Terrible Virtue (18 page)

“I can't do it,” I said.

JONAH J. GOLDSTEIN

SOMETIMES I TRY TO REMEMBER HOW I FELT THAT MORNING WHEN I WALKED IN THE DOOR AND SAW YOUR FACE. BEFORE YOU SAID A WORD, I KNEW YOU COULDN'T GO THROUGH WITH IT. I WAS MISERABLE. I WAS FURIOUS. BUT I MUST HAVE BEEN JUST A LITTLE RELIEVED. AS CRAZY IN LOVE WITH YOU AS I WAS, I MUST HAVE KNOWN
I WAS GETTING OFF EASY. YOU BROKE MY HEART THAT MORNING, PEG. BUT IF YOU HADN'T, YOU WOULD HAVE WRECKED MY LIFE. YOU HAD MY NUMBER ABOUT THAT. I WASN'T WORLDLY LIKE THOSE ENGLISH INTELLECTUALS AND AMERICAN ROMEOS YOU PLAYED AROUND WITH. I THOUGHT FREE LOVE WAS A LOT OF HOOEY. SOMEONE ALWAYS PAYS IN THE END. IN OUR CASE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ME. FROM WHAT I HEARD, YOUR SECOND HUSBAND DID THROUGH THE NOSE, ALTHOUGH GOSSIP SAID HE NEVER CAUGHT ON. IF HE DIDN'T, HE MUST HAVE BEEN DEAF, DUMB, AND BLIND. BUT I WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN. STILL, STANDING THERE LIKE SOME DOMESTICATED STAGE-DOOR JOHNNY WITH A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS IN ONE HAND AND A LOAF OF RYE BREAD IN THE OTHER, I HURT LIKE HELL
.

DAISY, THE WOMAN
J.J. had hired to come down from Harlem to take care of the apartment and the boys when they were home, had finished cleaning and was about to leave when the telegram arrived. I didn't tear it open immediately. I had a sixth sense of what it said.

I took my time walking to my desk, finding a paper knife, slitting open the envelope.

HARRIET AND I MARRIED IN LONDON THIS MORNING STOP JJ

I stood in the circle of yellow light from the lamp staring at the piece of paper. Daisy asked if anything was wrong.

I looked up and pasted a grin on my face. “No, nothing wrong. Good news, in fact. Mr. Goldstein got married.”

She went on staring at me for a moment, then put on her hat, buttoned her coat, and shook her head. “For a smart lady, you sure do some dumb things.”

“I'm sure he'll be very happy.”

“I was talking about you, not him. Who'd he marry, that nice Miss Lowenstein he brought round after you came back from California?”

“Yes, that nice Miss Lowenstein.”

“She'll make him a good wife.”

I started to say that was exactly what Harriet would be. A good little wife, loyal, tame, a one-man woman. Why not get a golden retriever? Then I caught myself. I refused to be that petty. Harriet would be all those things, but she would be more than that. She'd make J.J. happy. And she'd be happy herself. As a woman who'd dedicated herself to improving other women's lives, I had to rejoice. And I did. Really I did.

I
DIDN'T REGRET MY
decision. I don't believe in regret any more than I do in guilt. They're merely two sides of self-indulgence. Worse than that, they're two sides of self-pity. And I was too busy for either. I was writing another book. I was on the road constantly, not just in America but around the world, giving talks, organizing conferences, meeting with people who had the power and position to advance my agenda.

Albert Einstein wrote me a letter of support.

Gandhi invited me to his ashram. What a disappointment that was. I'm not suggesting he wasn't a great man. He was one of history's true saints, canonized not by an absurd and political church ritual but by his natural goodness. Like so many saints, however, he was pigheaded. He lived in a criminally overpopulated country, festering with illness and suffering and death, and saw the solution not in the science of contraception but in the so-called virtue of chastity. He would not have been out of place in the parish church in Corning. Instead of a black robe and turned-around collar, he wore a white loincloth; instead of threatening damnation, he beamed beatifically. But the message was the same. The celebrated thinker I went halfway around the
world to meet was as naïve and wrongheaded about sex as he was about irrigating the land with old-fashioned water wheels. More so. His agricultural schemes merely denied scientific and technological progress. His family-planning methods flew in the face of human nature.

