Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York Read online

  Susan rose and walked to the windows, open to the May morning and the garden. The scent of lilacs drifted in. Bees were humming in the honeysuckle outside and Elizabeth could hear mourning doves roo-coo-cooing in the big maples. “We must do something to move things forward. Our movement’s stalled like a carriage in the mud.” Susan paced as if consumed by her own energy.

  “Let’s go out to the porch.” As they strolled toward the door, Elizabeth snagged the pastry. Susan was thin as a pole, but Elizabeth enjoyed her girth. She felt her appearance was more grandmotherly and thus less threatening because she was plumpish—with curly hair and a great laugh—a useful façade for a lifelong revolutionary. She had been a flirt in her younger days, and she still carried herself with that ease, the confidence of someone often called charming.

  For a few moments they rocked in silence, looking at the side garden where a smattering of jonquils were still in bloom among bloodred and white tulips. This house was twice the size of hers in Seneca Falls—two full stories and a smaller third story, with six pillars in front. It was not one of the fashionable carpenter Gothic houses going up all around her but simple and grand in an older style. Susan was frowning. “We should never have agreed to amalgamate the Woman’s Rights Society with the Anti-Slavery Society. We thought we were all for universal suffrage, but they have other priorities. Once again they’re pushing women to the end of the line—telling us to be patient, forever and ever, amen.”

  For two decades Elizabeth and Susan had given their energy, their passion to abolition. “I supported Wendell for president of the society. I intend to remind him at the convention.” Elizabeth folded her arms and sniffed the lilacs. Somehow that scent was the same color as the flowers, lilac indeed. Wendell Phillips had been a friend and ally since 1840, at the anti-slavery convention in London, when he had supported the women’s desire to be seated as delegates. That defeat had been Elizabeth’s first awakening to her situation as a woman. Wendell was a handsome man who liked women and she got on with him. She was convinced she could get him to support woman suffrage.

  “You’re far more impressed by Wendell Phillips than I am, Mrs. Stanton.”

  “He’s of old Brahmin stock, but he’s given his all to anti-slavery. Let’s see if he pays his debt to us. I swear on the heads of my children, Susan, I won’t let our sex be put off this time.”

  “This meeting is crucial…” Susan turned to beam at her. Her face could soften remarkably. At such moments, she was almost handsome. “Well, are you going to address my typographers? Have you made up your mind yet?”

  Susan was organizing the women typographers into a union. “If you really want me to.”

  “Why do you let Henry come out here?” Susan returned to the earlier point of disagreement between them, in her dogged way.

  Susan would never understand the bond between them that, frayed as it was, made her forgiving. “I’ve had seven children with him. I’m financially independent finally. We live separately. What good would it do to create a fuss?”

  “You should never have married him to begin with.”

  “I hadn’t met you or Lucretia then. I was living with my father, who wouldn’t let me do anything political.” After she’d addressed the New York legislature on married women’s rights, he never forgave her for speaking in public, calling her a harridan. He had only reinstated her in his will shortly before he died. “Henry was the breadwinner then—not that he ever earned a lot of bread.” She laughed. Even the house in Seneca Falls on the outskirts of town overlooking the tanneries and mills—a plain house she had come to loathe for its isolation—was only theirs because her father had paid for it. “I can’t imagine life without my children. Sometimes I’ve wanted to run away from them and the constant problems and chores. But I never did and I never will. They give me great pleasure. They tether me to the wheel of life.”

  “You could do with a little less tethering.”

  Susan was capable of passionate friendship but had never really been in love. It was not that Susan lacked domestic virtues. She could cook and clean and sew and manage a household, if not as well as Elizabeth—who was not convinced anybody could do it as well—then sufficiently to fill in. How often Susan had come and taken over so she would be free to write a speech or a paper making their position on some issue clear. If it had not been for Susan, how would she have endured her marriage, really? Henry was never around when she needed him. He had not been present during the birth of any of their seven children. He loved to travel, so he arranged his life to spend vast amounts of time doing it. He always seemed to find work that required him to be elsewhere. And elsewhere he had usually been, until the scandal in the Customs House forced his resignation from his last grasp at public life. He missed the limelight now. He had a minor position at the Sun, writing about politics, and a small law practice in the city. He was jealous of her fame, but she ignored that.

  No, she had been married to Susan as well as Henry all those years. Susan had given her the support she needed when she felt as if her brain would burst her skull with the tedium of cooking meals for a big family every day, managing the scant help, dealing with laundry and sicknesses, creating her own medicines and poultices and salves, bringing in and putting up fruit from their orchard, sewing for an army, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning again. Indeed, Henry without ever acknowledging it had been married to Susan too, for Susan had run his household when Elizabeth couldn’t—something the children understood, who had grown up calling her Aunt Susan and giving her the love she had always given them. Susan and she had their disagreements, but Elizabeth never doubted they were far stronger together than separate. When they both agreed, they were always right.

