Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  The holiday revels seem to have done Dr. Rinehart some good. He was said by the family doctor to be showing improvement but given the usual caution to take it easy. The younger Stanley had already set up a trip with his father to the Florida Keys, for some fishing. Mary found this situation heartening enough to pack her own bags for a visit to Alan after the holidays. On the day when she was to catch her train for Hollywood, Stanley’s doctor confessed to her that there was no hope of a recovery. The only advice he could give was to keep Dr. Rinehart from finding out that his illness was terminal and to go on with the scheduled plans as if there were nothing wrong.

  Stanley Marshall Rinehart was nobody’s fool and certainly no coward. More than likely, that Washington doctor was only telling Mary what her husband had known all along. Mary wrote in My Story that Stanley himself had driven her to the station, that being away from him had been a nightmare, and that she’d cut her visit to Alan and his family as short as she’d dared. Stanley was home before her; whether it was his Florida tan or her own wishful thinking, Mary decided he looked a little better. Why shouldn’t they two go back to Florida and fish some more?

  By late April, Mary had to face the fact that not even fishing was doing her husband any good. All his doctors could suggest now was a trip to Baden-Baden; the German spa and the German physicians might somehow be efficacious in alleviating his symptoms. Of course Stanley could not go alone, nor could Mary have borne to be parted from him. She canceled her contract with the Ladies’ Home Journal and packed their steamer trunks.

  The voyage over was hell. Most of the time, Stanley lay in a coma, and Mary thought he was going to die. By the time they reached Germany he’d dropped twenty-five pounds and couldn’t even sit up in bed. They had to stop in Heidelberg for a week or so before he was able to go on to Baden-Baden. There, they naturally got an encouraging prognosis. If the Herr Doktor could go and live in a hot, dry climate like Egypt’s, his life might be prolonged for many good years. For the present, he must stay in bed and take his medicine.

  After several weeks, Stanley had gained back a little of his strength but was still having those disturbing attacks. While some of these were from his ailments, Mary suspected that others might be caused by the medication he was getting. There was nothing she could do, though, but sit around lending moral support and getting fat on German cooking. By June, Stanley was well enough to write home one of his typically humorous letters about Mary’s strange relationship with the German language. According to him, she invented her words as she went along and conveyed their meanings by some kind of telepathy which everybody but himself understood perfectly well.

  The Rineharts got back to the States on July sixth. Stanley was checked over by his own doctors, then it was on to the Adirondacks, where their sons had rented cottages for the family and hired a nurse to take the burden of caring for their father off Mary’s shoulders. That nurse lasted four days. The one who replaced her endured the doctor’s operating-room manner for almost a full week, perhaps because each of his attacks left him a little bit weaker than the one before. Mary kept trying to persuade herself that he was rallying.

  On the last day of July, Stanley had to be taken to a Utica hospital. The doctor who examined him described his condition as “not so good.” By the fourth of August it was critical, but on the eighth the patient was able to endure a journey back to Washington in a hired private railroad car, his wife and sons all with him.

  The press was covering the story, of course. The family doctor told reporters that Dr. Rinehart was on his way to recovery. But the end was not far off; Mary knew, and so did her husband. They were back to running on bluff, Mary wiping away the tears and pasting on a smile when she went to Stanley, he pretending not to notice her reddened eyelids. It was an up-and-down situation. Sometimes Stanley would feel well enough to go out with Mary, other days he couldn’t even drag himself out of bed. Only his spirit held up; after the act of writing had become too much for him, he could still dictate a letter in his old humorous style. There was no need to waste sympathy on the old man, he declared. He’d just got back from an enjoyable car ride, now he was in his easy chair reading a book and sipping a citrate of potash cocktail.

  Stanley Rinehart was probably past worrying about himself by this time, but he did frequently express his concern for Mary. He had hoped to leave her well fixed enough so that she wouldn’t have to keep on writing, but the stock market’s failure meant things weren’t going to work out that way. She told him money didn’t matter, all that counted was that they still had each other.

