It started the very first night. Mary and Stanley had just turned off their reading lamps when something like a black curtain blowing in the wind swept across their bedroom. But the air was still and the curtains were only narrow hangings held tight to the wall by heavy bands. This was a puzzler. So was the maid’s appearance at seven o’clock the next morning with her mistress’s coffee.
Mary, wakened from the exhausted sleep of the newly moved, was not happy. Marie, who was Cornelia’s maid and at this time the only live-in servant, insisted she’d heard the two short rings that were Mrs. Rinehart’s signal. This was odd. Either Marie had been dreaming or Mary had rung in her sleep, or else there was a short circuit in the wiring. After a few more such incidents they called in an electrician. He found nothing wrong with the bell, which had been installed after Senator Penrose had become bedridden. The ringing kept on.
CHAPTER 29
The Unexpected
Mary had always tried to keep to her original vow of not writing while her husband was at home. Now that he was gone so much, she either wrote in the study during the evenings or went to bed with a book. Alone and quiet, she began hearing odd noises. Sometimes they sounded as if furniture was being moved, which it wasn’t. Once she heard the apparent crash of a heavy fern basket falling on the porch, when no fern had fallen.
A friend interested in spiritualism told Mary that the proper drill on such occasions was to go and ask the noise what its problem was and whether she could be of help. Mary didn’t think much of that notion, but one night when she’d seemed to hear a living room window close without human aid she forced herself to enter the room. Pressed back against the wall, she addressed the intrusive spirit in a weak and trembling tone. At once the bell pealed out, and kept on ringing until Mary at last caught on. She was leaning against the bell-push.
This farcical episode did not clear up the problem. One day when Mary had a visitor, Keno, the resident bull terrier, climbed up on her lap and cowered there, growling, trembling, staring fixedly into one corner of the room for no apparent reason. Another time, when Alan, alone in the apartment, dressing for a party and in need of a buttonhook to cope with a heavily starched shirt collar, started into his parents’ bedroom, Keno bounced in front of him, then wheeled and crawled back out on his stomach, whining in abject terror. Alan decided he could manage without the buttonhook.
The phenomena went on. Two of Mary’s visiting aunts were startled by raps on the headboards of their beds and by a phantom typist tapping late at night in the dark, empty study. When Stanley Junior came to attend a ball with Alan, the hall floor had recently been painted and the furniture set back only that day. Stanley returned in the early hours, went straight to sleep, and was wakened by hearing a heavy leather armchair outside his door creak and scrape nonstop for about an hour. Mary found him in the morning trying to figure out how that chair could have scored the pristine floor so heavily in a circle about six inches wider than the chair.
One night when the Rineharts gave a dinner party, Mary made the mistake of chatting about their resident poltergeist. Thanks, very likely, to one of the hired waiters, the next day the Washington papers carried a story about the ghost of Senator Penrose, still ringing his bell. Somebody from the Senate Office Building corroborated the story. That bell in his private office had continued to send out its two short peals for some days after the senator’s death. Senate pages wouldn’t enter the office because they were afraid of ghosts.
These were Halloween yarns, a little bit scary, a little bit laughable. Now would come the genuine nightmare, bizarre, incredible, unutterably tragic.
Ever since her stroke fourteen years before, Cornelia Roberts had not only been mute but had dragged one foot and been totally without the use of her right arm. Never once had she tried to get into a bathtub by herself, and nobody had dreamed she ever could. But there it was.
Mary had left Washington earlier that day, on her way to spend a few days by herself at Eaton’s ranch before the family arrived. Marie, as always, was taking care of Mrs. Roberts, and they had spent a happy day checking over Cornelia’s clothes in preparation for her vacation at the ranch. At bathtime, Marie turned on the hot water and let it run while she was called away on a brief errand. Somehow, during those few minutes, Cornelia contrived to get into the tub. Unable to scream or to help herself, she suffered such terrible burns from the scalding hot water that she died in the hospital a mercifully short time later.
Mary had rushed back as soon as the telegram reached her, and was at the bedside when her mother died. They took the body back to Pittsburgh. Cornelia Gilleland Roberts would lie in familiar soil along with her husband, her mother-in-law, the little granddaughter who had drunk poison, the little niece who’d been hit by a train, with Sade and John. So many dead, so many violent deaths. Mary thought of Stanley’s half-brother Ed, dying of burns like Cornelia, saying, “I think I’d like to smoke.”
She felt again her old uncertainties. She still did not quite trust life, she prayed always for the ones she loved, asking only that they might be safe. She never quite shook her superstitious feeling that, should she fail to offer up her nightly petition, something awful might happen to them.
As a footnote, Mary found it worth mentioning that, after her mother’s death, those uncanny disturbances ceased.
The Rineharts went into mourning. Mary was feeling her mother’s death grievously; blaming herself, as people do, for all the little attentions she hadn’t given. She was missing the Bluff, her friends and relatives back in Pennsylvania, her sons now away from the nest. She was experiencing, like countless others, the bleak letdown of the postwar period. She found it next to impossible to get any work done, but she did begin to learn things about life in Washington, including the fact that, should she and Stanley decide to make the District their permanent home, they would lose their right to vote. Gradually the Rineharts began to mingle in society and to do a little entertaining themselves, always having to be mindful of the eternal Washingtonian protocol.
