Her enthusiastic delivery did nothing to hide the snippiness of her words. Part of her didn’t care, though. Just get on with it already.
“You’re a student journalist, not a journalist. Yet.”
She wouldn’t back down. “Maybe if you gave yourself a deadline, you’d reach the end faster. Easter, or something like that.”
“Fiction is a creative process, you can’t compare the two. It can’t be rushed.”
One section of the stacks, in the northeast corner, was set off from the rest by a wire cage that encircled two bookcases, around twenty feet in length. As Jack fiddled with the lock, Laura clutched the wire with her fingers and gave it a shake. “Seems pretty solid.”
“You’d need wire cutters to get through these.”
She peered inside. “It’s like a rare book zoo. Do you remember when we took the children to the Bronx Zoo? How Pearl growled back at the tiger?”
“Fearless, our Pearl.” The lock finally clicked, and he held open the wire door for her to step inside. “Harry could use some of her gumption.”
He pointed to the shelf that held the oversized books, some of which were in labeled gray boxes. “This is the Gutenberg Bible, one of forty-eight copies that survive from the mid-1400s. And over here is one of Shakespeare’s First Folios.”
These books had suffered through hundreds of years of handling without falling apart, without being lost or damaged. They were each a piece of history. Invaluable and precious. She stepped back, glancing along the shelves. “So this is the section where the Leaves of Grass and Tamerlane were kept?”
“Yes.”
“Were they checked out by anyone? Did you figure out who last asked to see them?”
He sighed. Of course they had. But she was just trying to be helpful.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve been over this a million times with Mr. Gaillard.”
“Not quite a million, but close.”
He locked the cage door carefully, checking it twice to make sure the lock was secure. His hands, so large around the key, reminded her just how strong he was, how faithfully he’d taken care of their family and provided them with everything they needed. She remembered how much she’d enjoyed watching him up at the estate, taking his place alongside the other men to help mend a stone wall, heaving rocks into place as if they were made of air. She shouldn’t have made him feel bad about his book earlier. He was doing the best he could.
She wrapped her hands around his waist and reached up to kiss the back of his neck.
“Careful. We’ve added another night watchman, we don’t want to cause trouble.” He smiled. “Well, not here, anyway.”
Laura followed him along the row to the staircase. “What else is kept in the cage?”
“Manuscripts, letters, maps.”
“Maybe one day your book will be in there. Imagine that. In a hundred years, when you’re a famous author, they’ll have all your first drafts lined up on the shelf next to Shakespeare.”
He nodded gamely, and she immediately regretted saying anything, as it only added to his pressure.
But it was probably just temporary, a part of a creative writer’s natural cadence. She shouldn’t blame herself for that.
It wasn’t her fault.
CHAPTER EIGHT
New York City, 1914
Greenwich Village was very different from Laura’s Fifth Avenue neighborhood, all narrow streets at odd angles, the buildings a mix of livery stables, tenements, cafés, and saloons. Recently, the low rents had attracted a new set of residents who called themselves bohemians and didn’t mind the fact that the apartments tended to be small and dingy. All part of the charm, Laura supposed. Even in winter, Village streets thrummed with energy, men and women spilling out of restaurants or animatedly chatting in front of a bakery, the windows slick with steam.
She turned down MacDougal Street and found the address for Polly Holladay’s restaurant. Inside, she paused, her nerves catching up with her. Men and women sat at long wooden trestle tables, drinking together. Her father would have had a fit if he knew his daughter was indulging in such scandalous behavior. Near the back, she caught sight of Amelia speaking with a woman with bobbed hair and wearing what looked like a meal sack and leather sandals. In February.
As Amelia greeted Laura, the woman was swept up the stairs by another group.
Laura couldn’t help herself. “What is she wearing?”
“That’s nothing. If you visit Henrietta at home, you’ll often find her in her birthday suit. A practicing feminist and nudist, our girl Henny.”
Laura memorized the phrase. What a quote. Since the new semester had begun, she’d been struggling to come up with an idea for her thesis assignment: nine thousand words on a single topic, with Professor Wakeman as her advisor. While Dr. Potter’s invitation had initially slipped her mind in the craziness of the holidays, the biweekly meetings of the Heterodoxy Club now seemed like a timely opportunity.
She followed Amelia upstairs to a large meeting room, where avant-garde artwork competed for attention with an assortment of sofas and chairs, all upholstered in bright citrus colors. They scrunched into a love seat near the front as a woman called for attention and recited the day’s agenda. Laura was just reaching into her satchel for her notebook when the woman’s words stopped her mid-reach.
“As we’ve said in the past, the comments and discussions that take place at the Heterodoxy Club are considered off the record, so members may speak their minds freely. Some of us have experienced firsthand how our words may be twisted by those who wish to demean and deride the causes we delve into over these three hours. This afternoon, you need not fear that.”
No note taking. She straightened up, curious to see what this was all about.
Margaret Sanger spoke first, about fighting the obscenity laws that prevented her from publishing and disseminating information regarding contraception to the women who most needed it. She used words that Laura had never heard spoken out loud, like “pessary” and “condom,” “coitus interruptus,” and talked of douching with carbolic acid or Lysol as a preventive measure. The room was brought to tears with her story of a young Jewish immigrant woman who begged her doctor for birth control, was refused, and then died in childbirth of septicemia. “In that moment, I resolved that women should have knowledge of contraception,” Sanger told them. “They have every right to know about their own bodies. I would scream from the housetops. I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard. No matter the cost, I would be heard.”
Amelia clapped with fervor. How brave, to be on the front lines of change, the way these women around Laura were. There was a sizzle of anger in the room but not in the way that the newspapers usually described, equating the New Woman with rabid, antiestablishment radicalism. The ideas being bandied about were radical, yes, but opposition arose with frequency and everyone got a say. When the talk turned to the suffrage movement, equal time was spent discussing whether gaining the right to vote in what was an inherently male, corrupt electoral system was even worth the effort, a perspective Laura hadn’t ever considered.