Had She But Known
Page 33
By her own standards, Mary was slowing down. Many writers today would be more than satisfied to equal her 1940 output of four short pieces and a full-length mystery, The Great Mistake. Within the first half of that decade, Rinehart & Company published three more new mysteries: Haunted Lady, Episode of the Wandering Knife, and The Yellow Room, as well as two short-story collections. 1946 left a blank in her bibliography, 1947 shows just one article, but that was the precedent-shattering “I Had Cancer.”
The year 1947 brought another momentous happening. As has been mentioned, Reyes the cook had always deemed Dr. Rinehart his employer. After the doctor’s death, Reyes had quietly appointed himself major domo. He ruled the domestic staff. He couldn’t prevent Mrs. Rinehart from hiring a new butler now and then, but he could quickly get rid of any butler she hired. They hadn’t had one for a long time, but that year the servant problem was desperate. Mary could not find a maid willing to come to Bar Harbor and work in so big a house, so she was virtually forced to hire a butler. As she’d expected, Reyes took her decision badly. Three weeks after the new man arrived, he gave her his notice.
He’d done this on a few previous occasions during his twenty-five years of service with the Rineharts but he’d always changed his mind by the following morning. This time, however, Reyes showed no sign of relenting. He took Mary’s morning orders and her marketing list and drove into town. After he’d left, Mary found his wife, Peggy, the maid, crying in the kitchen. They’d had a bad fight, Peggy confessed. Reyes had been drinking, he was determined to quit. Peggy had been equally adamant that she wouldn’t go with him.
He came back with the supplies and started preparing lunch as usual. Mary was in the library, reading. All of a sudden Reyes walked in, without the white coat that he had always been punctilious about wearing in his employer’s presence. He came straight up to Mary, whipped a revolver out of his trousers pocket, and pointed it at her face.
She saw him pull the trigger. The gun misfired. To her astonishment, she was still alive. As he tried again, Mary leaped from her chair, pushed him away, and ran for her life through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen with Reyes at her heels, totally out of his mind. Fortunately both Peggy and Ted, the chauffeur, were there. As Ted knocked Reyes down, Peggy collared the gun, handed it to Ted, then ran to get Mary a nitroglycerine tablet. The new butler, thinking that he himself was Reyes’s intended victim, had already run down the drive and hailed a passing car to bring help.
Mary gulped her tablet, got her breath back, and headed back to the library to phone for the police. As she passed the front door, a tall boy whom she’d never seen before took off his cap and told her he’d come to apply for a job as undergardener. Always the lady, Mary explained that he’d have to come back later; at the moment, somebody was trying to murder her. Not surprisingly, the applicant never returned.
But Reyes did. As Mary was telephoning, she heard Peggy scream and wheeled to see the cook bearing down on her, brandishing a carving knife in each hand. Both the chauffeur and the gardener came pounding after him. As the two men knocked him down and struggled to secure his hands, getting slashed badly by the crazily flailing knives, a uniformed policeman burst in. Reyes got up from the floor and went meekly along with him. That night in the jail, Mary’s long-time cook committed suicide. It was a relief to her and Peggy when the local Catholic priest, realizing that Reyes had been of unsound mind when he took his own life, allowed him to be buried in consecrated ground.
The summer of 1947 was unusually hot and dry. In October, after Mary had gone back to her New York apartment, a forest fire broke out of control. Fanned by a gale wind, it headed straight toward Bar Harbor’s summer colony. For Bar Harbor, this was the end of an era. For Mary Roberts Rinehart, losing the house that she’d enjoyed for so brief a span was a bleak awakening from yet another dream.
It was not, however, the finish of her career. In 1948 came another straight novel. Mary dubbed it A Light in the Window and sold the serial rights to Ladies’ Home Journal for $50,000. The Rinehart boys published both the novel and their mother’s updated version of My Story in 1948. Two short stories for the Post and one for Cosmopolitan netted the author another $18,000, an article for Town and Country brought $300 and no doubt a certain cachet, not that the regal Mrs. Rinehart needed another touch of class.
And still she wrote; a few more short pieces, then, in 1952, The Swimming Pool, one of the best mystery novels she’d ever written. A novelette, The Frightened Wife, appeared as a serial for the Post on Valentine’s Day 1953, and became the lead story in another Rinehart collection.
