Sisters (24 page)

Mrs. Syms knotted her brow,
then shook her head. "Nothin' important."

"Was there anything?
Tell me."

"It's just not
important..."

"Please, Mrs. Syms."

"Well, it was the back
door, just the screen really. You know, it's right at the top of the
basement stairs, and while I was down there, I heard someone go out,
and then it slammed shut. It's got a tight spring on it, so you have
to hold on to it or it does that. But whoever went out didn't hold
it, and it banged."

"Was that before or
after you heard the falling noise?"

"Oh, it was after,
right after. I remember hearin' the door slam and thinking it was
Sally again. I heard some runnin' footsteps, then a loud bang and I
said to myself, 'Oh, it's Sally.' But it wasn't her, because she and
Esther were still on the front porch then. It was before they came in
and..." Mrs. Syms seemed suddenly dumbfounded by her words.
"It's a hard thing talkin' about what happened. Those poor
little girls."

"Have you ever thought
who it might have been going out the back door?"

The gray-haired woman shook
her head. "I dunno. A friend of Sally's maybe. When I remember
that day, the only thing I really think about is the missus dead."

The housekeeper was close
to tears, and Sophie didn't press her further. But it could be
important that Helen had been lying on her back. That's how she would
have been if she'd had her back to the stairs when someone pushed
her. And the detail about the screen door--whoever had pushed Helen
would have run away, and because the girls were playing out front,
she would have had to go out the back. She... she. Ah, her thoughts
were going too fast, rushing her into judgments for which she had no
evidence. She laid her head back on the chair, closed her eyes for a
moment, and forced herself to take a mental step or two backward.

*

Paul arrived, deep furrows
of concern in his face.

"It's only my ankle,"
Sophie said, seeking to reassure him. "By tomorrow I think I'll
be able to walk without the cane."

"Tell me what
happened. Don't leave anything out."

She told him everything,
though she changed her excursion to Amy Travers' to an evening
stroll. "I'd missed my purse at the circus, and I thought
perhaps Rodman had taken it. From Honoria Bender's description--"

"She's the giant
lady?"

Sophie nodded. "From
her description, I'm sure it was Rodman who took my purse. He
probably had no idea what he'd do with it when he took it, but he
knew he'd find something. Then he hired Honoria when he realized how
she'd frighten me."

"I just can't believe
he'd do this to a woman!"

"I'm surprised he'd do
if after he'd been warned off."

Paul began to pace. Sophie
had never seen him look so agitated.

"James did ask you to
get word to Rodman and Huber to leave me alone, didn't he?" She
blurted the question out, hating that she needed to ask it.

Paul nodded distractedly.
Then he stopped in front of Sophie, reached out as if to touch her,
but drew his hand back. "He hurt you. Actually hurt you,"
he declared, anger and amazement mixed in his voice.

"I really did it
myself. I think he only meant to frighten me."

"No, no. He did it.
He's a... savage!"

It's because Rodman regards
me as part savage that he felt so little compunction, Sophie thought.
But she didn't say it to Paul. No need to increase his agitation. She
let him pace another moment or two before she changed the subject.
"Paul?" As he turned to her, she felt awkward about what
she was going to ask, but she plunged ahead. "Just how close
were Helen and Miss Travers?"

He looked at her
quizzically, obviously puzzled that she would ask. He shrugged. "Real
close. Had been for a long time. You remember how Helen used to trail
after Miss Travers at the fort. That something you never did. You
were always out riding on the prairie, getting into some kind of
trouble or other. But Helen, she was quieter. Used to like to draw
and sew, and Amy Travers had patience with her. I'll say that for
her. She was hardly more than a girl herself then, and she'd spend
hours with Helen."

"How did Amy feel
about Helen's marriage?"

"A little unhappy, I
suspect, that Helen'd go away. Miss Travers moved here, you know, as
soon as there was a teaching job for her."

"Did James mind that?"

"Mind? I don't know...
sometimes I think maybe... But it was just a feeling. I mean, what's
to mind? You know how women are. Like to get together and visit and
talk about... women things, I guess, and sew. I mean, you know, they
all do it, so why would James mind?"

