Edith saw them, from time to time. In the market crowds, a woman with a neck turned partly to bluish stone, hinging at her waist to inspect the butcher’s cuts or lifting an onion to her eyes. In the park, a girl with a bullet-sized pucker at the back of her head, where no hair now grew. Sometimes they noticed Edith staring and turned away shyly, or haughtily; mostly they were oblivious, absorbed in living indistinguishably, and Edith tried as well to ignore the steely prickling beneath her skin.
Twenty years ago a boy had stabbed Edith in an alley near Scollay Square. Vengeance, he’d said. She forgot the details: something her cop husband had done. Edith had laughed—he’d been so young. She’d felt her body change even as the knife went in: a deep, interior wrenching, like a pair of burly hands turning soil. No one had heard of the Protection yet, and Edith remembered thinking, That’s what death feels like. She remembered, in that split second, feeling brave and practical about it, like a Roman drinking poison. Then her stomach ate the blade off the hilt.
The boy screamed and ran.
For weeks after, she sensed the blade inside her, being broken down into shards, then shavings, then steel dust. She sat carefully. She pricked herself on herself when she crouched to get a bowl from the bottom cupboards. She inspected her stool in the pot with a candle, looking for reflective slivers. The knife never left her, but flowed in scratching particles through her veins. She’d never told Gerry. She was frightened of her new knife-blooded body and what it signified. She studied her temper and thought she saw herself quicker to spite and impatience—a little proud, a little waspish. A little cruel, maybe. That power, that kind of freedom frightened her. What exactly did it license? What did it obligate?
When she was pregnant with Caroline, she’d dreaded the knife filtering into her daughter, making her willful and cruel-blooded from the start; but in the years after, when it was clear no such thing had happened, she’d felt foully disappointed.
Even later, when the existence of an unkillable sex became generally known, Edith still didn’t tell Gerry. He’d just risen to bureau superintendent, and she examined the registry of executions he received from the Suffolk County prisons as if they might teach her something about the Protection. How far, exactly, did it extend? She knew the men wondered: What about very young girls? What about quickened fetuses? Men and women alike disbelieved it. There had to be exceptions. Did women still die in childbirth? What about “unwomanly” women? No one discussed the Protection publicly or in print—it was a barbarous subject, head to toe—but in her living room the men asked Gerry, who sat baffled, hands upturned as though lifting his own ignorance back at them.
The wives in Edith’s circle never spoke of the New Woman. They still used language like “the weaker sex,” as if reminding themselves of an errand they had to perform the next day. Edith purred along with them, agreeably enough, sharing their fear of a new century that would outpace them. She only felt the shame of it the mornings after, as she scraped crumbs from the tablecloth.
In Scollay Square they’d taken down the old oil lamps and installed electric lights. Edith had read a thorough scientific editorial on electric current and the light-bulb; still, she kept her distance as the new lanterns buzzed to life, as if by their own unthinking volition. A suffragette preached on a soapbox under one of them: Sisters, she said, waving her sheaf of handbills, don’t let them turn us against each other. She was young, bony, and awkward like a fledgling, her chest and elbows held uncertainly in her dove frock. In the dusk, the tungsten light painted her in uncanny new yellows—neither the molten, soupy gold of oil lamps nor quite different enough to forget that old color; the suffragette’s square little face shone like a moon, or like something altogether unfamiliar, something there wasn’t a word for yet.
1899, Apr 15th.
Henry Abolition TOAL, 49 (Vengeance)
Harry Toal was a well-liked ferryman in the lonely salt marshes along Massachusetts Bay, and had doggedly wooed Lidia Mazzola, a widow and housekeeper for the local Catholic priest. He grew embittered after a brawl with Lidia’s son left Toal with a broken jaw; he claimed Lidia had put the boy up to it, and his jaw being slow to heal, and him having to take his beer through a straw, to the great and rowdy mirth of his marsh neighbors, Toal let his bitterness climb into a rage.
Toal swore Lidia had left town, but the priest was suspicious because Lidia’s clothes were still in her room. About a year went by, however, and she was largely forgotten, until the new housekeeper, whom Toal had likewise courted, found Lidia’s bicycle in his overgrown back garden. Police dredged the marshes and found Mrs. Mazzola at the bottom of the Belle Isle inlet, tied and weighted with several large stones. She’d developed gills and had fed for the past eleven months on the tiny marsh fish she caught in her kelplike hair.
Toal was hanged behind Charlestown Prison. Lidia’s gills never went away, and she died of pneumonia some time after.
Boston Common was busy even late in the afternoon, with the sun low over the spire of Park Street Church. Edith held a scented handkerchief to her nose as the stink of horses and sewers followed her into the park, where workmen were hammering together a public gallows on the lawn, between two massive, screw-limbed oaks. Most executions now happened in yards behind prisons; but a notorious case like the Barrow childkiller demanded a notorious answer. The noose wasn’t yet slung, but the wooden framework was raised: recognizably a gallows.
Of course, I will be wearing a hood, Edith reminded herself.
In front of the scaffold, a white-haired preacher with white, horned brows denounced the Obscenity behind him, with his forefinger raised to Heaven: for the State of Massachusetts to apply its authority of violence to a woman was shamely, ungodful, a high crime no less immoral than the attacks for which men were hanged. Adam, charged with Eve’s protection, even in her sin. Holy matrimony. The weaker sex. He went on for some time, his raised finger crooking from fatigue. A small crowd of men murmured in agreement: if God wanted no woman killed, who was the hangman to thwart Him? A larger crowd of men jeered and shouted back arguments of varying sophistication, from the scriptural (Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live) to the scatological (sounds unrecordable in any notation). The women hung back in the shade and said nothing.
Edith tilted her head aside with queenly severity and a farmgirl’s sneer. The men jeering for the gallows looked frantic with need: Finally, their faces said, finally. No one knew exactly when the Protection had emerged—there were stories as far back as the end of the Civil War, of liberated slaves generaled by unkillable black women, rampaging behind Sherman’s March to the Sea. But once the bald new facts of womanhood did become publicly known, five years ago, the horrors visited in retaliation upon the indomitable sex had shocked the world. In Georgia, a man roped his wife behind his horse and dragged her galloping for miles. In California, a mob blasted a woman with dynamite. Across the country, there were men emboldened, or affronted, or both, who seemed to go savage as cornered dogs attempting to regain a sense of mastery. That was why attempted gynocide was always a capital crime: otherwise, women’s unkillable nature authorized a kind of insane license. Some additional deterrence was crucial. But now that the shoe was on the other, daintier foot, so to speak, small wonder that a few brutes were salivating at the prospect of a woman’s execution. It made Edith pause, and a little voice asked if she’d committed herself too quickly.