Terrible Virtue (19 page)

ETHEL BYRNES

THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF WINDSOR, WELL LA DI DA. MY SISTER, THE FORMER SOCIALIST, THE FORMER
IRISH
SOCIALIST, WAS BESIDE HERSELF BECAUSE SHE WAS GOING TO MEET THE KING OF ENGLAND, WHO'D ABDICATED, AND THE CLIMBER WHO THOUGHT SHE COULD SLEEP HER WAY TO BEING QUEEN. POOR MARG. YOU NEVER COULD MAKE UP YOUR MIND WHETHER YOU HATED THE PEOPLE AT THE TOP OF THE HILL OR LOVED THEM. PERHAPS THAT'S ONE MORE REASON YOU'RE NOT AS HAPPY AS YOU WANT THE WORLD TO BELIEVE
.

IF YOU ASK ME, ALL THIS TALK ABOUT YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS AND YOUR HONORS SOUNDS A LOT LIKE WHISTLING IN THE DARK. IF LIFE WAS SO SUNNY, IF YOU WERE SO FULFILLED, WHY DID YOU TAKE TO YOUR BED EVERY NOVEMBER 6? YOU REFUSED TO SEE ANYONE. YOU WOULDN'T EVEN TALK TO ME ON THE PHONE. I'M NOT FAULTING YOU FOR THAT. I'M MERELY SUGGESTING THAT MAYBE IF YOU'D STOP INSISTING YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN GUILT, IF YOU'D PERMIT YOURSELF SOME ORDINARY—I KNOW HOW YOU HATE THAT WORD—EMOTIONS, YOU'D HAVE AN EASIER TIME OF IT
.

OR MAYBE NOT. OWNING UP TO THE GUILT DOESN'T NECESSARILY DULL THE PAIN. ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR CHILDREN. I'M PROOF OF THAT
.

I
HAD WON THE
fight to make contraception legal and available to large numbers of women, but I hadn't found a way to make it simple or easy or even feasible for the millions of women who lived in urban tenements without adequate plumbing or privacy, or rural hovels with outhouses, or anywhere without access to doctors who could fit a diaphragm and explain how to use it. I wanted a form of birth control that could be effective in all those circumstances. I dreamed of an injection or a pill or a miracle drug of some kind. Dream on, skeptics told me. But if science could develop vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, surely it could find a substance that would prevent conception. I had no intention of giving up until it did.

KATHARINE MCCORMICK TO MARGARET SANGER

Boston, Massachusetts

November 18, 1950

Dear Mrs. Sanger,

My late husband's estate has been settled, and I find myself with some funds in hand. Do you have any suggestions about how to put the money to the best use? What is the status of contraceptive research, and where would contributions do the most good?

With sincere regards,

Katharine Dexter McCormick

Tucson, Arizona

December 1, 1950

Dear Mrs. McCormick:

Contraceptive research needs tremendous financial support. At present, Dr. Gregory Pincus of the Worcester Foundation in Massachusetts has proved that repeated injections of progesterone stops ovulation in animals. Do not be put off by the fact that he is working in a small underfunded laboratory, which he started with a colleague, rather than at a large university. He was formerly at Harvard, but was denied tenure. Some say he was bypassed because of his controversial in vitro fertilization of rabbits, which raised a moral brouhaha. Others ascribe his situation to academic politics, anti-Semitism, and plain old jealousy. Whichever it is, he has achieved excellent results, and I believe funding his work will yield success for our cause.

With sincere regards,

Margaret Sanger

Boston, Massachusetts

June 14, 1954

Dear Mrs. Sanger:

Dr. Pincus was here yesterday for two hours, and I feel so encouraged by his progress. As you know, the price of progesterone was $200 a gram, economically feasible for thoroughbred horses, but not for the average woman in need of contraception. However, Dr. Pincus reports that progesterone is now being made with synthetics.

The problem going forward will be the clinical tests. I pointed out to Dr. Pincus that we are unlikely to find a cage of ovulating females. He is thinking of Japan, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico.

With sincere regards,

Katharine Dexter McCormick

NEW YORK TIMES,
May 10, 1960

U.S. APPROVES PILL FOR BIRTH CONTROL

My legacy was secure.

