The Hope Chest (17 page)

Myrtle didn't know what they would do after the legislature voted. She had no plans. She didn't want to go back to the Girls' Training Institute, and she didn't want to stay in Tennessee, but she wasn't really sure what other choices she had. None, it seemed like.

Myrtle would have liked to have gone and found Violet. It would have been fun to go exploring together, but she had seen enough of Tennessee by now to know that was impossible.

Mrs. Ready had gone out to deliver some of the sewing she did for a living and then to visit her daughter. This was a relief. Myrtle felt she could have gotten along fine with Mrs. Ready if it wasn't for Mr. Martin, but Mr. Martin made the whole situation very uncomfortable. Mrs. Ready was always casting suspicious looks at him, trying to figure out what he was hiding from and why he was missing three fingers and why he had Myrtle with him.

Myrtle had been trying to keep Mr. Martin inside and out of sight. He didn't seem to be taking the fact that he was a wanted man very seriously, and Myrtle felt somebody had to. She had gone out for newspapers to keep him busy, and for groceries—sardines and peaches and Uneeda biscuits. But now Mr. Martin seemed determined to go out. He announced that he had to go and talk to people to see if there was any news. Myrtle didn't see any way she could actually forbid him to leave, and she privately suspected which person in particular he wanted to see.

Myrtle could see that the problem of Mr. Martin's future needed to be settled nearly as much as hers did. “Miss Chloe sure is pretty,” she commented.

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Martin, crawling under the bed to look for his socks.

“You should tell her that you love her.”

There was a loud, metallic clang from under the bed and Mr. Martin emerged, rubbing his head. “Myrtle, that's crazy talk. Be quiet.”

“You should get married,” Myrtle suggested.

“I'm a fugitive,” said Mr. Martin, smiling thinly. “Do you know what a fugitive is, Myrtle?”

“Of course,” said Myrtle. “So do your time, and then marry her.”

“My ‘time’ is likely to be twenty years in Fort Leavenworth,” said Mr. Martin, tying his shoes with unnecessary vigor. “Unless they deport me, which would be if I was lucky.”

Myrtle frowned. Twenty years was a lot. Miss Chloe, being so pretty, was likely to marry someone else in that time. More to the point, Myrtle would be very old in twenty years and wouldn't need a family anymore. “Maybe you should go to China,” she said.

“It's a thought,” said Mr. Martin. “Myrtle, I'm going out, and I want you to stay here and wait. Can I trust you for that?”

Myrtle ignored the question. “You could take Miss Chloe to China with you,” she said. “And then get married. And you might want to have a kid.”

“Myrtle, will you stay here and not move?”

“Not a baby, maybe,” said Myrtle. “Babies are a lot of trouble. But an older kid, you know.”

“Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea. Now stay here, Myrtle, and I'll be back in an hour or so.”

“Are you sure you would get twenty years?” said Myrtle. “I knew a fella in D.C. who cut another fella with a razor, and he only got three months.”

“Isn't it amazing?” said Mr. Martin, half sarcastically
and half seriously. “But I'm going to get twenty years. Most of my friends did. Big Bill Haywood did. And I will too.”

A thought struck Myrtle that had not previously occurred to her. Maybe Mr. Martin had actually done something really serious.

Maybe he had killed somebody.

“Mr. Martin, why are those agents chasing you?” Myrtle asked.

Mr. Martin frowned and straightened his soft collar in the mirror that hung on the wall. “Back in 1918, I spoke out against the War.”

“Spoke out against it?” Myrtle said.

“Yes. I said we shouldn't have been in it—that it wasn't our war.”

Myrtle stared. “That's it? That's what they're after you for?”

“What, you don't think that's enough?” Again Myrtle couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. “Keep it under your hat, all right, Myrtle?”

“Of course,” said Myrtle, offended.

“I'll be back in a bit.”

The way you were dressed, Violet had noticed, tended to make you act a certain way. Violet was dressed the way she had always hated, in a fluffy white dress with a violet satin sash and trimmings of violet ribbon.

“We wanted to get some artificial violets for your hat to go with your name; wouldn't that have been darling?”
Miss Escuadrille had said. “But the shops only have yellow and red roses.”

