Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  The system was pretty well organized. Boys would duck out first and form an impromptu stag line. Girls would linger to straighten their hats and pick up their muffs, then saunter decorously past the boys, pretending they weren’t there until some fiery young blade got up nerve enough to step forward and make his pitch. Being approached by the right swain was bliss, the wrong one was tragedy. No boy at all was utter despair, at least for the moment. These walkings-home amounted to exactly that, there would be no hanky-panky along the way. The boy didn’t even get asked in for a cup of cocoa unless the girl had reached sixteen, at which magical age she was entitled to pin up her hair, let down her hems, and serve the cocoa.

  Even sitting alone together on the front steps under the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors was taboo; but love, or its reasonable facsimile, would find a way. A few boys would band together like young Don Juans with their mandolins and banjos and stroll down the road, stopping under what they believed to be a girlfriend’s bedroom window and assaulting the night with what they further believed to be melody. Oftener than not, they’d choose the wrong window and get a dousing from the washstand pitcher of some wrathful father.

  Perhaps Mary got serenaded, or perhaps Cornelia decided that the bird’s-eye view of the privy did not reflect a proper image for her blossoming daughter. Mary had always been the pretty one, and her fond, ambitious mother envisioned for her daughter the ultimate happy ending: marriage to a nice young man of good family and comfortable fortune, or at least to a decent Presbyterian with a reasonably steady job and no great yearning to be an inventor. Again, she decided it was time to move.

  So Cornelia went house hunting. It didn’t take her long to find what she wanted. The new house was on the north side of the park, a better location from an upwardly mobile point of view, though less desirable in other ways. For Mary, getting to school would no longer mean just a pop around the corner but a long walk around the park; in wintertime she’d arrive at class numb with the cold. But this house was bigger than the old one, it had a genuine bathroom with a built-in tub, and, for the first time in their lives, Mary and Olive would each have a bedroom to herself.

  Cornelia had the same insouciant attitude toward money that Mary was to display with such éclat during her later life. She trained her elder daughter to say sweetly, “Mother isn’t in just now,” when a bill collector came knocking at the door. She sold Mother Roberts’s nice old rosewood parlor set for twenty dollars and splurged on a fashionable new plush-covered parlor suite with a matching fringed scarf for the mantelpiece. Once she’d got everything arranged to her liking, the parlor was so elegant that she kept the blinds down lest the upholstery fade and never let anybody sit in the chairs for fear of rubbing the plush.

  Mary said later that this house was the only mistake Cornelia Roberts ever made. The loving daughter might have erred a bit on the side of charity with regard to some of her mother’s decisions, but Mary was certainly not wrong about the move. By the end of the first year in their grand new quarters, the Robertses were feeling the pinch. Tom hadn’t found another steady job. He was earning some money, but not enough. Uncle John would have helped, but soon John himself was in bad trouble. His big wallpaper warehouse, the fount of all financial blessings, caught fire. Standing on Liberty Street, watching rolls of flaming wallpaper shoot out like skyrockets as the streams from the fire hoses hit them must have been like gazing into the Fiery Furnace that Mary had worried so much about as a child. Firemen, black as coalminers, were stationed on the roofs of surrounding buildings, wetting them down, trying to save them. The air was full of charred paper scraps, which blew into the spectators’ faces. By the time the fire was under control, the building had burned to the ground.

  It stands to reason that a canny Scot like John Roberts would have carried insurance on his business, but no sum is ever enough in the face of such a disaster. John must have had his own financial problems, and big ones; nevertheless, Mary’s description of her father’s setting up a wallpaper showroom suggests that her uncle was still trying to help his brother. Tom had a stand in his family dining room that held the samples. When a customer came along he would flick them over, one after another, with those aristocratic white hands his daughter so often mentioned.

  Maybe Cornelia resented having her new house turned into a shop; more likely the scheme just didn’t work. Soon Tom Roberts was out on the road selling wallpaper, mainly to dealers in Ohio. To the end of her days, Mary could recite a litany of Ohio towns from which her father had mailed home the exquisitely penned notes and postcards that she was to gather together and burn on the day of his funeral.