But the point is, I was too busy to miss J.J. And any number of men were eager to console me, not that I needed consoling. Havelock still welcomed me every time I went to London. Wantley was still a heavenly escape from town. And H. G. Wells entered my life. The spark between us was immediate. Later he admitted he'd expected it to flame briefly, then go out. It always did for him.

“But you're not like other women,” he said. “You don't cling.”

“You're not like other men,” I countered. “You don't smother.”

He was an intense lover, but a playful one. I still have the notes he sent commemorating our meetings, often with sketches. In my favorite, squiggles suggesting the electricity that we gave off decorate the margins of the page.

One afternoon in his hotel room, he got out of bed and walked to the desk. I lay back on the pillow, watching the play of light and shadow on his skin as he moved through the shaft of sun flowing through the window into the shadows and came back again carrying a manuscript. I looked at the top page.
SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART
was typed across it.

“I want to read you something,” he said, as he got back into bed.

And lying there beside him, I heard about V. V. Grammont, a young American who was the embodiment of the New Woman, a fearless pagan who took sex where and when she liked, without sin or shame, entanglements or regrets. She—and I loved this—was better read in the recent literature of socialism than
the male protagonist, and had a most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas.

Later, critics in the know would say that one of the greatest writers of our time had immortalized me. I prefer to think that I had inspired one of the greatest writers of our time.

So you see, my life was too full of love as well as work to give a thought to J.J., though once, on a train going from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I looked away from the blinding Pacific seascape to see a man across the aisle who reminded me of him. As I went on watching him, it occurred to me, the similarity wasn't of looks but of manner. He was with a little girl of about five or six. Perhaps she was the one who'd caught my eye, though she was dark and looked nothing like Peggy. Something in the way the man was speaking to her, not talking down in the singsong voice most adults use with children, but carrying on a normal conversation that gave her her due, reminded me of the way J.J. had been with Stuart and Grant, and for a moment the ache of loss, of all the losses, blindsided me.

I began gathering up my belongings. A porter was at my side in a moment. He asked if anything was wrong. I told him the car was too smoke-filled and I had to change my seat.

Then, years later, on a rainy afternoon during the war, I ran into the real J.J. on Constitution Avenue in Washington. I was walking with my head down and my umbrella tipped forward against the wind, so I didn't see the other umbrella coming at me until we collided.

Running into former lovers is always a dicey business. It's too easy to slip into paranoia on one hand or self-aggrandizement on the other. Does the shocked expression on his face mean I've aged that much, or is it a sign that even after all these years my presence still unhinges him? I was glad, irrationally since
I was wearing a raincoat, that Juliet and I had gone on that all-citrus diet that had knocked off four pounds. But I couldn't tell whether J.J. was love-or horror-struck. His face gave away nothing. He might have been parsing legal niceties instead of standing inches away from a woman he'd lived with and loved and pleaded to marry.

We huddled under our umbrellas as wet pedestrians hurried past our vapid duet of how-are-yous, and I'm-fines, and I-saw-the-piece-on-you-in-this-or-that-newspaper. He was a judge now, and there were rumors of a mayoral candidacy. We asked each other what we were doing in Washington.

I explained that I'd come down in hope of persuading the Women's Army Corps to distribute contraceptives to WACs. Unfortunately, the people I had to convince were men, and from the expressions on their faces as we'd sat around that conference table that was polished to as high a gloss as the brass on their uniforms, you'd have thought none of them had ever heard of sex without benefit of clergy. You'd certainly never have guessed that the army was spending millions of dollars passing out condoms to GIs, and plastering walls with warnings about Mata Haris who spread venereal disease, and showing ghoulish training films intended to instill a terror greater than the fear of war. But I knew better than to frame the argument in terms of sexual equality. I'd spoken only of the war effort. Did they want to beat Hitler and Hirohito, or did they want half the WACs in uniform mustering out because they were lonely and scared and found a little solace with some GI who was just as lonely and twice as terrified? The officers around the table hadn't bought it. They'd frowned and cleared their throats and explained that if they made birth control available to military women, the women would behave as badly as military men, and the officers around that table knew how bad that was.

“Any success?” J.J. asked.

“What do you think?”

He shook his head and explained that he was on his way to a press conference to announce that he was resigning from the American Bar Association, an organization so backward and benighted that it refused to admit a Phi Beta Kappa Yale graduate because he was a Negro.

