17

FREE SPEECH

If certain ladies in the colonies were given to “hearing voices,” it was only because they were doing their best to keep up with the current spiritual fashions and predilections of their clever, trend-setting British sisters. With their heightened sensitivities and delicate equipment—ears cunningly designed, auditory canals slender as pinkies, receptivity sharp as that of bats—it’s not surprising that such would be the chosen conduits for heavenly news and information. It was a time, after all, when scientific theory caused many to turn a deaf ear to messages from above, and the telephone, fast becoming the newest appendage to the head, had no lines laid to the realm of the supernatural.

Avice’s sister Cecile, dutiful and pious, was a woman who had the time and the inclination to heed the word of the Lord, or at least that of His minions, as direct speech from the Almighty might incinerate one’s head altogether. On occasion she did hear voices, and in fact, much to her dismay, one particular voice had become attached to her. This would not have been a problem, her faith being capacious enough to entertain the phenomenon, but the voice that dogged her was not very nice. It was brash and grating. It was full of boasts and brags. At times it wheedled and bullied her. It had a dry, sarcastic sense of humour. It lapsed into inferior foreign tongues in which it said, she was certain, the most disgusting things. Nor was there any predicting when it might happen along, when it might come to whisper its vile nothings in her ear, forcing itself and its unsavoury views upon her.

While having tea one day with Mrs. Archibald Brunt and reading aloud from a letter sent by her newly married sister, Cecile shuddered slightly, recognizing the familiar irritating snicker of her unwanted spiritual attendant, its warm breath tickling her earlobe, inflaming her cheek. It was bad enough that she had to censor and “translate” most of Avice’s letter, without also having to listen to an undertow of rude commentary, a subversive counter-interpretation of it. Mrs. Brunt, she knew, would be shocked to hear descriptions of factories, of tenements, of streetcars packed with immigrants. Her sister had sent postcards depicting the insane asylum, a giant Garland stove as large as a house, a beer garden, a dance hall, a bathhouse, an establishment in the Merrill block that displayed freaks and oddities—a Wild Man, a Tom Thumb, a woman dressed in snakes and nothing else. Why Avice did not choose to write about the distinguished commercial buildings, the university, the churches, or even the art gallery—and surely there must be one even in that city—was beyond Cecile. It was not beyond her, however, to describe these more elevated sights herself to her flesh-and-blood guest, while fending off the undermining insinuations of her immaterial one.

Don’t go to Michigan, that land of ills . . . the word means ague, fever and chills.

With the letter before her, gripped perhaps a bit too firmly in hand, Cecile recounted the finer theological points of a sermon that Mr. and Mrs. T. Griffith Smolders had attended in the beautiful cathedral of St. Paul’s (surely every city had one) in that delightful, if unusual, honeymoon destination—Detroit. But, au contraire, Cecile heard a murmured disavowal, and tried her best not to listen as it recounted in sickening detail how the young couple had been enjoying other delights entirely, and had scarcely stepped outside their room in the Hotel Cadillac.

In nomine fillii . . . et spiritus sancti . . . et furor uterinus. Noting the red blotches creeping up Cecile’s neck, not to mention her fixed gaze as she read the letter (was it memorized?), Mrs. Brunt secretly sympathized. It was not easy being an elder and unmarried daughter, and Cecile Drinkwater was stepping with some dignity into the comedic role of spinster. Soon—figuratively speaking, of course—she would disappear entirely, which in Cecile’s case might be an improvement, as she was alarmingly plain. A boiled potato had more evident charms. Mrs. Brunt was pleased to hear that Avice, the most spirited of the Drinkwater girls, certainly the most intractable, had finally come to her senses. Marriage had obviously done her some good, even if the husband was not exactly the sort of person you would want to invite into your own home.

“The Russell House is the leading hotel in Detroit, I believe,” she said. “It’s where the Prince of Wales stayed in ’60.”

“Fully booked, I understand.”

“How unfortunate. Did you say they attended the opera?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And what was being performed?”

Fellatio.

“Something . . . Italian.”

“Fidelio?”

“Yes, that was it.”

Porca Madonna!

