Terrible Virtue (5 page)

I
WAS STANDING IN
front of the hall mirror putting on my hat and thinking that being desired did more for a woman's complexion than cold cream. In the last few years, I'd tried half a dozen brands, but none of them had made me glow as I did tonight. A line I'd read somewhere floated through my mind.
It is as foolish to promise to love forever as to promise to live forever.
Not that I had stopped loving Bill.

Grant came barreling down the hall and stood behind me.

“Are you going out tonight, Mama?”

I sensed the cunning of an underage blackmailer.

“I am, my darling.”

“Are you going to a shoshism meeting?”

I inserted the long pin into the crown of my hat and nodded at his reflection in the mirror. His small fists balled, ready to take on the world.

“I hate shoshism!”

“Maybe Grant has a point,” Bill said. We had kissed the children, said good night to Bill's mother, and were on our way to the subway. “I certainly prefer my own family to Madame Pompadour de Dodge and her salon. It's a den of hypocrisy. They
talk about socializing the means of production, but what they're really thinking about is appropriating someone else's wife.”

I concentrated on lifting my evening dress an inch to keep from tripping on the steps down to the subway. I refused to argue with him about this.

Before Bill and I had eloped, we'd been in complete agreement on the nature of marriage. It was a stifling bourgeois institution, a form of legalized bondage that turned women into chattel. Ours would be a different kind of union, a melding of two equals based on love, mutual respect, and total freedom. We were committed to sexual equality. We believed that women as well as men had the right, the duty, to use their God-given bodies to live as fully as possible. In the abandoned shed with Cory Alberson, I'd known that instinctively. Since then, I'd read dozens of books, including works by the great Havelock Ellis, that proved it. The thwarting of passion, the suppression of the primal urge, injured not only the individual but society. Those convictions, not the minister's archaic words, had been our marriage vows that storm-threatened afternoon. But somehow in Hastings we'd lost our way. Living among a group of resolutely respectable young couples, we'd become conventional. Now, back in the city, moving among socialists, anarchists, and free-love advocates, gliding among men and women who believed that love was too precious ever to be denied, I was shedding my bourgeois camouflage. But Bill was still obsessed with fidelity. He didn't understand that love is not a limited resource but an exponential force. The more I lavished on others, the more I had to give him and the children and even poor Mrs. Berkowitz, whom the Henry Street Settlement had sent me to nurse back from an operation for what was commonly called woman's trouble.

The subway station was a cave of gleaming white tile decorated with lavender street numbers. Bill slid two nickels to the man in the booth, scooped up our tickets, put his hand on the small of my back to guide me to the gate, then handed the tickets to the attendant, who dropped them into the glass ticket chopper. It was all so smooth, an urban ballet. The subways were one more reason I loved being back in the city. The speed of the trains, the design of the stations, the sheer modernity of it all was head-spinning. Imagine traveling more than a hundred blocks in minutes.

A train rumbled in, the doors opened, and we stepped into the car. It was crowded with men and women coming home from work or going to a night job or heading out on the town. I took the last empty seat. Bill hung on to the leather strap above me. The train lurched out of the station and picked up speed, but Bill refused to move on from the subject he was worrying.

“If revolution means promiscuity,” he said as he swayed over my head, “you can call me a conservative.”

I pretended not to hear him above the noise of the train.

We climbed the steps and came up out of the subway at Fourteenth Street. A horse-drawn streetcar clanged past. Above the noise, a man dressed in black was haranguing the small crowd that had gathered around him. It occurred to me that black wasn't a color but an ideology. Anarchists wore black shirts and trousers and caps as a statement of nihilism. Street preachers dressed in black hats and suit jackets and throat-strangling ties as signs of respectability and sobriety. This street-corner seducer was working for God. He thumped his black Bible, and pointed his finger at me in my satin dress and evening cape, and howled, “Repent!” Hate twisted his mouth and glittered in his eyes, but fear crouched in the faces of his band of followers. They were
terrified of ideas and art and freedom and sex, of the new and the unknown, of their own shadows and their own bodies, so they went creeping back to ancient times and old myths and a certainty no one could disprove because it was based on that syrupy-sounding word,
faith
. But if belief was so sweet, why was the man so full of hate? His predictions of my blood-soaked, fire-crisped everlasting future followed me east toward Mabel Dodge's house at 23 Fifth Avenue.

