The Hour I First Believed

  “Nothing, Missus,” said she. “I only wonder that, with all your jabbering, do you hear that banging?” I was suddenly aware of the rapping of the brass knocker against the front door. “Well, miss, if this is to be thy home and we have a visitor, then I entreat thee to go to the door and say I am not receiving callers.” It was not proper for a child so young to be put to such a task, but I feared that, were I to rise and try to answer the door myself, my legs might collapse beneath me or I might burst into sobs. Such was my addled state.

  I stared after the waif as she hied to her task. How was I to explain this Irish imp? Was I to bring her to the town green and proclaim, “Here is Pansy, the fruit of my husband’s adultery”?

  And then, the four of them were standing at the parlor threshhold. The two children were in front, holding hands as if the steps from front door to parlor had made them friends. Behind them stood Martha, my sister and my rock, and our ne’er-do-well brother, Roswell, he with his eye patch and his leering smile. “Hallo, Sis. I’m back,” Ros proclaimed, as if this were welcome news, and not one more grievous burden heaped upon me.

  Because I could not yet bear to look at the smaller, darker girl standing beside Pansy, I looked instead at the doll she clutched—its gingham dress, its porcelain head and black painted hair. My eyes, again, fell upon the two girls’ clasped hands, and that was when I knew what I would do: I would announce them as sisters…. Pansy: a gaudy flower, a gaudy name, a gaudy mother. I would rename her Lillian. They would be Lydia and Lillian, the twin daughters of my widower-son, Willie, and his poor, doomed wife…. And Willie: he would not be a foolish stage-actor, but rather a respectable government agent, posted to Italy. No, not to Italy but to England, where people embraced not “free love” and Pope-worship but proper Protestant values. It was pretense, yes, motivated by pride, and pretense and pride are sinful, but by this treachery the two little girls and I could save face and survive this cruel assignment which fate had given us. They would be sisters, and I the grandmother of not one but both…. With my plan hatched, I was able to look now into the eyes of Willie’s girl. And when I did, I was lost with looking at her. Her black hair, her pale eyes and pale skin: she was plain, not pretty like the one whose hand she held. She was Hutchinson, top to toe, and my eyes filled with tears, and my head with thoughts of my beloved father, and my sons. I loved Lydia immediately, and when she gave me a shy smile, I gave her one in return. I turned then to the Daneghy girl. I knew that, though I would claim her and call her Popper, I would never love her. She somehow must have read my thoughts, for until that moment, she had acted as good as gold, but now her eyes went dead and her nostrils flared. She snatched the other’s dolly away from her and dashed it against the parlor wall. Its head exploded into a million shards.

  This outburst was apparently the first of many for Pansy Daneghy, now known to the world as Lillian Popper. In diary entries and letters, Lizzy variously described her charge as “tetchy,” “petulant,” “sulky,” “a fibber,” “a thief in the making,” and “a red-haired blackguard in banana curls.” In contrast, Lydia was “docile” and “sweet-natured”—a “shy but helpful girl with her head always in books.” Numerous references are made to Lillian’s tormenting of Lydia: the snatching away of trinkets and sweets, the ruining of clothing and keepsakes. Lydia’s knees were “scraped and bloodied” when Lillian “shoved her to the ground without provocation as the two walked home from Miss Bridges’s Sewing School.” Lydia’s wrists were sprained in a desperate jump from a tree swing after Lillian pushed her higher and higher, refusing to stop. An 1880 letter from Lizzy to Martha Weeks in Florida reveals details of the household dynamic when both girls were ten.

