Page 9 of A Mind of Her Own

On Tuesday, Alex did personal errands for Sylvia Bates. She bought silk stockings, and went to the dry cleaner for her. It was a menial job, but she enjoyed it anyway. She dropped off the dry cleaning at her home. Sylvia’s apartment was beautiful, two floors in a private house on Fifth Avenue close to Washington Square. Sylvia had had the same exquisite taste in her decorating as she did in what she wore, and Alex enjoyed seeing it.

Alex worked with Pam MacDonald in the afternoon, who covered all the notable parties in the city. The Astors were giving a summer deb ball for their granddaughter at their Connecticut estate. Alex wondered what it would be like. Like Cinderella, she imagined. It would have been fun to go to an event like that once in her life, and wear a beautiful gown. She loved the fantasy of it, but wasn’t sure if the reality would measure up to her girlish dreams. Her parents never went to important social events, all they did was work. Her grandfather had no social life at all. Her grandmother had gone to thé dansants in her youth, dances in the afternoon, which always sounded antiquated and sweet to Alex. The future she envisioned for herself was one of hard work too. Her dream was to write a book one day. In the meantime, she wrote short stories, and in her journal every night.

She wore a pale blue summer dress when she went to work on Wednesday. It was the color of her eyes, and she looked young and fresh when she met Oliver in the cafeteria for lunch. He left his office without telling anyone where he was going, and walked swiftly across the hall. They were the only department at the paper that didn’t mind being across from the kitchen smells. At least it competed with their cigarettes and cigars. And it offered a constant supply of coffee and food, since they worked till all hours, and there was always someone on duty. The building was teeming with employees. Society was one of the smallest departments, and Crime one of the biggest. There were no female reporters in Crime. The subject was too rough.

“You look lovely,” he commented as they went to get their food. It was a hot day, she was nervous meeting him, and she wasn’t hungry, so she took a salad and some fruit with an iced tea. He took a hearty hot meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes, some vegetables, and a slice of pie. He ate his main meal at the paper, so he didn’t have to cook or go out at night, and he was usually on the run from one crime scene to the next, watching some gang member get dragged off in handcuffs, or the police covering a body.

He paid for her lunch and they found a quiet corner table at the back of the room. The cafeteria wasn’t busy yet, and the weather was so fine that most people wanted to leave the building, so there was no one around them, which was rare.

“Where did you grow up?” he asked her as they started lunch. She could see that he had a hearty appetite although it didn’t show. He was fit and thin and athletic-looking.

“Paris, until last year,” she said, picking at her salad. She’d never gotten used to big meals again, since the years of rationing in Paris, and she was still very slim.

“And where do you live now, when you’re not a summer intern?” He was curious about her.

“I go to school in Chicago, at the University of Chicago, and my home is in Beardstown, Illinois, two hundred miles from there. It’s beautiful farmland. I never thought I’d like to live on a farm, but it’s nice, and very peaceful.”

“More so than Paris in wartime, I suspect.” She nodded. “Was Paris very tough during the war?” he asked her.

“Sometimes. There was no medicine, and rationing was really hard. We couldn’t get milk, sugar, and eggs, or even meat sometimes, and anything fresh went to the army. My grandmother was a good cook so she made it work. I lived with her during the war. My parents were at the front.”

“Both of them?” He looked surprised.

“My mother was a nurse.”

“And your father?”

“He was a doctor.” He didn’t dare ask her where they were now. He sensed from the look in her eyes that he had ventured onto a minefield. She answered his silent question before he could ask. “They were killed in the war.”

“They must have been very brave people,” Oliver said respectfully.

“They set up a field hospital at the front, it moved around to where the battles were. They saved a lot of lives. They were heroes,” she said proudly.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” he said sincerely. “I know what that’s like. I lost my parents when I was young too. But not as gloriously as yours. My father drank himself to death before he was forty. And my mother was killed in an accident. She was skating with me and she fell through the ice. I couldn’t save her. I wasn’t strong enough to pull her up. I was twelve and help came too late.” The horror of it was in Oliver’s eyes, and heavy on her heart, for him.