  John’s fire marked a turning point in several ways. Mother Roberts and Aunt Maggie left Diamond Street for Tillie and Joe’s big house in the suburbs. Left to manage without their friendly support and with Tom away on the road, Cornelia broke down from strain and overwork. Mary and Olive, aged fifteen and eleven, took care of their mother and managed somehow to keep the house running without letting the neighborhood know that there was no money to hire a helper.

  Mary had for a long time been in the habit of spinning romantic daydreams inside her head. Now she decided to recoup the family fortunes by writing down her tales and selling them. A local newspaper had been advertising for readers to send in short stories one column in length; Mary wrote three and saw them all published. She was paid a dollar apiece. Thanks to her recently acquired arithmetical skills, she figured out that, at this rate, a literary career was not the road to riches.

  Her father’s wallpaper venture was not doing too well, either. Later he switched to peddling a soft drink called Nux Phospho. Finally Tom took on a product that few people had ever heard of and almost nobody wanted to buy. It was called a cash register.

  At this time, small merchants were still using the old-fashioned till, an open invitation to human error and petty pilferage. A cash register would keep the money safe in a closed drawer, it would produce an accurate total. The customer need wait no longer than a minute or so for a clerk to ring up the sale and count out the change.

  But cash registers were expensive. They took up too much counter space. Clerks and cashiers were vociferously hostile, seeing the new machines as aspersions on their honesty and ability; Tom Roberts was not the man to talk them down. Mary thought her father’s basic problem was simply that he hated asking anybody to buy anything.

  Surely the problem must have run deeper than that. Selling had been Tom Roberts’s career for pretty much all his working life. He was experienced, personable, well dressed thanks to his wife’s solicitous valeting, well educated through his extensive reading. With so much going for him, why couldn’t Tom himself get going? If he didn’t like what he was doing, why not get into some other job such as bookkeeping or banking, where he wouldn’t have to ask for money because it was already there?

  The answer may lie in that seldom-used word hubris, the overweening arrogance that carries around its edges a dark hint of unhappy endings to grandiose dreams. Tom Roberts, like Pip, had great expectations. One day, he would be recognized as a famous inventor; one day he would command wealth beyond the dreams of avarice without having to demean himself by collecting it bit by bit like a common peddler. Mary’s reminiscences of her father give an impression of one who considered himself a gentleman and a scholar, sitting a bit aloof from his family, turning the pages of some learned tome with those white hands that had never done a day’s hard labor, honing his intellect as he spat gobs of tobacco juice into his well-burnished cuspidor.

  The cuspidor rather spoils the picture, but Tom wouldn’t have noticed. Intellectuals were entitled to their small indulgences. They could flout a mother’s most sacred beliefs, they could reward a wife’s many hours of toil at turning a dismal parlor into a decorator’s dream by allowing her one brief, patronizing smile and not a word of comment, much less praise. They married and had families because that was what manly males did, but they didn’t have to pay much attention to their child
ren, that was the woman’s job. A man’s was to provide the housekeeping money, which meant having a source of income, and therein lay the rub. One job was as boring as another, so why try to change? Until his ship came in, he might as well stick with what he knew.

  The life of a traveling salesman is never any picnic. Cheap hotels and bad food must have been particularly hard on a man who’d been pampered all his life, first by his mother and sisters, then by that quintessential helpmeet, Cornelia Gilleland Roberts. The proud dreamer was getting a bitter taste of life on the downside. Mary drew a sad picture of him coming home on weekends, always tired, sitting glum and silent at the table, letting his coffee cool off. He never liked to drink it hot.

  Cold coffee was not the only beverage Tom fancied. For so long as he’d lived under his mother’s roof, he must perforce have shunned the demon Alcohol. Once free of her domination, he and Cornelia had been able to relax a little. Mary could recall being sent with a dime and a pail to fetch beer from the local saloon when company dropped by; there was surely no great harm in that. Once away among strangers for the first time in his life, though, increasingly depressed by one turndown after another, with nowhere to go for solace but the YMCA or the corner gin mill, Tom would more likely than not have opted for the latter.

