Sex Wars (22 page)

“Good girl. I’ll see you as soon as my namby-pamby son gets off my back. For a weak-minded dolt, he can be a real mule. He’s bringing his wife and kids and half my idiot relatives. Even my drunken wastrel son Corny.” Vanderbilt began to pace in his sunny bedroom, the best room in the mansion on Washington Place. He strode up and down, puffing and roaring like one of his steam locomotives. “Corny drives me crazy. Runs up bills and expects me to pay them. When I won’t, he uses the Vanderbilt name to borrow money. That publisher Horace Greeley bails him out every time. I told Greeley I don’t give a hoot, I’ll be damned if I’ll pay Corny’s bills. But Greeley says he doesn’t expect to be paid back, and then he goes on doling out money to Corny as if the fool isn’t going to spend it on high living and be broke again by the following Monday.”

“No use getting so upset, old boy. Every family has a black sheep. Corny is yours, but at least he hasn’t shot anybody. Be thankful he’s just a ne’er-do-well and not an outlaw or something worse.”

So Vanderbilt went off to Saratoga grumbling about William spoiling his vacation. They did not hear from him until they read in the papers that Cornelius Vanderbilt Sr. had eloped to Canada with his second cousin called Frankie and married her.

Tennie threw the newspaper across the room, cursing like a sailor. “Shhh!” Victoria shook her head. “We can still use him. Don’t yell or Buck will get involved.”

“He promised to marry
me!
How could he do this? I never heard of this damned cousin.”

“I suspect his son William was behind it. Found her acceptable and sicced her on the Commodore.”

Tennie paced, tearing at her hair. “He asked me to marry him and I accepted. How could he run off with another woman?”

“I suggest as soon as he returns to New York, you go to his office and ask him. Politely but firmly. No scenes but straight-up questions. I’ll go with you, if that would help. We don’t want him to dump us. It’s too late to scream about him getting married—it’s done. We have to keep up a good relationship and wish him the best.”

Tennie picked up a chinoiserie vase Utica had bought and threw it into the fireplace, where it exploded into shards. “I’d like to break his neck. But I won’t, I’ll be treacle. Maybe we can turn this to our advantage. At least I don’t have to be a wife. I’m not real keen on wifehood, you know.”

Victoria picked up the pieces of china and put them into a folded paper. “We’ll see what this wife is like, how hard she tries to push us out of his life. And his pockets. If we can make him feel just moderately guilty, I have an idea how he might help us. And make us rich into the bargain. And that’s what we really want, isn’t it?”

E
LIZABETH AND SUSAN
sat side by side in a train that was not moving, although it was still belching black smoke and soot back on them. It was too hot to shut the window, so they sat there half choked and getting filthier by the minute. Word came back that the engine had hit a horse. “Poor thing!” Elizabeth said, for she loved horses still. “It’s not fair to them. What do they know of trains?”

Susan took out her pocket watch and looked at it with a resigned sigh. “We’re going to be late. We won’t have time to eat.”

“The food we’ve been getting on this trip, it’s healthier to go hungry.” Elizabeth wiped her forehead with a handkerchief no longer clean or white.

“I only hope the audience waits for us. The agent said we were sold out.”

“Ah!” Elizabeth cried out in pleasure as the train lurched forward. But then it stopped again. “Enough of this sitting about.” She rose and made her way along the railroad car. She spied a mother with a baby, and at once engaged her. The baby, a girl, was cranky in the heat. Elizabeth talked the mother into loosening the swaddling bands. Soon she had the little girl bouncing in her arms and chortling. Then, standing in the aisle with the baby, she talked with the woman about raising a daughter. She next got into conversation with a federal land agent about homesteading. Finally she chatted with an ex-soldier who had lost an arm at Manassas. All the other women were huddled in their seats fanning themselves, but she never saw any reason not to get to know fellow travelers.

With a great lurch the train finally got under way and they were once again rushing across the cornfields at a great clip, perhaps twenty-five
miles an hour. It was too noisy to talk, so she went over her speech, one of three she had given in town after town all over Missouri and Ohio and now would give again and again in Wisconsin, each time tweaking it a little. It kept things fresh. A local reference. A little anecdote. A new joke.

The train pulled into Beloit an hour and forty minutes late. A committee of three women and five men was waiting for them in the station. By the time everyone had been introduced—Elizabeth had a method of remembering names for a few hours that consisted of picking out one physical characteristic of each person (mole on chin; bushy eyebrows that meet; red hair that looks dyed; sparrow mannerisms) and fixing the name to that—it was time to go directly to the opera house. One of the women handed her a sandwich of homemade bread and ham which she ate in the open wagon as they rattled and bumped along.

“We have a good crowd.” Elizabeth peeked out from behind the dusty plush curtain. “I do prefer it when the seats are full.”

“It’s the same amount of work for forty people as it is for four hundred.” Susan was polishing her glasses.