GRANT SANGER

YOUR LEGACY WAS SECURE, MOTHER? I'M ONLY GLAD YOU DON'T SEE HALF OF WHAT'S WRITTEN ABOUT YOU THESE DAYS. I CAN'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT HAPPENED. YOU HAD NO PREJUDICE, EXCEPT PERHAPS AGAINST THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. YOU WENT TO JAIL FOR TRYING TO HELP THOSE POOR JEWISH AND ITALIAN WOMEN IN BROWNSVILLE. YOU SET UP CLINICS IN HARLEM AND THE SOUTH. YOU SPOKE AT A MOTHER'S DAY SERVICE AT THE ABYSSINIAN BAPTIST CHURCH. YOU GAVE INTERVIEWS TO NEGRO NEWSPAPERS SAYING THE WHITE MAN HAD TO BE EDUCATED TO OVERCOME HIS BIGOTRY. YOU DISTURBED THE PEACE BY INVITING THOSE TWO NEGRO DOCTORS TO YOUR TALK AT A WHITE CLUB IN OKLAHOMA CITY, THEN PRETENDED YOU'D HAD NO IDEA THEY WOULDN'T BE WELCOME. LATER, WHEN HITLER BEGAN ROUNDING UP JEWS, YOU FOUGHT THE BIGOTS AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT AND MANAGED TO BRING OVER DOCTORS AND RESEARCHERS WHO WERE BEING HOUNDED OUT OF THEIR OWN COUNTRIES. FOR A WHILE THERE,
VILLOWLAKE
, AS THEY CALLED IT, LOOKED LIKE A REFUGEE CENTER. YOU WERE SO MUCH ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS THAT THE NAZIS BURNED YOUR BOOKS. SO WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS HOW IN HELL DID YOU END UP BEING COMPARED TO HITLER AND ACCUSED OF GENOCIDE BY EVERY CRANK WITH A TYPEWRITER AND AN AX TO GRIND?

ISN'T HINDSIGHT WONDERFUL?
Doesn't it make us wise? But if you want to understand what really happened, you have to forget what came later—Hitler, concentration camps, gas chambers, ghoulish experiments on human beings—and return to the way the world was in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. I can remember that more vividly than I can recall what I had for lunch yesterday.

Eugenics was in the air. Everyone was intoxicated by it. We were going to wipe out illness and eliminate defects by engineering reproduction. We were going to cure society's ills by breeding, not a master race, but simply new and improved human beings. Perfection was just around the corner.

I was as idealistic as the next reformer, but I had a more practical motive as well. Eugenics was a reputable science. Serious thinkers and respected officials espoused it. Colleges and universities offered courses in it. But despite the successes I'd had, in certain circles birth control was still regarded as shady. Politicians were afraid to touch it. I was hoping the science of eugenics would paste a fig leaf of decency over the naked effrontery of contraception.

But eugenics turned out to be sham rather than science. And I became fair game for every crank enemy of contraception. The Catholic Church compared me to Hitler. Critics said, as the district attorney had so many years earlier, that I was trying to wipe out the Jewish population. But here's what I want to know. Why didn't those cranks and critics take out after Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled that enforced sterilization was legal? Why didn't they blame W. E. B. Du Bois and Roger Baldwin of the ACLU for subverting civil rights? I'll tell you why. Because they were men with impressive credentials and seemingly serious causes. I was a woman talking about sex and tampering with their cherished male prerogatives. I had to be discredited. More than that, I had to be disgraced.

They did a good job. I've seen the books calling me a Nazi and accusing me of trying to engineer a master race. I've read the way they've trimmed and twisted my words by taking them out of context. I know the way they've demonized me and discredited my cause. But their slurs can't undo what I achieved. I changed the world for the better. Nothing can take that away from me.

NOVEMBER 6, 1965

Tucson, Arizona

T
HE FIRST THING
I saw when I opened my eyes was the pink blush creeping over the distant peaks. My house spreads out on the desert floor like a fan, and every room commands a view of the mountains.

When I bought the land next to Stuart and his family, I asked my friend Frank Wright to design a fitting home for my soul's development. I was still studying Rosicrucianism and was determined to nourish my life-force as well as my aesthetic sense. But he said the piece of land was no more than a handkerchief and anything built on it would look like a pig's sty. Frank doesn't mince words, but he ate those once he saw the house another architect friend built for me. Every room pulsed with light. The lines were spare and clean without a hint of hand-me-down Spanish fraud. How could a woman not be happy here? And I was most of the time, no matter what Ethel said. But November 6 was always a day out of my life.

