I’ll be honest, at the time, suffrage was still an idea out of Mrs. French’s books: ponderous and abstract, with little bearing, I thought, on my own life. I cared about the election because Miss Rose and Mrs. French cared, though I still didn’t fully comprehend why the two were so at odds over it. What I wanted was reconciliation between them—my sun and moon. If Miss Rose and Mrs. French were out of sorts, so, too, was the new order of my universe.
They weren’t arguing at all. That was the worrisome thing. In the last several weeks, they had become too polite, vehemently polite. Mrs. French, watchful, quiet, retreated into the library, working on what, I don’t know. But her wariness made me wary, even in the face of Miss Rose’s certitude.
Not since the Nativity play had I seen Miss Rose so decisive, so radiant, f illing every room she entered with an enchanting (if somewhat frantic) conf idence, which demanded my conf idence as well. For three solid weeks, she ate well, slept well, suffered no headaches; if she suffered from anything, it was from f its of generosity—she’d promised a new roof for the Wayward Home and a library next to the Lutheran school. After printing her “Concerned Citizen” editorials, Mr. Dryfus agreed to print her ballots—in secret, of course, and at a generous prof it. If Mr. Stockwell suspected she was up to something, well, Miss Rose reasoned, he would have suspected regardless, wouldn’t he? None of the handful of people who knew of Miss Rose’s scheme had anything to gain by squealing. No one who knew was able to resist the swift current of Miss Rose’s optimism.
No one except Mrs. French.
So I guess I should not have been surprised to f ind myself, the morning of the election, trapped with Mrs. French and Violet in the library, as usual.
Violet made eyes at me across the table. Whatever we thought (or didn’t think) about suffrage, we agreed the occasion warranted a break from studies. But such a suggestion from Violet would have been heard as an attempt to shirk mathematics, of which she was not fond.
“Mrs. French?” I ventured.
“Hmm?” She did not look up.
Really, I couldn’t believe she could sit scribbling notes as if the day was like any other. Outside, a few clouds clumped like sheep in a powder-blue sky; light chimed through the cut-glass lamps. We could hear Miss Rose’s voice above the bustle of servants preparing for a dinner party planned for the next day. A celebratory dinner, though no one was yet calling it this.
Violet nodded at me to go on.
“Don’t you think it would be important—educational—to attend the election? I mean . . .” Mrs. French f inally looked up, and I continued bravely. “I mean if we are to vote one day, wouldn’t it be good to see how it’s done?”
She took off her oculars, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and I knew I’d won. Noes came quick and irreversibly from Mrs. French’s lips. “Perhaps. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to observe the machine.”
Miss Rose would not join us. Simply too much to do before the dinner party, and besides, she couldn’t show herself until after the vote. But we should by all means go and report all we saw. Nettle packed us a lunch. We three changed—Mrs. French into a brown muslin dress that would raise no eyebrows, I into a blue calico and a straw bonnet big enough to spy behind while avoiding eyes of strangers. Violet, wishing to distance herself, if only in taste, from the two of us, insisted on her pink walking dress and then complained about dust when she discovered we would not be using the carriage. I made sure to skip along, kicking as much dust as I could, and when Violet told me I was being unladylike, Mrs. French said, “If a lady is capable of doing something, then it must ladylike.”
Oh yes, it would be a glorious day!
Tiny indigo buntings blinked through the underbrush. Farmers from outlying precincts were still crowding the road, all of them stiff in their Sunday best. Beyond Millionaire’s Row, the portico of the courthouse rose above a bower of new-growth oak, and with it, a riot of voices, the clap of hands, the tinny melody of an organ grinder. And on the green: men, men everywhere. In paupers’ rags and city-going f inery. Sitting, standing, smoking, munching peanuts and pawpaws, cursing back and forth, thrusting hellos and handshakes to other men with the correct allegiances, and forming small, exclusive conclaves of banter and ballyhoo to exclude men with the wrong ones.
William was supposed to be canvasing the green with Hanley, but I couldn’t see either of them. The organ grinder wound a new tune. Across the street, a knot of people, men and women, swayed together. “Bible thumpers?” I asked Mrs. French. “Bible thumpers?” I said, shouting this time to be heard.
“Socialists,” she said, but offered no further explanation, for out of the wash of bodies Mr. Stockwell himself emerged.
