Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  Stanley wanted to take his bride to Bermuda for their honeymoon. Mary didn’t like to ask him where Bermuda was, so she sneaked over to the library and looked it up on a map. Six of Stanley’s young doctor friends would serve as ushers. He’d have to give them a stag party, and boutonnieres. Olive was elected to be Mary’s maid of honor, in her first long skirt. There would be no bridesmaids. This was still a time of mourning, and the Robertses hoped to keep the wedding as small and simple as possible.

  That wasn’t going to work. Besides Uncle John, Aunt Sade, Aunt Maggie, Aunt Tish, Aunt Tillie and Joe and their burgeoning family, there were assorted Gilleland connections and scads of Rinehart half-brothers, wives, nieces, and nephews, many of these considerably older than their aunt-to-be. They’d be coming back to the house after the ceremony to see the wedding presents—what if some of the Rineharts should wander back to the kitchen? On the fateful day, the Mrs. Klotz of the moment failed to show up. Mary spent a good part of the morning on her hands and knees with a brush and a bucket, scrubbing the kitchen floor.

  The ceremony was set for early evening. Late in the afternoon, Mary performed her ablutions, spread a sheet on the bedroom floor, dusted her face lightly with powder, pulled her glossy dark tresses back into their accustomed simple knot, and got down to serious business. First, one assumes, came the underdrawers, of finest cotton, hand-stitched with a mother’s loving care, probably flounced and lace-trimmed in contrast to the scalloped and embroidered short flannel petticoat that was to go over them. Stockings of white silk were carefully smoothed on. Perhaps these were a gift that Aunt Maggie had brought from the department store—did Mary spare a fleeting thought for the manager who’d attempted to catch her with his silken lure? How long ago that would have seemed, how fervently might the blushing bride have hoped that Stanley would never get wind of the incident.

  But on to the corset, scarcely needed by one so slender as Mary but inconceivable for a young lady to go without; thence to the beruffled corset cover, to the flannel petticoat, to the other petticoats, each a masterpiece of Cornelia Roberts’s art. And now came the moment of truth, when she had to draw the dressmaker’s chef d’oeuvre over her many underlayers, to wrestle its many hooks into their appropriate eyes, to smooth its shimmering folds over all those pads and petticoats.

  Finally Mary adjusted her satin bandeau, fluffed out the many yards of tulle, gave a final twitch to the birds of paradise, and donned her long white kid gloves, making sure that a seam in the fourth finger left hand had been slit open sufficiently for the wedding ring to be slipped on but not far enough to look tacky. Somebody, probably Olive, hollered up the stairs that the carriage had arrived. Mary gathered up her train as best she could and went to meet her fate.

  Protocol decrees that the groom must not see the bride in her wedding gown until she sails forward to meet him at the altar. Whoever wrote the etiquette book did not reckon with absent-minded best men. Mary and Stanley had to cool their heels downstairs in the shabby old Sabbath schoolroom until the forgetful one rushed back, red-faced and panting, with the ring. Then the organ began to play. Cornelia rustled up the aisle on an usher’s arm in her black taffeta gown and long widow’s veil. Olive straightened her sister’s heavy satin train. Uncle John, in a new frock coat bought for the occasion, offered his left arm to the dithering bride. The two clergymen who were to perform the ceremony entered right and left. But where was the bridegroom?

  The chancel of the church was set up on a high platform with stairs leading up to it, the front of the platform had been so lavishly banked with potted palms and Easter lilies that the stairs were not readily visible. Stanley, in his new frock coat and an advanced case of the jitters, thought he knew where they were. He was wrong. As he stepped forth to claim his bride, he dropped six feet and emerged from a sea of greenery like Tarzan hunting for Jane. Once again the world of the inanimate had shown how implacably it was out to get him.

  The church was full of relatives, of friends, of Mary’s comrades from the nursing school turned out en masse; and maybe with a few curious outsiders who’d just dropped in to see the show. This was a wedding like other weddings. Probably there were wedding cake and nonalcoholic fruit punch in the vestry afterward. No doubt Cornelia had more substantial viands prepared for those invited back to the house. Whether any of the visiting in-laws noticed the clean kitchen linoleum is not recorded in the annals.