  Now her youngest Robbie was screaming, so Elizabeth trotted in search of him. He was nine. He had been huge at his birth—twelve and a half pounds—and he was still big for his age. Big and awkward. He had been climbing in a weeping willow tree and had fallen. She examined him quickly with a practiced hand for injuries. “You didn’t break anything. You’ll have a big purple bruise on your knee. A comfrey poultice and you’ll feel like new. Come.”

  He was badly shaken from the fall. She put him on the sofa in the back parlor wrapped in a quilt she had sewn with women friends back in Seneca Falls, and set him up with a jigsaw puzzle of Washington Crossing the Delaware. She never made the boys ashamed to cry, although Henry had tried. Venting emotions was good for both sexes. Her own emotions—anger, love, passion—were the engine that drove her through all the obstacles an unjust society could throw in a woman’s path.

  Susan left for the city and the washing began. Amelia had already fired up the boiler, so the water for the linens was hot. They took turns stirring the suds into the water and then stirring the load with a huge wooden paddle. Amelia started the bluing cooking on the coal stove while Elizabeth rinsed the first two loads. They had a hand wringer that got most of the water out of the less delicate things—the sheets, towels, tablecloths, underclothes, towels, rags. Then Amelia joined her and they hung the damp clothes on lines from the back of the house to the carriage house—not that they had a carriage, but the family occupying the house before her had. They would get done as much as they could today, then resume tomorrow.

  Finally the next evening, she sat at the dining room table to begin the speech for the women typographers. Amelia was still ironing. Elizabeth passionately hated ironing, especially the goffering iron that was needed for all the ruffles and little tucks. Four different irons were used for all the linens and clothes. She would focus on the economic disadvantages of women. Yes, and she would talk about divorce and child custody. Some suffragists—the Boston ladies in particular—seemed afraid of working-class women. Elizabeth liked them. Susan was actually more ladylike than she had ever been. Elizabeth was made of coarser, more earthy stuff and understood women’s physical needs and desires while longing for a world in which they could achieve fuller expression without danger, without fear, without
condemnation. She had always liked her body and felt at home in it, enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, enjoying riding and dancing. Susan was abstemious by nature. Elizabeth did not want a life of bread and water and stones.

  When she’d first been with Henry, they had been disciples of Graham, who advocated loose clothing, cold rooms, lots of exercise, whole grains and avoiding meat and fats. He also advocated sex no more than twelve times a year. They had not stayed on Graham’s program long. The porridge and whey routine had gone out the window, but she retained her belief in fresh air, exercise and loose clothing. She had worn the bloomer costume for two years, but she found that no one could hear what she was saying for the commotion a woman wearing pants seemed to cause. Reluctantly she abandoned its comfort.

  When this draft was finished, Susan would transcribe it, for no one else could read her handwriting. She’d developed a terrible handwriting early, perhaps to keep her diary a secret from her stern mother. Or perhaps it had always been that her mind leapt ahead and her hand ran raggedly after to try to capture her thoughts. She scrawled and rushed on with that same feeling she used to have on horseback, a sense of being fast as the wind and conquering distance; that was all she could do to change the world so far. So quickly she wrote on.

  FOUR

  ANTHONY LEANED FORWARD, placing his hands on his knees and peering into Edward’s face. “My mother was the purest soul I’ve ever known. She was a saint, Edward. Losing her when I was a boy of ten is something I’ve never gotten over and never shall. But while she lived, she taught me to be a true Christian.”

  “I’m sure she was a remarkable woman, my friend. But the roles open to a young man in Manhattan are a far cry from the world of a ten-year-old on a farm in Connecticut. What did your mother know about living in a great metropolis?”

  “Here are more temptations, more sinners and more ways to sin. But the way to live righteously is exactly the same.” Anthony found the city frightening at times, but he never imagined returning to rural poverty. He must make his way here or not at all. They both stopped talking to watch a four-in-hand pass with matched horses, some rich guy off to an important appointment. The coachman in front and the footman standing on the back of the carriage wore livery of red and blue.

  “There’s the good life.” Edward knocked his pipe out on the edge of the stoop where they were eating bread and cheese for lunch. Anthony thought smoking a filthy habit that could lead into temptation, for some of the so-called tobacco shops in lower Manhattan had a bevy of prostitutes on call or available in the back room, as he’d learned when Edward stopped for pipe tobacco. “Sometimes I feel you just don’t see what life offers, Tony—may I call you that?”

  “Don’t. I like my own name. It’s more dignified.” No one had called him Tony since his mother died. It was too intimate for anyone else to use. “Life offers chances to sin, but they’re only useful to build your strength of character by resisting.” Perhaps it was futile to try to save Edward, but Anthony could not give up. Edward reminded him of his own brother Samuel, who had perished tragically of wounds received at Gettysburg on Barlow’s Knoll. Samuel had died slowly and in great pain over the course of a week, although Anthony had prayed for him day and night. Anthony had enlisted in the Fifteenth Connecticut Infantry to replace his brother. Because of Samuel, Anthony could not stop trying to reach Edward. Edward was his only friend so far in this strange city.

  “Anthony, you’re twenty-four, right? Have you ever had a woman?”

  “Had? You mean in the carnal sense?”

  “Is there another way to have a woman?”

