Terrible Virtue (12 page)

I
TOOK A ROOM
at the Hotel Rutledge on Lexington Avenue at Thirtieth Street. There was no time to hunt for an apartment. Then I called Jonah J. Goldstein to make an appointment. I'd planned to go to his office, but he said he'd come to the Rutledge. “You're still a wanted woman, Mrs. Sanger. I can't risk having the authorities pick you up before we notify them properly.”

His knock on the door was brash.

I opened it. “Is this a raid, Mr. Goldstein?”

“I wanted to make sure you heard me.”

I swung the door wider and glanced around the room. It couldn't have been more than fifteen by eighteen. “In case I was in the other wing, you mean?”

I moved aside. He stepped into the room and tossed his hat on the bed. I picked it up and put it on the desk.

His heavy eyebrows lifted in devilish arches. “Superstitious?”

“Tidy,” I lied.

He took off his coat. Before he did, I noticed the fit. In the year I'd been away, he'd found a tailor. He put it on the bed. I let it lie. There was a single chair in the room. He took it. I perched on the side of the bed.

“We've got the DA on the run,” he said. “He can't figure out how to pursue a case against you for demanding a discussion of contraception when half the respectable newspapers and magazines in the country are running articles on it. So he did the stupid thing and postponed the trial.”

“Wonderful! The longer this drags on, the more publicity we get.”

“You're a pistol, Mrs. Sanger. And incidentally, I think we've reached the Margaret and J.J. stage. Or better yet, Peg and Johnny.”

“Johnny?”

“That's what the boys at Tammany call me. Some name for a boy who wanted to be a rabbi.”

“You wanted to be a rabbi?”

“Had my heart set on it, until my brother told me it was a great racket. The word
racket
drove me straight to law school.”

“It's a nice story, even if it isn't true.”

“It's true. It just may not be factual. Isn't that the way you'd put it, Peg?”

IN THE NEXT
few weeks, my initial dislike of J.J.—I couldn't call him Johnny; Johnny belonged to the boys at the bottom of the hill who'd chased me with shouts of “devil's children”—gradually turned to respect. We made a good team. I admired the twists and turns of his legal mind. He complimented me on my grasp of tactics and strategy. But the bond did not go beyond the professional. In court, he was a fighter. On social issues, he
was a crusader. But in his heart, he was deeply conventional. My personal life would have shocked him. Wantley would have scandalized him. As we worked together in my small room at the Rutledge, I was intensely aware of his physical presence, but for the first time in my life, I fought an attraction. Bill had fooled me into thinking he was a free spirit. I wanted no more possessive, marriage-minded men in my life.

The district attorney postponed the trial a second time.

“Now he's cooked his goose,” J.J. said.

He was right. The first postponement had called attention to the cause. The second had made it, and me, famous. By the time my hearing finally came up, reporters packed the courtroom. They even chronicled what I wore.

The accused was dressed in modish attire, a close-fitting suit of black broadcloth, patent leather pumps, white spats, and an English walking hat.

“Pip pip, cheerio, and all that,” Ethel had said when she'd come to the hotel to pick me up.

“She'll have them cheering in the aisles,” J.J. had predicted.

At the hearing, the district attorney asked the judge to drop all charges. “We are determined that Mrs. Sanger should not become a martyr. If we can help it.”

“Lots of luck,” J.J. muttered under his breath.

I was free.

THE DAY AFTER
the hearing, I went out to New Jersey to see Grant and Peggy again. I explained the good news to them in terms a five-and six-year-old could understand.

“Now can we come live with you?” Peggy asked.

“Soon,” I replied.

The answer broke my heart, but I had no choice. The movement was making progress. I had to press the advances I'd fought so hard for. I also had to take the battle to new territory. Now that the idea of contraception was becoming more respectable, its supporters had to be too. I already had the socialists and anarchists and other progressives in my corner. I had to win over the women of influence, the ones who could raise money and get things done.

I STOOD ON
the stoop of a brownstone a few blocks south of the Hotel Rutledge under a washed winter sky. The house belonged to a maiden lady, an old-lace-and-smelling-salts term if ever I heard one, who had been born there some fifty years earlier and would probably die there in the not-too-distant future. She was one of those women who had made what I thought of as the choice—between feminism and life, between the vote and everything else, including men. Especially men. I called them the pink-tea ladies, women who cut the crusts off tea sandwiches, or had their maids do it for them. I knew I shouldn't let the shorn sandwiches bother me, but every time they arrived on a silver tray or china tea stand in one of those meetings I remembered supper in Corning. My mother and sisters and I had sat at the bottom of the table, below the salt, as I later learned it was called, and on lean nights the bread hadn't made it that far. Later, the trimmed sandwiches would bother me for another reason. Peggy had always been adamant about having the crusts cut off her bread.

I lifted the brass knocker in the shape of a hand holding a
bunch of grapes and let it fall against the door. A moment later, a maid in a gray uniform with a starched white apron opened it, took my coat, and led me down a dim hall. My eyes, still seared by winter brightness, adjusted slowly to the gloom.

The parlor she showed me into, a cave of thick velvet draperies, dark flocked wallpaper, and murky oil paintings of dour ancestors and melancholy landscapes, was no brighter. Ten or a dozen women—I didn't have time to count—sat erect and intimidating on horsehair-upholstered chairs and sofas. Every one of them had been raised never to let her shoulders graze the back of a chair. The hostess introduced me, and after I went around the room shaking hands, I took a seat, and we got down to business. A woman in a severe brown toque gave a report on the effort to organize women workers for the vote. It wasn't meeting with much success.

