Mattie

by Judy Alter

  “If its chemistry, I would think you could do something about it, give her some medicine.”

  “Maybe someday we can, Mattie, but we don’t know enough about it now. Look how they treat most people in her condition. They lock them up like animals and claim it doesn’t make any difference to them. But she’s not an animal. She knows me, knows herself. I couldn’t lock her up.”

  “Of course not. We can manage.” I tried to sound confident.

  “Mattie, Mattie, what would I do without you?” He put an arm around my shoulder and hugged me, and I glowed with a kind of comfort and security that had been denied me all my life. Dr. Dinsmore and I filled a real need for each other.

  It wasn’t that I replaced Mama with him, but rather, obviously, he became the father I never had. Instead of Mama, who was at once parent and child, I had a parent, someone I could respect and model myself after. And he had a semiadult, someone who would listen and never, no not ever, criticize. I was so wrapped up in my new life and what I saw as my new status and position in the world that I barely even missed Mama and Will Henry.

  I did hear from them. They were settled comfortably in what they called a soddie. Strange to think I had no idea what a soddie was, me who lived a good portion of my life in one. It sounded dirty and nasty to me, and I didn’t see how Mama would ever get better. Truth was, that was the one topic missing from that letter. There wasn’t one word about Mama’s health, and the omission made me nervous, as it well should have. But I brushed that worry from my mind and went on with my new life.

  Mary Jane Canary continued to tease. “Living with a crazy lady, aren’t you?” Word had gotten around town, of course, about Mrs. Dinsmore. I suppose it was because Mrs. Evans never talked to us, but outside the house, had a tongue that wouldn’t stop. She was horrified by the noises Mrs. Dinsmore made and used to shake her head and cluck her tongue and mutter, making almost as much racket as the poor woman herself. But somehow, Dr. Dinsmore had helped me with Mary Jane, and I no longer paid attention. Vaguely, I felt some kind of pity for her, but it was a feeling I would not recognize for years to come.

  I guess we would have gone on like that a long time, although I had a growing feeling that we couldn’t, that something had to be done about Mrs. Dinsmore. I think he felt it, too, because each day he seemed more worried. But as he confessed again and again, he had no idea what to do.

  “I can’t put her in one of those places, Mattie, I can’t. But last night, she . . . when I took her a tray, she . . .” He sat at his desk, head sunk in his hands in despair.

  She had, as I had feared, tried to harm him by attacking him with a knife, making only a small scratch but trying hard to do him real harm. I wanted to go up and slap her. How dare she injure him? Didn’t she know he was special?

  “Why did she do it?” I asked incredulously.

  He shook his head sadly. “Who knows? I doubt she does. Maybe she wanted to leave her room. Maybe it was anger at me, maybe a combination of those things, but mostly, the act of a mind that’s lost touch with reality and is probably frightened. Maybe the violence came from her own fright.”

  Dr. Dinsmore knew at that point that it would happen again, and that someday he would have to do something. If he were a wealthy man, I am sure he would have hired a keeper for her, but there was not enough money for that.

  Mrs. Dinsmore solved it for us one day, or rather, one night. In spite of Dr. Dinsmore’s care, she found a way to damage someone—herself. With a bedsheet tied out the window, she hung herself from the second story of the house. I was always thankful Sara and I were spared the sight. Someone saw her early in the morning and alerted Dr. Dinsmore, who ordered us to stay in our rooms. By the time we were released, the body had been taken away and the house was crowded with people, all offering sympathy and trying to satisfy their curiosity.

  “Mattie, dear, you’re so strong and such a help to the doctor in this terrible time” . . . “You’ve been through so much, Mattie. First your poor dear mother, and now this” . . . “How, I mean, does anybody know why . . . ?”

  Finally I said to one curious lady, “Sorry, I think Sara needs me.” I scooped the child up and ran from the room, nearly colliding with Dr. Dinsmore, who was talking with the minister.

  “Terrible shame, just terrible. Don’t suppose there’s anything a man can do to prevent it in cases like this.”

