Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  Between the friendly insurance man and the inscrutable Farleys lived the Millers, a middle-aged couple with a single child, a girl just about Mary’s age, which was then about seven. Sallow, thin little Bessie wasn’t much to look at, but her parents loved her dearly. They must, Mary realized later, have found the contrast between their lone chick and her rosy, chubby, energetic playmate something of a trial. The father, called Clem, was a Civil War veteran, one of many in the area at that time. Somehow, he had survived not only the Confederate bullets but also near starvation in dreaded Andersonville Prison. He’d even learned in that hellhole how to play the banjo, but the songs Mary heard him strumming were all sad ones.

  There was also an Aunt Norah, who suffered dreadfully from asthma and made noises that were hard to bear. To get away from all this melancholy strumming and wheezing, the two little girls invaded the Robertses’ shed, where the hydrant stood and where Cornelia kept her washtubs. Outside of having to vacate the shed on the days when Mrs. Klotz came to do the laundry, they were free to play house as they chose. They scrubbed the splintery wooden floor, they bedded their dolls down in the washtubs and treated them for imaginary ailments, got them up and gave them dolls’ tea parties.

  Then one day Bessie didn’t come out to play. She was sick in bed, and Mary was not to go near her. Mary never did see Bessie again; she watched in tears from an upstairs window as the little coffin was taken out of the house to the hearse waiting outside. But children have to get on with their own lives. Regrettably, Mary was not thinking about her long-ago playmate a dozen years later when she happened to plan her wedding for the same April date on which Bessie had died. Mrs. Miller never spoke to her again.

  Being a child was a dangerous business in those days, full of pitfalls that nobody even knew existed. There was, for instance, the river. Floods were almost routine in the springtime, there where the Allegheny and the Monongahela roared into the mighty Ohio with their waters swollen by melting snow and April rains. Floods could even be fun. During the epochal Pittsburgh flood of 1884, Tom Roberts, correct as always in his high white collar and high silk hat, took his family for a little cruise, rowing them right through his Sixth Street office from the front door to the back.

  Their own house stood high and dry above the floodplain but Mary knew well enough how the poor people in the cheap-rent district along the riverbank dealt with the yearly inundation. Even if The Case of Jennie Brice were not a splendid mystery, the book would be worth reading for Mary’s descriptions of life along the river in floodtime: the widowed boardinghouse keeper calmly taking up her carpets and moving the kitchen stove up to the back bedroom, mooring her rowboat to the newel post as the water flowed in through her front door, tying it higher up the banister as the floor continued to rise, finding it gone when the Good Samaritan arrived in his own boat loaded with raw liver to feed marooned and starving dogs and cats, and took his part in the macabre plot.

  Far more macabre were the real-life outbreaks of typhoid fever. Residents seem to have considered these more or less acts of God; a likelier cause would have been the pollution of human and animal waste washed from open privies and fouled streets into the river that was also the city’s drinking-water supply. Just how Olive Roberts managed to contract typhoid fever while the rest of her family stayed healthy can only be conjectured; it would have been easy enough when foodstuffs lay open to contamination in the markets and nobody had ever been told to boil the drinking water. Whatever the cause, Olive was suddenly a very sick little girl, and the doctor’s orders didn’t make her any better.

  While a cold should be stuffed, according to the canon of the time, a fever must be starved. This meant giving the four-year-old patient barely enough gruel and calf’s-foot jelly to keep body and soul together. Most importantly, Olive was to have no water to drink, not so much as a sip. No matter how high her fever raged, how heartrendingly she begged and screamed, the only relief she got was a teaspoon dipped into a glass of water and put in her mouth to suck on. Finally one night Cornelia could withstand her child’s frantic entreaties no longer. Feeling like a murderess, she filled a tumbler to the brim and held it to Olive’s parched lips. In spite of all that medical science could do, Olive got better.