I turned on my other side and closed my eyes. I knew I wouldn't fall back to sleep, but I had no reason to get up. I made no appointments on November 6. I did not see people. I did not even work. I devoted the day to my children. Stuart and Grant would call. They always did. Peggy would come to me, if I was patient.

I lay there thinking about my little girl. I had changed with the years. My hair had turned from ginger to rusty to gray, and grown thinner. Lines that had been no more than suggestions of life to come had deepened into ravines giving away my past. My wide almost-green eyes had gone into hiding beneath heavy lids. The alterations—no, the insults—had piled up year after year. But Peggy remained the same, a yellow-haired daisy of a girl with the smile of an imp and the eyes of an innocent. Even after all these years, those eyes staring through my memory made my heart ache.

My own eyes flew open. The day had been stalking me for weeks, it always did, but I hadn't given a thought to the year. November 6, 1965. Fifty years of November sixths. Half a century of taking to my bed to mourn, and to wait for her. How could that be? How could I have lived so long? So much longer?

I turned on my other side again and stared at the photograph on my night table. It had been taken in front of the building across from the Luxembourg Gardens. In it, Stuart's corduroy Norfolk jacket and knickers are disheveled from play. Grant stands with roller skates strapped to his feet and dirt smudges on his face. And Peggy stares into the camera from beneath blond bangs that fall like a silk curtain from the brim of her hat, daring the world, or me, to make her smile. The children do not look happy, but it is better than the other photograph, the professional one that J.J. persuaded me to have taken. I never should
have done it. I almost hadn't. On the way to the photographer's studio, I'd lost my nerve.

“I can't do it,” I said, standing on the sidewalk, somber in the gray dress with the scalloped white collar. I had started to put on a black skirt, white shirtwaist, and tie that morning, but J.J. had said the uniform of the suffragist was too provocative.

“Can't do what?” He stood facing me with a hand on each boy's shoulder. “Have a picture taken?”

“Exploit the situation. Exploit her.”

“You're not exploiting her, Peg. You're giving her meaning. Didn't you always say the cause was for her?”

I closed my eyes again and lay in the faint early-morning light, waiting for her.

The ringing of the phone shattered the silence. It was too early for Stuart to call, but Grant lived on the East Coast. I started to reach for the phone, then shrank back. Suddenly I remembered not the half century of calls from him on November 6, seeking and offering solace, commiserating in our shared grief, but the first November 6. He'd laid on his stomach and kicked his small brown oxfords against the floor. They took my sister to the hospital and they brought back a dead body, he'd cried over and over.

The outcry was directed against the world. He was too young and too terrified to turn on his mother.

I
F THERE WERE
any truth in advertising, they'd call this place not House by the Side of the Road but House at the End of the Road. That's what I've come to. The end of my road. I've run out of tricks to keep the memory at bay. The truth lies exposed in the heartless sun that beats into my room in this spirit-crushing prison they call a nursing home. It's as intrusive as the attendants coming and going on their soft-soled cheerfulness. The memory is all that's left. I am face-to-face with it, finally.

OCTOBER 1915

I had a premonition that night in Boston, but when I reached Ford Hall and found the police stationed around the auditorium, I was arrogant enough to think my foreboding had to do with nothing more than another attempt to silence me. At the last minute, the Boston city fathers, egged on by the Church, had decided they could not permit a birth controller to speak in a public forum.

An officer met me at the door and handed me a piece of paper. It said, in a garble of legalese, that Mrs. Margaret Sanger was prohibited from speaking at Ford Hall or anywhere else in the city. I wished J.J. were there, though I doubted he could have done much. Even if the order wasn't legal, and I had a feeling it wasn't, the police were determined to gag me.

The minute the word
gag
took shape in my mind, I knew what I had to do. I sent a young woman volunteer out to get a roll of surgical tape. It was lucky I was a nurse. (Oh, how the irony of that thought struck me later.)

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Just get the tape and meet me in the ladies' room.”

I went to the ladies' room and, while I waited for her, took a notebook from my handbag, tore out a page, wrote a brief paragraph, and put it back in my handbag.

She returned with the tape. I took the roll from her and sent her back to the auditorium to find Professor Arthur Schlesinger. His wife, who was active in feminist circles, had written that she would be coming over from Harvard with her husband for the speech.

