Terrible Virtue (17 page)

The only real hardship was celibacy. The visits from J.J., who was working on the appeal, made it even harder. We sat across from each other in the dim light of a bored guard's observation. Sometimes, when the guard glanced away, I ran my foot up and down J.J.'s calf beneath the scarred wooden table. He pulled his leg away. Sometimes, I moved my hand on top of the table until it was resting against his. He withdrew his hand. “Be serious, Peg,” he whispered. But when I held his glance with mine, he couldn't help himself.

The only brutality I was subjected to came as I was about to be released. Actually, it was more indignity than brutality, and I gave as good as I got.

Perhaps because I had come by way of Blackwell's Island, the Queens officials had neglected to fingerprint me when I arrived. Now that I was being released, the warden wanted to take my prints. I refused.

“Regulations,” he explained.

“Regulations for common criminals. I'm a political prisoner.”

“We can't release you until we got your prints on file.”

“Then you'll have to hold me.”

He called in two guards, told them to take my fingerprints, and left the room. I should have suspected what was coming, but I was too busy enjoying the warden's flight. One of the guards had moved behind me. He threw a hammerlock around my shoulders and chest and frog-walked me to a table where an ink pad and paper sat ready. The other guard grabbed my right hand. I tried to pull away, but between them they must have had more than two hundred pounds on me. The guard holding my arm managed to get my thumb onto the ink pad.

“Now that's a good girl,” he said, as he pressed my thumb
against the paper. I stopped struggling. He relaxed his grip. I smudged my thumb back and forth across the paper.

We went through the tussle again, and twice more after that. I had ink smudges all over me, but so did they. Finally the warden came back and said my attorney had protested the delay. He would release me without taking my fingerprints. He didn't look at me as he said it.

J.J. was waiting in the outer office. “Welcome back to freedom, Mrs. Sanger.”

A month had passed since I'd been outside. The frigid air came as a shock. I blinked against the glare, though the day was overcast. A crowd of women standing in front of the jail came into focus. There must have been a couple of hundred of them, friends of the movement, women we'd treated at the clinic, society matrons from the Committee of One Hundred, and Ethel.

“They've been standing out here in the cold since early this morning,” J.J. said.

He added something else, but I didn't hear him, because the women had started to sing.

Allons enfants de la patrie,

Le jour de gloire est arrivé

As I stood listening to them, fighting back the tears, I heard other voices behind me joining in. I turned my head and looked up. In the second-floor windows, the women who moments ago had been my fellow prisoners were gathered shoulder to shoulder, looking down at me, and humming along. They didn't know the words, they probably didn't even know they were French, but every one of them understood the sentiment.

Who could call this sacrifice?

J
.J. FILED THE
appeal. The court upheld the verdict, as we'd expected. Section 1142 of the state's obscenity law prohibited laymen and -women from disseminating birth control information. But the judge's ruling went further. He wrote that physicians were permitted to prescribe contraception on medical grounds, and here was what J.J. called the kicker, the twin kickers. The judge defined medical grounds in broader terms than venereal disease. And he included women as well as men. Birth control clinics were legal as long as they were staffed by doctors.

That night in the small apartment on West Fourteenth Street, I sat alone in the living room as I had the night after I'd given birth to Sadie Sachs. Unlike Bill, J.J. didn't come into the parlor to try to persuade me to return to bed. He knew me better.

I sat wrapped in a blanket, my bare feet tucked under me, remembering that earlier night and thinking about how far I'd come and how far I had yet to go. And as I did, I felt Peggy's presence beside me.

THE APPEAL RULING
was a victory, but I still had powerful enemies outside the movement and, almost as frustrating, misguided colleagues within it. Mary Ware Dennett was the most annoying. I won't dignify her by using a stronger word. She thought she could change unjust laws by lobbying legislators to rewrite them. She didn't understand that no politician would stand up for a cause that carried the faintest whiff of sex, especially sex for women. I knew the only way to change the law was to break it and have the court rule, as it had in my appeal. Mary also had a bias against physicians. I recognized their limitations and arrogance, but I would have joined forces with the devil if the devil could have got contraceptives into the hands of the women who needed them. I forgave Mary her naïveté, even her stubbornness, but I could not abide her pettiness.