“Are you feeling quite well, Miss Drinkwater? You do look a bit feverish.”

“A slight earache, I’m afraid, Mrs. Brunt. I should perhaps retire.”

Indeed it was trying for a proper young woman to maintain the required genteel glow while livid, or to retain her demure composure when all she wanted to do was smack herself on the side of the head, or tear off those coiled and tightly wound braids that were clapped onto her skull, serving her ill as mufflers but rather more as antennae sensitive to this most undesirable presence. How was one supposed to be an angel in the house when a devilish informant persistently tattled in one’s ear? And yet Cecile realized that there was truth in what she was hearing. She knew her sister was too headstrong and contrary to have become the sudden possessor of retiring wifely virtues. Nor did she believe for a moment that Avice was as blissfully wedded as she claimed to be in her cards and letters home. Lady Pride mounted on her high horse was the author of those.

Equally incredible was her claim that she was having a glorious time in . . . Detroit. In an industrial city seething with filth and crime, teeming with socialists, and blacks, and Americans—people who spoke much too loudly and told you everything about themselves at the drop of a hat. The land of free speech; and heavens, it was that—too free entirely. Who in their right mind would go to Detroit for their honeymoon? A Fabian? A factory girl? The Drinkwater sisters had all urged them to go to Niagara Falls, and the fiancé had been willing enough, but the inarguable reasoning that everyone goes there had only caused Avice, typically, to declare that in that case they would travel in the opposite direction. Her decision—and it could only have been hers—was pure spite and perversity.

What would become of her young sister? Cecile had to wonder as she watched Mrs. Brunt march down the front walk, her stately progress about to be undercut by a little mess that Pepys, the family dog, had deposited there. Nothing good, Cecile heard herself thinking, nothing good at all. For once she and her disembodied adviser were in complete accord. Mrs. Brunt slipped and went down with a loud shriek. Cecile clapped a hand to her mouth, trying to contain the wild shout of laughter bursting in her head.

Avice herself would not give the time of day to any form of intercession from a higher power. The very idea! She was temperamentally incapable of receiving advice, whether from an earthly father (or sister) or a heavenly one—or from one of His tedious, prating go-betweens. Whatever religious sentiment she might have possessed as a child, she had chucked years ago. The Reverend Elias Bee was largely responsible for this, having sermonized her into an apostatic stupor. Sunday after Sunday, corralled in the family pew of St. Paul’s, she had listened to his righteous blather and sanctimonious twaddle with a glowering and growing resentment. Besides causing her a sinful amount of boredom, he did not even present a sample of manliness worth her study. His face was too large for his features, as if someone had given his nose a good yank and pulled his tiny mouth and eyes inward. It was like a platter with an insufficient serving of character upon it. He had child-sized hands that fluttered about like moths as he spoke, and a peculiar vanity about his feet, which, in moments when he thought himself unregarded, he gazed at with undisguised admiration. His voice was a vessel that spilled over with an unguent hypocrisy. Christian virtue? Justice? Prudence? He no more believed what he preached than she did. Except when he got onto the subject of Quebec and the French menace. That was his real religion: inciting hatred. He’d incited hers, anyway. So, while her sisters faintly sighed their affirmations, their Amens and So-be-its, she was given to muttering more unseemly expressions—“Good God!” and “Oh shut up, you fat arse”—against which the family who sat in front of the Drinkwaters had to close their ears and stiffen their backs like shields.

The only voice Avice was going to listen to was her own. Not that this exercise hadn’t gotten more complicated of late, what with marriage and wanting to get to know her husband better, the onus being on her to generate that knowledge. She knew she could do it—why not? She wasn’t so encased in her own person, her own views, that she couldn’t entertain the prospect of his. She would be the very bridge (iron) linking the happy couple, the unifying structure (or steel) upon which their shared soul could shuttle back and forth. Any woman can dress in the guise of a man, but that was not enough for Avice. She wanted to be the mate who had deserted her. She wanted his endearments, his loyalty, his protection. She wanted to be the beneficiary of his masculine intelligence and authority (which she scarcely believed in, but in this case she would give him the benefit of the doubt). And later, when she caught up with him, her real husband, she wanted his hide as well. She wanted to hold up his shorn ears and tail and shake them triumphantly in the air. You bet.

