Michael rose from his seat, tears running down his cheeks and ran from the room.
Edward watched him go, thinking, “Now why did I do that?”
He had no right to take out his unhappiness on the children. But for Edward, life in Ottawa was like dwelling in a room in which the ceiling kept dropping, lower and lower. He just couldn’t help himself.
At no time did Edward dislike Ottawa more than when it was buried under a heavy blanket of snow. This reaction, of course, had much to do with how the damp cold affected Florence. Last year, after a particularly grueling winter, she had succumbed to one fever after another. Finally, she had agreed to have all of her teeth extracted. Even though the dentist had promised she would recover within a month, she hadn’t. Weak and demoralized, she slipped into a profound depression.
Edward’s male colleagues thought Florence was mentally unbalanced. One such individual was Alfred Kroeber, a “lay analyst.” Failing to comprehend what a ten-year battle with a chronic illness could do, Kroeber insisted that what Florence needed was to be psychoanalyzed. He recommended some sessions with William Alanson White, a high-priced psychiatrist who practiced in Washington, DC. Edward took Kroeber’s advice seriously until he found out what it would cost and then he said, “I should have to mortgage my soul for 10 years or more before I got through with him.”
Edward never spoke about how bad things were at home, but some of his colleagues found out anyway. Marius Barbeau knew the story. He said Edward “was much upset at the time and his wife was, too, to the point of insanity. Things had been going wrong somehow for them in their domesticity in Ottawa.”
By the time the ice had thawed on the Rideau Canal, Florence was nearly suicidal. In spite of the fact that she lacked the strength to walk even one city block, she insisted she wanted to take the children for an outing in the Gatinau Hills. Edward told her that she was too ill to manage such an excursion, but one afternoon when he returned from work, she was gone, along with Michael and Helen.
Barbeau recounted the rest: “Florence had jumped into the Rideau Canal with her two children under her arms to drown herself. She loved Michael and Helen, the two who she’d tried to take to the bottom of the canal. Thank the lord they were rescued.”
* * *
It was in February of 1924 that Edward and Florence decided it was worth going back to the United States to get another opinion from a respiratory specialist. While Howard Lilienthal, the expert Florence had consulted in New York, was reputed to be the best thoracic surgeon in the country, Florence hadn’t liked him. She’d found him cavalier and pompous. Edward was inclined to agree.
Not long after the night of Michael’s piano recital Edward wrote to Ruth, “I seem to be in very poor trim psychologically and none too good physically either. Forty is a dangerous age, is it not?”
Of course Edward knew the most challenging issue before him was moving the family out of Ottawa. It simply had to be done. Florence could not survive another winter. Yet leaving Canada necessitated finding a teaching position elsewhere, no easy matter. However, he had a plan. The annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was scheduled to take place in Toronto in August. A Canadian anthropologist would be designated to organize the anthropology presentations. Taking on such a role would give him the opportunity to elevate his profile among the American scholars who had all but forgotten him.
* * *
Late in February, Edward delivered Florence to her sister Nadya’s house in Boston, where she planned to stay for several months for consultations and a round of treatments.
On the journey back to Ottawa Edward stopped in New York City. He had specifically timed his visit to New York so he could attend the weekly anthropology lunch.
Edward arrived at the tearoom late, just as several of his colleagues were rising from the table and slipping into their coats. Calling out to both Pliny Goddard and Gladys Reichard not to be in such a rush, to sit back down and have some coffee, he grabbed a menu. Wasting no time, he announced to his colleagues that he had been put in charge of the Anthropology Program for that year’s meeting of scholars at the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
As he was talking, he spotted Ruth at the end of the table. She appeared to be looking at him. After he finished eating he moved to the empty chair opposite her.
“Have you heard?” he said, “I’m to be the local secretary for Anthropology at the Toronto meeting.”
“Well done,” she said.
“Perhaps you could get some people interested,” said Edward. “We Canadians should not like to have the meeting fizzle out through lack of American cooperation. You might be able to start the ball rolling.”
“I’m not sure how much influence I have.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself,” he said. “And there will undoubtedly be railroad reductions and possibly special rates for a transcontinental trip.”
“They’ll certainly like that,” she said, starting to rise from the table.
He stood up. “Maybe I shall get some Indian agent to stage a war dance for us.”
She laughed.
“I’ll walk you back.” Helping her on with her coat, he added, “Anyway, you might think of a paper for the grand occasion and get others to do likewise. We must try to have a good representation.”
Once outside they started to head back to campus. “So, Mrs. Benedict,” he said with feigned innocence, “I see you’re running a typewriter.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A typewriter,” he said. “You’re using a typewriter. That is sad.”
She stared at him, puzzled.
“It means that you have made up your mind to address me as ‘family’ and you’ve installed a machine to do it with.”
“A typewritten page is so much easier to read,” she said.
“That’s a poor defense,” said Edward. “Don’t I know that women decide in silence what they are flutteringly uncertain about with the tip of the tongue?”
Leaning in close, he said in a low, but emphatic voice, “Use a typewriter for a scientific manuscript, but not for our correspondence please!”