  Even getting a drink posed its problems, however. The redoubtable Carry Nation, relict of a drunkard, was already out swinging her hatchet. Legions of women who had seen too many children go ragged and hungry while their fathers drank up the week’s wages had begun marching in temperance parades, exhorting youths to join the Band of Hope. A few even grabbed their own hatchets and joined Mrs. Nation in her saloon bashing.

  Prohibition was to become the law of the land in 1919; the temperance marchers and a new legion of bootleggers would rise up and call it blessed. Cornelia Roberts wasn’t waiting thirty years or more for such a law to be passed. Her Covenanter blood was up, she was already running her own temperance campaign, with her husband as its sole target. Cornelia wasn’t a complete prude—she didn’t mind keeping a little beer on ice for hot summer evenings—but she did make her feelings known without inhibition whenever she found out that Tom had been nipping at the hard stuff.

  Tom Roberts was not one to brawl, he simply tuned her out. One way and another he was detaching himself from a reality too grim for an idealist to handle, retreating into his private world of inventions and daydreams, earning less, drinking more. On his weekends home, he and a crony who also liked the bottle too well for Cornelia’s taste would sit hour after hour at the dining room table with plans and figures spread before them, counting the riches that would be Tom Roberts’s once his patents were adopted and that overdue gravy train rolled into the depot, getting richer with every swig.

  Tom was by no means a fool. His inventions did have merit. His idea of making cement from the slag thrown out from the steel mill furnaces was valid, as witness the vast amount of cinder block and cinder concrete used in construction today. His glass insulator for telegraph wires probably would have worked as well as most of the other designs that still show up as collectibles at flea markets and yard sales. Again, his problem was the competition. The nineteenth century was a time of exploration and discovery on many fronts, the U.S. Patent Office was routinely buried under submissions ranging from world-changing to totally mad. Many were variations on previously issued patents. The first patent for a sewing machine had been issued in 1755, Tom Roberts’s patent was one of thousands in the same category.

  Tom’s invention was a rotary bobbin; he may not have known that a rotary hook-and-bobbin device had been patented in 1850 by another American, Allan B. Wilson. Wilson’s concept had not caught on, however; the sewing machines that Tom Roberts sold from his showroom had been constructed on the same principle as the weaver’s loom: a treadle-powered shuttle moved back and forth under the needle, spinning out thread from a slender bobbin that fitted inside the shuttle. This was a good, reliable design; such machines worked well and stood up to long use. Their one drawback, and the one that inspired Tom’s invention, was the tiny pause that resulted every time the shuttle must alternate from back to forth, or forth to back, thereby limiting the speed at which the machine could perform. Tom reasoned that a bobbin spinning around and around without pause would make for a smoother, faster, more efficient operation.

  He was quite right. A manufacturer saw his design and offered him $10,000 for the patent. That was a lot of money in those days, but Tom turned it down. If his patent was worth ten thousand, it was worth a million. The manufacturer didn’t agree. At this stage, John Roberts would have dickered for something like $15,000 and a small percentage of the profits, and eventually done very nicely out of the deal. Tom was adamant, and got nothing. One has to wonder which he really wanted, the money or the dream. By the time Tom’s patent came up for renewal, Joe Moffatt was dead and the inventor dead broke. Unrenewed, the patent went up for grabs, and the rotary bobbin became standard throughout the sewing industry. Mary kept her father’s hand-carved prototype bobbin to remind herself of how idly rich she and Olive might have become had Tom Roberts only known how to close a deal.

  CHAPTER 6

  Where the Brook and River Meet

  Despite the decline in the family fortunes, life at the new house was still not all doom and gloom. Cornelia was no Sade—she shook off her illness and got back to work, shifting Mary’s belongings in with Olive’s, renting out the bedroom that Mary had enjoyed for a scant year to two young men who came and went on silent feet, helping to keep the wolf from getting too close to the door. Cornelia also began to take in sewing, though she was less open about doing so than her mother-in-law had been.

