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A letter came from Lucy in the morning’s mail. Josephine slipped it into her sleeve and did not mention it to anyone. She wished to read it in privacy, feeling a furtive, half-shamed hunger for its contents.
In her bedroom, she unbuttoned her cuffs and rolled them back. Today she had chosen to wear black, like the Queen. Clothed in grief.
She slit the envelope with an ivory letter opener Simeon had brought from India.
August 30, 1889
Dear Mother,
Thank you for your letter. I have had quite the week.
First, at work, I got in trouble again for organizing a group of women to go to the foreman and demand a separate toilet. We are sick of the conditions, you can’t imagine and I won’t describe, but he got very angry with us and docked me a week’s pay for being the “ringleader” as he called me and so I have had to go to Cousin Carrie’s for my suppers this week.
Then we had a march through the streets on Sunday afternoon. We held banners calling for the vote. Buckets of water were thrown at us, as well as degrading insults which I will not repeat. Afterwards we went to a wealthy woman’s house where there was a big parlour and we held a meeting. Her husband burst in with some of the other women’s husbands. He roared at his wife and told us we would “never succeed” and that we “didn’t appreciate the protection and guiding minds of husbands” and made us leave.
We went to another place where we could be safe and we were pretty upset, you can imagine. What we discussed was men’s sense of superiority and how they are afraid of losing it. They say we have innate traits which are appropriate only for childrearing and homemaking. These traits are “emotivity, caring, supportiveness, and intuition.” We can’t reason, they say, because of our emotionalism. They believe it would be “race suicide” if we were allowed out of our sphere because the stresses upon us would damage our reproductive systems. At the bottom of it all, we decided, men are terrified of losing the power they hold over us. And so we decided that they are in fact weaker than we are. This gave us a sense of pride. We refuse to absorb these false descriptions of who we are any longer.
Are you getting names on the petition? We hope to have over ten thousand signatures.
Are you getting signatures for Mr. Fairweather’s almshouse petition?
How is your boarding house business doing? How are you, yourself, doing? Do you wish you did not have so much work?
I send you much love,
Lucy
The window was open, and she could smell the cidery tang of apples; overnight, the Yellow Transparent had dropped most of its fruit. All around the tree, deer tracks made black holes in the dewed grass. Another autumn was upon them: bees burrowing in the borage, slow-winged; leaves gathered against the porch lattice, smelling of frost.
She sat back in her chair, one hand on the letter and the other on her heart.
How are you, yourself, doing?
Lucy’s questions made her realize that the gains she had made within herself did not show as outward attributes. Do you wish you did not have so much work? Work, she thought, suddenly exasperated by the question, was a necessary thing—as Lucy should know from her studies into the rights of women. When she had been unable to rise from her bed, she had felt a sickness not of the body but of the soul. Since she had begun working, she felt no longer lost but necessary, her goal to improve the lives of all those who lived under her roof, even knowing that this circumscribed world was in jeopardy, since the house would never be hers, save for her dower right. Outrage, seeded by injustice, changed the way she walked, spoke and listened.
How can you own one-third of a house?
How can you not be the legal mother of children you have borne in pain and joy?
How can all you brought into the marriage become your husband’s property?
Lucy, who had left in anger as if the family’s misfortune were a thing Josephine herself had caused, had become an unwitting catalyst. She had no idea, Josephine thought, that the fury ringing from her daughter’s letters had become newly comprehensible, both affirmation and recognition.
Holding the letter, she went to the window and watched orange leaves detaching, riding the air, a slow and erratic spin, round, round, round: touching down on the green grass.
Harland was walking up the street. He paused at her lane, looked up at her window. She waved, and he waved in return. He seemed to make a sudden decision, turned into the lane. She hurried downstairs and was at the front door to greet him.
“Come in, Harland. I was just going to have a cup of tea.”
He had stirred his hair into disarray. The buttons of his vest were misaligned, the second one in the first hole. He set his linen hat on the sideboard next to Mr. Sprague’s derby. Light fell onto a chinoiserie vase filled with peacock feathers.
They sat in the turret room. Flora brought a tea tray. Steam curled from the teapot. A white bowl held late-crop raspberries, full-lobed, seedy. Butter cookies circled a plate, each one buttoned with strawberry jam in a thumbed dent. Flora turned, weaving a subtle route between chairs and around the piano. With a quick glance over her shoulder, she closed the door without making a sound.
Josephine poured tea for Harland. She poured for herself. On the mantelpiece, the clock made a clicking hesitation as the minute hand shifted.
“Did you come about the petition, Harland?”
It was the only point of reference between them, since Enid had been found, and the court case completed, and Mr. Mallory sent to prison, and Doreen bundled off to the county poorhouse.
“I need…” His hands shook and the cup rattled in
