When Women Were Dragons(14)
No one knows exactly what happened that night in 1952—other than that twenty-five different people rang the operator, asking to make a collect call, only to be told, “A girl can only take so much, after all.” And then the line went dead. The building ripped apart at exactly 11:13 p.m. Every brick was crushed. A search through the rubble uncovered Martin O’Leary’s polished wing tips, and not much else. His briefcase was found floating in the East River four days later. All traces of the switchboard girls were lost in the blast.
“Gas explosion,” the papers said. “No survivors.”
No one mentioned the fact that twenty-five pairs of polished pumps and twenty-five handbags and twenty-five smart dresses in different colors had been found laid out neatly on the sidewalk just outside the crater where the building once was. There was a sign, written in what appeared to be ashes on a piece of discarded desktop. It said SMART DRESSES FOR SMART GALS. WEAR UNTIL THIS LIFE NO LONGER FITS YOU. No one knew what it meant.
The Feibel-Ross girls, the runaway brides, the housewife in Kalamazoo, and the munitions workers were all dismissed as tragedies. Any evidence of dragoning was either lost, ignored, or suppressed. Any questioning was dismissed. Even in the aftermath of the Mass Dragoning, there was little interest in government or academia in pursuing cases outside of that event. The Mass Dragoning happened on April 25, 1955, and 642,987 women (wives and mothers, all) transformed: each name was known, investigated, recorded, and it was determined that there could not be a single one more. The case was closed and the book was written and there was nothing more to say.
The Mass Dragoning of 1955 became simply another day that lived in infamy—studied in school, but with more and more distance, more distaste, and more euphemisms every year. The story became vague, ill-defined, and briefly noted. Which made it forgettable. The other cases of spontaneous dragoning were not to be mentioned.
It was too shocking.
It was too embarrassing.
It was too, well, feminine. Words stumbled and cheeks went red and the subject became impolite. And so the world looked the other way. It was, for almost everyone, like any other taboo subject—cancer, or miscarriages, or menstruation—spoken of in tight whispers and vague innuendos before changing the subject.
Still.
While I was only a child when the Mass Dragoning of 1955 occurred, I have spent most of my adult life as a scientist and an academic, and the rigors and clarity of my work make me impatient with euphemistic obfuscation and nonsensical taboo. We spend our lives as adults making sense of the memories we carry with us from our childhoods, but we must still be beholden, always, to the facts. And the facts are these:
On April 25, 1955, the world changed.
On April 25, 1955, 642,987 American families changed.
On April 25, 1955, my own family changed forever.
And I have quite a bit more to say on the matter.
From The Washington Post, January 23, 1956
A meeting of the secretive House Subcommittee on Compensation and Resolution briefly erupted in chaos on Tuesday afternoon, as a group of activists who had disguised themselves as janitorial staff invaded the locked committee room and refused to allow the representatives to leave. As usual, no agenda for the subcommittee’s daily operation was made available to the public, and no minutes were provided. No members of the subcommittee were available for comment, and the arrested activists have been barred from speaking to the press. The standoff lasted for nine hours before police managed to enter the room, whereupon the assailants were arrested without incident. No further information was made available at press time.
[It should be noted that this story did not appear, as one would assume, in the National News section, but on the last page of the Style and Fashion pages. There was no explanation as to why.]
7.
The Mass Dragoning of 1955 happened when I was at school. We were practicing long division, as I recall. The principal arrived at the door, his face tight and pale. He jerked his head toward the hallway, and he and my teacher hurried out. We could hear their whispers hissing under the door, short and staccato. Within moments, they both returned to the classroom and closed the blinds.
“Eyes on your papers,” my principal said. “Don’t look up.”
They told us to be good children. And we were. We didn’t make a sound.
We did long division for the rest of the day, worksheet after worksheet, until our pencils wore down to nubs.
I remember the sound of sirens.
I remember the smell of smoke.
I remember taking the school bus home and watching houses burn.
I remember watching large shadows streaking across the ground. Each adult told us not to look up at the sky. We had to keep our gazes tilted down. We were good children, so we did as we were told.
When I got home, my mother made me a snack and asked me how my day was. She moved strangely. Her neck was in constant, writhing motion, like a snake. Her shoulders couldn’t stay still. She rubbed her arms briskly and lifted her gaze to the sky, again and again. I remember that the phone rang. I remember my mother bringing her hand to her chest and leaving it there for a long time. She let the receiver fall from her other hand. She brought both hands to her mouth and pressed down hard, as though to keep herself from screaming. The receiver swung back and forth, back and forth, until it eventually stopped.
Finally, after a few deep breaths, my mother walked to where I sat. She knelt down at my feet and took my hands. Her eyes were gold. Had they always been gold? She blinked hard, and they returned to their normal grey. I told myself I imagined anything else. My mother brought my fingers to her mouth, and kissed each knuckle, one by one.