Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  The Window at the White Cat apparently caused no such ruckus. As far as characterization went, the young lawyer who was both the narrator and the hero of the book could have been interchanged with the young lawyer who narrated and starred in The Man in Lower Ten. The plot here is less cluttered and the background of political chicanery provides an opportunity for some well-managed atmosphere. This book also sold well on the strength of Mary’s earlier successes, but seems not to have raised any great furor on its own. The White Cat is again in print, however, and is still a good read for those interested in works from the Golden Age of mystery fiction that Mary Roberts Rinehart did so much to build and sustain.

  While 1908 had begun auspiciously for Mary, things weren’t so great for Stanley. An article that appeared in a learned magazine during the 1980s solves the whole problem in a nutshell and offers a diagnosis:

  Mary Roberts Rinehart has all of a sudden become rich and famous. Therefore, Doctor Stanley Rinehart has developed a mysterious, disabling condition in his hands. He will thus be kept from continuing to pursue a profession that, while it pays pretty well and has made him a respected figure in his native city, will never yield him sufficient money and stature to keep up with his celebrated wife.

  This is known as a conversion phenomenon. It means that Stanley Rinehart’s disability has automatically removed him from having to compete with her. Henceforth the doctor can allow himself to enjoy a life of luxury at his wife’s expense without having to suffer either public ignominy or private guilt feelings.

  All this sounds very plausible, but there are some odd omissions. By 1908, Stanley Marshall Rinehart was head of surgery at Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital; he had already been doing surgery there before Mary entered the nursing program in 1893. Nothing is said in the article of the “wet” method that then required surgery to be performed under constantly dripping irrigation tubes at a time when viable rubber gloves were not to be had, or that surgeons were on call night and day without extra remuneration. Equally no mention is made of the grueling hours, of the late-night house calls that were a standard part of Stanley’s general practice, of his chronic weariness during those early years when he’d been the sole support of an often ailing wife and their three little boys.

  Nor is it pointed out that such symptoms as Stanley Rinehart was evincing do not, as a rule, come on suddenly. Who ever knew precisely when he’d begun to notice pain and stiffness in his hands? Typical behavior of the manly male is to make a great to-do about a hangnail or a sniffle but to maintain a stoical silence about any symptom that he suspects may indicate a serious problem. For upward of twenty years, Dr. Rinehart had been recognized as a fine surgeon. Losing his finger dexterity would mean cutting off an important part of his career, not to mention of his income and prestige. It would have been in character for him to make light of his symptoms as long as he could.

  As time went on, Stanley’s suffering would increase. In later years, he was sometimes unable even to get out of his chair because the pain was so intense. At other times he might have normal use of his limbs. This was not at all remarkable, the “rheumatics” that so many of our forebears suffered from and passed on to succeeding generations is still a rather mysterious ailment.

  Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common form. It can show up in a patient of any age, but is most likely to make itself felt in adults between thirty and forty. Stanley Rinehart had his forty-first birthday in January 1908. Pain and stiffness in the joints are the chief symptoms. These often show up first in the finger joints, tend to be worst on rising in the morning and may wear off to a greater or lesser degree in the course of the day. Sometimes they don’t manifest themselves at all; a patient can be pain-free one day and in agony the next. This makes it easy for nonsufferers to suspect the aching one of hypochondria, malingering, or a conversion phenomenon whereas in truth he may be even sicker than he himself realizes.

  Through Mary’s autobiography and her travel books, we get a picture of Stanley as the direct antithesis of an idle sybarite. We see an overworked doctor coming home late and weary from his evening rounds, crawling into bed for a little sleep, getting up in the night to warm bottles for a sick baby so that his equally tuckered-out wife can get the sleep she desperately needs. We see a loving father romping with his young sons, then hearing their prayers and tucking them in for the night, hoping he won’t get called out on an emergency but never refusing to go. We see a faithful husband refusing the blandishments of his rich female patients, keeping the home fires burning while the woman he’s promised to love, honor, and cherish breaks free of the shibboleths against wives who work outside the home. Is it really credible that such a man could ever have appointed himself the family gigolo on any pretext, conscious or subconscious; much less at a time when Mary’s writing career was still hovering on the brink?

