The Cure for Dreaming (20 page)

“Um . . . well . . .”

“Are you looking for bloomers?” asked Kate.

“Just admiring them for now.”

“You should ask your father to buy you a pair,” said Agnes, putting her hands on her bloomers-clad hips. “Turkish trousers don't get caught in bicycle spokes like that dangerous skirt of yours. Besides”—she winked at me—“today's a day to celebrate if you're a Portland woman.”

“It is?” I scratched my chin and tried to recall if we celebrated any famous Oregon women's birthdays . . . or if there
were
any famous Oregon women, for that matter. “Why?”

Agnes lifted her chin. “Because that
damned
editor”— she didn't even flinch when she swore like a sailor—“Mr. Harvey
Scott, finally found the courage to print a suffrage letter in the
Oregonian.
”

“Language, Agnes,” said Kate with a twinkle in her eye.

I gripped my handlebars and tried not to topple over with my bike. “I read that letter, but I—I—I . . . I don't . . .”

“I know, this historic occasion is enough to make a person speechless.” Agnes mounted one of the awaiting bicycles—a canary-yellow beaut with a silver horn attached to the handlebars. “I don't know if you realize it, but Mr. Scott's sister is our local suffragist leader, Abigail Scott Duniway. Up until this morning, that stubborn old mule has refused to print anything pro-suffrage in his paper. We blame him for the failure of the referendum.”

I shook my head. “But . . . I don't understand. Why do you think he printed this particular letter?”

Agnes shrugged. “Perhaps he thought it was a joke. The headline tried to poke fun at the letter writer, but it failed miserably. Mother, Kate, and I all received telephone calls from friends who read the letter and want to personally toast this mysterious ‘Responsible Woman.'”

“Oh.” Prickles of both fear and pride crawled across my skin like hundreds of sharp-clawed insects.
What have I done?
I thought.
What the blazes have I done?

Kate straddled the other bicycle with a swing of her right leg and pumped her pedals into motion. “Well, I'll see you at school, Olivia.”

“Ask your father to buy you bloomers,” added Agnes,
following her sister into the street. “Tell him you're asking for trouble if you don't adapt to modern safety advances.”

The young Frye ladies rode away, their bloomers flapping and billowing in the breeze like the sails of a schooner.

I know it was my eyes deceiving me again—a strange side effect of my awe over my letter's publication, perhaps—but halfway down the next block, the wheels of both the Frye girls' bikes lifted an inch off the ground, and the ladies careered down the street on the wind.

I FOUND FRANNIE PERFORMING HER FAVORITE BOOKSHOP
duty: arranging new arrivals in Harrison's display windows. I rapped on the glass, gave her a quick wave, and hurried inside the store. The jangling bell above the shop door announced my entrance.

“Good morning, Livie.” Frannie stood up straight with a book in each hand. “Is everything all right?”

I poked my head around shelves to check for eavesdroppers. “Where's the rest of your family?”

“Carl is out delivering a rare book, and the rest of the children are at Grandmother's. My parents took a riverboat ride to celebrate their anniversary.”

“I thought they were celebrating with a fancy supper tomorrow.”

“They are, but Papa wanted to treat Mother today, since she'll be cooking the meal tomorrow.”

I sighed. “Such a good man. Such a beautiful man.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I darted my head behind another bookshelf. “There aren't any customers here, either?”

“No, it's just me here at the moment. Why? What's happening? More hallucinations?”

I approached her and lowered my voice, just in case anyone should emerge from out of nowhere. “Frannie . . .”

“Yes?” she whispered back.

I swallowed and summoned a burst of courage. “I'm ‘A Responsible Woman.'”

“Yes, of course you are, Livie.” Her tone and nod were patronizing. “Except for when it comes to your relationship with Percy Acklen.”

“No.” I scowled. “I'm talking about the pro-suffrage letter printed in today's newspaper. I'm ‘A Responsible Woman.'”

Her brown eyes swelled as round and bulgy as my largest prized marbles. She exhaled with the sound of a deflating bicycle tire. “Egad, Livie. Really and truly?”

“Did you read the letter?”

“Of course I read it. It was the talk of the breakfast table this morning, and every woman who's walked through the shop door has asked for publications by Abigail Scott Duniway or Susan B. Anthony.”

“They have?”

She set down the books she was holding and pulled me toward General Literature. “We've sold every single copy of Duniway's women's rights novels in the past two hours. See
the gap?” She pointed to an empty space toward the end of the
D
section. “People think she's the one who wrote the letter.”

“Holy mackerel.” I breathed a sigh that whistled through my teeth. “Maybe this will mean women won't give up the fight. Maybe there'll be another referendum.”

“Maybe.” She raised her eyebrows. “But does Percy know you're the one publicly making his father sound like a buffoon?”

“Oh. Percy.” I growled and held my head between the tips of my fingers.

“The party didn't go well?” she asked.