“How awful.” Alex could only imagine the impact on him. It wasn’t surprising that there was a dark aura around him. She could see now that he had suffered a great deal.

“My father had already left her when it happened. I never saw him again after he left, and he didn’t come to the funeral. I got shipped off to boarding school after my mother died. He died within the year. A group of distant relatives whom I never saw and didn’t know paid for my schooling for the next six years, and then I came to New York, to go to Columbia School of Journalism on a scholarship, and here I am. We lived in Philadelphia until my mother died. And I spent six years in a boys’ school just outside Boston after that.”

“Were you in the army during the war?” she asked. They had gone straight to the hard subjects. He nodded.

“I was. I was lucky. They put me in military intelligence. I was thirty-four by the time we got into the war, and they figured I was too old to send to the front. I was stationed in London the entire time. Aside from the war, I loved it.”

“My mother studied in England. She went to Oxford after Chicago, and the Sorbonne. I wanted to go to the Sorbonne, but I didn’t apply because of the war. I didn’t go to university until I came here. I really like Chicago.” School was an easier subject than their lost parents. His seemed even more tragic than hers. Watching his mother die in front of him, being unable to save her, was an unimaginable horror, and having a drunken father who had abandoned them was a hard way to start life. It no longer surprised her that he seemed cynical, and had a difficult character. He had been punished early in life, and clearly had had no home life or contact with family to support him after his mother died. Alex had lost her parents but she’d had Mamie-Thérèse to love and comfort her. She was even more attentive and affectionate than her parents, who were so engrossed in their work. Mamie had all the time in the world for her. And she had a loving grandfather after that.

“It’s brave of you to go to university,” he said admiringly. “So many girls don’t want to. They just want to get married and have babies. And even with an education, women are paid nothing. Your bosses in Society make a tenth what we do in Crime. It’s disgusting.” He looked outraged as he said it, and Alex was touched. “I marched with them last year, but it never makes a difference. They pay women dirt in every business. It’s incredibly unfair.”

“I know,” Alex said. “At least we got the vote.”

“Barely, and not in every state yet. Some states are still trying to block it. But they can’t. The Senate passed it, and it’s an amendment to the Constitution now. It’s great that women got the vote, now they have to pay them a decent wage.” He sounded like her parents and grandfather. And it shocked her to hear that the women who worked on the society column made a fraction of what he did.

“And women here make a lot more than women in France,” she said with a fiery look in her eyes, and he smiled.

“And here I thought you were some spoiled debutante,” he said with a smirk. “I never understand why those girls want internships. It’s just a game to them. They’re never going to work a day in their lives. They’ll all be married in a year. And you’re right to go to university, it’s the only way you’ll ever earn a decent wage. Education is essential, or women will be treated like slave labor forever.”

“Most women can’t afford an education,” Alex said. Her grandfather had paid for hers, which she didn’t tell Oliver.

As they talked, she found that they both burned for the same causes, which amounted to education, equality, and freedom for all. They covered a number of serious topics, unlike at their first meeting. She had more sympathy for him now, after hearing about his childhood. Maybe he had good reason to be bitter. It sounded like he came from a decent family, with some money, and had had terrible luck, which was true of Alex too.

She hadn’t been totally honest with him. She told him that her grandfather had worked for a newspaper, but not that he owned it. And certainly not that now she did. She was afraid that Oliver would hate her for that, and think she was spoiled and rich.

“What newspaper does he write for?” Oliver asked her, not realizing that her grandfather had died.

“ The Beardstown Courier. Paul Peterson. He wrote a wonderful editorial column.” Oliver looked pensive for a moment and then it clicked.

“I’ve read his columns, reprinted in other papers. I think we even ran his editorials a few times. His analyses of European politics and the war were brilliant.” She looked proud when he said it. “You’ll have to send me his recent ones when you go back.”

