A Moment in the Sun (36 page)

There are more men in the hall this evening than Miss Loretta has ever seen at a Suffrage lecture. One will note a half-dozen scattered, sympathetic clergymen, a few scoffers who come to sit with folded arms and tight smiles or stand at the side of the aisle for the entire program making the ushers uneasy, now and then a reporter for one of the newspapers scribbling unkind observations and chuckling to themselves. But tonight they are nearly a third of the audience, including some hard-looking types who might not be expected to be able to afford the “donation” at the door. The fellow beside her, a solid little man in a brown checked suit, needs to be reminded to remove his bowler by the woman behind.

As for the women, Miss Loretta is surprised at some of the faces she recognizes, representatives from many of Wilmington’s finest families among them. The controversial nature of Mrs. Felton’s views has no doubt kept the meek, the uncommitted, from attending so public a gathering, and she is heartened by the turnout. If the cause is to succeed it will need the support, the strength of Southern women.

“It has been said that we are
whiners
.”

The Suffragist is in excellent form. Miss Loretta has always admired her aptitude for speaking forcefully and intelligently without surrendering any of her feminine grace. She is credited, not always unkindly, with being the mastermind of her husband’s political campaigns, and somehow his popularity with an all-male electorate has not been damaged by his wife’s outspoken advocacy of a widely derided position.

“It has been said that we are the most privileged class the world has ever known.”

The Suffragist’s voice is strong, almost musical. She stands on the stage behind a lectern draped with the American flag, wearing a slate-gray ensemble and a hat enlivened by a corona of violets.

“It has been said that we are so elevated in the regard of our menfolk, so cosseted, that to desire more is a display of not only folly, but greed.”

Miss Loretta has seen Mrs. Felton unravel the plans of an inebriated disrupter with nothing more than her Southern woman’s irony, drawing him sweetly into a logical argument, seeming to agree with him, leading him deeper and deeper before delivering her fatal thrust. She has perfected the tactic of presenting men’s intransigence about Suffrage not as brutal and hard-hearted, but as weak and unworthy of their manhood.

“I will admit it for myself,” she says with a coy smile. “Yes, I am greedy.”

Polite laughter from the ladies, some of whom have heard this gambit before and know where it is leading. Miss Loretta realizes that the man beside her is making a noise, a perhaps unconscious growling sound, barely perceptible during the speaker’s dramatic pauses.

“And yes, I would venture, many of you fine women sitting before me share that greed.
Yes
, women desire to be educated.
Yes
, women desire to escape the drudgery and debasement of rural servitude. And
yes
,” here she looks to every corner of the hall, seeking out the eyes of the men, “women desire Suffrage. Without the vote we are mere spectators, fated to serve as handmaidens to the powerful but never to share in the administration of that power. Slaves, if you will, to the whims and stubbornness of the so-called ‘stronger sex.’ ”

The man in the brown suit sits coiled and tight beside Miss Loretta, growling, if that is how one would describe the noise, even more loudly now. She leans out into the aisle and casts a glance backward to see where there might be someone to intercede if he proves dangerous.

“But with power,” the Suffragist continues, “comes responsi
bil
ity. A responsibility that is sadly lacking in our present administration in regards to their unholy alliance with a—” and here she looks around the hall again, as if searching for the parties she is about to malign, and though finding none, lowers her voice with the delicacy appropriate to public criticism, “—a less morally de
vel
oped segment of our citizenry.”

It can’t be.

Miss Loretta feels her cheeks begin to burn. This is wrong, this is not where it is supposed to lead. She had not believed Daddy when he told her, had refused to read the article in the newspaper, replying that as she had never heard him refer to its editors as anything but liars and scoundrels, why would she believe a slander they printed about Mrs. Felton, whose views they so airily disparage whenever given the opportunity?

“See for yourself,” he grumbled, “but don’t blame me for being the messenger.”

Daddy is a man with no idols. Even Mr. Lincoln, whose words and deeds he admired on the whole, was “still a politician” and therefore the object of some contempt. Even Socrates, endlessly quoted during her childhood and ever since, is not beyond reproach. “A Greek,” Daddy will say cryptically, leaving the nature of that particular shortcoming to her imagination.