Susan spoke first. When Elizabeth came out from behind the curtain, she beamed at the audience as if she were about to give them a treat. Excitement, controversy, humor, warmth and practical advice. As she stood at the podium with the gaslights glaring on her, she loved the heat of the crowd beating back. It was electrifying, no matter how many times she gave a speech ninety percent the same from town to town. That feeling of the crowd stirred up, excited, even at times angry: it was like nothing else. That had been Henry’s vice too, but now he had cut himself off because of his chicanery in office when he had been given the plum of customs official. He was jealous of the attention paid to her, as once she had envied him his freedom.

T
HE UNION AND CENTRAL PACIFIC
railroads had met at Promontory Point and the continent was crossed, joined east to west by railroad and telegraph. All over the States, there were parades and fireworks. Elizabeth and Amelia traveled into Manhattan with Harriot and Robbie to see the celebration. They would spend the night in the flat where Henry lived, for this was too momentous an occasion for the children to miss. After the parade, there were hours of oratory while the kids grew cranky. At last after sunset the fireworks filled the sky over the harbor and although Harriot covered her ears at the detonations, she oohed and aahed along with Robbie
at the bright exploding flowers zooming toward them. Henry had been holding forth on how important this link across the continent was to business. It was a relief to have the blasts drown him out. All that seemed left of their great love affair—besides the children, of course—was his capacity to annoy her.

B
ACK IN TENAFLY
the next day, Elizabeth sat at the dining room table with Amelia answering letters piled up over the past two months. Elizabeth was never sure whom she would count as her closest companion, Amelia or Susan. Susan was her intellectual and political companion, but Amelia shared everything that went on in the household.

Amelia picked up the letters waiting to be put into envelopes and stamped. The recipients were on their own translating Elizabeth’s scrawl, but in order to be sure the letters could pass through the post office, Amelia wrote the addresses in her neat sloping hand. A hundred times, Elizabeth thought she should dictate her correspondence to Amelia, whose handwriting was so legible Elizabeth could read it upside down. “Julius,” Amelia said—it was a nickname out of adolescence. Only her oldest friends called her that—”why do thee sign thy full name on every single letter even to thine own sisters? Elizabeth Cady Stanton—as if they wouldn’t know.”

“I fight constantly to keep my square foot of ground. You’re Amelia Willard in the morning, at noon and in the night. But if you married tomorrow, Amelia, say you married John Brown—”

“He was a good man in his heart but a violent one. And he was married. He had several sons—”

“All right, tomorrow morning you marry John Smith—”

“Didn’t he marry Priscilla Alden? I’ll not be committing bigamy, Julius, not even for thee.”

“Stop it!” She made a mock slap at Amelia. “Now you marry John Smith and five minutes later you’re no longer Amelia Willard. You vanish from the face of the earth. You’re Mrs. John Smith—a mere appendage. He’s swollen and you’ve shrunk.”

“But Lucy Stone is still Lucy Stone, as she was born.”

“That’s one of the strongest things she ever did. Nowadays she fears to cross a single Republican politician or a single husband who’s worried what will happen if the divorce or property laws change…” Elizabeth drew a
deep breath and smiled at Amelia. Amelia was neither plump like herself nor lean and bony like Susan, but a middle-of-the-weight, middle-of-the-road woman, strong-backed, strong-armed but of a sweet disposition—even if a little too inclined to tease her. “That’s why I sign my full name. Only my enemies call me Mrs. Henry Stanton—to make me not exist.”

“Thee hast many first names, however. Elizabeth. Julius. Two of thy school friends call thee Johnston after thy hometown. Thy sisters call thee Libby, as does Lucretia Mott. Thy husband used to call thee Lizzie Lee—”

“In the days when we were truly man and wife.” Elizabeth sighed heavily, signing another letter and passing it to Amelia. “That’s to Lucretia. I hope to see her again in a couple of weeks.”

“Thee wrote her just the day before yesterday.”

“I keep her apprised of all that’s going on. Philadelphia is just too far away. I want her in the next room.” She stood and walked to the windows, open on the warm October day. The maples were beginning to turn golden in the yard. Blue and lavender New England asters were blooming in beds she could see from the window, as were the hundreds of tiny flowers of white boltonia. “In another life, I would have time to garden. I’d grow beds and beds of flowers.”

“In another life, thee might be a fierce tiger and leap upon the men who frustrate thee so. That I can see before Julius in her rose garden.”

“I wouldn’t mind rending a few limb from limb. Back to the correspondence.” Next a group wanting to be part of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth wrote the same letter she did to all such, Welcome. Any group that wanted to join had only to let them know. She scrawled a reply and went on to the next. Susan usually handled the correspondence—for one thing, her handwriting was legible—but she was on the road lecturing.

“Why do thy old friends call thee Julius? I’ve always wondered about that.”

“In a school play, I was Julius Caesar and they all got to stab me. My friend Mary said I had his temperament and would make a great general.” Elizabeth scribbled another reply. “Susan and I are generals. Although lately we’re losing every battle. When they passed that damned Fifteenth Amendment that brought the word ‘male’ into the Constitution for the first time, I knew it would take us fifty years to get it out. I won’t live to see that.”

