And still the war went on, and so did Mary Roberts Rinehart. By now she’d earned a reputation in government circles as some kind of wonder woman. Herbert Hoover asked her to join the Food Administration. She had to turn him down. She was still visiting army camps, still writing her articles, still hoping to be accepted as an overseas nurse, the one job she really wanted and never got.
In August, Dr. Rinehart became Major Rinehart. Mary saw him off in his new uniform with his officer’s trunk strapped in the back of his car; she was somewhat comforted that Stanley Senior was on his way to the same camp where Stanley Junior was already getting his basic training. The major, on the other hand, was worrying about Mary. Her downtown office had been broken into and searched, not just once but several times. Nothing had been taken except a photograph of her, but her files had been rummaged through again and again. The reason was obvious enough. Because of her involvement with the military, somebody thought the inquisitive Mrs. Rinehart must have got hold of secret information, which she hadn’t and wouldn’t have been fool enough to leave kicking around her office if she had.
This was by no means Mary’s only brush with espionage. The War Department had been getting reports that morale in one of the officers’ training camps was showing a sudden inexplicable decline, and Mary was sent there as a troubleshooter. For the first few days, she did nothing but look and listen; those reports of lowered morale had not been exaggerated. She began to suspect the cause when she kept hearing the name of a certain officer. One night at a dinner dance, when he’d had a little too much to drink, he sat down at her table and started right in asking improper questions, mostly about troop sailings. Mary tried to shut him off, but the officer was drunk enough to persist. He began extolling the Germans, decrying the War Department, insisting that the army he was allegedly helping train was already beaten; they might as well quit before they got killed. Mary’s patriotism got the better of her discretion. She told him flat out that he was talking sedition and heading for serious trouble.
That sobered him up. He disappeared from the party and Mary left the next day for Washington, with a full written report of the encounter in her dressing case. On the train, a middle-aged man persisted in trying to make conversation with her. She assumed it was for the usual reason, so she snubbed the old goat pretty thoroughly and thought no more about him. However, she did take the precaution of taking her dressing case into her berth before she went to sleep. Waking early in the morning, she found her case out in the aisle and the report missing.
That settled the matter. The inquisitive officer was thenceforth under surveillance. He kept his nose clean after his big gaffe, but never got to France. Military intelligence had checked him out and discovered that he’d been one of a dozen or so young German officers planted in the U.S. Army as subversives some years back. Undoubtedly, the Germans were thorough. But not quite thorough enough. They ought to have taken into account the fact that a woman who’d written mystery stories for a living must be a hard person to fool.
CHAPTER 25
Far Too Many Cactus Plants
Early fall of 1917 found Mary’s finances once more in a state of crisis. There was no way she could carry on at the Bluff without her husband’s help. On the same night that she’d seen Alan off to Harvard and Ted to prep school, she went back and told her mother that she was closing the house. Cornelia could accompany Mary to a New York hotel or go to Olive’s with her maid. She chose Olive’s. Mary, her war work seemingly over, booked a small suite at the Hotel Langdon and filled her fountain pen.
She meant to write a book, in fact she had to write a book. But what could she write? Nothing was in her mind except her family and the war; she decided to write a romance about the war, based on her overseas experiences. Its heroine would be an idealistic young American girl who would wangle her way to Belgium and set up a soup kitchen in a bombed-out house while her worthy but bullheaded fiancé back in the States nursed his grudge and envisioned her being mauled by dirty foreigners. The hero would be a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel who ran dangerous missions on behalf of his beleaguered homeland when not scrounging whatever meats and vegetables he could find to keep his fair lady’s soup kettle at the boil.