Mabel Dodge and I were nothing alike. Her “evenings” were written up in the newspaper. Her exploits were talked about all over town, and beyond. She had grown up with nursemaids and governesses, ponies, and dancing lessons for which she'd had dozens of pairs of white gloves like the ones that had got me in trouble back in Miss Graves's class. When she'd married, it had been to more money. But Mabel and I had two traits in common: a belief in radical ideas and a simmering restlessness neither of us could put a name to. That was why she had her evenings. That was why I went to them.

Mabel's salon was, like Mabel herself, a product of sheer imagination and fierce will. Who but an imaginative and willful woman would attempt suicide first by eating figs studded with shards of glass, as she told the story, then by taking laudanum, as a doctor verified? And all because she fell in love with a beautiful blond boy who looked as if he'd stepped out of one of the Renaissance paintings in her Medici villa in Florence and hired him as her chauffeur. At first everyone thought it was a case of unrequited love, but the beautiful blond boy had not rebuffed Mabel. It had been the other way around. At the last moment, Mabel had discovered she was too fastidious to sleep with the hired help, even if she had hired him for that purpose. Mabel Dodge was a cautionary tale for women in love and socialists
the world over. Or perhaps she wasn't. Perhaps she was an inspiration, because despite shattered ideals (men she did not desire tried to take liberties with her) and broken hearts (men she desired insisted on taking their liberties with others) she seemed to be having an awfully good time of it.

“I used to collect dogs and glass and art,” she liked to say, fixing her listener with heavy-lidded dark eyes. “Now I collect people. Important people.”

Bill and I joined the stream of important and self-important people flowing into the apartment. The revolutionaries and artists went for the conversation and, because many of them were down and out, for the moment late in the evening when her butler threw open the doors and announced that supper was served. The more respectable guests went to mingle with the disreputable.

Mabel's apartment, like her life, was a protest against the stuffy conventional world into which she'd been born. In an era of dimly lit rooms dressed in dark colors, heavy fabrics, and murky paintings, her flat shone pure white. Even when the lights were dimmed, as they were at her evenings, the woodwork gleamed, and the silk hangings shimmered, and the bear rugs foamed like meringue. Need I add that Mabel, who stood at the door receiving her guests, wore a gown of radiant white?

“Good evening, how nice to see you,” she murmured. “Good evening, thank you for coming.” “Good evening, I hope you enjoy the talk.” Except for those greetings, and equally impersonal good-byes as guests left, Mabel rarely spoke at her gatherings. That was why I was surprised when instead of releasing my hand, she leaned closer to whisper in my ear.

“John arrived wearing a face out of an El Greco painting.” Mabel saw the world through an art collector's eyes. And like
any serious collector, she hated to let go of anything once she got her hands on it. Several months earlier, she'd had an affair with John. “What did you do to the poor man?”

I tried for an enigmatic smile.

She started to say something else, but a small dark man with long greasy hair came rushing up and embraced her. “My little sister!” Hippolyte Havel cried in a shrill voice with a thick Russian accent. “My little goddamn bourgeois capitalist sister!”

Bill grimaced at me over Havel's patent-leather head. I smiled back. I would not let him ruin my evening.

We moved into the salon. In the center of the room, Big Bill Haywood, in a flannel shirt and corduroy jacket, was holding forth to a bouquet of pink and yellow and blue satin girls who blushed up at him with adoring faces. Emma Goldman, anarchist, rabble-rouser, and free-love advocate, was lecturing a dark Talmudic-looking boy who couldn't have been older than eighteen or nineteen. Her chubby finger poked his chest to emphasize her words, but he didn't seem to mind. Walter Lippmann, co-founder of
The
New
Republic
, was talking to Hutchins Hapgood, who liked to comb the Bowery looking for truth in the mouths of drunks. And John Rompapas—the Greek, as Bill called him—was leaning against a wall, his hungry black eyes measuring me.

Bill was still holding my arm. I shook off his hand and plunged into the room. As I did, Walter Lippmann moved to the center, held up his hands, and stood waiting for the conversation to quiet. It died by fits and starts. Since a guest who worked in a nightclub in Harlem had sung risqué songs at one of her gatherings, Mabel was careful to plan her evenings around a serious topic. Tonight, Lippmann announced, we would have a discussion of the labor movement. Big Bill Haywood would speak first.

A noise erupted in a corner of the room where a group of artists stood talking. My Bill had joined them. The sound might have been a sneeze, it might have been a snicker.

John Rompapas pulled himself up and away from the wall and began to make his way around the room.

Big Bill, a force of nature in front of a mob of workers, more thin-skinned in Mabel's salon full of artists, intellectuals, and slumming bourgeoisie, decided the noise had been a sneer. For Big Bill, the class war, like charity, began at home.