The incident occurred at a dinner party at Juliet Rublee's. Juliet had a husband who was busy serving in President Wilson's cabinet in Washington, D.C., and did not have children. A botched surgery in her youth had taken care of her contraceptive problems. She also had boundless energy, a good deal of unspent passion, and a fortune. I had a movement that needed all three. It was a marriage made in heaven. It was, come to think of it, my most successful marriage.

Still, I hadn't wanted to go out that evening. My body ached, my head throbbed with fever, and outside my window a drenching rain turned the street to patent leather. But I couldn't let Juliet down. Every few weeks, she invited ten or a dozen of her well-heeled friends to dinner. When they were all gathered around the long dining table, silver glowing in the candlelight, wine shimmering in crystal goblets, men growing rosy with
good food and drink, women turning well-coiffed heads from one dinner partner to the other as the courses changed, she steered the conversation to birth control and asked my opinion on some aspect of it. That was my cue to go into my song and dance. So I put on the silk evening dress that brought out the green in my eyes, bundled into my raincoat, and went out into the wet night.

Mary Dennett was there that night too. Mary came from a Boston Brahmin family and never let you forget it. Excuse me. I swore I was not going to sink to her level.

By the time the women stood to leave the men to their cigars and brandy—even a rebel like Juliet still separated the sexes for digestive purposes after dinner—Juliet could tell from the flush on my cheeks that I was burning up and suggested that while the women returned to the drawing room, I go into her dressing room and lie down on the chaise for a few minutes.

“We'll let Mary carry the flag,” she said, and we smiled, because fund-raising was not Mary's strong suit. A woman who is brought up to believe talking about money is bad form is rarely any good begging for it.

At first I didn't know where the voices were coming from. Then I realized Juliet's dressing room communicated with another bathroom as well as her private one, and the door to the second had been left open a crack.

“Oh, Mary, you are wicked,” a voice I didn't recognize said.

“I'm sorry, but it's true,” Mary, whose voice I did know, replied. “I admit she's a charming vision in that green satin gown, and a genuine spellbinder, but oh, her English, and her facts that aren't facts, and her logic that isn't logic, and
her amazing faculty for being the whole moomunt! The woman can't even pronounce something she claims to be the head of.”

My cheeks were flaming, and not only from my fever. As I stood, slipped into my shoes, and smoothed my hair, I decided that the next day I'd sign up for elocution lessons. It was time to get the bottom of the hill out of my mouth for good. After all, I made my living as a public speaker.

MARY WARE DENNETT

I'M SORRY IF YOU DIDN'T LIKE THE IMITATION, MARGARET, BUT YOUR ACCENT REALLY WAS DREADFUL, AND YOU DID HAVE A HABIT OF BENDING THE FACTS TO YOUR OWN ENDS. THAT DIDN'T STOP ME FROM SUGGESTING THAT FOR THE GOOD OF THE MOVEMENT WE COOPERATE. WE WERE FIGHTING FOR THE SAME CAUSE. WE'D EVEN SUFFERED SIMILAR HEARTBREAK. I WAS DIVORCED FROM MY ARCHITECT HUSBAND. I HAD LOST A DAUGHTER IN INFANCY. BUT YOU DIDN'T WANT COLLEAGUES OR FRIENDS; YOU NEEDED FOLLOWERS AND ADMIRERS. NO, MORE THAN THAT, YOU NEEDED LACKEYS AND SYCOPHANTS. AND YOU HAD THEM IN DROVES, THOUGH I WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THE SPELL YOU CAST. MEN FELL IN LOVE WITH YOU. WOMEN, NOT ONLY THE POOR WOMEN IN THE TENEMENTS WHOM YOU HELPED BUT THOSE IN THE MOVEMENT, WERE WILLING TO LAY DOWN THEIR LIVES FOR YOU, DESPITE THE FACT THAT YOU WERE IMPOSSIBLE TO WORK WITH—DEMANDING, UNFORGIVING, CREDIT-STEALING. THE LAST WAS THE WORST. TO HEAR YOU TELL IT, MARGARET SANGER CREATED THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT AS SINGLE-HANDEDLY AS THE LORD CREATED THE UNIVERSE. SHE JUST TOOK A LITTLE LONGER
.