  But not for long. On the night of October 28, 1932, with his three tall sons standing over him and his wife of thirty-six years praying that his appalling struggles for breath might cease and deliver him from this final agony, Stanley Marshall Rinehart died. Hours later, Mary went into the room where her husband’s body still lay. As she had done so many times before, she sat down beside him and took his cold, still hand in hers. It was not until the stillness and coldness penetrated her consciousness that she fully realized she was a widow.

  Only someone who has gone through the experience of losing a long-cherished partner can understand how it feels to have half of one’s inner self torn away, to be experiencing at the same time a kind of personal death and a stinging resentment at finding oneself left alive, alone.

  Or perhaps not entirely alone?

  Mary had often insisted that she had no confidence in spiritualists’ claims about being able to make contact with loved ones who have passed beyond the veil. Stanley had been less dogmatic, the last book he’d been well enough to read was F.W.H. Myers’s ponderous but intriguing work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. For years, he and Mary had been curious enough about psychic phenomena to have made some explorations in the field. They had come to the conclusion that most mediums were blatant phonies. Nevertheless, they had made a pact that whichever of them lived the longer would try to get in touch with the one who died first.

  A promise was a promise; Mary could not but try. What happened was not what she’d expected. The medium was a nice young married woman, the venue a hotel room that contained nothing except two straight chairs, a table, and a stand in the corner with a vase of flowers on it. The floor was bare, the door was locked. After Mary had searched the room, the shades were drawn and the two women sat down face-to-face. Mary knew the protocol. She clasped the medium’s hands and gripped the knees tightly between her own to prevent any tricks from being played.

  The medium did not go into a trance. There was no moaning or thrashing about. She just sat there. Mary felt a hand on top of her head, the medium told her not to worry, just to sit still. The unseen hand moved down to touch Mary’s wedding ring, then she felt two small hands on her own and told the medium, who suggested she speak to the presence. Quite calmly, Mary asked the darkness if this was who she hoped it was, and whether the entity knew what she’d brought with her. She was shocked to feel a hand, if it was a hand, thrust itself forcibly down the open neck of her dress and shake the object that she’d pinned to her underwear. The object was the little caduceus, insignia of the Army Medical Corps, that Major Rinehart had worn pinned to his uniform collar.

  Mary’s reaction was to clutch the medium’s hands and knees even tighter, the woman asked her if anything had happened. Mary said yes, the medium expressed her satisfaction that they were having a productive sitting. Next, Mary exclaimed that she could hear something rustling the flowers on the stand. The medium said casually that it was probably invisible birds. They tended to fly in from the astral plane, she didn’t know why. Seconds later, Mary felt something being dropped down her dress front and landing beside Stanley’s caduceus; it was a rosebud from the bouquet across the room. Nonbeliever though she was, Mary would carry that withered bud for years in the back of her prayer book.

  Having honored her vow, Mary made no further attempt. Still, the matter was not allowed to rest. A couple of years later, when she was living in
New York, Mary invited the well-known English medium Eileen Garrett to tea. Mrs. Garrett surprised her hostess by saying that she herself was skeptical about conscious survival after death although, like Mary, she did believe in poltergeists. While the two women were chatting, Mary’s three sons dropped in, as they’d got in the habit of doing after work. Once the men were settled, Mrs. Garrett pulled another surprise. She set down her teacup, murmured that she might as well try for what she could get, leaned back in her chair, and fell into a trance.

  None of the Rineharts was much impressed by hearing the stereotypical babble from some alleged control with a hokey foreign accent. But now came the shocker. As the onlookers gaped in total bemusement, they heard Stanley Marshall Rinehart’s familiar dry chuckle, saw the medium aping his mannerisms, and listened to his voice. He told Mary, “I didn’t realize what had happened to me until you came in that night and sat down on the edge of the bed and took my hand.”

