Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  Whether or not she was as much in love with this human juggernaut as he was with her, Mary honestly did not know. She was elated because a member of the hospital staff had bestowed the honor of his affections upon her. This was romance straight out of a storybook. Here was the handsome young prince, whipping the glass slipper out of his pocket and sliding it on her throbbing little foot. But real love, the lifetime kind, what did Mary Ella Roberts know about that? Where was the surge of ecstasy she’d read about in novels? Why wasn’t her heart singing like the lark ascending, the way a heroine’s heart was supposed to?

  The advice she was getting from some of the other nurses didn’t help much. They told her she’d be crazy to tie herself to that human tornado. She was too young, too pretty, she could do better. (And besides, S.M. was the only bachelor on the staff, and they’d seen him first.)

  Nevertheless, Mary went on keeping an ear cocked for the unmistakable sound of her sweetheart’s tread on the bare wooden floors of the hallways. She saw that S.M.’s famous tantrums were reserved for incompetent staff, for interfering bureaucrats who tried to keep him from the woman of his choice, and most often for inanimate objects that conspired against him, as objects so often do to persons who run on short fuses.

  Stanley Rinehart was never other than gentle with Mary. The better she came to know him, the more she was able to recognize the true quality of this man to whom she had pledged herself: his blazing integrity, his swift intelligence, his fund of knowledge, so much greater than hers. She’d already found out, of course, what fun he could be on a buggy ride even when he wasn’t joking. One day as they were jogging along, Stanley reined in his horse and reached into his pocket.

  “I’ve found a poem that I thought you might like.” He pulled out a slim little volume, opened it, closed it, and stuck it back in his pocket.

  Mary wanted to know why he hadn’t read the poem. Stanley didn’t want to tell her, and at last she fished the book out of his pocket. The title was “The Therapeutics of Diarrhoea.” The world of the inanimate had struck again. She laughed so hard her ribs hurt.

  By this time, Mary was needing all the laughs she could get. During their second year of training, it was the hospital’s practice to send student nurses out on private cases. For home nursing, the hospital charged a set fee of ten dollars a week. This was paid either by the patient’s family or by some local charitable organization, depending on the circumstances. The nurse didn’t get a cent beyond her usual monthly stipend.

  The hospital’s rationale was that this one-on-one care would fit the nurse for private duty. For Mary it was sheer misery with no redeeming features whatsoever. None of the cases to which she was assigned could have prepared her for anything except a series of spectacular nightmares.

  In those days, only the very rich would hire a live-in nurse if the case wasn’t actually desperate. Most families waited until their loved ones were so far gone that Aesculapius himself couldn’t have done them any good. Mary’s first patient was a woman whose horses had bolted, throwing her in front of a cable car and severing both her legs. She was already dead when Mary got to the house. There was nothing for the nurse to do but sit with the body until morning, when the doctor came to sign the death certificate and the undertaker to take the poor mutilated body away.

  Her next was a ten-year-old child. Mary stayed on duty for thirty-six hours without a break. Nobody came to relieve her, for nurses were supposed to be indefatigable. The young sufferer slipped away quietly during the second night while his exhausted nurse dozed beside the bed.

  Third on her list was a rich and extremely prominent old man who entertained the pleasant fantasy that he’d robbed millions of dollars from one of the great steel companies. This patient didn’t need a nurse, he needed a keeper. He’d been sent for therapy to a sanitarium in the mountains; his wife had summoned up just enough courage to go along with him but was no earthly good at keeping him under control. Presumably the sanitarium staff couldn’t cope either, hence the need for an inexperienced student nurse whose chief qualification was that she did not have the option of refusing the case.

  The aged tycoon’s favorite diversion was to wait until the electric lights were turned off at night, then light an oil lamp and lean out the window, waving it back and forth, or else stroll down the halls with the lamp in his hand, a walking invitation to a bad fire. Why nobody managed to keep either lamps or matches away from the patient was never mentioned.

