One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  When she is particularly taxed or tired, Daisy tends to get pale and teary, and then she has to rest immediately or she gets the sweats or female troubles, which she treats with Electric Bitters.

  March 14, 1914

  Dear Jerry,

  Well happy birthday and many happy returns! Your nice letter came two weeks ago and as Mother is in bed with another heart attack, I’ll answer. She fainted after church meeting and has been in bed three days this time and I have been nearly wild with cooking meals, carrying trays & etc.—and then my concert Sunday afternoon at the new concert hall, I was nearly beside myself. Sunday morning Mother no better so Mrs. Sayer said she would stay. So suffering from extreme exhaustion, I went to sing. We had a crowded house both concerts and I had so many curtain calls that finally Mr. Daseli had to call a halt. Helen & her husband sent me gorgeous roses about three dozen and took me to dinner at the Windsor Room afterwards, but I was so weak they were afraid I’d faint before my food arrived. Eloise Ketchum told Mr. Daseli she considered me one of the very finest artists of the Twin Cities. I finished the program with “A Spirit Flower.” Do you know it?

  My heart was frozen, even as the earth

  That covered thee forever from my sight.

  All thoughts of happiness expired at birth.

  Within me naught but black and starless night.

  All shimmering like to silver butterflies,

  They seemed to whisper softly thy dear name.

  Can you see why my voice cracked when I thought of poor Papa and I wondered for a moment whether I would finish?

  Virginia Winterbourne, Dr. Winterbourne’s eldest daughter, accompanied me on the piano, she is a dear and musically talented to her backbone. I have taken her on as a voice student on the insistence of her father and hope to inspire her to become more well-rounded artistically. That makes four students I have. I teach them in the parlor and it is difficult at times because Mother’s attacks come at unpredictable times and then she rings the bell by her bed and I must run tho I am giving a voice lesson. I must remind myself at those times to pray for greater patience for, after all, how much longer will Mother be with us and this is the time for me to refine my character and complete my preparations for a Musical Career.

  Carlton and an actress (!) came by auto a few days ago and stayed to supper. He says he has three good investments for my money but I wonder when I will see a nickel. Oh! he is a dreamer I fear, and poor Ruth and the little boys.

  This is four heart attacks Mother has had in two months. She says she hopes to be all right and not to worry. She says to tell you this one was like the attack she had in church that time when she fell over.

  At first she didn’t want me to tell you, thot it might worry you & you would come home even if you couldn’t afford it, but tonight she thinks I had better tell you. Well now, Jerry, I just can’t begin to tell you how much I admire your character, the way you are carving out your life in grand and distant country, and of course your example helps me too.

  Your loving sister,

  Daisy Lou

  In those days, the term described a variety of occurrences in the heart region—the big seizing killers, but also flutterings, transitory nips, even just a vague leaden wrongness that could settle in the solar plexus for hours or days, refusing to lift or move on. Heart attacks of one kind or another had become as familiar to Mattie as her children. “My heart attacks,” she called them. “These pesky heart attacks.” They could put her to bed for an afternoon, a day, the better part of a week.

  Daisy Lou in 1914. Her audiences loved her. The Schubert Club, the Minnesota Club, the various churches in Saint Paul and even beyond were constantly requesting her. She had a way of making the familiar seem insightful because she sang as if she were discovering something instead of insisting on it. Eventually that quality would become stylized in her, but during her twenties she was able to seem freshly amazed whenever she sang.

  She was something of a chatterer in conversation and used her hands to whisk the words away. When she sang, she used her hands too, though in a more conscious way, as if she were drawing a picture.

  She took Italian and French lessons in Minneapolis on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. And then there were her voice students and three new piano students as well. Her own voice she kept at its best by daily practice. She sometimes sang the vocal prologue at a movie theater and took part from time to time in big recitals, like the one at the Art Institute in which the Ensemble of Fourteen from the Little Symphony Orchestra of Minneapolis played and then Daisy Lou sang three songs with piano accompaniment—“Iris,” “The Spirit Flower,” and “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden.”

