Stanley Marshall Rinehart had long been a person of note in the Pittsburgh area. His recent studies abroad and his decision to set up as a specialist were giving him added stature, and he was increasingly asked to write and lecture. He had already served for a number of years on Pittsburgh’s Tuberculosis Commission; now, as well as conducting a private practice, he was in charge of the State Tuberculosis Dispensary. In 1914 he would be invited to serve on the planning committee to outfit the new city tuberculosis hospital. A longish biographical sketch of Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart in the 1922 History of Pittsburgh and Environs stated that “the fight for the prevention of tuberculosis has no more faithful proponent than he, his contribution that of exact medical knowledge and the enthusiasm of the true humanitarian.”
The piece listed Dr. Rinehart as a member of the American and the Pennsylvania State Homeopathic Associations and of the Allegheny Homeopathic Society. His clubs were the Edgeworth and the Allegheny Country Club, his church Methodist Episcopal, his politics Republican. His sons’ schools and colleges were listed in detail. His wife the authoress rated a courteous paragraph at the end.
While her husband was setting up his new offices, Mary was drawing every cent she had out of the bank and feeding it to her badly injured white elephant. Not until the die had been irrevocably cast did she quite realize what she’d taken on. Cassella was truly enormous—its walls seemed to have spread farther every time she went there. A room that none of the family could recall ever having noticed before suddenly manifested itself behind the kitchen. No doubt this room showed problems that must be dealt with, for there were problems everywhere else.
One of the minor dilemmas was what they should rename the house now that “Cassella” was no longer appropriate. Mary asked Stanley if he had any ideas. He suggested they call it the Bluff, since that was what they were putting up, and the Bluff it became.
Those workmen, however, weren’t bluffing. They were there on the job, every week, swarms of them. Come payday, they expected to be paid cash on the barrelhead. Mary wrote like a perpetual motion machine, reeling off whatever words came into her head, hardly daring to lift her eyes from the page for fear of missing a payment. Her husband loathed seeing her in this state, but what could he do? Stanley Rinehart knew from experience that there was no use trying to stop his wife from knocking herself out with overwork until the gargantuan task that she’d so rashly set herself was done.
Nor was it all hack stuff that Mary was churning out. The Case of Jennie Brice was written in 1912 as an unassuming little mystery about a middle-aged widow who has seen better days and been reduced to running a boardinghouse down on the flats along the Allegheny River. It’s flood time again. The widow takes up her carpets as she does every year, she moves her cooking stove upstairs, she rents a rowboat and keeps it tied to the staircase banister in her front hall for transportation until the flooding is over and the river flows back out of her door. Her second-floor front is giving her trouble—theatrical couples are always chancy tenants.
Sometimes you have the good fortune to come upon a novel that’s like a suit tailored in Bond Street or an understated little black frock by a top designer, so exquisitely put together that you don’t quite realize you’re seeing something extraspecial until you take a second look. Even if the flood scenes were its only attraction, Jennie Brice would be well worth a second look.
By the end of that year, Mary was flagging sadly. Another mystery novel, The After House, written in early 1913, is no masterpiece. This one takes place on an old schooner that’s been tarted up as a rich man’s yacht. One of its lesser but more infuriating flaws is that Mary kept referring to the schooner as a ship. She’d lifted the plot from a true and grisly account of a triple ax murder aboard the lumber schooner Henry Fuller that had been told to her and Stanley by a fellow member one afternoon over drinks at the country club.
By the time the Rineharts heard the story, the first mate of the Henry Fuller had served nearly seventeen years of a life sentence for the triple murder. The case against him could not have been watertight or he would probably have been executed instead of incarcerated. Another member of the crew had been suspected but never indicted. The stir created by Mary Roberts Rinehart’s new thriller caused the case to be reopened.