I took a halting step back into Violet, who gave me a shove.
“Well, well, well. Missus French,” he said biting down hard on her name. He’d dressed in a tailed black jacket and top hat, but if the combination was meant to make him look taller, it failed; his neck disappeared beneath the starched collar and his burnsides stuck out like a pair of clipped walrus tusks on either side of his fat face.
Cocksure. That’s what Dot would say of him. That man is cocksure, but ready as any chicken for the pot. I felt my hackles rise—saw, too, a change come over Mrs. French.
“I trust,” he continued. “there will be no . . . display like the last election.”
Oh, yes! Maybe it was his tone or the way his watch chain stretched like a grin across his belly, but Mrs. French’s demeanor had changed. She raised her head, lowered her shoulders, and when she looked back at Violet and me, her eyes gleamed with competitive vigor. “Like the last election?” she said as if considering. “No. Now, if you’ll excuse us.”
Mr. Stockwell did not, and when he stepped in front of her, even Violet bristled.
“Where is our Miss Rose today?”
Our Miss Rose! I thought. Mrs. French laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. Her voice remained even.
“Attending business at the manor,” she said. “Of course,”
“Of course.”
This time, Mrs. French veered around him, took two steps. Then she stopped and turned so abruptly, Violet and I nearly fell into her.
“Mr. Stockwell?” she said. “May the best man win.”
Really, it’s too bad Mrs. French’s voice was so thin; Stockwell had no idea she’d thrown a gauntlet. Whereas I? Well, I could barely contain my f ighting pride. Any lingering ambivalence about the election vanished. Miss Rose was going to win. I was now quite sure and all but marched through the throng behind Mrs. French to a flat stretch of grass beyond the great oak, where other women lunched and children fussed and tumbled. There we spread our blanket, a conquering flag. Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I couldn’t see anything of the courthouse or the election from there.
A black man selling pawpaws from a cart, rickety as his voice, clattered by. Girls sold foxgloves. Grimy, hungry-eyed boys begged food until a deputy scattered them like so many blackbirds. Violet, sitting straight as a doll, arranged her skirts on the blanket so not one inch would touch the grass.
“You might as well have stayed at the manor,” I said.
“Mind your own, Madelyn.”
Even standing, all I could see of the courthouse was the portico, nosing into the air. Across the green, I could see Mrs. Smith with Mama, Little John on her hip (he was becoming too much for Clara alone), and a few other Suffrage Society ladies gathered like bees around the water pump in their yellow sashes. In a few minutes, Mrs. Smith and Mama joined us.
Without Little John clinging like a monkey, I’m not sure I would have known Mama from a distance. For moments at a time, now, I hardly recognized her, and when I did, I felt a kind of distant pride. It wasn’t her dress, which she had made, or her sash or hat, which she’d bought with money she’d earned making Miss Rose a dress. Not only these things. It was the upright way she was carrying herself as she walked this way. The way she looked other women in the eye; the way they looked at her, a wife, a mother, a lady of business. Two weeks ago, I’d found her alone at the dress-shop cutting table, bent in furious concentration over what I assumed to be a bit of fancy work—until she swiped it beneath the table.
A book. Mama reading a book.
Neither of us had mentioned it, of course. She didn’t mention William’s charm around my neck, either. So things had remained between us: watchful, cautious.
“Any idea how we’re doing?” Mrs. French asked Mrs. Smith.
Mama took Little John back to the shop to nurse. Hanley, emerging from the crowd, waved a ballot in his good hand and called out:
“Tired of hard-money men getting rich off the debt they created? Tired of government poking its nose into your mail and into your homes? Tired of hypocrisy and corruption and greed? Then R. S. Werner’s the mayor for me!”
Mrs. Smith clapped. “Bravo, Hanley!”
“Last one,” he said. “For your scrapbook, Maddy?” Along the top of the ballot, in fancy script, I read, National Green Party. Below, in smaller print, selections for assessor, clerk, sheriff, ward counselors. And for mayor: R. S. Werner.
Violet sat up, batting her eyes as if hurt. “What about me, Hanley? Where’s mine?”
Sun lit red highlights in her hair. Really, she was exceptionally pretty. Hanley blushed. I grabbed his good arm. “Let’s get a closer look at the courthouse.”
Mrs. French, frowning at the growing chaos of bodies, didn’t seem sure about this, so I didn’t ask permission. “Stay with Hanley!” Mrs. Smith shouted after us.
