1920s: New Decade - New Laws

 

The next morning, Alice is back home before Anna's up (it's right across the hall after all). By the time Anna is awake, she has cooked, showered and arranged for an audition for tomorrow. Anna is surprised, and asks her about the nights events. She might have been tired, but Alice not returning home did not go unnoticed. She wants to tell her to be careful, but bites her lip and thinks of Maurice. At least Alice can't get pregnant, she could have.

After tending to the dishes together, Anna and Alice goes downstairs to do something important that they've been longing to do for years - vote for the NAPs of their choice! So important, such a milestone. Especially Anna feels pleased with this.

As the young women vote for the first time, it's another new law that Emily is most excited about - the ban on alcohol. She eagerly brings this up with Frank, only to find that he has no intention of giving up drinking just because of some law. 

"But you're a politician!" Emily yells in exasperation. "You must follow the law!" 

The entire encounter ends up in a huge argument about, of all things, their globe bar. At the end of it, with both Frank and Emily furious, the bar ends up in the basement, but is not brought out of the house. There it joins a whole lot of new contraptions. A juice fizzer, a nectar maker... now when there is no legal way to buy alcohol, Frank has started to dabble in making his own moonshine. Emily is devastated, but can say nothing about it. If she did, Frank might get in serious trouble and then where would she and the kids be? With no money, no one to support them, they'd be out in the street in no time.

The rest of the day is a complete disaster. Frank and Emily barely speak to each other. It's not really as if Emily has time to speak anyway, not between tending to baby Harrison and cleaning, cooking and washing clothes. She feels worn out, and thinks she looks it too. She's gained weight, and she never uses the vanity table she was so proud to have when they first moved into the house.

At dinner Frank takes his anger out on John, seemingly annoyed with everything his eldest son does. Dinner ends quickly, and Emily sends the boys to bed while making Beatrice help out with the dishes before she too is allowed to go to bed.

As Frank comes to bed that night, she pretends to be asleep. It's not only that she's angry, because in spite of the fighting and the anger, she does still want her husband, but she cannot imagine going through yet another pregnancy. Frank, annoyed, goes to sleep feeling lonely, misunderstood and trapped in a marriage that is not at all what he once imagined it would be like.