  Often, her day would be so busy that Daisy wouldn’t find time for her own voice practice until the hour before she started the evening meal for her mother and herself. Then she might position herself near a curtained window in the silvery old house, her hands folded in the concert position and pressed lightly to her midriff. Occasionally, as she sang, she reached up to touch a forefinger to the hinge of her jawbone, making sure she had created the hollow that ensures proper resonation.

  The sun through the curtains burnished the outlines of her slim figure. She looked gallant and solitary. Her voice was sweet, but it sometimes wavered a little, just on the edges.

  The residential streets weren’t paved yet, and the wheels of buggies and phaetons and Fords released clouds of dust, making the late-afternoon light, sometimes, as filmy and golden as we imagine it now.

  Jan. 4, 1915

  Dear Jerry,

  Mother and I thank you and Vivian and little Francis for the lovely box of Christmas presents. Mother loves her pretty hankies and the stationery set for me is dear. We had the Ketchums and Winterbournes to punch and cookies, and Vivian’s fruitcake “brought the house down.”

  My most promising voice student is Virginia Winterbourne. Did I mention her before? She is fifteen, a young lady now and has a lovely natural voice, tho she don’t know the proper way to use it. She also has a reckless temperament which makes me despair that she will develop a well-rounded artistic approach and the necessary discipline. Oh! it is a challenge. She is a dear tho. I invited her to a lecture on Culture at the College Club and she said afterward that she had never heard anything so inspiring and she was grateful she had me for a teacher and gave me a hug. She is very impulsive, and I only hope I can guide her according to the best lights.

  Your loving sister,

  Daisy Lou

  Mattie outlived her own doctor, Virginia’s father, who was not an old man and was in fact a perfect example of the heavy-bellied, bully look that was taken to mean physical health in the early part of the last century. Spiritual health too, for all those predestinationists. Your eternal fate might be decided against you, they knew, but if you looked well-fed and prosperous on earth, that was a grand and godly hint in your favor. (The ragamuffins swarming in from Europe, many noted, looked wildly unsaved.)

  In actual fact, the robust Dr. Winterbourne smoked black cigars and wheezed like an ancient walrus on his sweaty bedcovers, and he departed this earth one morning in a brief noisy rush.

  His successor was a disturbing young physician named Daniel Sheehan.

  On Sheehan’s first visit, Daisy took note that he was quite handsome and wore no wedding ring. She had begun to automatically scan the left hands of young men she met—though, of course, many married men are ringless—because she hadn’t had much luck finding a beau and her school friends were getting married right and left. Marriage wasn’t Daisy’s goal—she considered herself an artist, a keeper of the sacred flame—but she would have liked an opportunity to say no. At the very least, she would have liked an escort. She would have liked to dine after her recitals with someone besides her friends and their husbands. She had a sense of missed signals—that something about beaus, and fiancés, and, for that matter, men in general had been made clear to her friends and contemporaries in a way that did not include her. Sh
e could not understand the casual way they got married. It seemed to her like sitting down to dinner at a friend’s, then inexplicably promising to stay there the rest of your life.

  In the mid-teens of the century, Daisy was still girlish and pretty. She had a willowy figure and delicate hands and an air of purpose, of severity even, that went well with her piquant face.

  Though she was curious about Dr. Sheehan—he seemed instantly mysterious—her manner with him was identical to her manner with most other young men. She practiced a stylized coquetry, which has the opposite effect of what it seems at first to intend. The recipient soon knows that it is not directed in any real way at him. The motions of it are like accidental punctuation. You notice it, but it means nothing, alters nothing. Even the rapid little gestures that referred other eyes to her body—the impatient flick of a crumb off a sleeve, an overattentive straightening of a blouse cuff—all those gestures seemed to pass through a screen that neutralized them of real intent. In this way, Daisy kept herself single.

