Free Woman (20 page)

Throughout the lecture, John Martin stared at Vicky through opera glasses. Occasionally, he'd pass the glasses to the friend who had accompanied him. Martin remarked, "I am charmed by her high intellect and fascinated by her manner."

His friend commented that Vicky was not entirely respectable.

John Martin made no reply. When the applause had died and Vicky had left the stage, he hurried backstage to pay his respects.

Vicky, her eyes still blazing with excitement, was surrounded by a crowd of admiring well-wishers. When John Martin came up to congratulate her, she noticed only that he was eager and very attractive.

"May I have the pleasure of calling on you someday soon?" he asked politely.

"Certainly," she answered. As he left, he pressed an engraved card into her hand. Later, after nearly everyone had departed, she looked at the card. The name read John Biddulph Martin, Esq. When she asked a woman standing nearby who the young man was, she was told that Martin happened to be the most eligible bachelor in England.

Vicky could not have known John Martin's enthralled mood as he left the lecture hall. "If Mrs. Woodhull would marry me," he confided to his friend, "I would certainly make her my wife."

But perhaps her power of extrasensory perception was working that night, after all. For she felt hopelessly gay. When she left St. James's Hall, snow was falling gently. Halfway back to her lodgings, she asked the cabman to stop. Stepping out, she stood there dreamily for a moment and let the velvet flakes melt on her cheeks.

Over the next few months, Vicky saw a great deal of John Martin. They dined on lobster salad and champagne at London's most fashionable restaurants. At Covent Garden, they were seen attending the opera. When spring arrived, they rode every afternoon along the gravel paths of Kensington Gardens.

She found him kind, considerate, and almost fatherly despite the fact that he was three years her junior. From the beginning, one fact was clear. John adored her. He made no secret of his infatuation.

The night he formally proposed, she burst into tears. If she didn't love him before, she did then. More than anything else in the world, she wanted someone to protect her. Never again did she want to worry about money or contemptuous people calling her names. By marrying John, a completely new life would be possible.

That very first time they had met, John had declared that if she would marry him, he wanted her. Vicky was willing, but the Martin family was not. John's doting mother frowned upon her son's association with Vicky. She called her "an adventuress." When Mrs. Martin heard that John wanted to marry Vicky, she was appalled.

"A divorced woman!" she exclaimed. "A woman divorced twice!"

As time went by, Mrs. Martin became even more resistant. The longer Vicky remained in England, the more sensational information about her past was dug up by the press. Soon London's most fashionable drawing rooms began to buzz with unsavory gossip.

"That woman," Mrs. Martin firmly told her son, "is not the sort of woman a man marries."

Fortunately for Vicky, John did not believe the gossip. Rarely did he question her in any detail about her past. Whatever she told him, he accepted because he loved her. Still, he would not defy his mother's wishes; he refused to marry Vicky unless his family consented.

Frantic at the prospect of losing John, Vicky embarked on a remarkable campaign of denial. Except for women's rights, she disavowed nearly everything she had ever said or done. Vicky knew what she wanted. To get it, she was willing to lie.

"I'm nearly forty," she cried to Tennie. "This is my last chance."

In the end, she did marry John Martin. But it took her six long years to become what she once despised: a "respectable" married lady.

13

End of the Dream

The first winter of her marriage, she went to live at 17 Hyde Park Gate, the sumptuous Martin mansion with its blue-and-gold-ceilinged entranceway and its marble busts of Aphrodite and Hermes. In the drawing room, the parquet floors had been covered with bearskin rugs, and a Venetian wood chandelier was carved with little cupids. Most stunning was a silver statue of the goddess Nike against a background of black velvet.

Despite its grandeur, Vicky found the mansion cold and lonely. None of John's snobbish friends visited her. Once her husband's club gave a dinner to which wives were invited. When John invited her and Tennie, the other wives boycotted the affair, saying they couldn't associate with them. In the end, she and Tennie had been the only women present at the dinner.

Two years after Vicky had finally wed John Martin, Tennie married an elderly widower, Sir Francis Cook. The owner of an importing firm, Cook was even wealthier than Vicky's husband. He lived in a magnificent home on the Thames River, Doughty House. He also owned a large estate in Portugal where the king had granted him the title of Viscount de Montserrat.

