by Nancy Horan
But what had been clear in September became fuzzy by October. After working six days a week at the girls’ seminary from seven in the morning to one in the afternoon, she often returned to her room to study Swedish until nine or ten at night. Translating some of The Woman Movement, Mamah discovered little of the excitement she’d found in other texts.
She was exhausted, distracted. And for the first time in months, she found herself questioning the trail of decisions that had led her to the tiny room at Pension Gottschalk. The longing for her children was almost too much to bear. At night she lay in bed, trying to recall the exact smell of Martha when she was a baby. What had it been? Lilac talcum? Milk on her breath? Mamah couldn’t conjure up the mix of smells she had so loved, but she could almost hear the sound of Martha’s chatter rippling down the hall from her crib.
And John at four. Coming in from outside, time and again, carrying his bug jar. “I am the daddy of this worm,” he’d announced once, then he’d taken it for a walk in his wagon. Another time he’d come up to her when she was standing in the living room, leaned in to her side, and said, “I love you as much as a bomb could explode.”
Awake at night in Berlin, she cried and laughed.
When sleep came, the children were in her dreams. The whorls of dark hair at the nape of John’s neck. The constellation of moles sprinkled across his back like the Little Dipper. She saw Martha’s small fingers wrapped around one of her own; the delicate indentation in her chin, the bottle-blue eyes. Regret filled her when she woke. Or sometimes terror. One night she saw John batting at a wasp’s nest while she looked down on him from a window she could not open. A particularly horrible nightmare came two nights in a row. John appeared to her and said, “A man is burying Martha in sand.” When Mamah tried to rise from her chair in the dream, her limbs wouldn’t move.
She began taking long walks, cutting through the zoological garden that lay like a wonderland between her pension and the heart of Berlin. She stood among the crowds of children in front of the animal cages, imagining John and Martha agog at the whimsical animal shelters where pelicans lived in a Japanese temple and antelopes in a Moorish house decorated with colorful majolica tiles.
When she wrote to Edwin begging him to allow Louise to bring the children for a visit, he responded with a swift no. His letter threw her into a downward spiral, but it was Lizzie’s letter in late September that put her at the bottom of a dark pit.
Dearest Mamah,
I write to you today with a hopeful heart that what I have to say will help you see the truth.
Frank Wright returned to Oak Park last week in his usual way, making a spectacle of himself. I am told he enlisted poor William Martin to collect him and his belongings at the train station, then came along Chicago Avenue like a politician on the 4th of July, waving his hat and calling out to anyone he saw on the street. It would almost be amusing were this family not part of the humiliating attention that has been stirred up by his return.
People who never spoke to me in the past about your situation have come forward recently. Did you know that when Frank Wright departed for Europe, he left Catherine Wright with a $900 grocery bill? I am told Catherine has been hounded by debt collectors of all kinds throughout his absence, including the sheriff. Now that he is back, the entire town believes Frank has returned to Catherine, because that is what he is telling people. Yet your letters give me no reason to believe you and he have parted ways. Can you possibly believe a man who behaves this way?
As for Edwin, he is mightily hurt. Yet I am convinced that if you saw your way back here, he would welcome you with open arms.
Contrary to what you wrote in your last letter, Mamah, people remember you for the good and kind person you are. They are more forgiving than you think.
Faithfully,
Lizzie
Returned from her outing to the police station, Mamah hung up her coat in the small wardrobe in her room and sat down at her desk. It was cold in the room and quiet except for the sound of a streetcar squealing around a corner.
She hadn’t known what to make of Lizzie’s letter. Frank had struggled financially in the past; it might be true about the grocery debt. But his money troubles never seemed to last, because work always came along. Now, though, he was trying to perform a miracle on a shoestring—restart his practice, get the portfolio printed—and he hadn’t had a new commission in a very long time.
The letter she had just mailed to Lizzie was as truthful as she could manage without admitting the gnawing doubts left by her sister’s words.
Dear Lizzie,
I cannot speak for Frank. I know him well enough to understand that his return in the manner you describe was the bravado of a man in great pain. His friends and clients have abandoned him. I deeply regret that you are suffering anew as a result of his return. Yet he is there because he is the sole provider for his family. Whatever his debts may be—I do not know of any “grocer’s bill,” but I suspect exaggeration in the remark made to you—he has returned to support his children out of loyalty and obligation.
And how can I not do the same, you may wonder. I struggle with this question throughout each day here. I cannot explain except to say that the pressing need continues to be that I be alone to study, to work as I can, to sort things out unaffected by Frank’s influence or, in truth, the influence of my own family. It is not a need that I welcome, but it does not go away.
This much I know: I can stay here because of you, my darling Liz. It would be impossible otherwise. This gift of time to strengthen myself away from judging eyes is the greatest of the many kindnesses you have showered upon me. I hold you to your word that you will wire me immediately if any emergency arises. I will be on the next ship. In the meantime, it is not lost upon me that my absence is an ongoing sadness for the children. You understand, as no one else seems to, that every day away from John and Martha is an arrow in my heart, knowing it is I who causes their pain. I know you are the one who sits with them as they compose their precious letters. I live for their arrival, and I thank you.