The Amazing Interlude starts off a bit lamely but soon the reader is struck full force by the starkness, the misery behind the battle lines, the small acts of heroism that made up everyday life in a country where little else than courage and fortitude still existed. For Mary, the book must have been a catharsis. She said herself that it became an obsession. She worked as much as fourteen hours a day, going out only to get a breath of air or to spend a quiet time at a little Episcopal church nearby. She realized that, when she prayed, she was too often performing an empty ritual, going through the motions because she harbored a vestigial fear lest that wrathful God of her grandmother’s might yet exist and require placating. But she didn’t dare stop. Her menfolk were too precious to her, she had to do what she could for them.
Ted’s school was outside New York. With her book well underway, Mary sneaked time off to visit her youngest son. She found him in bad shape, jerking with nerves, looking like death warmed over. Examination revealed a dilated heart and incipient chorea. Mary admitted Ted to Roosevelt Hospital and divided her time between her book and his bedside. It occurred to her that Ted’s illness might have been brought on at least partly by nervous strain. Boys his age, almost but not quite old enough to enter the service, must have suffered a greater sense of frustration in this time of crisis than their parents realized.
By Christmas, however, Ted was back on his feet. Alan came on the train from Boston and they all three went to spend the holidays with the two Stanleys at Camp Sherman. Being together was the best Christmas present of all, and one of the family’s treats was their being allowed to sit in while Major Rinehart delivered a scientific paper to a large medical group. His subject was capillectomy. As he rolled off his learned discourse, Mary and the boys heard murmurs from the physicians around them. God, how rusty one got in a speciality! What was a capillectomy? None of the doctors could remember. It was not until the major wound up in high glee presenting two cases, one man with long hair and a virgin beard, the other freshly shaven and barbered, that his colleagues caught on. A capillectomy was a haircut.
Sergeant Stanley Junior, by now six foot two and a bit, presented his own form of entertainment, which was to stand at attention in his father’s office doorway and make Major Rinehart return his salute in accordance with military protocol. He’d then march off, returning five minutes later to salute again, and again to an increasing volume of army-style expletives, until the major lost it completely and threw him out of the building. Even Jock the Airedale contributed his bit to the hilarity, chasing off with a machine-gun company, getting himself lost, being brought back under military arrest and officially ordered by General Glenn henceforth to wear a dog tag.
Partly through a serendipitous ignorance of certain army rules, Major Rinehart got hold of two riding horses for himself and Mary. Great was the joy of some privates on the bank when the major’s horse tried to lie down in the middle of a stream. Another night, husband and wife rode out on maneuvers with an artillery squad. Mary listened to the familiar noises of pounding hooves and creaking gun caissons and felt herself hauntingly back in France.
The holidays over, alone in New York, Mary gave way to exhaustion and came down with bronchitis. Howard Eaton must have had his sensors out; he dropped by in his casual way and proposed a trip to the Southwest. She began to feel the call of the wild, and why not? Ted was back at school and doing fine. Mary had collected a healthy advance on The Amazing Interlude. She’d also sold a story to the movies and been paid in cash with three one-thousand-dollar bills, the first she’d ever seen. Her living expenses were down to a relative pittance, her bronchial tubes deserved a quiet vacation in the sunny Southwest. Clearly, this trip was meant to be.
But what was meant was not what happened. Mary had a part-time neighbo
r at the Langdon, none other than her erstwhile political acquaintance, Col. Theodore Roosevelt. Former President Teddy had resumed his old military title in the hope of taking a division to the front, but there would be no place in this new army for the old Rough Rider. Roosevelt and Mary, both of them rather at loose ends, became fairly well acquainted. When Howard Eaton came to see Mary, she sent word down the hall to the colonel that a mutual friend of theirs had arrived; in no time, the two men and the lonely woman were knee-deep in plans. They’d get up a riding party and a pack outfit, forget the war, and go looking for bighorns south of the border.