  Even today, laymen have many misconceptions about how much and how often writers get paid. The author of the article may surely be excused for not having known that, while The Circular Staircase was getting rave reviews, Mary still hadn’t touched a penny of income from her surprising best-seller, and wouldn’t for some time to come. Standard publishing practice at that time, particularly with a writer who had as yet no track record in hardcover sales, was to pay nothing on acceptance, nothing on publication. The author’s recompense would come solely—and slowly—as a small royalty on each separate copy of the book after the purchase money had filtered back from the bookseller to the publisher. The reason Mary failed to record the payments she received from those early hardcover sales may well have been that it was just too much bother to keep track of the many fiddling sums that trickled in at unpredictable times. Since there was no income tax to worry about in those semihalcyon days, she would have been under no special compulsion to keep careful records.

  During that exasperating hiatus before the gravy train rolled up to the door, Stanley’s hands kept on hurting. Aspirin, which has been a standard panacea for arthritic pain as long as most of us now living can remember, would not be introduced in America until during World War I. There were a good many patent medicines on the drugstore shelves and many people dosed themselves just as recklessly as they do nowadays, but Stanley knew better than to fall for any quack nostrums. When the pain got too bad to be borne, he took a morphine tablet and carried on.

  Morphine is still in the pharmacopoeia because it is still the most effective painkiller available. Nowadays it is a controlled substance available only by prescription; in the early 1900s, druggists would keep great jars of morphine pills sitting on their counters and scoop them out like jellybeans. Then, as now, most purchasers did not automatically become addicts. Using narcotics, except in moderation for therapeutic purposes, was considered a sign of a weak character. No respectable person, and respectability was important in those days, wanted to be tagged a hophead. Stanley Rinehart’s only problem, but a devasting one, was that the morphine made his hands shake.

  This meant no more surgery. Stanley still had his general practice, of course. He also tried his now tremulous hand at writing some articles on nutrition and other medical subjects of interest to the lay reader. These pieces were accepted by the prestigious Saturday Evening Post, which Mary had thus far not succeeded in cracking. They must have provided some solace for the doctor’s amour propre as well as extra cash for his pocket, since the Post paid quite well, but his writings did not lead to a change in his career.

  Mary was not wasting any time waiting for those as yet hypothetical royalties from her first big seller. The sales she did record for 1908 and 1909 show that she was still churning out shorter pieces, meekly accepting whatever payment any publication chose to offer. In December 1908, Lippincott published a novella of hers called Seven Days. The following year, Dodd, Mead & Co. retitled the piece When a Man Marries and offered it as a full-length book in a handsome hardcover edition, eked out with a goodly number of peppy line drawings by Mayo Larkin and a couple of swoony full-color plates by the famous
Harrison Fisher.

  By a slight stretch of the publisher’s imagination, this charming literary excursus of Mary’s could have been marketed as a mystery. Mostly, it’s pure fun. The narrator is a bright young butterfly of the social set. Her rejected suitor has recently married another, his wife has already walked out on him for reasons of boredom. His formidable old aunt is coming to visit and will expect to find a doting spouse in residence. Can’t the girl he once loved please help him out for auld lang syne?

  The once-loved says forget it, Freddy; but the rest of their mutual coterie pressure her to accept. Eventually she agrees, on condition that the whole gang come along to chaperon. No sooner are they all ensconced in the bereft bridegroom’s house than his Japanese manservant comes down with smallpox and is carted away to the hospital. The entire houseparty, including the acerbic aunt, are put under quarantine with not a single lackey, serf, or esne to wait on them and hardly a clue about fending for themselves. A gaggle of reporters get wind of the story, they come to camp on the doorstep, and a mysterious presence starts riding up and down the dumbwaiter.