“Tell me honestly, did he touch you?” I asked in return.

Frannie turned her face away and ran a knuckle across Charles Dickens's spines.

“Frannie?”

“Are you still in love with him?” she asked.

“Not anymore.”

“Then, yes.” She dropped her hand from the books. “I admit, he grabbed me last year when I was retying the lace of my shoe in the school stairwell. He came up the steps behind me, gave me a spank and a squeeze, and then continued up the stairs without even looking back. I hated myself the whole rest of the day.”

“Oh, Frannie. Why didn't you tell me?”

“I was never sure if he simply confused me for someone else, or . . .” She fussed with the end of her braid. “I don't
know. It happened a whole year ago. I hoped he might have matured a little.”

“No.” I folded my arms over my chest. “He's still a grabber . . . and a biter . . . and a terrible kisser.”

“You kissed him?”

“He kissed me, and it was awful.”

The shop door opened, and a woman and her twin daughters—girls no older than twelve or thirteen—strolled into the store.

“Do you have
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin?” asked the mother.

“I believe so,” said Frannie in a professional tone. She reached up and took hold of a tan book with green grapevines laced around the title. “Yes, ma'am. Here it is.”

I wandered to one of the front-window displays and thumbed through a Kipling book while Frannie proceeded with business. In addition to Chopin's novel, the woman and her daughters purchased
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft. I hadn't read
The Yellow Wallpaper
, but I knew all three of the texts questioned the subordination of women.

After the sale, each of the customers retreated with a book wedged under her left arm, and before they reached the door, a transformation occurred. The little family brightened. Their faces, like those of Agnes and the other suffragists at the restaurant, shone with some sort of internal brilliance,
and their hair—fluffed and pinned beneath a small straw hat in the case of the mother, long braids for the daughters— became the bold yellowish orange of firelight.

The door shut behind them, and the little bell punctuated their exit with a jingle. The illusion ended.

“You see what I mean?” asked Frannie, coming toward me. “You stirred up something remarkable with that letter. What does your father think?”

“He doesn't know I wrote it.”

“If he finds out . . . do you think . . . what about the hypnosis?”

“I wrote that letter after he mandated that hypnotism
cure
”
—
I spat out that last word—“so, clearly, it did nothing but push me into trying things I never would have dared before.”

“You're not saying you like being hypnotized, are you?”

“No! It's just . . . Look here . . .” I squatted down and fished around in my right shoe. Henry's theater tickets, along with some quarters I'd brought in case I got hungry, were hidden between the stiff leather and my thick stocking. “I've seen Henry—”

“I thought it was
On-ree
.”

“His real name is Henry Rhodes, and he gave me these tickets so we could stay in contact with each other.” I pulled out the tickets and stood upright. “I begged him to end the hypnosis, but he needs my father's money for his sister. She has a tumor that requires surgery. It's cancerous.”

Frannie took the tickets from my hand and, with her lips pursed, read them over.

“He can't change me back,” I continued, “until my father gives him his full payment on Tuesday. That's when he'll be taking his sister to San Francisco for her surgery.”

“He's about to leave town?”

“In three more days.”

“Are you still seeing strange sights?”

“Yes.” I grabbed for the tickets, but Frannie hid them behind her back. “Frannie?” I tugged on her elbow. “Give those back.”

“You're telling me”—she swung her arm away and inched backward—“you're going to keep viewing your father as a vampire, and doing whatever other horrible things that hypnotist is making you do, for three more days?”

“I've got no other choice. That poor girl might die if she doesn't undergo her surgery. The cancer's in her bosom.”

“How do you know he's not making up her illness?”

“Don't be mean.”

“How do you know, Livie?”

“I trust him.”

She stopped and thrust the tickets at me. “Fine. Trust a traveling, mind-altering showman.”

“There's no need to get upset.” I took the tickets from her.

“I bet he smells terrible, too.”

“Frannie!”

“I'm just worried about you. Wait . . .” She squinted at the
backside of the tickets and snatched them straight back out of my hand. “What's this?”

“What?”

“This note. ‘Come to the side door of the theater after the show—'”

I grabbed the papers so hard, one of them ripped. “Never mind what that says.”

“You're going to meet him in private?”

“I don't know.” I slunk toward the exit. “I'm not sure what to do about any of this, but I know whom to trust and whom to avoid, so stop frowning at me like I'm an idiot.”

“I didn't say you were an idiot, Livie.”

“But you're looking at me as if I am one.” I turned and pushed open the door.

“Wait! Livie . . .”

The door slammed shut behind me before she could say another word.

I climbed aboard my bicycle and pedaled away, toward the Metropolitan.

enry's matinee performance wasn't scheduled to start until one thirty in the afternoon. To bide the time, I stopped for a ham sandwich across the street in a smoky café with a pressed-tin ceiling and theater posters hanging from knotty-pine walls.