Accordingly, when she was he, she tried to see things differently, exactly as he might. Cecile Drinkwater would have been gratified—her attendant voice chuckling away like a spring in her ear—to observe how her brother-in-law recoiled from the sights that met his eye, and the smells that flew up his nose, the moment “he” stepped over the American border. While his fellow honeymooners in Niagara Falls thrilled to the spectacle of tons of water thundering past, misting them to a state of damp, romantic receptivity, he found himself less enthrallingly engulfed. In the spring of 1898, Detroit, Michigan, was home to over nine hundred factories, and to all the social enlightenment that went with the times. The air was yellow with sulphur, thick with dust from streets not yet macadamized, clogged with the traffic of human misery: the halt, the sick, the insane, gaunt beggars, children dressed in rags, girls selling themselves for a meal. He was jostled and shoved, nearly run over by a rattling, clanging streetcar, and swept into a stream of striking workers who were surging down Woodward, bellowing and throwing rocks, a simmering violence barely contained. The women in this country, he noted, were large—and brassy. A herd of them nearly trampled him to death trying to get to a sale of shirtwaists—twenty-five cents each—at a towering store called Mabley’s.

Most of the time he stumbled around, his new boots sealed with spats of horseshit from all the droppings on the streets, his skin furred with soot, his lungs bursting with “seegar” smoke, his head rattling with Yankee boosterism. Mrs. Smolders’ husband in honesty had to conclude that he had entered some rank, discordant underworld, and screwing his derby tighter onto his head, resolved to get his wife out of this hellhole as fast as their little heels would take them.

Mrs. Smolders, on the other hand, was having a fantastic time. It’s not that she didn’t take in the noise and dirt and degradation, the sorry human scenery, but she knew that a person could see much the same in the shantytowns of Toronto or Montreal—if they cared to look. She simply responded more directly and fully to the spirit of the place, to the bustling commerce and confidence and American self-delight. The whole city, wealthy and poor quarters alike, crackled with life; everything seemed to be electrified and in motion. Striding briskly down Jefferson, she marvelled at how the fad of wheeling had overtaken this city. Surely every citizen who could get their hands on one owned a bicycle, for they skimmed by in packs—one a tandem built for ten—and were parked and piled everywhere, leaning up four deep against offices, stores, saloons, even churches. She saw Bloomer Girls by the score—all manner of women, as old as forty, wearing those “bifurcated nether garments” that old Bee had fulminated against so fiercely from his pulpit. Not only bicycles, but there were also numerous wheeled and unidentifiable vehicles, some with gasoline-powered motors attached, that flew by at phenomenal speeds. Fifteen miles per hour, or so she was informed by a waiter when she was in Swann’s Chop House on Larned, sampling a stimulating brown beverage called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca and trying the new flaked wheat cereal invented by a Dr. Harvey Kellogg. “Eat what the monkey eats,” Dr. Kellogg apparently advised. And, more ominously, “A housebroken colon is a damaged colon.”

Invigorated, her appetite for novelty aroused, she climbed the two hundred and ten steps to the top of the city hall’s main tower and, along with the four Amazonian stone maidens stationed there in niches, gazed out over the city, taking in the clean streets, the elegant homes flanked by groves of shade trees, the river surging with traffic, Belle Isle, and the Dominion beyond—distant, cold, stodgy. What she saw below her, though, was a cauldron of a country, hot and bubbling, rich with possibility, throbbing at this very moment with war fever and patriotic ferment. Even that strike her husband had briefly gotten enmeshed in was exciting, and appealing. She would not have ducked and run as he had, turning away the moment the police arrived with their truncheons and revolvers. She would have marched in inviolable solidarity with the workers, demanding her rights, demanding a ten-hour working day—never mind that she had never worked a day in her life, or that the laxity of such a shortened day, as her father insisted with an undeniable rationale, would cripple the economy and destroy moral resolve.

