PAULA MCLAIN
Lucy Cuthbert woke from a dream of fire to the feeling of—all too real—being burned alive. The heat came with terrible pressure, radiating in molten waves from her stomach up through her chest and neck, flaming into her face, which pulsed and vibrated unbearably. She threw off the duvet, feeling sure she wouldn’t be able to stand it, not this time. Her heart was beating so violently she could feel it thrashing everywhere. She was a kettle on the boil, a lobster pot. A kiln. Her nightgown was a wet glove, pasted to her torso. She couldn’t breathe. This was the end. It had to be. She would incinerate and be nothing but ash and regret and insufficiency.
But wait. There. Something had shifted. The fire had reached the top of her skull and climbed through somehow, into the wall, to the inner workings of the house, and been absorbed materially. Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all. Perhaps the heat had simply collapsed in on itself, retreating to wherever it had originated from. Either way, she was empty now, wrung out and trembling, and all too awake. This would be the worst part, she knew. There were hours ahead of her with nothing but her restless mind, her worries and her fears, for company. Whatever time it was—she didn’t want to look—it was already tomorrow. Through this dark would come the dawn, then morning, then an anxious lunch—she couldn’t imagine an alternative—and finally, at three p.m. exactly, the banner parade would begin at Washington Square Park, tens of thousands marching, and Lucy in their midst. If she didn’t lose her nerve first.
Tugging her nightgown after her like damp netting, Lucy turned toward the wall and worked to solidify the speech in her head, the one she’d been fretting over since she’d filled out the pledge card three weeks ago. Edwin hated spectacle, hated ostentation of any sort. Parades and theatrical pageants, open-air meetings in parks and town squares, hunger strikes, picket lines—all connoted hysteria in Edwin’s opinion, an unseemly urgency. His was a scientific mind, a temple of right order. Evolutions had their own pace, he insisted, and shouldn’t be bullied this way, so unnaturally.
Lucy still remembered their exchange the morning after the first official suffrage parade, in May 1910, when Harriot Stanton Blatch had led four hundred women and a single supporting man up Fifth Avenue to Union Park with banners and horses and a marching band, of all things. Edwin had flicked away The New York Times as if it exuded an embarrassing miasma and then walked away, into his study, putting an end to the matter, dismissing it, while Lucy had sat frozen, afraid to respond, uncertain of her own mind. Did she think that women were equal in every way to men? Did she truly believe that a woman was sovereign to herself, whole, able to govern her own life and mind? Did she, or only wish she did?
The parade had been a radical act, to be sure. Women didn’t march; soldiers did. Women didn’t stand on wooden scaffolds berating the New York state legislature for failing to advance the suffrage measure. They didn’t demand; they yielded. She, Lucy, had yielded all of her adult life, not daring to question her role. Her self. But the newspaper still lay there. Lucy picked up the Times where Edwin had dropped it and felt a rising tide of contradictory emotions. The photographs of the parade formation passing along Fifth Avenue didn’t look hysterical or unseemly, but somber, almost funereal: dark-suited bodies surrounded by dark buildings, a heavy sky, pressing afternoon fog. One image showed a contingent of women who’d traveled all the way from Colorado, which had passed the voting referendum in 1893. The sign above their smart hats, very smart for Colorado, actually, declared: WE HAVE VOTED FOR PRESIDENT. Was that pride in their eyes? Triumph? Another photograph caught Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, National American Woman Suffrage Association president, mid-speech, her mouth cupped around some assertion or demand. One gloved hand gripped the scaffolding. Her shoulders were broad and immovable-looking in her black dress and doctoral robes—the whole of her appearing less like a gentlewoman than a human bulwark of sorts. What was she shouting? No? Now? Or was it the word you, perhaps? You, as in: You, Lucy Eileen Cuthbert. I see you there, hiding.
That first parade had taken place five and a half years ago. And though she had said nothing that day to Edwin, not a single word to either agree with him or stake a small claim in the other direction, something had begun to stir in Lucy, a dark thing, nebulous and unformed, incredibly new and yet as old as she was. She was afraid to look at it, afraid to give it air or space or even a drop of water, but it had grown all the same. It prodded her now in the dark of her room, accosting her. Ready or not, tomorrow had become today. She’d run out of time to waffle or avoid the issue. Edwin had no engagements, this being a Saturday. He would be there in the house as she dressed in her white jacket and long white skirt and put on the pale straw boater she’d had since the year they met, when she was eighteen and utterly in awe of him and his keen analytical mind, his deliberateness.
