Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction (30 page)

He doesn’t give my retort his customary pinched lips. Instead he chuckles and shakes his head, deploring the ceiling for guidance. “Oh Lord, give me strength,” he says.

I reserve another comment so that he can stay focused on what he has to say. I at least recognize a man on a mission.

He puts his arm on the back of the sofa. I notice then the cream-colored trousers, the red cashmere sweater and how it blushes his cheeks and shows off his freshly-washed blond hair. He catches my breath with his casual good looks. “I’ve come on too fast and too strong, when what we need first is friendship. I know I’ve been a total cad, but I just couldn’t help myself, you’re so pretty.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’m in agreement so far.”

I see him struggling with this and I wonder why he wants to be friends with a smart-ass, when he’s said more than once that he hates them.

He forces out a small chuckle and nods. “I deserve that.” He meets my eyes with that puppy dog look. “I’d like for us to start over again. As friends. Just do things together. We have a lot in common, like movies and music, and I know we could have a first-rate time together, just getting to know one another.” He licks and chews a bit on his bottom lip apprehensively. “And I won’t even mind that you don’t always agree with me.” He pulls out a slip of paper from his trousers’ pocket and reads, “Too much agreement kills a chat’, says Eldridge Cleaver.”

“I don’t know,” I say carefully, trying not to stare at how he made his mouth moist and kiss-ably pink. I decide to hold out for some more groveling; this is entertaining, especially coming from William Thomas Jackson the Third.

“And to prove it to you,” he continues, “I’ve went to great lengths in order to assist you in your business of the day. I’m here at your disposal. Why, I’ve even gone so far as to meet with Ellen Whitman and tell her I’ll chauffeur you to her as early as this morning, if you’re open to it.” He does his usual and raises his hands to my raised eyebrows. “I know you think I’m not listening but I remember distinctly you telling me that you are supposed to meet with her about some sort of baby clinic.”

I let that one pass. I sit there silently, trying to soak this in, this everybody-seems-to-know-your-business town. He must’ve talked to her after I called her.

“Mrs. Whitman said herself that you could use a male escort around there. To open up this kind of clinic is risky business, now you have to know that.” He says this softly, as if he wants to break it to me gently that I could be in danger and he’s here to rescue.

So what – maybe I do need rescuing. At any rate I need pushing in keeping this appointment and I owe Mama some effort in research. I just don’t feel inspired like she does but I can’t tell her my heart’s not in it – she’d never understand. I grew up on women’s
rights the way most babies grow up on Pablum and I’d gotten tired of the same food. Wouldn’t Mama be surprised at whom her advocate is; I smile at the irony.

William slaps his knee as if silence is close enough to agreement and he jumps up, grabs my hands and pulls me to my feet. “One more thing,” he says. He lifts my chin to meet such earnest eyes, more blue than green today. “I promise not to advance on you again. Not even so much as a kiss. I’ll wait til you’re ready, and if that’s never, then we’ll still have our friendship, and I’m still better off than before I met you.”

I smile again, which seems to be all I need to do, and we head outside, with my only insistence in that I drive so that I can learn my way around (I also want to get my hands back on my car). “Yes, ma’am,” he says as he hands me the keys, with a stronger than southern sound, more like a colored person’s acquiesce.

This is my first time outside Pickerville, which according to William is the only hotspot of the south. I say to him that the real reason he doesn’t go to Savannah is because of the crummy umbilical cord that attaches Pickerville to its big mama, Savannah, less than 15 miles east. This cord is a road that is a combination of gravel and dirt that hasn’t sufficiently filled in the potholes. He laughs and says I’m just thinking that way to get into the mood to talk to Mrs. Whitman about having loads of babies.

That proves it; I didn’t think he had been listening.

Anyway I find I need more than that to get into the mood to open a birth control clinic. I’m excited that Ellen Whitman’s address is not an office but her own home in the wealthy Victorian District - until I find that many of these great homes have been deserted by the wealthy and have become boarding houses. After driving past many of the twenty-something park-like squares, splashing fountains, canopies of oak trees, statues and cast-iron railing, her whiteboard siding looks drab and some of her windows are boarded up. She has a neglected rose bush and bicycle by her door and a tricycle inside her entrance. Men in uniform are coming down the stairs and she explains that they are her boarders.

She introduces us to her eight children, reminding me of octopus arms going all which way around her, and hence I understand her personal interest in birth control. Ellen is big-boned, looks frazzled and disorganized; her place a shamble of toys, shoes and an indoors-dog of all things, and I sniff hints of urine. William and I have to move aside books and folded laundry to sit on her sofa. Mama would never allow this clutter at the Lighthouse and I immediately feel outside my comfort zone.

I suddenly wish I had asked more questions of Mama before coming here.

Ellen doesn’t make me feel any better when she finally sits across from us and hardly looks our way, saying as much as she can at once, as if this is one of a million things on her mind. Her first mistake is that she assumes I know more than I do and she throws me right in the middle of her mess. “I’m glad you came. We’ve got problems here that are too big for me alone. I need to rent office space but I can’t get funding, so you’ll need to raise some. The Maternal Health League is on my back to get it going but they won’t give me any money. I asked the state to sponsor it and before the war, that would’ve been no problem. But now churches are stepping in and saying that because of all the soldiers coming in here, venereal disease has spread, and if birth control contraception is readily available, such as condoms and jells, we’re promoting loose women who are seeking sexual relations with soldiers. Police are now singing with their choir that prostitution is on the rise, and … what else …” She smoothes back some loose strands of diffused hair, removes a bobby pin, opens it with her teeth, and reinserts it in her loose bun. “Oh yes, and the mayor is shouting that immoral, diseased women have brought contagion to healthy soldiers and he doesn’t want to lose the money that soldiers are bringing in to his town. I don’t know what to do.”

