Chapter 39 Emily #2
The tears slipped down Emily’s cheeks. “But will people read a story about convicts and lunatics and prostitutes? Will they even care?”
“Of course they will care. Because your friend Annie, and even these other women…they’re all of us, in a way, and we’re all them.
If your article can get this horrid place shut down, or at least change some of the laws, well…
maybe other women won’t have to feel so afraid to ask for help when they need it.
” She swiped at a tear and smiled. “I just can’t believe…
well…those poor girls. I just keep thinking, they’re each someone’s daughter, aren’t they?
Just like Eleanor. Being starved and abused and all the rest of it. Someone’s baby girl.”
Emily nodded. “Though many of their parents are responsible for them ending up there in the first place. Dad told you how easy it was to convince that judge a prison sentence was proportionate punishment for my obstinance. He’d practically decided before we even got there.”
Bess sighed. “Girls never are valued as highly as boys. Even by some parents. That’s the ugly truth of it. I hope things will be different one day. And I’m sorry the change hasn’t come quick enough for you, my dear.”
“Dad told me back in the spring that things would have been easier for me if I’d been a boy.”
“Well,” Bess said, “that may be true. But we need girls—women—like you, to carve these paths, don’t we? Because the men sure aren’t going to do it for us.”
Emily’s eyes stung. “ ‘Carving the paths,’ ” she echoed.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m out in the woods alone, Mom.
In the dark, with nothing but a damn butter knife to clear the way.
It’s very…isolating. Not wanting what Eleanor wants, or what other girls my age want. Having dreams that are a man’s dreams.”
She thought then of Bernie, and true understanding settled on her. How singularly isolating it would be to feel as though you were born in the wrong body. That you were, in fact, a man. The heartache of it nearly took her breath away.
Bess watched her, thoughtful. “Of course it feels that way. But what courage, Emily, to take that on. And remember,” she added, “there are women on the path ahead of you, who set out with even fewer tools, in even darker woods. Women like Doris, or your idol, Nellie Bly. Keep your eyes on them when you feel alone. Call out to them. They’ll wait for you, give you a hand when you need it, show you their scars and the hurdles to watch out for, guide you over the ground they’ve already worked so hard to clear. ”
She brushed back a wild strand of Emily’s hair.
“The brambles might close in again from time to time, or grow over the path. But it’s still there, beneath.
Stay on it, my dear. Push the thorns back, even if you bleed.
And be sure to look over your shoulder, from time to time, to see who’s on the path behind you, or who might have fallen along the way.
Reach down, and help her back up again. Because she’s following you now, my dear. She’s following you.”
Emily let out a sob and embraced her mother again. “Thank you, Mom.”
They clung to one another in the silence of the room, the grey winter light beaming in on them.
Finally, Emily pulled away, and Bess ran her thumbs over Emily’s cheeks, brushing away the tears as she had so many times before.
The tenderness of Bess’s words sank into Emily’s skin like a healing balm.
“Now, then,” Bess said, her own eyes glistening. “That typewriter is your scythe. Go clear the path.”
Three days later, Emily rose from the desk she’d hardly left for ten days, other than to eat and sleep and use the bathroom. She exhaled, deliberately long and heavy. She felt as though she’d just been cleansed of something toxic.
She was consumed by competing feelings of relief and anxiety about the stack of papers in her hand, her final draft of the Mercer article.
Or at least, her final draft before the copyeditors got their hands on it.
But she had a feeling Doris wouldn’t cut much, that she would run it long-form, to make sure the whole story was told, the full truth finally known and acknowledged in print.
Doris had told her to come into the office when it was ready, but first, Emily wanted her father’s professional opinion. She also felt that with all the emotional turmoil she had put her parents through by taking on this story in the first place, they deserved to be the first to see it.
She walked into the dining room, then into the kitchen, finally spotting her parents out on the back patio, wrapped in thick winter coats in the two slatted lawn chairs beneath the awning, protected, somewhat, from the soft snow that fell outside in the late-evening darkness.
