Scholarly Pursuits

by M. Louisa Locke

  Caro nodded grimly in affirmation.

  Laura continued, “From something Ned said, I think there was more going on. He was trying to justify Willie’s behavior by saying that there was a lot of pressure on him to drop Grace even earlier than the dance. That fits what May Shepard told us. He hinted that a couple of the Zeta Psi seniors appeared to have a personal grievance against her because, while his fraternity brothers usually reserved what he called ‘their little jokes’ for other men on campus, a couple of them seemed to go out of their way to give Grace a hard time.”

  “What kind of little jokes?”

  “Ned got really uncomfortable when I asked him to give me some examples, and he wouldn’t give me any specifics. He did say that he asked one of the Zeta juniors why the seniors were behaving in such an ungentlemanly fashion to Grace. This boy told Ned that two years ago, when Grace was a freshman, almost all the men in the class ahead of hers, the graduating class of ’81 who are now seniors, got suspended for playing a few unfortunate pranks and that feelings were still pretty raw among members of that class. This meant they didn’t much like anyone who seemed hostile to fraternities.”

  Caro sat up straighter and said, “Both Miss Beck and Miss Stokker mentioned something similar about suspensions and that somehow these suspensions were connected to some anti-fraternity feelings on campus. And Grace certainly wouldn’t have been shy about expressing her opinion on something that got men suspended. Remember how I told you this minister, Reverend Mason, sold her on coming to Berkeley because the campus needed more women of her moral caliber?”

  “Campus suspensions and anti-fraternity movements seem to be topics I should look into for any article I write about campus life. I wonder if the school yearbooks mentioned any of this? Or I could look at back copies of the Berkeleyan.”

  Caro got up and rummaged in a crowded bookcase before triumphantly pulling out two slender stiff-backed volumes bound in blue cloth. “Perfect, I thought I’d seen these. Here are copies of the Blue and Gold for her freshman and sophomore years. I will look through them tonight.”

  Caro then said she was going to go down to the kitchen and fix herself something to eat and asked if Laura would like to join her. Laura thanked her but said she had brought her own lunch.

  As Caro disappeared down the steps, Laura stood up and went to look out the small window tucked under the eaves. The weather had turned ominous, and she could see dark clouds rolling in from the northwest. She wondered if she could borrow an umbrella from Caro if it started raining before she had to leave for the train.

  This morning, as Seth helped her climb down from Kitty’s carriage at the ferry depot, he had scolded her for not being prepared for rain, which was a constant threat during the months of January and February. He’d laughed when she pointed out that she didn’t see any umbrella under his arm and said the old beat-up oil cloth duster he was wearing, plus his Stetson, had protected him in many a squall on cattle drives, so he thought it would carry him through a San Francisco storm.

  At least he’d talked to her. On Monday, when she tried to tell him what she’d learned from Ned at the study session, he’d said he needed to ask Kitty something about their Latin assignment and turned his back on her. And he’d been unusually distant all week. She wondered if she’d done or said something to offend him at dinner on Saturday. You could never tell with Seth; he held his feelings so close to the chest.

  Looking down to the street below to see if it had actually started to rain, she saw a boy turn into the walk leading up to the boarding house. Hearing the front doorbell peal, she wondered if Mrs. Feltzer would expect Caro to answer the door for her.

  Such a badly run house! I hope Caro found something decent in the kitchen to eat.

  She went over to her satchel, and with some satisfaction, she took out the apple and thick ham sandwich Mrs. O’Rourke had prepared for her this morning. She would only eat half the sandwich and eat the rest on the way back to San Francisco this afternoon, a pick-me-up before starting work.

  She’d barely started eating the sandwich when she heard the door to the attic open and Caro’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Taking another sip of tea to wash down the rather large bite of sandwich she had in her mouth, she said, “If you didn’t find anything worthwhile to eat, I can certainly spare the some of this sandwich. It’s enormous…”

  Scrabbling out of her chair, she ran over to Caro, who stood mutely at the top of the stairs, her face twisted in agony.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Oh, Laura. A telegram! They want me to come home. Grace unexpectedly took a turn for the worse. She…she died this morning.”