Before Stanley had got thoroughly fed up with the Veterans’ Bureau and begun to make his feelings known in his own uninhibited fashion, the Rineharts had developed an acquaintance with a neighbor who was also a colleague of Stanley’s. Charles F. Cramer was a lawyer whom Forbes had brought with him from California to be the attorney for the Veterans’ Bureau. Francis Russell described him as a tight-lipped little fox with a pompadour brushed up to mask his receding hairline and a pince-nez that gave him almost a womanly air. Cramer and his wife had bought the Hardings’ former dwelling on Wyoming Avenue for $60,000. Living so nearby and being so closely connected through the bureau, the Cramers often joined the Rineharts for a quiet dinner or a game of bridge.
By the end of his second year as head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charlie Forbes’s grand-scale looting had become too flagrant to go unnoticed. Rumors were going around, and they were all true. Eventually Harding’s attorney general and close friend Harry Daugherty had to let the president know what was going on. Harding took it badly; he flatly refused to believe that his great pal and poker buddy would knife him in the back. Daugherty told Harding to check Forbes out for himself; the evidence was too clear for even the Great Bloviator to overlook.
The following afternoon, as Russell tells it, a visitor with an appointment to see the president had been misdirected to the Red Room. As he entered, the visitor was appalled to see the president throttling a man he had pinned against the wall, yelling “You yellow rat! You double-crossing bastard!”
The yellow rat was Charlie Forbes, and the unnamed visitor may have saved Forbes’s life. When Harding realized someone else was in the room, he let go, pulled himself together, and took his visitor into the next room. Forbes staggered away, his face blotched, his breath coming in gasps.
In the hope of averting an open scandal, Forbes was allowed to leave for Europe, ostensibly on business connected with veterans still in overseas hospitals. On January 31, 1923, a reorganization
of the Veterans’ Bureau was instituted. On February 1, Attorney Cramer tendered his resignation. On February 12, the Senate passed a resolution for an examination of the allegations that were being made. On the fifteenth, Forbes cabled his resignation from Paris, and Harding accepted it.
Early in March, Charles Cramer drove his attractive young wife to Union Station to catch a train for New York. He then went home, asked the maid to get him some stamps, and sat down to write letters. Cramer seems to have spent most of the night writing letters, then early in the morning he went into the bathroom and shot himself.
Russell says that Mrs. Rinehart heard the shot, ran over, saw the pile of letters on the desk, and found Cramer dead on the bathroom floor. Mary’s version in My Story was that Stanley answered an early morning phone call from the Cramer house, turned to Mary, and said, “Charlie Cramer has killed himself.”
Whoever phoned had asked both the Rineharts to go over. The doctor was there before them, and they discovered that the butler, for some reason, had carried Cramer’s body from the bathroom to an upper back porch. Mary mentioned how bizarre it seemed to see their dead neighbor lying there in the bright sunlight; she and Stanley had him moved back into the house and laid out decently on a bed.
Sometime in the general confusion, the letters that Cramer had written disappeared. Perhaps they were abstracted for political reasons. The simplest explanation is that the maid who’d fetched the stamps simply mailed them as a final service to her late employer. Gaston B. Means, a Washington character known for his uninhibited narrative style, was later to allege in a book called The Strange Death of President Harding that Cramer had been murdered. Means also averred that, later on in San Francisco, Flossie Harding had poisoned her husband to spare him from going back to Washington and being impeached. Means’s effrontery was boundless; his amanuensis was a lady whom he’d met while he was serving a term in an Atlanta jail. This woman also wrote for a confession magazine, and it need hardly be said that their collaborative effort made the best-seller list.
Cramer’s death couldn’t have done much to lift Mary’s depression, but she did go back to work on a play based on her novel The Breaking Point. It finally opened in Washington on a sweltering summer evening, to standing room only and roses all the way for the playwright. At last Mary Roberts Rinehart, who had been dodging her own first nights for the past fifteen years, stood on a stage and received an ovation, knowing as she bowed and smiled that the play was not going to make the grade.
While the critics were still lauding The Breaking Point, the playgoers themselves had already begun to slip quietly away in search of livelier entertainment. This was not the time for a searching drama of human emotions; what they’d hoped for was another Bat.
Rewriting didn’t help much. The play went to New York, ran for a month, and walked for a month. By the end of the third month it had crawled to a faltering finish. Mary would know better next time, if there was ever to be a next time.
What with the upheaval in the Veterans’ Bureau and the sad demise of Mr. Cramer, the Rineharts now accepted the fact that, much as they loved the Bluff, they were never going back there. They were succumbing to the charm of the capital city, and they liked being closer to their sons.
Alan was still living with them. He had been working for one of the Washington papers, chasing down stories in his disgraceful old jalopy except on those occasions when he enhanced the paper’s reputation while saving it money by borrowing his parents’ impressive car to ferry visiting VIPs to their interviews.