“Have you explained the importance of the ballot in simple language they can comprehend?” another woman asked.

“You must make them understand that woman suffrage is not only an inalienable right, it is the road to a better, more just world,” a third suggested.

The discussion heated up.

“Explain that it will put an end to war. What woman would cast a vote to send her husband or son off to battle?”

“Tell them it will take children out of the factories and send them to school. What mother could sleep through the night while another mother's children slaved ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day over dangerous machinery?”

“It will save women from degradation.”

At the last word, a shiver went through the room.

“Women will vote for equal pay for equal work, and their sisters will not have to take to the streets to support themselves.”

“It will replace the tainted milk, contaminated bread, and spoiled produce of the cities with a safe food supply. Women know about marketing and preparation. Men know only about sitting down to a meal someone else has prepared.”

And they thought socialists were dreamers.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore. “It's not that they don't understand. It's that they have more pressing problems on their minds.”

“What could be more pressing than the ballot?”

“Mouths to feed.” I was careful to keep my voice as tepid as the tea being poured.

“They should not have so many children.”

The maid in the gray uniform and white apron held a silver tray with tea sandwiches out to me. I took one, raised it to my mouth, then lowered it to my saucer.

“They do not have them by choice.”

The words hung in the musty air. The women averted their eyes from them.

“Self-restraint,” someone whispered.

“The husbands are the ones who lack self-restraint,” I whispered back.

“Perhaps they should not marry,” the hostess suggested. “It is a small sacrifice for the greater welfare.”

“Precisely,” another woman agreed. “Our daughters and granddaughters will have the freedom to marry once we have won the vote.”

I resisted the impulse to ask how these daughters and granddaughters would get themselves born.

“For these women, marriage is not a choice but an economic necessity,” I explained. “Then, when they do marry, the children begin arriving, and each one makes the hardship worse.”

A dozen pairs of eyes stared at me. To them hunger was a missed teatime; backbreaking work meant a long afternoon pruning rosebushes; and if they did have husbands who, after a few too many drinks, turned more amorous than they'd like, the men usually had the sense to take their attentions elsewhere.

“That's why contraception is so important.”

I might as well have let a mangy dog into the parlor to push its snout into their innocent crotches.

“I do not understand how we got off on this subject,” someone said.

“You're muddying the waters, Mrs. Sanger.”

“You'll expose us to accusations of immorality.”

“Men will use it as a way to silence us.”

“Women who might support suffrage will be scandalized by this talk of . . . of . . . of this.”

“You're asking for trouble,” the hostess summed up.

I smiled politely. These women hadn't an inkling of how much trouble I was about to ask for.

A COLD WIND
howled off the Hudson, down the cross streets, and out over the East River, but inside the ballroom of the Hotel Brevoort a tropical garden bloomed, fragrant with the bouquets of hothouse flowers on the white-linen-covered tables and the perfume of well-groomed ladies out on the town for a good cause. I was the good cause. The Committee of One Hundred, a tony group of society and club women, had decided to give a dinner to honor me. I had no intention of wasting the opportunity.

Most of the guests were women, not the bluestockings who believed in abstinence so their daughters and granddaughters
could have the vote, but a more worldly breed. A few had brought their husbands. Several male doctors had come as well.

The speeches went on for too long, as those sorts of encomiums tend to. By the time I stood to deliver my remarks, a man in my line of vision was nodding off. The woman beside him opened her mouth in a cavernous yawn, then remembered herself and covered it with a hand weighed down by a wickedly big diamond.

I thanked the guests for coming. I told them how proud I was to be honored by them. I spoke about the injustice to hundreds, no, thousands, no, millions of our less fortunate sisters and their unwanted children, doomed to misery, illness, and death. I described the lines of women who queued up every Saturday, payday, for the five-dollar abortionist. I explained again, because it was shocking how few people knew it, that contraception was not abortion. Contraception was the tool that would make abortion unnecessary. I recounted the story of Sadie Sachs, but this time I left out the doctor's line about telling Jake to sleep on the roof. I needed the support of the physicians in the audience as well as their wives.

The dozing man's chin rested on his chest. The yawns had become contagious. Rings and bracelets on the hands trying to cover them flared around the room like fireflies.

“That is why I am asking fifty of you who are married women to sign this manifesto.”

I held up a sheet of paper.

“I'm asking fifty of you to demand that information about birth control be made available to all married women, not only those of us who can afford private doctors, but those in tenements and slums who rely on social services. And . . . I am asking you to admit that you have used contraception yourselves.”

The dozing man's eyes flew open. The woman next to him sat up. An intake of breath ran through the room like a gust of the wind coming off the Hudson.

I thanked them and took my seat.

Applause sputtered, then swelled to an ovation. People began pushing back their chairs, standing, and milling around. A line formed in front of the head table. One after another, the guests congratulated me, complimented me, and swore to support me. An inspiration, a triumph, a tour de force. There was so much excitement that I didn't get to look at the manifesto until the ballroom had emptied. I was studying it as J.J. came up carrying my coat.

“I figure we had between one fifty and two hundred people,” he said. “Maybe thirty of them men. That still gives us a hefty margin.”