  At the time of this writing, in 1993, the Rinehart mysteries are being reissued in paperback for the umpteenth time. Why no publisher has yet picked up this little bundle of delight is a puzzlement. The book sold very well at its debut and did even better as a play that Mary and Avery Hopwood later worked up together, going back to the original title. Seven Days ran for 397 performances on Broadway and eventually netted Mary $50,000.

  Obviously the vow that Mary had sworn after her early fiasco never again to become involved with the theater had been made with her fingers crossed. She’d no sooner got back to Pittsburgh and licked her wounds when Beatrice DeMille, swamped with submissions from would-be playwrights that she had no time to read, began sending armloads of scripts for Mary’s critical opinion. Most of these were awful. Mary took particular delight in rejecting the very worst of the bunch, which had been written by a well-known critic who’d given her play a merciless roasting.

  Mrs. DeMille also coaxed Mary into taking on new assignments as a play doctor, calling her up every so often with a last-minute plea to come back to New York and turn some floundering turkey into a box-office smash. How could a stagestruck writer resist such a challenge? Mary would send her mother an SOS to come and mind the boys, throw a few things into a bag, and rush to catch the train. After a tedious commute and a hectic stint of nonstop writing, she’d stagger back, worn to a frazzle and too often depressed at her failure to pull off a miracle.

  This chapter in the Rinehart saga was a short one. Stanley wanted a wife, not a whirligig, and was not shy about voicing his feelings. The smashing grand finale came when Mary was summoned to rescue The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary, a play based on a book by the popular Anne Warner, in which May Robson was to star.

  The trouble was easy enough to spot. Miss Robson, like Mary’s late bête noire the Devouring Dutchman, wanted the whole show to herself. At this point the play was little more than a static monologue. Mary’s attempt to introduce some lively dialogue turned it into a clawing catalog. Actress and playpatcher went for each other like two irate tabbies on a backyard fence. Beatrice DeMille, in a desperate attempt at fur-smoothing, met the two for lunch at the Astor wearing a blue-checkered kitchen apron that she’d been too flustered to take off before she left home. Probably nobody nowadays ever says, as our grandmothers were wont to do, “I’d like to take that she-devil over my checkered apron and give her a good spanking,” but some such notion may have been floating around Mrs. DeMille’s subconscious when she entered the fray so aptly attired. Anyway, she took it off; the waiter gallantly folded it up and presented it to her in a doggie bag.

  Mary was finally talked into carrying on, and she got almost no sleep until the job was done. The play did well. Eventually and grudgingly, May Robson paid Mary $200 for saving her show. Even if this hadn’t been the last straw, Mary would have had to quit running to New York. She’d lost her baby-sitter.

  Cornelia Roberts had suffered a stroke. Temporarily paralyzed, permanently bereft of speech, Mary’s and Olive’s vigorous, capable, ever-resourceful mother had become, at fifty-five years of age, her daughters’ baby. After a lengthy hospital stay, she was carried on a stretcher to the Rineharts’ and Mary switched back from author to nurse.

  The stricken woman never recovered fully, but she did regain some of her accustomed functions. Rehabilitating a stroke patient was, and is, a wearisome task. Cornelia had to be retaught even the most basic skills, such as how to feed herself gruel from a spoon. With good nursing and loving care, her strength and her memory began to come back. She could move her legs and her left arm. Although the right arm and hand would remain useless, she relearned certain hand skills, even the embroidery she’d always done so well. She never did get her voice back, however. For the next fourteen years she would remain, as Mary described her, “A silent, gentle, patient presence in the house.”

  Silent, gentle, and patient though she might be, Cornelia also became an ongoing problem. Once she’d got her legs back under her, she had to be watched like the child she’d become, to be kept away from the stairs, from the stove, from all the possible danger spots. She would lock herself in her bedroom and forget how to turn the key. As a result, the neighborhood locksmith became a frequent visitor. She developed a Jacksonian epilepsy. These sudden mild seizures were an additional worry.