“He’s not writing now,” she said quietly, as Oliver looked at her strangely.

“Why not?”

“He died of the flu in December.”

“What does that mean for you, Alex? Are you alone in this country now?” More than that, she was alone in the world, but he didn’t realize that she had no living relatives left in Europe either.

“Yes,” she answered his question simply.

“What will you do when you graduate?” It was three years away, so she had time to decide.

“I’m trying to figure that out. I think I’d like to get a job in New York. Maybe here.”

“The only department they’d hire you for is Society, where you are now. You don’t want to be writing about weddings for the rest of your life.”

“I might have to. It’s a start.”

“That’s what I did with Crime. And then you get stuck. They don’t pay you enough so you can afford to give up the job. I want to write a book one of these days. I’m saving all my money for that. I want to leave here in the next year or two, and write a novel. I’ve seen enough dead bodies for one career. It’s a sick way to make a living,” he said somberly.

They talked about Europe then. He had loved his time in England, and he had been to France with his mother as a child, which made her think that his family had had money then. Alex and Oliver were in somewhat similar circumstances, with no family, and only burning ambitions. But she guessed that her financial circumstances were far better than his. She owned a newspaper, which she couldn’t tell him.

He liked her even better after lunch than before, now that he knew more about her. He felt bad that she had no relatives in the States, since her grandfather had died. He knew what that was like, and she was a woman, and only nineteen years old. She was incredibly na?ve—anyone could see it. Talking to her made him want to protect her, but she seemed to be doing fine on her own. And she had very definite ideas. He had noticed during lunch that when he pushed too hard on a subject she didn’t agree with, she didn’t become aggressive, she just pulled back, and took another path to reach the same goal, but she never lost sight of it, and she didn’t give up. She had perseverance. He liked her combination of gentleness and strength—she remained feminine at all times, but she was a very strong woman, who knew her mind, and what she believed in. She had no doubts.

As they left the cafeteria, he said she’d have to come and visit the Crime office sometime, some evening when it wasn’t too busy.

“They play cards all day, waiting to get sent out on assignments. We’re either rushing like maniacs, or sitting around waiting. The guys love to play poker. Do you play?” he asked her.

“I play cards, but not poker.”

“It’s easy. I’ll teach you sometime.”

There were a lot of things he wanted to do with her now, and to show her. He wanted to take her under his wing and protect her. He rarely had weekends off, but he would have loved to take her out for a nice dinner. He loved her company, and talking to her, but he didn’t want to date her. He knew it would get complicated. He was seventeen years older than she, and he knew his own difficult nature and fear of relationships. He didn’t want to start something he couldn’t finish. He meant it when he said he would never marry. He didn’t want to break his child’s heart if the marriage didn’t work out, the way his father had broken his when he left. Oliver thought a serious relationship was the first step to disaster and an accident waiting to happen. He didn’t want to break Alex’s heart, or have her break his, and she was so breathtakingly beautiful that he was sure they would lose control once they started and head straight into a wall. He didn’t want that for either of them. She wasn’t the kind of girl one could have a fling with. She was the genuine article. She was solid gold.

He looked wistful when she thanked him for lunch and left him to go back to her office, and he walked to his desk with a serious expression. There was no point starting something with her, he told himself, she was leaving in less than two months. He could think of a dozen reasons not to pursue her, but he wanted to anyway.

He was sent out on one of the Gambino court appearances after that. They were always bringing the Gambinos in for something, and they would appear with their fleet of lawyers, pull all the right strings, and the charges would get dropped. Today was more of the same. Oliver sat in court, thinking about Alex, wishing that things were different and she worked in New York, and had a normal life with a normal family. She was so vulnerable that he was afraid to touch her and ruin her life. He had nothing to give her, and she had suffered enough and he didn’t want to add to it. He knew that if he let himself get close to her, he would hurt her in the end. That was the last thing he wanted for her. Or for himself. She was someone to stay away from, no matter how appealing she was.

