Free Butterfly's Child by Angela Davis-Gardner Page A

dead.”
    â€œThat must have been the church people who came,” Father Pinkerton said. “It’s easy to be confused at a time like that.”
    Mama said Papa-san was coming and then she was dead. “It wasn’t church people,” Benji yelled.
    â€œCalm down now, and I’ll tell you what I know about your mother. She was a geisha, the church people said, which means singer, and she was named Cio-Cio—that means Butterfly in English. She left a note asking for some kind people to take you to America; she signed it herself. They said she was the daughter of a samurai—a brave warrior—and that means you come from good stock. Look, I spy an arrowhead.” He stopped the horses. “Want to get it?”
    Benji jumped down and started running back to the house, stamping on the hills and spitting on them. Father Pinkerton called after him, but his voice got smaller and then stopped. Benji went through the back of the house where no one would see him and into his room. The women were in the kitchen, so he jammed a chair against his door and took out the picture. The man was Father Pinkerton. He turned the picture over and stared at the writing. It wasn’t the church people, the writing said, Papa-san is a liar.

 
    Although Kate had
to host the first meeting of the women’s reading circle, Aimee Moore prevailed. Her house in Stockton was centrally located, she said, and her parlor could comfortably accommodate the dozen women they had chosen to invite. Kate was miffed—the circle had been her idea. In addition to providing intellectual stimulation, reading and talking about books would be a welcome diversion from the disappointment at home. There had not been another pregnancy, in spite of Frank’s grim determination.
    The circle met on a Sunday in midsummer. There were a dozen fashionably dressed women, all of them from town except Kate. She was glad for her new summer dress, lawn with a sprigged print; it looked as fine as anyone’s. Aimee’s parlor was pleasantly cool; the open windows, in the shade of large trees, provided relief from the heat. The room was large and expensively decorated, with Turkish carpets, clusters of velvet chairs and love seats, two large stained-glass lamps handmade by Mr. Tiffany of New York—works of art, Aimee informed them—and bouquets of flowers in porcelain vases. There was on one table a framed woodblock Japanese print of two women, which Aimee had displayed in Kate’s honor.
    She served charlotte russe and tea and passed plates of almond cookies and petits fours. Most of the women had not read the assigned novel, George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
, but listened placidly while Kate, Aimee, and Beth Moss, the spinster librarian of Stockton, discussed the themes of the book. Interest picked up when Beth Moss mentioned that George Eliot was a pseudonym; the writer was in fact a woman named Mary Ann Evans.
    â€œWhy would she use a man’s name?” asked Mrs. Robert Cassidy, an overweight woman whose rings and bracelets cut cruelly into her flesh. She looked around the parlor at the other ladies. “Doesn’t that seem a little peculiar?”
    â€œShe wanted to be accorded full respect as a writer,” Miss Moss said. “She felt that only a man would have been taken seriously.”
    â€œIf she couldn’t enjoy the respect that is associated with being a woman,” Mrs. Cassidy said, “I don’t know why she’d want to be a novelist.”
    â€œMaybe that’s why she
was
a novelist,” Kate said. “Because she was accorded little respect in the first place.”
    Aimee called attention to the Japanese print. It had been given to her, she told the group, by a world traveler of considerable means, a classmate of hers at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Aimee made reference at every opportunity to having attended Mount Holyoke; the only wonder, Kate thought, was that she