  “Of course I haven’t. Purity is not only for women.”

  “You’ll make some woman a good husband. If you ever get close enough to one to marry her.” Edward winked at him.

  “But on what we earn, when can we think about marriage? Twelve dollars a week. Out of that we pay room and board, our clothing, transportation, and I have to give some to my church on Sunday—”

  “The boss has you going to his church in Brooklyn. All the way on the ferry there and back every Sunday. Isn’t that a little excessive just to lick his boots?”

  “It’s a decent church. I feel at home there.” He liked strict hellfire and brimstone sermons, just as in the Congregational churches of his childhood and the commanding revivalist preachers that had swept through, saving everybody again and again. That was real religion, religion that smote him to his bones. The fear of hell could make a man feel truly alive.

  “Ah, Anthony, tonight after work, come with me to the Melodeon. It’s a concert saloon. There’s a fight on tonight and Katie Sullivan is going to dance with her Girly Girls. Enjoy yourself for once.”

  “You go there every Friday night.” For Anthony, it was as if Edward plunged into darkness and vanished. Was it his duty to accompany him once, to see what so fascinated his friend? Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he suspected. Maybe he was unfair to Edward.

  “Because it’s fun, Anthony, fun.”

  Anthony was eyeing Edward’s pocket. Something yellow with printing on it. Edward succumbed to the dirty books that were sold everywhere in the neighborhood where they worked, on Pearl Street. Anthony had tried to reason with Edward before and gotten nowhere. Edward’s reading would have corrupted a far stronger soul.

  “It’s a good-time place. Let yourself loosen up for once. Relax with the boys.”

  Anthony passed those concert saloons, drab as empty warehouses by day, lit up at night with every window ablaze, men staggering in and out and women too on the arms of ruffians, sometimes alone as only a lady of easy virtue would appear. He should investigate. “All right, Edward. I’ll go with you tonight after supper.”

  Edward clapped him on the back. “You won’t be sorry! New York has a lot to offer a young man, even sports like us with scarcely two dollars jingling in our pockets. There’s lots of pleasure to be had by sporting men, Anthony, a whole world of excitement. We work from eight till eight, and we deserve some fun.”

  It was time to go back to work. They were both shipping clerks in a big dry goods importer, working at adjacent desks and going home at night to a dingy boardinghouse eight blocks away. Edward and he would probably never have become friends if they did not share that walk every day from boardinghouse to work and back again. Every day together they ate meager lunches that left them hungry. Edward was like the men in Anthony’s regiment in the Union army, who had teased him unmercifully, mocking his religion and his temperance, one of whom had actually knocked him down when he spilled his daily rum ration on the ground rather than passing it on. He had to fight Reddiger then. The ring of men gathered around them, one on the lookout for the sergeant, egging on that bully, jeering him. They had expected Reddiger to squash Anthony, although they were both big men. The men had mistaken blustering, drinking, whoring and playing cards on the Sabbath for real manhood. Anthony could admit to himself how much satisfaction he had taken in laying Reddiger on the ground. He had proved that godliness did not make him a marshmallow. Years of hard chores on the farm had given him power in his arms and shoulders. He had sparred with his older brothers many times out behind the barn.

  Not that Edward was a bully. No, he was simply weak, like so many of his fellow soldiers had been, without backbone to resist the temptations surrounding them. Prostitutes followed armies, and even the officers accepted that as a fact of life instead of a way to moral death—sometimes with the terrible diseases God would smite them with, actual death. Corruption sent out tentacles a hundred different ways, through obscene books, postcards and picture books the men passed around to each other and kept in their mattresses, through rum they drank and cards they played, the constant gambling, the dirty jokes they told as if nothing was worth laughing at that did not degrade women or insult anyone with faith.

  Normally Friday he would go to the YMCA on Varick Street. He had come to know the work of the YMCA when he was in the infantry. The YMCA was one of the groups in the Christian Commission
that sent Bibles, ministers and religious tracts to the front, along with blankets. When his fellow soldiers mocked him, he sometimes found solace with representatives of the commission. One minister had aided him in setting up regular prayer meetings in his company, but often he was the only attendee. It had been a frustrating time. When he arrived in the city with exactly five dollars in his pocket, and that borrowed, he quickly found the YMCA, whose officers helped him to his present job—such as it was.

  After the usual greasy supper at their boardinghouse—unidentifiable meat in watery gravy topped with lard and eked out with turnips and mushy cabbage—he allowed Edward to take him by the arm and steer him in the direction of the Bowery. Anthony seldom walked there with its garish gaslights and huge crowds jostling each other off the pavement. The street was chockablock with carriages and wagons among the pedestrians. Women arm in arm accosted them as the two men struggled through the crowd. Many of the men and women were poorly dressed, tenement dwellers he judged, but he saw many young men, clerks, apprentices, office workers like the two of them. Anthony turned his face away from the advances of the wanton girls, but Edward bantered with them. On they went to a place where a placard proclaimed grog and dancing. It cost them twenty-five cents to enter, although Anthony noticed a separate smaller door for women, who apparently were passed in free.