Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  As parents, Cornelia and Tom Roberts had done as well as many and better than some, but that hadn’t made them the world’s greatest role models. Mary must have found her mother’s instructions in lying to bill collectors a confusing paradox in one who professed such lofty religious tenets. Tom’s rather cruel baiting of his half-blind mother, his absorption in his inventions, his increasingly excessive drinking, and finally his suicide just before his elder daughter was to marry a thoroughly eligible young man from a prominent local family suggest a neurotic self-involvement that might well have precluded any really deep attachment to anyone else.

  It has been suggested nevertheless that Tom Roberts was the center of Mary’s universe. For a child of her intelligence, disposition, and abilities, it seems more likely that Mary’s universe would have fitted the metaphysical definition of a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. She had always found friends outside the family, at fifteen she’d been briefly engaged to a boy at school, at nineteen she’d been wearing Stanley Rinehart’s ring tucked under her uniform tie. The grief that Mary showed over her father’s suicide could have been compounded from one part affection, one part shock, one part exhaustion and depression generated by the hideous experiences she’d run into as a private nurse, and one part exasperation that he couldn’t have waited till after the wedding.

  All this is arguable. It is safe only to say that, whether influenced by heredity, habitat, or hormones, Mary Roberts Rinehart was what she was. That headlong plunge into the lake on her new bicycle can be taken as a symbol of her inborn penchant for leaping into fresh experiences without stopping to wonder whether she’d be able to put on the brakes.

  Stanley knew his Mary perhaps better than she knew herself. He could not but have realized how greatly she needed his love and strength to keep her life in balance. Mary Roberts on her own could still have become an author and playwright, could still have raked in all the money and notice that she was getting now, and still have found herself socially unacceptable. Mrs. Stanley Rinehart the doctor’s wife bore a cachet of respectability that could take her to places where a mere celebrity would never find entree, except perhaps as some kind of amusing freak.

  Mary was very aware of her position. Once she found herself being interviewed for the papers, she took care to present herself as a wife and mother who amused herself by scribbling a bit in her off moments. But this was a trivial concern. Her big worry was the state of her husband’s hands. She loved Stanley Rinehart as a man, she honored him as a professional, she wanted him to be happy. Since he could no longer practice surgery, he must find something else to do. And, thanks to her sudden affluence, she could help.

  A new trend had been sweeping the medical profession. At the beginning of a new century, the way for an American doctor to get ahead was to specialize, and the way to learn a specialty was to study in Vienna. Stanley came from German stock on his father’s side, he spoke German well enough to get along, so to Vienna he would go. But not alone. For so devoted a family man to leave his wife and young sons for months on end would have been unthinkable even if that adventurous crew would have let him get away with it. There was money enough coming in from Mary’s writing so that they all could go. Cornelia would stay at Olive’s house, where there was a grandchild to pet and another on the way. Mary got out the steamer trunks and the boys’ little suitcases and started to pack.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Rineharts Broaden Their Horizons

  Precisely why the Rineharts elected to drive from Pittsburgh to New York instead of going by train is not recorded. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. A few months previously they had bought their first motor car, a Premier, one of the more splendid of the various models that were by this time being manufactured in small factories scattered around the country.

  The question of whether a driver should sit on the right- or the left-hand side of the car had still not been settled. The Premier’s steering wheel was on the right, with its gearshift and brake levers outside on the running board. These were easy enough to get at because the Premier, like other cars of the time, had no top. Nor did its front seat have any doors, but the sides dipped lower in front than in back. An agile male suitably attired in an ankle-length dustcoat, a peaked cloth cap worn backwards and anchored to the head by the strap of his driving goggles, and a formidable pair of driving gauntlets could easily step in over the side.

  A lady in a long skirt, a dustcoat like her husband’s, kid gloves, spatted boots, and an architectural marvel of a motoring hat skewered to her hair with hatpins ten inches long would probably prefer to enter demurely via the rear door in the tonneau. She would not be wearing goggles, for she wouldn’t have been able to put them on without messing her high-piled, side-puffed, and back-knotted coiffure, ruining the effect of her hat, and risking snags in its yard upon yard of filmy veiling.

  It was not sexism that made driving primarily a man’s job. A fair amount of muscle must have been required to keep a big touring car like the Premier on course, and considerably more to cope with the flat tires that were an inevitable part of the fun. By 1910, pneumatic tires had replaced the original hard rubber carriage tires; these gave a less jouncy ride but the air-filled inner tubes were subject to punctures and blowouts. No motorist in his right mind would travel without a jack, tire irons, a lug wrench, a repair kit, a hand pump, and a spare tire or two. It was by no means unusual to see a car with four or five spares strapped to the back or the running board.

  Fixing a flat was in truth no job for a weakling. Those early tires carried fifty or sixty pounds’ pressure. Aside from the jacking, unbolting, patching, and remounting, just pumping up the inner tube was a pretty good workout for even a sturdy male in rude health. Rude language may on occasion have assisted the process. We can picture Mary, mindful of Stanley’s volcanic explosions in the operating room, tactfully suggesting to her boys that they all go and admire the beauties of nature somewhere out of earshot so that Daddy could have full freedom of expression while he practiced surgery on their fifteenth or twentieth blowout.