Now Alan was making noises about sailing alone around the world in an eighteen-foot boat. Mary knew better than to voice her motherly alarms; she talked her son out of it by giving him a graphic word picture of how unutterably boring such a voyage would be. So he decided instead to go and write up the Haitians. This didn’t sit well with Mary either. She didn’t want any of her boys to be a writer; she knew too well what the penalties were. But when Alan came back from the Caribbean with a sheaf of pieces that were eagerly grabbed up by Cosmopolitan magazine, Mary had to face the awful truth.
Ted was less of a shock to his mother. He was nearly through at Harvard, it was time for him to get serious about a vocation. He seems always to have felt that he ought to become a doctor, not so much from personal inclination as out of respect for his father. One day he asked his mother if she would like him to study medicine. Her answer was no, not unless he himself wanted that more than anything else. In that case, he decided with great relief, he’d prefer to go into publishing with his elder brother.
So Ted would also be settling in New York. His mother and father might as well put the Bluff up for sale and begin house hunting in Washington. They were in no special rush, however. The apartment was peaceful with just the two of them, perhaps a bit lonely at times, but they had each other. Their marriage had been in the truest sense of the word, a labor of love; a determined effort by two strong individuals to keep their relationship in good repair. Being sensible parents, they were not trying to keep their sons tied to them, but the ties that held Mary and the doctor together were far too strong ever to be broken, however great the strain.
They went back to Sewickley for the last and final time, making decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of, tying tags to some shrubs that they wanted transplanted to their new house on Massachusetts Avenue. The white lilac tree that Stanley had given his wife once at Eastertime when they were still, as Mary said, young marrieds just scraping along would have to go with them. The lilac had got used to being moved; it would survive another uprooting and so would they.
There were at that time plenty of places to ride horseback around Washington. At Christmastime, Stanley had given Mary a saddle horse and she had reciprocated in kind. Mary’s was a reliable mare. The horse she’d bought for Stanley had come with all sorts of guarantees, but somehow she’d always been a trifle wary of the creature. One day when they were out together, Stanley happened to slip one foot out of his stirrup. Not noticing what he’d done, Mary began to canter. Seeing the mare speed up, Stanley’s mount followed suit. The empty stirrup began to swing, hitting the horse in the side and hurrying it on as the rider groped in vain with his foot to solve the predicament.
Then Mary saw her husband flash past and realized he was on a runaway. She chased after him but couldn’t keep up. Horse and rider were soon out of sight. There was nothing she could do but keep on; coming to a paved road she was horrified to see her husband lying there unconscious, bleeding from a head wound. She sat down in the road and cradled his head in her lap, loosened his collar, took off his tie, sure all the time that it was no use. Her best-beloved was dead! She’d murdered him by giving him the wrong horse.
About the time people began to gather, the corpse sat up and demanded indignantly, “What happened?” From the evidence, the bolting horse had tried to swerve from the bridle path to the pavement, throwing his rider headfirst onto the concrete, then falling on top of him. Somebody called an ambulance, and Stanley was carted off to the hospital with a bad concussion and a broken leg. The leg mended, Stanley insisted on being active as usual, but for the next six months or so he was, as Mary put it, distinctly queer. Once back to normal, he remembered next to nothing about his half-year in a fugue state; Mary thought it was just as well he didn’t.
Ted was being graduated from Harvard that year, class of 1924. There would be no visit to the ranch. Dr. Rinehart was still having occasional dizzy spells and, all things considered, neither he nor Mary could have been hankering much for long days in the saddle. Instead, they decided to rent a house for the summer on one of the many islands off the coast of Maine. As soon as Ted had secured his diploma and shed his robe and mortarboard, they all set off for the island.
They found island life much to their liking. Among this one’s various amenities was a separate studio, sitting among the scrub pines and facing out toward the ocean. Mary appropriated this convenient aerie for her office and, knowing that the boys always
enjoyed having their father to themselves and would keep him well occupied, went off every morning to work on a new mystery novel. Maine mornings, even in high summer and particularly on the ocean, can be cold and foggy. Mary provided herself with heat of a sort by lighting a big oil lamp and setting it on the floor near her feet.
Rinehart fans may have thought—may still think, since the book is yet again in print—that The Red Lamp was an odd sort of book for their idol to have written. It may have been inspired to some degree by the late Boies Penrose’s strange legacy. However, the venue of the quick and the possibly undead at a big old house on the water is reminiscent of that other haunted house she’d rented six summers before and the red lamp a small tribute to the one that had given her some uneasy nights there.
Mary was not one to waste a picturesque setting. She had a suitably eerie plot, an ingenious solution, some excellent characters—all the necessary ingredients for a highly readable novel, which The Red Lamp still is, but somehow it comes off just a bit logy, like the old rowboat that had its own small part in the narrative.
This is not strange. Mary was going through another bad patch. She was tired all the time, her handwriting was deteriorating, she worried too much over things that might never happen, she had shaking spells. Mary was forty-eight years old that year. Surely she, a nurse, and Stanley, a doctor, must have recognized the symptoms; but in 1936, when My Story was first published, the word menopause would not have been the sort of thing a gracious lady with an international reputation could comfortably put into her memoirs.
Had She But Known Page 28