Your loving sister,
Mamah
In the letter to Lizzie, Mamah had revealed half her true situation. She was desperately lonely and nearly broke. She couldn’t afford decent stationery, using instead school paper cadged from the seminary to write the letter. She had holes in her shoes and would need a new pair by winter, though she hadn’t any idea where that money would come from. Thankfully, her winter things—two wool suits and a good coat—had held up. No one looking at her would guess her underwear was threadbare.
Living a spartan life was not so hard; Mamah embraced it. For the first time since Port Huron, she was self-reliant. She found pleasure in having a work schedule again, and in teaching the eager young women who wanted to be teachers themselves. Far more troubling than poverty were the panics that came over her in the morning when she woke to find herself in the rented room.
Then her heart tripped so madly that it frightened her. Had Frank gone back to Oak Park and realized how impossible their hopes were? Had he returned to the open arms of his children and regretted more deeply his absence? Mamah struggled to steady herself when the terror hit. She had doubted him two years earlier, when he’d obliged Catherine by giving her the year she’d asked for. But Frank had come back to Mamah then.
What assurances did she have that he would return to her this time? And if he didn’t, how could she fault him? She didn’t doubt that he loved her. She was certain he did. But he was human.
In her panics, she tallied the cost of what they had done. Two families ripped apart. The children hurt cruelly. Frank’s business wrecked. Her reputation so universally ruined that her prospects for self-support were nil if she returned. And all for what? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it was already over with in Frank’s mind. Maybe he felt as Mamah was beginning to feel—that the price for their relationship was too dear to continue paying.
She didn’t blame Frank. This was a self-imposed exile. Why di
d I feel so compelled to stay?
She got up from the desk, knelt beside the bed, and put her forehead down on the covers. She was not practiced at prayer anymore. The only word that came to mind was “please.”
For a long time she had believed that a gardener prayed when she dug a hole; that a carpenter prayed when he pounded a nail. Now that notion seemed the attitude of a naive and lucky person. In the past, it had felt wrong, given the tragedies in the world, to ask for her own problems to be solved. But she asked it now.
When a prayer came, she wasn’t surprised that it came as a poem, one she’d learned long ago.
If I stoop into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time; I press God’s lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
Her knees were stiff when she finally stood up. She went back to her desk to write the one letter she’d been so reluctant to compose. Sentences appeared on the paper so fast it was as if they had been waiting inside her fingers to trail out.
Ellen Key, most beloved Lady,
I have meant for some time to write to you and tell you just how important you are in my life. Before I attended your lecture in Nancy, I had met you as a true friend on the printed page. In fact, you have been a greater influence on my life than any other person except for Frank Lloyd Wright. You cannot imagine the light your words shed on me during the dark days before I met you. I shall never forget the brightness of your torch, the warmth of your companionship, as I struggled to follow a path I had come to fear was mine alone.
In truth, I struggle even now. I don’t know if I have the strength required to pursue this path of living freely and openly with the one real love of my life. Just now I feel as if the price may be too terrible for everyone involved if I continue on in this direction. There is only one thing certain. Your words will light my way and help me find the path I should pursue.
Your loving disciple,
Mamah Bouton Borthwick
October 28, 1910
CHAPTER 30
On Monday morning, when the headmistress stopped her in the hall outside her classroom, she grabbed Mamah’s wrist. The end of the ruse, Mamah thought. Something in her demeanor had undoubtedly raised the woman’s suspicions. Butterflies fluttered around her stomach when the headmistress stared intently at her. “Do you belong to a church?” she asked.
Mamah took in a quick breath. “I—”
“Because if you don’t, my church could surely use your services. We send volunteers over to a doss-house in the Wedding District on Sunday afternoons.”
“What do you do there?” Mamah felt the tension ebb.
The headmistress shrugged. “What we can.”
“You need a translator?”
“Yes.” The woman’s voice warmed a degree. “To write letters. It’s factory workers, you know. Poor. They all have long-lost cousins in America. That’s where they want to go.” She laughed. “They think all their problems will be solved if they can just get over to Minnesota.”
ONE EGG. A length of ribbon. An embroidered handkerchief. Pfeffernüesse. The items they brought were not gifts, Mamah realized, but barter for her services. By the middle of November, word was out on the street that there was an American woman at a doss-house in the neighborhood who would translate letters. The small lobby was usually full of people when she arrived. Whole families arrived together, debated over what to include in their letters, ate food they’d brought. The room smelled of cooked cabbage and soiled diapers. Small children toddled around, their noses running. Coughs hacked through the air.
All of them wanted their letters written in English, though they could have been understood in German by their recipients. It dawned on Mamah that many of these people couldn’t write in their own language and did not want to admit it. One woman would leave the table, and another would take her place. Often there was a girl of fourteen or fifteen in tow. During the first week, Mamah saw the pattern. These were the “domestics” who made any number of things possible for American women of a certain class: clean houses, meals, child care while they attended club meetings. The girls slept in attic bedrooms and sent home whatever they made.
