The Invisible Line (49 page)

The girl's mother guided her into a room. Someone was sitting in there—her mother's aunt, the girl knew. Stepping closer, she saw a very old woman in an old-fashioned dress, one of the oldest people she had ever seen. The woman was skeletal, her papery skin crumpled up and smoothed out again. The girl startled when her great-aunt looked at her. Framed by white hair, the woman's eyes were blazing blue, enormous, almost pushing out of her head. They softened as she attempted a smile. It was not every day that three generations of Isabel Walls gathered together in one place.
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The oldest, Isabel Elterich—Aunt Bel—was O.S.B. and Amanda Wall's daughter, born during the Civil War and still alive at the end of World War II. Elterich's niece Isabel Winward was in her forties, still beautiful, though no longer the “pretty little miss” in blond ringlets once celebrated by newspapers across the country. Winward's young daughter, Isabel, was almost the same age her mother had been, nearly thirty-seven years before, when the Brookland School kicked her out of the first grade.

 

 

THE LITTLE GIRL WANDERED around the house while her parents talked with Aunt Bel. Aside from her husband, daughter, and sister Ethel, Isabel Winward only had her aunt left. Her parents were long dead. In the years after they lost their lawsuit against the District of Columbia school board, the Walls never stayed in one place. They shuttled from one neighborhood to another, west across the city. Although they disappeared from colored Washington, Winward's father, Stephen Wall, never lost touch with his brother and sisters. Stephen was the only one of O.S.B. Wall's sons and daughters to have children of his own. They knew they had aunts and uncles, and their aunts and uncles knew about them. As Isabel grew up, she heard their names mentioned: Aunt Bel, Aunt Helen, Uncle Edward.
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Stephen Wall worked at the Government Printing Office until the day before his sixty-fifth birthday in 1922. He tried to extend his job two years past the mandatory retirement date—his foreman agreed that he was “quite efficient and a willing worker and appears to be in vigorous physical condition”—but the public printer denied the request without explanation. Outside of work, the Walls had changed their names, so after he retired, no one knew him as Stephen Wall again. To all the world, he had become Steven Russell Gates. Until he dropped dead in the spring of 1934, he moved whenever he noticed a black family living nearby. He told his children that black neighbors made property values go down.
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As Stephen's government service was ending, his wife, Lillie, took a job as a clerk in the War Department and then moved to Treasury. At the office and at home, she was known as Elizabeth Jane Gates. Leaving work on a December evening in 1930, she fell down the steps outside the Treasury Building. She spent more than six months in the hospital but never fully recovered, lingering until 1936.
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Isabel Irene Wall took her mother's name, Lillian. Everyone called her Lillie, including her brother and sister. As Lillian Isabel Gates, she went through the District's white public schools and, eight years after her court case, went on to the city's Business High School. After briefly working as a secretary in her twenties, she married Frank McGowan, a scientist who worked at the Department of Agriculture, and settled into a gracious brick house across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia. There were moments when it seemed to Lillian Gates McGowan that she had found a comfortable life, but she soon realized that she too had to keep moving. Her husband started beating her. When she dyed her hair to match a dress that she was wearing to a party, he expressed his disapproval by throwing a glass of beer in her face. By 1933 she had left him, and that April he jumped fifty feet from a bridge, shattering his skull.
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Isabel went north. Her sister Ethel had married someone from Bristol, Rhode Island, and moved there to live with his family. In Bristol a quiet man Isabel's age named Charles Winward was boarding with them. Isabel and Charles fell in love and married in November 1933. Winward's parents had died when he was seven, and he grew up in an orphanage with his six brothers and sisters. Although he had left school after the eighth grade, he was an avid reader and taught himself trigonometry. A jack-of-all-trades, he did everything from repairing refrigerators to writing calligraphy for a Providence greeting card company. Mostly, though, he worked as a wool-sorter, one of the only skilled jobs in a textile mill. He spent his days surrounded by sacks of just-sheared fleece shipped straight from the farm. He pulled apart the wool, slowly separating and categorizing the fleece into fourteen grades. It was a job that experienced sorters, in time, could do just with their hands, intuiting from feel alone the different qualities of wool. After years of combing through the lanolin-coated bales, Winward's hands were as soft as a child's.