LATER, WHEN I
was recognized as the mother of the birth control movement, the fearless advocate who had saved the lives of millions of women and children around the globe, my leadership would come to seem preordained, almost an act of God, or at least fate. It was more complicated than that. It always is.

A
S THE UNDISPUTED
leader of the movement, I had to be more careful than ever, not only about the sexual side of my life but about another aspect as well. I could not afford to have doctors and scientists, philanthropists and policy makers, dismiss me as a crank any more than I could have them censure me as a loose woman. That was why I told few people about my study of Rosicrucianism. I was even more secretive about the séances I attended.

Yes, I attended séances. Is that so awful? Are we so sure the spirit world doesn't exist merely because our limited powers of reasoning can't prove it? I refuse to believe that the bonds of love formed between souls cease to be once the bodies that housed those souls are no longer with us. I refuse to let the limitations of the human mind define the possibilities of the human spirit. There is more to life than birth and death and the daily drudgery between. I was determined to find out what. So the evening in question, the evening that would finally usher me into that other sphere, I went to hear the Parsi Indian speak. Juliet Rublee went with me. She was searching too.

The speaker was spellbinding. Life, he explained, is a temporary
state, but so is death. When time ends and the final renovation arrives, the souls of the dead will return to life in their undead form. Perhaps I'm not describing this well, but he made it all clear.

Afterward, Juliet and I were standing on the sidewalk in front of the hall, waiting for her touring car, when a small woman approached. She seemed to know who I was. I assumed that she'd heard me speak or seen my photo in a newspaper. She explained that she was a psychic. I was immediately on my guard. I believe in the spirit world, but I'm skeptical of people who accost strangers on the street, proclaiming their powers. I kept walking to Juliet's car, which had pulled up at the curb. The woman put a hand on my arm. I started to shake it off. Then she spoke again.

“I have been in communication with Peggy.”

I stopped. This couldn't be a scam. The world couldn't be that cruel.

“Moonbeams danced on her blond hair, and she was running like the wind. Without a brace,” she added.

How could she know about the brace? I stood on the sidewalk unable to move. Juliet, who was stepping into the car, turned, saw me, and came back.

“Are you all right, Margaret? You look shaken.”

“She's seen Peggy.”

Juliet looked from me to the woman. “Is this true?”

“Didn't you hear the talk tonight? I do not deal in falsehoods.”

I wanted to believe her, but still, she could have seen a photo of Peggy. Perhaps there was even one with a brace that Bill had taken and never shown me.

“Tell me more about her,” I begged.

“She is with Doma.”

Any doubts I still harbored evaporated in the breath of that one word. Doma had been Peggy's name for Bill's mother. No one outside the family knew it.

“With Doma,” I repeated and clutched the woman's arm. “Please tell me more. Anything.”

But she slipped out of my grasp and disappeared into the crowd.

I swore Juliet to secrecy and told no one else about the incident. I'd battled with Bill over Peggy's body; I refused to fight over her soul. The boys were too young to understand. J.J. would say that the woman was a con artist out to exploit my grief. When he caught me sitting alone in a room, holding a hair ribbon or toy or old sweater, he didn't try to comfort me, and that was the only comfort I could hope for. But he wouldn't be able to let this pass. Be reasonable, Peg, he'd say in that maddeningly reasonable tone. So I kept the secret of Peggy and her reentry into my life to myself.

I
WENT ON ANOTHER
speaking tour. The schedule was even more demanding and the crowds larger. By the time I returned home, I was exhausted, weak, and ailing. The doctor prescribed a holiday. I couldn't manage a holiday, but I could take Grant to California for several months. I would write a book, and we would get to know each other. Peggy had given me the idea.

