The woman was watching her closely. Alison could feel this, though the woman’s face remained shadowed and she couldn’t quite bring herself to look back at her directly. She looked at Elvis instead and the way his eyes wavered through her lens of candlelight and tears. Lonesome tonight? “You really have it bad, don’t you?” the woman said. Her tone was sympathetic. Alison softened again. She decided to tell this perceptive woman everything. How much she’d loved him. How she’d never loved anyone else. How she felt it every time she took a breath, and had for weeks now.
“I don’t think I’ll ever feel better,” she said. “No matter what I do.”
“I hear it takes a year to recover from a serious loss. Unless you find someone else.”
A year. Alison could be a mother by then. How would she find someone else, pregnant like she was or with a small child? Could she spend a year hurting like this? Would she have a choice?
“Have you ever heard of Laura D. Fair?” the woman asked.
Alison shook her head. She picked up the empty wineglass and tipped it to see if any drops remained. None did. She set it back down and picked up the napkin, wiping her eyes. She wasn’t crying. She just wasn’t exactly not crying.
“Mrs. Fair killed her lover,” the woman told her. Alison looked at her own fingernails. One of them had a ragged end. She bit it off shorter while she listened. “He was a lawyer. A. P. Crittenden. She shot him on the ferry to Oakland in November of 1870 in front of his whole family because she saw him kiss his wife. He’d promised to leave her and marry Mrs. Fair instead, and then he didn’t, of course. She pleaded a transient insanity known at that time as emotional insanity. She said she was incapable of killing Mr. Crittenden, who had been the only friend she’d had in the world.” Alison examined her nail. She had only succeeded in making it more ragged. She bit it again, too close to the skin this time. It hurt and she put it back in her mouth. “Mrs. Fair said she had no memory of the murder, which many people, not all of them related to the deceased, witnessed. She was the first woman sentenced to hang in California.”
Loud clapping and catcalls at the bar. The third quarter had started with a return all the way to the fifty-yard line. Alison heard it. She did not turn around, but she took her finger out of her mouth and picked up the napkin. She folded it again. Four small squares. “Rules are rules,” Alison said.
“But then she didn’t hang. Certain objections were made on behalf of the defense and sustained, and a new trial was held. This time she was acquitted. By now she was the most famous and the most hated woman in the country.”
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.