There were also itchy white stockings and some wretched little patent leather shoes called Mary Janes.

In this ridiculous getup Violet sat on one of the wire-backed chairs at a little round marble-topped table at Max Bloomstein's Pharmacy, feeling very ladylike but at the same time much younger than she was. She told Chloe everything she had overheard in the last twenty-four hours.

“If the Antis
do
think they're going to lose,” Violet said, poking at the blob of vanilla ice cream in her grape ice cream soda, “they said there just won't be a quorum. What's a quorum?” She normally didn't like to ask what words meant, because it made her feel babyish, but in a costume like this, she had no choice.

“A quorum means having enough members of the legislature there to have a valid vote,” said Chloe. “Sometimes dissenting state legislators will leave the state in order to prevent there being enough people to vote. It's an old trick. I'll tell Charlotte Ormond Williams we need to beef up the guard at the train station to keep them from escaping.

“At least now we know what that surprise you heard mentioned yesterday was. The publisher of the
Nashville Banner
changed sides. He used to be a Suff; now suddenly he's an Anti.” Chloe shrugged. “Wonder how they got to him. Is there anything else?”

Violet thought hard. She wished she'd taken notes,
but of course that would have been too conspicuous. “I don't know. That Miss Escuadrille that I'm sharing a room with is a blithering idiot—”

“Violet,” said Chloe reprovingly.

“Well, she is—she really doesn't have a clue what's going on. She just believes all the applesauce they've told her about how women are too
good
to vote or too weak or something.”

“I know,” said Chloe with a sigh.

“And at that meeting I went to last night, that Senator Candler, the way he was talking, I think he really
hates
females. He doesn't think we're too good to vote, he thinks we're too bad.”

“I know,” Chloe repeated. She was looking more tired by the minute.

“Oh, and here are these stupid pamphlets I'm supposed to be passing out at the train station this afternoon.” Violet dropped the stack of leaflets on the table.

Chloe picked one up. “ ‘Beware! Men of the South! Heed not the song of the suffrage siren!’ ” She managed to get all the exclamation points in without raising her voice. Chloe had always been good at making her voice expressive. Violet thought fondly of the stories about Alaska that Chloe used to tell her.

“Read the inside,” said Violet.

Chloe did and then dropped the pamphlet back on the table. “Oh, that old argument,” she said. “That there are more colored women than colored men in the South, so giving women the vote will increase the colored vote.
‘Save the Anglo-Saxon race!’ Most of those states don't even let colored people vote anyway.”

“How come there are no colored suffragists?” Violet asked.

“There are tons of colored suffragists,” said Chloe. “But they've been asked to stay out of sight.”

“That's not fair,” said Violet. She felt she'd had a pretty thorough lifelong experience of what it was like to be seen and not heard, and being neither seen
nor
heard had to be even worse.

“Of course it isn't,” said Chloe. “Drink your soda.”

The bells on the door of the pharmacy jingled. A moment later Mr. Martin sat down next to them.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he said belatedly.

“Oh, hello, Theo.” Chloe instantly looked less tired.

Violet studied the slowly turning wooden ceiling fans overhead while they talked. She would have liked to go somewhere else, because she was beginning to suspect that Myrtle was right and that Chloe had no intention of sending Mr. Martin to the rightabout. In fact, Chloe had probably told Mr. Martin they were going to be at the drugstore. The whole thing embarrassed Violet. She didn't understand it either, because both of the Mr. R.'s had been much better-looking and more suitable than Mr. Martin, not to mention richer. Plus they hadn't been Bolsheviks and they hadn't had Palmer agents looking for them. Violet got up and wandered over and looked at a display of boxed candies.

“What do you mean, you have to go to the movies?”
Mr. Martin was saying. “You don't even like movies! You don't like the grainy little lines running up and down the screen. They give you a headache.”

“I know,” said Chloe, sounding like she already had a headache. “Maybe I'll take him to the burlesque instead.”

“Just who is this fella, anyway?”

“I don't know. We'll be assigned them this evening. We have to make sure the legislators have a good time so that they don't leave town over the weekend.”

“Make sure they have a good time? Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“Theo, please. You're causing a scene.”

