CHAPTER 22

December 1, 1909

Nancy, France. I am sick at the stomach with what Frank takes to be the flu. I know better. This is what despair makes of your belly. He says we will move on to Paris in a few days when I am feeling well. Then we can decide what we, each of us, will do. But how will I ever feel well again?

Frank’s mother wrote in her letter that young Catherine has been dismissed from the high school because of the “scandal.” Frank’s anger is murderous. He is wounded by this mess, yet there is something in him, a rock-hard core, that allows him to move forward. His work is his refuge.

Last night I lay awake, desperately worried for the children. How I wish I could simply go back and hold them. How I wish none of this ever happened. I pray Louise holds fast now. There is no fiercer gatekeeper.

I take one hour at a time and wonder at how quickly courage has forsaken me.

         

“GHASTLY,” FRANK MUTTERED. “Sentimental, degenerate crap. What is the matter with these people?” They had been walking the streets of Nancy after a silent dinner, looking at Jugendstil architecture. Now they stood in front of an ornate art nouveau house, the façade of which, with its curving window tops like drooping eyelids, reminded her of the face of a gnome.

A strolling couple paused to see what Frank was looking at as he tapped his cane on the walk indignantly, then jabbed the air as he pointed toward the house. “Dog waste,” he sneered.

The man looked at the house, confused, then back at Frank. But the woman clearly understood as she drew her collar up and pulled her husband along.

Mamah was glad for the appearance of the ugly house, for it was taking the full brunt of Frank’s outrage. There was a time she’d been mortified when Frank had stood outside someone’s expensive Chicago home and declared it trash. How quaint that sort of embarrassment seemed now.

She walked on and he followed, his eyes panning the street, daring another visual assault. Mamah caught sight of a flyer attached to the side of a newsstand. The words “Ellen Key” appeared in large print at the top. She knew the name; she’d read a book by the Swedish feminist some years before, though she couldn’t remember the title.

Mamah pulled the flyer off the shed. “She’s speaking here Wednesday night.”

“Who’s Ellen Key?”

“She’s important in the Woman Movement over here. Let’s see. She’ll be talking on…” Mamah translated with her lips moving, her finger following the words on each line. “The morality of woman, love’s freedom, free divorce, and a new marriage law.”

“Do you suppose she knows we’re in town?”

Mamah tried to smile. “I want to see if I can find any of her books.”

At a bookstore not far from their hotel, she came upon just one, Love and Marriage. Editions in French, English, and German were stacked beside one another. Browsing through them, she could see that, in any language, it was heavy going.

She found Frank among the art books. “The text is very dense in that woolly, scholarly sort of way,” she said. “But listen to this.”

Frank leaned against the bookcase where they stood, his head down in concentration, while Mamah read from the English version.

“‘Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life’s gracious gifts to the elect. There can be no other standard of morality for him who loves more than once than for him who loves only one: that of the enhancement of life. He who in a new love hears the singing of dried-up springs, feels the sap rising in dead boughs, the renewal of life’s creative forces; he who is prompted anew to magnanimity and truth, to gentleness and generosity, he who finds strength as well as intoxication in his new love, nourishment as well as a feast—that man has a right to the experience.’”

She glanced up to find Frank’s eyes on her.

“Have I ever told you that?” His gaze was tender.

“Told me what?”

“Finding you was like finding a safe place to think again. Before I met you, I felt I could soar at the drawing table, but I always came back to the most static prison in my marriage. It set me free to find you, to think that there was the possibility of something more expansive. You make me want to be a better man. A better artist.” He put his hand in hers. “I’d be such a sad person if it had never happened.”

“Thank you.” She put his hand to her face and brushed it across her lips.

“Which version will it be?”

“English, I suppose. Are you buying it for me?”

“Yes.”