I had to use my teeth, but I managed to tear off a piece of tape about five inches in length. If it were any longer, it would get in my hair and removing it would be painful and, even worse, ruin my hairdo. The memory of my vanity on that night goes through me like a knife. I faced the mirror and fastened the tape over my mouth from ear to ear. When I was sure it was secure, I took my handbag and headed back to the stage. Professor Schlesinger was there, waiting for me.

I mounted the steps to the stage, Professor Schlesinger and I shook hands, and I gave him the paragraph I'd written. He studied it for a moment.

“Can you read it?” The words came out muffled from behind the surgical tape.

“Perfectly,” he said.

We turned to face the audience. I stood with my head up, daring the police and the world, while he read.

As a pioneer fighting for a cause, I believe in free speech. As a propagandist, I see immense advantages in being gagged. It silences me, but it makes millions of others talk and think about the cause in which I live.

When he finished, the applause shook the room.

Someone was helping me remove the surgical tape, and I was trying to keep it out of my hair, and people were crowding up to the stage. A guard cut through the throng and handed me a telegram. I tore it open. It was from Bill. These days he wrote and wired only to harass me. I started to stuff the sheet of yellow paper in my pocket. I would not let his badgering spoil my triumph. Then one word jumped out at me. Peggy.

I HAVE NO
idea how I got to the station or who bought my ticket. All I remember is sitting in the unforgiving light of the Pullman car, reading and rereading Bill's wire. It was anemic with lack of information.

I crumpled the telegram and sat staring out the window. There was no view, only an occasional light carving a desolate hole in the darkness, and my own reflection.

I smoothed out the piece of paper in my lap and read it again.

PEGGY RUSHED FROM STELTON TO MT SINAI WITH
PNEUMONIA STOP COME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP LOVE BILL

I lifted my eyes to the night-blackened window again. My mother's face stared back at me. Now you know, she said.

Outside the Grand Central Terminal, the city was still in darkness, but overhead a beam of thin autumn light had snagged on a water tank on one of the roofs. A queue of taxis stood waiting in front of the station. I stepped into the first one. “Mount Sinai Hospital,” I said.

The smells of the hospital, the forced cheerfulness of the early-morning activity, the sagging faces of the nurses going off duty and the sleep-softened ones of those coming on—these were all familiar, but everything about my being there was strange and alien and wrong. This was a mistake. It had to be.

The woman behind the desk gave me the room number. Peggy was here. There was no mistake.

The elevator inched up. I stepped off it and started down the hall. Even before I reached the room, I heard the noise. That tortured rasp could not be the breathing of a five-year-old. It must be coming from another patient, a dying old man, a stranger.

I reached the room. The sight of that small body struggling for air stopped me in the doorway.

FOR THE NEXT
three days, or five, or ten—I didn't know then; I can't remember now—I could not leave her side. I didn't dare. I was her mother. It was up to me to save her. Another nurse, even Ethel, would not get the compress cold enough, or warm the chill metal bedpan sufficiently, or sponge-bathe her as lovingly. They would manhandle the weakened fragile body. They would
fail to get all the mucus from her lungs. That was the worst part. That was why I could not trust anyone else to do it.

I leaned over her, forcing myself to pound her skinny chest with the cruel hammers of my hands, again and again and again. Tears streamed down my face and fell onto hers. The skin that used to be smooth and translucent was crepey as an old woman's. Once, when I finished the procedure, I complained to Ethel about the noise down the hall.

“That was you, Margaret. You were the one who was screaming.”

The lung procedure was agony. Inactivity was worse. What kind of nurse was I, what kind of mother, to sit by the side of the bed helpless while life leaked out of my baby? I demanded to see the doctors. I would not let other nurses in the room. I hated having Bill there. He was always getting between Peggy and me. He was always putting a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. I couldn't stand his touch.

I was with her when it happened. Her body convulsed, then went limp. I threw myself across the bed and clutched her to me. I would hold her in this world by physical force. But I could not hold her here. She was gone.

I CANNOT PUT
the days that followed in any kind of order.

Tears stream down Bill's face.

Stuart clings to me as he has not in years. Stuart hides under a bed and will not come out.

Grant pummels the floor with his hands and feet and bays at the world.

A churning sea of faces. Ethel. J.J. Sisters and friends and women in the movement. Sorry, they say, so sorry.

Sorry. What a puny lisping word. I could not stand to hear it. I could not stand to see all those people who were still alive. I could not stand myself. I went back to my room at the Rutledge, locked the door behind me, and put the box with Peggy's ashes on the table. It was so small it barely took up any space at all.