  The aftereffects of Olive’s ordeal were felt for a long time. For one thing, she was thenceforth considered delicate. Like Aunt Sade, Olive must not be expected to do anything she didn’t want to do. Even when she got old enough to run errands, these were still routinely handed over to Mary. Not to omit any of the barbarities that went with treating a fever, the doctor had decreed that her head must be shaved.

  Nearly bald, reduced to skin and bones by her starvation diet, Olive Roberts was the living picture of a pathetic little waif. As children will, she made the most of it. Cornelia was naturally anxious to get a little meat back on the convalescent child’s bones, but Olive had always been a fussy eater. Now she developed a new idiosyncrasy: for a whole year she absolutely refused to eat at the family table if her father was present.

  Nobody knew why. Tom Roberts had done nothing to hurt or frighten her. On the other hand, Mary’s autobiography doesn’t contain any tender mention of a doting daddy dandling a winsome wee one on his knee, much less haunting the sickroom to agonize over his desperately ill younger daughter. Even a four-year-old can recognize and resent a parent’s indifference. But this is only a hypothesis. Olive’s recalcitrance may have been some leftover fantasy brought on by the fever, or simply a ploy to keep on getting the extra attention she’d had from her mother during the bad time.

  Whatever the reason, Olive stuck to her guns. For a solid year, Cornelia Roberts was constrained to toting supper trays up to the bedroom that Olive and Mary had continued to share even during the worst of the fever. There she stayed, coaxing and wheedling, while the little tyrant took her time picking disdainfully at the food in which her mother had invested so much love and care.

  Just how and when this small melodrama came to the end of its run is not specified. Maybe Olive got over her fixation, more likely she just got bored with the game. She certainly would not have received so much coddling had the family doctor’s view of the matter paralleled that of the man Mary later married. When asked how he’d have handled the situation, Dr. Rinehart replied, “Let her starve.” A four-year-old child who’d been able to manipulate her parents so effectively was, in his opinion, capable of anything. Mary, on the other hand, seems to have taken a certain amount of pride in her little sister’s stubbornness and even profited on occasion from Olive’s example.

  Take the incident of the bicycle. This has to have happened sometime after 1885, though probably not a great deal later. Mary would have been eleven or so. Bicycling had already caught on with boys and men young enough and agile enough to have mastered the Ordinary, the original high-wheeled boneshaker that had made its first appearance in Britain four years before Mary was born and had been manufactured by the Pope Company in Boston, Massachusetts, since 1877. The Ordinary was not for the unadventurous. But in 1885 came the Safety, the precursor of the modern bicycle. With both wheels the same size, it was low and dependable enough to be mounted and ridden without serious risk to life or limb. The company was even offering a model with a dropped frame suitable to be ridden by females, depending on how one defined “suitable.”

  One of Mary’s friends had a father who owned a toy store. He must have been doing well with the immediately popular men’s Safety, for in a moment of daring he’d ordered two of the dropped-frame models, one for his own daughter, the other for whoever had the intestinal fortitude to buy it. Mary had the fortitude, but she didn’t have the money.

  So she did what Olive might have done. She kept hammering at her parents night and day until at last they gave in. She got her bicycle, along with a good deal of flak from the neighborhood. Bicycle-riding by young girls was not at all the thing. It was dangerous, it was unladylike, it was downright indelicate, and the Robertses ought to be ashamed of themselves. Tom was
not one to care what the neighbors thought. He was always receptive to new inventions; why shouldn’t his daughter move with the times?

  Cornelia did mind the talk, but even she came around after a while and made Mary a natty dark blue cycling suit with brass buttons. The skirt would create no hazard—schoolgirls’ skirts weren’t very full and reached only to their boottops. Besides, there was a wire guard to keep her clothes from becoming entangled in the rear wheel. The bicycle was further equipped with hard rubber tires, a bell on the handlebars, and a will of its own, as Mary discovered during her first attempt to ride it. She was riding down a path in the park near her home when she suddenly found herself heading straight for the (fortunately shallow) lake. She got halfway across before she fell off, which wasn’t bad for a beginner.

