Margaret laughed hard enough to make her curls shake. “When Father asked Mr. Thoreau whether he thought I was being cussed, he shouted in answer, ‘She is indeed, and I adore her for her contrariety! Hers is an act of civil disobedience that puts mine to shame! Three cheers for little Miss Margaret!’
“It was so much fun, those childhood days in Worcester. Now they’re all dead—Henry David, Waldo, Margaret Fuller, my father and mother—all those kind souls have gone off to Glory, or to annihilation, if we are to believe gloomy old Herman Melville.”
We returned to the sofa and allowed our minds to drift in the currents of nostalgia and regret. I thought of my own dead, especially my poor brother-in-law, Martin. He and Melville—and Mrs. Stanton’s husband, Henry, as I would learn—the three of them had worked in the city for the U.S. Customs Service. Is history a game played by God in which humans are pawns? Or does time whipstitch together people and events, haphazardly catching up this piece or that one in its rumpled cloth?
My thoughts returned to Elizabeth, of whom I’d been thinking during the walk from Bryant Park. Of my two suffragists, she was the elder and worldlier. She had married Henry Brewster Stanton, a former abolitionist, whom I never once laid eyes on, and she had brought children into the turbulent world by “voluntary motherhood.” In this, as in all else pertaining to the dignity of women, she would not allow herself to be “forced” or her belief in her own worth set aside. She and Susan rarely spoke of Mr. Stanton; when they did, it was in low voices and never to me. I was unable to satisfy a natural curiosity concerning him and his whereabouts.
Margaret got up and played something mournful on a miniature harmonium, a gift from P. T. Barnum. As a girl living in Worcester, she had been taught the reedy instrument, and to my ear, she sounded accomplished.
“Do you play an instrument?” she asked, turning her head from the keyboard.
“I play the lyre,” I replied archly.
She finished “The Heart That Is Broken” and took up a sprightly air, “Do, Do, My Huckleberry Do.”
“Is it difficult to master?” she asked.
“Necessity is a great teacher.” In my voice, I heard self-pity and felt ashamed.
As I lay in bed that night, I pictured Margaret in hers, no larger than a child’s. What dreams sweeten her sleep? I wondered. What nightmares disturb it? Does she imagine herself a tiny princess in a fairy tale, waiting for a prince’s kiss to undo a curse and restore her to full womanhood? No! I upbraided myself. Margaret is complete in herself and would hate to be thought otherwise. All the same, I was troubled by the notion that a being lay shut up inside her—a fully grown woman impossible to rescue. It was too sad a thought to entertain. I would not let myself ponder the hopeless desires of so famished a heart, nor would I consider the possibility that Margaret might have reason to lament the death of General Tom apart from camaraderie. I recalled the parlor and its contents, which had been sized to accommodate Margaret’s humble standpoint, with the exception of a chair and an ornate mirror placed above her head—both objects kept for visiting emissaries from the larger world.
An Object of Curiosity
ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, MR. TIPSON, celebrated narcoleptic, delivered a note from Margaret, asking if she might visit on Friday at one o’clock, “if convenient.” “I’d be delighted,” I replied. In the brief time it took to compose my answer, Mr. Tipson had fallen asleep, and I had to poke him with Susan’s black umbrella to set him in motion again.
The appointed hour arrived, and I was looking anxiously out the window onto the street. The cause of my uneasiness was twofold: I worried that my suffragists would unwittingly pass a remark that would embarrass my small guest, and I feared that Margaret might come calling on board an elephant. I imagined her mistaking Miss Redpath’s second-floor apartment for ours and, peering in at her window, startling the elderly spinster into Green-Wood Cemetery. Who wouldn’t be terrified at the sight of a little woman seated on an elephant and rapping on the windowpane with tiny knuckles to attract her notice? In my fancy, I heard Jumbo trumpeting in fierce joy for a reason best known to pachyderms in captivity. (What monumental grudges might they harbor in their gigantic breasts! Now that Lincoln is dead, who is there to emancipate them?)
At five minutes past the hour, I watched as a hansom emblazoned with a seal balancing a red ball on its snout drew up to the curb, driven by David Henry Dode, the world’s tallest man. He unfolded his long legs from under the dashboard and, having opened the carriage door, lifted my petite guest onto the brick pavement. I was surprised to see a second person exit the carriage, whom Margaret would shortly introduce as Frank Ashton, renowned for his “posturing.”
Mr. Dode escorted Margaret upstairs and to our door, while Mr. Ashton, walking behind them, carried a large box done up with string. The brass knocker fell, and I let the strange party inside.
“Good afternoon, Ellen,” said Margaret pleasantly.
“Good afternoon. Won’t you and your friends come in?”
Having delivered his small charge to the door, the tall man turned on his heels and left.
“Mr. Dode will wait outside,” replied Margaret. “Mr. Barnum insisted he accompany me. He’s very protective of me, and Mr. Dode is daunting.” She turned her head to Mr. Ashton, who was standing in the hallway in an attitude of profound deference. In its exaggeration, it exceeded all bounds of polite usage and, in fact, the ordinary limitations of the human frame. I could not help laughing, a rudeness that brought out in him a smile so broad, I feared his lips, thin to start with, would disappear, leaving behind only a toothy gape such as children love to carve on jack-o’-lanterns. “Mr. Ashton, if you please,” said Margaret.
The man, whose parts appeared to have been molded of India rubber and whose face was the color of gamboge, bowed to her and then to me—an obeisance so extravagant that the top of his high hat rested on the floor. It resembled a flowerpot, from which grew a bulbous nose and a pair of ears that could only be described as elephantine. He stood upright and, with tremendous effort, carried the box into the sitting room as though it were packed with cast-iron stove lids. With another scarcely possible feat of agility, he bent over backward and placed the box on a three-legged stool, and then in a fluent movement that seemed to defy the laws of science and anatomy, he shot upright, as if his backbone were a spring, nodded to Margaret, and passed out the door, shutting it behind him with his foot.
Margaret behaved as if this preposterous show were commonplace, which it was in the strange world to which fate, will, or God’s carelessness had placed her. She took off white gloves such as children wear to dancing lessons, looked about for a place to sit, and, having chosen a chair that was shallower in its seat than the rest, ascended, as if to a throne, by the footstool Elizabeth had thoughtfully placed there.
“I was not sure how large your appetites would be,” said Margaret, glancing at the white box, from which a sweet smell escaped that in a graveyard would have made one gag. In that queasy observation lies a truth that can be profound or trivial according to one’s lights. “I have never before bought cake for ladies of substance.”
Susan and Elizabeth chose that moment to enter, their arms outstretched in welcome. “We are glad, Miss Hardesty, to make your acquaintance,” they said as one. “Ellen speaks highly of you.”
I blushed at hearing the word highly spoken within hearing of my new friend, though the remark had been an innocent one.
“I assure you that ‘ladies of substance’ are inclined to eat more cake than is good for them,” said Elizabeth. “And suffer the consequences.” She patted her stomach contentedly.
“Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” snapped Susan, for whom temperance extended to cakes, if not to her speeches, which were ardent, even inflammatory.
“Shall I open it?” Elizabeth had picked up the outsize box and set it on a taboret.
“By all means!” cried Margaret, rubbing her hands in anticipation. “I’ve been waiting to try it!”
What