“We are suspicious of Mr. James’s attitude toward woman’s suffrage,” retorted Elizabeth.
“We are indeed!” said Susan, her face having become as sharp as her tone.
“However, in that his prose is difficult—”
“At times, tortuous.”
“We believe you are qualified.”
“But she has not yet given us a demonstration of her skills!” objected Susan.
“That won’t be necessary,” concluded Elizabeth with the decisiveness of Caesar settling the vexatious question of Gaul.
“Did Mrs. Lang mention that you will be required to stay here?” asked Susan, relaxing her jaw muscles into the faintest of smiles.
“We do not keep regular hours,” explained Elizabeth.
“Yes, she did,” I replied to the space between the two women, since I was beginning to find it hard to tell them apart in spite of their very different appearances. One was fat and jolly, the other thin and caustic; together, however, they made an impression as disconcerting as the plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng in Dr. Mütter’s Museum in Philadelphia.
“You will find the situation a pleasant one, I think,” said Susan, whose hatchet-shaped face would eventually become endearing. “Elizabeth loves to bake, you know.”
“I have an Eccles cake in the oven right now. Do you accept?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. Now that my heavy machine and I were comfortably installed in a sitting room fragrant with pastry and currants, it would have been a pity to have had to look elsewhere. Besides, I was feeling sleepy; I remember that I yawned in full view of my new employers. Embarrassed, I reaffirmed my joy at finding so happy a situation: “I accept with pleasure!”
Neither woman raised an eyebrow. Consorting for so many years with those in whom ideas produce the greatest excitement would have inured them to the enthusiastic display of a professional typist—or her back teeth.
“Good,” they remarked in unison.
“We are pleased,” said Elizabeth, who favored the royal we. And then she astonished me by asking, “When is the baby expected?”
If I’d been a reader of romance novels or had laced my corset too tightly, I would have required smelling salts. But I was accommodating the baby’s need for oxygen by doing without stays. I was slender to begin with, and even then, in the sixth month of my gravidity (a word I had recently encountered in one of Mr. James’s drafts), only a practiced eye—or a prying one—could have detected the immanent presence of another human being underneath my voluminous skirts.
The two women apparently sensed my surprise and perplexity.
“We’ve spent our lives mostly among women and have helped many ‘unfortunates,’” said Elizabeth meaningfully.
“Are you married, Ellen?” asked Susan bluntly. “It makes no difference to us whether or not you are.”
Elizabeth nodded hopefully. “Not in the least!”
What dears! I said to myself. Bless them for their tolerance.
“I am married,” I replied. “My husband is in San Francisco, looking for a place on one of the papers.”
They received this piece of intelligence glumly.
“Is that so,” remarked Susan, disappointment evident on her face and in her voice.
“We can’t allow our work to be interrupted,” said Elizabeth, having stiffened. The rigor was provided by her own bones and not borrowed from a dead whale’s. “You understand, Mrs. Finch, that what we do must take priority over other considerations.” She had resorted to an ominous formality. “If your husband were to find a position in California and send for you, we would be very much at sixes and sevens.”
“Very much so!” said Susan, offering vigorous confirmation of her friend’s misgivings.
Sinking into the horsehair sofa, I beheld in my fancy the scuttling of the household—Franklin’s and mine—awash in debt. I watched as our best hope of rescue drifted among the wreckage like a seaborne spar or bobbing hogshead beyond salvage. I had not counted on the women’s single-minded ambitiousness. No, the word wrongs them and belittles the devotion with which they pursued the overthrow of a fraternity that deemed women unequal by law and custom and no more deserving of protection than a mule. Their altruism, then.
As if to clarify the importance of their efforts, Elizabeth remarked, “A negro man can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of two hundred and fifty dollars; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool. But women are voiceless and oppressed.”
“The Lord will admit a good and virtuous woman into Heaven, although during her life, she was made to wait outside the polling place while her husband cast his vote. By the law of coverture, his vote represented hers regardless of whether or not her opinion was considered in the matter!” said an indignant Susan, who had neither vote nor husband, but had been arrested for violating the sanctity of the polling place.
I knew that the child’s welfare and my own could be assured in those delightful rooms kept by a pair of suffragists besotted on the intoxicant of high ideals and, in Elizabeth’s case, a pleasing sense of martyrdom. The infant would be nourished, loved, and endued with sympathy for the disadvantaged, whose lot I did not wish to share as I waited for Franklin to send for me.
I began to sob. They leaned forward, not with the pity that conceals self-righteousness or spitefulness, but with genuine compassion.
Elizabeth sat beside me on the sofa and, putting her arm around my shoulder, intoned, “There, there,” as if those two words had the power to resolve the disharmonies of the world. I let my head rest against her bosom and sneezed when particles of her violet sachet entered my nostrils.
“Tell us what’s troubling you, child,” encouraged Susan from across the room.
“I have no husband!” I cried, but the words were muffled by a snowy expanse of muslin.
“What’s that you said, Ellen?” asked Susan, whose withered breasts had never felt the greedy mouths of infants or of men.
I turned my head toward her. “I’m not married!”
“Ah, I thought as much!” she gasped.
“Wonderful!” The word had escaped Elizabeth’s lips before she could purse them.
“Please don’t send me to the Home for Magdalens!”
“We would sooner send you to the Tombs!” vowed Susan.
“Or to the river, along with a stone to tie around your waist!” cried Elizabeth, the more theatrical of the two.
“You’re a skillful Sholes and Glidden operator, not a laundress,” said Susan, alluding to the fate of unwed Magdalens who did not throw themselves into the river.
“I have no idea how I’ll manage,” I said ruefully. Oh, I was shameless!
“You will manage perfectly well with us!” replied Elizabeth, and in her resoluteness, I glimpsed the young firebrand who had omitted the words and obey from her marriage vow and affirmed our sex’s equality in the Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed at the Seneca Falls convention: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal …”
“When your time comes, you won’t find us wanting in either compassion or skill,” she said, or maybe it was Susan who did. I’d begun to weep in earnest, picturing myself left to face poverty and shame on my own. On the other side of the continent, Franklin seemed a figment of a dream.