Besides picking up ideas both good and otherwise, Mary was meeting some of the locals in Vienna. A lady professor from Berlin asked her how Americans were taxed. Mary said her husband had to pay a dollar a year poll tax and another dollar for a school tax.
And was that all? The Professorin was flabbergasted.
Actually Americans were taxed in a number of ways, such as on property, alcohol, and inheritance; but the Rineharts then owned no real estate, imbibed only modestly, and had no rich relatives leaving them money, so how was Mary to know? At least she gave the Professorin something new to think about.
New Year’s Eve in Vienna was a night to remember. The city was one great festival with orchestras playing, dancers waltzing around and around to the heady strains of Strauss and Waldteufel, flowers being flung down from theater boxes and flung back again like confetti, a chimney sweep running around with a squealing piglet in his arms. To touch a sweep was lucky, to touch the pig was luckier still. Four years hence, the Austrians would be needing all the luck they could get; tonight the fun and feasting went on.
But then, feasting was always going on. A true Viennese would have coffee and rolls upon rising, a hearty breakfast about nine o’clock, perhaps a little something around noontime to stay the stomach until the day’s big meal at two, afternoon tea or coffee with Schlagobers at five, then an early evening dinner and maybe a midnight snack to make sure nobody went to bed hungry.
CHAPTER 16
Cities of Dreams and Nightmares
Nobody went hungry, that is, except the poor. Herr Doktor Rinehart was working in both the pulmonary and cardiac fields, at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus he found plenty of subjects for clinical study. This beautiful old city of Vienna was not all whipped cream and Liebesfreud. Too many dashing young soldiers were fathering illegitimate children on too-trusting girls and leaving them to shift for themselves however they might. Older women who had the misfortune to be neither pretty nor rich were held in low esteem, the Rineharts were aghast to see so many gray-haired matrons working on construction projects, climbing ladders, carrying hodfuls of brick, stone, and mortar up to the masons.
One of Dr. Rinehart’s courses was in bronchoscopy. This included learning to remove foreign bodies from the bronchial tubes, a terribly painful process that involved having to give the patient heavy doses of cocaine. The numbers of poor volunteers who were willing to let untrained students like himself practice on them for a pitifully low fee shocked the American doctor to his depths.
What appalled Mary even more was finding out how many of the foreign doctors who flitted in and out of the classrooms were staying in Vienna for only a couple of weeks, or a month at most. They would take a crash course or two, learn a few catch phrases and precious little else, then bustle off home surrounded by the glamorous aura of having studied abroad and hang up a diploma that was worth about as much in the way of credentials as a souvenir program from the opera.
The Dozents who signed these farcical diplomas knew what was going on, but what could they do? They were only there to teach; if these fly-by-night physicians were brash enough to go back to America and pass themselves off as specialists, was it any skin off the Austrians’ noses? Nevertheless, honest instructors loathed being made parties to so blatant a fraud. After she got home, Mary wrote an article called “The Medical Quick Lunch Counter.” It ran in the Saturday Evening Post July 26, 1913. Some American doctors took umbrage but one of the best-known Viennese lecturers sent her a letter of thanks.
Among the happier memories soon to be carried away by the Rineharts would be a ball given by the city of Vienna to the emperor. At the last minute, the aging Franz Joseph, who had by this time only about five more years to live, fell ill; his place was taken by his grandson, Prince Carl, then hardly more than a boy. Moral support was provided by an older archduchess wearing a diamond-studded crown tipped with enormous pear-shaped pearls on all its points. She looked frail, bored, and wearied by that glittering load of responsibility weighing down her head.
In 1917, Mary would poke gentle fun at Anthony Hope and George Barr McCutcheon with a Graustarkian romance in which the handsome prince is only ten years old. It’s hard to believe that Long Live the King was not to some extent inspired by the memory of that night at the absent emperor’s ball, dredged up from the subliminal ragbag that is so indispensable a part of any fiction writer’s tool kit.