  Mary didn’t get much sleep on that job, either. It was finally decided that the old man’s presence was not doing either him or the sanitarium any good. His private railway car was made ready, and he and his reluctant nurse traveled back to Pittsburgh locked inside its drawing room together, he pounding madly on the windows with the handle of his umbrella and screeching the whole way to be let out.

  During her hectic tour of duty at the sanitarium, Mary had been further shaken to receive a startling letter from her father. Grandmother Roberts was dead, suddenly and violently. At Aunt Tillie’s house, on the previous Sunday morning, she’d tripped over the hem of her long wrapper and plunged headlong down the cellar stairs, landing at the bottom with a broken neck. Tom had written beautifully of the useful life his mother had lived, of her steadfast belief in a heaven where she had surely earned her place. He said nothing about his own lack of faith that such a reward would in fact be forthcoming.

  Mary took the news badly. It seemed so unfair that the old lady had been robbed of her life just when things had grown easier for her, when she might still have had some years of quiet enjoyment. But there was no sense in going back to be with the family now—the funeral had already taken place. Mary might as well stay with her patient.

  Then came another blow. Only a few days after Mrs. Roberts’s death, darling Aunt Tillie’s small daughter was run down by a train. The family seemed to be under some awful dark cloud.

  The one ray of light was Mary’s engagement. She was nineteen by now, she would be graduated in the spring, then she and Stanley Rinehart would be married. In the meantime, she must finish her course. Surely her next case would be less harrowing than the ones before it, surely no further tragedy could strike the Robertses. Mary was wrong on both counts.

  Her fourth case, a woman suffering from typhoid, was a situation beyond any horror she could have imagined. Mary arrived at the small, dingy four-room house at night, astonished to find the downstairs front room floor covered with barefoot men, all asleep or drunk or both. She picked her way among the recumbent bodies and went upstairs. The sickroom was crowded with women. Mary had a hard time shooing them out so that she could get to the bed. Her patient was delirious with fever, flailing and raving; Nurse Roberts got no sleep that night. In the morning there was nowhere to eat but a filthy kitchen. She had to drink her coffee from a tin cup and fight a swarm of cockroaches for what food there was to be had.

  A younger sister was out on the porch washing fouled bed-sheets. Mary wanted to help the wretched girl but the sick woman kept trying to get out of bed. She had to run back upstairs and stay there while her patient raved on and on, through the day and late into the evening. Then suddenly, just at midnight, the woman died. Mary went to notify the husband but he wasn’t interested. He went back to sleep on the floor and she followed the procedure she’d been trained to in the hospital mortuary.

  She bathed the dead woman and laid her out according to protocol. She tied up the jaw with a bandage and set the body semi-upright on pillows to drain the blood from the congested face. Finally, exhausted by her twenty-four-hour waking nightmare, Nurse Roberts sat down in the rocking chair beside the bed and let herself doze off.

  Sometime in the small hours, stiffening with rigor mortis and lying a little too close to the edge, the pathetic corpse pitched off the bed and landed across the rockers of Mary’s chair. To be catapulted backward on top of an ice-cold cadaver was a particularly rude awakening.

  That Nurse Roberts agreed to accept a fifth assignment says a g
ood deal for her fortitude. This would be Mary’s last and, in a bizarre way, her most tragic case. The patient was an elderly woman dying painfully from cancer of the stomach after a lifetime of tragedy. Born into a family so socially prominent that Mary refused to write down the name even in her private memoirs more than half a century later, the patient had borne a child out of wedlock and perversely refused to give it up for adoption. More concerned with their reputations than with their daughter’s welfare, the haughty parents had cast off the ex-heiress with a pittance, settling her in a tiny house downriver where she and her nameless brat would not contaminate their rarified atmosphere.

  This had happened some thirty years previously. The family were still adamant, their daughter was still an outcast, still existing on the same tiny pension that was by now barely adequate to provide the necessities. Her illegitimate child had been staunch. She’d stayed with her mother, tending her lovingly through this final episode in a drab and pain-ridden life. By now, the younger woman could go on no longer without a respite; the doctor, who seemed to be their only friend, had got in touch with the hospital’s nursing service. Again Mary found herself on round-the-clock duty.

