Terrible Virtue

For

Laurie Blackburn

and

Fred Allen

and again and always

for Stephen

It is only rebel woman, when she gets out of the

habits imposed on her by bourgeois convention, who

can do some deed of terrible virtue.

—MARGARET SANGER, 1914

A
LL MY LIFE
people have been asking me the same question. Margaret, they say, Maggie, Marge, Peg, Darling from the society ladies, Dear from those less swell, and you can tell from the way they say it that they can't decide whether to disapprove or envy, or maybe they disapprove because they envy. What made you do it, they ask. What made you sacrifice everything, husband, children, a normal life—whatever that's supposed to be—for the cause? Once, a friend who was a convert to Freudian theories agreed to fund my magazine,
The
Woman
Rebel
, if I'd go into treatment to find out my real motives for wanting to publish it. I did not have to go into psychoanalysis to know my motives. And it was not a sacrifice. I never told them that. Honesty is not the best policy, no matter what some of those good women who ask the question stitch on their samplers. Instead, I told them about Sadie Sachs.

Sadie's story silenced them. It was a heartbreaker. And it was true, I always added, because that's something else people said about me all my life, that I embellished the facts, made myths about myself, in a word, lied. Even J.J. accused me of it.

“Tell the truth, Peg, there never was a Sadie Sachs.”

I stood staring at him with the go-to-hell look in my eye. It made Bill back down, or fly into a rage. It made J.J. amorous.

“You're right,” I said. “There never was
a
Sadie Sachs. There were thousands of them. Millions.”

Including my mother. I didn't tell him that, but he understood. God, that man had a sweet sympathy.

My mother, hunched over a washtub full of husband-and-child-soiled shirts and socks and underwear; my mother, bent over a pot of soup stretched thin as water to feed thirteen greedy mouths; my mother, kneeling on a mud-streaked floor that no amount of elbow grease would ever get clean. My gaunt, God-whipped, digger-of-her-own-grave mother made me do it. And the women on the hill. The ones who were nothing like my mother. I could have killed them for that. But I loved them for it too. That's what made me do it. My mother, the women on the hill, and the howling gulf between.

And oh, yes, love. That made me do it too.

But there is another question, and that has come to me only here in this bleached white room of this prison they call a nursing home. Peggy is the one who asks it.

She creeps in, her small bare feet silent on the linoleum floor, unlike the rubber-soled whispers of the nurses or the clicking high heels of my granddaughters who come to visit, perches on the bed, and stares down at me with eyes as blue as the Caribbean and as merciless as the priests and politicians and prosecutors who fought me all my life.

May I ask you something, Mama? Her tone surprises me. There's a sweet shyness to it. I had expected her to be angry.

I tell her she can ask me anything, though my damaged heart pounds in my withered chest as I say it. I know what's coming.

If you could do it again, would you do it the same?

And even now, in this narrow loveless bed, in this sterile white room, faced with the memory I have spent my life trying not to remember, with the guilt I thought I had drowned in the well of life, I cannot give her an answer.

So perhaps the question of sacrifice is not irrelevant.

O
NCE, ON A
train going God knows where, to give still another speech, I awakened in the middle of the night nauseated. Oh, no, I thought, pregnant again. It didn't seem fair. I'd been so careful. Then I calculated the timing. I couldn't be pregnant. To calm myself, I raised the shade of the window above my berth and looked out. I was just in time to see the sign marking the station fly by.
CORNING.
Even after all those years, merely passing through the town could make me sick to my stomach.

I can't remember a time that I didn't dream of escape. When the neighborhood brats made fun of me, I told myself I'd show them someday. When Miss Graves drove me out of school, I swore I'd never return. How old was I then? Fifteen? Sixteen?

I was so proud that morning, swinging along in my new baby-soft white kidskin gloves embroidered with tiny pink and blue forget-me-nots. Well, not exactly new. They were a hand-me-down from Mrs. Abbot by way of my sister Mary. But they had barely been worn. The Abbots were like that.

Mary worked for the Abbotts, who were related to the Houghtons, who owned Corning Glass, which owned the town
of Corning. My mother said Mary was lucky to have such a good job. My father said the Abbotts were the lucky ones, because a girl with a less forgiving nature than Mary would have murdered them in their beds long ago for the paltry wages they paid and the advantage they took. Mary said nothing, but then she got to live on the hill, even if her room was high in the attic under the eaves where the water froze in winter and she boiled in summer.

I started out for school that morning, joining the friends I usually walked with, slowing down here and there to give others a chance to catch up. I wanted everyone to see my new gloves. And sure enough, one after the other, the girls oohed and aahed and asked where I'd got such beautiful gloves. A gift, I answered and tried to look mysterious. Brigit O'Mara begged to try them on. “Maybe later,” I lied. I had no intention of letting her or anyone else get her hands on, or more accurately in, them.

The teacher noticed my gloves too. How could she miss them when my hand shot up to answer the first question?