“Perhaps like Moses on Pisgah Mountain, thee will see the land of equality even if thee fears not to live in it.”

She put down the pen. “The matter of a woman’s name is not trivial, Amelia. Slaves have no names but what their masters give them. Sambo McNaught signifies the Negro belonging to Master McNaught. Similarly, a woman’s name disappears upon marriage because she becomes property too. So it matters what a woman is called.”

Ever since the meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association in January in Washington, groups had been asking to join. That did not include the Boston women. Lucy Stone had aligned with Julia Ward Howe to organize their own association. Lucretia had been invited but had refused. Susan and Elizabeth had pointedly not been asked. The New England women were going to organize a new national suffrage organization this winter, to rival the National. They would include men and would take great care to do nothing that went against the Republican Party’s agenda. Elizabeth propped her head on her hand. “Do these letters never end? Susan does so well with this. I’ll be glad when she’s back. Three more weeks!”

S
USAN RETURNED FROM
her lecture tour and slept in her room for eighteen hours straight. When she finally woke, Elizabeth had Amelia bring up breakfast. Susan sat up in bed staring at the tray, reaching for her glasses on the bedside table. Elizabeth took a seat in a rocking chair by the window and grinned at her. “You’re having breakfast in bed, Susan dear. Let me coddle you a bit.”

“We can’t afford to get soft, Mrs. Stanton. We must keep our backs straight and our heads high.”

“Outside the house. Today and tomorrow, you put your feet up, you relax for once and I’ll make you chocolate pudding. We have strategy to discuss. We have a war to plan. I have news from Boston. Lucy Stone refuses to share leadership with me. I offered to resign—”

“Mrs. Stanton, you cannot!”

“She didn’t care. She won’t participate in any organization in which her husband cannot vote. Apparently she’s worried about male suffrage. Perhaps that will be their new plank.”

“Who else is involved besides Lucy and Julia? And Lucy’s hubby, Henry.”

“Chalk up another Henry—Henry Ward Beecher, the passionate preacher.”

“Is Tilton involved? Has he turned against us?”

“He’s trying to negotiate a truce. No, he hasn’t deserted us. Yet, anyhow.
He has some bone to pick with Beecher. Therefore, though Beecher may be the dog who wags the tail, Tilton will not wag this time.”

“We should go see him this week.”

“Agreed. Now, Lucy has lined up Abby Kelly and a bunch of other New Englanders, that’s it so far. They’ve called a convention in Cleveland in two weeks.”

Susan climbed out of bed, setting the tray aside. “I’ll bathe and make plans to attend.”

“We’ve very purposely not been invited, my dear.”

“I’d like to see them keep me out. I intend to march in as if I expected a welcome, and I intend to give a speech. Tomorrow, write it for me. They shall not hold their convention without me unless they carry me out bodily.”

Amelia came to collect the tray. “Thee has little to worry about on that score. I can’t imagine the women’s convention that would oust Susan B. Anthony.”

Elizabeth patted Susan’s hand. “I find these endless conventions boring as tea parties. I’m going to abstain from them.”

“Mrs. Stanton, you cannot do that! You can’t abandon the movement.”

“Conventions aren’t the movement. We want to reach women all over the States, on the frontier, in Western towns. The women who go to these conventions are already for suffrage even if they don’t see eye to eye with you and me.”

“But you cannot give over the movement to the New England caucus overloaded with husbands and male preachers.”

“Oh, I’ll go now and then. But I’m finished attending every single convention ten women in Knoxville decide to hold.”

“I’ll go to Cleveland and assume they’ll let me speak. I’ll be meek and mild but state our position unwaveringly.”

Amelia laughed. “Thee will march in with banners flying, oh Susan, angels of fire in thy hair. Thee has still thy Quaker meekness with all the stubbornness underneath we conceal in our little gray dresses like so many Protestant nuns. Ah, but don’t we know how to make ourselves heard when that small still voice speaks through us? If I were a gambling woman, I would bet upon thee, Susan.”

E
LIZABETH STOOD ON HER LAWN
under the trees whose leaves had mostly fallen, except for a few parched remnants clinging to the oaks. She drew her coat about her and tucked her hands into her old muff. She was
not dressed for going out in public, wearing an old serge dress much mended and scruffy boots, for the grass was damp. A dank wind picked at her but the air felt clean, unlike the city air she would be breathing this time tomorrow. Susan would leave in the morning early, then she would get herself organized to go into the city to the
Revolution
office.

She was happiest in Tenafly, where sometimes when Susan was here with Amelia present and her favorite daughter Harriot she felt as if she had created a little paradise of women. In her house they could be free together. In her house they could govern themselves. In her house, their ideas were listened to, taken seriously, discussed, improved upon. The rest of their lives was war, but here she found peace and a reasonable amount of plenty. It revived her. It fed her. It enabled her to go on.