The polls had opened hours before, but it was lunchtime now, and soon I found myself pressed on every side by a rank hubbub of shoulders, boots, and trousers. If I lost Hanley, it occurred to me, I might get crushed, so I stuck as close as I could, inching forward in f its and starts, until f inally we found a channel, crossed the street, and climbed the steps to the porch of the Turner Building. From there we had a much better view of the polling window, open on the south side of the courthouse.
Even then I was a little disappointed. Except for the men, bunched like ants around a morsel, nothing distinguished this window from the four others gaping from the f irst floor. Behind us, a rough swill of voices, then several dozen glass-factory and brewery workers, singing and stumbling over one another, trooped around the corner from the Third Street grog shops. A ruckus of shoving rose up, out of nothing it seemed, on the far side of the green. I’ll be honest. I expected election day would be more, I don’t know, somber? The beer and sour apple stink of bodies, the party agents shouting slogans and promising violence and favors, even the two toughs flanking the polling window, reminded me of nothing so much as a gambling hall. I was not at all sure I wanted to vote if this is what it would be like.
Two men yanked another dressed in funny clothes from the polling window and shoved him to the ground.
“Foreigner, I guess,” said Hanley.
“How do you know?”
“Looks like one.”
But he wasn’t looking at the man anymore. He was looking at me, a queer expression on his face I wasn’t sure how to read.
After the night of Saint Stephen’s, I didn’t see Hanley again for two weeks; when I did, on my way to deliver one of Miss Rose’s editorials to Mr. Dryfus, I found him in the composition room, apron strings dangling dangerously close to the iron jaws of the press, trying with one arm to do the job of two. I knew better than to offer help but didn’t want him to know I’d seen him struggling, either. So I went back to the shop front, slammed the door, and stomped in like I’d just arrived.
I couldn’t help but stare. The bruises, the eye patched over, the arm in a sling, the nose left of center. He would have scared me if I didn’t know him. Scared me a little anyway, even after he showed me the articles he’d saved for my scrapbook—crimes of passion, loves lost, that sort of thing. He talked the news as usual: Indian wars, a railroad strike in Chicago, a steamboat accident near Cairo that killed some foreign dignitary’s son. But between us sat this snorting bull of awkwardness that rose up whenever we were alone together.
It was there now as we stood side by side.
“What, Hanley? What’s wrong with you?”
The ruckus grew louder.
“Nothing. It’s just . . .” He wasn’t looking at me anymore but staring, jaw set, at the courthouse. “I wanted to tell you. I decided. I’m not going into the army. I know I always talk of it, but I can’t. I mean, I can’t leave my sister with him out there somewhere.”
He didn’t have to say who him was.
“Alright,” I said, watching him close. I never wanted him to go away in the army, but I knew how much it meant to him. I knew I should say more, but didn’t know what.
“You saw me that night,” Hanley said, nodding his head. “I could have killed him,” then looked at me like he wasn’t so sure anymore. “You think I could have killed him?”
The thing was, I wasn’t entirely sure what Hanley wanted me to say. I wanted to say no, but it wasn’t true, and I knew he would know. I’d seen his face that night. The constable had been right. Murder mad.
“Yeah, I do. Maybe rightly so,” I told him.
“He comes back,” he nodded. “I’ll kill him.”
The silence that fell across the green alarmed us. Well, not fell exactly, but rippled from the direction of Fourth Street, like a stone thrown into a pond. Hanley and I climbed up the rail of the porch for a better look and saw Reverend Reynolds of the First African Baptist Church, smiling big in the face of a lot of frowns and walking slow toward the courthouse with six well-dressed Negro men. He stopped and shook hands with eight or ten white men, guns conspicuously holstered, who closed ranks and formed a kind of ballast around the reverend. If not for those guns, it might have been funny looking—all those heads turning—but no one was laughing. I felt my guts seize, looked to Hanley, who was watching that crowd like he was watching a thunderstorm, not sure yet of the threat. “We better go,” he said.
Most women on the lower green had bundled their blankets and herded their children home. Mrs. French, waiting there with our blanket, pointed us to the print shop, and I was glad to go.
Glad, that is, until, walking in, I saw William leaning on the shop counter next to a giggling Violet.