“What fine gloves,” Miss Graves said, and I turned my wrist this way and that to give everyone a better view. That would teach them to mock me.

“Are those forget-me-nots?” she asked.

I allowed myself a regal smile and admitted they were.

“I wonder where Margaret Higgins got such fine gloves,” she said to the class.

I didn't know what she was up to, but the tone of her voice made me lower my hand.

“She said they were a gift,” Brigit volunteered.

“A gift?” Miss Graves's dark eyebrows that went straight across her forehead in a single line shot up. “Now who would give Margaret Higgins such a handsome gift, I wonder.”

“My sister Mary,” I admitted. Now everyone would know they were charity from Mrs. Abbot.

“And where would Mary Higgins get such fine gloves to give to her little sister?” Miss Graves went on.

I waited for the ridicule about my secondhand dresses and shoes and hats.

“Do you think she made a pact with someone?”

The girls who were supposed to be my friends tittered. A boy hooted. Now I knew what was coming, and it was worse than a sneer about hand-me-downs.

My father was the town's freethinker. “Devil's children,” other kids brayed as they chased us through the unpaved streets, dusty in fall, muddy in spring. “Devil's children.” Sometimes I ran; others I stood my ground and took swings at them. When I fought back, I came home dress-torn, dirt-stained, and bloody, scandalizing my mother. Girls don't fight, she always said.

I was accustomed to the slurs in the streets, but not in school. At least not from a teacher.

I hid my hands beneath the desk.

“Do you think the Higgins girls made a pact with the devil for those fine gloves?”

She did not have to say any more. First the boys took up the cry, then some of the girls joined in.

“Devil's children! Devil's children!”

I put my gloved hands on the desk, pushed myself up out of the seat, started down the aisle, and slammed out of the classroom. As I burst through the front door into the schoolyard, the sun beat down on my shame, but I kept going, dodging buggies, pedestrians, a man on a bicycle.

“Slow down, Margaret Higgins,” a woman called after me.

“Where's the fire?” the man on the bicycle shouted.

My hair flew in my face, and my breath came in gasps, but I wouldn't stop. I leapt over a log and came down hard on the balls of my feet. My ankle twisted in a carriage rut. Instinctively, my hands rose to break my fall, then, just as instinctively, went behind my back. My hip collided with a rock. Pain wrenched my shoulder. The side of my face hit the ground. But I'd saved the baby-soft white kid gloves with the pink and blue forget-me-nots.

I WAS NEVER
going back to school. No one could make me. My parents didn't even try. My mother, heart sore for her two eldest daughters who had high school diplomas but neither husbands nor children, said she could use some help at home. My father was jubilant. He liked to say formal education was nothing but a tool to breed docility and instill capitalist claptrap. “I myself am an autodidact,” he announced. “And you're a chip off the old block, Peg.”

My older sisters had other ideas. Nan came home from Buffalo, where she worked as a secretary, Mary came down from the hill, and they took me into the fields, away from our parents, sat me down on a log, and had at me.

Mary: Do you want to spend the rest of your life in Corning?

Nan: Do you want to marry a boy who works in the glassworks and start having children, one a year, until you're old and worn out and have never seen anything of the world?

Do you want to turn into Mother?

Neither of them said that, but all three of us were thinking it. If there was one point on which the Higgins sisters agreed, it was that we were never going to marry.

“You have a good mind,” Mary said.

“Don't waste it,” Nan warned and held a brochure out to me. As I reached for it, I felt the twinge in my shoulder. I was still black and blue from my fall. The cover showed a big stone building. The words
Claverack
College
and
Hudson
River
Institute
,
a
co
-
educational
boarding
school
in
the
Hudson
Valley
ran beneath it.

I opened the brochure and began to read.
A
special
program
for
women
offers
training
in
moral
,
physical,
and
social
development
.

“Mary and I will scrape together the tuition,” Nan said.

“You'll work in the kitchen for your room and board,” Mary added.

Ten days later, on a clement September evening, I went up the hill to say good-bye to Mary.

The sun hung low in the sky, pink as a skinned rabbit. Beneath a canopy of rustling leaves, I made my way down a wide street. Unlike the roads at the bottom of the hill, the ones where I ran from the cries of “devil's children,” it was paved, so I couldn't kick up dust if I wanted to. The smells of half a dozen suppers, which Mary said were called dinners up here, just as dinners were called luncheons, drifted through the screens of the open windows. Voices rode the supper scents as if they were waves. I was of two minds about those voices. My father, the smooth-tongued village atheist with a bag full of incendiary opinions, the hard-drinking stonecutter whose handsome cemetery monuments the good Catholics of the town shunned like sin, made fun of them. Flat as the world before Columbus, he said, and hard as Plymouth Rock. I heard the want of music in those voices, but what they lacked in Irish lilt, they made up with an absence of blarney.

I passed porches two and three times the size of our parlor,
with white wicker chairs, oiled-to-a-whisper swings, and fiery geraniums rising from stout pots and swinging in baskets. Grass soft as a carpet and green as dollar bills spilled down the yards all the way to the street.