  Roads in some of the cities that the Rineharts passed through might have been paved. Those in the rural areas, and they were far in the majority, almost certainly had not. This was late September, the dirt roads had had a long, hot summer in which to dry out, and the Premier’s windshield could have done little or nothing to screen its passengers from the clouds of dust that were stirred up by every turn of the wheels.

  The three boys perched in the high tonneau didn’t seem to mind the dust. They amused themselves in various imaginative ways. One trick was to let their broad-brimmed straw hats fly off, always when some gullible soul was nearby to yell “Hey, boy, you’ve lost your hat!” The hatless one would then calmly reel in the long string to which the hat was attached and put his catch back on. Such were then the simple joys of childhood.

  Their father and mother in the front seat, which was lower than the back, got the brunt of the dust. Driving goggles doubtless served Stanley well enough, but Mary’s multiple veils could not have been all that effective at keeping the fine particles from sifting through their mesh. Her eyes became badly bloodshot. Somewhere along the way she read in a newspaper article that Mrs. Rinehart, the well-known novelist, was going blind and that this trip to Europe was being undertaken in the hope of saving her eyesight. Being Mary, she worried for weeks, even though bed rest and a milk diet easily cleared up the problem once she’d got away from the dust.

  They boarded their steamship in New York and made a short stopover in England for sight-seeing.

  Stanley Junior had been elected to keep a journal of the trip. According to his diary, they went to luncheon at “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,” which had been a loafing place (sic) of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Father sat in Dr. Johnson’s place at the table where the eminent lexicographer had gourmandized. Stanley didn’t write “eminent lexicographer”; on the evidence he probably could not have spelled it. They visited
Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which was gloomy. They went to a curiosity shop. Stanley Junior bought a telescope. They took the subway to Madame Tussaud’s; the boys must not have been allowed inside the Chamber of Horrors or Stanley’s entry would surely have been longer.

  Westminster Abbey was impressive, but the dancing at the Alhambra Theater was more to the young diarist’s taste. They toured Old London in taxis, they had lunch at Pagani’s. Stanley said the food was rotten and didn’t eat any.

  On October 22, they packed up and went to Folkestone, on the coast. The channel boat took them to Boulogne, and thence by train to Vienna.

  In May 1910, Dr. Rinehart had spent a couple of weeks at his old college, Hahnemann in Philadelphia, ostensibly taking a refresher course, perhaps mainly trying to get his head together. Mary had missed her husband dreadfully, she’d been even less happy when he wrote that he’d decided to specialize in tuberculosis.

  His was a brave decision, but a logical one. Doctors saw more tuberculosis cases than anything else. During the previous year, this highly contagious lung disease had still been the number one killer in the United States, with a death rate of one out of every nine patients. In some other countries, the rate was a good deal higher.

  The great problem with tuberculosis was—and remains—that it is so dreadfully easy to catch. Just being on the same streetcar with an infected person who sneezed or coughed carelessly, spraying live bacilli into the air for fellow passengers to inhale, could hypothetically have wiped out every ninth rider. Even dust from dried sputum contains live bacteria, and there was far too much of that around in 1910, especially in cities where men chewed tobacco and spat on the sidewalks where well-dressed ladies strolled by, wearing skirts with trains that swept the pavement. Before pasteurization became mandatory, milk from cows infected with bovine tuberculosis was another serious threat. One bucketful mixed into a vat at a dairy where milk from various farms was collected could mean trouble for households all along the milkman’s route.

  In 1882, when Stanley Marshall Rinehart was fifteen, the tubercle bacillus had been discovered by a German, Dr. Robert Koch. With the cause of the disease established, progress could be made in controlling it on an international basis. Since 1904 there had been national tuberculosis associations in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States; but it was in Denmark that Einar Holbøll invented the Christmas Seal in 1903 as a device for funding research.

  Studies were proving what doctors had surely suspected, that tuberculosis was more prevalent in crowded areas, particularly among people living in unsanitary conditions. However, nobody was immune. This was a full-scale war that would have to be fought on many fronts, with more knowledge, better medicines and techniques, and far more well-trained doctors than were then available. Dr. Rinehart’s studies abroad, coupled with his already fine reputation, would qualify him for a high position. Still, Mary begged her husband to get himself an antiseptic spray before he faced those foreign germs.

  Staying at a Viennese hotel would have been too expensive, so the Rineharts settled down in the Pension Columbia on the Dochgosse near the Allgemeine Krankenhaus (literally the “all-sorts-of-people-sick-house”; i.e. general hospital). Stanley Junior recorded the pension as a very homelike place. Dr. Rinehart got right down to hard work, taking German lessons on the side to supplement his imperfect knowledge of the language. Mary also began studying German, with a nearsighted fräulein who couldn’t see the text unless she literally had her nose in the book; for a young woman to wear eyeglasses was not the done thing.

  The boys acquired a governess. Her name was Reif, she was about twenty-five years old, and young Stanley liked her very much. She was supposed to teach the boys German. Instead, they did wonders for her English. After the turn of the year, Mary and the doctor decided to enroll their sons in school. The teachers didn’t seem to care whether the boys showed up or not; it seems to have been their parents who were getting most of the education.

