Authors: Marge Piercy
“Can’t I just be put down as John Smith? I got the money right here and deeds to property.”
“Your legal name or nothing,” the judge said.
She kept insisting she had plenty of money to pay the bail, but the judge held firm. He was a good man, Anthony had always found. He refused to accept anything but bondsmen whose names would be legally recorded and reported. However, the game did not go on as long as Anthony would have liked. Her infernal grandson kept running around town and finally came up with two tradesmen who pledged her bond. She returned to her elegant house of vice.
When the examination of Madame Restell began, the courtroom was crammed with journalists and onlookers. Anthony had Maggie put extra starch in his shirt so it would stay crisp on the stand. He was hard on his clothes for he sweated heavily. He always wore red flannel underwear, summer or winter. It was more decent that way. Madame was dressed up in velvets and silks, wearing diamonds at her ears and leaning on her
grandson, Charlie, to whom she whispered frequently. Her lawyers asked to have the proceedings closed and the public and press denied access, but the judge refused. He knew Anthony wanted as much coverage as he could get. The judge found ample evidence, all supplied by Anthony, that she should be tried. Once again, there was a scurrying for anyone who would stand surety for her bond to bail her out. Her shysters attempted to dismiss all charges, claiming lack of evidence, bringing her to one of the New York supreme courts. Restell, dressed to the nines with her grandson propping her up, was carted about from court to court in her own carriage. Her damned lawyer pleaded that he, Anthony, had to prove that the items he had seized could either prevent conception or cause an abortion. The judge refused. Anthony watched the whole proceedings from a few feet away. He kept hoping that the obstacles the judge and clerk were throwing in her path could remand her to the Tombs, but she went home, finally, once again on bail.
He heard she was shopping around for a more powerful lawyer, trying an ex-judge with more connections, a bigger reputation. The new lawyer, Stewart, was said to have agreed to represent her if she would take down her sign and travel in a less elegant and ostentatious coach. She agreed.
Anthony made a strong presentation to the grand jury—eloquent and forceful, emphasizing the danger this murderess posed to society. He was back in full voice now, strong and commanding. He could feel his own power radiating to the gentlemen listening. The grand jury indicted Restell just as he wished. He heard that she was drawing up a new will and giving away property to her grandson and granddaughter. He hoped that all the bonuses paid to bondsmen and all the fees to the myriad lawyers were draining her ill-gotten wealth. Because of the judge’s rulings, she had to bribe bail bondsmen, since her own money and property could not be used as surety. He had her house watched and learned that she was sending for her new lawyer on a daily basis. She was falling apart. He could not have hoped for a better outcome. He would destroy her. She had been cool in court but now she was unraveling. She kept summoning her new lawyer or running to his office. He had put fear into her, at last. When next she came to court, she was wrapped like a mummy in layers of shawls over her gown, wan and haggard. Her age suddenly began to show.
He had to leave town the next week. A petition of free lusters and freethinkers fifty thousand strong was being presented to Congress to urge repeal of the law he had secured, which bore his name popularly, as well it
should. Restell’s lawyer Stewart had asked for time to have a chemist analyze the pills and powders to prove that they were not as Anthony claimed, illegal substances. Anthony pushed to have the case brought to the oyer and terminer court, where it would move more quickly and where he suspected he could get a heavier verdict against her. The trial now would begin the following Monday, so Stewart could not get a chemist in time. Anthony was taking no chances on the old witch getting off. Anthony buttered up his supporters in Congress, put on another quick display of shocking items and then rushed back on Saturday to take Sunday with his family and congregation. He was feeling fine enough to attend a birthday celebration for Budington, who was presented with a fine Moroccan leather illustrated Bible by the congregation. Monday morning Anthony would be ready to meet Restell before the bar of justice.
Anthony arrived at court in plenty of time, his wife having prepared his clothes the night before and put his papers in order. He found a scene of confusion. Two women were weeping—her granddaughter and a veiled woman. A man was with the granddaughter, apparently her husband. Were they trying to pull something? Had Restell fled? He began to sweat copiously. He would pursue her at once. Could she have left the country over the weekend? He had his man watching her house, but she might have somehow slipped out. He elbowed his way through the throng of lawyers and witnesses and court officials. “Why is Restell not here?” he thundered. Her family turned and glared at him. The granddaughter ostentatiously pulled her skirts so he would not brush them.
Her lawyer Stewart drew him aside. “The granddaughter found her body in the bathtub this morning. During the night, she slit her own throat.”
“She’s dead?”
Stewart turned to the family. “He wants to know if Madame is really dead.”
“Tell that man that she died rather than endure the scandal of a trial. She did it for us.” The granddaughter was weeping. “And she was terrified of dying in prison. She kept saying she wanted to die at home.”