Despite Vicky and Tennie's high position, people continued to snub them. Tennie didn't seem to mind, but Vicky felt humiliated and constantly struggled so that John would not regret having married her. Yet her past haunted their marriage. People insisted on talking and writing about her— the Beecher scandal, "free love," her many husbands, her career as a fortune-teller.

During the 1880s and '90s, she crossed the ocean countless times to answer her American critics in person. It never did a bit of good. Each time she appeared in her native country, there would be a fresh wave of sensational stories in the papers. Tennie said it was because she was rich now, and people enjoyed persecuting the rich. Perhaps, but she could never ignore an attack. Each time, she'd book passage and sail back to do battle.

There were other trips, too. Several times she returned expressly to renew her campaign for President. These were merely gestures; futile ones, she had to admit. Mostly, she wanted to impress John's family and to show English society that she was an important person. But the English continued to ignore her, and the Americans laughed. A Chicago paper described her as a middle-aged woman with the sharp, eager look of an adventuress.

In 1892 John rented a house in New York while Vicky tried to muster political support as a feminist candidate for President. Collecting fifty women, she formed the Humanitarian party to run her against Grover Cleveland. At once, she received a hailstorm of indignant protests from the feminists. How dare she, a foreigner, presume to speak for American women! Lucy Stone claimed that not one of the women supporting Vicky was a bona fide feminist. Frances Willard, speaking for the National Woman's Suffrage Association, warned that Vicky could run for President if she wanted, but she shouldn't link her name with such saints as Susan Anthony.

The following year she returned to America for a lecture tour. In New York she spoke at Carnegie Hall on "The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race." A big crowd turned out to witness her comeback after seventeen years away from the lecture platform. She was dressed in violet with a bunch of violets at her throat. But people went away disappointed because she had lost her fire and fizz. Then in her mid-fifties, she wore glasses to read her speech. The evening fell flat; upset, she canceled the rest of her tour.

The years before the turn of the century were stormy. One of Vicky's biggest troubles was learning to live with boredom. Much of her restless traveling across the Atlantic and her weak attempts at politics resulted from having nothing to do. As much as she loved her husband, the monotonous life of a wealthy English matron bored her to death, and she came to regard the Martin mansion as a mausoleum. Time hung heavily on her hands.

Once, searching for distraction, she decided to write her autobiography. At a rosewood writing desk before a fire in her bedroom, she began:

"Sitting here today in this north room of 17 Hyde Park Gate, London—dreary, smoky, foggy, insulated as you are in the customs and prejudices of centuries—I am thinking with all the bitterness of my woman's nature how my life has been warped and twisted out of shape by this environment, until, as I catch a glimpse of my haggard face in the mirror opposite, I wonder whether I shall be able to pen the history of this stormy existence."

As it turned out, she was not able to pen her history. She gave up after writing a dozen pages. Many of the memories that pleased her she had already denied; the rest were too sad to dwell upon. An autobiography should tell the truth. She couldn't.

Besides, she knew that her story was badly written as well as bitter. Better that she stick to an impersonal medium like journalism. In the 1890s she launched a new journal, the
Humanitarian.
Instead of choosing Tennie as her associate, this time she selected her daughter. Zulu Maud had none of her mother's dashing qualities. Sweet and gentle, she seemed content to devote her life to Vicky. In truth, Vicky discouraged her from marrying, but Zulu did not appear to care. For a half dozen years, Zulu helped her edit the
Humanitarian.
It was a handsome publication which looked like
Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly.
But the resemblance ended there. The new journal dealt mildly with social themes but lacked the fire that had made the
Weekly
so memorable.

After John Martin's death in 1897, Vicky made no more trips to America. Closing down the
Humanitarian
and the house at 17 Hyde Park Gate, she took the $850,000 he left her and, with Byron and Zulu Maud, moved to Norton Park, the Martin family estate in Worcestershire. It was hers now.