Blushing, Ruth said, “Then perhaps you should stop addressing me as ‘Mrs. Benedict’ and call me Ruth.”
“Touché.” Edward smiled. “And, oh, yes, I am old-fashioned on a few things.”
When Ruth queried him on what those things might be, he didn’t answer but his eyes danced from side to side and a little smile crossed his lips.
If he was flirting, he appeared not to realize it.
Others, however, did realize it, and were quick to exchange stories about his so-called naïveté. Bunny Bunzel, the department’s new secretary, described him as “abnormally innocent when it came to the opposite sex,” while other female colleagues said they found his allegiance to monogamy “touching.”
* * *
After his return to Ottawa, in a letter written to Ruth on March 1, Edward picked up their discussion where it had left off.
“It’s just like me to have to be clubbed with the obvious,” he said. “I am like the sleepy Missouri farmer of the Ozarks who asks each chance comer if the Civil War is indeed at an end.” And then he went further, staking claim to what he termed “the privilege” of retaining his innocence, saying, “Florence is quite right when she says of me that with all my Bolshevistic fanfare, I am really a most-hidebound and conventional fellow.”
So far the dialogue that Edward and Ruth had established had begun and ended with a discussion of Edward’s poetry. He was gratified that Ruth responded to his poems with an intensity that matched his own. Her comments were well considered, and deeply felt, everything he had hungered for from the editors who sent his verse back with “the regularity of clockwork.”
So far he had not been given the opportunity to read her poems, nor had he been made privy to any of her deeper feelings, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.
On February 27 he
launched his campaign, writing, “Send your verse. I feel it in my bones that you have much to say.”
* * *
On March 12, Edward wrote to Ruth, naming several of the luminaries who would be attending the conference:
I am delighted to hear that you are coming to Toronto. Goldenweiser, Wissler, Todd and Wallis will be there, also Barbeau, Jenness, Mcllwraith, and myself. By all means give me a title for a paper. Anything you are interested in. Don’t just come and listen. It’s much more fun making others listen.
He accepted her offer to send a good book, saying “Yes, Maugham, or anyone else you think will make me civilized.”
The next week a fat parcel arrived. In it was Ruth’s copy of Of Human Bondage, recently published, by the British writer Somerset Maugham. At over five hundred pages, the book weighed several pounds. Edward wrote a note of thanks, saying:
Maugham’s book frightens me, but I shall take your word for it and go ahead bravely. Do people really read such long novels? Remember, I do not read photographically. I have to hear every syllable!
Left in Ottawa with his mother and the children, Edward dreaded the long hours after dark. Often unable to sleep, he tried to concentrate on Maugham’s story, which he found “psychologically accurate but lightweight.” The thoughts that were foremost on Edward’s mind, however, were not about Maugham’s characters, but about Ruth’s poems. He was determined to find out what went on behind her vague and fleeting smile. He sensed that she could be drawn out, the way a feral cat is tempted by a bowl of milk left day after day on the back porch. He alluded to his desire for a more reciprocal relationship:
I wish I had a poem to send you in answer to your letter of March 24th but I haven’t. I have been too horribly depressed of late to do anything.… You are doing a good deal of verse yourself. Won’t you let me see some of it?
* * *
Three days later, Edward informed Ruth that Florence was better and had gone to the hospital for observation. He added that she was in capable hands. The new doctor was optimistic enough to think that she would be helped by another operation, “but not the excision the New York doctor spoke of. The latter is terribly dangerous.”
From that point on, events moved swiftly. By the end of the week, the doctor cabled to say that surgery was imminent. Florence was to be admitted to the hospital and would remain there until they were ready to operate.
Edward packed his bag and, instructing his mother to forward all his mail to his sister-in-law’s house in Boston, caught the next train down. Upon his arrival in Boston, he sent Ruth an account of how things stood:
Florence has pretty regularly recurring fever and considerable pain. Some operative procedure will be necessary, I am afraid. What the doctor proposed to do so far as I understand him, is to collapse the right lung. Air injection is to be tried first (one trial has already been made, I understand) but the doctor is practically certain this will be of no real use.
* * *
A few nights later on his return to his room, Edward found a package full of mail waiting for him. The letters were a welcome distraction. One was an envelope from Ruth. When he scissored it open, out fell a note addressed to Florence, a brief letter for him, and two poems. One was titled a “Discourse on Prayer”:
And I have peace. The moon at harvest is
Round jocund laughter on the sky,—no more;
And I have sleepy comfort in your kiss
That is a wind-blown flame to you.
He read it over again. He rose from his desk and paced the room. Holding the sheet of paper in his hand he went out the front door, down the stone steps, and into the night.
Later, when he returned to his desk, he wrote to thank Ruth for the letter to Florence, which he would give to her in the morning. He also said that her proposed topics for a presentation at the Toronto meeting all sounded interesting. Sounding a note of uncertainty about his own ability to attend the conference, he apologized, saying much would depend on the speed of Florence’s recovery.