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Together the couple went from Rhode Island to New York and back, and then to Hudson, Massachusetts, west of Boston, where Charles worked as a sorter for a mohair mill. Isabel had long been accustomed to a nomadic life, but now it was life on a humbler scale than what she had known as a child. When there was no work, her husband would put on waders and boots and rake for scallops in shallow water on the coast. They shucked the shells together, sold what they could, and ate the rest. She fried scallops, stewed them, fricasseed and baked them. She performed so many miracles with scallops that her daughter could not look at them for years.
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To her daughter, Isabel would make occasional remarks about her childhood, hints of a different existence: a cook, a big house with a dumbwaiter, dates with college boys. When Isabel showed her daughter fading sepia pictures of herself as a child, the girl admired the intricately stitched dresses and the beautiful white ribbons in her hair. Every night Isabel set the table with linens and china. She would never live in a city like Washington again, go to grand parties, or live in a fine home. But she did not seem to mind. The Winwards' life revolved around wool, not fine clothes.
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Early on in their relationship Charles Winward learned that his wife's real name was Isabel Wall, not Lillian Gates. Perhaps she told him the truth about her childhood, and the wool-sorter refused to classify her differently. Years later she explained the name change as a decision her family made after nasty property litigation between her father and his sisters. While her sister Ethel and her husband's family called her Lillie for the rest of her life, Charles took to calling her Isabel. When their daughter was born in 1937, they put down “Gates” as the mother's maiden name on the girl's birth certificate. But they named her Isabel Wall Winward.
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The girl did not like her middle name. “Isabel Wall Winward was not . . . feminine . . . in my estimation,” she later said. At school, when her full name was announced at attendance or listed in the yearbook, her classmates would call her “Stonewall Jackson.” She once asked her mother, “Where did I get the Wall from? Why couldn't it be Irene like yours?” Her mother said, “Your father named you because there were no more Walls to carry the name on.” “And I said, ‘Thank you very much,' ” the daughter remembered, “with tongue in cheek.”
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Isabel doted on her girl. She tried but could not have other children. To her husband's occasional distress, she “spent money like water” on her daughter. She raised her strictly—good manners, proper dress. A bar of soap in the mouth washed away bad words. Above all, in Isabel's house, there would be no lying. “Her famous saying was, ‘Oh what tangled webs we weave once we practice to deceive,' ” her daughter recalled. “I was brought up, you do not lie, you do not fib. No matter what it is, you tell the truth.”
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THE OLD WOMAN, Aunt Bel, opened her eyes wide, like the star of a silent film. Every word she spoke was meticulously chosen and enunciated, each sentence long and ornate, baroquely phrased, with peaks of high inflection. Instead of asking, “Would you get me a cup of coffee?” Aunt Bel might say, “Isabel, do you think that you could possibly get me a cup of coffee?” To her grand-niece, she sounded “so very old English . . . , what I call putting on airs.” It was as if everyday life were high performance.
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Bel always had a flair for the dramatic, having trained at elocution school in the art of “personal magnetism,” “by which a person is enabled to control those within reach of his voice, eye, or touch.” In even the most mundane interactions, she enjoyed using what she called “my best theatrical voice, smile and manner.” When a peddler once asked if she wanted to buy perfume, Bel brought a busy commercial area to a standstill with a resounding “No!” Shaking her head, staring straight at the peddler, she added, “I never use perfume. I use soap and water! I
prefer
soap and water!”
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In the 1890s Bel headed with her sister Sallie to the larger stage of New York. While the two sisters initially lived together on the Upper West Side, they soon went in different directions. Sallie changed her name to Helen Easton and moved uptown, renting rooms in her apartment on Harlem's southern fringe to a generation of Columbia University students, laboratory assistants, and teachers, all white. In 1897 Bel married a German engineer who built railroads in the American West and was fluent in five languages. Assuming the role of Mrs. Gotthold Otto Elterich, she lived in Greenwich Village and summered in Freeport. Like every one of her siblings except Stephen, she had no children. Her husband sailed frequently to Europe to raise money for new projects.