  “Perhaps I should have put her into an institution, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, just couldn’t. Maybe this is all for the best.”

  “Oh, never, man, never must you say that. It’s a sin, what she has done, a terrible sin.”

  “She didn’t know sin from right, Reverend. I think she only wanted to be free of her torment.”

  The funeral was held the next day, instead of the customary three days later, and there was no large funeral party. Only a handful of people gathered around the gravesite as the reverend implored God to forgive her for she knew not what she did.

  I didn’t think Mrs. Dinsmore’s death would make as much difference in our lives as it did, except that we’d be spared that sense of a shadow looming over us and those awful noises she used to make. But I guess I was young and didn’t realize about hidden tension. Things changed dramatically around the Dinsmore house, almost immediately, and for the better. Dr. Dinsmore, my rock and my protector, became almost a playmate for Sara and me. It was as though he took a day or two to reconcile himself to the inevitability of what had happened, then shook off the past and determined to build himself a new life.

  “Come on, girls, what are you doing with your noses in books on a day like this?”

  “Sara was studying her ABCs, and I’m trying to finish—”

  “I don’t care what you’re trying to finish!” He said it with a laugh and grabbed The Last of the Mohicans right out of my hands. We’re going on a picnic.”

  “A picnic!” Sara squealed, running to Mrs. Evans to demand, “I want fried chicken for my picnic.”

  That grim lady, unlike her employer, had not reconciled herself to the death, and she said harshly, “You’ll get sandwiches of yesterday’s roast. I ain’t got no time to fry chicken.”

  But even Mrs. Evans couldn’t put a damper on our day, and soon we were loaded into the carriage, a picnic hamper of our own packing on the floor. Dr. Dinsmore drove way out into the country, or so it seemed, even though it probably was no more than two miles. We spread a blanket under a large oak tree.

  He and Sara wandered, picking wildflowers, while I unpacked the lunch of cold roast, carrot sticks, homemade bread (Mrs. Evans could make wonderful bread even if she was the sourest lady in all of Missouri!) and a chocolate cake which I had made in an effort to become domestic as well as widely read. It was all delicious except the cake.

  “A trifle dry, Mattie,” Dr. Dinsmore said carefully. “You’ll get better. Then again, maybe you won’t. Maybe you weren’t meant to bake and sweep and clean. You could learn medicine from me, you know.”

  I guess he planted the idea in my mind right then. Anyway, I didn’t answer, just stared off at Sara, who was playing with something in the grass. But my thoughts were on the future, because suddenly I saw a way out of the trap set by my childhood and background.

  “Sure,” I answered finally, trying to be casual. “I can learn medicine.” But I meant it seriously.

  After we ate, we all lay on the ground and listened while he told stories of his boyhood in Philadelphia and how he had come to be a doctor and why he had come out to Missouri to practice instead of staying back there even though doctors weren’t really well respected on the frontier. I was thrilled to my bones to hear of his early life.

  Mrs. Dinsmore had died at the beginning of summer, and for the three of us, it was a glorious summer, unkind as that sounds. Sometimes we went picnicking, sometimes Sara and I went on house calls with Dr. Dinsmore, and once we went fishing, though Sara was much better than I about getting a worm on the hook.

  “Have to get over that
squeamishness if you’re going to work with me,” he teased. “Got to develop a strong stomach.”

  I bit my lip and forced the wriggling, squiggly thing onto the hook, but I have never to this day liked fishing and don’t really like to eat fish. I think it all comes from that memory.

  When fall came, we settled more into a routine. Sara was six and off to school for the first year, and I was busy with high school. Unconsciously, I had somewhat taken over the running of the household, not that Mrs. Dinsmore had ever done much of it in recent years. But the doctor would ask me to check this or that with Mrs. Evans, and soon I found myself selecting what we would have for dinner for the coming week and reminding her that the rugs needed beating. To this day, I don’t know how I knew how to keep house, for certainly, in our little shack, Mama had never beaten the rugs—there were only two. I think that housekeeping knowledge was another gift to me from Dr. Dinsmore, a gift given so subtly I was never aware of it.