  As she moved through her twenties, she thought herself to be in love from time to time, but the object was generally someone who was not possible. He turned out to be married or to have an unsatisfactory character, habits of drink or gambling, for instance.

  When America joined the World War, she sometimes pretended she was in love with a handsome young man who had gone off to Europe to be killed; to be stopped forever in his firm and glossy youth, eternally desirable and out of reach. That is not such an odd fantasy for an artist, after all. Artists are yearners. She made him up and then she killed him, so he would be with her, perfect, forever.

  July 1, 1916

  Dear Jerry and Vivian and little Francis and Maudie,

  My but we are having a heat wave like you would find hard to believe. Baking must be done before midmorning or it is no use trying to stay in the kitchen. I would prefer no baking at all, of course, but the Ensemble of Fourteen has its ice cream social at Furness Park this weekend and we must all bring goodies. I made Midge Ritter’s famous Lemon Swirls and they are delicious if I may say so myself.

  Virginia Winterbourne, the girl who usually accompanies me on the piano, has her own voice solo this year at Aberdeen Hotel’s musicale. I perform too, of course, so have had to find another accompanist. Virginia has been my star student for several years now, and she has grown in so many ways that she is a regular young lady, tho still flighty. I worry so about her. We have developed a friendship and are very congenial most of the time, tho she is very headstrong, more since her father died, and doesn’t practice her music as she should. Virginia and I plan to hear John McCormack in Chicago together in two weeks’ time. We shall go by train. I am so looking forward to it.

  I pray for Virginia daily, as I do for you and Vivian and the kiddies, and for Mother, especially during this recent trouble with Carlton. Oh! it pains me to even think about it much less commit it to paper, but here goes. Sunday, note from Carlton to say he is delivering my money at long last. “Investments have yielded return.” Tuesday no Carlton. Wednesday, he shows up in a new Hudson Town Car, fawn-colored with luxury tires! Well! you could have knocked me over with a feather. I knew when I set eyes on it that it was my money from Papa right before my eyes! And of course I wasn’t wrong, tho Carlton says I will have it within three months and that he needed a new car to show his business clients they were not wrong to put their trust and their money with so fine and secure a fellow!!! He says he expects a promotion from home office in a month maybe and then my money will be handed over in a lump sum. Meanwhile, he says I am making a needless fuss because Mother has said she will send me to auditions in New York if that is what I feel I must do. I do, but I will never take her old-age money to do it. I will go with my own money or not at all, which Carlton knows perfectly well and so he is just keeping me in St. Paul indefinitely with his tricks. Oh! he is a rogue.

  I wish you were here to advise me how to deal with him. Mother is no help because of her attacks which are more frequent with the heat. Dr. Sheehan has been here three evenings in the past two weeks to check her and adjust her medication. He is very well-dressed but I sense something tragic about him. Mother says it’s only his eyes, which are different from one another, one wide open, one squinting. She says eyes that don’t match are no reason to suspect tragedy and she is probably right. I do know he is unhappily married.

  Well, I think of you in your frontier town and try to imagine all that space and grandeur and those cool breezes too! It must feel wonderful, at the end of a long day, to watch the sun sink behind the purple mountains and know again that you are part of a grand American enterprise. Yes you are! And I admire you for it.

  P.S. Do you have Christian Scientists in Cut Bank? I met a lovely woman two weeks ago who is a Christian Scientist and we talked for two hours after the lecture at the St. Paul Institute. They believe that the limitations of our mortal state can be overcome if we come to understand our true spirit nature, and I am inclined to agree. I am coming to know that I have unconventional, unorthodox religious tendencies, which doesn’t surprise me a bit with my sensitive temperament.

  P.S. again—Mother’s birthday is the 24th, so I’m sure you won’t forget to send her a greeting. She misses you sorely and says, I only hope I am not taken unexpectedly without seeing Jerome and my grandchildren, and of course she includes Vivian too. She would make the trip to Montana, but Dr. Sheehan advises against it in this heat and with her heart.