  She was still determined to keep up appearances. The doorstep must be scrubbed, the windows washed, the silver knives and forks must be warmed in the oven before the Sunday roast was served even though there was no longer a maid to wash and clean and wait on table. Mary’s piano lessons had gone by the board; she was spending her after-school hours helping Cornelia with the chores and wondering what would became of her once she’d taken her small part in the graduation rites that were swiftly approaching.

  Mary was popular in high school. She worked on the school paper, she played the assembly-room piano for the hymns that were an invariable start to the school day. Sometimes she got invited to parties. Allegheny was an affluent community, and even young people’s at-home dances were taken seriously as social events, with real dance programs, favors, elegant refreshments, a hired musician at the piano and another playing the violin. White cotton crash tacked over the double parlor carpets provided a smooth surface for boys and girls to glide over, trying to remember what they’d learned in dancing class, while the chaperons looked on with benign but vigilant eyes. Mary was always as well dressed as any, Cornelia saw to that, but no party would be given for her at the Roberts house. So darling Aunt Tillie gave one instead, dance cards, favors, musicians, and all. Mary never forgot Tillie’s kindness, for this was the only party she’d ever had.

  Mary was sixteen now, and the boys were noticing, and not just boys, either. She set the whole school buzzing one day when the new Latin teacher, a good-looking young bachelor who was studying to be a lawyer, took her out to lunch. Perhaps Jimmy Morrow put a pulex in the teacher’s ear, for he didn’t ask her again, but that didn’t matter. Next in line was a blue-eyed, blond-haired boy to whom Mary became secretly engaged. They kissed once or twice in a chaste and respectful manner. He gave her a ring set with her birthstone, a sardonyx, the ugliest stone there was. She wore the token around her neck under her blouse for a few weeks, then handed it back. The rejected lover sulked for a while, but there were other pretty girls in Allegheny and young males’ hearts can be turned as easily as their heads. Mary was sorry to have upset her blue-eyed swain, but she had more pressing matters on her mind.

  All through high school, even during the worst of the family upheavals, Mary had been operating on the premise that, one way or another, she wo
uld be able to attend college. During her senior year she’d been getting special tutoring from a friend of her father’s named Mitchell. She had a firm goal in mind: She wanted to become a doctor.

  This must have seemed crazy in a period when the medical field was considered an all-male enclave, especially by the males. Mary, however, had precedent on her side. Not long after her family had moved to their first real home, a small brass plate had appeared one day on a house down the street. It read C. JANE VINCENT, M.D.

  This was the first time anyone in the neighborhood had so much as heard of a woman doctor, much less found one living next door. For a while, nobody went near Dr. Vincent. Then patients began drifting in, mostly parents bringing children. Having a woman treat a young child seemed less bizarre than letting her work on adults. Dr. Vincent was neither young nor beautiful, and her manner was somewhat forbidding, as well it might have been considering the battles she must have had to fight; but she’d caught Mary’s imagination.

  Doctors were persons of consequence. Allegheny housewives would get out of a sickbed to scrub the doorstep and put on a clean nightgown rather than be shamed when the doctor arrived. Doctors had buggies to drive and mysterious satchels to carry, they knew how to take your pulse and make you say, “Ah.” It may also have occurred to Mary that they were healers of the sick. In any event, she had clung steadfastly to her childhood decision. Now here she was, ready to start but not knowing where to go.

  Mary knew better than to expect any financial aid from her father and mother. They had all they could do in those tough times just to pay their butcher’s bill. Uncle John wouldn’t be able to help because the panic of 1893 was affecting his struggle to recoup from the warehouse fire. Even if she’d had the money she wouldn’t have known where to apply. Most medical schools wouldn’t even let a woman through their doors, and they certainly wouldn’t admit a girl under eighteen. But Mary couldn’t sit around the house spinning vain hopes for the next two years, and she was certainly not about to take in sewing.