Sex Wars (49 page)

Elizabeth was rather pleased with herself that she had shocked so many by her later writings. She might look like a kindly grandmother with white curls and a sweet round Mrs. Santa Claus face, but inside she was as fiery and radical as ever. She attacked religion, to Susan’s annoyance, because revering a bunch of writing from men who had lived two thousand years ago as holy was ludicrous. Divines were always quoting certain passages in the Bible and ignoring others. The Bible maligned women, as did just about every so-called holy book she was aware of. Men put on dresses, called themselves priests and began telling women how wicked they were and that they must give up their will and desires.

When she was supposed to be resting, alone in her room, she took the
powder Livonia had given her with a glass of port. It had a bitter taste, but the port sweetened her mouth. She called Harriot and Livonia and asked to stand. Livonia stood on one side and Harriot on the other as they lifted her gently out of her chair. She signaled to them to let go. She stood on her own, staring straight ahead, although she could see nothing but dim shapes. She had been too weak to dress, but she was tidy enough in her best blue dressing gown. She asked the maid Maria to lay out a handsome navy silk dress she hoped they would bury her in. She wondered if there were an audience, what she might say to them in this, the hour of her departure. Her death. Use the blunt word. The last century had used quite enough euphemisms. She hoped people would speak more honestly in this new century.

Things had changed a bit for women. They had some rights to property. Divorce had grown easier for women to obtain. More often than not, the woman was given custody of her children. She had been born into a world in which the father owned the wife and the children with the force of an absolute ruler. Women were at least on the road to owning themselves. They were still paid far less than men, but some professions were open. She had cried and pleaded for a college education. Now more women went to college every year. Increasing numbers of women attended medical schools. Women were admitted in some states to practice before the bar. In Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho women voted. Prostitution was still rampant, and thanks to Congress, it was illegal for a woman to control her body and her fertility, but they did it anyhow. Contraception might be illegal, but it was widely practiced. There was much work to do to free women, but she would have to leave those battles to others. She was laying down her heavy banner at last.

Her children were good people, useful, bright. What more could she ask for than to have used her time to move things forward? She had loved her friends. When she was young, she loved Henry fiercely. She had enjoyed her old age, famous, embattled but always with allies who grasped her intent and helped her fight on, surrounded by loving children and grandchildren who called her Queen Mother. She had a good time of it. A good run.

“I’m tired now.”

Harriot grasped her elbow and with Livonia began to help her into the chair, but she shook her head. “I want to go to bed. It’s time for me to sleep now.”

And it was.

Victoria had been widowed eighteen years before, when John had died of pneumonia. She inherited his estate and was once again an independently rich woman. She had begun editing a periodical, the
Humanitarian.
Until her death, her old friend Elizabeth contributed articles, as did many prominent feminists—as woman’s rights advocates were now called—scientists and professors. She had become quite respectable. She was still passionate about causes but no longer interested in men, not in a sexual way. She had loved John. Their life together had been good, their intimacy satisfying. Now that he was gone, she devoted her affection to her daughter. Zulu Maud had occasional suitors, but no one Victoria considered worthy of her, so she discouraged them. She preferred to keep her daughter with her. After all, Victoria had been married three times, and two of those marriages she considered disastrous. It was better for a woman to remain unmarried, if she could afford to, as she often told Zulu, to maintain control of her own destiny. “My dearest, you will always have plenty of money. You don’t need a man for anything but amusement.”

After the turn of the century, she suspended her journal and moved with Zulu Maud to the old estate, Norton Park, on 1,100 acres in Worcestershire. The elegant house dated back to the sixteenth century. There were a number of cottages on the land and a Norman church. She invited Tennie to come live with her, as her lover Francis, who had actually married her, had died suddenly. Tennie declined. She had her own money, fine houses and a life she enjoyed. Tennie went on collecting art and occasional young men. She was still beautiful at fifty-six. She liked traveling, staying in the best hotels. She visited occasionally but said, “I don’t fancy living in the country and growing moss on my back. A week or two is all I can take of the manor life, Vickie. How can you endure it? You’re a hundred and ten miles from London, from the world. Who’s to talk to?”

