Terrible Virtue (13 page)

I didn't say anything.

“So, how many signatures?”

I handed him the manifesto.

Six women had demanded the dissemination of birth control information. Three had admitted they'd used it.

“So much for my triumph,” I said to J.J. as we made our way back to the Rutledge, our collars turned up against the cold, the wind whipping my coat around my ankles. “Every time I start to think I'm making progress, there's another setback.”

“You're making progress.”

“Of course. Now instead of throwing me in jail, they give dinners to honor me. Giving me a dinner is the easy part. It makes them feel progressive and high-minded and courageous. Putting themselves on the line is another story.”

“Give them time.”

“Tell that to a woman who's living in a cramped tenement
apartment, and whose husband is out of work or not even looking for work, and who's pregnant with her fifth or tenth or”—I thought of my mother—“thirteenth child.”

This time he didn't say anything. He merely took my hand and tucked it in his coat pocket. I was surprised. We walked on like that, the fingers of his left hand tangled with those of my right in the warm nest of his coat. For an innocent connection, it packed a powerful charge.

Half a block from the hotel, I took my hand from his pocket. I was a married woman and the champion of a still-suspect cause. The paltry number of signatures on the petitions was evidence of that.

In the elevator, we stood side by side, staring silently at the gray-uniformed back of the operator. We were models of propriety, but desire was flexing its unruly muscle in the pit of my stomach.

I stepped off the elevator, he followed, and we started down the corridor with a prim slice of hotel-musty air between us. When we reached my door, he opened it, and I stepped into the room ahead of him and turned to face him. We stood that way for a moment. I waited. That was new. I'd never waited before. I'd never had to. And while I waited, I felt the attraction that had been pulling me toward him since we'd left the dinner—for longer than that, really—suddenly twist into anger. His caution had awakened a similar response in me. I hated cautious people.

I said good night and closed the door.

JONAH J. GOLDSTEIN

YOU THINK IT WAS EASY NOT FOLLOWING YOU INTO YOUR ROOM THAT NIGHT? I WAS PUNCH-DRUNK WITH WANTING YOU. BUT I KNEW MORE
ABOUT YOUR LIFE THAN YOU THOUGHT. LIKE SHERMAN THROUGH GEORGIA, YOU WENT THROUGH MEN. SOMETIMES I WONDER WHY WE ALL FELL SO HARD. YOU WERE EASY TO LOOK AT, WITH THAT RED HAIR AND THOSE GREEN EYES, AND YOU HAD A NICE LITTLE SHAPE, BUT FACE IT, PEG, YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE KIND OF BEAUTY THAT STOPS TRAFFIC. YOU COULD BE PIGHEADED AND SELFISH, AND YOUR WORD WASN'T EXACTLY AS RELIABLE AS THE ALMANAC. THERE WAS THE SEX, OF COURSE, BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ONLY THE SEX. MEN GO TO BED WITH WOMEN FOR SEX, BUT THEY DON'T PROPOSE MARRIAGE TO WOMEN FOR SEX, AND I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO WENT DOWN ON ONE METAPHORICAL KNEE MORE TIMES THAN I LIKE TO REMEMBER. SOMETIMES I THINK IT WAS BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT ANY OF US. WE ALL PLAYED SECOND BANANA TO THE MOVEMENT. THAT'S WHY YOU AND I ENDED UP EYEING EACH OTHER ACROSS THAT NO-MAN'S-LAND OF SEX. I WAS CRAZY ABOUT YOU, BUT I WASN'T SUICIDAL
.

S
UDDENLY, ALL OVER
America, women, and some men, wanted to hear me speak. I was delighted. I was terrified. As I walked to the podiums, I thought my knees would give out beneath me. It was fortunate that I didn't need notes, because my hands trembled too badly to hold them. I lived in fear that my voice would come out as a croak, and sometimes it did for the first few sentences. I told myself the stage fright would pass with practice. It didn't. I felt as sick to my stomach before my twentieth speech as I had before my first. Once or twice I attempted to begin with a witty comment or joke, but it always fell flat. Maybe that was why the public thought I had no sense of humor. I did, but not about birth control.