When the time came, however, Roosevelt was not free to go. Somehow or other, this had turned from an innocent hunting trip into a government project. Mrs. Rinehart’s quasi-military connection made her eligible to participate. Her traveling companion would be a Miss Mary Elizabeth Evans, rank and serial number unknown. An army intelligence man had signed on as interpreter, a border officer was going to hunt for smugglers. While the War and Treasury departments were messing around with the itinerary, the State Department was having fits about the expedition’s going at all, not so much because of the participants’ very good chance of being killed by bandits as that any such untoward incident could hypothetically affect international relations in a decidedly negative way. Eventually, even the navy got involved. Mary wondered why Agriculture and the post office failed to horn in, but that gap was filled at the last minute by the none-too-trusting Mexican government with two of their own army officers, three sergeants, and two privates, all in uniform and on horseback, all of them armed to the teeth.
The Mexican soldiers had nothing on Mary. A rash of alarming headlines had recently erupted, each new scarehead had inspired another addition to her personal armory. She carried a Winchester .30–30 rifle in a scabbard under her right stirrup, a small combination rifle-shotgun hung on her saddle horn, and a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver stuck in her belt, plus ammunition enough to start her own war.
Any notion that this would be a pleasure trip was long gone. They were after spies, saboteurs, and assorted bad hats; all they would find were a few American draft dodgers and far too many cactus plants. The route laid out for them was arduous in the extreme. They were not equipped for the weather, they had no tents nor even umbrellas. They’d pictured the desert as hot and dry, they had not reckoned on freezing cold nights and an occasional cloudburst. They’d thought they were hiring a cook, he turned out to be a barber.
It was marvelous what bureaucracy could achieve, but Mary’s previous camping experiences had prepared her for anything. She was jogging peacefully along one day, wearing dark glasses and a green mesh veil to protect her face and eyes, when the intelligence officer pulled his horse up beside hers. He wondered, he said, whether Mrs. Rinehart had ever read any stories about a woman named Tish. Somehow or other, he’d noticed a resemblance between the two.
There were some good times. One day they discovered a small hot spring, the two women hung a blanket around it and took turns. It felt like bathing in a midget volcano crater, Mary said, but it did help to get the kinks out. Then there were the bad times. Miss Evans’s horse fell with her on a precipitous mountain trail, and she narrowly missed being killed. Mary caught sight of a mountain lion, or thought she did, and picked up her rifle. As she was drawing a bead, somebody yelled, “Don’t shoot! That’s the cook.”
On their last day out, both humans and animals were worn out and suffering badly from thirst, until they topped a rise and saw below them the Pacific Ocean and the hospitable town of Ensenada. The American consul was the only person who wasn’t glad to see them: he went away for the weekend while the townsfolk threw a dance for the visitors and the town band serenaded them in the wee hours while they were trying to get some sleep.
Monday morning it was adiós, muchachos! Members of the pack train who had been checked into the town lockup in the interests of sobriety were liberated. As they lined up to start home, every single member of the expedition, including Mary and Miss Evans, was presented with a quart bottle of mescal. An hour or two later, the pack train was in total disarray. Even the mules were drunk. Mary and her sober companions urged their horses into a canter and left the revelers far behind.
Late that night the laggards caught up with the leaders. Crossing the border was no problem. It was not until they got to San Diego that Mary learned the consul at Ensenada had come back from his weekend and sent a panicky wire about a woman with a German-sounding name who’d led a horde of desperados into his town. At that very moment, a U.S. Navy gunboat was steaming southward to arrest the dangerous Mrs. Rinehart and her sinister cohorts.
Back in New York, Mary had a surprise waiting for her, but not the one she’d wanted. She’d finally been accepted as a Red Cross nurse, though not for overseas duty. This was a blow, as her whole intention in volunteering had been to get sent to France in case any of her menfolk needed her at the battle front. Now young Stanley was about to go over with his division and his mother wouldn’t be with him. Nor would his father. Major Rinehart had made the mistake of being too good at his job. He was stuck in Washington with the surgeon general, discussing some innovations with which he had experimented at Camp Sherman and which would soon have an effect on the entire Army Medical Corps.