  Although Lillian never tires of plaguing her, Lydia remains a devoted sis, absorbing each insult, forgiving every trespass. In this regard, my granddaughter is a model of Christian forgiveness, and her grandmother suffers in comparison. I am at my wits’ end about this troubled and troublesome creature who causes such havoc in our household. I suppose I am partly responsible for her troubles, for the girl believes as gospel what I have told her for her own protection: that her father and Lydia’s father are one and the same. Would it not be worse to say the truth: that she is the daughter of fornicators? Still, the child suffers when fine gifts arrive for Lydia but not for her. In the days before and after her birthday, Lil stood on the front porch in the cold, awaiting the postman’s arrival. Each day when he came into view, she would run up the lane to meet him. “Anything for me? Anything for me?” When at last she was reconciled to the fact that no packages were coming to her from Italy, she set about destroying the ones her sister had received. She took scissors to the red velvet cloak which that Urso woman had sent Lydia. She defaced Lydia’s favorite book, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, a gift from Willie. Across each page, she scrawled, “Lydia is ugley.” Page after page of that mean-spirited insult, and misspelled to boot. (Lillian is a poor speller, Lydia an excellent one.) Poor Lyd cried and cried for her losses. Yet when her Uncle Roswell grabbed the hickory switch to whip Lillian for her wickedness, who was it intervened on behalf of the sinner but she who had been sinned against! She hadn’t liked that red cloak anyway, Lydia told her uncle. She had read Alice in Wonderland so many times that she had grown tired of it. Roswell whipped Lillian about the legs and buttocks, but he said he gave her an easier thrashing than he had planned because it upset Lydia so.

  Truth be told, Sister, it was with dread that I granted Roswell permission to take up residence in our home again. Yet I have been grateful for his help, for I doubt I could have dealt with Lillian on my own. When she has one of her conniption fits, it is “Uncle Ros” who can bring her back under control, sometimes with nothing more than a fierce look in her direction, or by placing his fingers against his eye patch. For all her bluster and boisterousness, the girl is terrified that she might be made to look at what lies beneath Roswell’s patch, and it is a threat he holds over her head, the better to control her.

  In thy last letter, thee asked if Roswell had embraced temperance. No, sad to say, he is still under the curse of the bottle. Yet, for the most part, he has done as I have asked and confined his consumption of spirits to the privacy of his room after he retires for the evening. With two young girls to raise, my life has become one of compromise, and Roswell is one of these. As the man of the house, he may be somewhat lacking in industry and moral rectitude, but without him, I would have to forsake my work. In the months when thee and Nathanael are away in Florida, how could I sojourn otherwise on behalf of my prisoners?

  Sojourn on behalf of her prisoners Elizabeth Popper did. Her travel log reveals that she crisscrossed Connecticut numerous times in the years when Lydia and Lillian were in her care, calling on mayors, influential clergy, and prominent citizens to enlist their support for the separate state-funded women’s reformatory she envisioned. In a second log, Popper recorded the ups and downs of her lobbying efforts. Beside the name of each member of the Connecticut General Assembly she approached, she wrote “yes,” “no,” or “?”. In 1882, Popper presented Governor Hobart Bigelow letters of support from such illustrious Connecticut citizens as Aetna Life Insurance Company president (and future Hartford mayor) Morgan Bulkeley, the Hartford Retreat’s Dr. Eli Todd, social crusader Josephine Dodge, Norwich industrialist William Slater, Trinity College president John Brocklesby, and her friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell of Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church. But Popper had also picked up an articulate enemy of her cause, Yale professor William Sumner. The brilliant Sumner, an ardent Social Darwinist, championed laissez-faire, warn-ing that man must not tamper with the natural laws of social development. He spoke out against trade unions, government regulation, and such “meddling” social legislation as that for which Lizzy Popper advocated. In June of 1879, the Social Darwinist and the social reformer skirmished in the editorial pages of the Hartford Daily Times. Sumner fired the first shot, writing that criminals, the great majority of whom belonged
to the lower classes, could not be reformed. “The little Quaker lady who now bustles about the State Capitol on behalf of incorrigibles would squander the government’s money on a futile endeavor,” Sumner maintained.

  Popper’s response, published the following week, dismissed Sumner’s argument as “elitist claptrap” that flew in the face of democratic ideals and biblical teachings.