  While Dr. Rinehart strove to fit himself for his new specialty, Mary went about broadening her horizons. She visited art galleries and studied the paintings and prints. She went to the opera and followed the libretto as the Viennese did. Wagner’s operas, not yet well known in the States outside of New York, were all the rage here. Austrian patrons could go out between the acts and buy sausages; Parsifal might have been more palatable to then uninitiated Americans if they could have got their culture with a little bratwurst and sauerkraut on the side.

  Another between-the-acts custom in Vienna was for men to stand up and study the ladies through their opera glasses from only a few seats away. Whether this was machismo or myopia, Mary seems never to have found out, but she was gracious enough to be glad later that these pleasure-bent dandies had managed to enjoy themselves before the powder keg blew up.

  The Rineharts’ temporary home consisted of a suite of rooms on the third floor of a vast stone building. It had no lift and no lights in the hallways after 10 P.M., but Vienna was a night-owl city. Nobody went straight home from the opera. Some of the theaters and music halls didn’t even open until midnight. On Saturday nights, when Dr. Rinehart borrowed time from his studies to take the family out to dinner and didn’t bring them back until after curfew, the house would be dark and the front door locked. They’d have to ring the doorbell and wait.

  Eventually a grumpy Hausbesorger (porter) would come down in his nightshirt, with his wide-spreading, formidably waxed mustache tied up in a contraption much like the whaleboned net collars that women were then wearing for no good reason that Mary could think of, even though she wore them too. The bandage went all around his head and tied at the back, and it had holes cut in the sides so that his ears could stick out and serve as anchors.

  He would first collect the five hellers (one cent) per head that was his fixed rate for overtime, then he’d equip each member of the party with a lighted midget candle, the sort that the Rinehart boys associated with birthday cakes. The latecomers would then wind their little torchlight procession up those many stairs, take out the pads between the hermetically sealed double windows, and let in the perilous night air against which their landlady, Frau Gallitzenstein, repeatedly warned them.

  Determined, like her husband, to squeeze every drop of juice from this once-in-a-lifetime experience, Mary took the boys and their governess to the Semmering (the Austrian Alps) for a before-Thanksgiving holiday. They had their first experience with skis, they went sledding. Young Stanley did not fail to record that Miss Reif fell off five times.

  Candles were the only nighttime illumination at the inn. Mary would light a dozen at a time in the living room and read by them after the children were in bed. She’d discovered a whole set of books by Lafcadio Hearn. Born in Ionia of half-Greek, half-Irish parentage, educated in France and England, a journalist in America, always writing but seldom successful in his earlier years, Hearn at last found his true home in Japan, married the daughter of a samurai family and became a respected university professor. He was a spinner of strangely intriguing stories, often with a thread of the supernatural winding through; just the candlelight fare for a compulsive reader’s snowy winter evenings in a strange land.

  Dr. Rinehart came up for the weekend, and then it was back to work for all hands. While the boys went through the motions of attending school, Mary began a novel. Her eyes no longer bothered her, but she found it necessary to light the candles by three o’clock in the afternoon when the gray twilight set in. Always, Vienna’s misty air cast a chill over the room even though Mary crammed charcoal briquettes recklessly into the tall, handsome, but inefficient porcelain stove. Sometimes she wrapped the half-size goosefeather mattress from her bed around her legs, but it didn’t help much.

  Nor did Mary’s study of German contribute anything useful to her writing style. When she got back to Pittsburgh and read over what she’d put down under the influence of all that braunschweiger and Sachertorte, she found her text so full of awkward semi-Germanic constructions that she had to j
unk it and rewrite the whole thing.

  This book, based on an unproduced play of hers called The Water Wooers, is an almost totally American story of a health spa tottering on the brink of insolvency. A redheaded female Figaro narrates the story, and a number of other characters are involved in assorted dilemmas, which the engaging redhead has to sort out with a little help and a good deal of hindrance from her friends. It need hardly be said that two of the featured players are a beautiful American heiress and a suave European nobleman, complete with monocle and mustache, to whom she is betrothed. The heiress asks for the redhead’s honest verdict on her princely spouse-to-be, the redhead comes up with a tactful answer.

  “He looks all right. Perhaps you can coax him to shave.”

  Equally needless to say, it all comes out in the wash. Where There’s a Will was published in 1912 by Bobbs-Merrill.

  But didn’t Mary do a novel set in Austria? Of course she did. How could she have resisted so beguiling a locale as the Siebensternengasse, the Little Street of the Seven Stars? She wasn’t able to tackle this next project until after she’d got home; the book reads as if she was having withdrawal symptoms from all the Schlag-laden coffee she’d imbibed at the Kaffeehaus where she and the doctor had gone daily to read the newspapers. It’s all about a poor but beautiful young violinist (female), a poor but noble young doctor (male), and a poor little orphan (boy) who is fading away in the Krankenhaus. The Street of Seven Stars was not enthusiastically received in the States, but Mary liked it. A writer can’t help keeping a warm spot for even the sickliest of her brainchildren.