Sometimes she missed the simplicity of that early time. How easy it had been to let Edwin lead the way into their lives. Before they were married, even, he’d shared his plan with her, that he’d teach zoology at Columbia if they’d have him, or at Fordham or Barnard if not. That they’d live downtown as newlyweds, on Varick Street, perhaps, visiting his parents in Stamford and her parents in Tenafly on alternating weekends; that once they were more established, they’d move to the Upper West Side, to an apartment near Riverside Park, with a view of the Hudson.
How persuasive it had all sounded to Lucy then. In Tenafly, she’d spent her childhood looking east to the river, but Edwin was promising the opposite view, a journey not of distance but of perspective. How symbolic that had felt at eighteen, how like true arrival. But there had been more as well. When Edwin had proposed in 1889, he had shown her the roll of parchment paper where he’d scheduled everything, right down to how many children they’d have—four—and at what intervals—every three years, so as to really linger over and enjoy their infancy before rushing on to the next. She wouldn’t have to think of anything. It was all there in writing; she only had to agree and give away her name and then she’d be there, be that Lucy instead of this one.
She’d had other suitors, of course, the most memorable being a classmate of hers in school in Tenafly, Lars Pederson. He was the second son of a Dutch immigrant farmer, and he and Lucy had grown up together without her really seeing him, somehow. Then, just after her seventeenth birthday, she had noticed him all at once. How blue Lars’s eyes were, the color of cornflowers. How he carried a little copy of William Blake’s poems wherever he went and had memorized many of them, as a personal manifesto, a metaphysical path that seemed wonderfully outrageous to her, as if Lars spoke a foreign language in his heart.
One summer day when they had taken a walk along the Hudson, Lars had stopped and looked across the river. Yonkers lay on the other bank, but Lars seemed unbound by such ordinariness. He was imagining distant lands and vistas, the world. He told Lucy that he wanted to be a pianist or a poet or a gypsy or all three, living in a colorful caravan and traveling everywhere. Didn’t that sound fine, he wanted to know? “Oh, yes,” Lucy had told him. And she’d meant it. She also knew he wasn’t simply dreaming. Lars would get to that place. She could hear it in the tenor of his voice: he’d already sent his longing on ahead, like a bright lantern, and only needed to follow it now.
Not long after that walk, they’d taken another, through the woods near his family’s farm. They had stopped near an egg-shaped pond, where Lars had bent to place a baby frog in Lucy’s hand, yellow-green with dewy, shimmering skin, and she’d been struck by how alive it was, how full of possibility. Lars had said nothing at all, only kissed her very lightly, for the first time, and in the same moment, the little animal had stirred in Lucy’s hand. Twenty-seven years later, she had not forgotten that. How she had felt herself shimmer with a kind of permeability—as if, like the frog, she could take in life itself through her skin. Whatever had happened to that feeling, Lucy sometimes wondered now. How could such a moment present itself with such force and not change you altogether? It didn’t seem possible to her, and yet it was. The proof was here, in the still middle of the night, in the middle of her life, and she could do nothing but let it come—like the hot flash—and feast on her.
A few hours later, Lucy woke again, without ever being aware that she had fallen asleep. Her shoulders ached and her neck was impossibly stiff, as if her head—there on the pillow—had alchemized into concrete and back again in the last of the early morning hours. Through the far wall, the door that led past her dressing room into Edwin’s dressing room, and then his bedroom, Lucy heard her husband rise from bed, the creaking of the polished maple floorboards as he found his slippers and went to wash and relieve himself. She sat up, reaching for her dressing gown just as a light rapping came at her door.
“Are you awake, pussycat?” Edwin called.
Pussycat. Lucy stiffened automatically. When had she come to hate that nickname? It had been sweet once, even tender. “Yes,” she finally called back, feeling terrified that he might open the door, just as he had every right to.
“Meet me downstairs, then?”
Relief flooded her. A reprieve. “Yes, dear. Soon.”
