Scholarly Pursuits

by M. Louisa Locke

  “But Mrs. Stein says that as long as I am nursing, I will want the baby in the room with us. And that could be for at least the first six months, so there’s no rush. The crib we picked out today can go right next to the bed, if we move the bed up against the wall.”

  Annie waved at the large mahogany bedstead, then paused, wondering how Nate would then be able to get into bed if that were the solution. “Or better yet, I can move this old trunk up into the storage room and put the crib right at the foot of the bed.”

  “And where are you going to put the blankets and extra pillows you keep in that trunk? That’s my point, Annie. Even if you keep the baby in here at first, what about all the stuff we just bought? The extra baby blankets, the nightgowns and flannel wrappers, the swaddling bands, the frilly shirts, and those sweet matching caps and booties.”

  “But everything is so small! None of it will take up much room.”

  Annie hadn’t been able to get over how tiny all the infant clothing was, but the clerk at the Silver Strike Bazaar had assured them that everything a new-born infant would need came in the deluxe layette set she had purchased. The whole thirty-one piece set cost the outrageous sum of twenty-eight dollars, but it had included a cunning baby basket that had a comb and brush, a small toy, and a packet of safety pins that, if bought separately, cost four dollars.

  She put her hand on her stomach and felt the little sprout give a strong kick of approval. The crib they bought would be delivered this afternoon, as would the sheets and blankets and cotton mattress, which the clerk recommended as far more sanitary than the horsehair mattress. There had been several cribs to pick from, including iron cribs that were advertised as modern and hygienic, as well as a kind of hanging cradle that Laura had quite fallen in love with. After much discussion, Annie ultimately chose a plain wooden crib that was quite reasonable in price.

  She just hadn’t been convinced that a baby wouldn’t try to chew on the iron model and end up with white paint in its mouth, and Mrs. Stein had said she knew of a great recipe for wood polish for furniture that wouldn’t upset a baby’s stomach if ingested.

  Annie had considered inviting Mrs. Stein to come shopping with her. But the older woman, with her numerous children and grandchildren, had almost too much advice to give. Recently, after every encounter with the Steins, who had the two-room suite across the hall, Annie felt more and more anxious. Mrs. Stein would inundate her with suggestions on how she needed to prepare for the blessed event, emphasizing that Annie had no idea how her life was going to change once the baby came.

  In turn, Mr. Stein kept talking about the unexpected expenses of raising a family—the cost of food, clothing, medical expenses. This was the last thing that Nate needed to hear. As it was, he was working himself to death, trying to build up a reserve of savings, so that Annie wouldn’t feel she had to go to work immediately after the baby arrived.

  She had hoped to get Nate to come with her on this shopping trip, but he had canceled twice this month because of work, and she didn’t feel she could wait any longer. She believed the idea that a woman should never go out in public when she was pregnant was archaic. Nevertheless, she didn’t like the feeling that people were staring at her, and soon, even if she wore her long cape, her condition would be hard to hide. Besides, just the effort of climbing in and out of a hansom cab today was not a pleasant experience. Getting around would only become more difficult in the next two months. As a result, she’d jumped at the chance to get Laura to come with her. The younger woman’s enthusiasm for the expedition had really helped make the morning a pleasant experience.

  Laura continued to prowl around the bedroom, opening the drawers in the mahogany dresser and saying, “You don’t have enough space in here for both your and Nate’s things, much less for all the clothing that a baby will eventually need. Didn’t you see all the diapers, blankets, bibs, bonnets, and such that Violet had when we were at the ranch over Christmas?”

  “I assure you that we will be fine. I’m sure that Kathleen will figure out where everything should go.”

  “No, Annie, I am determined. I know Celia hopes to get a job on campus helping with the library move this summer, so she should be able to find an inexpensive room in Berkeley once the rest of the students have gone home. Once Celia has moved out, you can store extra things in my dresser, close to hand. After the baby comes, if Nate needs a good night’s sleep, say right before a big court trial, you and the baby can come in with me. I will tell Celia this weekend…if she is speaking to me by then.”

  Annie knew about Sunday’s altercation with Ned, but as she listened to the note of relief in Laura’s voice, she realized that Laura really did want Celia to move out. Making way for the baby provided a good excuse.

  She walked over to the rocker, sat down, and put her aching feet up on the footstool, sighing with relief. “Laura, is there something more going on between you and Celia? Do you want to ask her to leave before the term is over?”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t do that. I think that the knowledge she will be leaving soon will help, though. I hate to say this, but sometimes she reminds me of Violet! Horrid thing to say, I know. But she refuses to see how badly Ned treats her, and it gets on my nerves. She doesn’t even seem to notice the constant little slights all of us women on campus have to endure. At least Kitty readily admits that most of the professors don’t call on us as often as they do the men or do anything to reprimand the boys in the back of the class who try to drown us out with laughter when we do answer a question. Kitty says there’s nothing we can do about it, and as long as we do well on our papers and exams, we don’t have anything to worry about. Celia…well…she says that I am looking for slights where there are none.”