That year Mary did a couple of pieces for Collier’s magazine, but the old writing machine was at last running down. In 1954, the woman who had been the highest-paid author in the United States and perhaps in the entire world earned just $400, for a short story titled “The Splinter” that ran in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Even then, she was not quite through. During her few remaining years, Mary worked when she felt able on a private memoir for her children and grandchildren. It contains no startling revelations but does present a franker, more vivid picture of her life as a child, a student nurse, a young wife and mother than some of the blander, rosier descriptions she’d given in My Story. The holograph manuscript is among the Rinehart archives at the University of Pittsburgh and it is from these largely handwritten pages that much of the earlier section of this biography has been derived.
Mary’s granddaughter Connie, Mrs. B. Albert Burton, recalls Grandmary in her final years, sitting cross-legged on her bed working jigsaw puzzles, always well coiffed, always becomingly clad in a pretty negligee or bedjacket, always pleased to welcome family members. In 1958, with her eighty-second birthday approaching, Mary suffered another massive heart attack from which she never rallied. On September 22, 1958, she died.
In The Bookman of July 1927, author-critic Grant Overton made a bold statement. It was not, he said, Owen Wister nor Zane Grey nor any other writer of the purple sage, but a little woman from Pittsburgh who’d been the first to burn away the sentimental haze and depict the American cowboy as he really was. In Lost Ecstasy, Mary Roberts Rinehart, who styled herself a mere storyteller and hoped someday to be a novelist, had taken a simple story of a cowpoke and a girl and done with it what no author had ever done before. But was this literature?
Charles Dickens, Overton noted, had been shy on literary values, but that didn’t make him any the less a novelist. Thomas Hardy’s plot construction was, in Overton’s word, lamentable; but Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles are still being taught in English classes. The list could go on and on; what it boils down to is that the art of the novel depends above all else on good characterization.
Mary probably hadn’t even realized what she was doing when she’d hooked a whole nation of readers with her first published book. It was not the adroit plotting, not the headlong pace of a desperate struggle to solve a crime that kept the drama rolling on. It was Miss Rachel Innes, a feisty spinster of uncertain years reporting in her own grimly funny words, who yanked her readers into the midst of an ongoing family tragedy and kept her audience glued to their seats until the last gun was fired and the smoke cleared away to Miss Innes’s complete satisfaction, and theirs.
There would be many successes to come, but by no means everything that came from Mary’s ever-flying pen was worth crowing over. She was always ready to take on a fresh experiment; some worked, some didn’t. Like Mark Twain, she turned out plenty of trash to keep the home fires burning when the flames of inspiration sank low, and was even more versatile than he about finding new ways to get bilked of her earnings. Whatever she had, she spent without stint: her money, her time, her deep attachment to her family, her spirit of adventure, her penchant for leaping in where angels feared to tread and coming up with a new batch of grist for her always ready mill. In her old age, when she could no longer hit the trail, she loaded herself with jewels and amused herself by playi
ng the grande dame to the hilt. For Mary Roberts Rinehart, the game was never over till it was over.
Whether Mrs. Stanley Marshall Rinehart did in fact keep that long-standing appointment with her husband on the other side of the veil is not for us to know. As for Mary Roberts Rinehart, novelist and adventurer, there is still much to be read, much to be learned, and much more to be written about a woman whose spectacular career surely entitles her to be ranked among our national treasures.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books by Mary Roberts Rinehart:
The Circular Staircase. Bobbs-Merrill, 1908.
The Man in Lower Ten. Bobbs-Merrill, 1909.
When a Man Marries. Bobbs-Merrill, 1909.
The Window at the White Cat. Bobbs-Merrill, 1910.
The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry. Bobbs-Merrill, 1911.
Where There’s a Will. Bobbs-Merrill, 1912.
The Case of Jennie Brice. Bobbs-Merrill, 1913.
The After House. Houghton Mifflin, 1914.
The Street of Seven Stars. Houghton Mifflin, 1914.
“K”. Houghton Mifflin, 1915.
Kings, Queens, and Pawns. Doran, 1915.
Tish. Houghton Mifflin, 1916.
Through Glacier Park. Houghton Mifflin, 1916.
Bab: A Sub-Deb. Doran, 1917.
The Altar of Freedom. Houghton Mifflin, 1917.
Tenting Tonight. Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
The Amazing Interlude. Doran, 1918.
Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave. Doran, 1918.
Dangerous Days. Doran, 1919.
A Poor Wise Man. Doran, 1920.
The Truce of God. Doran, 1920.
More Tish. Doran, 1921. (short stories)
The Breaking Point. Doran, 1921.
Sight Unseen and The Confession. Doran, 1921.
The Out Trail. Doran, 1922.
Temperamental People. Doran, 1924. (short stories)
The Red Lamp. Doran, 1925.
The Bat. Doran, 1926. (Fictionalized anonymously by Stephen Vincent Benét)
Two Flights Up. Doran, 1926.