When he was gone, Lucy rose, avoiding her mirror, pinned up her long hair, now the color of gunmetal at her temples, and dressed in a blue muslin skirt and shirtwaist. It was far too early to put on her white skirt and jacket. There were hours and hours to fill between now and the parade, and besides, Edwin would be confused to see her costumed this way and expect an answer immediately. She was going to tell him, though. At breakfast, she would find a way to conjure the words that retreated from her now, in terror and self-doubt. Somehow, she would have to find the strength to bear Edwin’s derision or disbelief—whatever his response might be. Would he laugh? Mock her decision? Forbid her? Or would he simply close the door of himself, the way he often did when he didn’t approve of or understand Lucy, shutting off his emotions, his reassurance. His love.
If she were really being honest with herself, this was what Lucy dreaded most. Why else had she remained immobilized on the matter for years now, pulled toward the precipice, while simultaneously resisting it? Annually, since 1910, the woman suffrage parade in Manhattan had doubled and tripled in size, growing in force and dimension. This year’s event had already been presaged in Philadelphia and Boston, where the Votes for Women campaign was making a last brave push, just as New York was, for the referendum that would take place on November second. New Jersey had already defeated the measure, though Woodrow Wilson had publicly endorsed it, and though all of the west now, save Texas, had reached liberation.
The east was still bafflingly resistant, entrenched, which was why Lucy felt this was her moment to act. Signing the pledge card had forced the matter, and yet Lucy was all too aware that this upcoming conversation at breakfast, one woman trying to explain to her husband just what she believed in and why, would mean not just acknowledging the vast emotional and intellectual divide between herself and Edwin, but plunging right into it, into nothingness. Of course Lucy was trembling. In the smallest possible way, in her home, the world was teetering on a knife’s edge. Today, October twenty-third, was either the end of days, or the end of Lucy’s ability to live with herself, and didn’t they amount to the same thing?
Half an hour later, when Lucy finally stilled the palsy in her hands enough to button up her shirtwaist and descend the stairs from her room, she found Edwin in the dining room, cheerfully drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. He was humming under his breath. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d heard a snatch of song in him. It was unsettling at best.
“You look awfully pretty,” Edwin said as Lucy took her chair.
Even more off balance, she felt her mouth swing open in surprise, and then recover, rearrange itself. “Do I?” Lucy’s voice came breathily. “Thank you.”
“That color favors you,” Edwin went on, still looking at her.
“Thank you,” Lucy said again, feeling dizzy and out of place, as if she’d somehow stumbled into someone else’s dining room by mistake. She reached for the ivory linen napkin and opened it on her lap as her heart rattled and rasped inside her chest. Marta had already put out warm rolls and glasses of juice. The smell of bacon on the fry drifted through the closed kitchen door. The Chippendale table shone with care. Now, her mind whispered fiercely. Speak.
“Did you sleep well?” Edwin asked genially, setting aside his paper altogether.
“Hardly,” she allowed.
“Poor pussycat. I know what will cheer you up. I have a wonderful idea for today.”
Lucy stopped breathing then. Time iced over. Whole eons passed, the rise and fall of species, of continents. “Oh?”
“Why don’t we go to the Bronx Zoo? The weather’s supposed to be beautiful all day and we haven’t been in ages. There’s a male thylacine I’ve wanted to see. The other zoologist in my department says it’s a fine specimen.”
“What’s a thylacine?” Lucy managed to ask, while her inner workings continued to tumble and gyrate in the wildest of storms.
“Thylacinus cynocephalus,” he replied professorially. “A carnivorous marsupial from Tasmania. They don’t do well in captivity. Two before this one have died, and I don’t want to miss my opportunity.”
“Died? How?”
“General illness, I suppose, an inability to adapt. The weather here isn’t anything like in Tasmania. Nothing to be done about that, I suppose.”
Nothing? Lucy thought to herself. Couldn’t they leave the poor animal alone?
“Shall we go, then?”
This was Lucy’s moment. Her true feelings welled up, insisting on themselves. No was the only answer. She was already committed elsewhere today. She should have been committed years ago, actually. There wasn’t a single cell in her being that wanted to see a sickly animal at the zoo. And what were they doing, she and Edwin, pretending all was fine and well, pantomiming agreement and affection, when really there was a hollowness between them, a dark and yawning lack?