The encounter after the Parsi lecture had left me suddenly hopeful. Peggy's spirit was here among us. It was only a matter of time until she contacted me. But as the days and weeks passed and she gave no sign, I felt the intensity of the loss all over again. It was as if she had abandoned me a second time. Still, I refused to give up. I went to séances. Other souls appeared, but Peggy remained elusive. I consulted mediums. Patience, they counseled. You cannot rush the spirits. So I pretended to myself, as if the pretense would fool Peggy, that I was not waiting. And then, when I really had given up hope, she began to appear in my dreams. I know what the skeptics will say. We all dream of those we're longing for. But not with this vibrancy. Her presence was so real, so vivid, that it lingered long after I awoke. It was as if she were in the room
with me. Soon I heard the echo of her voice. Again the skeptics will jeer. We all carry the voices of loved ones around with us, they'll say. But they're wrong. The memory of a voice fades faster than the recollection of words or appearance or habits. Ask the women whose husbands went overseas in the war. They cherished photographs. They read and reread letters. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't conjure voices. That's how I knew Peggy's voice whispering in my ear was real.

And because I believed, because I trusted, she began to leave signs. Photographs turned up in drawers where I was sure I hadn't left them. Grant's letter telling me how much he missed me was lying on my desk when I returned home from the doctor who'd told me I needed a holiday. The connection was as clear as if Peggy had written the prescription.

I had another more practical motive for going to California. J.J. was still talking about marriage.

“Can't you see it, Peg? A real home. I'm not talking about a house in the suburbs. I know you'd hate that. But a decent apartment with a room for the boys. No more boarding schools.”

“They love their boarding schools.”

“That's what they tell you.”

“Are you saying the boys lie to me?”

“The boys don't want to worry you. Don't you know that much about them yet? But you see what they're like when they have to go back to school. Worse still, when they can't come home for a holiday, because you're off lecturing somewhere.”

“Now you sound like Bill.”

“That's not what I mean, and you know it. All I'm saying is that even if you were off lecturing, the boys could be here with me. We'd keep the home fires burning until you got back. Admit it, Peg, it's a rosy picture.”

His rosy picture looked too much like Bill's rose window. It had been a mistake to say yes to the window, but I couldn't seem to say no to J.J. I was counting on three months in California to give me courage, or at least perspective.

Grant and I settled into a cottage in Coronado. It was surrounded by palm trees that whispered and clapped in the wind, thick vegetation exploding in flamboyant flowers, and raucous birdsong. I promised Grant we'd learn the names of all the local flora and fauna. Peggy had been right when she'd told me to take him out of boarding school to spend a few months with me. He misses you, Mama, she'd whispered to me in my dreams.

He started public school and made friends with the neighborhood boys. They spent hours cruising the well-kept streets on their bicycles, exploring the tidal pools, and doing whatever eleven-year-old boys do after school. He was flourishing.

One afternoon I felt him hovering in the doorway of my study but didn't look up. I was in the middle of a thought and afraid of losing it.

“Mother,” he began.

I held up my hand, palm toward him. He knew what that meant and stood waiting. My fingers flew over the typewriter keys. I finished the paragraph and looked up. The sun had bleached his hair and darkened his skin.

“What is it, handsome?” I asked.

“May I ask you a favor, please?”

He was such a polite boy. More than polite. He was so protective. He'd been that way with Peggy. He was that way with me.

“Of course.”

“Please don't tell people here that you were in jail.”

Peggy was right. He needed time with me. I'd open his eyes to worlds beyond bourgeois convention.

But despite the fact that Grant was thriving and my book was going well, my spirits were low. I blamed it on the weather. The constant eye-searing light, the ever-changing blue sea, the crimson sun sliding into it in a balmy farewell each evening—these were narcotics intended to dull the pain and suffering of the real world. But I refused to run from reality. My old friends Jack Reed and Louise Bryant were on trial in Washington for making Bolshevik statements. Emma Goldman had been deported. Free speech was dead, and now that the war was over, all the country cared about was having a good time. Hemlines were rising, sexual inhibitions were falling, and women were breaking free. I celebrated all that, but I bemoaned the lack of seriousness. People needed contraception more than ever, but everyone seemed to be too drunk on jazz music and bootleg liquor to fight for it.

My fevers returned. The doctors recommended X-ray treatments. They didn't help. Other doctors prescribed iron injections. They were just as ineffective. I was eating like a stevedore, and my clothes hung on me as if on a hanger.