Nomad’s Land. Doran, 1926 (travel articles)
Lost Ecstasy. Doran, 1927.
The Romantics. Farrar & Rinehart, 1929. (short stories)
The Door. Farrar & Rinehart, 1930.
My Story. Farrar & Rinehart, 1931.
Miss Pinkerton. Farrar & Rinehart, 1932.
The Album. Farrar & Rinehart, 1933.
The State vs. Elinor Norton. Farrar & Rinehart, 1933.
Mr. Cohen Takes a Walk. Farrar & Rinehart, 1934.
The Doctor. Farrar & Rinehart, 1936.
The Wall. Farrar & Rinehart, 1938.
Writing Is Work. The Writer, Inc. 1939.
The Great Mistake. Farrar & Rinehart, 1940.
Haunted Lady. Farrar & Rinehart, 1942.
Alibi for Isabel and Other Stories. Farrar & Rinehart, 1944.
The Yellow Room. Farrar & Rinehart, 1945.
My Story: A New Edition and Seventeen New Years. Rinehart, 1948.
Episode of the Wandering Knife. Rinehart, 1950.
The Swimming Pool. Rinehart, 1952.
The Frightened Wife and Other Murder Stories. Rinehart, 1953.
Other Sources:
History of Pittsburgh and Environs. New York, Chicago: American Historical Society, Inc., 1922.
Cohn, Jan. Improbable Fiction. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
Dirckx, John H., M.D. Dr. and Mrs. Rinehart: A Biographic and Literary Study. Menlo Park, CA: Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society, Spring 1987.
Edwards, Julia. Women of the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.
Green, Anna Katharine. Hand and Ring. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1926. Copyright 1883, 1911, 1926 by Anna Katharine Green.
Lewis Allen, Frederick. Only Yesterday. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931.
Means, Gaston B. The Strange Death of President Harding. New York: New York Guild of Publishers, 1930.
Myers, F.W.H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1903.
Overton, Grant. Mary Roberts Rinehart: a Study in Career. New York: The Bookman, George H. Doran, July 1927.
Pope-Hennessy, James. Queen Mary 1867–1953. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960.
Russell, Francis. The Shadow of Blooming Grove. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
IMAGE GALLERY
Cornelia Gilleland Roberts at 23, the year her elder daughter was born. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rinehart Burton)
Three lively young sons and a tired young mother, at Christmastime, 1904. Stanley Jr. was already the picture of his father. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rinehart Burton)
At home in Pittsburgh, the doctor’s wife and the chorus. LEFT TO RIGHT: Ted, Mary Alan, and Stanley Jr. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
Exploring the unknown. Mary never did learn to typewrite. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rinehart Burton)
Trout fishing in the mountains with Alan (standing) and Ted. Note the convertible skirt, rebelliously left unbuttoned. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rhinehart Burton)
Is it a gun, a trick, or a silly joke? Mary could write melodrama and farce with equal facility.
A star must shine. The opulent fur turban must have been warm for evening wear, but the stole and muff were approved by Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting in 1915. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
An experienced horsewoman in an idyllic setting. Mary had ridden since she was six years old. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rhinehart Burton)
Two fish that didn’t get away. The Head claimed to have caught both on a single cast. Everyone, of course, believed him. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rhinehart Burton)
Checking a simmering pot, watched by a simmering chef. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
Out for a stroll in matching fur coats. Even Mary’s pets had a sense of style. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
The age of elegance. The Rineharts’ chauffer waits with a fur rug while the lady of the house enters her limousine bare-handed and flimsily shod. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
Blackfeet Indians in Washington D.C., May 31, 1923. LEFT TO RIGHT: Chief Mad Plumes; adopted member Pi-ta-ma-kin (Running Eagle); Chief Two Gun White Calf. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress).
A nurse again, ready for action. The impressive diamonds on the ring finger are not part of the unofrm. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rhinehart Burton)
Mute and partly paralyzed after her stroke, Cornelia Roberts learned to embroider with one hand. The hoop fixed to her armchair was Mary’s idea. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
The author at work. The office is a far cry from that black-painted cave in Pittsburgh.
A brave face and a worried wife. With only a short time to live, Dr. Rinehart still kept a straight back and a stiff upper lip. (Photo courtesy of Cornelia Rhinehart Burton)
The Bar Harbor house was Mary’s last and loveliest plaything. Only a few years later, it was destroyed by fire. (Photo courtesy of Bar Harbor Historical Society)
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1994 by Charlotte MacLeod
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
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This 2016 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Head of Zeus
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