“A good man will cosset you; a bad one will beat you,” declared Susan. “In either case, you’ll be exploited and—whether you are aware of it or not—humiliated.”
“Mr. Barnum treats me with consideration.”
“We are not interested in whether Mr. Barnum profits by your small stature. We leave that to his conscience. What does interest us is whether or not you are being taken advantage of because you are a defenseless woman,” said Elizabeth, or Susan. At such times, I could not tell them apart.
“Our conviction is that you most certainly are a victim!” asserted either the gray-bunned lioness or the plump states-woman with cake crumbs on her lap.
“Ellen, what is your opinion?”
I did not want to give it.
“Ellen?”
I bit my nails.
“Please answer the question!” a voice admonished. “I don’t think it’s any of my business!” I retorted. “Or yours!”
Susan and Elizabeth gasped, and their eyes narrowed in disapproval. I wondered if I would be sacked now that the tea party had gone to pot.
“It is our business! Her plight is of concern to all women—small, medium, and large.” Once again, Elizabeth patted the fabric stretched over her middle section.
I looked to Margaret in my distress.
“What I do with my life is my own affair,” she said with a fierce dignity that made her appear the largest person in the room.
An uncomfortable silence ensued. I looked outside and saw Mr. Dode and Mr. Ashton arm wrestling, one of their specialties. The Posturing Man’s hyperbolic pantomime expressed strenuous effort, heroic gumption, and—visible in his eyes, which were opened so wide that I feared his eyeballs would pop out of their sockets—profound despair. The horse drowsed between the shafts, its plumes drooping. I wished I were with them instead of in a room electric with barely suppressed antagonism.
“And for your information, ladies, I am not presently faced with a plight,” said Margaret, putting an end to the subject.
The suffragists had incensed Margaret, who was now climbing down from her chair and calling for her hat.
“Furthermore, I don’t have a problem with men.”
In the world of eccentrics, who, in Margaret’s view, had been chosen to transform our savage race into a civil one, the sexes may have lived in harmony. In any case, she would not allow herself to be used to further the cause of women outside the tented universe in which she had been placed. I couldn’t blame her.
Having put on her hat, Margaret turned her back on us and sailed through the door. Scowling at Elizabeth and Susan, I hurried after her. I caught up to la petite just as Mr. Ashton was handing her into the coach with the finesse of a French dandy in the court of the Sun King.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I would not have seen you belittled for the world.”
Margaret laughed. “I enjoyed myself immensely! I seldom get among your kind except as an object of curiosity. Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony are good women, and I hope they can understand my refusal to be put on display. I would feel a freakishness on a lyceum stage that I don’t in a circus parade.” She pressed my hand affectionately. “I’d like to show you my kind not as you might have seen us at Madison Square Garden or in a fairground tent, but as we are. What do you say, Ellen? Are you game?”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Good. I’ll stop for you tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow … Friday. On Friday, the ladies will be in Philadelphia, addressing the National Woman Suffrage Association.”
“Expect me at a half-past eleven.”
Madame Singleton
“ON HER DEATHBED, MY MOTHER begged my forgiveness for having locked me in the root cellar as punishment for my childish misdemeanors. Even now, I can smell the damp earthen floor, the mold and mildew, and the baskets of turnips, carrots, and potatoes. Father said I would grow eyes like the potatoes, which can see in the dark. He was not afraid to defy convention, but he could not stand up to Mother, who, he said, was ‘as fierce as an Amazon.’ She blamed herself for my ‘condition,’ she told me as she prepared to molder in an everlasting root cellar. But she was no more to blame for my eccentricity than a malevolent curse such as one encounters in a cruel tale by Heinrich Hoffmann or the Brothers Grimm. My diminutiveness has no external cause, but is, as General Tom maintained, an act of free will. Were it otherwise, I would not be able to call my life my own. I refused Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton’s offer because I am my own person and not anybody’s example.”
I was sitting beside Margaret in the carriage that had brought her to Murray Hill three days before. Mr. Ashton sat on the sprung seat next to Mr. Dode. The black horse had been changed for a white one adorned with scarlet plumes fatally plucked from a Florida spoonbill. Margaret held my hand—or rather, I held hers, her white glove enveloped in my fawn. I thought her a precious creature and was instantly ashamed. I reminded myself that she was not a little girl being taken to the stores by a favorite aunt. She was taking me to visit the small world, which I had never before entered.
“Most of our troupe is with Mr. Barnum on a London engagement,” she said. “I stayed behind to comfort Tom’s wife, Lavinia. Mr. Dode and Mr. Ashton remained to chaperone me, and some six or seven others suffer from seasickness and do not go abroad. They’re stopping at Barnum’s Hotel, at Twentieth Street and Broadway.”
She sensed my nervousness, and, squeezing my thumb with her hand reassuringly, said with a smile, “It will be no worse than your tea party.” That is what worries me, I told myself. “I suspect that my friends will take to you, just as I have. You have only to be yourself, Ellen.”
And what is that self? I wondered.
I rested my eyes in the shadows of the coach. Margaret relaxed her grip on my thumb but did not take her hand from my palm. My mind was confused by her presence, and I wanted to compose myself. She was both rose and thorn: She delighted and vexed me at the same time.
Margaret’s imperious withdrawal from the sitting room had dismayed my suffragists. They criticized her for choosing to remain aloof from the issue of woman’s sovereignty; at the same time, they insisted on viewing her as another victim of men, who were incorporated in the shameless showman Phineas T. Barnum. Long after the customary hour of Morpheus’s descent, they fretted. At breakfast, they announced that they had failed her. Keeping Margaret’s parting words to me a secret, I let them stew. The dish was, I thought then, seasoned to their taste.
By supper, “the unfortunate business” had assumed gigantic importance in their minds. I do believe that if they had not been reconciled with Margaret, Susan and Elizabeth would never have finished the History; the ink would have dried to powder in their inkwells. Margaret never did agree to appearing on the lecture circuit, nor did she disavow her affection for Barnum. She gave the two suffragists to understand, however, that she admired their work and would value them as friends. Having met their match, the two firebrands let the matter drop.
Driving down Broadway, Margaret and I passed the Fifth Avenue Hotel, equipped with a steam-powered “vertical railroad” to transport guests to the upper floors, and Madison Square Garden, where the colossal arm and torch of Liberty awaited money to be pledged so that her dismembered parts could be assembled on Bedloe’s Island and rise colossally above New York Harbor.