It was discovered that some years after the mate had been sent to jail, the other suspect, who was by then a patient in a Swedish hospital, had been seized with a sudden fit of homicidal mania and attacked his nurse with a knife. Once this fact was made public, the mate was exonerated and released. He wrote Mrs. Rinehart a heartfelt letter of thanks, swearing that he had been innocent of the crime for which he had spent seventeen years behind bars and letting her know that he was now running a night restaurant wagon in Atlanta.
So the stories went out and the money came in. The impossible was actually happening; in the spring of 1912, renovations at the Bluff were far enough along for the family to move in. By that time Mary had spent $50,000 on her dream house. She still owed $20,000, and she would have to shell out yet another $20,000 before work was complete down to the garage and the driveways and all seven acres had been brought under control by the landscapers.
Even after the job was done, expenses continued to be heavy. An estate the size of the Bluff required a staff of servants both indoors and out, and they had to be housed, fed, and paid. There were furnishings to be bought, there were the boys’ school fees, there were endless duns for donations from the allegedly rich Rineharts to innumerable worthy causes. Mary told a touching tale of being hit up by the minister for a new church organ at a time when her bank balance totaled exactly $300. But no matter what it cost, the Bluff was worth every penny. Once again Mary could say, as she’d said on that long-ago night when her parents had at last moved into a place of their own, “This is my home.”
She was at home here in more ways than one. She’d known the Sewickley Valley as a little girl, this was where she and Uncle John used to come riding. Now John was living out in Cincinnati with his second wife. The woods and fields that he and his niece had once roamed freely on horseback had given way to stately houses and rolling lawns. The country club was close by. The Rineharts were welcomed as new members and were making new friends. Here in this enclave of the privileged nobody bothered to lock doors in the daytime. Neighbors strolled in and out of each other’s houses without ceremony, not even bothering to knock. Life was all marvelously free and easy after those frenetic years in the city.
Mary the workhorse was learning that much could be said for the leisured life of a well-to-do suburban matron. She played bridge, got invited to women’s club meetings, shopped for wonderful hats, took her boys to the dancing classes taught by Miss Molly at the Edgeworth Club. When Miss Molly organized a costume dance for the children, Mary dressed Alan as a furry Robinson Crusoe and ripped the leather upholstery off an old chair to make him a real animal-skin umbrella. Ted played his brother’s Man Friday in a costume that sounds a bit like Gunga Din’s, with nothing much before and rather less than half of that behind.
All the Rineharts were animal lovers, and they began to accumulate pets: dogs, cats, pheasants, rabbits, a few sheep to nibble off the rank grass and weeds down in the ravine. One of the boys sent off somewhere for a pair of ferrets. These enterprising members of the polecat family came in a box, and sometime during the night they managed to chew their way out of it. William the gardener joined in the hunt. While he was on his knees searching under a radiator, a streak of whitish fur whizzed up his back and took a nip out of his neck.
This was a most disrespectful way for an old retainer to be treated. William wasn’t actually old, but he had worked on the property before the Rineharts arrived and would stay at the Bluff until they were gone. In the springtime he planted, in summer he mowed the lawns and tended the flower beds, in autumn he raked leaves and mulched the roses. In winter he shoveled snow, on Christmas he played Santa Claus in a red velvet suit and a bushy white beard. Born in Germany, Wi
lliam had become wholly Americanized. A few years from now, his sons would fight on the Allied side. Nevertheless, William still shaved his head every spring with a razor because that was what his forebears had always done back home in Prussia.
Their other old retainer was Maggie, the cook. Mrs. Rinehart credited Maggie’s good food for the fact that all three boys grew to be over six feet tall. Other servants came and went. One was a butler from Barbados who suspected Maggie of sneaking a love philter into his coffee. Another butler got drunk one night and decided to debag the village policeman. The butler removed the officer’s trousers with aplomb and dispatch, as a good servant should, but Dr. Rinehart fired him anyway.