  Chapter 14

  Friday evening, January 21, 1881

  San Francisco

  “1 Pair of muslin drawers with ruffle of embroidery and tucks, $.49” Bloomingdale’s Illustrated 1886 Catalog

  At the sound of a light knock on her door, Annie said, “Come in.”

  She knew it would be Laura, because she’d just heard the door to the bedroom next door open and close, and the other occupant of the room, her sister-in-law’s friend Celia, had headed out a couple of hours ago to spend most of the weekend with her father and siblings.

  Consequently, she didn’t bother to look up from her sewing when her own door opened and closed. She was engaged in attaching a new waistband to one of her muslin drawers in order to accommodate her growing girth. She knew Miss Minnie and Miss Millie would be more than happy to do this for her, but they were stretched thin between their usual clients and their new responsibilities designing for the Silver Strike Bazaar. She could also go out and buy a bunch of readymade underthings at that very emporium, but the new side corsets she’d already purchased there had been exorbitantly expensive. Consequently, she was feeling virtuous to be doing this tiny bit to save money. She tied a knot in the thread, snipped the end with small scissors, and thrust the needle into the pin cushion on the small table next to her.

  She lifted up the drawers up and said proudly, “Look, Laura, they’re now fit for an elephant, don’t you think? Oh, my dear…whatever is the matter?”

  Laura stood just in the door, her lip quivering, and at Annie’s exclamation, her whole face crumpled. She ran over and kneeled down to bury her head in Annie’s lap and began to cry.

  From experience, Annie knew that whatever had occurred, it wasn’t some sort of immediate emergency. Laura was extremely calm in a crisis—so Annie didn’t try to do anything beyond stroking her sister-in-law’s hair until her shoulders stopped heaving and her sobs turned into hiccups.

  Then she said, gently, “Go bathe your face. Then you can tell me exactly what has happened.”

  When Laura was composed and sitting across from her, Annie said, “Kathleen will be up soon with dinner. Do you want me to ring and have her come later?”

  “No, if anything, getting food in me will help.”

  Smart girl.

  “So what’s going on?”

  “I was with Caro Sutton when she got a telegram from her aunt Jean, Grace Atherton’s mother. Grace passed away this morning, and they want Caro to return.”

  “Oh, Laura, that’s awful. What happened? I thought she was recovering.”

  Laura’s lip began to quiver again, but she took a deep breath and said, “Evidently, the lung infection returned. Caro fears that their family doctor mismanaged things. He’d been giving her cousin laudanum, which you know can affect a person’s breathing. However, I think what she is most afraid of is that Grace may have used the laudanum to end her own life.”

  “Oh, my dearest, this must have been so difficult for you to hear about…given what happened to your friend Hattie a year ago.”

  “Annie, I knew you would understand. At least I was with Hattie at the end. Poor Caro feels so guilty, second guessing her decision to come to the university, wondering if she could have prevented this from happening if she had stayed in Nebraska.”

  “Do you think she will return to
the university?”

  “I don’t know. There isn’t really any academic reason for her to come back. She was only taking classes she thought might help her meet people who knew Grace. The tragedy is that we were just starting to get some hints about what had been going on in Grace’s life. If she doesn’t return, she may never figure out what did happen, and I don’t know if she can stand not knowing.”

  Thinking about her own driving need to understand what had caused the death of one of her favorite clients, Mathew Voss, and how this had precipitated her first foray into crime investigation, Annie said, “That’s only natural. Sometimes the not-knowing makes everything seem worse.”

  “Exactly.”