  Dr. and Mrs. Rinehart sailed off to Bermuda. Mary got seasick but gallantly maintained that she had a lovely time. They came home, relieved that the people who’d been living in the house where Stanley rented his office had moved out to make way for the newlyweds; their housekeeping had not been up to Cornelia’s standards. Mary washed windows and woodwork, ripped up carpets to give them a sound thrashing and laid them back with her own hands. She and Stanley bought what furniture they could afford, which wasn’t a great deal. All those onyx-topped tables helped to fill in the blank spaces.

  Used to wearing a uniform, Mary created for herself some new ones; brightly printed washable housedresses, delicate lawn aprons like the ones that the hospital laundry had ruined, and gauzy kerchiefs to fold around her shoulders. She was enormously proud of her new status as a wife, of her husband the doctor, of their clean house, enhanced by so many elegant wedding gifts. She was delighted to be cherished and cared for; she was still a little short on ecstasy.

  With regard to the sexual aspects of marriage, Mary was in a far less precarious position than many young brides of that late Victorian era who had gone to the bridal bed with no inkling of what was about to happen. The prostitutes she’d nursed during those long night shifts had given her many an earful about the facts of life on the seamy side, her work in the obstetric ward had shown her precisely how babies were born, she’d seen the labor pangs, she’d heard the cries of anguish, she’d personally steered a slimy, blood-smeared infant out of its mother’s womb.

  She’d had plenty of training at doing her duty, and she knew that a wife must accommodate herself to her husband’s masculine appetites. Stanley and she had practiced enough umlauts together during their courtship for her to anticipate that this duty would not be an arduous one. She had repudiated her grandmother’s doctrine that all sex was wicked, that the curse of Eve was that babies were conceived in sin and that the agony of childbirth was the penance a woman had to pay for her sinning. Nor was Mary locked into the then still current supposition that no decent woman could possibly receive any pleasure from the sex act except perhaps some mild satisfaction at having conscientiously performed a distasteful task.

  Nevertheless, Mary had had hellfire and brimstone dinned into her from her earliest days. Her grandmother had seen the devil under every bed and behind every cribbage board, finding work for idle hands to do. She’d managed to instill in her children and grandchildren the notion that, regardless of how good you tried to be, you were never quite good enough. Considering the brainwashing to which she’d been subjected, Mary hadn’t done badly so far. During her nurse’s training she had faithfully performed far too many arduous tasks. She had seen the kinds of trouble that sent young girls into brothels or cemeteries, and stayed well clear of them. Within the past year she had lost her grandmother, her young niece, and her father, all under harrowing circumstances. She’d borne up under blow after blow; she’d had no leisure in which to prepare herself for marriage.

  As a doctor’s wife, Mary had taken on an awesome responsibility. If she wasn’t hearing heavenly chimes as she ironed Stanley’s shirts and darned his socks, she was finding far more to enjoy than to deplore in her new life. During those twilight years when the doctor’s widow looked back over her marriage through the experienced eyes of a romantic writer, Mary recalled that none of the elusive aura called ecstasy had been hovering about her during that fateful moment when Stanley Marshall Rinehart had fought his way through the potted palms to claim her as his own. She didn’t seem to have missed it much.

  CHAPTER 10

  Th
e Doctor’s Wife at Home

  Although Stanley Marshall Rinehart came of a well-to-do family and Mary’s Uncle John was by this time a minor mogul in the wallpaper business, nobody was showering largesse on the newlyweds. “Doctor Rinehart,” as Mary would thenceforth refer to him in public and in print, was not getting rich on the standard fees then charged by general practitioners. One dollar was the standard rate for an office visit, two for a house call, no matter how long the distance or how late the hour.