Lucy gripped the table, steeling herself to speak her mind, just as Marta came through the door with their breakfast plates, agreeable as ever. In the many years she’d worked for Lucy, Marta had never once been out of sorts or raised her voice. She’d never burned a meal or scalded the pudding, or if she had, Lucy hadn’t ever suspected it. It all went off without a hitch. The eggs were beautiful, creamy and pale yellow. Marta had placed two strawberries side by side on the plate so that they leaned on each other. It was the loveliest possible meal, utterly without reproach, and yet Lucy suddenly couldn’t bear any of it. Before she quite knew what was happening, she was sobbing into her napkin, crying out as if she were suffering. And wasn’t she?
“Oh, missus,” Marta said, blanching. “What’s happened?”
“Everything’s fine,” Edwin said to Marta, her clear cue to leave them. She did, in a flustered way, while Edwin kept his chair. He pushed up his round wire-rimmed spectacles with one finger, his face seeming to soften with the gesture. Then, with a gentleness Lucy rarely heard from him, Edwin said, “I’m sorry you’re out of sorts.” He paused and drew his hands together professorially. “It’s the change, isn’t it? I know this time can be difficult for a woman.”
Lucy found herself blinking at her husband. How could he know what raged in her? He wasn’t a woman, after all. But it was also true that Edwin had seldom spoken to her with even this much empathy. It was hard, she wanted to say—and not just the change, either, but everything. Their entire lives together, from the very beginning. That roll of parchment paper had failed them both, but he couldn’t see it. Edwin was still safely inside the life he’d built for them, while she’d been marooned along the way.
“I’ll tell you what,” Edwin went on, ever so calmly. “Let’s forget breakfast. You go upstairs and collect yourself. I’ll have Marta pack a lunch for us, and we’ll take it to the zoo. You’ve been under strain lately. It’s all right to admit that. A day away will be just the thing. You’ll see.”
Lucy closed her eyes, her lashes spiked with tears, and felt very small suddenly. What had she thought, signing the pledge card? She’d been playacting at bravery and progress. She was a silly woman; it was embarrassingly obvious. Sighing resignedly from a deep and awful place, Lucy opened her eyes again, knowing that she was now less than she’d been even moments before. “Yes. All right.”
October was always a wonderful month in New York. How the auburn and crimson leaves tumbled in drifts along the avenues. The way the light tipped at a sharpening angle toward the buildings. If Lucy could only focus on these known things, she told herself as she and her husband passed through the Southern Boulevard gate of the Bronx Zoological Gardens a few minutes before noon, she just might make it through the day.
She’d washed her reddened face and put on a dark wool jacket over her shirtwaist and skirt, not at all what she thought she’d be wearing today, but the perfect weight for this sunny, cool day with its fresh gusts of breeze. Above their heads, just past the grand entrance, a single white cloud bobbed past like a carnival balloon. You are this cloud, Lucy tried to tell herself. You are just this moment. Don’t look further.
The park was full of children calling out to their mothers, pointing with awe and delight; pairs of young women walking side by side under pretty parasols; handsome, contented-looking couples drinking lemonade on brightly painted benches. Lucy tried very hard to be happy for all of them as she and Edwin passed the Butterfly Garden, still surprisingly lush for the turning season, and made a wide circle through the main exhibits, pausing at the Rockefeller Fountain, where crystalline water droplets sent prisms bending and unfolding through the air.
“Wasn’t this a good idea I had?” Edwin asked her then. “Do you feel better?”
“Much better,” Lucy lied. “Thank you.”
The Barbary lions had always been a favorite of Lucy’s, and so she and Edwin stayed a long while watching their movements. Bedouin Maid, the female, was drowsing in a patch of dust, her fur the color of smoked gold. Sultan, her magnificent king, paced fluidly along the eastern wall of their enclosure, turning with grace, his tail flicking back and forth like a metronome. Long ago, Edwin had told her the lions had come from North Africa, from the Atlas Mountains, which bounded Morocco and the Sahara Desert. She’d always liked how well traveled the pair were, how much they’d seen of the world, but today, her shoulders tightened, thinking how unfair it was that they should be here at all, instead of free. Every animal should have freedom, she thought: the ungainly giraffes with their long black tongues; the elephants with the leathery folds beneath their eyes that seemed to hold sadness and regret, so much regret; and even the young women with their parasols. Freedom to do and be whatever and whomever they chose for themselves.