“For the want of political gain,” the great lady goes on, indignation creeping into her voice, “these white men have initiated the
ne
gro into the mysteries of the ballot box, confounding him with tall stories and outright bribery in exchange for his vote!”

The Suffragist says
vote
with disgust, a dirty thing in her mouth. The man in the brown suit has begun to rock slightly to and fro in his seat, the movement somewhat indecent, his burning eyes fixed on the speaker. There have been reports, a new one practically every day, that indicate a rash, no, an epidemic of black men inflicting the “nameless crime” upon innocent white women. Six of them—or is it nine, or fourteen? Some of the stories end with the tree and the rope, others with only the howl of outraged Southern Manhood. Daddy, of course, with his contempt for the Fourth Estate, especially as it is manifested in North Carolina, remains unconvinced.

“Can it then surprise us that once allowed to break our election laws with impunity, these creatures assume they may engage in theft, rapine, and murder without fear of retribution?”

Grumbles among the audience members, male voices for the most part. The Suffragist begins to increase her volume, laying a foundation for her
crescendo
, lowering her register, now that she knows she has the men with her, from a soft
coloratura
to a hearty
tenore spinto
.

“As long as your politicians take the colored man into their embrace on election day and make him think that he is a man and a brother, so long will lynching prevail—for familiarity breeds con
tempt
.”

She is brilliant, as usual, in her use of the language. “Your” politicians, leaving the unenfranchised women innocent of the outrage, the twist in logic that makes misplaced benevolence the handmaiden of murder. Daddy was president of the Forensic Society in his Princeton days and has drilled Miss Loretta in the uses and abuses of rhetoric. She feels tears beginning to form. The man beside her presses his hands, curled into fists, against his thighs as he rocks and growls, his knuckles white.

“And if it needs lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from these ravening human brutes—” a tiny caesura, the intake of breath before the final chord, “—then I say
lynch
, a thousand times a week if necessary!”

The little man springs to his feet, smashing his hands together in approval, joined by half the audience, the women applauding as fervently if not as athletically as the men. It is what they have come for, the air in the room with a different charge than she’s ever felt before, a raw and terrible energy. Miss Loretta rises and walks quickly up the aisle toward the rear of the hall, a tight smile on her face, the tears coming now.

She recognizes the man standing at the very back. He is not applauding but writing on a pad, a frown fixed on his handsome face. Their eyes meet for an instant and he nods, though they have never been formally introduced. It is Alex Manly, the editor of the
Wilmington Daily Record
, who is engaged to her dear little Carrie.

Miss Loretta may be the only person in the hall who knows he is not white.

“The manhood of the South,” she hears the Suffragist continue as the applause dies down, the words echoing, distant and hollow now as she hurries across the lobby, “must put a sheltering arm around innocence and virtue. The black fiend who lays his unholy and lustful hands on white women must surely die!”

An ancient negro waits, leaning against his hackney carriage at the bottom of the steps.

“M’am,” he says, tipping his battered cap, and offers his hand to help her up.

Miss Loretta experiences a twinge of—what? Discomfort? Fear?—as she takes it, and is immediately furious with herself.

“Thank you,” she says when she is settled. “Eighth and Market, please.”

The old man tips his cap again and climbs up into the driver’s seat.

“Listenin to Mrs. Felton,” he says as he urges the horse into motion.

“Yes. She’s—she’s quite an orator.”

“Womens at the ballot box,” he says, shaking his head at the wonder of the idea. “That be a new day.”

VOLUNTEERS

In Denver they don’t make him undress.

The meeting is in the bigger bar downstairs at the Windsor, the one with the silver dollars inlaid every few feet in the floor and walls. Masterson perched on a stool pulled away from the bar counter as the pencil artist sits and stands and squats to draw his face from different vantage points, Niles Manigault obligingly skittering out of the eyeline whenever it changes, the fat man blocking most all the daylight from the open doorway.

“He knows the deal?” asks Masterson, flicking his eyes briefly at Hod.

“He fought Choynski,” says Niles. “Held his own.”