There were other minor vicissitudes. Mary had taken up horseback riding again. She got tossed once in a while but that was nothing to worry about. Somewhat more disturbing were Alan’s chemistry experiments. Somehow or other, he found out how to make a railroad torpedo, obtained the necessary ingredients, put them together in the garage, then tested his creation by banging it with an iron weight. The explosion was impressive; Mary was aghast to see her young son stagger out of the garage in a cloud of smoke with his hair and eyebrows partly singed off and sit down in the middle of the driveway to ponder on what had gone wrong.
One the whole, however, life at the Bluff was going along happily. Mary had a real study to work in. Her desk sat in a bay window overlooking the garden, its walls were lined with bookcases, there was even a safe hidden behind a pair of glass doors camouflaged by painted-on books that could perhaps, she thought, have deceived a seriously myopic burglar. Mary never kept anything in the safe except a mess of odds and ends, mostly scribbled notes and early drafts of forgotten works, but no doubt a safe was a nice thing to have. Her plan was to work in the study each day until she heard the slamming and stomping that always meant her menfolk were home.
Like the other ladies in her set, Mary was still wearing her skirts brushing the ground, her choker collars up to her ears, her hair piled high on her head, her whaleboned corset pinched in at the waist. Her hats were enormous, her veils spotted with fluffy chenille polka dots the size of a dime. And, like her neighbors, she saw no reason to pass up the rich cream soups, the calorie-laden entrées, the lavish desserts that everybody’s cook, including her own, knew so well how to concoct. Why should she? Dieting was a laughable concept; a fine figure of a woman was one with plenty of meat on her bones. Mary did gain some weight but she never got fat—she never had the time.
Whether she or her husband was the greater workaholic in those days would have been hard to judge. In addition to his private practice, Dr. Rinehart was building the State Tuberculosis Dispensary—his dispensary—into one of the biggest and best in the entire United States. As the facility grew, his staff increased. There was always more than enough work for the doctors and nurses to do but Stanley Marshall Rinehart never lost the personal touch. His poor patients were his children; he lectured them, scolded them, babied them into taking their medicine and working with him toward getting well. At Christmas he had no qualms about panhandling from the rich to give to the poor; there was to be a tree at the dispensary with presents for everybody. Perhaps Stanley himself led the carols, as he had done on that fateful Christmas years ago when Nurse Roberts had played the piano for those mutinous patients in the quarantined hospital.
And still the effort was not enough to keep up with the need. A young boy sick with tuberculosis, learning that he would have to wait weeks for a bed in the badly overcrowded state sanitarium, walked out of the dispensary, climbed to the top of a high building, and jumped off. Such tragedies must never happen again. Stanley went home and enlisted his wife in the fight. Mary willingly dropped her writing long enough to establish a women’s organization dedicated to supporting and furthering the growth of the dispensary. Her fund-raising group succeeded, and kept on succeeding; Mary considered this one of her most important achievements.
It was also one more complication in an already overcrowded life. Mary reorganized her household on more businesslike lines, systematized the marketing and buying, and offloaded to her mother’s hired companion the mending and darning on which she herself, from force of habit, had still been spending many of her evenings. She’d faced the fact that, while she might prefer not to think of herself as a career woman, she was indubitably and irrevocably a professional writer.
Every new success meant added stress: editors and agents begged to talk with her, lion-hunters showered her with invitations. Readers wrote scads of fan letters, and some of them tried to start an ongoing correspondence. All very flattering, of course, but also distracting and time-consuming. Mary spoke wistfully in her autobiography of “the creative writer’s desperate search for freedom not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.”
Her fear was real. In this great, rambling house, with so many rooms that it was hard to keep track of which was where, the beleaguered mistress could find not one solitary corner where it was possible for her to write without being pestered. Her elegant new study was hopeless, so she fled to the boys’ gymnasium and set up a card table behind the punching bag. Even there she was hunted down, by servants, by neighbors, by total strangers wanting to meet the famous author.
