Making History Read online

  Alison unfolded the napkin and tried to smooth out the creases with the side of her palm. “I never heard of her.”

  “Laura D. Fair was not some little innocent.” The woman’s hat brim dipped decisively. “Mrs. Fair had been married four times, and each had been a profitable venture. One of her husbands killed himself. She was not pretty, but she was passionate. She was not smart, but she was clever. And she saw, in her celebrity, a new way to make money. She announced a new career as a public speaker. She traveled the country with her lectures. And what was her message? She told women to murder the men who seduced and betrayed them.”

  “I never heard of her,” said Alison.

  “Mrs. Fair was a compelling speaker. She’d had some acting and elocution experience. Her performance in court showed training. On the stage she was even better. ‘The act will strike a terror to the hearts of sensualists and libertines.’” The woman stabbed dramatically at her own breast with her fist, hitting Elvis right in the eye. Behind her hand, Elvis winked at Alison in the candlelight. “Mrs. Fair said that women throughout the world would glory in the revenge exacted by American womanhood. Overdue. Long overdue. Thousands of women heard her. Men, too, and not all of them entirely unsympathetic. Fanny Hyde and Kate Stoddart were released in Brooklyn. Stoddart never even stood trial. But then there was a backlash. The martyred Marys were hanged in Philadelphia. And then . . .”

  The woman’s voice dropped suddenly in volume and gained in intensity. Alison looked up at her quickly. The woman was staring back. Alison looked away.

  “And then a group of women hunted down and dispatched Charles S. Smith in an alley near his home. Mr. Smith was a married man and his victim, Edith Wilson, was pregnant, an invalid, and eleven years old. But this time the women wore sheets and could not be identified. Edith Wilson was perhaps the only female in Otsego County, New York, who could not have taken part.” Alison folded her napkin along the diagonal.

  “So no one could be tried. It was an inspiring and purging operation. It was copied in many little towns across the country. God knows, the women had access to sheets.”

  Alison laughed, but the woman was not expecting it, had not paused to allow for laughter. “And then Annie Oakley shot Frank Butler in a challenge match in Cincinnati.”

  “Excuse me,” said Alison. “I didn’t quite hear you.” But she really had and the woman continued anyway, without pausing or repeating.

  “She said it was an accident, but she was too good a shot. They hanged her for it. And then Grover Cleveland was killed by twelve sheeted women on the White House lawn. At teatime,” the woman said.

  “Wait a minute.” Alison stopped her. “Grover Cleveland served out two terms. Nonconsecutively. I’m sure.”

  The woman leaned into the candlelight, resting her chin on a bridge she made of her hands. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “That’s what happened here. But in another universe where the feminine force was just a little stronger in 1872, Grover Cleveland died in office. With a scone in his mouth and a child in New York.”

  “All right,” said Alison accommodatingly. Accommodation was one of Alison’s strengths. “But what difference does that make to us?”

  “I could take you there.” The woman pushed her hat back so that Alison could have seen her eyes if she wanted to. “The universe right next door. Practically walking distance.”

  The candle flame was casting shadows which reached and withdrew and reached at Alison over the table. In the unsteady light, the woman’s face flickered like a silent film star’s. Then she pulled back in her chair and sank into the darkness beyond the candle. The ball was on the ten-yard line and the bar was quiet. “I knew you were going to say that,” Alison said finally. “How did I know you were going to say that? Who would say that?”

  “Some lunatic?” the woman suggested.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want to hear about it anyway? About my universe?” The woman smiled at her. An unperturbed smile. Nice even teeth. And a kind of confidence that was rare among the women Alison knew. Alison had noticed it immediately without realizing she was noticing. The way the woman sat back in her chair and didn’t pick at herself. Didn’t play with her hair. Didn’t look at her hands. The way she lectured Alison.

  “All right,” Alison said. She put the napkin down and fit her hands together, forcing herself to sit as still. “But first tell me about Laura Fair. My Laura Fair.”

  “Up until 1872 the two histories are identical,” the woman said. “Mrs. Fair married four times and shot her lover and was convicted and the conviction was overturned. She just never lectured. She planned to. She was scheduled to speak at Platt’s Hotel in San Francisco on November 11, 1872, but a mob of some two thousand men gathered outside the hotel and another two thousand surrounded the apartment building she lived in. She asked for police protection, but it was refused and she was too frightened to leave her home. Even staying where she was proved dangerous. A few men tried to force their way inside. She spent a terrifying night and never attempted to lecture again. She died in poverty and obscurity.

  “Fanny Hyde and Kate Stoddart were released anyway. I can’t find out what happened to the Marys. Edith Wilson was condemned by respectable people everywhere and cast out of her family.”

  “The eleven-year-old child?” Alison said.

  “In your universe,” the woman reminded her. “Not in mine. You don’t know much of your own history, do you? Name a great American woman.”

  The men at the bar were in an uproar. Alison turned to look. “Interception,” the man in the blue sweater shouted to her exultantly. “Did you see it?”

  “Name a great American woman,” Alison called back to him.

  “Goddamn interception with goal to go,” he said. “Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  “Marilyn Monroe,” said a man at the end of the bar.

