Chapter Nine
Washington, DC
JULIA
When the tide was right, and only the tops of the rocks they’d placed along the water’s edge showed, they played Cross the River. They leapt from rock to rock, careful not to slip into the water, lest they be pulled into dangerous rapids or get eaten by an alligator.
There weren’t really alligators, of course, and it was only a few inches of water, but it’s easy to persuade yourself of something when everyone else acts like they believe it, too. (Grown-ups do it all the time, only they don’t admit it’s pretend.)
FROM LIBERTY ISLAND, BY MISS CRANE
The curtain had closed, but Louisa was still laughing.
“Now you know why I insisted we sit in the rear of the theater,” Julia said to Bess Riordan, her fellow third grade teacher at Morgan. “Take Louisa to a comedy, and she’ll barely crack a smile. Dramatic films? In hysterics, beginning to end.”
“It was too absurd.” Louisa was still mirthful as they gathered up their things and left the theater.
“It was rather ridiculous,” Bess said. She stopped and read from the poster on the wall outside, one hand on her chest, the other stretched out dramatically. “‘Theda Bara’s Camille is a comet of Exalted Passion rushing brilliantly across the firmament of life!’”
“See?” Louisa said. “High comedy.”
They headed down Columbia Road until they reached Bess’s corner. They bade her goodbye with a hug; then Julia and Louisa continued toward Mintwood Place, where they would dress for Mina Ellis’s housewarming party.
The suffrage effort was heating up, and Mina and several of her friends from New York had taken jobs with the National Woman’s Party. “We’re storming the barricades!” Mina said in her letter announcing their plans. Julia had been glad of the news, but she had a few concerns.
Julia and Louisa were as close as ever, and though jobs in different parts of the city made it impractical for them to live together, their more separate lives had only expanded both of their circles.
But Louisa and Mina had never gotten along very well; Louisa still maintained that Mina was not a good friend to Julia, and she felt her teasing was too hard-edged.
That said, she had readily agreed to attend the housewarming, so Julia had reason to hope that Mina’s presence would not cause problems in her most treasured friendship.
“Does Mina know anything about you and Mr. Stewart?” Louisa asked, naming another of Julia’s concerns.
“Well … she knows that I met him,” Julia said.
“Only that?” Louisa raised an eyebrow.
“I know. I know…” Julia sighed.
Mina was proprietary about people, and it would irk her that Julia and Pelham were communicating without her knowledge, especially if she learned about it from someone else.
It had not felt so consequential when Mina was hundreds of miles away in New York, but now she would live in Julia’s neighborhood.
Pelham’s first letter had come not long after he left for France.
I think of your bright eyes and eager shoulders, how pleased I was that you did not touch your hair when you removed your hat. You were so unselfconscious, and your hair so charmingly tousled. I can still picture the ringlets the damp air made about your face.
I wish I had not wasted an hour of the twenty-four between meeting you and my departure on something so mundane as sleep.
I could have spent them with you, basking in your sun, appreciating your youth.
(We were nearly the same age then, but every week here adds a decade to my years.
Soon I will be old enough to be your grandfather.)
Pelham did not write of battles or troop movements.
He sent his observations of people, places, and ideas.
His letters had a discursive quality, as if he was continuing the conversation they had begun during their brief time together.
Julia was already familiar with his beautiful prose, and his brilliant, incisive thinking.
She was flattered that these skills were being put to use for her sole benefit.
As she and Louisa dressed, Julia again considered telling Mina, but ultimately she decided against it.
She and Pelham were nurturing something in their letters, like an egg in an incubator, and any disturbance could crack the delicate shell.
Mina was so indiscreet, Julia could easily imagine her making public property of what was, for the time being, theirs alone.
“I must say, Mina is awfully lucky that you love dogs,” Louisa said, as they headed down the block. “She’d never have found this place otherwise.”
“Perhaps I should patent it—the Canine Method! The answer to the housing shortage.”
Finding places to live in the capital was a famous challenge, especially for unmarried women.
Many advertisements explicitly forbade “Bachelor Girls.” Fortunately for Mina, Julia had befriended Zeke, a large, homely creature who was often in the fenced yard of a row house she passed on her way to and from school.