She smiled, watching them both from the kitchen window, the light illuminating their backs.
They were in muffled conversation, and smoke curled, then dissipated in the air beside her father as he nursed his after-dinner cigarillo.
She walked to the back door and stepped outside. They both turned at the sound.
“If you’re finished for the day, your dinner’s still in the oven keeping warm, dear,” Bess said. “You must be hungry. It’s nearly eight o’clock.”
Emily had declined dinner and worked through, unable to stop as her mind and fingers stumbled over one another.
That was her favourite part of writing, when what was in her mind and heart felt unstoppable, connected and fluid, the thoughts and words pouring out of her fingertips onto the page of their own volition, when she was more medium than scrivener, when she felt unable to think or type fast enough. There was nothing else like it.
“I’m finished,” she said, approaching them now. “Not just for the day. I mean I’m done. It’s written.”
Her mother’s mouth was open a little, pencilled brows pressing against her hairline. A smile played at her dad’s lips as they puckered around the cigarillo.
“I’d like you both to read it first,” Emily said, walking forward and pulling her burgundy cardigan closer around her. It fit like a tent on her now, but wouldn’t for long, at the rate Bess was pressing second helpings on her at every meal.
William leapt up, Bess right beside him.
“Let’s get comfortable in front of the fire, then,” he said with an excited smile Emily couldn’t help but return. “It’s bloody freezing out here.”
Emily coughed in the dry winter air as she made her way down Augusta Avenue through Kensington Market, chin tucked into the collar of her peacoat, her satchel containing the article slung over her shoulder.
She always preferred this route to work, avoiding the traffic, streetcars, and diesel-fuelled hustle of Spadina for the side street lined with walk-up coffee windows and market stalls.
She passed the poultry shop with its butchered chickens hanging in the window, the live ones cooing in cages just off the narrow sidewalk, and breathed in the smell of fresh-baked bread from the bakery next door.
She’d had a full breakfast, but still her mouth watered.
Although she had been imprisoned under false pretences, the experience of the incarceration was real, and her newfound freedom still felt strange and wondrous.
It was as though she had been squashed into some cramped case for six months and was only now able to stretch her legs, to remember that she in fact had them, could use them to live and explore.
Like she had somehow escaped death, a death of the soul.
She kept up her pace as she made her way onto Dundas and through Chinatown, mulling over what she would say to Doris and her colleagues.
It occurred to her, as she passed the sprawling art gallery, that she didn’t know who at Chatelaine knew about her undercover project at the Mercer besides Doris and the staff writers.
Doris wasn’t the type to share information with anyone she didn’t believe had rightful claim to it, so it was possible she simply told anyone inquiring that it wasn’t their business.
Emily smiled then, thinking of her old officemate Betty, and what she would have had to say about Emily’s foray into a women’s prison.
But perhaps she hadn’t stuck around for more than a few days after her engagement was announced.
She would be married by now. Emily wondered who had taken her place at that desk in the Closet.
A light turned green, and Emily stepped forward onto the crosswalk with a small crowd of other office workers headed toward the banks and legal offices that lined Bay Street to the east. Heart racing a little from the brisk walk and her nerves, she heaved on the heavy door and entered the familiar lobby of the grand building.
She pressed the elevator button and stood back.
She remembered how she’d waited in this same spot for the elevator on the afternoon she got back from scoping out the Mercer and meeting June Jones, when she went to Doris with the seed of this story in her little green hand.
She’d felt exhilarated then, bold and excited, to do what she thought was “real journalism,” to get her hands dirty.
But those hands were worn and older now, and she would be scrubbing at that grime for a long time to come.
Because she was indelibly altered by her time at the Mercer, just like every woman who walked through the creaking, aged front doors that had, for nearly a hundred years, swallowed the women society didn’t like, didn’t want, or didn’t know what to do with.
Locking women up was the default reaction of the men in charge who neither understood nor respected them.
Who viewed the white, mentally healthy women as second-class, and the others a step farther below that, something subhuman.