At the end of April, Grant and I boarded the train for the trip home. He would finish the school year in the East. I had a manuscript in my suitcase, a new closeness to my son, and several months of rest, and I still felt terrible. The most recent letter from J.J. didn't improve my mood. It was about marriage, and strangely enough, he used the same words Bill had the day he'd hired the horse and buggy and lined up a minister. It's now or never, Peg.

The ultimatum came on the heels of several letters in which he'd mentioned a woman called Harriet Lowenstein. I'd met
Miss Lowenstein when he'd brought her to one of my talks. She'd worn her conventionality like a sandwich board.

I'D WIRED J.J.
to tell him which train we were taking, and he was waiting on the platform. I saw him from the window before the train stopped. He spotted me coming down the steps from the Pullman car with Grant and a porter in tow. We shouldered our way through the crowd toward each other. Suddenly, after months, we were inches apart. We stood that way for a moment; then I held out my hand. He took it. In those days respectable people did not kiss on station platforms, and we would not have even if others did. Newspaper photographers often met the more glamorous limited trains, and while I wasn't a movie star and he wasn't a baseball player or senator, if none of those was arriving, a photographer might settle for a picture of the birth control champion and the lawyer who fought her court battles.

He turned to Grant. Grant imitated me and held out his hand. J.J. ignored it and swallowed him in a bear hug. I waited for Grant to recoil. He would think he was too old for such flamboyant displays of affection. But J.J. had pegged him better than I had. Grant closed his eyes and hung on for dear life. When they released each other, J.J. ruffled Grant's hair, Grant gave J.J.'s arm a playful punch, and then they slipped back into their masculine dignity. How could I not marry this man?

GRANT SANGER

THAT'S WHAT I WAS THINKING THE DAY HE MET US AT THE STATION, MOTHER. I WANTED IT SO BADLY. STUART AND I BOTH DID. IF YOU
MARRIED J.J., WE'D BE A NORMAL FAMILY. YOU DO KNOW THAT'S WHAT CHILDREN LONG FOR, DON'T YOU? BUT I THINK EVEN THEN I KNEW THAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU WANTED, BECAUSE BY THEN I HAD GOT TO KNOW YOU. I GREW UP ON THAT TRIP, MOTHER. I SUPPOSE REALIZING THAT A PARENT IS ONLY HUMAN, THE OLD FEET-OF-CLAY STORY, IS PART OF GROWING UP. I JUST DID IT SOONER AND MORE PRECIPITOUSLY THAN MOST
.

YOU WERE DETERMINED TO OPEN MY MIND, AND YOU DID. YOU MADE ME CHALLENGE THE ACCEPTED PIETIES THEY PASSED OUT AT SCHOOL. YOU FORCED ME TO QUESTION THE INJUSTICES OF THE WORLD THAT OUR NEIGHBORS IN THAT ELEGANTLY ALOOF PARADISE IGNORED. YOU INTRODUCED ME TO UNUSUAL PEOPLE WITH EXTRAVAGANT IDEAS. AND YOU TRUCKED A STREAM OF BESOTTED MEN THROUGH THE HOUSE. I HATED YOU FOR THAT. I FELT AS IF YOU WERE BETRAYING NOT ONLY J.J. BUT STUART AND ME TOO
.

I REMEMBER ONE NIGHT SOME NEIGHBORS HAD A LUAU AND HIRED HAWAIIAN DANCERS FOR THE OCCASION. I CAN STILL SEE YOUR FACE AS YOU WATCHED THE FIRELIGHT GLEAMING OFF THE OILED BODIES OF THE HALF-NAKED MEN. I WAS ON THE EDGE OF PUBERTY AND HAD TO LOOK AWAY, BECAUSE I SENSED SOMETHING THAT I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND, AND DIDN'T WANT TO UNDERSTAND
.