Romance was unavoidable in Vienna. It ran rife among all who could afford the luxury and no doubt a good many who couldn’t. The Rineharts’ Saturday night visits to the Bal Tabarin were given an extra touch of zest for Mary by a certain tall army officer. He never spoke to her, never begged to be introduced, but never failed to catch her eye, stand to attention, and raise his glass in a toast. Being an anständige Frau like the fair Valencienne in The Merry Widow, Mary had to pretend that she was unaware of the gallant officer’s attention. Nevertheless, a woman in her midthirties, mother of three, could scarcely have come away without a smug little feeling that she still had what it took to please the troops.
Late in February, the family said good-bye to Frau Gallitzenstein, the mustachioed porter, and their neighbor the Serbian spy. Dr. Rinehart had dutifully done what he’d come for, and he’d earned a holiday before they hit the homeward trail. Their next stop was Munich. They arrived during the pre-Lenten celebration, in a rain of confetti that soon turned to hail and then to snow.
Considering what the Rineharts would be experiencing in a few years’ time, it’s hardly surprising that Mary, writing her autobiography a quarter of a century later, dismissed their visit to Germany in a few curt paragraphs. Stanley Junior’s on-the-spot reporting paints a far livelier picture, starting with their first night in Munich, when his mother decided to take a picture of the three boys all huddled together under an enormous puff.
The 1911 equivalent of the flash bulb was a pinch of magnesium powder in a metal holder at the far end of Father’s outstretched arm. When ignited on this night, the flash powder flared up for an instant in a strong white glare and incidentally set fire to a curtain that nobody had noticed in time. Dr. Rinehart, blinded by the flash, didn’t react right away. Whether Mary remembered to snap the picture before putting out the fire, young Stanley forgot to say. Anyway, the curtain was only singed and the holiday went merrily on.
The Stanleys Senior and Junior went to cash an Austrian check. The easygoing Austrian bank clerk had assured Dr. Rinehart that he wouldn’t need any notice, but the regulation-minded Teutons said he did, and furthermore that he’d have to wait several days for the notice to come from Vienna. The doctor had only seven dollars in his pocket, but he was not without his undaunted fighting spirit. By afternoon he’d got his money. One gets the impression that the boys spent it all on confetti. This was the first time they’d seen tiny bits of colored paper used as an offensive weapon. As young Stanley was ambling along with his mouth open, a prankster shouted “Mahlzeit!” (literally “mealtime,” slang for “enjoy your meal”) and shoved a handful down his gullet. Spectators on balconies tossed down balls of confetti wrapped in tissue paper, and children raced to get them, knocking other boys and girls and even grown-ups off their feet. Neatly dressed people trying to get through the crowd emerged looking like scarecrows. Stanley Junior recorded one man sitting on the sidewalk with a dent in his hat, and what surprised him most was that neither this victim nor any of the others seemed to mind getting mauled about.
The boys had a different fräulein now, a well-connected young lady named Hilda von Wagner von Florheim. She had a gentleman friend, a professor, who took them riding in his auto. According to Stanley Junior, the professor was short but cheerful and let the chauffeur drive fast. One object of their sight-seeing tour was the Hofbrauhalle, an enormous barn of a place starkly furnished with long wooden tables and benches. The wooden floor was soaked with spilled beer, and the boys estimated later that between two and three hundred gallons of beer got drunk every day. (And it was terrible, Stanley Junior ad
ded in a jocose parenthesis, when beer got drunk.)
The Munich pigeons were friendly, and Stanley Junior persuaded them to perch on his head by sprinkling bird seed in his hair. At the aquarium the boys met a seal who was clamoring loudly for fish. Alan went to buy him one—Stanley noted in his diary that they cost ten pfennig, or two and a half cents per fish. Once the seal had made sure Alan was really buying the fish, he stood up on his hind legs (sic) and waited with no more fuss. This was evidently standard procedure enjoyed by the feeder, the fishmonger, and most particularly by the seal.