“Do you remember Demosthenes and his prophecy that I’d be a leader of my people?”

Tennie nodded. “So you ran for president. Then that sour son of a bitch Comstock stuck us in the Tombs.”

“That prophecy’s come true, at least here. I’ve started a women’s agricultural college. I’ve improved local schools. I’ve converted the barn to a cultural center for plays, lectures, concerts, magic lantern shows. I’ve
launched a fair to improve agricultural practices. I’ve started a Ladies’ Automobile Club… Let’s go for a drive, now, before it starts raining again.”

“You drive so fast, it makes me nervous.”

“It’s fun! Come on. I’ll have my chauffeur drive, if that makes you more comfortable. You can see the village and my people.”

“You speak like you’re their queen.”

“In a way, I am… Queen Boadicea is said to have journeyed here to Bredon Hill to consult the Druids. Did you know the Prince of Wales came to visit me? It’s a long way from the Tombs, Tennie. I just wish we’d come by some of this when we were younger.”

“I still kick up my heels, Vickie. So could you, if you didn’t shut yourself up. You’ve still got your beauty. Neither of us look twenty, but for a couple of old warhorses, we do okay.”

“The house is gorgeous, isn’t it? They wrote it up in
Country Life.
The gardens are a joy. I’ve become enamored of gardening—”

“Well, you have an army of gardeners to do the work. It isn’t like planting potatoes in Ohio, is it? I have gardens at Richmond Hill, but I don’t give a fig about them. I just tell the head gardener to do whatever he likes.”

“I find country life satisfying, Tennie. When I drive out, the people wave to me. My neighbors are friendly. I’m accepted here, as we never were in the States.”

“Well, you’ve invented a whole family tree back to Alexander Hamilton and probably to Julius Caesar.”

“Come, let’s go for a drive. I love cars. Let’s go along the Avon, where Shakespeare lived, and then up into the Malvern Hills. It’s lovely countryside.”

They sat together in the back of the limousine while her chauffeur drove as fast as Tennie would allow. Victoria loved speed. It made her feel free. They shared a bottle of champagne with chicken and watercress sandwiches. Tennie put her hand on Victoria’s arm. “Don’t you ever feel as if you’re pretending, as if you’re back onstage playing the grande dame for an audience of stuffed shirts?”

Victoria was silent for a while. “I do think about writing my autobiography. Then leaving it when I die. I think about it often. I haven’t had time to sit down and begin to write yet, but I will. When I’m a bit older. Then I’ll tell the whole truth about my life—all of it as it really happened. Who I really am, who I was, what I did and believed.”

As she grew older, she provided medical and dental care to the villagers,
set up scholarships, gave Christmas and May Day parties on the estate. Her house was headquarters for the Peace Organization, but when the world war broke out, she supported the Allied cause. She flew the American flag over Norton, joined the Red Cross and put on events in support of the troops. She received a number of celebrity visitors every year—the prime minister among them and the president of Columbia University. Zulu Maud ran the medical and dental services and took care of their finances. She had learned about managing money over the years and increased their principal. Victoria grew interested in aviation and started a society for women pilots. She liked going up in planes, but it made Zulu Maud nervous when Victoria flew. She wished she could live on for the whole new century, with so many exciting inventions and changes.

Yes, she was an important figure in her village and in society. She was respectable, although when she visited the States, the old accusations and scandal were dug up and flung after her. She would not go again. Her adopted country was far kinder to her. Yet at times, as Tennie suggested, she felt far from her roots—attenuated. Again and again, she tried to write her true life story, but something stopped her. She could not seem to grasp how to do it. Writing essays and articles and speeches had come easily, but to write about her life stymied her. She could not find a way to express on the page all those adventures and transformations, those turns and twists and misadventures. Who would understand? She had never been entirely truthful with her husband, because what man could ever know her actual life and not judge her? They would never accept her large and small loves, that she had enjoyed the embrace of so many different men without guilt, without the need to hold on to them. In fact, she had fabricated rather a lot with John, but only for his own good and the good of their relationship, and hadn’t he been happy? She had simply created a biography he could accept, no different really than ordering a meal he’d enjoy. She had known how to please him and he had pleased her. Like the Commodore with Tennie and like Colonel Blood with her, he had some sexual problems when she met him that she had easily overcome. Few men realized how common these little difficulties were. So many women were still quite inhibited. It helped to have the experiences she had enjoyed but she put them behind her and out of her history, at least for his consumption. Men could only endure so much truth. It had all worked out for the best. But someday, someday she would sit down and tell the whole truth for herself as well as for the world.