"Maybe he thought
Helen would leave him. Go away with Miss Travers."

Paul looked at her as
though she had taken leave of her senses. "Leave? Where would
she go?"

"Do you know who the
Ladies of Llangollen are?"

"The ladies of who?"

"Oh, it's nothing.
Never mind. I just thought... Well, never mind." It was useless
to ask Paul such questions. He hadn't paid attention to what the
women around him were doing. He had no more idea of what had passed
between Amy and Helen than... than of what was going on at the WCTU
meetings. How surprised he would be if he knew what Anna May and her
friends talked about at the Presbyterian Church on Friday afternoons.
Men thought it was all about whiskey. How little they knew. And while
they were looking the other way, the women began to live the ideas
they discussed, until one day came the jolting intersection with
their husbands' lives. That's what had happened to James. He had been
in his world and Helen in hers, and she was talking to the other
women and feeling more and more intensely, and James didn't know.
Even after that night when Helen screamed at him that he had raped
her, he didn't understand what had happened.

"Sophie, have you seen
a doctor?" Paul asked.

Of course. If my behavior
puzzles him, she thought, it means there's something wrong with me.
But the resentment she felt dissipated as she looked up and saw him
leaning over her, his brow more deeply furrowed than ever. How much
he cared for her and worried about her. And how much she cared for
him. She assured him a doctor was unnecessary and gripped his hand
tightly as he took his leave.

"That Rodman fellow
won't be bothering you anymore," he declared with more fervor
than she'd ever seen in him. "You've heard the last of him."

*

When Lydia Swerdlow came,
she brought a dozen jars of plum preserves. It seemed an
extraordinary amount of jam to Sophie, and she wondered if this was
typical Cheyenne hospitality or a heroic effort on Lydia's part to
give her visit a homey air, the kind of atmosphere in which Sophie
would hesitate to bring up her shocking ideas.

Lydia sat uneasily on the
edge of the sofa, and Sophie considered how best to begin. She looked
into the intelligent eyes of the woman across from her and doubted
that any strategem would pass unnoticed. Honesty seemed the only
possible approach. But if she were too direct, too brutally honest,
she was certain Lydia Swerdlow would be up off the edge of the sofa
and gone.

"Do you have a sister,
Mrs. Swerdlow?" Sophie asked.

"Yes, two. Both
younger. One's here, and the other's still back East. In New York
State.

"I ask because I know
it's difficult for us to talk, and I want to find a... a bridge
between us. Perhaps it can be our sisters. Perhaps yours can give you
some sympathy for my situation, because you can imagine the loss I
feel now that Helen's gone." Sophie paused a moment, then
continued. "I suppose some would say that Helen's death ought
not to have brought me the grief if has, because we were never close,
not in the way I'm certain you and your sisters are. As children,
Helen and I were very different, and then, when we were little more
than childrdn, our lives diverged. We wrote to one another, but not
about the things that were really important to us. But that hasn't
kept me from grieving, only given a particular cast to my feeling of
loss, a yearning to know Helen in a way I never did when she was
alive."

"I... I see."

"I don't want to
persuade you or anyone to different viewpoints. It's not the least
important to me to impose my way of thinking on anyone else. All I
want is to understand how Helen thought and felt, and I have no way
to do that without asking questions. I am aware that my questions are
likely to offend. Not because I mean to shock or annoy, but because I
can only frame them out of my own life, out of experience woefully
ignorant of Helen's life... and yours."

"What exactly did you
want to ask?"

Sophie hesitated. She
didn't want to begin with Helen and Amy. It would be too sudden a
leap. "Perhaps we should go back to the last time we talked."

Lydia's eyes slid away from
Sophie's.

"If you thought I felt
as you do, would it be easier?"

Lydia considered for a
moment. "I suppose it would. I've had conversations with my
friends about... preventive devices." She gave a rueful smile.
"Short conversations. We reject them and go on from there."