He swiveled his massive head and fixed the group with his good eye. “The first thing to understand is that the labor revolution will transform every aspect of the state.”

John Rompapas came up behind me. I could feel his breath on my neck.

“Take art,” Big Bill went on. “In the new order, art won't be above the masses. Artists won't be a chosen species.”

Across the room, I saw my Bill's eyes narrow in anger. He admired Big Bill, but he was in thrall to art.

I felt John press close against my back. That afternoon, in the small room behind his bookstore, he had complained that I didn't love him. I did love him. I couldn't make love with someone I didn't love. But that didn't mean I would run off with him. It didn't even mean I had stopped loving Bill. Besides, I had the children to think of.

“Proletarian art is the art of the future,” Big Bill proclaimed. “The state will see to it that everyone is an artist. The state will ensure that everyone has the leisure to paint or write or play the goddamn violin. Everyone will be an artist, and no one will be an
artiste
.”

“They'll have the leisure,” my Bill shouted, “but will they have the talent?”

My heart went out to him. It really did. But John was standing so close behind me, his chest pressed to my back, that his was the heart I felt beating.

“Perhaps we could move on from art to the woman question,” Hutchins Hapgood suggested, like a policeman herding the crowd to safer ground, though only a man could think raising the woman question was pushing the discussion out of harm's way.

“Right,” Emma Goldman cried. “Let's talk about equal pay for equal work.”

I felt John's erection pressing against me.

Big Bill took a long swallow of his drink and handed the empty glass to one of the pastel satin girls, who danced off to refill it.

“Of course, socialism stands for equal pay for equal work,” he pronounced. “But the measure is only a stopgap.”

I leaned back against John. I would not run away with him, but I was willing to slip away with him for a while. We had done it at another of Mabel's evenings.

Big Bill took the fresh drink from the girl and drained half of it. “In the socialist state, women will not have to work at all. In the socialist state, women will not run a sewing machine, or toil in a mill, or mop the boss lady's floor. Their job will be to care for their children, as many as possible. Their job will be to raise a new breed of man, one who is truly free and equal to his fellow man.”

John leaned over until his lips were against my ear. “Do I have to force you to run off?”

I took a step away from him. These blinkered men who thought women were nothing more than brood mares and love was a matter of absconding with the goods.

A
FTER THAT NIGHT
at Mabel's, I began to see the world with different eyes. I continued to go to socialist meetings, strike-planning sessions, and Mabel's salon, but now when I listened to the men arguing about socialism and communism and anarchism, shouting one another down, banging their big fists, swapping disparagements, I knew they were nothing more than lost boys. Dialectic materialism, my foot. Dictatorship of the proletarian, my eye. They thought they had the answers. They didn't even know the questions. I didn't either, but at least I was searching. I never dreamed I'd stumble on a clue delivering a talk at a women's meeting of Socialist Local Number Five.

Anita Block, the head, asked me to fill in for a speaker who'd fallen ill at the last moment. The subject was woman suffrage. I told her I couldn't possibly get up in front of a crowd and lecture on the ballot for women. I was in favor of it, of course, but I wasn't an authority.

“You know enough,” Anita said. “As for a crowd, you'll be lucky if ten people show up.”

Standing in the doorway to the cramped chilly room above the grocery store, I counted seven. They sat in the rickety
chairs, bleary-eyed from a long day spent sewing piecework and making artificial flowers, bone-tired from cleaning other women's houses, lifeless as rag dolls. That they had come at all amazed me.

I stepped into the room. Heads turned. They eyed me warily. I walked to the lectern that had been set up. “Good evening.” My voice came out arch and uncertain, a bad imitation of John Reed's tony Harvard accent with an undercurrent of shanty Irish.

Two of the women shifted in their chairs.

“I've come to talk to you about the ballot,” I went on in that ridiculous accent I couldn't seem to shed.

One of the women yawned. Another, who looked sixty but was probably in her forties, blinked several times, as if she were fighting sleep. But the worst was a young girl sitting right in front of me. She was leaning forward eagerly, clearly hungry for information about the ballot. As I went on looking at her, I saw Peggy in fifteen years, curious, determined, alive to life's opportunities. That was when the idea came to me. I knew what these women wanted to hear, I knew what they needed to hear, and it wasn't a lecture on suffrage. The vote couldn't save them. Socialism couldn't change their lives. Only one thing would do that.

“However, I am not going to speak about the ballot. You all know it is our inalienable right to have a voice in making the laws we must obey. You all know there will be no justice in the world until women can vote side by side with their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. You know all that, but what do you know about . . .” I hesitated, debating the proper words, not because I was afraid to use them, but because I wanted to make it clear to them what I was going to talk about. “. . . women's health?”