Mary’s most implacable huntress was her mother. Cornelia Roberts had conceived the convenient notion that if she crept up ever so silently and gave her frantically toiling daughter just the slightest hint of a touch on the arm, it wouldn’t count as an interruption. As any writer knows, the gentlest word, the smallest sound, anything that breaks the ferocious concentration necessary to get words that have formed in the mind down on paper before they dissolve into nothing can have the same impact as sticking a finger in a lamp socket. Greatly to Mary’s credit, she refrained from matricide. Instead, patiently and lovingly, she would put down her pen and embark on the tedious round of question and signal.
“Is it something you want to do?”
Cornelia would shake her head. No.
“Something to eat?” No. “Someone you’ve seen?” No.
This could go on for hours, sometimes for the better part of a day, until both were exhausted and close to tears. Finally the magic word would be spoken, it would turn out that Cornelia wanted to know why one of her handkerchiefs was missing.
Stanley could not allow this silent hectoring to go on. There was a small room in his downtown suite that nobody was using, and he suggested that his wife had better come and work there. The only problem was that, thinking he might want to set up an X-ray machine, he’d had the walls and ceiling painted black. Should he have them repainted? Mary said no, she didn’t mind a bit. By this time, a nice, dark, quiet cave was just the kind of place she needed.
CHAPTER 18
A Lot of Work, A Little Play, A Gathering Storm
Back when they were newlyweds and too green to know any better, the Rineharts had bought themselves a consummately ugly golden oak dining table. This table, a matching chair, and a desk lamp went to the new office. Mary added a large blotter, a stack of the yellow paper that she found easier on her eyes than white, a bottle of ink, and her trusty fountain pen, and was ready for business.
With nobody creeping from behind to nudge her elbow, she was able to speed up production. For the next two years, this cozy cavern was where Mary cranked out a goodly number of the pieces that were sold to pay for the huge house in which she could find no place to work. Being just across the hall from one another, she and Stanley had no doubt envisioned commuting together, lunching together, coming home together. Sometimes they did, but far more often they didn’t.
It was a twelve-mile commute by train. Because his afternoons must be given up to the dispensary, Stanley often had to schedule his private patients for early morning appointments. He usually left home before Mary had got herself bathed, corseted, tied, hooked, snapped, and buttoned into her multifarious garments, had seen the boys off to school, given her staff their orders for the day, telephoned the grocer and the but
cher—daily deliveries were then a matter of course—made out her list of city errands that would have to be squeezed in somehow, and kissed her mother good-bye.
Perhaps Cornelia missed her daughter during the day, quite likely she didn’t. Her ever-present companion was a kind woman, always ready to see to Mrs. Roberts’s comfort, play questions and answers with her, thread needles for the exquisite handwork that Cornelia was by now able to turn out in volume. Mary had fixed a clamp that held an embroidery hoop to the arm of her mother’s favorite chair. Inserting the needle with her one usable hand then reaching around and drawing it through the cloth took longer than when she’d lavished all that unseen decoration on Mary’s wedding petticoats, but Cornelia Roberts had plenty of time.
As for those hoped-for tête-à-tête lunches with Stanley, Mary seldom found time to eat anything at all. By the spring of 1913, she was dangerously overtired from the never-ending pressure to keep ahead of the Bluff’s constant demands for more money. Her mind wasn’t working right, her hand would cramp up when she tried to grasp her pen. One day she mistook an express train for the local that she meant to take and stepped out in front of it, scaring the station master into fits and saving herself only by falling backwards away from the track.
She knew she was being unfair to her family, and Stanley thought she was being unfair to herself. Another short visit to Europe was what the doctor ordered—nobody could get at either one of them there. His prescription worked. They had a wonderful time and made a new acquaintance named Douglas Fairbanks. Adventurous off camera as well as on, the swashbuckling movie star wore them out playing a game he’d invented called “Follow the Man from Cook’s.” This was the beginning of a long and lively friendship; the Rineharts would be seeing Fairbanks later when their ongoing saga took yet another turn.
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