“You killed her!” the veiled woman screeched.
“A bloody end to a bloody life.” He turned on his heel and left the court. At first, he admitted, he had felt a pang of disappointment at being denied the pleasure of bringing her to justice, but death was surely punishment enough with hell fires awaiting. He had won again. He had plenty
to do, three other trials coming up, a lecture tonight to a group of businessmen who might contribute to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a group of educators to address the next evening about the dangers facing youth. He felt his own power as he took a cab to the offices of the society. He even asked himself if he wasn’t puffing up with unseemly pride at his success. But the Lord had guided his hand. He was cleaning up this city. He was cleaning up this country. Sometimes he could almost see the orderly, well-run moral society of the future, when all this talk and writing and picturing of sex would be vanquished. A great purity would reign. He felt wonderful.
Newsboys were already hawking stories of Restell’s suicide. He had his driver stop so he could pick up some papers. It would be satisfying to read the accounts. No one could accuse him again of hesitating to attack the rich. Her fine mansion on Fifth Avenue, her diamond earrings and fine velvet gowns had not protected her, nor had her real estate holdings nor her carriage and matched horses nor her powerful friends including the chief of police. They had all deserted her. Vice was always alone in the end.
She lay in a coffin on ice in the parlor of her mansion, where a stream of reporters and others came through to view the body. Anthony decided to take a look for himself, to make sure it really was Restell and she was as dead as they claimed. She looked as she had when he had first met her rather than her last haggard appearances before the bar. She looked more youthful than she had any right to, her face calm and dead white, devoid of blood. Her throat was marked with a red line across it. She had severed the carotid artery and both jugular veins. A thorough job. The family—her daughter and family, her granddaughter and husband, her grandson—all glared at him and turned away, but he was not sorry for coming. He had wanted to be sure. Now he was. He had closed her down for good. Her death would serve as a bloody reminder to other abortionists what could become of them. It should be most effective. Soon he would make it impossible for a woman to effect such a crime against society and the family. His duty for the moment was done.
E
LIZABETH THOUGHT THEY DIVIDED
the work of the history up in an intelligent manner. Susan organized the materials; she had a memory for organizational details that Elizabeth not only did not recall but doubted she had paid attention to at the time. All of them researched; Matilda and she wrote. They haggled over the interpretation and then Susan would see the material through the press. They worked in Tenafly because Elizabeth was, as she said, the “least portable.” In her sizable house, their work could take over what had been Theo’s bedroom, now that he was marrying.
“The church is one of the primary enemies of women’s liberty,” Matilda said. “Why do we hold off saying so?”
Elizabeth nodded and was about to speak when Susan frowned at them over her spectacles. “We are not trying to offend the largest number of women possible. We’re trying to build a suffrage movement, not whittle it down to three true believers.”
“I get sick of singing the same old suffrage tune,” Elizabeth said. “There’s so much else wrong.”
“First the vote. Then whatever we choose to attack next.” Susan was adamant. But neither could Susan persuade her to confine herself to that one-note serenade. She found working on the history fascinating, but she still spent months lecturing. The next Monday, she set off again, this time to the West, where she most enjoyed traveling. The people were open to new ideas, and the vast scale of the scenery, the huge mountains of the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, the deserts stretching for days, the canyons and wild rivers excited her.
She endured many adventures on her travels, caught in snowstorms and once in Arizona, in a sandstorm. She endured floods. Forest fires trapped her briefly in a town in Northern California. Now it was early fall in Wyoming. She was riding in an omnibus with miners, cowboys, a rancher, a newspaperman, a banker and his wife, the tanned and wrinkled
widow of a settler. They were telling anecdotes of children’s misadventures. She was halfway through the story of how Gat and Neil had taken baby Theo up on the roof and tied him to the chimney when the omnibus gave a terrible lurch, bounded forward and toppled over, spilling the passengers onto a dry river bed. She was pinned under a wheel for hours watching helplessly while the driver slowly bled to death, his chest punctured by a rod. She wondered if she was going to die there. Two of the least injured men cut the horses loose and tried to move the coach. Their first attempt crushed the shoulder of one of the pinned cowboys. They were still trying to move the coach when they saw dust.
“I hope it ain’t the Sioux,” the rancher said.
They watched the dust cloud approach until at last they could see it was three men riding out to discover why the coach hadn’t arrived at the next station. The five able men hoisted the carriage upright with the aid of the horses. The driver was dead. They had to amputate the leg of a middle-aged miner in order to free him from the wreckage, sawing away while he drank whiskey from a canteen, screaming, until mercifully he passed out. Finally she was freed and helped to her feet, but she could not put weight on her left leg. It buckled under her, and she had to wait for the men to come back with a wagon.