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In May 1907 Bel's husband went to Paris to promote a railroad in Vancouver, British Columbia, to French financiers. On his way home a month later, he stopped in London and met a wealthy American widow who had been touring Cairo and the Holy Land, with a detour to Monte Carlo. On her thirty-fifth birthday, the two of them took a day trip to the scenic town of Maidenhead, west of London. They rented a boat and rowed out on the Thames toward Cliveden, an estate with formal gardens often visited by Queen Victoria, famous for its Fountain of Love. A boatman noticed that Elterich was an unskilled oarsman and could not avoid the thickets banking the river. The boat ran against the roots of a tree and started taking on water. Panicking, Elterich and his companion jumped. She sank ten feet to the river's bottom, and he was swept away by the current.
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Newspapers across the United States could not resist what appeared to be a perfect summer story: wealthy characters, romantic Old World setting, gruesome deaths, a hint of scandal. In New York and Washington and coast-to-coast, the dailies reported details of the accident, the detective work that helped identify the bodies, the “handsome and charming” appearance of the “millionaire widow,” and the findings of the coroner's inquest.
The Washington Post
noted that Elterich's wife was the former “Miss Isabel Irene Wall.” Although the newspaper had published dozens of stories about her father, fifteen years after O.S.B. Wall's death there was no mention of his race. Instead, Bel was described only as the “daughter of a successful lawyer,” a woman “well known in diplomatic and social circles in Washington.” It was as if, in the context of her husband's death, it was impossible to imagine that she was not white. Racial passing was one scandal too many for the story. Bel played the part of the “prostrated” widow so well that she could use her real name in her hometown, and no one questioned her status.
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Childless and alone, with enough money to live comfortably, Bel devoted her days to inventions, some tangible and others less so. Six months after her husband's death, she patented a “shield for ladies' drawers” that promised easy removal for washing. At a time when many women were immobilized by their menstrual periods, Bel saw her shield of overlapping triangles of fabric as a first step toward freeing women to join the world as equals to men. Fashioning herself as a feminist thinker, she advertised herself as a lecturer to women's groups on subjects ranging from “Are we fair to our children?” to “What is and who gave us etiquette?” “No one today need be poor, unsuccessful, unhealthy or unhappy,” she wrote. “We live in a wonderful age—reach out and take what you will! ”
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A strong supporter of women's rights, Bel published in 1918 a florid manifesto called
The Girl of the Golden Future
, which declared to men, “I am your peer! My birthright came as yours did with the first draw of breath . . . We'll hear no more talk of woman's sphere. Unhand us, gentlemen! gently, gently! Thank you, sirs!” Much of her “Message-Appeal to Girlies Everywhere” was eccentric, the product of a lonely mind. She advocated feminine strength in modesty, but her language was anything but demure. She urged young women to embrace “bodily cleanliness, clothescrispiness and simplicity” over “jewels, dingles, [and] gimcracks that scream ‘look at me!' ” “Fringes, dangles, impediments, cumbersome useless ornaments ; too big hats trimmed in feathers, spears, swords and bowie-knives that tickle or inflict injuries on innocent unwary passers-by—let's wave them aside,” she wrote. She had created a voice that was too conspicuous, too self-contained, and too singular to afford any question or suspicious thought about her race. People would fixate on the wide shock of her blue eyes, not on her skin.
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Bel was so confident in her voice that in the course of her manifesto she repeatedly invoked civil rights for blacks. “Since the beginning of time Girlies have been treated unfairly. They have been discriminated against,” she wrote. “There was a difference made between brother and sister. There was Liberty and Freedom for brother; for his sister a chain.” It was rhetoric that women's advocates had been using since before the Civil War. Bel, however, was channeling her parents' activism, which had viewed the struggle for full citizenship of blacks and women as one and the same fight. Alongside her suggestion that young women eat only five ounces of food, three times a day, Bel described how “in my dressing-room by the side of my mirror is pinned a picture of Lincoln, the Liberator.” She wrote that the picture inspired her to work for “Independence, Freedom, Justice and Liberty” for “one half of the world.” Her readership understood that she meant women; few outside her family could have imagined that she meant anything else.
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