  We went on that way for three more years. Sara grew and flourished, an adorable and sweet child in whom I thought the sun rose and set. She filled the void left by Will Henry. When she was seven, she lost her first tooth, and I stitched her a small sampler about the tooth fairy, trying to remember all the fine stitches Mama had tried to teach me and doing a poor job of it. That was probably the last needlework I ever did in my whole life, except for emergency mending. My stitches were always clumsy and obvious, not fine and delicate like Mama’s, and because I didn’t sew well, it bored me. To this day, I’m a little suspicious of women who sew for the pleasure of it.

  But back to Sara. When she was nine, she broke her wrist. I remember it distinctly. I was more frantic than any mother could have been, alternating between wringing my hands and scolding her for unladylike behavior. If she hadn’t climbed that tree, she never would have fallen.

  “Mattie, Mattie. It’s unfortunate, but broken bones are often a part of growing up. And I’d rather she take risks and have fun than sit in a chair and never experience the world.”

  I looked doubtful. It was the first time that I was clearly aware that Dr. Dinsmore might not always be right, but I guess I didn’t know that he was thinking of his wife and the risks she never took, the narrowness of a constricted life that finally led to madness and suicide.

  Other incidents stand out more happily—Sara giggling with a little friend over a book they had sneaked from the library, Sara dressed for her first communion or riding the pony her father bought her for her eighth birthday. She had a wonderful childhood, and my teen years, which could have been awkward and miserable, turned wonderful because of her and her father. But inside, the whole time, I nursed a secret plan. I knew Sara would be grown one day, and I couldn’t be her nursemaid forever, but I knew what came next for me. The only question was, how?

  The death of my mother was the only blow that came to me in those years, but it was a major one. Mr. Reeves wrote the kindest of letters, explaining that she had simply continued to lose strength, and nothing he could do had revived her. He was, I remember sensing, even more heartbroken than I, and I felt sorry for him. He promised to keep Will Henry with him and said I had a home, too, any time I wanted it. He expected they would move from Kansas to Nebraska soon because he had heard the farming was good there, and he felt the need to move on to a place with fewer memories.

  I was a little angry that he would move and leave Mama buried alone in strange soil, but I knew enough to recognize that as an irrational thought and didn’t mention it when I wrote back. Neither did I mention the awful sense of guilt that tore at me because I had let my mother go without me, a sense of guilt that perhaps I never did work out the rest of my life.

  I thanked him for all his kindness and assured him that I was comfortably settled where I was and would remain in Princeton for years to come. I didn’t bother to tell him about my secret plan for the future, mostly because as yet I had no idea how I would implement that plan. It was a fantasy that I clung to tightly.

  Mama used to say to me that fate works in mysterious ways. That’s truly how it was when Dr. Dinsmore announced one day that he was moving to Omaha, where he had accepted a position with the new medical school. With my usual selfishness, I could not see beyond my own nose and saw, not possibilities, but closed doors in his announcement. It had happened to me once before—the family I loved had left me behind—and now it was going to happen again. He was moving to Omaha, and I would be left in Princeton, where I now had neither family nor friends and certainly no way of making my dream come true.

  “Mattie, aren’t you glad? Why can’t you say something?”

  “I’m sure you’ll be very happy there,” I said stiffly, my back straight and my face tightly set.

  “What do you mean, you’re sure I’ll be happy there? What about you?”

  I stared, silent, and a look of awareness broke on his face, followed by a grin. “You’re to go, too, you silly thing. Do you think Sara and I would leave you behind? I thought you’d be delighted. We’ll be at a medical school, a chance for you to learn more about medicine.” He paused, seeming lost in thought, though now I wonder if he wasn’t after a dramatic effect. “You could, you know, go to medical school.”

  I almost sagged with relief. Here was the key to my plan. Yet experience had taught me caution.