  Mary insisted in her autobiography that she had never told anybody about that last time, in the dead of night, when she had sat alone with her husband’s cooling body and faced the fact that their life together was over. At the time of Mrs. Garrett’s demonstration, Mary had been willing to believe that she’d seen a genuine breakthrough. As time passed, credulity waned; but even as one doubted, one could always hope.

  Major Rinehart had been given a full-dress military funeral and interment at Arlington National Cemetery. For the time being, Mary stayed on in the big Washington house, trying to adjust to being alone. She was not in total solitude, of course. There were Miguel the chauffeur, Peggy the parlormaid, Reyes the cook, all getting on in years, none of them likely to find new jobs in this straitened economy. How could she turn them away? Reyes was a problem, though. He had always regarded Dr. Rinehart as his employer. Having to take orders from a woman was a big adjustment, and not an easy one for him to make.

  After Stanley’s accident, the Rineharts had got rid of their saddle horses. During that first period of readjustment, Mary also sold the Greyhound. She got far less than her husband had paid for it but at least she wouldn’t have to cope with the awful nuisance that a boat can be. As for the house, she’d worry about that later.

  A presidential election in the midst of economic disaster was a distraction, and the boys did their best to keep their mother in good spirits. After New Year’s 1933, Ted took Mary to Florida for a much-needed break. They were in Palm Beach, sitting on a hotel veranda after a luxurious meal among well-dressed fellow sufferers from the Depression when their newly inaugurated president’s voice came over the radio.

  There was nothing to fear, Franklin D. Roosevelt told them, except fear itself. Staunch Republican though she was, the widow felt a sense of relief. Life was going to be worth living, after all. There was still hope for the country, for her sons’ business future, for everybody’s future, even her own. But she, who had been on visiting terms with three previous presidents, would not be dining again at the White House.

  Nor was Mary overcome with joy by Roosevelt’s New Deal. She did not believe in what she saw as governmental handouts. Her stern old Covenanter faith called for personal initiative, hard work, thrift (even, presumably, among those who could afford diamond necklaces and twenty-two-room mansions on Massachusetts Avenue), and what she saw generally as the old-fashioned virtues. She could not but have felt a certain incongruity among her ideas. She quoted in My Story a line of George Eliot’s: “Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind. It has an occasional tenderness for old abuses.”

  Come summer, Mary went back to Eaton’s ranch. The visit was not a success. Though everybody was kind and sociable as always, being there by herself made her even more keenly aware of her widowhood. Now she had nobody to whom she was the most important woman in the world. Riding her horse without Stanley by her side was no fun at all. She felt tired all the time, just the short climb from her cabin to the corral left her gasping for breath. In Professor at the Breakfast Table Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked that he’d “died out” of his former lodgings; after so many happy visits, Mary was dying away from Eaton’s ranch. She would not be taking the out trail again.

  CHAPTER 33

  Moving On

  Before going west, Mary had written an article for the Post about a possible new approach to an age-old social problem. “Can Women Stop Crime?” brought amazing results. When she got back from that painful last visit to the ranch, she found a great heap of letters pressing her to mobilize a countrywide army of female crimebusters.

  In those pre-TV days, the newsreel, along with the double feature and the “Previews of Coming Attractions,” was an integral part of every movie show. “The Eyes and Ears of the World” came and shot some footage of Mrs. Rinehart trying to explain that she hadn’t meant for women to become vigilantes but just to support and assist the efforts of the police. As a result of this useful publicity, Roosevelt’s new attorney general asked her to serve as a member—typically, the only woman member—of a committee on crime. According to her, the group never did much except hold a general meeting for an international group of police chiefs and other interested persons. It did, however, mellow Mrs. Rinehart’s attitude toward F.D.R. as she sat on the platform watching the new president’s slow, painful, but determined struggle to reach the podium on his polio-weakened legs.

