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American Follies
Author: Norman Lock

 

Gentlemen, be seated. We will commence with the overture.

—Mr. Interlocutor to Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones

 

 

Overture

We live in hard and stirring times, Too sad for mirth, too rough for rhymes.

—Stephen Foster

WHY, DR. GARMANY, just look at the state of your hands! And you have blood and cigar ash on your coat.

Yellow primroses! Mr. James, you are too kind. And in this rain! For goodness sake, water is dripping from your hat! Put it in the bedpan, please; I have not used it. They say my womb is wandering, but they will not tell me where. Mr. James, please be acquainted with Dr. Garmany, who will be presiding. You have time to buy a ticket, but only just, for he has already called for the overture. Do say you will! I shall be performing a tragic farce on the Sholes & Glidden. My husband, Franklin, you know. He was grateful for the shaving mug you sent him at Christmas—all the way from London, where the queen is in mourning for us all.

The bedsheet is white, the nurse no taller than a girl. Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, O, how you shuffle! On, off. Just look at the horses’ fancy plumes! Gentlemen, I am dying underneath the heavy odor of chloroform. Black night is falling fast. Franklin, do not let go of my hand!

 

 

Cakewalk

SEPTEMBER 1883–APRIL 1884

… how small the sons of Adam are!

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

Declaration of Sentiments

MRS. LANG’S SECRETARIAL BUREAU had arranged for me to stay with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at their boardinghouse in Murray Hill. They were in New York City to collaborate on the third volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage. Miss Anthony had traveled from her home in Rochester for the purpose, Mrs. Stanton from hers in Tenafly. They required a stenographer and typist. I arrived in a hackney driven by an Irishman with a put-upon expression and a grizzled beard stained by tobacco juice. As I entered the ladies’ sitting room, followed by the cabman, who had grunted and grumbled up the stairs with the bulk of my Sholes & Glidden in his arms, I was struck by its cheerfulness. Aware of their militant reputation, I had expected to find Spartan quarters devoid of the follies that often encrust the rooms of elderly ladies. But my suffragists, as I would come to think of them, did not scorn a so-called feminine weakness if the indulgence pleased them. They were as likely to meet an expectation based on gender as they were to defy it. Had I not been prejudiced by accounts of their warlike humor published in the sensational papers of the day, I wouldn’t have been surprised by the scent of violets emanating from Mrs. Stanton’s ample bosom or by the Henry Maillard bonbons they nibbled from a plate, as if the two most formidable women of the age were a pair of schoolmistresses whose delight was to needlepoint sentimental mottoes on fine linen for the adornment of walls papered in the color of dried blood. I was glad no such homely artifacts were displayed and that the walls were enlivened by a pattern of tea roses. A Persian carpet lay on the shellacked floor. Strings of glass beads hung from a gasolier, unlighted at that hour, and the walnut cornices were free of the dust that swayed from the ceilings of my own rooms like tiny trapezes. The apartment declared Mrs. Cady Stanton’s Dutch ancestry and Miss Anthony’s Quaker devotion to cleanliness. (Later, I would be introduced to Miss McGinty, who came on Tuesdays to do the actual cleaning.)

“I presume you’re acquainted with our work,” said Mrs. Stanton. She was the plump one of the two, whose white hair was dressed in ringlets.

“I am,” I said brazenly.

I knew the story, in its outline, of their long, tempestuous life together more than the particulars of their work, which was denounced by clerics as impious and by politicians as contrary to the self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence. At the time, I had no opinion on woman’s suffrage. Had I operated a sewing machine in the Garment District instead of a typewriter, I would have been more mindful of the cause to which the two women were devoted. As it was, I considered myself fortunate in having a profession and did not think my situation could be improved by the election of this man or that one, even if I had had a ballot to cast for either. One can find Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln on a map of the United States, in the names of its towns and streets, but men of their sort are scarce in the seats of government.

“Would you have any reservations about aiding us in our work?” asked Mrs. Stanton.

“I would not—ahem.” I had let the sentence “hang fire,” as Henry James would put it, uncertain as I was of how to address a suffragist who at one time in her long life had worn pants.

“Ellen, would you like a glass of water?” she asked solicitously.

I wondered if I ought to object to the familiarity; she would not have called Mr. James by his Christian name on so short an acquaintance—or, for that matter, a lengthy one.

“Our notoriety does not give you pause?” asked Miss Anthony in a manner I interpreted as a challenge.

The death of my brother-in-law, whose salary earned as one of Herman Melville’s underlings in the U.S. Customs Service had been essential to keeping our small household on Maiden Lane afloat, obliged me to overlook the disapproval with which the two women were generally regarded. In truth, I would have kept the accounts for Mrs. Standly’s brothel in the Tenderloin until my husband, Franklin, could find employment in the typesetting trade out west, where I planned to join him.

“Not at all, Miss Anthony.”

“You may call me Susan,” she graciously allowed.

“And you may call me Elizabeth,” said the other, inclining her venerable head toward me.

“When would you like me to start?” I was eager to begin; I had a grocer’s bill to pay.

“That remains to be seen,” said Susan flintily. “You haven’t been examined.”

“I was given to understand that the matter had already been decided,” I said with what I hoped was an air of dignity and not one of indignation, which was slowly mounting in me.

I thought I caught a glint of malice in Susan’s eyes as she went on airily. “No doubt you have stenographic and typewriting experience in business correspondence.” By the way she had pronounced business, I understood that the manufacture of tinware or galoshes could be of little consequence when compared to the “work.”

I nodded in the affirmative, suppressing an urge to battery.

Susan continued: “Here, however, the dictation you would be called upon to take—”

“And the manuscripts you would be typewriting,” said Elizabeth, “putting in her oar,” as Melville might have said.

“From handwritten notes and scribbles on foolscap or the back of butcher paper—”

“Can be daunting.”

Having been a long time together, the two were in the habit of collaborating on each other’s sentences whenever excitement or agitation caught them up like an outgoing tide.

“Have you had anything to do with—Oh, homilies, for example, or treatises where the style of the prose and the difficulties of the thoughts expressed would’ve challenged you more than a feather merchant’s letter of complaint to the chickens?”

Apropos of her friend’s remark, Susan cackled.

“I am sometimes called upon to typewrite manuscripts for Henry James,” I said smugly.

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