  Once she’d mastered the principles of riding, Mary had lots of good times on her bicycle, but she never explained what became of the bicycle later. Perhaps Olive took possession when Mary left home, or perhaps the two-wheeler had been sold by then, for strange things were happening at the little brick house. Somewhere along the line, Tom Roberts’s sewing machine business, like his daughter’s bicycle, had faded into oblivion.

  It must be remembered that the sewing machine was no recent invention. By the 1880s there were numerous models on the market. Tom had been carrying the Domestic Sewing Machine, a brand that must have faced stiff competition from better-known companies like Singer, founded in 1851 and still, at the time of this writing, a leader in the field. Furthermore, adaptations of sewing machines to industrial use had created a growing business in ready-made clothing that was cutting into the home sewing market. A sewing-machine dealer catering to homemakers must have been under constant pressure to keep up with his competitors. Tom was no supersalesman; whether he quit or got fired is moot. The one relevant fact is that, once he’d got through at Domestic, nothing at the Robertses’ was ever again the same.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Great Deal to Learn

  To young Mary Roberts, her father was just a man whom she didn’t actually know very well, even though she could remember him in his nightshirt, back when they’d lived with Grandmother Roberts, fanning the coal grate with a newspaper to get the fire going. He was fair, good looking, medium tall. Lately he’d grown a mustache, perhaps to compensate in some measure for his receding hairline. When he was home, he read books and chewed tobacco, a habit that disgusted Mary, particularly when she got old enough to take on the revolting job of cleaning his spittoon. For as long as she could remember, he’d crossed the bridge to his Pittsburgh office every morning, dressed in the clothes Cornelia had laid out for him: the studs already fixed in his clean shirt, the links in his stiffly starched detachable cuffs, his folded handkerchief laid ready on the bureau. When he was about to leave the house, Cornelia would hand him his shiny black top hat, always carefully ironed by her own wifely hand.

  Mary had never seen her mother kiss her father good-bye, however. As far as her daughters could tell, Cornelia never kissed Tom at all. The two seemed to be contented in their marriage, even though they had little in common except their home and their children. Tom was not ill-disposed toward his daughters, Olive’s megrims notwithstanding; he used to bring home a dozen bananas and a box of candy every Saturday night as a special treat. But children, like housework, were a woman’s responsibility. Tom’s spare hours were more apt to be spent inventing an improved glass insulator for the telegraph lines that were by this time crisscrossing the country or pondering how to convert slag from Pittsburgh’s blast furnaces into a usable form of building cement. Playing with his offspring came low on Tom’s list of priorities. What finally drew his attention to Mary as a person was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

  Since she was about eight years old, Mary had been a faithful patron of the town library. Mr. Benny, the one-armed librarian, seemed never to notice, much less care, what she took out. Neither did her father, until he discovered her one evening scaring herself into fits over Foxe’s grisly illustrations of early Christians being tortured to death in various imaginative ways. Forthwith, Tom ordered the book returned to the library and suggested that Mary instead turn her attention to Dickens and Thackeray.

  Mary took her father’s advice gladly enough. Dickens and Thackeray disposed of, she went on to read Zola, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Dumas, Balzac. She wept over The Duchess of Malfi, she read Eugéne Sue’s The Wandering Jew, she explored Through the Dark Continent with Stanley and discovered Dr. Livingstone. Tough meat some of this for a girl still in grade school; but a far more worthwhile education for an embryo novelist than Mary had been getting from the boring, straitjacketed curriculum at school. She claimed never to have gone back to any of these books in later years, not even to have reread her own novels once she’d seen them tucked safely between covers. Nevertheless, what she gained from her early raids on the library stuck with her forever after.

  Mr. Benny himself was never one of Mary’s heroes, although she did get a new perspective on him one Decoration Day when she saw him in a faded soldier’s uniform, marching through the cemetery with a number of fellow veterans. Mr. Benny was the flagbearer, steadying with his one hand the staff that fitted into a leather socket at his belt. The drums were beating, the pipes were shrilling. For some reason she couldn’t explain, his dedicated but undevoted young patron burst into tears.