Alex was pensive too when she went back to her office after lunch with Oliver. All she wanted to do was take away the pain of his past. And she had no idea how. The scene he had described of his mother’s death made her heart ache for him.

—

Alex had been following the activities of the National Women’s Party since she’d started school in Chicago. She had attended a few meetings. But once the Nineteenth Amendment had been passed by the Senate, there were fewer meetings. It was up to the individual states to enforce the new law and see that it was respected. There was a smaller sub-group that held meetings to increase women’s wages and inform them of their rights. She had read that they were planning to hold a peaceful rally two days after her second lunch with Oliver.

She hadn’t seen him since their lunch, and she’d been planning to ask him what he thought of the rally, but had forgotten to mention it at lunch. The rally was going to be held near the factories in the garment district where women were working for shockingly low wages, sometimes working eighteen-hour days in terrible conditions. The rally wasn’t too far from her hotel, in the West Thirties, and she was tempted to go, just to show support. She didn’t want to ask the girls in the office to go with her, and risk getting accused of being a troublemaker and getting fired. She was enjoying her job and didn’t want to lose it. But she was curious about the rally.

It was on Friday night and she had nothing to do. She decided to walk from her hotel in Murray Hill, and observe for a few minutes. It was due to start at eight o’clock, and she didn’t plan to stay long.

She was surprised to find when she got there that it was a bigger group than she’d expected, and of many nationalities. Many seemed to be speaking Polish, German, or Yiddish. They were seamstresses in the factories around them. And there was a large Asian contingent, conversing loudly in Chinese. They all were a noisy group, and less well-behaved than the meetings and rallies Alex had attended for the vote. There was very little English spoken in the crowd, and most of the women were strident and angry right from the beginning. Their anger was justifiably directed at the factory owners, but as there were none present, they began pushing and shoving and arguing between the various factions. Within minutes the gathering turned into a seething mass of angry, frustrated women fighting with each other rather than their oppressors, and Alex realized that the wisest course was to leave as quickly as possible. But it was too late. When Alex turned to leave, she found that more women had arrived behind her and she couldn’t move in the crowd. She was trapped, and was trying to avoid the punches and blows the women were landing on each other. Some of them were very powerful, and she got two sound blows to the head from women bigger than she was. She wasn’t sure if there was normally this much hostility between European and Asian women, and she couldn’t understand what they were saying. In their rage, they began turning over garbage cans, and using the lids to smash windows and damage cars or hit each other.

The fighting became increasingly vicious and there was nothing Alex could do to get out and escape them. They were pulling each other’s hair, and brawling in the street. People were hanging out the upper windows of residential buildings to watch them fight. It was a poor neighborhood that was mostly industrial, but some people lived there too, in slum conditions. Some of the women in the apartments came downstairs to join the fray. It seemed like senseless violence to Alex and she was sorry she had come. She covered her head with her arms as best she could, and was buffeted by the crowd like a cork in the ocean.

The police arrived quickly, and pushed the women with their clubs. The women attacked them too, and the police got rough with them. Wagons arrived, and the cops began pushing the women into them to arrest them. Many of the women fled then, but there were well over a hundred left on the street, and Alex was among them, still at the center of the action, with women swinging at each other and at the police. Alex was eager to get close enough to a police officer to ask for his help to get her out of the crowd. She had come in simple clothes not to attract attention, a cotton skirt, sandals, and a blouse. There was nothing to distinguish her from the crowd of rough women who were still swinging at each other and the cops. The police kept trying to separate them from each other and then the women would attack the police. It was a genuine brawl worthy of any mob of drunken men. The women weren’t even drunk—they were irate and crazed and had exploded.