  Annie picked up the pair of drawers, which had fallen to the floor, and folded them while she thought how to put the next question. Finally, she said, “Do you think that there is any chance that Miss Atherton, given that she was engaged, might have…”

  “Gotten pregnant? Of course, I wondered that as well. That would certainly explain her hasty flight home and her emotional distress. Imagine if she discovered her condition at the same time her engagement fell apart. When I hinted at this possibility to Caro, she said Grace had her monthlies soon after she arrived, so that couldn’t be the explanation.”

  Annie bit her lip. Just this week her physician, Dr. Lottie Brown, had informed her that her baby might be due a month earlier than they all assumed…because often a woman could bleed a little bit the first month or two of pregnancy. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Nate, because Dr. Brown had said that determining the due date for a baby was not precise in the early months. Her re-estimate—based on physiological signs like Annie’s weight gain and the fact that she’d had clear signs of quickening for at least a month—could be wrong.

  Selfishly, she wanted to keep this possibility to herself for a little while longer, because she feared everyone would start pressuring her to cut back on her work even sooner. Going out to see her clients, having a regular routine to her days, was helping keep her natural fears at bay as well. She decided not to mention the possibility that Grace still could have been pregnant, not seeing how it would help anything.

  Her sister-in-law stood up and wandered to the window, where rain now lashed against the panes. After a moment, she turned and said, “Caro’s theory is that whatever happened to Grace last term caused such a trauma that it threw her into some sort of crisis of faith…in herself, in others, in God. And that’s why she wouldn’t talk to anyone, even go to church, and why she might have taken her own life.”

  Annie remembered how she’d become completely paralyzed after being hit by the series of misfortunes that culminated in her husband’s suicide. And how she’d lost faith in herself or in any possibility that life could ever get better. Thank heavens, she’d never given up. But she knew not everyone was able to fight their way up from that sort of slough of despair.

  “And do you think that Miss Sutton is correct?”

  “I think it’s possible. You have to understand, Grace was not some sort of fragile, hysterical woman. A broken romance, a problem with her academic studies, a falling out with another student, none of this would have sent her flying home. Nor would any of these things explain why the other women in her class don’t want to talk about her…or why her former fiancé reacted in fear when her name came up. Something really terrible happened to her, and someone at the university must know what that was.”

  Chapter 15

  Sunday afternoon, March 6, 1881

  Oakland

  “I had never seen a university, and did not know what to expect. We got off at the Berkeley station.” 920 O’Farrell Street, Harriet Lane Levy

  As the train pulled out of the Oakland Long Wharf and started on its half-hour trip to Berkeley, Laura glanced around the car to see if there was anyone she recognized. She’d never made this trip on a weekend before, and she was intrigued how different the train felt from weekday mornings when it was filled to bursting with students. Sunday, at two in the afternoon, her car was only half-full, and most of the passengers appeared to be family parties returning from morning church services.

  There were several young men slouched in the front seats, the stale smell of alcohol and the disreputable state of their evening clothes proclaiming that they were straggling home from a Saturday night of debauchery in the city. However, with their top hats tipped over their eyes, their chins resting on their chests, she couldn’t determine which of her classmates they might be. She just hoped none of them were Ned Goodwin.

  No, he wouldn’t be on this train because Celia told her this morning, before she left for her weekly trip to see her family, that Ned had faithfully promised to take her for a carriage ride this afternoon. And if he’d spent last evening in San Francisco, there would be no reason why he wouldn’t have simply ended up in his family home in the Western Addition, where he could sober and clean up before coming to meet Celia at the O’Farrell Street boarding house today.

  As Laura had hoped, Celia’s influence on Ned had been beneficial this term. He appeared to be making an effort to arrive at Instructor Royce’s nine o’clock English Composition and Logic class on time, and he really couldn’t slip away when Celia tucked her arm through his to accompany him down the hall to math class. However, when Celia, Kitty, and Seth went on to their Latin class at eleven, Ned tended to disappear for the next few hours, supposedly to eat his luncheon at the Zeta Psi fraternity house before he joined Laura at noon for their German class.