Freydeh was living in a brownstone on the edge of Williamsburg, now part of Brooklyn. She had the whole house, with herself on the second floor, Kezia and her husband upstairs, and the common rooms on the parlor floor and the ground floor. Reba had been widowed in the Spanish-American War but she had remarried and was living farther out in Crown Heights, an area just being developed. She was a grandmother but she had just given birth to another baby with this new husband, something Freydeh had worried about because of Reba’s age. The birth had been long and difficult, but baby boy and mother seemed healthy so far. Sammy and Debra lived down the block. Debra was a nurse. Sammy was in real estate with Freydeh. He ran the office and managed the buildings. He no longer did the actual carpentry, as he had for so many years.

She had taken the profits from her business and begun buying land in Brooklyn she developed herself. She had contractors she worked with regularly. Over the years she learned which ones did shoddy work, which ones tried to cheat her and failed, of course, and which ones she could trust. It had taken her ten years from the time she got out of jail to move from the ghetto with her large family, to move them across the river. By that time, their old neighborhood was crammed with Yiddish-speaking landsmen, with Jews who acted like Jews, with coffee shops and Yiddish theaters and delis that sold the kind of food she loved, with Yiddish newspapers and books. Williamsburg had plenty of Jews too. It was good to hear the
mamme loshen.
They still went back to the old neighborhood where the pickles were the best and the bialys. It had taken her another eight years to pay off their new house, and then she began buying cheap land. By that time, Sammy was an accomplished carpenter and could work on the houses as they went up. The job went better when he was on the site.

Kezia’s oldest daughter Rose was with her today, helping her prepare for the seder tomorrow when the whole extended family would come together. Rose and she would need to place every table in the house end to end and then lay doors across hobbyhorses from a construction site to seat everyone, going from the front parlor all the way through to the far wall. She would have twenty-one at table, twenty-two if Danny got back from Cornell in time. Twenty-three if Feygeleh’s widower came.

Rose was taking down dishes, standing on a chair.
“Bubbeleh,
how
come you never got married again? Even Aunt Reba found a second husband. So did Great-auntie Sara. Didn’t you want a man?”

“I was too busy. I had plenty children to love. Why should I bother?” She was ironing tablecloths to lay over the tables. “Besides, I got so used to bossing everybody around. What man would let me have my own way? I didn’t need somebody interfering with my way of doing things.”

“You were never lonely?”

“When am I ever alone?”

Rose shrugged. She was a pretty girl with Kezia’s black hair and green eyes but tall like her father. She was getting down dishes for the seder and washing them. Standing near her, Freydeh could tell that she smoked, although her parents had forbidden it. Freydeh wouldn’t say a word. Every kid needed some rebellion. All the
maidelehs
were obsessed with being skinny, so Rose probably smoked to stay thin. Grandchildren were a treat, because she wasn’t responsible for them but she could love them as much as she wanted. Their mothers could do the worrying and scolding. She would never tell Rose that she had caught Kezia smooching with an Italian boy standing in the doorway of a tenement. She had scolded Kezia—curses and tears. Shame on the family. She must have sounded just like poor Asher
selig,
dead of a heart attack these twenty-five years. Sara had married again, to a big strapping man who worked on the docks and, after he was too old for that, fixed barrels and kegs. He was still working at eighty, fixing furniture now. They lived in Manhattan farther uptown off Lexington, a nice apartment. Chaim had become a rabbi out in Cleveland. Asher had been pleased but never forgave him for taking a pulpit far away. The next year he had his heart attack and died trudging through snowdrifts to shul for morning prayers.