Thinking of that strike, and of a few other of her forays into the city as Mr. Smolders, she bit her cheek to stop herself from grinning inanely. Truly, it was a joke, what she had gotten away with, and how she had so readily been taken for a male. Slap on a man’s hat, fasten a high collar over your plucked Adam’s apple, some loose clothing to dissemble the want, or largesse, of other telltale bumps . . . and you’re in, you’ve joined the boys’ club. Given her experience with this, she had to conclude that people didn’t notice much, really, outside of themselves. They saw what they expected to see. But she noticed; she was aware. Alertness was absolutely essential as she moved undercover and warily through the city. If it weren’t for her, he’d be lying dead on the street. When those officers appeared, revolvers flashing in the sun, she hustled him out of there, slipped him swiftly down an alley, made him desert the strike as precipitously as he had joined it. Surely she wasn’t expected to be her brother’s keeper as well as her husband’s.

She glared at him now, turned inward on himself, folded primly on the lyre-back chair in their room at the Cadillac. How insubstantial he was! She thought of that sculpture she’d seen at the Museum of Art, a stone man in a pose of thought, not wearing a stitch, and her blood quickened. Her husband simply could not compare. She wondered if she could do without him entirely, then supposed not. Without him she’d never be allowed to do half the things she’d done that day, including the trip out to Bennett Park to watch a baseball game. Reluctantly, goaded by his portable wife, he had paid his fifty cents to climb the scaffolding erected around the outside of the fence, a perfect vantage point from which to hurl insults and rotten vegetables at the team from Chicago, and spew wads of Mayflower “eatin” tobacco on the hats of the fans below. Not that he had joined in any of the fun—oh, it was galling in the extreme.

Was this marriage? Slight as he was, he dragged her down. He was a dead weight that she was yoked to, her silent, disapproving Siamese twin. Indignant, frustrated, rebellious—she could have torn out her hair, if it weren’t already halfway across the room, a dark, brimming mass stuffed in one of his shirts like a submerged head. If she had had an intellectual acquaintance with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Susan B. Anthony, or even Emma Goldman, Avice might have burst out of her cozy cocoon at the Cadillac and stormed the streets as a fully realized New Woman. If she had stooped to pick up that trampled and spattered copy of Free Society she saw during the strike, instead of buying the Detroit Times, Mr. Hearst’s eye-popping, salacious rag, revolutionary and liberating ideas might now have been zinging like bullets through her head. She had often enough mocked the reformist and do-gooder clubs her friends joined—the Dominion Order of the King’s Daughters, the Girls’ Friendly Society, the Anti-Corset League—and yet she had more spunk and a greater independent nature than any of them; otherwise what was she doing here?

Progressive? Of course she was. That’s why she had picked up a Vogue magazine along with the paper at the newsstand. Lounging on the bed in her silk robe, smoking, drinking, chewing gum, cramming as many liberating habits as she could into the afternoon, she began to flip through it, and was dazzled once again by American dash and ingenuity and style. Even the name of the magazine, Vogue, was chic and alluring. Arriving at the final pages, she sat briefly, absorbed in contemplation, then leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette in one of his shoes, for she had suddenly been taken with a desire to embark on a defining and advanced cultural activity. She decided to get dressed as the missus and go shopping.

A gift, then, a honeymoon souvenir for Mr. Smolders. This is what she resolved to find while trolling the aisles of the Newcomb-Endicott Company, a department store she had discovered after following one of its red-and-gold delivery wagons to its source. What to choose? A moon calendar watch in a silver case? A solid gold vest chain? Or one made of braided hair? Perhaps a fob, an ebony cane, a gent’s charm—a tiny anvil, or a bicycle lamp set with a ruby for the light. How about collar studs, a stamp box, a hat mark, a moustache comb, an umbrella plate, an autoharp, a hunter’s suit made of marsh grass, an ear cleaner (spoon and sponge combined), an electric ring—or a castrating knife from the veterinary department? A book might be useful. One on the subject of faciology, or Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Adviser. Dipping into the latter, Avice was a little shocked at its author’s forthright modernity, addressing as he did the effects of sexual isolation on old maids, and the prevention of conception “for those who would enjoy a higher and better love.” Dr. Hood also tackled the problem of unhappy marriage and how it destroyed the tone of the nervous system. Certainly her husband could use such a book, but she found herself incapable of deciding whether or not to buy it, for the tone of her own nervous system had tightened to an almost painful pitch.