  Returning memory created new difficulties. Cornelia could hear and understand what others were saying, and though she wanted desperately to take her part in the conversation, the words would not come out. The family tried coaxing her to spell out words with the children’s alphabet blocks, but this was more than she could manage. Finally they resorted to asking yes-or-no questions that she could answer with a nod or a shake of the head. The method was tedious and time-consuming, but it worked.

  As time went on, Cornelia found herself able to read printed matter. Books and newspapers became a source of much satisfaction, but anything handwritten defeated her completely. Mary even had to read Olive’s letters aloud. She must have been saddened to remember her mother’s clandestine penmanship lessons and to realize that never again would she receive one of those exquisitely penned notes, with each separate character standing out proud and perfect for the recipient to see and to admire.

  At least money was not lacking. Mary’s mysteries and her play Seven Days were by now bringing in impressive royalties. The boys at school and Cornelia in the spare bedroom were doing as well as could be expected; the family’s one big problem was Stanley’s hands. By 1910, he and Mary had come to a decision. Doing general medicine without being able to practice surgery as well was not a viable course for a man who still regarded himself as the family provider. Sporadic payments from Mary’s writing seemed too much like leprechauns’ gold; who was to know whether all those serendipitous dollars might suddenly turn to dead leaves and blow away overnight?

  As soon as Mary had begun earning, she’d insisted on adding whatever she got to the common pool. She had known women with money of their own that they felt free to use as they pleased while expecting their husbands to pay all the bills; this was not her idea of an honorable marriage. Stanley Rinehart was the head of their family, Mary was glad to be able to help her husband but had not thought of taking over his position. She was still distrustful, not so much these days of her ability to earn money as of life in general. She needed his strength to lean on, perhaps even more than she knew.

  According to modern medical books, a type A personality is one whose life is “a chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time.” The “A type” tends to believe that he or she can win approval only through achievement, even though this may be far from the actual case.

  Modern studies have revealed that hormonal responses to stressful situations tend to be higher in type A children. Mary Roberts Rinehart’s life had been stressful from the day she was born. She never forgot those hellfire and
brimstone sermons that had been standard Sabbath fare at grandmother’s house, or the many senseless restrictions to which she’d routinely been subjected, or the trauma of that first day in school when she’d been chastised for not knowing that the hand which served her best was the one that she was somehow wrong and wicked to use.

  Studies have also revealed that the parents of type A children often respond to their achievements not by praise but by pressing them to do more and more, better and better; whereas their laid-back type B siblings get approval for lesser achievements and no parental demands to try harder. This seems to have been the case with Mary and her sister. As Mary had outgrown that ever-ready switch, Cornelia had loaded her with errands, household chores, and extracurricular piano and dancing lessons, expecting her to keep up her grades at school but leaving her little time to study. Olive, on the other hand, was allowed to slide along at her own pace and to have her most unreasonable whims gratified without a murmur of protest from her mother.

  Type A personalities basically enjoy being what they are and have no desire to moderate their breakneck careerings along the road of life. Mary had not balked at her mother’s demands; she’d drawn satisfaction from being able to do more than her fair share. Her reaction to being freed from schoolday routine had been to subject herself to a far more arduous discipline, taking the nurses’ training course over parental protests and sticking it out to the end even though the work was really far too arduous for a young girl of slender build and strong sensibilities.

  Stanley Rinehart was himself an achiever, but he was also a cherisher. He’d taken time to show love as well as caring to the sick children back at the hospital. He must have seen pretty Mary Roberts as someone who needed what he had to offer, and he could not have been more right. He surely hadn’t expected his wife just to sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam all her days; it was Mary who set herself the goal of being a perfect housekeeper and mother, slaving to keep up the high standards to which Cornelia had trained her, even though as a busy doctor’s wife she had a far more complex household to run.