“Well, there she is,” said William, “We were just talking about you, Maddy. Hello there, Hanley.”
Hanley excused himself back to the Turner Building with notepad in case anything did happen. Mrs. Smith, standing in the hall, shouted up the stairwell. “She’s here. She’s back, Rebecca.” Mrs. French handed me the blanket, then asked for a word with William and Mr. Dryfus in the study, leaving me alone in the shop front with Violet.
She knew I wanted to know what William had said about me, what had been so funny. So I bit my tongue.
“I think,” she said, watching me, “William looks just like Lord Byron. Don’t you? He says he’s off to Europe as soon as he can. I’m sure Miss Rose will send him. Reliance is no place for talent.”
I could tell she considered herself among the misplaced.
“But that Hanley,” she said. “He looked a brute before. Now, well! William says”—she leaned in—“he says they’ll never take a cripple like him in the army.”
I couldn’t help it, I started at this. My heart clenched because I heard the truth in what she said. It hadn’t been his choice after all. Hanley hadn’t decided anything. Violet gave a shrug of mock surprise. “Well, why would they?”
“The moment the result is known, William, come to us,” said Mrs. French striding from the study. She beckoned us to follow and did not slow until we reached the cusp of the cypress drive. There, wind gusting through the leaves, she stopped, cocked her ear as if she could hear in the wind the thrum of voices.
“What, Mrs. French?” I said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “A feeling.”
Violet and I looked at each other. If we knew anything about Mrs. French, it was that she was not governed by feelings. At the manor, she took silent leave and went straight to Miss Rose. Violet turned to follow.
“Violet, wait.”
I still wanted to know what she and William had been saying about me, but damned if I’d ask her that. “Reckon Mrs. French got a premonition? Reckon she thinks we’re going to win?”
“Do I reckon?” said Violet. “Dear Madelyn, why do you persist in speaking like a heathen?”
“Fine. Do you think—”
“I don’t know,” said Violet.
“Well, what happened in New York, then? Mrs. French said she’s afraid Miss Rose might go too far again. What’s she mean, again?”
To my surprise, Violet’s blue eyes glistened. Her pretty nose flared. “You horrid heartless beast! Don’t ever ask me that again, Madelyn. Never again.”
That evening, in the rose garden, Alby lit her pipe and leaned back to blow smoke. “People in this house got more secrets than is good for ’em,” she said. “Bet it’s different out West. Out there you arrive and say, ‘This is who I am and to hell with anyone who don’t like it.’”
“I’m not sure that’s how it is anywhere.”
“Some kind of an expert in everything now, that it?”
I reached for the pipe and she gave it.
“I told you I’d teach you to read,” I said.
“Bah,” said Alby. “Lots of good Latin do me, anyway. Lots of good it do you. Fancy words, fancy dresses, fancy dinners. Just makes you expect more of the same. You think I’m jealous, but I say you’d of been better off learning a kitchen with me, instead of playing poet lady. Might’ve had options, Maddy, and now you’ll be thinking you got to live fancy to have any life at all.”
“Options like your dog woman?”
“Nettle won’t say it, Maddy. But I’m gonna. You listening? Now I don’t mean to hurt you, but here it is: All those big words and big ideas they’re stuff ing in your head don’t change the ways of the world. And you just better get your head around the fact people always gonna look at you like they look at old Cyrus. At me, too. They gonna look at you and see a color f irst. Fancy walk and talk and clothes or no, they gonna see a color. What’s more?” She took the pipe back. “You’re a damned fool if you think Miss Rose will give you anything more’n a boot out the door when she’s through with you. As big a fool as Violet. Bigger, since she never had nobody to tell her straight.”
“That’s not true!”
“She’s playing with you, Maddy. Don’t get how you can’t see that. She’s rich. It’s what rich people do. You think you mean anything to her? Well then, all that learning’s making you blind. She ain’t nothing but a self ish, vain woman who does good things so that people will think good of her. Impressive on the outside.”
“That’s not true. It’s what some people think.”
“It’s what everybody thinks, everybody she ain’t witched blind to it. But hey, maybe Lizzette’s right? You mighty easy to witch, ain’t you? Give you a fancy dress, or a charm, and you loyal as a—”
“You take that back!” I demanded, standing now, my f ists clenched, but Alby, reaching up, pulled me down again.
“Just be careful, okay? That’s all I’m saying.”