Standing there in the shelter of our umbrellas and our moral rectitude as the rain puddled around us, I had a sudden flash of what our life together might have been. Then it passed.

I'M NOT SUGGESTING
I wasn't happy. For one thing, I had married again.

Noah Slee was a God-fearing, churchgoing, conservative businessman. He was also rich. We met at another of Juliet's dinner parties. You might say he was my mark that night. Juliet had told me he gave generously to good causes. All I had to do was persuade him that birth control was a good cause.

I went after Noah for his money, but I was also intrigued by him. Most of the men I knew wanted to fix the world. He was satisfied with it the way it was. Of course, it had been awfully good to him.

He wasn't handsome, but with the exception of my two Hughs—de Selincourt and Brodie—I have rarely fallen for superficial traits. He had a head of silver hair, a kind face that tended to flush when he was excited, and a stocky body, but he carried himself with a sense of his success that made people pay attention. And there was the sex. There must always be the sex. Even before he told me about his wife, I knew I was preparing a feast for a starving man. I saw it in the way he looked at me that
first night. Nothing obvious or vulgar, simply a gaze so intense it was almost a physical touch.

NOAH SLEE

I HATE TO THINK OF HOW CLOSE I CAME TO NOT GOING THAT EVENING, MARGY. IN THOSE DAYS, I WAS LIVING OFF AND ON AT THE UNION LEAGUE. THERE WASN'T MUCH POINT IN GOING HOME TO DUTCHESS COUNTY. MARY DIDN'T WANT TO SEE ME ANY MORE THAN I WANTED TO SEE HER. ALL I DID WANT THAT NIGHT WAS DINNER AT THE CLUB, A BRANDY, A CIGAR, AND THE NEWSPAPERS. THE LAST THING I WAS IN THE MOOD FOR WAS ONE OF MRS. RUBLEE'S DINNER PARTIES WITH ALL THOSE SWELLS WHO PAINTED OR DANCED OR HATCHED FORMULAS FOR SAVING THE WORLD. NOT ONE OF THEM COULD HAVE COME UP WITH A REAL FORMULA, LIKE THE ONE I DEVELOPED FOR MY THREE-IN-ONE OIL, IF THEIR LIVES DEPENDED ON IT. I WASN'T IN THE MOOD FOR MRS. RUBLEE EITHER. I NEVER COULD UNDERSTAND HOW HER HUSBAND PUT UP WITH ALL HER HAREBRAINED ENTHUSIASMS
.

THEN YOU WALKED IN AND THERE WAS NO OTHER PLACE I WANTED TO BE. I SUPPOSE THE WAY I CUT THROUGH ALL THE OTHER GUESTS TO GET TO YOU WAS UNSEEMLY, BUT I WOULDN'T HAVE GOT WHERE I AM TODAY IF I WORRIED ABOUT SEEMLINESS. I'M A PLAIN BUSINESSMAN, NOT A PARLOR SNAKE
.

YOU WERE SWEET AS HONEY TO ME THAT NIGHT. THESE DAYS YOU TELL PEOPLE THAT YOU ALMOST FAINTED WHEN I TALKED ABOUT MY WORK AT ST. GEORGE'S SUNDAY SCHOOL DOWN IN STUYVESANT SQUARE, BUT YOU SURE HID YOUR SURPRISE THEN. YOU ASKED ABOUT THE SCHOOL, AND WANTED TO KNOW THE SIZE OF THE FAMILIES IN THE CONGREGATION, AND TALKED ABOUT HOW THOSE WOMEN HAD ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTION WHILE POOR WOMEN DIDN'T. THAT WAS MY TURN TO ALMOST FAINT
.
I COULDN'T BELIEVE THIS LITTLE LADY LOOKING UP AT ME WITH THOSE BIG GREEN EYES WOULD TALK ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL AS IF SHE WAS DISCUSSING THE WEATHER. I'D NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT. I'D NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE YOU. MARY NEVER MENTIONED SEX. WOULDN'T TALK ABOUT IT. WOULDN'T COMMIT IT. EVERY TIME I MANAGED TO, SHE CALLED HER MAMA THE NEXT MORNING CRYING. BUT I'VE ALREADY TOLD YOU ABOUT THOSE CALLS. MOTHER, SHE'D WAIL, HE DID IT AGAIN
.

