Do you really think you can bully me into—”
“I’ve lost more than you’ll ever have,” she said, this time interrupting him. “Catherine, if you can look me in the eye and tell me that you honestly don’t want to come back and rejoin the march, I’ll leave. But if you want to return, speak now and we will.”
The question hung there, floating milkweed, and for a moment the other schoolteacher glanced back and forth between her fiancé and her friend.
The Irish thought she was Italian and the Italians thought she was Polish and the Polish thought she was Persian. Some of her neighbors on the Lower East Side saw her on the street and wondered if her parents might have been slaves. No one, when they met her, could pronounce or spell her last name, though a few had at least heard something (though they could never recall what, precisely) about Armenians being massacred. Hadn’t that nurse, that saint, Clara Barton, worried about them fifteen or twenty years ago?
Ani actually had been a washerwoman when Catherine first brought her to New York City. She’d worked in a plant that cleaned the bedding and the towels and the table linens of Manhattan’s upscale hotels until Catherine had been able to convince the school’s founder that Ani could replace the married French teacher when she left because she was going to have a baby.
Had her world in Adana not unraveled—no, it hadn’t unraveled, it had been burned to the ground—she most likely would be married now, too. She would no longer be teaching, because she’d have a husband and children. There were men who were interested in her and whom she, in turn, fancied. There were matches that her family and theirs would have encouraged. Facilitated, in fact. She would be managing a house, and it would be a house with a servant to assist her. Would her husband have been Armen or Antranig? Both men intrigued Ani. Both died in the first hours of the rampage.
Of the two, Armen would have been more comfortable with the notion of her voting. He might even have seen the logic and reasonableness of the idea. But not Antranig. He would have thought it totally unnecessary, since women were married to men and men could vote. But he also wouldn’t have stopped her if the law had changed. He wouldn’t have physically prevented her from marching in a parade like this, the way William had kidnapped Catherine.
But there would never have been a parade like this in Adana. Not in Adana or Dikranagerd or Constantinople. She could count on one hand the nations today that permitted women to vote, and there was certainly no reason to believe that the Young Turks would ever allow such a thing. They had shown their true colors that spring and summer when they initiated the massacres that already dwarfed even the firestorm of Adana.
And her mother, what would she have said about a march such as this?
She would have been perplexed. But, in the end, she would have wanted her only daughter to vote. She might even have voted herself.
And just as her voting would not have compromised her marriage to a man such as Armen or Antranig, she liked to believe that if she ever found a man in America, he would not be the sort who would oppose her voting here. But as her eyes took in Catherine and William and the man’s two coworkers or friends, the radical subversiveness of what she was doing on this corner grew painfully real. Not the marching: retrieving Catherine. It was, arguably, too subversive. Too radical. She had gone too far and may have risked digging a chasm between these two people who were betrothed. What right had she to force her friend to make this decision?
None. She had no right at all.
The fact was, whenever she had attempted to transcend her natural timidity and what may (or may not) have been the natural order of things, it hadn’t ended well. She would carry inside her forever the scars from Adana: her heart was racing now. A part of her wanted to say her friend’s name, this time apologizing—to her and to William—because she had overstepped her place and her right. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She had come too far. They all had.
And in the vacuum, Catherine spoke.
“William,” she said, her voice huskier than usual, a little hoarse from crying. “I know you think this is funny. I also know you don’t want me here. But, please, let me do this. Let me do this anyway.”
“Catherine, why?” he asked. “Why?”
“Because you love her,” Ani answered quickly, speaking for her friend, hoping this was true. “And because she wants to.”
“Well, there are many things I want—”
“And because you’re a man, you’ve a better chance of grasping them,” she told him.
The baker’s two friends looked at her. She was responsible for this confrontation, even if now a part of her feared her presumption was going to have ramifications. Then they looked at William. He was wearing a tweed cap and he removed it and held it in his hands, staring inside it as if the solution to his soon-to-be wife’s rebelliousness was right there in the lining.
“She takes such good care of me here,” Ani told him. “Since I came to America. And, every day it seems, at the school. If you’re worried about her safety, William, I’ll be beside her.” Her voice was as soft as she could make it, as she fabricated for him a reason for his behavior that he could look back on and justify. I was worried you might get hurt, Catherine, that’s all. I was worried.
“You,” he said, looking up. He smiled ever so slightly, but it was not a withering, angry smile. It was bemusement. “You’ll protect her.”
“Me,” she said simply.
One of his accomplices glanced at him, realized that William was softening, and wanting to be on the right side of the man’s opinion, said, “It’s just politics, Bill. Right?”
“Politics is no place for a lady,” he muttered, but it was wholly without conviction.
“Then view it as a parade,” Ani offered. “Just a parade.”
“You want this that badly, Catherine?” he asked her.
“I do,” she said, and nodded. “Very much.”
“Girls won’t ever vote, Bill,” his other friend reassured him. “It really is just a parade.”
William returned his cap to his head. He sighed epically. “Then fine. Do what you want.”
“You mean that?”
He nodded. “Where does this thing end? Remind me.”
“The library. Forty-Second Street. The mayor himself—”
“I know. The mayor himself will be there. You told me. Fine. I’ll be there, too. East side of the avenue so we can get out of this madness right quick.”
For a moment, none of them moved. Then Catherine stood on her toes and kissed her fiancé on the cheek, before taking Ani’s hand and pulling her back across the street and toward the parade.
“I almost asked him to go to the arch or the back of the line, wherever it is now, and join the men there—the men who are going to march and bring up the rear,” Catherine was saying, as together they scurried west through the park.
“I think it was wise that you didn’t.”
“Probably, yes. Thank you, Ani.”
“You’re welcome.”
“He is a good man, you know.”
Ani did not know that, but she remained silent. She said nothing about the way he had plucked Catherine from the line and carted her off. That was mob behavior—mob mentality—and she knew where mob mentality led.
“And this is just a parade,” Catherine went on.
“And this is just politics,” Ani murmured, a hint of sarcasm in her voice, the intimation so slight that Ani doubted her friend caught it. But in the same way that she knew the difference between a scream and a shout, the way that words had particulars and distinctions, she paused on the word just.
Yes. This was indeed just politics. This was righteous politics.
That was precisely why they marched.