All her life, happiness had been hard to find; in truth, it had always eluded her. The closest she came to peace were her years at Norton Park. There, on a small scale, she lived the life of a queen, or a president. Her constituency was the ancient village of Bredon's Norton. She repaired its roads, renovated its quaint thatched cottages, and installed electric street lighting. She educated the local farmers about new methods of agriculture. One year, she divided up a farm she owned and rented the land to women so that they might learn to farm.

After hearing about a new method of education for very young children—the kindergarten system—she built a school on her estate, hired trained kindergarten teachers, and provided bus service so that children from the surrounding villages could attend.

Demosthenes had prophesied that she would lead her people; there, in Bredon's Norton, she tried. She established an annual flower show which, as years passed, became the largest agricultural fair in that section of England. She also brought culture to the village. Renovating an old barn on her property, she turned it into a hall where she arranged lectures, pageants, and Christmas parties with carols sung by the village choir.

On a foggy January afternoon in 1923, Vicky sat impatiently in the rear seat of her shiny white limousine. It seemed as if they had left London hours ago and still they were nowhere near Norton Park.

She fought an urge to yell at her chauffeur. His driving annoyed her. In good weather she had to remind him constantly to drive faster. She loved cars; in fact, she had been one of the first in England to own one. But she also enjoyed speeding.

That day there was no use insisting the chauffeur speed up. The fog grew worse than ever. Blurred shapes of trees and houses surged slowly by the window. Now and then she could see an electric light glowing dimly in the thick grayness. It was almost as dark as night.

From head to toe, Vicky was enveloped in fur. A dark fur hat covered her white hair; over the lap of her sable coat, a fur rug was thrown. All that showed were her fragile face, still as exquisite as a cameo, and her thin hands crisscrossed by blue veins. She turned to Zulu Maud with a sigh and asked the time.

Her daughter told her that it was almost four.

Then she fell silent again, trying hard to clear her mind of all thoughts. But the painful emotions kept hammering their way to the surface. "Why did Tennie have to go and die!" she cried to herself. Tennie dead! When the telegram had arrived the week before, she had refused to believe it. "She couldn't be dead," she'd moaned to Zulu. "She's only seventy-seven!" She had always imagined Tennie, seven years her junior, would outlive her.

Eighty-four! She hadn't felt her age, at least not until the past week. Now she suddenly realized that everyone but her had passed away—Roxanna and Buck and her sisters and brothers. All three of her husbands were dead: John, who succumbed to pneumonia in the eighteenth year of their marriage; James, who went to hunt gold in Africa and died there of a fever; Canning, released these many years from the grip of alcohol and morphine.

Even those whose paths she had crossed briefly were no longer living. The feminists came to mind—Susan Anthony, Elizabeth Stanton, Lucy Stone, Isabella and Pauline. For the first time in years, she thought of Henry Ward Beecher. After he died of a stroke in 1887, the mayor of Brooklyn declared a public holiday. Fifty thousand persons, mostly women, lined the streets to watch his funeral procession. Poor Lib Tilton survived him by another ten years. When she publicly confessed that Beecher had been her lover after all, the minister declared she was unbalanced and never spoke to her again. She went to live with one of her daughters and became a recluse. When Lib died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Beecher.

And Theodore Tilton. Vicky remembered that, after the trial, he traveled around the country lecturing. Finally he went to Paris where he wrote poetry and played chess until he died in 1907.

Driving up to London for Tennie's funeral had stirred a thousand memories in her. Since she'd given up her London home and retired to the country twenty years before, she and Tennie had been less close. Tennie never changed, though. Whenever she visited Vicky, she'd curl up in a chair reading trashy mystery novels. She wore ruffled frocks too youthful for her age and, in Vicky's opinion, too much makeup. During the war, she'd talked about organizing women into an amazon army, but nothing ever came of it.

The car came to a stop at a village crossroads. Staring out into the blackness, she could see shrouded figures come into view and then vanish. This fog will last until spring, she thought wearily. She had grown to hate the uncomfortable English winters with their smog and drizzle and snow. Suddenly she remembered to ask Zulu Maud about Tennie's obituaries. The
Times,
her daughter said, had called her Tennessee Claflin instead of Lady Cook. The obituary mentioned that Tennie had been a pioneer in the women's rights movement and that she had studied law, banking, and medicine.