The consequences of the accident stayed with her. Whenever she went up or down stairs, that knee would give way. She had endured backaches during the last month of pregnancy, but once she had delivered, her back had always been fine. Now she had to sleep on her side with her knees drawn up. Her son Gat was living in Iowa, so she headed for him. His wife nursed and babied her. Six weeks later, she resumed her tour. It was winter now, and by the time she had talked to the last audience in the last town, she was running a fever. When she got home to New Jersey, her doctor said she had walking pneumonia and must get into bed and stay there. Five of her seven children gathered, hovering over her.
“Mother,” Harriot said, assuming the role of family spokesman, “you must stop this incessant traveling. Not only do we scarcely see you, but you’re driving yourself into an early grave. You must spare your health and stay home.”
Amelia said the same thing more bluntly. “Let younger women hit the trail. There be forty other women can lecture. Nobody writes like thee.”
Susan was after her to go out on the circuit. Elizabeth resisted, writing, “I owe it to my children to spend more of what time remains to me
with them. I want to get on with our history. I want to tackle another large project.” She was going to take on religion with a frontal assault. She was thinking of calling the new work
The Women’s Bible.
“Neil has moved back in after his divorce. To continue the marriage would have been absurd. They no longer cared for each other and their home had become a battleground. Why live like that? She has her own money. The Civil War and then his domestic war have sapped his strength, as all this traveling has sapped mine.” She was not above trying to provoke a little guilt in Susan for riding her all the time to run conventions, to go out on the lecture circuit, to write speeches for Susan to give.
In truth, she did not mind staying home in the company of family and friends. She received as many visitors as she could endure. There were pleasant evenings playing chess with Neil, playing cards with whichever of her children were there. She performed their favorite songs on her pianoforte and everyone sang. She held conversationals as she had years ago in Seneca Falls; now they argued about Marx, economics, religion and politics and national character, the frontier. Matilda had brought the treatment of Indians to the attention of Elizabeth and Harriot, who was proving to be a suffrage activist. Matilda was writing about the history of treaties with sovereign tribes the government made and then broke at will. The conversations sometimes concerned Indians now as well as expansionist ideas that were current and, Elizabeth thought, masculine and pernicious. Take, conquer, grab. Call those who resisted uncivilized. Call them savage if they fought back.
She wasn’t by any means confined to the house. She went to see electric lights installed in Manhattan. She picnicked with her daughters Harriot and Margaret in Central Park to see Cleopatra’s Needle just erected there. She tried out the new telephone and organized a meeting on the implications of the Edmunds Act, prohibiting polygamy in the territories. She even managed while in Chicago to see the building they called a skyscraper, ten stories tall, the Monadnock Building with walls thick as a fortress. She viewed the immense arm and hand of the Statue of Liberty in Madison Square, where it was on display. She visited Frederick Douglass to wish him well on being appointed ambassador to Haiti. She was aware that she was one of the few to fervently congratulate him on his second marriage. She didn’t see that it mattered that his new wife was white, since they were obviously suited.
“I can please myself now as well as others. That’s the advantage of being
an old lady—that is, one with means to support herself—that makes all the difference,” she told her daughters. “You have in the end only yourself You must never lose yourself for another. Love, but hold on to your own sweet values and your own ideas. Always remember what you need and what you want.”
She and Susan had tried to vote in the 1880 election, again in 1888 and this year, but were turned away. Disgusted, she threw the ballot at the recorder and stormed out. Would she ever, ever get to vote before they buried her? She had begun to doubt it, but perhaps her daughters would have that constitutional right.
Susan went to every convention. The younger women gave her scarves and jewelry, which she seldom wore. They bought her gloves and sachets. They fawned on her, kissed her, fussed over her. Sometimes Elizabeth felt a pang of jealousy but it was gone in an instant. Susan, when they traveled together, had been known to exhibit jealousy of the greater attention Elizabeth’s manner and delivery brought her. Susan complained that when she was on a stage or in a room of strangers with Elizabeth, nobody listened to her. She was overshadowed and ignored. Elizabeth also knew that she had not Susan’s patience with the young things. Susan adored them back. Aside from her sisters, Susan had no family ties and was all theirs. She was cool to Elizabeth’s heat, thin and precise. She was the perfect aunt, and the younger women were comfortable with her.
Never before had Elizabeth had enough time to write. Some writers complained of the agony of production. Not her. Up in her room, remembering the days she had written at a table in the nursery, she gloried in the hours she had to read, to study, to write and write. This was the sunset of living. A few aches and pains were nothing compared to the freedom of her mind.