  These men would have been Civil War veterans, of course. Decoration Day, later Memorial Day, had been instituted once the shooting was over as a time to deck the graves of those who had died on both sides of that terrible struggle. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War doesn’t seem to have meant much to the Robertses. They were surprised to learn that a neighbor of theirs who they hadn’t realized was a naval officer had been killed in the war.

  Tom was even less interested than his wife and daughters in what was happening around the neighborhood; his inventions were engaging more and more of his attention. He had a financial backer, a man whom the children were taught to call Uncle Joe Moffatt, though “Uncle” was only a courtesy title. Joe Moffatt had put up part of the money Tom needed to take out a patent on his most potentially profitable invention, a rotary sewing-machine bobbin. Of more interest to Mary were the plants and seeds that Uncle Joe sent from his own garden to beautify the Robertses’ backyard.

  Until now, the place had been what Mary described as a weed-grown no-man’s-land, merely two strips of unthrifty vegetation on either side of a brick path that led to the privy that leaned up against the back fence that separated the Robertses’ back lot from the prison yard. For his daughter, it was a revelation to see Tom Roberts, whose well-tended hands were unused to manual labor, turning over the soil and whitewashing the fence. She was happy to work with him, setting out plants, sowing seeds, running string up the fence for the morning glories to twine on. To their mutual astonishment, the plants throve. Tom tended them like children, better, in fact, than he cared for his own children, as Mary recorded somewhat bitterly in her unpublished memoirs.

  Watching her father out on the path holding a hose, watering his garden bit by bit, Mary got the bright idea that he might run a perforated pipe along the fence from the hydrant. In that way, the entire garden could be watered at once, just by turning on the valve. Tom didn’t think a young daughter’s suggestion worth pursuing, however, and somebody else got to cash in on the sprinkler systems that have been so widely used during the past century.

  Mary was growing up, shedding her baby fat, getting ready for high school. From Tom’s garden, the Robertses had watched the old prison behind their house being torn down and a new high school being erected in its place. This was the school Mary would enter. She was horrified after it opened to realize that one of the classrooms looked directly down on her own family’s privy.

  This new high school was in no way like the stultifying old grammar school. Its curriculum was stiff but stimulating, more like a junior college. Courses were long and tough: algebra, geometry, English literature, rhet
oric, and science, which was mostly limited to physics. The Latin teacher, a Dr. Gibbons, was a graduate of Amherst College. He had a heavy head of hair, which he was apt to tear at in anguish at his pupils’ stumbling attempts to scan Caesar and Virgil. The teachers were, without exception, men; although shortly after Mary had been graduated at the age of sixteen, a young woman named Willa Cather would break the all-male precedent by teaching at Allegheny for a year.

  The principal, James Morrow, whom everybody called Jimmy behind his back, was small in stature but great in achievement. His son Dwight became a lawyer, won many honors for distinguished service to government and charitable institutions, and was ambassador plenipotentiary to Mexico under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Another son, Jay, a colonel in the U.S. Army, was an engineer in the building of the Panama Canal and served as the canal’s governor and president of the Panama Canal Railroad from 1921 to 1924; he went on to hold other distinguished positions and honors. Dwight’s daughter, Anne, married the famous pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh and herself became an acclaimed author.

  In addition to his administrative duties, Jimmy Morrow taught senior mathematics. He himself was an arithmetical wizard. During a spare moment, he liked to pop into the algebra class and invite a student to write two long rows of figures on the blackboard. He’d glance at them for a second or so, turn his back to the figures, multiply them mentally, and reel off the total in a flash. Mary complained that Principal Morrow had given her an inferiority complex, but at least she’d learned to add in her head by the time she received her diploma.

  High school was also teaching her some extracurricular lessons, chiefly about boys. Mary confessed later that her sudden interest in attending the young people’s Sunday evening services at church was not due to a spurt of religious zeal. Like the rest of the attendees, she would listen with something less than half an ear to the sermon, the larger share of her mind being focused on whether some reasonably personable member of the opposite sex would ask to walk home with her.