  Laura didn’t have the heart to tell Celia how often this meant that he either got a tardy for making it to the class late or didn’t show up at all. He did generally attend their last class of the day, the truncated Latin for the non-classics scholars, but that was only because Celia was always waiting for him when he got out of that class.

  The train slowed down for the first stop on the line, and two couples got on, the men with knapsacks on their back and the women carrying baskets. She speculated that they were going to take advantage of the return of sunshine after a blustery first couple of weeks in March to go picnicking in the hills behind campus.

  At the beginning of the term, Seth had talked about doing something similar on a Sunday, the only day either of them had off…maybe even hiring some horses so they could go up further in the hills, do some exploring. But he’d never followed up on the suggestion.

  They were both so busy…they barely had a moment to talk.

  For the past two months, neither of them seemed to be able to meet for dinner on Saturdays…either she was running home after work so she could have dinner with Annie, or he had some conflict or other. Sundays, he seldom made it to the boarding house for the mid-day meal anymore, and while he had shown up for some of the study sessions, she knew that Ned’s presence was a deterrent.

  That wasn’t the only way this term differed from last. Laura hadn’t foreseen how Celia starting at the university and Ned moving to live in the Zeta Psi fraternity house in Berkeley would change things. But it had, at least in subtle ways. First of all, Kitty and Celia had become fast friends. Only natural, given that they were both working towards the classics degree, so they had all four classes together. But every day, when Laura had to leave campus to make it to work on time, they would spend the rest of the afternoon together, either studying in the temporary library in South Hall or going to the Harmon Gymnasium Wednesdays and Fridays when it was reserved for women to use the equipment while the men marched around campus.

  And these afternoons also provided Kitty and Celia a chance to become better acquainted with other female students, something Laura found more difficult. Either she was rushing off to catch the train, or in the hours between classes, she was busy getting ahead on her work so she wouldn’t have too much to do when she dragged home from five hours of typesetting. This reminded her of why she hadn’t ever developed a closer relationship to Grace Atherton last fall. She hadn’t had the time or the opportunity.

  Even the evenings didn
’t turn out quite as she expected, either, because Celia usually went to Kitty’s house to have dinner and study until about nine. As a result, Laura usually made it back from work several hours before Celia arrived home. Not that Laura minded, she was glad of the time to herself. She did, however, feel disappointed that she hadn’t gotten to know Celia as well as she thought she would…sharing a room as they did.

  If she were honest, she was a little jealous of Kitty and Celia’s growing friendship. Or maybe she simply envied that they had time to develop that friendship. The only occasions for the three of them to socialize was on Fridays, when Kitty and Celia would join Laura at the Neolaean meetings so they could all three return to the city together. Yet, even then, she was so exhausted that she didn’t feel much like participating in their conversations.

  She didn’t even have the time or energy to cultivate friendships at work. Iris, her forewoman, was always asking her to go with her to the theatre or attend one of the parties that she frequently hosted in her apartment above the shop on the weekends. Laura almost always said, no, maybe another time. Truth was, she would prefer to stay in, spending her Friday or Saturday evenings after she was done studying, gossiping down in the kitchen, playing cards in the parlor with other boarders, or, best of all, keeping Annie company those evening when Nate had to work late, which happened with increasing frequency.

  She loved this time with Annie, but she did worry about her brother, who appeared to be single-handedly defending every woman in the city who was seeking a divorce while not giving up any of the routine bread-and-butter work of being a lawyer, like drawing up property deeds, wills, and articles of incorporation.

  Annie joked that this was his way of avoiding her increasingly grumpy moods as her belly rounded and her feet swelled. From Laura’s perspective, Annie’s attempts to remain even-tempered during these past months had been truly heroic. Mrs. O’Rourke was forever scolding her each time she didn’t finish a meal, Kathleen hovered around her every time she went up or down the stairs, and the boarder Mrs. Stein—as the mother of six and grandmother of countless grandchildren and therefore the resident expert—had cheerfully suggested that Annie’s rapid weight gain meant twins might be on the way.