In early November news came that Lucretia was ill. Elizabeth was packed and ready to be taken to the train when a telegram came. Lucretia was dead. She wept and repacked for the funeral. They had been friends for forty years—longer even than Susan and in some ways more harmonious, probably because, she admitted to herself, Lucretia and she did not usually work together. She had loved Lucretia unstintingly for her sweet disposition, her clarity of mind, her steadfastness of purpose. She remembered standing on the bridge watching ducks in St. James’s Park in London, Lucinda holding her hand while she absorbed Henry’s betrayal. She
remembered the afternoon in Seneca Falls when they had plotted the first woman’s rights convention. She remembered Philadelphia, torrid heat and petty squabbles, then Lucretia riding in with cold chicken from her farm. She would never taste Oolong tea without thinking of Lucretia.
Among her many regular correspondents was Victoria, living in London, as was her sister—but they were not together. Victoria had brought over her parents and set them up, but she lived only with her children. She emphasized that although she had renounced some of her earlier radical causes such as free love, she lectured on and was still committed to woman’s rights. She had fallen in love with an Englishman from an old and respectable banking family. A certain amount of scandal had followed her, but mostly she had been able to quash it with a lawsuit.
Elizabeth asked her what had happened to Colonel Blood. Victoria wrote that he had moved to Maine, married an heiress and gone off to South Africa to prospect. She knew nothing else nor did she wish contact with him. Her ex-husbands had gotten her into considerable trouble, and she was not looking for additional scandal.
Elizabeth heard from Isabella that the sisters were not as close. Tennie did not give a fig about the respectability Victoria was wooing so industriously. She had taken up with a multimillionaire, Francis Cook—Viscount of Montserrat—who owned palaces in Portugal and overlooking the Thames on Richmond Hill. He collected art by Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, so Tennie had taken up a passionate interest in art. Isabella also wrote, with her usual lack of discretion, that Victoria was moving heaven and earth to get her lover, John Martin, to marry her. Recently she had twisted his arm long and hard enough so that he finally introduced her to his family, who lived on an ancient estate.
Elizabeth followed Victoria’s career with interest, especially since she was starting a periodical. When an English suffragist had written to query Susan about Victoria, Susan had told them to avoid contact with her. Elizabeth was sorry about that, but they had not asked her. Victoria was thus denied entrance to the woman’s movement in England. They were afraid of her reputation, however she tried to conceal it. Elizabeth did not think Victoria had done anything to be regretted, however badly it turned out for her and for the movement. Victoria had been forced to retreat from her more radical positions, because she actually lived them. Elizabeth agreed with the free love position, but it got her in less trouble because she was such a respectable wife and mother. It was her anti-religious views that
were beginning to heat the atmosphere. Well, she was old enough to weather any controversy. She had little to lose, besides the good opinion of people she did not respect.
Victoria had been knocked down and almost out by attacks on her. Elizabeth did not blame her for seeking shelter. So long as she advocated woman’s rights, Elizabeth would support her positions and even her attempt to rewrite her own past. Colonel Blood had been a handsome man, an able and brave soldier, but he had been of no use to Victoria that Elizabeth could see. She hoped Victoria’s new lover would prove more of an asset. As for Tennie, that ship would float on any tide. She was a woman whose sensuality was obvious, yet not vulgar. Something about her was natural and powerful. She could also write, when she chose to. Her articles for the
Weekly
had been pungent, with a clarity of thought and writing that surprised Elizabeth at the time. Yet she doubted that Tennie took much pride in that fluency. Probably she would live out her life happily without ever writing more than a note to a friend or relative. Susan had never trusted Tennie, but while Elizabeth did not admire her as she had Victoria nor find Tennie someone she could make into an intimate friend, she enjoyed her energy and her honesty. She was what she was, no apologies, no pretense. That was so unusual in a woman that Susan had never understood it.
The years seemed to move faster and faster. Elizabeth enjoyed a constant round of visitors, including her children and their friends and fiancés and then their spouses and, by and by, their children. She reached a friendly understanding with Henry: they could spend time with their children, have Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays together. She refused, however, to celebrate their anniversary, no matter what Henry or the children might suggest. It had been two decades since they were husband and wife. The legal fiction of marriage was comfortable, and so were the old folks’ gossips they had. He was her best source on party politics and electoral contests. He had met Grover Cleveland and liked him. She enjoyed quizzing him about names in the news, and he relished his superior knowledge of local politicos. He loved to hold forth. When she grew weary of his stories, she would simply excuse herself, go off to her room in the Manhattan flat, shut the door and read. Her writing had a harder edge, she was well aware of that. In her old age, she was growing ever more iconoclastic. She could not take more than a few of the younger women with her, but those few were great company.