“It seems sad to me,” she said finally, feeling her insides flutter with the discomfort of something bordering on anger.“A life like that.”
“Perhaps it is,” Doris said.“But this is how you effect change.You need to understand people before you can coax them into the tent.And we face the added challenge of trying to coax these women without their husbands noticing.Hence the vapid covers.”
Emily nodded at that.They’d had an editorial meeting before the battered women piece ran to confirm how they were to manage the entire issue.It was critical, Doris had said, that a woman who might need the information be able to read it, undiscovered, with her husband in bed next to her.An abusive husband wouldn’t bother monitoring what his wife was reading in a ladies’ magazine.Like the women who ran it, the contents ofChatelaineneeded to be authoritative and convincing while remaining entirely unthreatening to the status quo.
“Don’t you get impatient, though?”Emily asked her.“Waiting on the change?”She swallowed, and the words tumbled out before she could stop them.“I know I do.I can’t wait decades for things to get better for us.”She thought of her mother’s repeated hints about marriage and talkof ticking clocks, of how her father had already adopted Jem into their family as a de facto son-in-law alongside Harry, who expected his wife to always be polished and perfect.Emily’s own future as Mrs.Jeremy Gordon felt frighteningly inevitable, despite the fact that she couldn’t see herself in the role, couldn’t see herself ever signing that name.Emily Radcliffewould be erased, and her hopes and dreams right along with it, all in the stroke of a pen.
“I do,” Doris said.“But I have a feeling it’s coming.Things aren’t what they were, even a few years ago.The momentum will come, Emily.All it takes is a big enough push.”
CHAPTER 2
EMILY
May, 1961
One Friday, the weather was so balmy that Emily opted to walk home from work instead of taking the streetcar.A little before five-thirty, she wandered up the moss-laced flagstone path of their family home on Borden Street.
Her nose told her that her mother had already started on dinner.Emily had always had a healthy appetite, something her mother admired.Bess Radcliffe said that feeding one’s children remained one of the last vestiges of a mother’s role once they were grown and, as such, the Radcliffes still hosted almost all the big holiday and Sunday night dinners, the table weighed down with enough food to feed a football team as Bess pushed third helpings on them all and sent Eleanor away with stacks of multicoloured Tupperware.
They were coming for dinner tonight, Eleanor and her family, instead of Sunday, due to some church event Eleanor was volunteering for and which Emily had managed to wriggle out of.Emily liked seeing her sister, but generally preferred to have a couple of days’ rest under her belt after the workweek before being subjected to the chaos of a family dinner with eight people, including noisy children.But at least it had been a productive week at work.She’d felt even more energized since her recent conversation with Doris, and her mentor had noticed.On Monday she’d tossed Emily a more complicated bit of writing than she typically got to do.It waswhat Emily would have called a fluff piece before, but now she was trying her best to reframe it as necessary scaffolding for the proverbial feminist “tent” to which Doris had referred.And she did get the sense that she was being tested by the editor, who had handed her the assignment with a twitch of her maroon lip.
“All right, Emily,” Doris had said, peering down at her across her little desk in the Closet.“I know you’re hungry.Let’s see what you come up with.On my desk by Friday, please.”
Emily had hit the deadline with several hours to spare, and was pleased with herself as she sat across from Doris and watched the older woman read through her work, making notes with a red fountain pen.
“It’s good,” Doris had said eventually, nodding with satisfaction.“We’ll tidy it up a little in copyedit, but good work, Emily.Now go enjoy your weekend.Best to your father.”
Emily now hung her leather bag on the coat stand in the hall, checked her reflection in the mirror.She smoothed her flyaway hairs with some futility, then pulled off her shoes.She always felt so much more grounded in bare feet or stockings, as though she’d been floating on the balls of her feet all day, and her heels were finally getting a chance to touch down to reality.She would have worn men’s loafers every day, if she were allowed.
“That you, Em?”her father called from the sitting room on the other side of the wall.Emily stepped through the doorway to find him seated at his desk.It was a rolltop from the twenties that he’d acquired cheap at an old antiques store in Kensington Market when Emily and her sister were children.She remembered the day he’d brought it in, with help from his friend Lawrence at theStar, who did the deliveries and had a van big enough to transport it.Back then, William’s home office was in the attic of the house, away from the noise of two boisterous young girls, but the damn desk proved to be a lot heavier than it appeared and impossible to haul up the narrow staircase.And so it had stayed in the sitting room, nestled into the bay window that looked out over the small, tree-shaded yard.
William’s productivity hadn’t suffered, though, despite the desk’s placement in the common gathering room of the house.Emily and Eleanor had played with their dolls and blocks on the rug behind him while he clacked away at the typewriter on Sunday afternoons, or during the evening, if his workday spilled into night with a deadline looming.He always preferred to bring his work home, if he could, never spending any more time at the office than he had to—a side effect, perhaps, of knowing his life should have ended on a Sicilian mountain in the summer of forty-three; that he never should have seen his wife and girls again, but by a stroke of good fortune, he did.
Emily figured his ability to tune out the noise around him while he worked was probably a souvenir of the war.He’d learned to focus, observe his surroundings, and knuckle down to write while the soldiers around him yelled to one another, talked, laughed, and cried.Bombs exploded in the distance as the dry Italian earth beneath him shuddered.What were the squeals and arguments of a pair of children compared to that?So many men had trouble sleeping in the quiet of their peaceful residential streets when they returned from the war, so accustomed they’d become to the cacophony of battle.Perhaps the same held true for productivity.
“Hey, Dad,” Emily said, bending to plant a kiss on his cheek, the five-o’clock shadow prickling her lips.“What are you working on?”
She knew he missed travelling abroad to cover stories in the field, and the nature of his injuries meant he was reduced to typing with one hand, and progress was therefore slow.William Radcliffe’s mind and pen were as sharp as ever, though, which had rendered him still in demand despite his physical limitations.His editor atMaclean’swas perfectly happy to print whatever he wrote, on any timeline.
“Oh, just a snarky piece about the bank merger,” he said.“It’s a little too monopolistic for my liking.Mark my words, more banks will disappear and it’ll be the working man who’ll suffer.We need competition in lending rates.”
Emily didn’t know much about banking, but smiled at her father’s enthusiasm as she sat down in the armchair near his desk.
“And how are you?”he asked, returning her grin.Unlike Eleanor, she’d inherited their father’s smile—a little lopsided, with just one dimple on the left cheek.He always said it was a smile made for sarcasm and wit, both of which Emily had also inherited, though she didn’t get to exercise them in public as much as her dad did.“Doris still treating you well?”
“Oh yes,” Emily said.“She’s just terrific.”
“She’s a bulldog in pearls,” William said, and Emily chuckled.“And one hell of a fantastic mentor for you.I bet the other ladies are, too.Maeve and Virginia and the like.”
Emily nodded.“It’s like a whole other world over there, Dad.”
“So I understand.And it’s a world you enjoy, isn’t it?”He was looking down at his hand now, clasped over one knee.He was a talker, her dad, but often didn’t make eye contact, particularly if the content of the conversation was emotional.
“I do,” Emily said.“I love being at home, of course, with family, but…” It was difficult for her to articulate it without telling him the bald truth, which was that within the four walls of that office on University Avenue, she felt a sense of belonging and purpose that she’d never truly experienced anywhere else before.
“I’m so very glad, Em.So very glad.”He nodded solemnly.Sounds of Bess cooking dinner wafted toward them in the silence of the living room.
Emily’s instincts began to tingle, and she realized her father was behaving as he did when he was about to deliver bad news.She’d seen it before.“What is it?”she asked.