“The three great virtues of a prizefighter,” says Masterson, lifting his chin a bit to catch the light angling in from Larimer Street, “are Talent, Heart, and O
be
dience. In my book the last of these is the greatest.”

“He’s a sharp lad,” says Niles. “Once the deal, whatever it is, has been agreed upon—”

“Twelve rounds,” says the fat man, slowly circling Hod, poking his bicep once with his cane. “Reddy needs time to sell beer, and if the Kid and Mongone are fighting straight—”

“For eight rounds they’re fighting so that both stay on their feet,” interrupts Masterson, “and then they can knock each other’s brains out.”

“You’ve placed some wagers.”

“Move, Otto,” says Masterson, holding his pose and wiggling a finger sideways. “You’re throwing a shadow.”

The fat man snorts in annoyance but moves to the side a few feet. He wears a bright checked suit and a red vest. “If you’d just have a photograph taken like a normal man—”

“It lacks the human dimension,” says Masterson. His face is fleshier than Hod has imagined, his eyes sharper. In their boyhood games he always insisted on being Masterson, his brother Zeb left with a choice of badmen to represent. “It lacks the
soul
. These likenesses, which will appear in—what’s this one to be called?”

“
Bat Masterson, Plague of the Kansas Outlaw
,” answers the crouching artist, eyes fixed on his sketchpad.

“These likenesses convey the
spirit
of the man, his sense of vitality. A photograph freezes time, character becomes a mask, motion a blur—”

“What about the moving pictures?”

“Overrated.”

Hod catches the eye of Niles Manigault, who discretely motions for him to sit back at the bar. He wonders what they do to keep men like himself, desperate men, from prying the silver dollars out of the woodwork.

“They could have used one of those cameras in San Francisco when your friend Earp handed the fight to Sharkey—”

“The man fouled—”

“Fitz had him all but knocked out.”

“On a punch delivered when the Tom’s knees were on the canvas.”

“A film wouldn’t have lied—”

“Were you
there
?”

The fat man pushes the skimmer back on his head. “No. But if there had been a camera—”

“
I
was there. It was the correct decision.”

The artist clears his throat. “Do you think,” he asks softly, “you could assume a gunfighting stance?”

“About to draw or piece in hand?”

“Either one would suit me.”

The Hero of Adobe Walls stands and pulls a short-barreled Colt from inside his jacket. The fat man takes a step backward.

“That isn’t loaded, is it?”

“What fucking use under God’s blue firmament would it do me to carry an unloaded firearm?”

Hod looks down to the end of the bar. A large man has folded his arms on the counter and is dozing upon them. Tabor had the hotel built during the first gush of silver from his holes, had supervised the details in both of the bars. This is a drinking man’s dream of heaven—inlaid panels of ebony and oak, cherrywood on the bartop, enamel spittoons with Chinese designs, gleaming brass and silver metalwork and a dozen cut-glass chandeliers hanging overhead. A bartender in sleeve garters is polishing glasses, feigning indifference to the negotiations.

“They wanted to make a moving picture of the border fight,” says Mas-terson, crouching slightly and pointing the iron held at his hip toward an imaginary foe. “I’m down in El Paso with Tom O’Rourke, sitting on the ten thousand cash prize, when the Rangers run the lot of us—fighters, managers, promoters, fans—out on a rail. So Roy Bean down in Langtry says he can handle it and he builds a little bridge out to a sandbar in the middle of the Pecos. ‘It’s not Texas and it’s not Mexico,’ he says, ‘and is subject only to the laws of Nature.’ The fellow with the camera had paid a bundle to Stuart for the right to photograph, and when Fitzsimmons’s people demand a percentage of his profits, he turns them down cold. As it was, Ruby Robert put Maher away with one of his corkscrew punches in less than a minute of the first round.”

“A disappointing afternoon,” ventures Niles.

“Not for Judge Bean, who had the liquor concession. He sold out his stock to the sporting crowd, then issued an ordinance that not a drop could be consumed in Langtry. It was a memorable train ride.” Masterson turns and points the gun barrel at the fat man. “What’s this I hear of the ‘Otto Floto Circus’?”