  As too often happened, the patient had reached a stage where there was little a nurse could do except change the sheets and administer the opiates. The house was cold, the food was meager. Mary broke out in hives. On the third night she was sitting half asleep beside the sickbed when a Western Union messenger rang the doorbell with a telegram for Miss Mary Roberts. Her father was dead, she must go home at once.

  Despite her own burden of woe, the dying woman’s daughter showed kindness and sympathy. She helped Mary get ready to catch the early morning train. Her aid was not unneeded. Mary was completely bowled over. What could possibly have struck down a robust man, not yet out of his forties, who’d never been sick a day in his life?

  Once on the train, she found out. She had bought the morning papers hoping to find some explanation. Sure enough, Tom Roberts had made the news. PITTSBURGH MAN SHOOTS SELF IN BUFFALO HOTEL ROOM.

  What was her father doing in Buffalo? She hadn’t even known he was there. Coming on top of physical exhaustion and the string of horrors to which she’d recently been subjected, having it broken to her in so outlandish a fashion, this dreadful news was more than Mary could handle. When the conductor came to ask for her ticket, she was crying so hard she could barely see him through her tears.

  “My father,” she sobbed. “He’s dead.”

  The conductor didn’t give a toot of his whistle. He didn’t want somebody else’s hard luck story, he just wanted this young woman’s ticket. She’d bought one, but where had it got to? Mary rummaged frantically in her bag, the conductor simmered. At last she found the errant pasteboard on the floor. The conductor took it and passed on. She was left to grieve alone.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Funeral and a Wedding

  Nobody met Mary at the station. She must have forgotten to wire back what train she’d be taking. Somehow or other she got herself home. Her father was there before her, laid out in an open coffin beside his wife’s cherished plush parlor set. Uncle Joe Moffatt was with him, keeping vigil. Shivering with grief and shock, Mary went over to the coffin.

  Her trained eye at once picked up a mark on the forehead that the undertaker had tried to cover. Tom Roberts had made a neat job of the shooting. He’d left no message for his family, perhaps he hadn’t thought it necessary. The inventions on which he’d counted to make him rich and famous had brought nothing but frustration; his hopes had been dashed, one after another. For some time now, Tom had been drinking too much and too often. Alcohol is a depressant, and it must have been particularly so for a man who had failed at everything he’d tried, whose wife had been reduced to taking in boarders, and whose mother, the strong prop and mainstay of his early years whom he’d repaid by repudiating her most deeply cherished principles, had just met with a violent death.

  As a former local merchant and younger brother of the highly respected John Roberts, Tom had been well known in the Pittsburgh area. His tragic end was local news. Reporters besieged the house wanting to know more. Of course they were not let in. Mary finally went out and begged them to go away.

  They left, but the family could not escape unwanted publicity. One way or another, the press had managed to get hold of a letter that Tom had been carrying with him, one that Mary herself had written two or three weeks previously. To her horror, it was published in full. She’d told her father that he mustn’t worry, that she and Dr. Rinehart would be married soon and would take care of things until the times got better. An editorial comment that Miss Roberts’s letter was “a model of penmanship and construction” did nothing to ease the hurt and humiliation. Mary never forgave this tasteless intrusion into the privacy of her family in their sorrow.

  The Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph of November 15, 1895, stated that “Despondency Drove T. B. Roberts to Suicide in Buffalo,” and was probably right in that statement. The rest of the obituary reads rather strangely when compared with the facts as Mary gave them. According to the reportage, Tom had been well known for years in local insurance circles, had been in his youth one of the best salesmen in the city, and had been in the dry-goods business (sic) for some time. “During the oil excitement” he had allegedly speculated with his usual degree of success and “lost a fortune in one day.” More recently he was said to have been involved in building-and-loan associations, and then traveled for the Nux-Phospho Company of Pittsburgh.

  He had not been in good health, said the obituary. On the previous day, he had received a letter from the cash-register company notifying him of his dismissal. Thirty-seven cents was all the money found in his pockets. He had shot himself through the heart (this presumably accounted for the bullet wound in his forehead), covering himself with two quilts to muffle the sound of the shot. The body had not been discovered for some time.