On one of the greenback lawns a family was playing croquet. There were four of them, mother, father, girl, and boy. I knew no more children lurked in the house behind, though it looked big enough to accommodate a brood of eight or ten or a dozen. I knew it from the whiteness of their clothes, as immaculate as the conception fable the priest handed out to the parishioners at the bottom of the hill; and from the mother's serene smiling face as she swung her arms and the sound of the mallet making contact with the ball cracked the quiet air; and from the confident careless mirth that bubbled up from the children as the ball rolled through the wicket. I knew it from the way they seemed to float in the soft evening, light as dandelion seeds. The sight of that perfect quartet who had never scrapped for food or love or attention, who had never been humiliated before an entire class, who had never felt ashamed of anything, reached out and grabbed me like an arresting officer. And I was guilty as charged, of envy and pride and shame.

FEW THINGS IN
life fail to disappoint. The beau who pursues you becomes the husband who won't let you out of his sight. The lover who writes letters so ardent that the paper scalds your fingertips becomes the stranger waiting on a station platform wearing an ill-fitting suit and a hangdog expression. The women who are supposed to be your friends do cruel imitations of you behind your back. But Claverack did not disappoint. Claverack and the movement.

I discovered that my sisters were right, I was smart. Miss Graves and the other teachers in Corning had kept the information a secret. I also found out that I was pretty. My mother was the one who'd kept that secret. At home, Ethel, the youngest of us girls and my mother's favorite, was the pretty one. But at Claverack the red tint in my brown hair made it titian, the green lights in my hazel eyes turned them emerald, and my pale complexion was milky.

Smart and pretty, however, were not enough. I hadn't forgotten the aura of that family on the hill. I struggled to shed the echoes of my father's brogue. I imitated the easy educated voices of the other students who lived on whatever hills dominated the landscapes of their hometowns. I mimicked the way they dressed and moved and even ate. No changing of hands to ferry the food from fork to mouth. I learned to play croquet. Yes, we played croquet at Claverack, just as they did on the hill. Day by day, I felt myself growing smoother. I was becoming a polished stone, glossy on the outside, hard at my core, where it counted. At the monthly assemblies, I orated on Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Woman Suffrage Amendment, in refined tones, of course.

No one seemed to mind that I had to work in the kitchen for my room and board. No one except me. I tried to hide my roughened hands in my pockets or the folds of my skirt. I scrubbed my face and neck and hair for fear of reeking of last night's meat and potatoes. All that lathering must have worked, because Cory Alberson was always saying that I smelled like roses or lilies or fresh-cut grass. Later he'd say I tasted like honey right out of a comb.

Cory, who came from the wilds of Long Island, was the most popular boy at Claverack. Girls adored him; boys admired
him; faculty approved of him. But he was no stuffed shirt. If he had been, he never would have lured me out the dormitory window and down to the abandoned off-limits shed, night after night.

One evening in the shed he took his cunning mouth from mine, turned his back, and felt around in the tangle of clothing on the gritty floor. When he turned back, he was holding something in his hand. I couldn't make out what it was in the dim light filtering through the grimy window from a sliver of moon, so I asked. My father had always encouraged my curiosity.

“A French letter.” He whispered the words into my mouth, then went back to opening the packet.

I watched in fascination as he put it on. If only there were more light. He finished and turned back to me, and I forgot his words in the eye-widening wonder of what we were doing. But later when our breathing had returned to normal, I suddenly knew this was how the women on the hill kept their houses empty and their husbands happy, their children loved and themselves young. Here was a real miracle, better than anything the church had dreamed up.

“You know, Peg,” he said a few nights later as we were putting on our clothes, “this doesn't make any difference.”

“This?”

“What we do here.”

I didn't understand. As far as I was concerned, what we did in that shed made all the difference in the world. Those off-limits nights had turned the body I had barely known into an instrument of awe. The sheer physicality of myself stunned me. How could he think it changed nothing?

“I still want to marry you,” he went on.

I had to laugh. If I were going to marry, I could imagine marrying for this, but only a fool would not marry because of it.

OUTSIDE THE DORMITORY,
the January darkness had already fallen, but inside lights were bright and radiators hissed and clanked. Unlike the house at the bottom of the hill, Claverack had electricity, central heating, and indoor plumbing. The room simmered with warmth and the aromas of hair pomade, dusting powder, and the candied breath of a dozen chattering girls. It was a Thursday night. Many of us were packing to go home for the weekend. I wasn't going home. I seldom did. I was going to spend the weekend at my best friend Amelia Stuart's.

Miss Fletcher appeared in the doorway. The room went as silent as the night pressing against the windows. Miss Fletcher was the Reverend Dr. Flack's assistant in charge of female students, the dark angel who summoned girls to the headmaster's office for the delivery of moral lectures, the meting out of punishments, and, once since I'd been there, the announcement of a dismissal. But I wasn't worried. Miss Fletcher never came for me. I was too clever for her.