  “At least she doesn’t agree with Violet about a woman’s right to a higher education or she wouldn’t be at the university,” Annie said. “From the few conversations I’ve had with her since she moved in, it does look like she comes from a pretty traditional family. It must have taken some gumption on her part to resist the natural assumption she would stay home and take care of the rest of the family when her mother died.”

  “You are perfectly correct, Annie. I need to have more respect for what she has achieved. And she has five brothers. If they are at all like Nate and Billy, they have probably given her a good deal of practice ignoring a man’s teasing.”

  “My dear, I hope you know that even though Nate gives you a hard time, he is enormously proud of your determination to pursue a degree.”

  “Oh, Annie, I know that. And I really wouldn’t be as upset by the way some of the male students treat us women, if I didn’t know how that sort of behavior was used as a weapon against Julia Beck and Grace Atherton. The three years I spent at San Jose Normal were so different, so I know that relations between male and female students don’t have to be so hostile.”

  “Why do you think it was so different at San Jose?”

  “I’ve thought a lot about this. Even wondered if it would be a good approach to take for my essay for Royce. The most obvious difference was the fact that women predominated there because the goal was to prepare you for teaching, and the vast majority of teachers in the state are female. I think women made up over eighty percent of the student body and at least half the teaching staff. I suppose that some of the male faculty and students, like Ned Goodwin, might have secretly thought women were inferior—fit only for a motherhood or a teaching career. However, they would have been fools to express that opinion in public.”

  “What is the ratio of male to female students at Berkeley?”

  “Pretty much the opposite. I got the enrollment numbers from the Registrar’s office. Only twenty percent of the total student body are female this year. And of course, none of the professors are women.”

  Anna tried to imagine what it would be like to spend her days on a campus where men were such a visible majority. She said, “I went to an all-female academy, so I don’t really have a sense of what it would feel like to be o
ne of only a couple of women walking into a classroom with fifty male eyes staring at me.”

  “It’s uncomfortable. Thank goodness, there are six of us freshmen taking the literary classes. I would hate to be one of the four seniors, taking one of the upper division electives. You could end up the only female in the room.” Laura frowned. “You know, I never thought about what it would be like for a male, like Seth or Ned, to walk into a class filled with females the way they had to do at San Jose. I wonder if they felt as uncomfortable as we do at Berkeley?”

  “Why don’t you ask Seth?”

  Laura smiled. “I suspect the discomfort Seth felt was being closed up in a classroom with a bunch of immature boys. I don’t see him giving a hoot about what the other students, male or female, thought of him. I bet that Ned hated it, though. And now that I think of it, he’s a lot more patronizing to all of us women, not just Celia, since he became part of the dominant majority.”

  Annie nodded. “When you think about the faculty, most of them probably got all of their education, after primary school, in male-only institutions. Just think of Nate’s history. He went to Boy’s High, then Western Reserve, which didn’t have any women at that time. Next he got his law degree from the all-male Harvard and went right to an all-male law firm. I suppose I should thank you, the feisty little sister he adored, for any degree of enlightenment about women he showed when I first met him.”

  “I would say that my brother is lucky you are a forgiving individual, seeing the way he’s been reverting to his old habits these last few months. I swear, if you don’t watch out, he’s going to start patting you on the head and calling you little mother.”

  Annie smiled, thinking of what Laura would say if she knew what happened the very first time Annie and Nate met, but she’d promised she would never reveal that particular secret to his sister. Although, if Nate didn’t stop treating her as if having a baby growing inside of her had turned her into some fragile doll, she might go back on that promise.

  I have enough fears of my own about the coming ordeal.

  She’d overhead Kathleen telling Mrs. Stein about what she remembered when her mother died during childbirth…and how the baby had died as well. And it seemed like every one of her female clients, once they learned of her “interesting condition,” wanted to tell her, in excruciating detail, some horrific experience they or a loved one went through when they were brought to bed. A couple of them had strongly recommended she find a physician who would put her under right away with chloroform, or at least get a doctor who would be willing to use forceps early in the delivery. Her physician, Dr. Brown, said that neither putting her to sleep nor using forceps, except as a last resort, was a healthy way to deliver a child. She had to have faith in her.

  “Annie, I should let you rest; you look tired. I need to start doing some work on those poetry books Caro Sutton loaned to me, take advantage of these couple of hours before I need to go to work. Shall I go down to the kitchen and ask Kathleen to bring you up lunch, first?”

  “Yes, please do. Is this for the possible paper topic you want to present to Sanders? The professor you suspect might have something to do with what happened to Miss Atherton?”

  “Yes, we were curious about why she changed her essay topic for the literary society from female poets to public ethics. Caro found a copy of an anthology of female poets among Grace’s books, and then Alice Pratt, the senior I told you about who rooms with Julia Beck, loaned her a volume of Sanders’ poetry. I thought it would be interesting to look at them both, then I could tell Sanders I want to compare poems by men and women and mention that I had gotten the idea from my friend Grace. See how he reacts.”

  “Sounds innocuous enough. But do be careful.”