Later, looking back on those weeks and months of travel, I'd see them as one of those movie montages where a train comes speeding toward the audience while place-names whirl across the screen. Boston, Buffalo, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle. The halls were packed. Five hundred, a thousand, two thousand—toffs and laborers, doctors and anarchists, club women and mothers of huge broods who smelled of laundry soap and baby spit-up. In Indianapolis, a woman stood up and quoted the biblical lines about suffering little children to come unto me. The
audience booed her down. In St. Louis, the management bowed to threats from the Catholic Church and locked me out of a theater. I moved the meeting to a businessmen's club and drew larger crowds than either Taft or Roosevelt had. Not all religious groups opposed me. In Spokane, I spoke to a full house at a Unitarian church. In Los Angeles, I found copies of my pamphlet “Family Limitation” translated into Japanese and Spanish. In Portland, I was arrested along with several others, and when we refused bail and spent the night in jail, we set off demonstrations that made the national newspapers.

But despite the excitement of those meetings and the enthusiasm of my audiences, life on the road was bleak. I was tired all the time and feverish much of it. A hotel room for one is a lonely place. I missed my children. Sometimes, when I lay in the cold sheets of those narrow unloved beds, exhausted but unable to sleep, I switched on the electric light or turned up the gas lamp and read and reread their letters.

Dear Mother,

I received the marshmellows. Thank you very much. Mother will you come down on Thanksgiving Day? Now you put down in your engagement book, Nov. 28 Go down to see Grant. Answer soon.

Lots of love,

Grant

Dear Mother,

How are you? I am fine. When are you coming home?

Love,

Stuart

Peggy was too young to write. If only she hadn't been. I'd give a great deal now for a scrawled message from her.

Other letters poured in as well. Most of them went to New York, but sometimes I'd check into a hotel to find an envelope or five or ten waiting for me.

Dear Mrs. Sanger,

I have nine children, two died at birth,

and my husband is out of work. I will kill

myself before I have another child.

Dear Mrs. Sanger,

I am a churchgoing woman who tries to keep

a good clean home, and my husband is respected

in our town, but he will beat me if I get

pregnant again. He did the last time.

Dear Mrs. Sanger,

The doc says another baby will kill my wife.

I know I should stay away from her, but the

flesh is weak.

Then they all asked the same question, the one that had killed Sadie Sachs.

Other letters followed me across the country as well. Havelock wrote to his Dear Rebel. Hugh wrote to Darling Margaret. Walter Roberts wrote to his Dear One. Even Bill wrote to Peg,
My Sweetheart. The only one who didn't send letters was J.J. Occasionally I got a telegram from him about legal matters. I was relieved. Really I was. We were better off keeping our distance.

I covered hundreds of miles. The scenery changed, but the experience remained numbingly the same. Except for one talk in late October of 1915. I remember the timing because the incident occurred the evening before I was banned from speaking in Boston, and that's one night I will never forget.

But on the night I'm talking about, the night before Boston, I had finished my remarks and was answering the flood of questions that always followed. Suddenly, as I looked out at the audience, I saw Peggy in her favorite white nightgown with the yellow daises, floating above them. I closed my eyes to clear my vision. When I opened them, Peggy was still floating, but higher now, until she was level with the windows at the top of the auditorium. As I watched, a breeze sent her nightgown fluttering, and her small body drifted peacefully, oh, so peacefully, through the window and off into the darkening sky.

I chalked the vision up to exhaustion.

A
WEEK AFTER THAT
strange hallucination, a week I refuse to talk about, I locked myself in my room at the Rutledge. Friends sent letters and cards. I barely glanced at them before throwing them away—except for Emma Goldman's. For some reason, I clung to that. “You must not blame yourself,” she wrote. “I cannot imagine anyone with your intelligence holding herself responsible for something that could not possibly have been in your power.”

Others came in person. I refused to see them. Their pity would make it real. I preferred my own version of events. I inhabited a world where Stuart was getting along in his new school, and Grant was flourishing at Stelton, and Peggy had all the crustless jelly sandwiches she wanted. In that world, she ran free, without a brace. In that world, we did everything together. We rode double-decker buses in London, and watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and fed the waterfowl in St. James's Park. We collected shells and built sand castles on the beach in Provincetown and ventured out into the water, where I taught her to swim. I took her to the ballet and museums and the library. As she grew older, she shadowed my
steps at rallies and strikes and speeches. The first time I'd held her in my arms, I'd sensed an attachment deeper than any I'd ever known. As time passed, she became my hope, my inspiration, the embodiment of my cause.

At the end of another week, I packed that world away for safekeeping—I knew I'd be coming back to it—washed my hair, put on a suit and hat, and faced myself in the mirror. The suit hung on me as if on a hanger. J.J. had arranged for the management to leave trays outside my door, but I'd barely touched them. My eyes were sunk in circles of darkness. The bones of my face were savagely sharp. I realized with a shock that I was squaring off with my mother's reflection. She had survived five miscarriages and two infant deaths. I would endure what I had to.