He ended with the following:
I find myself at last somewhat in the mood to say a few words about your poems. Have you copies of them? I will be frank enough to say that they seem a little short on technique here and there, but that’s an exceedingly small thing soon remedied with practice and persistence. The main point is they show great sincerity of feeling, strikingly original imagery, and strength …
* * *
Edward waited on a straight-backed chair in the hallway outside the operating theater. The odor of formaldehyde, plaster of Paris, and floor wax was strong. From a far distance a rattling noise got his attention. He looked up. A nurse pushing a metal trolley was coming up the long corridor, moving toward him. The trolley’s little wheels jangled as they moved over the shiny linoleum tiles. As the trolley neared he could see that it carried an odd-looking machine. The machine consisted of a large deflated cloth balloon that sprouted a red rubber tubing. The contraption was seated on a polished wooden base. Next to it were several large metal canisters that presumably held nitrous oxide.
Edward watched as the nurse rolled the trolley past him, opened the door to the operating theater, and disappeared inside.
This apparatus—the artificial pneumothorax—was the surgeon’s last great hope. This was the machine that would enable the doctor to pump gas into the pleural space that enclosed the diseased lung. Once the pleural cavity was inflated, it would balloon in size and push inward against the lung, causing the lung to collapse. The theory was that a collapsed lung was a resting lung, a lung that could heal.
The doctors had told him that sometimes the presence of scar tissue made it impossible for them to inject air into the pleural space. They had warned him that if this turned out to be the case, they would need to try a more drastic approach.
Edward explained it to Ruth. “The next … is to remove a few ribs and collapse the lung artificially.”
These few words, however, did not really convey what Florence was facing. If the artificial pneumothorax failed, the surgeon would have to reach his own hand inside the pleural cavity and apply manual pressure to collapse the lung.
“So you see poor Florence has a great ordeal before her,” said Edward. “She is exceedingly brave about it all and impatient to have something radical done.”
The operation seemed to go on for a very long time. The longer Edward waited, the more nervous he became. Only by holding on to the knowledge that this crisis was temporary was he able to soothe himself. Soon this would be over and they would be able to get on with their lives.
* * *
Edward stood by the side of the bed, looking down at Florence. A thick gauze wrap encircled her rib cage where the sections of ribs had been removed. The doctor told him that she had been given morphine to lessen the pain.
She looked up at him with glazed eyes.
He reached for her hand and held it.
Later that day he wrote to Ruth:
Florence had an operation yesterday—six rib sections were taken out—and while she looks pale and weak today, she did very well and says she has no pain. I hope the operation will cure the abscess, but it is too early to say anything definite yet.
Five days after the surgery Edward brought Florence back to Nadya’s house. Florence was feeling well enough to announce that what she wanted, more than anything else, was to get her hair bobbed. Later that afternoon, while Edward was sitting by her side reading out loud to her from Of Human Bondage, Florence interrupted with another request. “Edward,” she said, “do you know what I’d like to do when I’m better?”
“What?” he asked.
“Go for high tea at the Château Laurier. After the first snowfall.”
The Laurier was Ottawa’s grand old hotel. It overlooked the Rideau Canal. From its dining room guests were treated to a view of a winter wonderland—skaters gliding arm-in-arm up and down the glistening ice of the frozen waterway. Tea at the Laurier was always a special event.
&nb
sp; “With the children, of course,” she added. “Helen would love it.”
Edward stood up and moved to the side of the bed. He gently caressed her cheek. “We will,” he said, thinking how good it would be to replace that other memory of the Rideau Canal with this one.
Looking down at her wan, but still beautiful face, Edward resolved that he had to find another job, even if it meant a cut in pay and status. He simply could not subject Florence to another winter in Ottawa. That evening, Edward watched Florence joke with her sister as she had in the old days. His wife’s exuberance made her look like a young girl again.
Later that night he wrote to Ruth. He had more to say about her poems:
There is a mannerism of yours. An apologetic, conditional style of utterance. It is in your speech and letters, but eschew it in verse. You have more defiance than you allow yourself to express. You must scale off the crust of protective coloration. If you are not careful, you will become mincing, like Henry James.
He was careful to leave her with a word of praise. “There. You must send more. And certainly you must work. I wish I had your delicacy of feeling.… It would be unforgiveable if you didn’t.”
* * *
Edward awoke from a dream. In it he had been back at the Algonquin Provincial Park walking with Florence and Michael toward the entrance of Camp Pathfinder. No sooner had they seen the cabins than Michael had taken off at a run. Edward and Florence followed slowly behind. Just then Edward saw Taylor Statent, the camp’s director, walking toward them. Edward was embarrassed because he’d not yet paid for Michael’s camp session. Before Mr. Statent could raise the subject, Edward reached into a bag and carefully withdrew a large bundle wrapped in brown paper. He held it out to Mr. Statent. Statent took it out of the paper. It was an authentic headdress, once worn by a Sarcee chief. The kind one could only see in a museum. The feathers were uniform, dove gray in color. It was majestic. Edward had correctly surmised that if anyone would be willing to barter, it was Pathfinder’s director.
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