Violet drifted farther away. She tried to interest herself in a display of Sure-Fire Liquor Cures. She was aware that everyone in the drugstore was watching Chloe and Mr. Martin quarrel, and she wished Mr. Martin would remember that there were Palmer agents looking for him.

Then she thought of something. If Mr. Martin was here, maybe Myrtle was around somewhere. Violet wanted to see her—and it would be a relief to talk to someone her own age after all the boring adult conversations she'd had to listen to lately.

Violet found Myrtle hiding in a recessed doorway beside the drugstore, under a sign advertising
Underwood Typewriters—The Machine You Will Eventually Buy.

Myrtle was happy to see her, and they sat down on the stoop and exchanged news. Myrtle was jealous of Violet's job as a spy.

“Because it's important,” Myrtle said. “I'm not doing anything important. I'm just waiting for them to vote.” She nodded upward at Capitol Hill.

“You're keeping an eye on Mr. Martin,” Violet pointed out. “That's important. He needs someone to keep an eye on him.”

“He sure does,” Myrtle agreed. “It's bad enough he has a scar on his face and three fingers missing. He doesn't need to go telling people how to change the way they do things all the time. It makes them remember him.”

Violet thought Mr. Martin probably
did
need to go telling people to change the way they did things or he wouldn't be Mr. Martin. “He's in there making a scene right now,” she said.

Myrtle looked apprehensive. “Maybe we should go in and stop him.”

Violet shook her head. “I think that would just make it more of a scene.”

Myrtle nodded, seeing the sense in this. “I don't know what's going to happen to him after this is all over. He's no good at hiding.”

At the thought of “after this is all over,” they both lapsed into silence. Violet was thinking about Chloe, who had yet to say that Violet could come and live with her. Violet didn't want to go home. She didn't miss it at all. All right, she missed her own room, and her bed with the green chenille spread, and her shelf full of Oz books. But she didn't miss the empty, echoing loneliness of a house
with no one in it but Stephen, who wasn't really there, and Father, who never talked except to issue edicts, and Mother, who had betrayed Violet.

She supposed Myrtle was thinking about the Girls' Training Institute, and how she didn't want to go back there, and where she would go if she didn't.

“When will it all be over?” said Myrtle.

“No one knows,” said Violet. “The Senate might vote on the amendment today. Or they might not, which would mean maybe they'd vote on it Monday, or maybe not. And then the House might vote on it Monday, but they have to wait for a committee to recommend it—” She broke off, noting that Myrtle was laughing at her.

“You sound like a politician or something,” said Myrtle.

Violet shrugged. “ 'Cause I've been listening to so much political talk lately.” She thought of how sick she was of political talk. “I should come visit you and Mr. Martin where you're staying, and maybe we could go—”

“No,” said Myrtle.

Violet looked away, stung. A colored man in overalls was sweeping the edge of the sidewalk, his broom making gritty swishing sounds as he swept clouds of dust into the gutter.

“It's just not that interesting a place. You'd be bored,” Myrtle said, sounding half apologetic.

Before Violet could reply, the door to the drugstore burst open and Mr. Martin stormed out. Violet could just
imagine the eyes of everyone in the place following him and his scar and his missing fingers that the Palmer agents had such a good description of.

Myrtle jumped to her feet and waved a hasty goodbye to Violet. Violet was sorry to see her go, but Mr. Martin clearly needed supervision.

“He just refuses to understand,” said Chloe when Violet sat back down at the marble-topped table. “I told him back in New York that nothing was more important than winning the vote. I don't know why he thinks I should have changed my mind now.”

Violet decided this remark was not really addressed to her. “What's going to happen today?” she asked. “Are they meeting in the capitol?”

“The Senate will probably vote today,” said Chloe, pulling the paper straw out of her strawberry phosphate and looking at it disconsolately. It was coming apart.

“Really? On the Susan B. Anthony Amendment?” Violet thought this was great news and couldn't understand why Chloe wasn't more excited.

“It's only the Senate,” said Chloe. “That's just half of the legislature. There's still the House to worry about. And they're what we
are
worried about. We know we're going to win the Senate.”

All anybody on either side ever seemed to say was that they knew they were going to win, so Violet wasn't very impressed by this. “I don't think Senator Candler is going to vote for the amendment. He despises women.”