I telephoned J.J. I wasn't sure why. There were other people in the movement I could have called. Ethel had tried to see me a dozen times. But somehow I felt safer with J.J. He wasn't a part of my old life.

I asked how soon we could meet.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“J.J., are you there?”

“Yes. Sure. I'm on my way.”

Fifteen minutes later he knocked on my door. I opened it. The expression on his face was more telling than any mirror. I looked even worse than I'd thought, but for the first time in my life, I didn't care about my appearance.

He reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, then drew back, as if he were afraid to touch me.

I took his hand and drew him into the room. “I'm not a porcelain doll.”

A porcelain doll. The doll with the painted china face I'd sent Peggy the previous Christmas. I'd bought it at Harrods and
spent far too much money on it. The memory undid me. I could not go through with this after all. I did not have my mother's strength. I would send J.J. away, tear off my disguise of sanity, go back to bed, and hold my grief tight as a lover.

I thought of my mother again, of thousands of mothers. “It's time to get back to work,” I said.

I WAS MORE
in demand than ever. Reporters came to the Rutledge for interviews. Photographers snapped pictures. J.J. arranged for me to have a formal portrait taken with the boys. He thought it came out well. I hated it. Grant, wearing a Buster Brown suit, leans against me, his soft little-boy face above the floppy tie old with grief. Stuart stands at my side, his head tilted toward my shoulder, poised between a childish demand to be taken care of and a precocious offer to protect. The picture isn't even a photograph, it's a negative, not in the sense that black is white and white black, but because what matters is not the bodies in the frame but the empty space at its heart.

A few nights after I had the photograph taken, Bill showed up at the Rutledge. I hadn't seen him since I'd gone into hiding in my room. His strong features had somehow shriveled. All the force had seeped out of him.

“Aren't you going to invite me in?” He was still in the hall, and I was in the doorway with one hand on the frame, the other on the doorknob.

“I think it's better if you say whatever you want to say here.”

“Is this what we've come to, Peg?”

“We'll only end up blaming each other. We don't seem to be able to stop blaming each other. That's why it's better if we're apart.”

“It's not better for me. I love you.”

“You have a strange way of showing it. Telling everyone what a bad mother I was.”

He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was thick, as if he couldn't get his tongue around the words. “You weren't a bad mother. You aren't a bad mother,” he corrected himself, “when you're with them. It's just that you're never with them. You're always off working and lecturing.”

“And if I weren't off working and lecturing, who would support them?”

He flinched. I would have been sorry, if I'd had any sorrow to spare.

“Peg.” He reached for me. I took a step back.

“Someone's coming,” I said. It wasn't entirely a ruse. I'd heard the elevator doors open and close.

His face collapsed. “You're ice. Ice with a hole where your heart ought to be.”

I wanted to scream at him not to talk about the hole where my heart ought to be. I managed to hold my tongue.

“You never gave a damn about me.” His grief was curdling into anger. “I suppose there's a certain consolation in that. Ironic as it is. You didn't give a damn about me, but you don't give a damn about any of the others either.” He was working himself up to a rage now. “Your affairs, your pathological promiscuity—”

“Is there a problem, Peg?”

At the sound of the voice, we both turned to see J.J. coming around the corner from the elevator.

“Bill was just leaving,” I said.

Bill looked from J.J. to me and back. “All right, I'll go. But watch yourself, Mr. Goldstein. You think you're a smart lawyer,
but you're no match for my wife. She'll eat you up and spit you out, and before you know it, this hardhearted, unnatural—”

J.J. took a step to my side. “Good night, Mr. Sanger.”

Bill stood staring at J.J. I saw his hands ball into fists, then open, then close again.

“Go home,” J.J. said quietly. His voice was kind but cool, and suddenly I understood the impulse that had made me telephone him when I'd decided to return to the world. I couldn't stand to be around Bill. It wasn't merely the backlog of bitterness and recrimination. It was the unbearable intimacy of shared agony. We tore at each other's wounds like animals. J.J. was a stranger to the hurt. He felt sympathy, but sympathy is not suffering. His distance from the pain was a kind of solace, and for the first time in my life, more than love, more than sex, I needed solace. That night I found it with J.J.

There was nothing romantic about our lovemaking. His hands were not practiced at hooks and laces. Mine were too impatient and tore a button off his fly. We did an awkward two-step to the bed. He was on top of me, then I was on top of him. We were too wild, too thrashingly eager. Then suddenly we stopped. He was on top of me again, and he put a hand on either side of my head, straightened his arms, as if he were doing a push-up, and held himself that way looking down at me. His eyes were like holes in the universe. I have never seen such darkness. I swam up into them.