"Is it possible for
you to forget how you think I feel? Don't suppose you have to argue
or convince me. Just explain to me. I saw Alice Lassawell and what
childbearing has done to her. I know about Helen's many miscarriages.
These are stories repeated thousands of times, thousands upon
thousands of times. And it doesn't have to be that way. Why do you
condemn the devices for prevention?"

"They're wrong. It's
as simple as that."

"But why?"

"They're unnatural."

"But there are so many
things 'against nature' that we accept. Like all the clothing we
wear. People aren't born with clothes on."

"But clothes go along
with a higher nature. A spiritual one. That's the one I'm talking
about. We aren't animals, and so we cover ourselves."

"Whatever relates to
our bodies, then, relates to a lower nature, an animal nature."

Lydia nodded.

"Particularly the
sexual act."

Lydia nodded again and
looked at Sophie straight on. "Unless it is transfigured by the
possibility of generation."

"And the devices, when
they're present, make this transfiguration impossible."

"Of course."

Sophie looked at Lydia. Her
color was high with feeling, and her eyes bright. Sophie noticed her
lashes, long, dark, and upward-curving. This was no frail,
other-worldly creature whose body was incapable of response. "Is
it not possible," Sophie asked, choosing her words carefully,
"that the pleasure of two human beings who love one another is
transfiguring?"

"That's not how women
are!" Lydia burst out. "It's not pleasure for women. That's
only how men would like it to be." She paused, then leaned
forward and continued, "And it is my perfect right to be as I
am, to be as God meant me to be. Why should I demean myself by
pretending I find so much pleasure in the act that I would seek it as
an end in itself? And that's what the devices do. They don't
emancipate. They reduce a woman to the level of a prostitute."

"There are women, then
who enjoy--"

"Degraded women,
dragged down by men. But they can be brought back to their true
nature, rescued by good women showing them the way."

"And there are no good
men?"

"A few. J. H. Stead in
England. Anthony Comstock in New York."

Sophie recoiled inwardly.
She thought Stead a fool, and Comstock was a dreadful man, absolutely
obsessed with the notion of suppressing vice. He had so harassed
Madame Restell, a Fifth Avenue dispenser of pills and powders, that
the poor woman had finally cut her throat.

"But there will be
more in due time," Lydia said. "It's a matter of evolution.
That's what Frances Willard says. Women have advanced ahead of men,
but men will one day climb to the same level."

"I just... How do you
know women have caught the upward curve? How can you be sure that
this progress you see is indeed progress?"

"It just has to be,"
she declared feelingly. "It has to be." She put her head
down and closed her eyes as if to compose herself. "Let me think
how to explain..." She was silent for what seemed to be a long
time; then she nodded her head slowly. "Just before I came here,
I visited a friend. Her husband is... was a railroad fireman. Last
week he was run over by a switching engine and mangled horribly. He
can't live, not possibly, but he won't die. He just lies in the
hospital and screams and screams." She looked up at Sophie.
"There just has to be more than the pain and dying our bodies
bring us."

She paused again and turned
her eyes to the window. When finally she spoke, her voice was very
soft. "Sometimes I feel that I'm standing with all my friends
around a cavernous pit, and the edges of it are constantly crumbling
away. If one of us loses our footing, the rest of us can pull her
back, because we're holding hands, you see. But it's so important
that none of us slips over the edge, because she would surely drag
the rest." She shrugged and shook her head. "I'm not making
myself clear."

"I think you are. I
think I've felt what you're describing."

"But it's more here.
We feel it more here."

"More than where?"

"More than where you
live. I was in New York City once, and I remember it felt heavy to
me. So many things everywhere, layers of things keeping you from
earth and sky. But they protect you too, all those layers do, wrap
you up so life isn't so painful, so... raw."

"Or perhaps they just
distract us, help us forget." For a moment, just a moment,
Sophie had a sense of the pressures which molded Lydia's feelings,
and she saw that the way the other woman felt was not perverse, but a
right response to her life. It had to do with wanting control; it was
a different path to a goal Sophie herself was always seeking. But the
understanding she felt was like water held in the hand. No sooner did
she cup it in her mind than it started to slip away. "Lydia, who
are the Ladies of Llangollen?" She spoke quickly, wanting to
understand more while she still understood a little.