  Perhaps Professor Sumner would be more at home amongst England’s queen-lovers or Rome’s papists, for here in America we reject the notion that the rich and powerful are designated by divine right. Ergo, we must also reject the arrogant assumption that the criminal, driven more often than not by grinding poverty, is doomed by the hand of Almighty God. Nay, he is made poor and desperate not by natural laws as directed by the Great Overseer, but by the greed of the upper classes. Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.

  The dozens of letters from Hartford Daily Times readers that followed this exchange ran two to one in favor of Popper’s argument and won her new support among Hartford’s lawmakers. Yet, curiously, just as Popper’s campaign for prison reform was gathering momentum in the General Assembly, she abruptly halted her lobbying efforts. Little is known about why the travel log of the “little Quaker lady” lists no trips from April of 1883 to October of 1885, or why this otherwise meticulous chronicler, letter-writer, and letter-saver saved none of her own or others’ correspondence from this period, or recorded no diary entries. From this time period there exists only the faded five-sentence beginning of a letter from Popper to her sister Martha dated April 6, 1883—a communiqué that apparently was never finished and never posted, and which indicates that Popper’s retreat from politics was triggered by a domestic crisis involving her ward, Lillian, and her brother, Roswell.

  Sister,

  Thee must burn this immediately after reading. It is with anger and shame that I write of a vile thing that has happened, and has been happening, inside my home while I have been away. Since yesterday, I have been borne back over and over to a time long ago when my boys were young and Charlie warned me that I would save the world at the expense of his neglected children. Alas, that is what now has come to pass, although I thank the Good Lord that in this instance it is “child,” not “children.” To the best of my knowledge, Lydia has been spared. The injured party is not one of mine, but one with whom I have shared a surname and a home. The injurer, it pains me to say, is our brother. Yesterday, quite by accident, I discovered the

  Popper stopped herself mid-sentence, then put a large X through what she had written. Interestingly, she did not follow her own dictate and burn the unfinished letter. Had Roswell Hutchinson’s whippings of Lillian led to greater violence against her? Had she become the victim of sexual abuse? The details of what happened are left to the conjecture of the modern biographer. All that is known is this: Roswell Hutchinson left the Popper home abruptly in April of 1883, the troubled Lillian ran away the following year, and Lizzy Popper entered a long and atypical period of disengagement from politics.

  Both Roswell Hutchinson and Lillian Popper suffered untimely deaths. Among Lizzy’s papers are certificates of death for both. Hutchinson’s, issued at Baltimore, Maryland, is dated June 5, 1884. Cause of death: cranial bleeding from mortal blows to the head, suffered during a barroom altercation. Lillian Popper died in March of 1885 while incarcerated in the notorious New York City Tombs. Her death certificate indicates that, following her flight from Lizzy Popper’s home, she retained her father’s surname but reclaimed her given name of Pansy. As Pansy Popper, she was exiled to the Tombs for “the use of fisticuffs in the settling of a dispute” and “frequenting a chop suey house of bad repute.” The latter charge suggests the possibility that Charlie Popper and Vera Daneghy’s child had become a prostitute, a drug addict, or both, as “chop suey houses” of this era sometimes served as fronts for parlors at which opium and sex were bought and consumed. Pansy was fifteen when she died, her cause of death listed as “consumption,” the nineteenth-century term for pulmonary tuberculosis.

  The bitter irony of these tragic outcomes surely must have caused Lizzy Popper to suffer. Like her birth mother, the obstreperous girl Lizzy had reluctantly agreed to safeguard had become another of the “fallen women” for whom she had advocated so faithfully. The brother whom she had raised, supported, and enabled had become one of the “malevolent men” from whom Lizzy had worked so hard to protect imprisoned females. Yet it was during her extended absences on behalf of these women that her home had become, for young Lillian, a prison run by a “jailer” who had clearly abused his power.

  Whatever the stirrings of Lizzy Popper’s conscience, she left behind no written reflections of her own or others regarding this matter. Perhaps she burned these, or perhaps she suffered in silence. Perhaps her withdrawal from the world indicates that her old nemesis, depression, had descended once again. A lack of documentary evidence leads only to speculation.