DON'T GET ME WRONG, MOTHER. I DIDN'T LOSE FAITH IN YOU DURING THOSE MONTHS. IN SOME WAYS, I CAME TO ADMIRE YOU MORE THAN EVER. I HAD NEVER KNOWN, I STILL DON'T KNOW, ANYONE WHO IS AS OPEN TO NEW EXPERIENCES AND IDEAS. YOU SEEMED TO BE ALWAYS IN A STATE OF WONDER. BUT FOR THE FIRST TIME I SAW YOU WHOLE, YOUR DEVIOUSNESS AND DISHONESTY AND SELFISHNESS AS WELL AS YOUR STRENGTH AND COMPASSION AND SENSE OF JUSTICE. AT FIRST THE REALIZATION WAS FRIGHTENING, BUT SOMEHOW I LEARNED TO HOLD ALL OF YOU, THE BLACK AND THE WHITE, THE JEKYLL AND THE HYDE, THE ARROGANCE AND THE INSECURITY, THE HELL-BENT AMBITION AND THE
CAPACITY FOR LOVE, IN MY MIND AT ONCE. STUART NEVER GOT THE CHANCE TO. MAYBE THAT'S WHY HE'S STILL ANGRY
.

WE TOOK A
taxi to the Pennsylvania Station and put Grant on a train back to school.

“I'll miss you.” I stood on the platform mouthing the words up to the window.

Grant looked down at us. He was trying to smile, but the effort to fight back the tears turned the expression into a grimace. “I'll miss you too,” he mouthed back at me.

The train started moving, slowly at first, then gathering speed. It carried him away like an outgoing tide. I fought the urge to run after him. I'd felt it before when I'd said good-bye to the children, but never as powerfully. We'd grown so close in California. I stood, my hands clenched, my eyes closed, wishing that I were like other women. I hung on for another beat. The moment passed. I was myself again.

In the taxi going downtown, J.J. and I sat at opposite ends of the backseat. On the way up the stairs to the apartment, I felt his eyes on me, but he kept his hands to himself. When we reached the landing, he opened the door and stepped aside for me to go in before him. He closed the door behind us. We put down the luggage. And there against the wall, still in our hats and coats and shoes, he went down on his knees, and I pulled up my skirt and pushed down my bloomers, and afterward I was no closer to an answer to him than when I'd left.

We moved to the bedroom and made love in slow motion as the sky outside the window turned from blue to mauve to black, and the streetlamps went on, and a full moon swung up over the
roof of the building across the street. Later, we lay side by side in the sex-rumpled sheets, our bodies pale in the stream of streetlamp light flooding through the window. His breathing still had a jagged edge. I didn't want him to speak, but I knew he would.

He rolled over on his side, rested his head on his hand, and looked down at me. “Can I take this as an affirmative?” His voice was tentative. He knew that for me sex was not an affirmation of anything but sex. Still, he was hoping.

I shimmied out from under his gaze and sat up with my back against the iron headboard. “Why do you want to marry me, J.J.?” I wasn't being coy. He knew I didn't believe in marriage. He also knew I was no good at it. Why was he asking for trouble?

He sat up beside me and shook his head. “Because I love you. And you say you love me. When people are in love, they usually get married.”

“We're not people. We're rebels,” I said, though I knew he wasn't.

“Even rebels get married. If they didn't, there'd be no little rebels who grow up to be revolutionaries.”

“That's another thing. I don't want any more children. You do.”

“I've got all the kids I can handle. Stuart and Grant. The entire membership of the Grand Street Boys. What I want is you.”

The conversation went on that way for some time. We stopped to go out to dinner and came back and made love again, but the sentences spun out and circled back on themselves. We begged each other to see reason. He raised his voice. I did too. He got out of bed and paced the apartment. I laughed.

He whirled on me. “What's so funny?”

“This apartment is too small for pacing.”

He looked at me with the expression of a man who's itching to get his hands around a woman's throat, and not in affection. A moment passed. Then he burst out laughing and came back to bed. Somewhere around dawn I told him I'd marry him.

I AWAKENED WITH
a vague feeling that something was wrong. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

I turned over and saw J.J. was gone. A frisson of relief, cold and quick as ice going down my back, ran through me. A moment later I recognized his step on the stairs. The door opened and he was standing there with a loaf of bread in one hand and a bunch of roses in the other. I could have taken one or the other, but the two together undid me. I didn't want the crumbs of daily living littering the rose-strewn bed of passion. As I watched him come toward me, smiling a promissory note good for the rest of my life, I knew it was hopeless. I could never be faithful to one man. It was against my nature. It was against my creed. It would be giving in to the forces of convention and small-mindedness and bourgeois prejudice. It would be a betrayal of my essence. It would be taking the easy way out.