  The late Mr. Roberts had left a wife and two daughters. A brother held a high position under the wallpaper trust in Cincinnati. A brother-in-law lived at Edgewood. Sisters evidently didn’t count. The family had been visiting friends in the country since Monday and nothing could be learned about funeral arrangements (which in fact were clearly stated on another page of that same paper; it would be held at his late residence, 27 Poplar Street, Allegheny, and interment would be private).

  The gun was a surprise to the family. The fact that Tom had owned one suggested that his suicide was no spur-of-the-moment decision. He had left a little insurance; Cornelia had her boarders and her dressmaking for added income; there was always Uncle John to fall back on in a pinch. Olive would be able to finish her schooling and be trained as a teacher. Mary stayed home for a week, helping out as best she could, then went back to work.

  Having a job to do is always the most effective therapy at a time of mourning, and Mary found it a relief to be on the wards again. The soap opera that had been entertaining the entire hospital was just about played out by now. The hospital bigwigs were no longer insisting that Nurse Roberts’s engagement be kept secret. S.M.’s fiancée was free to wear her ring, enjoy her buggy rides, and get ready for her wedding.

  Uncle John offered not only to give the bride away but to pay for the wedding dress. His niece was marrying into an influential family. Her husband-to-be was descended from one of Pittsburgh’s earliest settlers. Stanley’s father, William Rinehart, had been a cofounder of W. D. Rinehart, a highly successful wholesale tobacco business. William was also a cofounder and director of the Pittsburgh Insurance Company and had even been nominated in 1854 for mayor of Pittsburgh.

  William’s first wife had borne him ten children. Five of them had lived and prospered. Edward, the eldest, was professor of music for all the Pittsburgh schools. It was he whom Mary would be startled to recognize at the wedding as her former music teacher. Dr. Clarence, second in line, was at least as well known as his illustrious father. Since 1884, C.C., as Mary knew him, had been on the staff of t
he Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital and on the faculty of the nurses’ training school. Frank, another brother, was secretary and treasurer of the Standard Underground Cable Company.

  Four years after his first wife’s death in 1860, William had married a widow, Louise Gillespie Hancock. Stanley, much younger than his half-brothers, was the sole fruit of that union. Being the man he was, Stanley refused to be put off by Tom Roberts’s sensational demise. He was determined to get married as soon as Mary finished her course. They set the date for April 21, 1896, four days after her graduation, just two months and nine days before her twentieth birthday.

  The Robertses would still be in mourning, but a decent interval would have passed since Tom’s funeral. Now, of all times, John Roberts argued, Mary must do the family credit. He gave his niece $100 and sent her to a professional dressmaker. This would be the first gown she’d ever owned that had not been made by her mother, her grandmother, or herself; it was going be a knockout.

  Only the richest white satin would do. The impressive train was lined with row upon row of lace ruffles. The veil was of filmy white tulle, gathered into a satin bandeau that was pinned with an aigrette of white ostrich tips, called in the fashionable parlance of the day a bird of paradise. Mary’s figure was far too slight to do justice to so much opulence; both the hips and the bosom had to be heavily padded.

  Cornelia was sewing up a storm, turning out exquisite lingerie for Mary’s trousseau, hemming table linens with all-but-invisible stitches, thanking the Lord that her wayward elder daughter was soon to be redeemed by a respectable marriage. She was pathetically grateful to Stanley Rinehart for rescuing her Mamie from the ignominy of hospital nursing. She rejoiced that hospital regulations forbade married women to keep on with their jobs. Anyway, Mary would have plenty to do keeping house. And she had so very much to learn.

  Wedding presents came pouring in: silver, cut glass, gold-bowled coffee spoons, no fewer than seven tippy, impractical onyx-topped occasional tables—all the appurtenances of gracious living for a young couple who’d be lucky to afford a single hired girl at two-fifty a week until Stanley was more firmly established in his practice.