Feeling bereft and thwarted, Mary went back to The Bat. Committing imaginary murders got rid of some of her frustration; she’d managed to finish two acts and rough out a third before depression overtook her and she simply could not go on. So she wrote a funny story. Laughter is, after all, the best medicine; some of the most hilarious fiction comes out of a writer’s deepest grief.
Mary let the seesaw swing pretty high with Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave. A year or so later, she slipped into a movie theater and listened to a packed audience roar its collective head off at the antics of a young soldier who’d bet he could eat breakfast with his commanding general on his final leave. The story of how he won his bet but lost both his heart and his uniform and had to make his farewell appearance in nothing but a slicker gave even the author a few chuckles.
Summer was coming. Alan and Ted would be out of school, it was high time to give Olive a break from mother-sitting. Mary decided to rent a house on Long Island where the family could enjoy the ocean breezes and she could work on another wartime novel. This one featured a munitions manufacturer with a conscience; she called it Dangerous Days. The War Department didn’t want her this summer of 1918, but she did go to Washington as often as she could, to boost her husband’s morale. Major Rinehart was still hoping to get overseas, but still not succeeding.
In June, Mary moved the boys, her mother, her secretary, two maids, and a cook into the rented house. The house was big, sunny, and comfortable but isolated from the highway by a long road; the cook didn’t like it. It wasn’t that she minded them walking around all night in the empty room overhead, she explained, but she did feel uncomfortable when they came and sat in the rocking chair beside her bed. Mary asked who “they” were, the cook replied, “I’m not saying.”
Mary begged the woman to keep right on not saying, particularly to the other servants, but that didn’t solve the problem. One night at bedtime the laundress raised a ruckus, claiming that she’d seen a man going upstairs in front of her. Alan grabbed his shotgun and they searched the house but found nobody. Then the actress Marie Doro came to spend a weekend discussing the role she was to play in a drama based on The Amazing Interlude. The morning after her arrival, Miss Doro brought her breakfast tray into Mary’s room, complaining that she hadn’t slept a wink because somebody kept walking up and down outside her door all night long. Mary said it must be rats. They set traps and caught nothing.
The truth was, Mary hadn’t expected to catch anything. She’d been having some odd experiences of her own. The room where she slept was joined to a small boudoir that she used for a study. Accessible only from the bedroom, its only furnishings were a wooden chair and a kitchen table with a brass lamp and Ma
ry’s writing materials on it. At night, Mary left the connecting door open. She often thought she heard sounds of the lamp being moved around. When she got up and turned on the overhead light, however, the lamp was always just where she’d left it.
Alan was wakened one night by heavy footsteps slowly thumping up the stairs and stopping at his door. He jumped out of bed, grabbed his gun, and switched on the light practically in one lightning-fast movement, but found nothing to shoot at. It was spooky but also, at times, ludicrous. One night Mary’s secretary, a no-nonsense young woman with long red hair who scorned all this supernatural nonsense and didn’t even balk at going downstairs in the dark for a glass of iced water, burst into Mary’s room with her hair flying and blurted that somebody was hiding in the laundry hamper outside her door. While brushing her hair, she’d heard the squeaky lid being raised and lowered twice.
Mary snatched her revolver and ran to confront the hamper. “Come out or I’ll shoot,” she ordered. The hamper didn’t even squeak. Very carefully, gun at the ready, Mary raised the lid. She found nothing more eerie than the family wash.
Mary sometimes wondered why, during that oddly disturbing summer, none of them accidentally killed somebody else. They all tried to laugh off the noises, even when something or other beat a monotonous tattoo on the antique warming pan that hung beside Mary’s bedroom fireplace. One day she put a tentative question or two to the gardener who lived in the small house down near the road. He wasn’t a bit surprised. His wife had tried to sleep there overnight once, he said. After something had come along and dragged the covers off her bed, she’d rushed downstairs and rung the big bell outside the back door for him to come and get her. She wouldn’t stay in that house again for a million dollars, cash on the barrelhead.
Had She But Known Page 24