Later, J.J. would say that sexually I was a revelation. I never told him that I could have said the same about him. I hadn't expected an accomplished lover. But when he raised himself on both arms and looked down at me, the world slowed. For a while, I could have sworn it stopped. There was nothing beyond the here and now and our two bodies hell-bent on pleasure. That
was something else about J.J. It was just the two of us in bed that night. With Havelock and Hugh and the rest of the Wantley set, I'd always sensed a crowd. I don't mean the occasions when there really were other people in bed with us. I mean even alone with one man, I'd felt the hot breath of others upping the ante, the competition to give me more and better orgasms, the rivalry to postpone their own for longer, the drive to make me howl with pleasure as I never had before. I'm not complaining about any of that. I'm merely saying that it was nice being alone with J.J. and, for a minute or two, without my grief.

HE TOOK AN
apartment on West Fourteenth Street for me, and for the boys when they were home from school. The building had lost its claim to respectability years earlier, though a set of lace curtains in the first-floor windows made a gallant stab at decorum and a couple of bright red geraniums strove for cheerfulness. The flat was on the fourth floor, a tiny bedroom with a window facing a brick wall and a larger square room with two windows, one facing the street, the other another brick wall. A tin bathtub, gas stove, and sink stood in one corner of the larger room.

“You can put a screen around those,” J.J. said when he showed me the place.

He hired a woman from Harlem to come in and clean. I was too grateful to him for taking care of practical arrangements to notice that solace was inching toward domesticity.

Ethel liked the apartment so much that she took a smaller one, not much more than a room really, on the floor above. On the one below, a woman who wanted to sing lieder but performed ragtime in a music store on Broadway practiced scales
at all hours. The building was louche, despite the lace curtains on the first floor, but that was the point. J.J. could stay the night rather than having to get up, put on his clothes, and go back to his own apartment, as he would have had to at the Rutledge or a more reputable establishment. Still, we had to be careful. He was a respectable attorney with political ambitions. I was a well-known activist for a still-questionable cause.

“We wouldn't have to worry if we were married,” J.J. began saying.

“Why ruin things?” I always answered. “I like living in sin,” I sometimes teased him.

“What about the boys?”

“You're wonderful with the boys,” I said, though I knew that wasn't what he'd meant. “They're crazy about you.”

It was true. He taught them the kinds of things boys were supposed to know and I didn't. Bill didn't seem to either, but then Bill wasn't around much. J.J. took them to ball games, and on outings to Surprise Lake with the Grand Street Boys, a group of youths he sponsored from the tenements, and to Coney Island in a Stutz Bearcat that belonged to a Tammany friend. One afternoon, he took them to the Lower East Side to buy Stuart his first pair of long pants. I'd promised to as soon as I had time, but I'd been so busy.

“Nice fit, right?” J.J. said while Stuart strutted around the living room in such high spirits that he knocked over the Japanese screen I'd put around sink and tub and stove.

That night J.J. brought up marriage again.

“I am married,” I said. Bill still refused to give me a divorce or even a separation agreement.

“Have you even asked him for a divorce?”

“Every time I wrote from abroad.”

“I mean more recently.”

I hadn't. Much as I wanted to be free of Bill, he was my protection against another marriage. But J.J. kept harping on the subject. Finally I sent Bill an invitation to dinner. “You can see the boys and perhaps we can settle matters,” I wrote.

He arrived with a dozen long-stemmed roses. There is something pitiful about a man in a shiny suit and frayed cuffs bearing roses.

The evening was not a success. Bill was overly hearty with the boys. They were too polite with him. I watched the three of them and thought how much easier we were when J.J. was there.

In the middle of dinner, Bill put down his knife and fork, laid his napkin on the table, and stood. “I can't.” He stumbled out of the room as if he'd been drinking, though he hadn't.

The next day I got a letter from him. “Please don't invite me again. I sat across the table from you and still loved you so much I couldn't bear it.”

That evening J.J. asked how the dinner had gone. I told him we'd never got around to discussing a divorce.

“Did you even bring it up?”

“He didn't give me a chance. He left in the middle of it.” I didn't mention Bill's letter, but I didn't have to.

J.J. shook his head. “The poor bugger,” he said and stopped talking about marriage. Maybe Bill's example had put him off. Or maybe he didn't stop, but I no longer heard him. I was too preoccupied.