Zeke’s owner, Mrs. Palmer, occasionally rented rooms to young working women. When Mina announced she was coming, Julia asked if she had any available, though she thought it best to be candid. “They’re moving here to work for women’s suffrage, and they’re a bit … unconventional.”
Mrs. Palmer narrowed her eyes in thought. “I can take your one friend,” she said finally. “Not sure I can stomach a houseful.”
When Julia and Louisa reached the gate, Zeke galumphed over to greet them. Julia scratched the back of his neck, and his tongue lolled with pleasure. The door opened, and they looked up to see Emmeline, Mrs. Palmer’s maid.
“You’ve come to see your friend?” she asked, a rather haughty expression on her face. Julia smiled. Emmeline had an aristocratic bearing, and Mina and her friends had clearly outraged her sense of decorum (which Julia had observed was far stricter than Mrs. Palmer’s).
“It’s good to see you, Emmeline. And yes, we’re here to see Miss Ellis.”
“Just follow the noise,” she sniffed.
Julia and Louisa, thoroughly amused, climbed the stairs to Mina’s door. There was music coming from inside, some twangy Hawaiian tune, but to Julia’s relief, it was not terribly loud.
“Duchess!” Mina stood in the middle of the small living room, arms out, a large bottle of gin in one hand. She wore exotic harem pants in a brown-and-gold pattern, and a loose peasant blouse. Her dark hair was bobbed short.
“I think you’ve shocked Emmeline,” Julia said, laughing.
“I’ve shocked who?” Mina asked.
“Emmeline. The maid?”
“Oh, well—” Mina waved a hand, and Julia cringed inwardly. Mina’s head was often in the clouds, but it had not escaped Julia’s notice that her friend was particularly oblivious to servants, streetcar drivers, and others in unexalted professions.
Clothes spilled out of an open trunk in the corner, and cardboard boxes were serving as coffee tables. The ukulele strains Julia had heard came from a little Victrola in the corner.
Looking beyond the messiness, Julia felt a little thrill, a sense that she had found something she had been missing in Washington.
On the wall behind Mina hung a giant unframed painting of a woman in a kimono, holding a corset out her window, preparing to drop it into a trash can below.
Painted in large black letters at the top was the message “Can the mind be enfranchised when the body is enslaved?” On the other walls were illustrations from Rogue, a satirical fashion magazine where Mina worked for a spell.
Three other guests had arrived, two of whom Julia and Louisa already knew—Mina’s former roommates Vera Markwell (“Vera the Dancer”) and Jane Varney (“Jane the Socialist”). The third guest, Mitzy Warren, was one of their illustrator friends.
“Is Vera all right?” Julia asked, nodding toward the divan. Vera, in a loose, silky dress, a batik scarf tied around her head, was stretched out, with one long, thin arm dangling off to the side, and one long, thin, bare leg thrown over the back.
“She got herself tangled up with Bernard Fulton,” Mina said.
Bernard was a writer who lived with his wife, Francine, in Greenwich Village.
(Despite their iconoclasm, Greenwich Villagers did occasionally get married, though as Mina once said, they were “usually quite apologetic about it.”) Francine, also an illustrator, had created some of the Rogue covers gracing Mina’s wall.
“Mystifying to all of us, as the man dances like a rudderless barge,” Mina said. “Francine supposedly believed in free unions, but she reneged when she had a baby. Bernard now calls himself an ‘experimentalist.’”
“Sounds very scientific,” Jane said. “Six syllables, when the two-syllable cheater would be just as apt.”
More guests arrived—mostly women, as was the case with all gatherings of young people these days, but a wonderfully shaggy older gentleman, a sculptor friend of Jane’s, showed up, as did a young writer who happened to be in town, and a couple of other men who were working on labor issues in the capital.
As Julia had expected, there was much grumbling about the fact that Washington would be a dry city in a few months.
Julia had never been much of a drinker, so she did not have quite the same dread of Prohibition as others did, but she had always found mild inebriation to be contagious.
Mina’s guests gave the impression of getting all the liquor they could into their systems, like bears preparing for hibernation, and Julia’s spirits rose as people loosened up and grew more cheerful and amusing.
Evidently tourists had discovered Greenwich Village, and Mina and Jane staged an impromptu skit, pretending to be the “rich plutocrats” peering at the residents of the village like they were animals in the Central Park Zoo.