Past black wrought-iron posts, a mossy boulder of a tortoise moved glacially forward on ancient clawed feet toward its supper of lettuces and eucalyptus leaves. As the tortoise chewed with impossible slowness, Lucy felt in a stabbing way that this was her marriage, and she wanted to be eighteen again, to start her whole self over. She barely heard Edwin begin to give a speech about the life expectancy of giant tortoises and how resourceful they were, dispersing themselves to islands deep in the ocean by being able to float with their heads up out of the water and to survive for months and months without food or water. This was just like her husband, to praise not the animal’s tenacity, its endurance, or even its will, but its ability to tolerate deprivation. Six months without food? Now there was heroism.
Lucy was still in a kind of trance when she and Edwin finally arrived at the exhibit they’d come for, the thylacine, one of a very few left in the world. As it trotted back and forth along an invisible line in its enclosure, the creature didn’t look like anything Lucy had ever seen before. It was the size of a wolf or large dog, but shaped like something between a tiger and a giant rat, with a swath of dark stripes only on its rump, protruding claws, and a long, stiff tail like the branch of a tree.
Edwin began to chatter away to Lucy about the animal’s significance, how the carnivorous marsupial had evolved millions of years ago. “It’s a living fossil,” he said, with a kind of awe, and went on elatedly. How the thylacine was pouched in both sexes, like the water opossum, and related to both the numbat and Tasmanian devil. As he spoke, Edwin looked neither at his wife nor at the animal, but at the air just above his nose, a tic of his. His zoology and paleontology students at Columbia probably laughed at him for it, but perhaps not. Perhaps they were persuaded or even in awe of him, as Lucy herself had been once. She’d been Edwin’s wife for twenty-six years now, long enough for her to pass through dozens of doors of familiarity, intimacy, knowledge, and even love, yes, before arriving at this estrangement. If they’d had a child, would any of it have been different? Would she be different? Lucy would never have a chance to know. Each of her pregnancies (there’d been four; that number at least was in keeping with Edwin’s plan) had ended in a stillbirth, an ocean of grief. Finally, they’d stopped trying, to spare her any further suffering. She’d turned forty-four in June. She should have been a grandmother, as many of her friends were. Instead, her body blazed and steamed in the night, seeming to mock her. This was “the change.” She was changing, but from what into whom?
There in front of the enclosure, Edwin’s voice drifted further and further away from Lucy as she took in the thylacine, trying to decide for herself what it most resembled. It’s eyes were diamond-shaped and sharp, bright, consequential. Don’t try to name me, the eyes seemed to be saying to Lucy with utter clarity and sovereignty. I’ve seen everything. Millions and millions of years, the rearranging of continents, oceans retreating from the land. I am myself and nothing more.
“Are you all right?” Edwin asked from the other side of a widening chasm. “Pussycat?”
It took great effort for Lucy to answer him. Her voice was dreamy. Had she been dreaming, or was she finally completely awake? “Yes.”
“You seem winded. Shall we have lunch?”
“I have to go now,” she said.
“What’s that? Go where?”
Lucy shook her head. It was all so clear to her suddenly. “I should have lived in a gypsy caravan.”
Edwin’s expression was pained and fearful. “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
Lucy felt great sympathy for him, suddenly, but even more for herself. “I’ve been so afraid. I see that now.”
Before them, the thylacine made a noise in its throat that was so strange, so specific, Lucy couldn’t have described it to anyone. She felt something turn in her, the great flaming wheel of her courage, or her soul.
“I’m going to be late,” she said to Edwin.
“What?” His eyes had grown more and more bewildered, but there wasn’t time to try to explain. There were miles and miles between the Bronx and Washington Square Park, where the marchers had already begun gathering. There were miles and miles to go for women. Suffrage was sixty-seven years old—an old woman, and yet an infant, too.
So many changes lay before and behind all women, for every living thing. There weren’t words for any of it, and no time at all for anything but running, which is exactly what Lucy Cuthbert did that day, there at the end of one world and the beginning of the next. Through the park, past the laughing children, past the tortoise and the fountain, feeling breathless and new again. She ran until her feet failed her, and then she flew.