A big burly Irish policeman finally got close enough for Alex to ask for help, but before she could speak, he had grabbed her by the neck, lifted her off the ground by the shoulders, and thrown her into one of the wagons, on top of the other women, with a fresh heap of women who landed shortly after, crushing Alex beneath them until she could barely breathe, and when the wagon was full, they were taken off to the police station to be arrested. Alex had to fight for air all the way there. Once arrived at jail, they were all pulled out of the wagons and dumped unceremoniously on the sidewalk, then pushed into the police station with the use of clubs again. It was obvious that the men in uniform were utterly fed up with them. Blows rained on the officers from the women pummeling them. The women were the most unruly group Alex had ever seen, and when she tried to stand up, she found that she had injured her ankle and couldn’t walk. The police and the crowd shoved her along into the building, and she grabbed onto a police officer before she fell over.

“Please help me, I got caught in the crowd. I’m not part of this. I’m hurt, can you please take me home?” He looked at her as though she was crazy and pushed her back into the herd of women still flailing and shouting, and she discovered that somewhere in the fray, on the street or in the wagon, her purse had disappeared off her arm, perhaps with a broken strap, and she could show them no identification. She had nothing else with her. She tried to reach out to another officer, who ignored her and pushed her away. The police shoved them all into holding cells, and four more wagons arrived before they stopped coming. The women were screaming and fighting and arguing again by then, and causing mayhem in the cells. By then, Alex’s arm was hurting, her head was pounding, she couldn’t stand on one foot, her lip was swollen, and she thought she might have a black eye. And she was being arrested.

A police officer walked up and down in front of the overcrowded holding cells and told them their situation. They were arrested, and were going to be booked. They could release themselves for the fee of ten dollars, or they would spend two days in jail. Since most of them didn’t speak English, they went on screaming and shouting and crying. Alex reached through the bars then, and grabbed the sleeve of an officer, and tried to sound as sane and respectable as she could.

“I’m Alexandra Bouvier,” she said urgently, “I’m here from Chicago, I got caught in this mob on the street, I am not part of it. I’ve lost my purse. May I please call my brother to come and get me? I’m injured.” She hadn’t even noticed that one sleeve of her blouse was torn.

“He’ll have to pay your fine to release you.” The officer observed her closely, and the way she spoke to him suggested that she might be telling the truth.

She didn’t know anyone to call, but Oliver had given her his phone number to call if she ever had a problem. He said it was a phone in the hall of his building, he didn’t have his own. She remembered the number, it was a simple one. A minute later, the policeman pulled her out of the holding cell, while pushing the others back. She hobbled to the sergeant’s desk, following him, and he pointed to the phone.

“You have two minutes,” he said in a heavy Irish brogue, “or you’re here for two days.” She dialed the number with shaking hands. A voice answered finally, and she asked for Oliver in a breathless voice. She wondered if he might be working, but he came on the line two minutes later, while the police chatted with each other. She spoke to Oliver as quickly as she could.

“I’m really sorry. I need help. I’m in jail. Can you bail me out? It’s ten dollars. I’ll pay you back.”

“You what ?” he said in disbelief. She sounded frantic so he knew it was real.

“I’ve been arrested. I need your help. They want ten dollars to bail me out. Can you come?”

“Where are you?” She leaned toward the two police officers to ask.

“Where am I?” They gave her the address and she told Oliver, and one of the two cops turned to her.

“Your time is up,” he said sternly, and he took the phone from her, pushed her back toward the holding cell, opened the door, and shoved her in. She stood there, feeling like a criminal, praying that Oliver would show up. It was mortifying, but she had no one else to call.

—

Twenty minutes later, a different officer stood in front of the long wall of holding cells that contained the prisoners and shouted her name above the din.

Alex waved frantically until he saw her, unlocked the door, and pulled her out, and she limped out of the jail behind him into a large room where people were waiting, reporting crimes, and explaining their mundane problems to a sergeant at a desk. Oliver was standing in the middle of the room and stared at her in disbelief as she limped toward him, in genuine pain from her ankle. She looked like she’d been hit by a bus.