YOU MADE ME FEEL SO BIG THAT NIGHT. WAS IT AN ACT? WERE YOU LAUGHING UP YOUR SLEEVE IN THE BACKSEAT OF MY TOWN CAR AS MY CHAUFFEUR DROVE US DOWN TO YOUR APARTMENT? I MUST HAVE SOUNDED LIKE A RUBE TO YOU, A RICH RUBE, BUT A RUBE ALL THE SAME. EVEN THEN I KNEW MY MONEY WAS PART OF THE ATTRACTION, BUT THAT WAS ALL RIGHT. MY MONEY WAS PART OF ME. I'D MADE IT MYSELF. WHEN I TOLD YOU ABOUT DRIVING AROUND THE COUNTRYSIDE AS I WAS JUST STARTING THE COMPANY AND SEEING BARNS THAT WERE IN NEED OF A PAINT JOB, THEN OFFERING TO PAINT THE BARN FOR THE FARMER IF HE'D LET ME PUT A SIGN FOR THREE-IN-ONE OIL ON THE SIDE FACING THE ROAD—I FIGURED IF HE HADN'T BEEN ABLE TO PAINT IT THEN, HE WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO IN THE FUTURE, AND THE ADVERTISEMENT WOULD STAY FOR A WHILE—YOU SAID WHAT A CLEVER IDEA AND I MUST BE A VERY FORWARD-THINKING MAN TO HAVE HATCHED IT. BY THE TIME I GOT OUT OF THE CAR TO SEE YOU TO THE DOOR, I WAS TEN FEET TALL. WHEN YOU AGREED TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME, I WAS OVER THE MOON, AS YOUR ENGLISH FRIENDS WOULD SAY. I'D GIVE A LOT TO HAVE THOSE DAYS BACK
.

NOAH AND I
got along better than we should have, at least in the beginning. If he minded about the other men, he didn't say so. I can't believe he didn't know. Let's just say he was wise enough to pretend ignorance.

I'd known his money would be a boon to the cause, but I hadn't suspected he'd be useful as well. My proper businessman husband became a bootlegger for the movement, smuggling German and Dutch diaphragms into the country packed in his Three-in-One Oil containers. He also managed to get his hands on the German formula for a spermicidal jelly to be used with the smuggled diaphragms—he wouldn't say how, but he couldn't stop grinning when he told me about it—and began producing it in one of his factories in New Jersey.

He put my finances in order too. Suddenly the organization wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy, and I wasn't living hand to mouth. Noah was generous, at least in the beginning. He built me my own Wantley, complete with a man-made lake on a hundred and ten acres in Fishkill in Dutchess County. It was a handsome Tudor mansion—I know the word is vulgar, but there's no other way to describe the house—a short drive from New York. Willowlake was my home on the hill, and now I was one of those enviable matrons who floated over green-as-legal-tender lawns through soft summer nights. I even took up tennis and golf.

I enjoyed living well, but now that I had money, I thought about it even less. Manufacturers of contraceptives offered me fees to endorse their products. I refused. A firm in the Midwest tried to capitalize on my reputation by calling itself the Margaret Sanger Company. I sued. When the Crash came, Noah lost his seat on the stock exchange, and we cut back, but all I had to do was look around me at families suffering in Hooverville tents in Central Park, men selling apples on street corners, and women writing to me desperate for ways to prevent having another mouth to feed to know that we were still living unconscionably well.

Each year seemed to bring a new triumph for the movement. In 1936, the Supreme Court ruled that contraceptives could be sent through the mails to doctors. In 1937, the American Medical Association endorsed birth control. Contraception was becoming so respectable that the Sears, Roebuck catalog advertised what it called “preventives.” CBS invited me on national radio to deliver a talk on family planning. For years the airwaves had banned me. The FCC gave a license to Aimee Semple McPherson, that snake-oil saleswoman whom I'd seen in London the night I'd stumbled into a religious meeting, with her healing-through-the-air-waves scam, but they'd refused to let me near a broadcast studio. Now suddenly they decided I was worth listening to.

As the years passed, the honors and accolades poured in. Tokyo gave me the key to the city. Smith College awarded me an honorary degree. I heard that President Johnson wanted to present me with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but feared antagonizing the Catholic Church. I was feted as Woman of the Century at a dinner attended by more than a thousand people, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.