  “The senator from California?” the woman asked. “Now that’s a good choice.”

  Alison laughed again. “Funny,” she said, turning back to the woman. “Very good.”

  “We have football, too,” the woman told her. “Invented in 1873. Outlawed in 1950. No one ever got paid to play it.”

  “And you have Elvis.”

  “No, we don’t. Not like yours. Of course not. I got this here.”

  “Interception,” the man in the blue sweater said. He was standing beside Alison, shaking his head with the wonder of it. “Let me buy you ladies a drink.” Alison opened her mouth and he waved his hand. “Something nonalcoholic for you,” he said. “Please. I really want to.”

  “Ginger ale, then,” she agreed. “No ice.”

  “Nothing for me,” said the woman. They watched the man walk back to the bar, and then, when he was far enough away not to hear, she leaned forward toward Alison. “You like men, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Alison. “I always have. Are they different where you come from? Have they learned to be honest and careful with women, since you kill them when they’re not?” Alison’s voice was sharper than she intended, so she softened the effect with a sadder question. “Is it better there?”

  “Better for whom?” The woman did not take her eyes off Alison. “Where I come from the men and women hardly speak to each other. First of all, they don’t speak the same language. They don’t here, either, but you don’t recognize that as clearly. Where I come from there’s men’s English and there’s women’s English.”

  “Say something in men’s English.”

  “‘I love you.’ Shall I translate?”

  “No,” said Alison. “I know the translation for that one.” The heaviness closed over her heart again. Not that it had ever gone away. Nothing made Alison feel better, but many things made her feel worse. The bartender brought her ginger ale. With ice. Alison was angry, suddenly, that she couldn’t even get a drink with no ice. She looked for the man in the blue sweater, raised the glass at him, and rattled it. Of course he was too far away to hear even if he was listeni
ng, and there was no reason to believe he was.

  “Two-minute warning,” he called back. “I’ll be with you in two minutes.”

  Men were always promising to be with you soon. Men could never be with you now. Alison had only cared about this once, and she never would again. “Football has the longest two minutes in the world,” she told the woman. “So don’t hold your breath. What else is different where you come from?” She sipped at her ginger ale. She’d been grinding her teeth recently - stress, the dentist said - and so the cold liquid made her mouth hurt.

  “Everything is different. Didn’t you ask for no ice? Don’t drink that,” the woman said. She called to the bartender. “She didn’t want ice. You gave her ice.”

  “Sorry.” The bartender brought another bottle and another glass. “Nobody told me no ice.”

  “Thank you,” Alison said. He took the other glass away. Alison thought he was annoyed. The woman didn’t seem to notice.

  “Imagine your world without a hundred years of adulterers,” she said. “The level of technology is considerably depressed. Lots of books never written because the authors didn’t live. Lots of men who didn’t get to be president. Lots of passing. Although it’s illegal. Men dressing as women. Women dressing as men. And the dress is more sexually differentiated. Codpieces are fashionable again. But you don’t have to believe me,” the woman said. “Come and see for yourself. I can take you there in a minute. What would it cost you to just come and see? What do you have here that you’d be losing?”

  The woman gave her time to think. Alison sat and drank her ginger ale and repeated to herself the things her lover had said the last time she had seen him. She remembered them all, some of them surprisingly careless, some of them surprisingly cruel, all of them surprising. She repeated them again, one by one, like a rosary. The man who had left was not the man she had loved. The man she had loved would never have said such things to her. The man she had loved did not exist. She had made him up. Or he had. “Why would you want me to go?” Alison asked.

  “The universe is shaped by the struggle between two great forces. Sometimes a small thing can tip the balance. One more woman. Who knows?” The woman tilted her hat back with her hand. “Save a galaxy. Make new friends. Or stay here where your heart is. Broken.”

  “Can I come back if I don’t like it?”

  “Yes. Do you like it here?”

  She drank her ginger ale and then set the glass down, still half full. She glanced at the man in the blue sweater, then past him to the bartender. She let herself feel just for a moment what it might be like to know that she could finish this drink and then go home to the one person in the world who loved her.

  Never in this world. “I’m going out for a minute. Two minutes,” she called to the bartender. One minute to get back. “Don’t take my drink.”

  She stood and the other woman stood too, even taller than Alison had thought. “I’ll follow you. Which way?” Alison asked.

  “It’s not hard,” the woman said. “In fact, I’ll follow you. Go to the back. Find the door that says WOMEN and go on through it. I’m just going to pay for my drink and then I’ll be right along.”

  VIXENS was what the door actually said, across the way from the one marked GANDERS. Alison paused and then pushed through. She felt more than a little silly, standing in the small bathroom that apparently fronted two universes. One toilet, one sink, one mirror. Two universes. She went into the stall and closed the door. Before she had finished she heard the outer door open and shut again. “I’ll be right out,” she said. The toilet paper was small and unusually rough. The toilet wouldn’t flush. It embarrassed her. She tried three times before giving up.

  The bathroom was larger than it had been, less clean, and a row of urinals lined one wall. The woman stood at the sink, looking into the mirror, which was smaller. “Are you ready?” she asked and removed her breasts from behind Elvis, tossing them into a wire wastebasket. She turned. “Ready or not.”