  What is known, however, is that in 1886 Lizzy Popper reengaged with the world and resumed her political efforts with a vigor that defied her eighty-two years. Her granddaughter Lydia was now enrolled at a private boarding school in Massachusetts, her tuition paid for by Willie Popper’s wealthy inamorata, Camilla Urso. Back on the road, Lizzy procured new letters of support for a women’s reformatory from biblical scholar Calvin Stowe and his famous wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe; retired United States senator Lafayette Foster; Hartford Courant newspaper scion Joseph Hawley; and, through the intervention of their mutual friend, Reverend Twichell, the illustrious Mark Twain. Remarkably, Popper also managed to obtain a letter from investment banker and Hartford native J. P. Morgan. The supremely wealthy and powerful Morgan was a member in good standing of the avaricious upper classes of which Popper was so critical, and he was not otherwise a supporter of social welfare. It remains a mystery how Popper accomplished this epistolary coup, as she left behind no documentation as to the circumstances by which she managed to get Morgan to endorse her vision.

  In her later years, Elizabeth Popper wrote and spoke out about other political issues of the day. Following the May 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, at which both police and labor protesters were killed, Popper published a Hartford Daily Times editorial in support of the controversial Knights of Labor, lauding the Knights’ efforts to lessen the disparity between America’s “filthy rich and her desperate poor.”

  Following the well-publicized September 1886 surrender of the Apache chief Geronimo to federal troops, while walking across the New Haven green with her granddaughter, Lydia, Lizzy Popper came upon an amateur orator who was lauding the victory of the U.S. military over the “renegade savage.” In response to the man’s comments, Lizzy gave an impromptu speech of her own in support of the captured warrior. In her diary, she wrote the following about what ensued:

  I was hissed at and booed, mine being the unpopular sentiment, but I persevered. Halfway through my remarks, I had to stop and remind a loutish young man in a tweed cap that he and I lived in a land where free speech was guaranteed, and if he was assaying to take away my right to say what was on my mind, I should be glad to step over to where he stood and box his ears for him, or else to find his own grandmother and have her do the job for me. He left then in a huff and I was able to resume my speech-making.

  In October of 1886, Popper ferried to New York City in the company of her granddaughter, Lydia, now sixteen, for the purpose of witnessing the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Of that historic event, Lizzy wrote the following reflection to her now-bedridden sister, Martha Weeks:

  There was a grand parade, and a hundred or more boats afloat in the harbor. Lydia and I were amongst the lucky ones to have secured a place on Bedloe’s Island itself, close to the dais. Bartoldi, the statue’s maker, was there, and Senator Evarts, and the President himself and several members of his Cabinet. Mr. Cleve
land is the third President these now old and rheumy eyes have espied. The others were Jackson and Lincoln. Oh, yes, General Grant, too, when he visited the sick at Shipley Hospital. So the number is four, not three, and of these Grant cut the most dashing figure and Lincoln, all arms and legs, the most awkward.

  I chuckle now to recall for thee, Martha, the mishap we who had gathered witnessed in the midst of the glorious pomp and hoopla over Lady Liberty’s debut. Before the grand unveiling, Senator Evarts was speaking on and on. (Pity he had not learned the value of Quaker conciseness!) Then, midway through the Senator’s lengthy disquisition, the nervous Bartoldi pulled the cord, accidentally and prematurely. The drapery dropped and Miss Liberty was revealed in all her splendor. This set off the cheers of the crowd, the boom of cannonfire, the screeching of boat whistles, and joyful music from any number of bands on the mainland and in the harbor. The Senator continued moving his mouth through this hubbub but at last gave it up for lost and resumed his seat. Would that all politicians could be so soundly silenced!

  As for Lady Liberty, she is a fitting goddess to symbolize the American ideal, though as I stared up at her, I could not help but think of the many thousands who, two decades earlier, had to die to expiate America’s sin of slavery. It made my eyes wet to think of my Edmond and my Levi amongst those who perished. Eddie, in particular, would have relished this dedication which his Ma and his niece Lyd were lucky enough to have witnessed.