A quickening of interest rustled through the room like silk.

“Women's health,” I repeated the words. “It is a subject shrouded in mystery. A forbidden topic. Or so men tell us. But even the ballot is not as important to our well-being, our safety, our lives, and those of our children. I do not pretend to be an expert in the field, but as a nurse I do know something about the subject. And I would like to tell you what I know.”

The young girl was leaning so far forward I was afraid she'd fall out of her chair. The skeptics were alert. The old-before-her-time woman was nodding her head vigorously.

I talked for almost an hour. I didn't impart any medical or specialized information. I merely explained the facts of life. It's shocking how few women are acquainted with them. They know about demanding husbands and agonizing deliveries and painful menstruation, but they understand little of the connection among those things.

Two days later, Anita turned up at the apartment. “I heard you gave quite a talk the other night.”

I had sworn I wasn't going to apologize.

“They said it was the best talk they ever heard. The committee wants you to give another next week.”

The following week close to a hundred women showed up. Word had spread. They crowded into the small headquarters above the shop and spilled out into the hall.

The talks were such a success that Anita asked me to write a series of articles for the
Call
, the New York socialist daily.

I started to say that I'd never written for a newspaper.

“We'll call it ‘What Every Girl Should Know,'” she went on.

I'd grown up gleaning information from the whispers of
other girls, the teasing of boys, the jokes of older siblings, the unspoken words and veiled looks of my parents. Once again, I thought of Peggy. I told Anita I'd write the series.

Bill asked when I'd find the time. He never understood that for me, work, like love, was exponential. The more I did, the more I could do. He was just the opposite, but then he was an artist.

For the next month I sat beside dozing patients and taught a thirteen-year-old Peggy about menstruation, a seventeen-year-old Peggy about love, a twenty-four-year-old Peggy about childbirth, a twenty-and thirty-and even forty-year-old Peggy about how to avoid it. But I was careful. I wrote the last in veiled explanations and exhortations to demand more specific information. I wanted my voice heard, not censored, and I knew how close I was coming to that.

WHEN I HAD
night duty, I picked up the paper on the way home in the morning and stood in front of the vendor reading my column on the street. On the days when I wasn't working and my column was running, Bill went out and brought the paper back to me before he went to work. On the morning the next-to-the-last piece was scheduled to run, I took the paper from him as soon as he walked in the door and turned to the woman's page. It was an expanse of white. At first I thought he'd picked up a bum copy. Then I realized.

A headline marched across the top.

WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW

Beneath it the white space was broken by seven bold black letters falling vertically.

N

O

T

H

I

N

G

By Order of

The Post-Office Department

What it should have read was by order of Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Anthony Comstock was a big brutal bully with a dirty little mind. Who else but a tyrant with a warped sex-obsessed brain would want to be the nation's censor? Thanks to a ridiculous woman-and-child-killing law he'd managed to ram through Congress, he had the power to open any piece of mail passing through the United States Postal Service and designate it lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene. And it wasn't only the postal system. He'd tried to remove nude models from the Art Students League. He was a philistine as well as a despot. He boasted that he'd destroyed one hundred and sixty tons of literature, convicted enough men and women to fill sixty-one railroad coaches, and driven Madame Restell—an abortionist, yes, but one who provided safe procedures—to suicide. It wasn't only Madame Restell. He bragged that thanks to him, a grand total of fifteen individuals had taken their own lives. He would not drive me to that extreme. He spurred me to action. A few weeks after Comstock murdered my articles in the
Call
, I gave birth to Sadie Sachs.

I could have named her Rachael or Rifka or Teresa or Maria or Mary or Brigit or Anna. She could as easily have married Mr. Caniglio or Mr. Reilly or Mr. Zilkowski. As long as she had an identity. Human nature likes a clear narrative line. No one wants to hear about scores of women mutilating themselves with a variety of sharp instruments, and poisoning themselves with old wives' remedies, and bleeding to death at the hands of quacks. People want a woman with a name and a face and three small motherless children sobbing their hearts out. So I gave them Sadie Sachs. Her story might not have been factual, but it was true.

I LIFTED MY
skirt several inches and stepped carefully as I made my way down Grand Street. My stomach still churned at the stench, though I should have been used to it by now. I averted my eyes from the carcass of a dead horse.