  During that winter of 1933–34, Mary continued to find work her most effective therapy. She finished another mystery novel for the boys. The Album takes place in a heavily cushioned enclave of old houses inhabited by well-off people who have known each other too long and too well; where neither their attitudes, their habits, nor the cut of their clothes have had room to move with the times; and where a good-looking young woman could wither on the vine like some of her neighbors, unless a particularly gory murder should become, by a freak, her way to liberation.

  Shortly after The Album had gone off to the publishers, Mary herself almost reached the end of the road. One night while she was sitting alone, reading, she was seized by a violent pain in the chest, accompanied by an icy chill. She struggled to her room, collapsed on the bed, and passed out.

  Now comes the eerie part. After his father’s death, Alan had moved his family to Washington. Their home was four long blocks from Mary’s. At one o’clock in the morning, something impelled him to get up, go out, and walk to his mother’s house. He had a key, he let himself in. He climbed the stairs to her bedroom, found her unconscious with hardly a thread of pulse, and sent for an ambulance. Sometime later, Mary opened her eyes to an anxious audience of doctors, nurses, and a haggard, exhausted son who, by heeding some inexplicable inner warning, had saved his mother’s life.

  The revelation that she had a damaged heart and was likely to suffer further attacks, as in fact she would do during the rest of her life, meant more changes in Mary’s lifestyle but was not allowed to interfere with her writing. She wrote much of The State vs. Elinor Norton sitting up in bed. This book is less a mystery than a straight novel with a wide streak of melodrama; Jan Cohn appraises it as showing strong influences of both This Strange Adventure and Lost Ecstasy, which it certainly does. Like The Album, Elinor Norton got fine reviews, although William Rose Benét did mention some problems. He may have been referring to the somewhat too parfitly gentil narrator, or to the strange discrepancy between Elinor’s letting herself drift into a stupid marriage with a man she didn’t much like and then showing such rigid determination to stick by him after he’d proven himself altogether unworthy of her misplaced devotion.

  Anyway, the book’s gloomily perfervid atmosphere was the sort of writing that gets a novel hailed as “a definite contribution to serious American literature.” The State vs. Elinor Norton netted the writer $45,000 from Ladies’ Home Journal for the serial rights, $20,000 from Fox Films and, presumably, some healthy royalties from Farrar & Rinehart. The Album, more ably crafted and ringing a dramatic change on the Lizzie Borden legend, had fetched $60,000 from the Post for the serial rights and $20,0
00 from Fox, plus the hardcover sales. Whatever new trials might beleaguer Mary Roberts Rinehart, it didn’t look as if penury was going to be one of them.

  In the spring of 1934, Mary noticed that her hair was beginning to turn gray. Since she was within a few months of her fifty-eighth birthday, the only remarkable thing about the grizzling was that it hadn’t happened sooner. She saw little use in touching it up; there was no point in trying to look young now that her grandchildren were growing up.

  As to the kind of world they would live in, Grandmary was both curious and apprehensive. While the Depression had damped down the more spectacular cavortings of the jazz babies whom John Held caricatured with such wry affection and such consummate skill, it had by no means thrust them back into their grandmothers’ high-buttoned boots and whaleboned corsets. A parody on a popular ballad of the thirties wrapped up the situation in ¾ time: the sweetheart of Sigma Chi was no longer a blonde but a fiery redhead. She imbibed strong waters, she inhaled the seductive fumes of tobacco, she told risqué stories in mixed company. For all her despairing serenader knew, his wayward dream girl might be dossing down with the whole fraternity, one for each night of the week.

  Henry Goddard Leach of The Forum gave a dinner followed by a Socratic dialogue in which Mary took part along with Margaret Calkins Banning, Ruth Hale, and a few other prominent women. The subject was supposed to be Modern Marriage; it wound up in a gentle mass headshaking over the ladies’ inescapable consensus that chastity before marriage was no longer a sine qua non for the younger generation. They attributed the change to a general breakdown of American morals brought on by the war, a lack of parental supervision, the decline in regular churchgoing, and, by inference, too much petting in rumble seats.