The seal was not the only creature being fed. The boys saw the man in charge give a dead white mouse to a big lizard in a cage. They watched for five minutes while the lizard swallowed the mouse in a series of leisurely gulps. A water moccasin was offered a live mouse: It struck with its fangs, waited a few minutes, then grabbed the luckless creature in its mouth. Stanley Junior thought it did this to make the mouse jump and that the mouse did not enjoy the snake’s attention, and about the latter he was probably right. After a while, the snake swallowed the mouse, still alive, at the same slow pace as the lizard had done. Stanley records that he and his brothers were horrified.
The Rineharts had got to Munich on the night of February 25, 1911. They left the night of March 4 for Berlin, and arrived at eight the next morning. The diarist gives high marks to the German sleeping cars but regrets having to leave fräulein’s friend’s motor car. Fräulein von Wagner von Florheim did take them walking down the famous Unter den Lindenstrasse. This bustling, shop-lined avenue reminded Stanley Junior of Broadway and made him homesick for New York; although, as he explained, he wasn’t wishing to be there because he knew that once he’d got back to the States he’d be wishing he were still in Europe.
The doubly vonned young governess seemed to have friends everywhere. One of the Berlin contingent took the party out driving in an open carriage, and they went to a wonderful store that outshone most of the American stores Stanley Junior had seen.
Berlin was different from Munich and far, far different from Vienna. Berliners were organized, they were diligent, but they didn’t seem to have much fun. The pension where the Rineharts were staying was literally too clean for comfort; every floor, every piece of furniture got polished every single day. The boys felt compelled to sneak around on tiptoe for fear of disturbing the Hausfrau’s impeccable appointments.
Here, the military motif was far too much in evidence. Queen Victoria’s nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had dreamed of expanding his empire; now it was beginning to look as though he and his generals might be on the way to converting their wishes for conquest into action. Berlin was full of soldiers, squads of them marching down the streets with a stiff-legged goose step that the Rinehart boys found amusing. Mary had to shush her irreverently snickering sons and tell them to wipe the smiles off their faces. Those other faces under the peaked uniform caps were too set, too wooden, too dehumanized; she herself saw nothing funny about them.
King George V and Queen Mary of England had always liked their cousin the kaiser. In May 1912, they would attend the wedding of Wilhelm II’s only daughter, Princess Victoria Louise, to their cousin Ernest Augustus, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, despite the growing tensions between their respective countries. Britain’s king would make it clear to the Germans and particularly to his own somewhat jittery subjects that this was purely a family occasion and must in no way be interpreted as a state visit. George V did not then know that it would be the last visit ever paid between these two then reigning monarchs, or that, once the Armistice was signed, the monarchy in Germany would thenceforth cease to exist.
During the Rineharts’ brief stay in Berlin, they had plenty of opportunities to observe that relations between Germany and Britain were already showing signs of strain. Americans were still tolerated but the English were anathema and it was not always easy for Berliners to discern the differences between people of two nationalities who spoke the same language. The Rineharts got sick of arriving at a restaurant, seeing plenty of empty tables, and then being kept standing around for an unconscionable length of time while the waiters fawned servilely over every Oberleutnant and Unterleutnant in the place.
Despite a good deal of rude treatment, the boys were enjoying themselves. They still had one day in the city, and they made the most of the time, collecting snapshots they’d taken to be developed, shopping for souvenirs. Stanley Junior bought his mother a calendar mounted on wood that was carved in the shape of a dachshund drinking beer. Fräulein’s friend took them for another carriage ride, which Stanley thought was nice of the friend. And the cocoa was good.
On their last afternoon, the family took a sight-seeing tour by taxi. Going past some woods, Stanley Junior asked their driver if animals lived there. “Oh yes,” the man replied, “there is a dog.” The diarist commented sweetly on the German taxi drivers’ penchant for humor, including their prankish way of driving strangers out into the countryside and giving them a choice of paying double fare or walking back to the city.
Then it was auf wiedersehen to Berlin and on to Cologne, another overnight journey. They changed trains for Brussels, where fräulein again proved her worth by being able to translate from English to German to French or Flemish, these last two being the only languages Belgian taxi drivers seemed able to speak.