  The cost of delivering a baby depended to a great extent on what the parents could afford. Usually it averaged out to about twenty-five dollars. One of Mary’s new responsibilities was to make out the quarterly bills, Stanley’s part was to make sure they got paid. Every so often she’d hear him downstairs in his office, sounding off to a delinquent patient in his familiar, forthright operating-room style. Since the parents-to-be had known for nine months that the baby was on its way, why hadn’t they had brains enough to set aside money to pay their bill?

  Such was the life of a newlywed GP. Stanley had to put in many hours of hard labor and sometimes a lot of yelling to keep the rent paid and his wife provided with housekeeping money. Mary got fifty dollars a month with which to buy the groceries and other household necessities, including coal for the furnace in wintertime and two dollars and fifty cents a week for a hired girl, when they could afford one. There would be no “Tell that bill collector I’m not home” in Dr. Rinehart’s house. Mary budgeted her allowance down to the penny and saved wherever she could. She baked her own bread, she put up her own jams, jellies, and pickles. She washed the lace curtains herself and trusted no hands but her own to perform the fussy job of pinning them on stretchers to dry.

  One thing Mary Rinehart did not do was to lay out Stanley’s clothes every morning as Cornelia Roberts had done for Tom. Perhaps she saw this not very arduous task as somehow demeaning. More likely it was just that Stanley often had to get dressed at such odd times. Many a night, he’d be sleeping the sleep of the exhausted while Mary, awakened by a shrill whistle through the speaking tube that led up from the front doorway to the bedroom, would be listening to a desperate voice from below, pleading for the doctor. There’d been an accident, or somebody’s old grandfather had been taken bad, or the baby was on the way; Doctor had better come quick. In those days, the doctor went, no matter what. Mary’s job was to roust Stanley out of bed, which wasn’t always an easy thing to do, and make sure that he was decently covered before he dashed off to the rescue.

  These calls must have been almost as hard on her as they were on her husband. During the early months of her marriage, Mary herself was often unwell. This was not surprising. Ever since she’d enrolled herself in the student nursing program, she’d been stretching herself to the limit, and beyond. Now that she was out from under the too-demanding hospital discipline, she had time to collapse, as people who have undergone long periods of stress are apt to do once the pressure is lifted.

  Mary Rinehart could have headed for the sofa and remained there as Aunt Sade had done, thus avoiding these new demands that went with being a doctor’s wife. According to her autobiography she’d been a robust, athletic child; but accounts of later years are peppered with references to her ailments, including hospital visits and occasional surgery. Now that we know words like neurasthenia and psychosomatic, it would be easy to pin these tags on both Sade and Mary.

  But Sade, though she didn’t yet realize what was going on inside her, would die of cancer within the next few years. Mary, by hurling herself into that arduous training program while her teenaged body was still not fully developed, may well have done herself permanent damage in ways that the medical knowledge of the time was inadequate to diagnose, much less treat properly. She could have carried too many foot-filled buckets, inhaled too much hot formaldehyde, caught an insidious bacterial infection from cockroach-tainted food in that noisome kitchen where she’d been sent on private duty, overstrained some vital organ lifting the corpse that had spilled her out of her rocking chair back onto the bed from which it had fallen.

  Whatever might ail her, Mary carried on, determined to be a perfect wife whether or not Stanley really wanted quite that much perfection from his zealous young bride. She ironed her husband’s shirts and kept his trousers pressed. She prepared the hot lunches for which he was supposed to be home in time, since his office hours were from two to four and then from seven until he ran out of patients. In practice, their routine didn’t work out that smoothly. Mary always had dinner ready on the dot of six but there was no way of telling when or whether Stanley would find time to eat. His irregular hours must often have exasperated her, but only once did she turn violent.

  The Metropolitan Opera was coming to Pittsburgh. Mary and Stanley were both music lovers, and somebody had given them a pair of tickets. They hadn’t had an evening out in ages, so this was going to be a rare treat. For weeks, Mary looked forward to the opera. Came the big night, she dressed early in her best evening gown and, for once, laid out her husband’s dress clothes and his high silk hat. That done, she waited. And waited. And waited. When Stanley showed up at half-past nine, with only a brief apology, Mary went up in smoke. He could at least have telephoned.