They came for streets paved with gold. What they found was streets and sidewalks and alleys and courtyards strewn with the garbage of too many people living too close together. There was nowhere else to dispose of the detritus of their grim lives. Out the window went old meat bones, rotten vegetables, dead rats, dead cats, and human excrement because the single bathroom that served two floors of the tenement was backed up. If they had an old newspaper, they wrapped the filth. If they didn't, so much the worse. I had known poverty at the bottom of the hill, but this was a more primitive hell, a jungle where men slaved for a few cents a day, then came home to take out their frustration with tongue-lashings and beatings and sex; where women berated and cursed and slapped the children whom they'd suffered and almost died to bring into the world; where people cheated
their neighbors, stole from their friends, and swindled their relatives just off the boat. How else could they survive? Surely a world so vicious and bereft of love could not give birth to new life, but it teemed with it.

I did not have to search for the number of the tenement. I had been there every day for the past two weeks since the Henry Street Settlement had assigned me to the case. I climbed past two girls, about seven or eight, hunched together on the stoop. They looked like sisters with their dark eyes sunken in shadows, waxy pallor, and lank unwashed hair. I thought of my daughter with her mop of shining white-gold hair, safe and sunny in the scrubbed apartment uptown.

Still, these two wan undernourished waifs were the lucky ones. They could sit on the stoop in the spring sunshine, even if the spring sunshine stank like a sewer. Most of the neighborhood children were upstairs in rancid flats or behind the locked fire doors of sweatshops, sewing buttons or stitching hatbands or twining wire stems on artificial flowers.

The girls watched me pass without curiosity. By now I was a familiar presence in the tenement, though when I'd first arrived, within minutes the women had begun drifting out of their kitchens. It was the same in every building. The ones who were not behind in the rent, or had been paid for their piecework recently, or had found a new boarder waylaid me with gifts of cakes and jellies and gefilte fish. The ones who were broke brought only their questions. They asked about coughs, stomach ailments, rashes, sores, bites, broken bones, diarrhea, and constipation—their children's, their husbands', and their own. Then, after I answered them, they had one more question.

“Please,” they whispered. “Tell me the secret. Tell me how to keep from having another baby.”

I told them what I knew. They found the information unhelpful. Condoms or French letters were legal only to stop the spread of disease, and then only for men. They were also expensive. There was no law against coitus interruptus, except the law of human nature.

They shook their heads and asked again. They wanted the real method, the one the rich ladies uptown used to keep their families small.

I told them about pessaries, and added that only a woman with money and an accommodating private physician who was willing to skirt the law was likely to get her hands on one.

There must be something else, they insisted. A few thought their kitchen gifts insufficient and offered bribes. When I refused the money and swore I had no more information, some grew angry. Most became despondent. Withdrawal and French letters or rubbers or whatever you chose to call them, if you could get your hands on them, depended on the man, and the women knew that when it came to sex, even the most dependable were not.

I pushed open the door to the tenement and stepped from the blinding yellow morning into darkness. A cobweb brushed my face. Dead roaches crackled beneath my shoes. I couldn't understand the society women who relished their work in the tenements and settlement houses. I found it sinister, despite my warm welcome. But then those women walked the slums like tourists.

A girl about the same age as the two on the stoop opened the door to my knock. She was as sad-eyed and hollow-cheeked as they, but every now and then in the past two weeks, I'd made her giggle. Her giggle could be as infectious as Peggy's. I wondered how long it would take life to beat the laughter out of her.
Two younger children squatted on the floor playing with a pot and a pan. The woman who would become Sadie Sachs was leaning over a metal tub, working a piece of faded cloth against a washboard. The doctor had told her to stay in bed for at least another week, but if you have three small children and a good husband—for this husband was one of the good ones—and pride, you cannot stay in bed when you have strength to stand on your feet, no matter what the doctor says.

The woman took her hands out of the tub and dried them on her apron. I asked how she was feeling. She said she was fine, and without being told sat in a chair and opened her shirtwaist. I listened to her heart, counted her pulse, and checked her breathing, and all the time I was measuring her vital signs, her mouth kept moving. At first I thought she was praying, though on earlier visits she hadn't seemed religious. Then I realized. She wasn't praying, she was working up to a question. She was working up to
the
question.

“Mrs. Sanger,” she said as she began buttoning her shirtwaist, “a thing like I just had, I can't go through again.”

“No, you can't. You mustn't.”

She grabbed my hand in both of hers. “Then tell me, please, to keep from having the babies, what can I do?”

I told her what she, or rather her husband, could do, and as I spoke, I watched the shadow of hopelessness spread across her face, dark and ugly as the hemorrhagic rash from the septicemia she'd got inserting a knitting needle into her vagina. I had treated the rash, but there was nothing I could do for this.