Neither do I. I can’t even think of the right question to ask and all this sex talk is making me squirm in front of William, and just when he promises to calm down. “How do you know my mama?” is all I can think of to ask.

She answers this just as quickly as her last explanation as if this question was on her agenda too. “I was up in New York more than twenty years ago in the same march she was in and I heard her speak, but we didn’t actually meet there. What a scandal she was, in shouting out that women should lose their corsets and be free! I was about the only suffragist left standing for her. Then she was down here for a short term when married to your daddy, but we didn’t actually meet here. She stuck to the Pick Plantation and didn’t make connections, I hear. I remember reading about them in the papers when your daddy died though. And then they said she vanished into thin air. No, I met her in Nashville Tennessee in 1920 when suffrage was won. Isn’t that funny how lines cross? You start realizing after a few years that there’s only a squirt gun of us activists out there. I don’t know how I did it, being pregnant most of the time. I’m just like a machine – pop another one out and keep going. I met her and her handsome Indian beau at a celebration party. I heard they got hitched but I don’t know if that’s true. Well, no, that couldn’t be true because she married Thomas Pickering, didn’t she? A fine-looking fellow your daddy was, with so much going for him. Never at a halt, always travelling. You favor him, you know. I’ve seen his picture. Pickerville was named after your great grandfather and he also founded the Pickerville newspaper. Now I know
that
because my husband is from Pickerville and he was working at the newspaper when we met –”

“We don’t have much time, Mrs. Whitman,” rudely interrupts William. I want to hear more and give him a cross look. “I apologize,” he says lightly, touching my arm, “but I have to get back to the printing shop soon.” He turns back to Ellen. “What is it exactly that you want Katy to do? I’ll help her where I can but if it’s dangerous, we’ll have to discuss it with her uncle. He’s very protective of his kin.”

“Yes, of course,” she says and begins rummaging in a basket next to her chair. She moves aside knitting needles, yarn, newspaper, a rag doll, and pulls out a sheet of paper from a stack of such. “I have found one potential source of funding that you need to go talk to. It’s the Eugenics Board of Georgia. They’ve offered to combine
their method of birth control with ours and they’re state-funded. It’s better than nothing.”

I don’t want to ask, in front of William, what methods of birth control she’s talking about and I plan to look up “eugenics” later. I accept the paper with the Savannah address on it and tell Ellen I’ll call them soon to set up an appointment.

She nods, her small rounded eyes reminding me of her children’s marbles, taking us both in for the first time. “Just be careful; we don’t want anyone getting arrested. Some of this is hush-hush, don’t want to upset some people, even though every woman I know is begging for such a clinic. Your mother tells me she is opening up such a place up in New York so perhaps you two could bounce ideas off each other. Of course the south has its own way of doing things and some don’t take kindly to northern advice but the north does seem to pave the way, and we southerners do follow – eventually. We’re to handle this delicately, like a rose.”

“Right,” I answer. I have a headache and can’t get out of there soon enough. William has ants in his pants and seems eager to get back to his job at the printing shop.

“‘Like a rose’” he mimics, as we pull Duesy away from the curb. “Did you notice that dead rosebush? No wonder she can’t get a clinic started. And a birth clinic? Don’t need it; she’s got babies everywhere.” He snorts. “My father would die if he knew I was in Savannah.”

“Why is that? It looks like a beautiful old city.”

“The oldest in Georgia,” he nods. “But it went to hell when all the niggers moved in after the war.” (I was to learn that whenever anyone in Pickerville referred to the war, they meant only the Civil War.) He continues. “It’s half filled with them now and look at all the slums.” We’re driving past some pitiful dwellings and everything seems to be in primary shades of gray, black and brown as if frozen in old black and white snapshots.

“I’ve never seen so many niggers before,” I say, and then feel guilty for using the “n” word like others do down here. We always described them as “colored people” up north. “Why are they all
down here? It’s like the Great Wall of China lines the northern border of Georgia. You don’t see many in New York where I grew up. Papa had to export one up to our house, an ex-slave by the name of Lizzie who lived with them for many years.” William gives me a scowl and I hastily add, “She was their maid.” He responds with a satisfied smile but I only feel more guilty.

“My uncle tore down his house here,” William says, “and built a brick four-story, and he charges high rents but they stay anyway. Look how lazy some of them are there; they’re about as handy as a back pocket on a shirt. And fight with each other like cats and dogs. It’s true what they say that Savannah has become a pretty woman with a dirty face. You won’t see that happening in Pickerville, I can promise you that. Daddy nipped that rose in the bud.” He snorts at himself. He also sounds like he’s repeating others’ words and has grown to mean it.

I’m not understanding anything since I woke up this morning. I’m relieved when I finally drop him off at his print shop at the port where hundreds of workers are building the Liberty Ships for the war effort. I learn later that that was the smartest thing I did all day.

I’m back in the warm, aromatic kitchen with Clary the next morning, loving our routine. I thought I’d hate any type of habit because of the Lighthouse’s rigid schedule, but I fit back into it like a well-worn house-slipper. With just the two of us, Clary is back to her old self and she makes me my favorite of her cooking: sweet potato biscuits.

“Here’s some more peckings, chile’; I don’t know where you put it all. Did you find what you were looking for yesterday, Miss Katy?” she asks, setting two of these orange biscuits in front of me, the butter melting across the tops making me salivate. I’ll tell her anything she wants while smelling this, and so I tell her every “hush-hush” that happened with Ellen Whitman.

“
Eugenics
?” She freezes in mid-scrubbing

I blush at her reaction like I’ve said a bad word. “Do you know what that is?”