At the hotel, she sat in the room for hours, reading Love and Marriage. So much of what she believed was right there on the page. From the beginning of the book, she sensed that Ellen Key wouldn’t be pigeonholed. The woman didn’t bother herself with the vote, like other feminists; that was a right she expected without remark. She wasn’t an Emma Goldman, or a Socialist-style feminist like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or a firebrand like Emmeline Pank-hurst. Nor was she a subversive saint like Jane Addams. Ellen Key seemed to be something else entirely.

Her style appealed to Mamah—cool and logical, in a scattershot sort of way. She would introduce an argument in one spot and take it up fifty pages later, trusting that those readers who were still with her were the ones she wanted along. She made you travel the paths that her own reasoning took, knocking off one objection after another to her radical views, so that by the time you got to her conclusion, you agreed with her.

Mamah traveled through evolutionary science, Church history, sociological studies, anthropology, Swedish folk customs, critiques of George Sand and other novelists. There were moments during the long afternoon and night of devouring Love and Marriage when she felt as if she were a boat pushing through high waves. Just when she reached the top of one line of reasoning, she was plopped down at the base of another.

“It’s funny,” she said when Frank brought in dinner. “This woman is conservative and wildly radical at the same time.”

“How is that?” He was setting up a picnic dinner on the floor. He had gone out and bought a baguette, ham, and a chunk of cheese that he was laying out on butcher paper. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, with his wavy brown hair grown longer since they sailed over, he looked like a young man just then.

“Well,” Mamah said thoughtfully, “on one hand, she says women’s natures are best suited to raise children, but then she argues that they should be paid for it because it’s society’s most important job. What I like is that she champions a woman’s freedom to realize her personality. For the longest time, it seems there’s been almost no discussion of individualism in the Woman Movement. But here is a woman getting at the deeper question of what a woman is and what she can be.”

“You look so much better.”

“Thank you, my love. I do feel better. Probably because this book is telling me precisely what I want to hear right now.”

“Such as?”

“She says that once love leaves a marriage, then the marriage isn’t sacred anymore. But if a true, great love happens outside of marriage, it’s sacred and has its own rights. She says each fresh couple must prove that their love enhances their lives and the human race by living together. Here, listen. ‘Only cohabitation can decide the morality of a particular case.’”

Frank was slicing the bread with a small knife. “You mean we’re doing this for the human race?”

“Oh, there’s a lot of eugenics in here, to be sure. She claims that as people perfect a culture of love, the human race will evolve to a higher plane where there won’t be a need for laws regulating marriage and divorce.”

“So if we can just hang on for a millennium or two, it’ll all work out.”

“You’ll like this part. There are some people today—mostly artists—who can handle the freedom of living honestly. Listen: ‘Without “criminal” love, the world’s creations of beauty would be…not only infinitely fewer but poorer.’ In fact, artists have a responsibility to show others how to live truthfully.”

She found his eyes. “Frank, I want to stay to hear this woman.”

“Do you think it would help?”

“How I feel? I don’t know if anything can help for very long.” She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“How would you feel if I went on ahead to Paris and met with Wasmuth’s contact there?”

“I’ll be all right by myself.”

Frank looked doubtful.

“Truly,” she said. “I will be there in a few days. Just wire me when you get a hotel. I’ll find you there.”

MAMAH READ ON INTO the night, with Frank sleeping beside her. There were moments when she came upon a sentence so true she wanted to shake him awake. But she couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t take the time to tell him about it. There would be hours and days for that later. When she got to the chapter on free divorce, she felt as if Ellen Key had interviewed her for the book: Why is the heart that is broken considered so much more valuable than the one or the two who must cause the pain lest they themselves perish?

Mamah put down the book sometime before dawn. The only sound that penetrated the walls of the little hotel was the creaking of pines outside their window. In the dark, she could see the giants, their snow-laden branches moving almost imperceptibly in the wind. She pulled the layers of quilts over her face.

Edwin didn’t know where she was. Her sister didn’t know, either. She had disappeared into a part of Europe that no one’s finger would be drawn to on a map. She felt a sense of relief. It was as if Mamah Cheney, the troubled woman in the headlines, had ceased to exist. For the first time in many days, she didn’t cry before she slept.