  Laura hoped that Annie would take a nap after lunch. She’d looked so worn out. Nate was a fool not to see that what his wife wanted during these last months of pregnancy was his presence, not the money he made. She’d been so nice about thanking Laura for coming with her, but she knew Annie would have preferred to have Nate by her side, not his little sister, as she picked out cribs and decided whether cotton mattresses were superior to horsehair. Nate would say that he had no expertise in any of those sorts of domestic matters. But if what Annie wanted was expertise, she would have chosen Mrs. Stein to accompany her, not Laura, who had no more experience than her brother.

  Well, Annie and Nate would work things out. They always did.

  For now, she needed to finish looking through the book Female Poets of America that had belonged to Grace to see if she could figure out why Grace had abandoned this topic—or what Grace meant by the cryptic note that said, “Check Sanders,” that Caro had found in this book.

  She had started paging through the volume this morning before the shopping trip with Annie and discovered that someone, she assumed Grace, had put very light pencil marks along the page margins. She quickly determined that these pencil marks indicated words and phrases that then appeared in the back of Grace’s notebook for Sanders’ class. Laura thought these must have been possible themes that Grace was exploring for her essay for the Neolaean Society meeting.

  If Laura actually wrote a paper for Sanders’ class, she would probably create a similar index, although she suspected she would choose slightly different key words than Grace had chosen. Grace appeared to have been focusing on explicit religious imagery, not something of much interest to Laura. What she was interested in was refuting the stupid argument the editor of this compilation of female poets had made in his preface. Rufus Wilmot Griswold had written: “…it does not follow that, because the most essential genius in men is marked by qualities which we may call feminine, that such qualities when found in female writers have any certain or just relation to mental superiority.”

  The man seemed to be arguing that if a woman wrote something flowery, it was ordinary, but if a man did the same thing…he was a genius! This reminded Laura of the argument made by the San Francisco school board when they slashed teachers’ salaries in half, saying that women who were excellent teachers were not doing anything extraordinary because they were only doing what came naturally to any woman. But a man who was an excellent elementary or primary school teacher should be rewarded by being given a job with better pay and more prestige—like being the school principal.

  While she knew Caro would hate that argument, it wasn’t clear that Grace would have felt the same way. Caro had mentioned several times that her cousin tended to accept the idea that women should be granted greater access to education, even be given the right to vote, not because they were equal to men, but because they would bring a unique morality to that environment.

  But arguing in her mind with Grace or Rufus Griswold wasn’t going to solve the puzzle of what, if anything, this essay topic had to do with Sanders falling off his pedestal in Grace’s eyes. She needed to get to work, take advantage of having her bedroom all to herself.

  After a few more minutes looking through the book of women’s poetry, Laura came to something that did seem to be promising. The biographical introduction of two sisters, Alice and Phoebe Carey, mentioned that they lived outside of Cincinnati. And Grace had put a penciled exclamation mark next to that fact. This made sense because Sanders had made no secret of the fact that he’d grown up in Ohio. Who knows, he might have even known these two women. Maybe that was what the note was about.

  Laura settled down to read the sisters’ poetry. If the pencil marks were any indication, Grace had found a good number of their religious themes of interest. There was one poem about the minister George Burroughs, famous for being martyred as part of the Salem witch trials. Another had the title “Two Missionaries.” Wasn’t Grace’s ultimate goal once she had completed her degree to become a missionary? Could Sanders have disparaged this as a career when they talked about this poem? That certainly might have upset her.

  After finishing this section on the Carey sisters, she decided to give herself a break and look at the volume of Sanders’ poems, enti
tled The Cloister and earlier poems. Laura had already checked, and the Berkeley library had two copies of this volume. The librarian, Joseph Rowland, confirmed that Grace had told him about her plan to write about women poetesses and that he’d seen that Sanders’ volume was one of the books she was consulting.

  The introduction to this volume indicated that these poems were from Sanders’ early years. It was her understanding that he had written a lot more since then, but he was concentrating on getting them into national magazines. She decided she would first start looking at the poems with titles that sounded like they had religious themes.

  As she looked through the table of contents, she had to laugh. Except for one poem he wrote called “The Martyr,” which sounded vaguely religious, all the rest seemed to be about nature. There were poems about rain, snow, wind, mountains, valleys, and numerous flora and fauna. As she turned the pages to find the “Martyr” poem, she thought about Sanders being part of the group who went camping the weekend Willie died. Certainly no one would have thought twice about his presence, but it would be interesting to see if he, or any of the other people like Reverend Mason, had joined at the very last minute…like after Willie had his conversation with Caro.

  She found the poem she was looking for near the beginning of the volume and started to read it, looking to see if she could see any similarities or differences between his treatment of the subject and Alice’s treatment of Burroughs. She didn’t recognize the import of what she was finding until she had made it to the third stanza. She reread Alice Carey’s poem, then slowly reread Sanders’ poem, and by the end she had found at least six places where Theodore Sanders and Alice Carey had used the exact same words and phrases in their two poems.

  This has to be what Grace discovered! No wonder he’d fallen right off of his pedestal! The question is, did she confront him over this possible case of plagiarism, and if so, would it have been damaging enough to motivate him to organize the fraternity harassment against her?