I came home bubbling with enthusiasm. Now this was a real case, one I could sink my teeth into with no twinges of conscience about catching illicit couples. It would be easy enough to blend in and pass as an ordinary working girl, since I was one. Not in such dire circumstances as most of them, but still struggling to earn my way in a new country. Of course learning to be an efficient seamstress was another matter. Skill with a needle has never been one of my greatest attributes.
The front door at 9 Patchin Place was open, revealing a veritable hive of enthusiasm and industry. Exotic, herby smells wafted down the hallway toward me. Gus was studying an enormous cookery book in the kitchen, while Sid was stringing paper lanterns out in the garden. The kitchen sink teemed with scrabbling lobsters. I didn’t even have time to spill the news of my new commission before Gus pounced upon me.
“Molly, you’re just in time. I need someone to slice onions.”
I was given an apron and dragged into the frantic preparations. By eight o’clock the house was ready and started to fill with writers, painters, poets, and freethinkers. There were many more people than there were lobsters, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was plenty of wine and ale, so a good time was had by all. Myself, I was content to sit back and take it all in. I was still such a newcomer to the world of artists and freethinkers that I felt a little awkward taking part in their witty badinage, but I soaked it all in like a sponge. The discussion moved from women’s rights to birth control to anarchy. Then the talk moved on to New York politics and the upcoming mayoral election.
“It really seems that Tammany might be losing its grip,” Lennie, a painter friend, said, waving an ear of sweet corn—a delicacy I had just discovered. “There’s little love for this Shepherd fellow. Everyone says Seth Low is the man to get rid of Charlie Murphy’s corruption.”
“I see little point in discussing an election in which half of us can’t participate,” Sid said angrily. “Whoever wins it will be the same—more jobs for the boys, more kickbacks under the table.”
“And what do you say, Mr. Clemens?” Gus asked an elderly gentleman with bushy white hair and a drooping mustache who had come to join the group. He looked too old to be part of Sid and Gus’s artistic set and I wondered how he had been invited.
The old man smiled. “It should be perfectly obvious what you have to do. Give women the vote. That will do away with tyrants and dictators instantly. Women will always opt for sensible and compassionate over warlike and corrupt.”
There was loud applause from the whole room. I began to think that he must be a politician of sorts. I nudged Gus who was standing beside me. “Who is that man?”
She looked at me in amazement. “You haven’t heard of Samuel Clemens?”
I shook my head.
“He’s one of our most distinguished writers. He’s just come back from Europe and he has chosen to live in our little neck of the woods. Isn’t he magnificent?”
I had to agree that he was and resolved to go out and buy one of his books forthwith. Any man who was a champion of votes for women was definitely worth reading.
As the talk went on late into the night, I found myself becoming philosophical. This group and those factory girls I had witnessed just a few short blocks away were so far removed from each other that they might have been circling two different suns. I knew that some of these people also struggled to survive. That chubby painter in the corner only ate when he sold a painting. And yet survival was not at the core of their existence. If they had to choose between paint and food, they would choose the former. Whereas those girls at the sweatshop worked their lives away in those dreary conditions to pay for food and rent and probably thought that they had no choice. But didn’t each of us have a choice in what we did? Then I decided that it was the unaccustomed wine that was making me think this way.
The last reveler didn’t leave until the wee hours of the morning. We collapsed into our beds, only to be woken at first light by a hammering on the front door. I heard Sid’s slippers flip-flopping down the stairs, a conversation, then up again, calling softly, “Molly, are you awake? A man is outside with a message for you.”