“Wisconsin,” said the peasant woman who sat next to her daughter.
“Where in Wisconsin, Frau Westergren? Do you have the address?”
The woman took Mamah’s pen in her raw, knobby fingers and wrote out six letters. “R-A-C-I-N-E.”
“Is that all you have?” Mamah spoke in German. She’d just written a letter to the woman’s brother asking if her daughter might work in his house as a nanny or maid.
“Yes.”
“But you say you haven’t seen your brother in fifteen years. How do you know he’s alive? You can’t just send her over there without knowing.”
The woman pursed her lips. Mamah understood that she had stepped over a line. She examined the girl. All of fifteen, with a fifth-grade education, she was wan from her work as a spooler in a factory. The girl stared heavily at her lap. That a mother would catapult her only child two thousand miles across an ocean to the Wisconsin farm of a brother she didn’t know anymore was some measure of the woman’s desperation. Or hope.
“Then we shall send the letter to Mr. Adolph Westergren in Racine, Wisconsin,” Mamah said finally when it became apparent that the woman would not speak again. “Let’s just see what happens.”
The next day she asked the headmistress if she knew Frau Westergren. “Yes, I know which one she is,” she said. “And her daughter.” She shot Mamah a knowing look. “Illegitimate,” she said softly.
Mamah was ashamed she had thought ill of the mother. To have a love so great for her child that she would give her up—she was stunned by it. The girl was doomed to poverty in Germany. In America she stood a chance. She could reinvent herself.
MAMAH FELT BETTER when she came home from the doss-house. It was comforting to help people fling their hopes out into the ether on the long chance that something good would come back. And it did sometimes. Relatives occasionally replied, offering to sponsor them. One man, a bricklayer, found a Catholic parish in Chicago willing to employ him in building their new church.
She came to look forward to Sundays. The fusty smell of the tenements grew on her, and the occasional drunk urinating in the gutter ceased to rattle her. She arrived in the Wedding District curious to see what the day held.
One Sunday afternoon Mamah came home so exhausted she fell into bed without eating dinner. When she woke, she found herself still dressed in her street clothes and realized she had slept for nearly twelve hours. She rose and went to the window. Dawn was just breaking, the sun pushing pink veins through a sky that wanted to rain. Watching the light come up, she felt oddly hopeful. She was sick to death of uncertainty, weary of fear and remorse.
She missed Frank. He wasn’t a perfect man, but she loved him so deeply, she hardly knew how her body contained it. Someday, she was almost certain, they would look back on all this and say, Yes, it was harrowing, but it’s over, and we’re stronger for it.
There was another way it could unfold, though, and she forced herself to think of it. There were no guarantees. Frank might have already said goodbye to her. She could be drifting on an ice floe and just not know it yet.
What would she do if that were true? Edwin had not responded to her request for a divorce. If he would take her back, as Lizzie said, would she return to him? She tried to picture it, and she knew then and there that no matter how desperate she might be, she would never go back to Ed. That knowledge offered a strange comfort. She had left not only because of Frank but because her marriage had been all wrong.
Before Mamah came over to Germany, Mattie had said to her, “What will you do if Frank returns to his wife? You’ll have nothing.” But Mamah felt now that if that came to be, she had more than nothing. She had whatever it was inside herself that made her survive. The past few months had boiled he
r down to her very essence. All the rest, it seemed, had just floated away.
She had never believed, as Edwin did, that if a person simply acted happy, he would be happy. But it seemed futile to hang on to sorrow at this point. What good did it do anyone for her to continue grieving, as if it were the only proper emotion, given the situation?
Children need happy people around them. That thought alone was reason enough to let go of all the misery she had held on to. She resolved then that, come hell or high water, she would have John and Martha with her when she went back—for as much time as she could negotiate, beg, or steal.
As Christmas approached, Mamah bought gifts for the children from the vendors who set up booths along the streets. She chose a set of miniature painted soldiers for John and a small sapphire ring for Martha, to match her eyes. Mamah packed these and a few other wrapped toys into a parcel that she posted in mid-November.
In December Frau Boehm erected a towering Christmas tree in the parlor and strung garlands of fir and gilded nutshells throughout the house. For three weeks the fragrance of pine punished Mamah’s emotions. On Christmas Day, when the inmates of Pension Gottschalk sat down to smoked goose, she excused herself. She slipped out the front door onto Schaper Strasse and walked a few blocks up Joachimstaler Strasse toward Kurfürstendamm and the Café des Westens, where the evening could be passed uncelebrated among the Jewish artists.
CHAPTER 31
On a small platform stage at Café des Westens, a costumed woman stood motionless with her head bent, a flute to her lips, waiting for the room to quiet. Every table of the smoke-filled café was occupied. A standing throng leaned against the poster-papered walls, holding glasses of beer.