  “No,” said Alison, seeing the face under the hat clearly for the first time. “Please, no.” She began to cry again, looking up at his face, looking down at his chest. ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT?

  “You lied to me,” she said dully.

  “I never lied,” he answered. “Think back. You just translated wrong. Because you’re that kind of woman. We don’t have women like you here now. And anyway, what does it matter whose side you play on? All that matters is that no one wins. Aren’t I right? Aren’t I?” He tipped his hat to her.

  Maureen McHugh is the award-winning writer of four novels and two collections of short fiction. She won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, and she was a finalist for the Story Award for her collection Mothers & Other Monsters. She won the Shirley Jackson Award for her collection After the Apocalypse, which was also named one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2011. “The Lincoln Train” was a nominee for the 1996 Nebula Award and won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. It takes an alternate look at post-Civil War America and a very different kind of Reconstruction.

  Soldiers of the G.A.R. stand alongside the tracks. They are General Dodge’s soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can’t see the soldiers at all. It is a spring evening. At the house, the lilacs are blooming. My mother wears a sprig pinned to her dress under her cameo. I can smell it, even in the crush of these people all waiting for the train. I can smell the lilac, and the smell of too many people crowded together, and a faint taste of cinders on the air. I want to go home, but that house is not ours anymore. I smooth my black dress. On the train platform we are all in mourning.

  The train will take us to St. Louis, from whence we will leave for the Oklahoma territories. They say we will walk, but I don’t know how my mother will do that. She has been poorly since the winter of ‘62. I check my bag with our water and provisions.

  “Julia Adelaide,” my mother says, “I think we should go home.”

  “We’ve come to catch the train,” I say, very sharp.

  I’m Clara, my sister Julia is eleven years older than me. Julia is married and living in Tennessee. My mother blinks and touches her sprig of lilac uncertainly. If I am not sharp with her, she will keep on it.

  I wait. When I was younger I used to try to school my unruly self in Christian charity. God sends us nothing we cannot bear. Now I only try to keep it from my face, try to keep my outer self disciplined. There is a feeling inside me, an anger, that I can’t even speak. Something is being bent, like a bow, bending and bending and bending-

  “When are we going home?” my mother says.

  “Soon,” I say because it is easy.

  But she won’t remember and in a moment she’ll ask again. And again and again, through this long, long train ride to St. Louis. I am trying to be a Christian daughter, and I remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. But it’s not my fault either. I don’t even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I am full of unchristian feelings. My mother’s infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine.

  I wish I were someone else.

  The train comes down the track, chuffing, coming slow. It is an old, badly used thing, but I can see that once it was a model of chaste and beautiful workmanship. Under the dust it is a dark claret in color. It is said that the engine was built to be used by President Lincoln, but since the assassination attempt he is too infirm to travel. People begin to push to the edge of the platform, hauling their bags and worldly goods. I don’t know how I will get our valise on. If Zeke could have come I could have at least insured that it was loaded on, but the Negroes are free now and they are not to help. The notice said no family Negroes could come to the station, although I see their faces here and there through the crowd.

&n
bsp; The train stops outside the station to take on water.

  “Is it your father?” my mother says diffidently. “Do you see him on the train?”

  “No, Mother,” I say. “We are taking the train.”

  “Are we going to see your father?” she asks.

  It doesn’t matter what I say to her, she’ll forget it in a few minutes, but I cannot say yes to her. I cannot say that we will see my father even to give her a few moments of joy.

  “Are we going to see your father?” she asks again.

  “No,” I say.

  “Where are we going?”

  I have carefully explained it all to her and she cried every time I did. People are pushing down the platform toward the train, and I am trying to decide if I should move my valise toward the front of the platform. Why are they in such a hurry to get on the train? It is taking us all away.

  “Where are we going? Julia Adelaide, you will answer me this moment,” my mother says, her voice too full of quaver to quite sound like her own.

  “I’m Clara,” I say. “We’re going to St. Louis.”

  “St. Louis,” she says. “We don’t need to go to St. Louis. We can’t get through the lines, Julia, and I . . . I am quite indisposed. Let’s go back home now, this is foolish.”

  We cannot go back home. General Dodge has made it clear that if we did not show up at the train platform this morning and get our names checked off the list, he would arrest every man in town, and then he would shoot every tenth man. The town knows to believe him, General Dodge was put in charge of the trains into Washington, and he did the same thing then. He arrested men and held them and every time the train was fired upon he hanged a man.

  There is a shout and I can only see the crowd moving like a wave, pouring off the edge of the platform. Everyone is afraid there will not be room. I grab the valise and I grab my mother’s arm and pull them both. The valise is so heavy that my fingers hurt, and the weight of our water and food is heavy on my arm. My mother is small and when I put her in bed at night she is all tiny like a child, but now she refuses to move, pulling against me and opening her mouth wide, her mouth pink inside and wet and open in a wail I can just barely hear over the shouting crowd. I don’t know if I should let go of the valise to pull her, and for a moment I think of letting go of her, letting someone else get her on the train and finding her later.