  No, he couldn’t have. He suggested they drop the subject.

  Had Mary been Eliza Doolittle, she’d have known what to say. Not bloody likely! She snatched the high silk hat and hurled it clear across the room. Being a sensible man, he picked up his topper and kept his mouth shut.

  Several days passed. Finally Stanley got up his nerve to tell Mary why they’d missed the opera. He’d gone by streetcar to make a house call, leaving himself plenty of time to get home and dress. Stanley had caught the return car all right, but made the mistake of shutting his eyes once he’d sat down. Overworked, always tired, he’d fallen sound asleep. By the time he woke up, he was far out in the suburbs. There wasn’t a thing he could do but stand and wait for the next car back, foiled once again by the world of the inanimate.

  Generally speaking, Mary knew better than to resent being left alone while her husband was out on call, but for a while she found the evening hours hanging heavy. Once word got around the neighborhood that Dr. Rinehart’s new wife was herself a trained nurse, however, she became the most sought-after woman on the block. She comforted expectant mothers who were having panic attacks. She greased a boy who’d got his head stuck in a wrought-iron fence and popped him out, to the admiration of all beholders. A woman fell downstairs and hurt herself. Mary strapped up her ribs with adhesive tape. A man rushed into the office with his finger all but cut off. Mary could see nothing to do but finish the amputation, which she did in a thoroughly professional manner, and put a surgical dressing on the stump. She collected no fees for these impromptu services, but they must have generated lots of goodwill for her husband’s practice.

  Not that Stanley couldn’t generate enough goodwill on his own. Back at the hospital, Mary had often been amused to notice a general straightening of caps and smoothing of hair among her fellow nurses when S.M. showed up on his rounds. Now she was noticing those identical symptoms among some of Dr. Rinehart’s female patients.

  Allegheny at that time was a wealthy community. Among its residents were a number of affluent matrons with nothing much to do and even less to think about. Some of these women were finding a visit to Dr. Rinehart’s office the ideal treatment for their nervous ailments, real or fancied. Mary didn’t resent her husband’s being cloistered with these well-heeled ornaments of the social set—she was too well aware what a serious handicap a jealous wife could be to a doctor on his way up. What really got to the doctor’s young wife was having to open the door for all these beautifully gowned and coiffed ladies of leisure while she herself, in the midst of her household chores, had barely time to snatch off her kitchen apron and take a quick poke at her hair.

  As any reader of romantic novels about doctors might predict, there was one not-too-attractive woman who let her crush get out of hand.
She took to showing up every day during office hours, even telephoning for no good reason. Stanley Rinehart’s temper was beginning to simmer, and his wife’s was close to the boil. One day Mary took the call; the enamored lady had enough grace left to sound a wee bit embarrassed. It wasn’t anything important, she’d only wanted to ask Dr. Rinehart the meaning of a curious word she’d run across.

  What, Mary demanded with no excess of civility, was the word?

  The word was ultramontane.

  This meant simply “across the mountain.” Mary told her so pretty sharply and slammed down the earphone. A patient who couldn’t tell the difference between a doctor and a dictionary was not worth humoring, even if she did pay her bills on time.

  Those first months in her new life taught Mary a great deal, but an even more vital learning opportunity was about to occur. Eight months or so after the wedding, it became clear that she was in an interesting condition. This was good news, for Stanley was eager to start a family and Mary herself had never been one to shrink from a new experience. Unfortunately her rosy dreams of motherhood soon took on a bilious hue. All during her pregnancy, she had a hard time keeping food down; as a result, she would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night absolutely ravenous. In her memoirs, Mary drew a touching word picture of her devoted husband in his nightshirt, grilling her a lamb chop over the coal fire in the bedroom grate.

  It was Stanley’s half-brother, whom Mary had known in the hospital only as the awesome Dr. C.C., who got her squared away. One evening while her errant digestive tract was giving her a particularly rough time, Brother Tal, as she had by now learned to call him, dropped in with a cardboard box in his hand.