The volume of choice in this compound store was overwhelming. Aisles and aisles of goods—stockings, vests, jewellery, dishes, trinkets—all gleaming and new and desirable. At first, dazzled and a bit greedy, her heart had pounded at the sight of so much; but then, after a short while, roaming up and down, touching, marvelling, only her head pounded. Everything seemed to crowd in upon her, exhorting her to purchase. She turned a jaded eye upon a pair of gorgeous kid gloves, a hatpin set with pearls and a large turquoise, and even stared blankly at a Princess Bust Developer (with Bust Food) that formerly would have made her snicker with delight. She tried to imagine the eventual destination of all these things, who on earth was going to buy them; and once they were gone, she supposed that even more of the same would appear in their place. More and more.

Oh, don’t be such a nit, she upbraided herself. This is perfectly wonderful. The more ear cleaners there are in the world, the more there will be for everyone. Humanity will be better served, and better for it. Everyone’s hearing will improve. Maybe they’ll even begin to listen to one another.

She couldn’t wait to write home and tell Cecile about this place. Poor old Cecile, who won’t want to know, who will only plough her head further into her bible so that she doesn’t have to hear anything about progress and business and filthy lucre. Yet, God the Father does not bring Cecile damask piano scarves and berry sets, Avice thought, as she ran a finger over the smooth, cool belly of a silver teapot. Father does, courtesy of the Merchant Bank and the stock market.

That resolved, and her moment of consumer’s despair conquered, Avice thought she might as well get herself something instead. Or something that she and her husband could share—like, say, a gun. Perhaps that pearl-handled pistol her eye had lit upon and lingered over, entranced. It was displayed in a glass case with several other derringers and revolvers, and was an instrument of such compact beauty that even she, who knew nothing of guns, could appreciate the workmanship involved: a Colt House model with cloverleaf cylinder, four-shot, single action. It had a three-inch barrel, a bronze frame, and ivory grips inlaid with silver bands. Why, a tiny voice seemed to twist like a worm in her head, it might easily be concealed in a pocket, or in one’s palm, its fit snug as a child’s little hand.

Death’s little hand.

Avice longed to touch it, only fractionally as cold as what it promised to deliver. If she did, she knew she would have to buy it, the perfect souvenir from a nation that settled its problems so promptly and efficiently. Hearing that crack of gunfire earlier, during the strike, had sent an undeniable thrill up her retreating back; how many of her fellow marchers lay bleeding on the street, she had wondered. She recalled Kit Coleman’s piece in the Mail & Empire about international styles of murder and how stabbing was not a British habit, stilettoes and daggers being the favoured choice of Italians and Spaniards. The weapons of the Britisher were his fists, whereas the American used the revolver . . . but surely it could be customized to fit the colonial way of doing things. She imagined taking a more conservative approach to the exercise by shooting first one limb and then another. And this her real husband, not the surrogate she’d been trailing around. Put out an eye, blow off a finger, all the while apologizing to him, like a good Canadian, for the inconvenience. So sorry, Grif—BANG—do forgive me, dear—BANG—my fault entirely—BANG, BANG!

While she was entertaining herself thus, happily and murderously musing, a salesman approached her from behind. It was an appreciative approach, too, for she cut a fine figure. He was accustomed to ladies stopping at this case, attracted by their own reflections in the glass. They adjusted their hats or patted their hair, fixing a stray lock, or simply made quick, satisfied assessments of their appearance. Women, all frills and vanity. Take this one—she was a peach, he thought, and she knew it, too. She was staring at herself with such rapt intensity that he could scarcely keep a chuckle out of his voice when he cleared his throat and asked, “May I be of some service to you, Madam?”

“Yes,” she answered, without even turning around. She knew what she wanted, but out of the habit of deferring to masculine expertise, or perhaps only to follow a commercial ritual, she solicited his opinion. “I am going to kill my husband,” she said. “Slowly—he must be made to suffer. Please, which of these fine instruments would you recommend?”