“What in God’s name happened to you? Were you attacked?” He would have laughed at her but she looked pathetic, and she was hurt. He had come as quickly as he could. “You said you were arrested.” She looked like she’d been in a brawl with ten men. Worse, she had been mauled by a hundred women.

“I thought it was an NWP rally for better wages,” she said, as tears filled her eyes as he put an arm around her shoulders to support her and led her out of the station. “They went crazy, attacking each other, beating each other up, breaking things. The police came, and they attacked them, and I got caught in the middle, and then they threw us into wagons and arrested us.” He had kept his cab waiting and gently helped her into it, and gave the driver his address. “Where are we going?” she asked him, as he dried her cheeks gently with his handkerchief and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She was mortified, and scared, and her ankle was excruciatingly painful, and so was her head.

“We’re going to my apartment to clean you up. You can’t go back to your hotel looking like that,” he said, trying not to smile. The situation was so absurd, and the kind of thing a young innocent girl could get herself into. One sleeve of her blouse had been completely torn off. He was eyeing her injuries and he thought they were superficial. “Do you think you need a doctor?” She shook her head and blew her nose on the handkerchief he gave her.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know who to call,” she said, feeling pathetic and embarrassed to have him see her that way.

“I’m glad you called me.” He looked at her closely. “I think you’re going to have a hell of a shiner tomorrow.” Fortunately she had the weekend for the minor injuries to fade. He wasn’t sure about the ankle, and hoped it wasn’t broken. She cried more on the drive to his apartment and told him the whole story. He carried her up the stairs when they got there and deposited her on a worn brown leather couch. The apartment looked cozy and masculine and he took her to the bathroom to wash her face, and went to make her a cup of tea. He handed her a bathrobe for her to wear until he figured out what she could wear to go home.

She emerged from the bathroom in his robe, looking calmer. She had a small cut above her ear from one of the garbage can lids, and he was right, she had a black eye and a swollen lip, but there was no other visible damage, just the headache and the ankle. He handed her some ice wrapped in a towel for her lip and eye, and another towel with ice for her ankle, put some pillows behind her on the couch, and sat in a big leather chair next to her and held her hand.

“That will teach you to play rough with a bunch of girls in a bar fight,” he said, and she laughed. She looked infinitely better than she had when they arrived. She’d been frightened more than anything.

“I told the police you were my brother,” she said, still embarrassed.

“At least you didn’t say I’m your father. This brings back memories. I haven’t been called to bail anyone out of jail since college. How on earth could you go to that street brawl?” he asked her, half amused and half worried. The ankle was very swollen and bruised, and she winced when he touched it. She said the ice was helping.

“I thought it would be a peaceful demonstration for higher wages and I wanted to help. None of them spoke English and they behaved like savages.”

“The factories don’t hire them out of finishing schools. May I extract a promise from you, Miss Bouvier?” he said seriously, and she nodded. She still looked pale and badly shaken. “Two promises,” he corrected. “One, that you will always call me if you need help. You did the right thing. And two, that you will not go to any more rallies or riots or demonstrations. Especially not here. This is a rough city. It’s not some farm town in Illinois. And you shouldn’t do this in Chicago either. The Mafia families are making Chicago extremely dangerous now too. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” she said solemnly. They talked for a while, and then he gave her one of his clean shirts to wear with her skirt, and he took her back to her hotel. She used his hairbrush to get her hair in order, and she looked respectable enough when they left his apartment and he carried her to the cab. She could step gingerly on her foot by then, and Oliver thought it was a bad sprain, but not broken.

He had his arm around her in the cab on the drive home, and she closed her eyes and leaned her head against his shoulder. As he looked down at her with a tenderness she didn’t see, his heart was aching for her. She was so sweet and so young and innocent, and so alone. He could feel himself being swept away on a wave of feelings for her that he had sworn he wouldn’t allow himself to feel. She was impossible to resist, but he knew he’d have to try. She had climbed right over his carefully built walls and into his heart. It frightened him more than the street brawl she’d been in, or anything in the world. Love was a risk he never allowed himself to take.