  “Women don’t go to medical school,” I said, testing him.

  He had anticipated my arguments and had his answers ready. “They do back East. I admit none has ever gone to the college in Omaha. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be the first.”

  “Me?” It was what I wanted, yet when it was presented to me, I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  “Yes, you. You could do it, Mattie. You’re a good student, you’ve got a background in medicine, at least a little from me. And you are interested, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” I admitted. “I really would like to be a doctor because, well, because there ought to have been some way that Mama didn’t need to die.” It wasn’t a new thought on the spur of the moment, but something I had been thinking about. If I had been trained, had more knowledge, would Mama have lived? She wouldn’t, but I didn’t know it back then. And in the back of my mind still was the thought that I didn’t tell him: Medicine was my way out of Princeton and poverty.

  “Good. It’s settled. I’ll sponsor you.”

  In those days it didn’t take much to get into medical school, not like today, and one of the surest paths was to get another doctor to sponsor you. There would, I thought, be no question of my admission to the next class, since I already had my high school training. With Dr. Dinsmore speaking for me, there would be no problems unless the school objected to women.

  He must have read my mind. “It’s time that school admitted women, started looking ahead. I’m going to change some things there, and you’re going to help me do it, Mattie. It’s perfect.”

  No, I didn’t feel like a tool he was using. I knew Dr. Dinsmore really did want what was best for me, and that, to his mind, was for me to be that first woman doctor, no matter what problems I faced. Of course, we hadn’t heard of Pygmalion at the time.

  Chapter Two

  Omaha was school to me. The two run together in my mind now, and I can remember little else. Oh, I remember we arrived by train from St. Louis, after an awful, long ride, and Dr. Dinsmore settled us in a two-story brick house, not as big as the one in Princeton but much more elegant, with walnut wainscoting in the downstairs rooms, little gas sconces that were decorated with brass, big, wide steps up to a grand front porch, and a window seat that Sara loved.

  Actually, Dr. Dinsmore only bought the house. I did the work of getting us settled, because he began his duties at the medical school right away. We moved in the late spring, when both Sara and I were through with school for the year, and that gave me the summer to settle us in. I knew enough about housekeeping, even without Mrs. Evans, to unpack dishes and clothes and put them away. You do what you have to.

  Omaha was a
surprise to me, just because Princeton had been so small. It was a big city, even back then in 1885, with office buildings, an opera house, real asphalt paving on the streets and an electric light company. Sara and I walked to Capitol Hill, where the Territorial Capitol was until they moved it to Lincoln in 1867, and we wandered past the Douglas House and the City Hotel, wondering about people who stayed in hotels and supposing they were very glamorous. We didn’t know that most of them were drummers, like Mr. Reeves had been, hawking their wares from one city to another in an existence that was anything but glamorous. We stayed away from the gambling houses, which were plentiful in those days, and from the huge, sprawling stockyards with their strong smells and bawling cattle. Sometimes we walked through residential sections, making up stories about the people we imagined lived in the houses. Omaha had its share of grand, big homes, and we made up equally grand, big tales about their owners.

  I made Sara work that summer, and she rebelled some.

  “Mattie, why do I have to sweep?” She pouted, leaning on the broom.

  I stirred the simmering meat too strongly in my impatience with her. “You have to sweep because there’s dirt on the floor, and I’m fixing dinner.”

  I didn’t realize Dr. Dinsmore had been listening from the doorway until he came into the kitchen with a soft “Bravo, Mattie, you’re finally being firm with her. Raising children doesn’t always consist of making them love you, you know.”

  I thought that one over while he watched me cut up potatoes and turnips for the stew. I guessed he was right. I’d grown into a role with Sara that grew out of the days when I was responsible for keeping her amused and happy, and I still tended to think that was my responsibility.

  “She needs more than fun,” he finally said. “If she is to grow into a lady we can like to have around, I suspect she needs discipline and order in her life. I won’t have time to give her all she needs.”