Mary was not feeling well; even Stanley Junior was tired out. The next day they went on to Calais and straight to the channel steamer. The crossing to Dover was rough, but getting back to England felt good. Stanley was glad to be where everybody spoke English; still he referred to the hotel as a pension and remarked that the waiter was German.
Dr. Rinehart was still keeping his nose to the grindstone. He intended to finish his overseas studies with a two-week course at Guy’s Hospital in London.
Having done their duty as sightseers on their earlier visit, Mary and the boys took the return trip more easily. They lounged around the hotel, they went shopping. They saw Maskelyne, the famous magician, who asked for a volunteer from the audience and got young Stanley. They went to the zoo in Hyde Park on Sunday and watched a baby camel gambol. Stanley Junior recorded in his diary that he supposed it was too young to know it shouldn’t gambol (sic) on Sunday. They went to see an airship flight. There were three biplanes and a monoplane—this was a great thrill.
On March 25, 1911, the Rineharts said good-bye to fräulein at the station and went on to Liverpool, where they boarded the steamship that would take them home. The crossing was rough at times, but the fun went on. The best part of the voyage was docking in New York. On April 4, they were back in Pittsburgh, and content to be there.
CHAPTER 17
Be It Never So Humble
Nowadays we hear a fair amount about right-brain and left-brain characteristics. The general idea seems to be that the creative side of the brain feeds on honeydew and drinks the milk of paradise while the stodgy old other half is the dependable drudge that remembers to clean the cat box and pay the light bill. By now it must be clear to us that Mary Roberts Rinehart had a brain half that worked much like Mozart’s, whizzing out new plots and dialogue even faster than her well-trained hand could write them down.
Unfortunately, her superdynamic creative half must often have forgotten to let the not-so-swift practical side know what it was up to. The faster Mary wrote, the more money poured in. The more money she earned, the more financial binds it got her into. That romantic imagination tricked her into buying a sixteenth of a gold mine that never got mined. In another burst of wishful thinking, she gave an ex-aviator a check for $10,000 to develop an oil well that existed only in his brain. Not long after the family got home, this mental communication gap of Mary’s developed into the biggest case yet of “had she but known.”
Dr. Rinehart’s new career was going to make a tremendous difference in the way his family lived. He would no longer be on call night and day, his offices would not be in the house, the telephone wouldn’t be ringing at all hours. Mary wouldn’t
be trying desperately to quiet the boys down so as not to disturb patients in the waiting room or frantically tracking down her husband and alerting him to the latest emergency. His business address would be an attractive suite in downtown Pittsburgh where he would hold no evening hours. Mary could invite friends to dinner with confidence that their host would be on hand to carve the roast with surgical skill and not fall asleep with his head in the soup. They could go to parties, to the theater, have a life of their own for a change.
And they would have a house of their own. All her life long, Mary had lived in rented dwellings. Other people bought houses, why shouldn’t the Rineharts? She envisioned a haven of peace and security where the boys could grow up, a real home to which, in future years, her sons’ sons and daughters could come and stay and be happy. She had money now, she could make her dream come true. She began to house hunt.
Here it came, the ultimate opportunity for Mary Roberts Rinehart to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Twelve miles outside Pittsburgh, in the picturesque Sewickley Valley to which wealthy families had begun moving now that old Allegheny had been absorbed into the metropolis, beautifully situated on a high bluff overlooking the Ohio River, sat a magnificent ruin. Named Cassella, the mansion had been built half a century before for George W. Cass, one of the post–Civil War era’s swashbuckling railroad barons. There remained in the gulley below the bluff a spur track to which the magnate’s private railway car had often been shunted. Whether the Rineharts could ever make use of so particular an amenity was doubtful, but the track did add a certain cachet to the demesne.
Cassella had been nobly planned; in its heyday the house must have been magnificent. But any dwelling begins to decay if it sits too long untenanted; even the enthralled Mary could see that extensive repairs needed to be made before these rooms were again fit to live in. She was, as usual, undaunted. This was the house she wanted, this was the house she would have. And this was the house she would pay for, she vowed, every cent of it, all by herself. Dr. Rinehart had far more important things to do with his money than cater to the whims of his admittedly sometimes extravagant wife.
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