  Your loving sister,

  Daisy Lou

  From the beginning there was a shadow attached to this Sheehan. Rumors that he drank spirits; that his wife had been seen weeping or was too pale; that he accepted German immigrants as patients. Within weeks of his arrival in Saint Paul, it was remarked upon that the young doctor was sometimes noticed sitting by himself after evening rounds in the hospital ward where the sickest patients were. The ones who were very quiet. He simply sat there on a wooden bench, very quiet himself, sometimes with his eyes closed.

  Daniel Sheehan was at that time a lanky man in his early thirties, dressed so impeccably and conventionally that his clothes seemed a conscious antidote to the edginess that showed itself in his wild shock of black hair, his parson’s forehead, and the eyes that looked unmatched in a way that often belongs to people apart.

  One fact about the natty and troubled Daniel Sheehan was that the chaos and noise of his daily life had come to seem intolerable to him. Everything seemed to conspire to bowl him over with sound. The screech of the baby, the sharp scolding exhausted voice of his wife, the ringing metallic sounds of the hospital.

  Another truth was that he did not love his wife. Did not even like her and could not remember why he had promised to go to the death with her. Could not remember himself as he was when he made that terrible vow.

  Another fact: He was addicted to morphine. His wife would realize later that she had never seen his arms in the daylight without sleeves. He was a controlled and knowledgeable person, and so he timed his injections and remained mindful of dangerous doses and the necessity of masking the symptoms of bliss.

  He was not ashamed. He had the addict’s grandiosity, which says that a drug in the bloodstream does not represent a weak person’s intolerance for pain; it represents a strong person’s willingness to look honestly at real pain, to acknowledge the terrifying whimsy and heartbreak of this life. No fully conscious person could do that unaided. Morphine aided. It was his shield against the sad and answerless. He could either acknowledge the sadness, see it, and take morphine. Or he would have to seal himself off, become sober and not care. He felt he had made the nobler choice.

  When did he put the needle into his arm? On occasion. Not daily. But regularly. Often at dusk on the evening before another doctor took night duty. When newborns weren’t due. Then he would lock himself in his office, which was next door to the hospital, and he would lovingly and ritualistically prepare the needle, lovingly wipe his arm with alcohol, tenderly press the veins. Take his ti
me.

  He would take a deep breath and insert the needle, gently press the drug into himself, withdraw the needle, apply the cool-hot burn of alcohol on a wad of cotton and close his eyes.

  The feeling was one of utter well-being and warmth. A person who loved him beyond all telling had wrapped him in a fleecy warm blanket and insisted that he never worry about anything again. That he had done all he could and it was enough and the deeper secret of life ran joyous beneath its tragic and stupid and jarring surface. Now he could float down there for a while where it was sweet and real.

  Sometimes, at this point, he took himself to the death ward next door. He went to the ward and sat with the people he and others had been unable to help. It was all right. It didn’t matter. All was understood.

  5

  ON THE day Vivian and Jerry were married, the long tablecloth flew up at the corners, ladies grabbed for their big hats, a hawk floated across the sun, a meadowlark on a fence post made a sound like gurgling water.

  Everything moved then.

  The stars spiraled and the moon stalked the sky beyond all hearing.

  Rippling flax like blue water. The howl and clatter of the trains and their cargoes of the disembarking—it all moved. Raw little buildings sprouted overnight.

  The galloping sun stirred the air. Everyone was young and they moved with the quick bright motions of young people. Each day leaped up new.

  In 1915, the rains didn’t come.

  In 1916, the Russian thistle—those tall purple stalks Vivian had tended like flowers—spread like prairie fire, grabbing moisture and soil from the wheat, mocking it with their fat nodding flowers. That was the second rainless summer.

  And then a third. Stunted scorched wheat during the World War, when prices were higher than they’d ever been.