by Daniel Stone
Bell, in his high-minded scheming, had a similar plan for Fairchild, whom he had only observed once, and had never formally met. But Fairchild reminded Bell of his younger self, ambitious yet capricious, established but with much still to accomplish. Fairchild didn’t know this. He sat in the corner hoping no one questioned whether he belonged. As he tried to follow the discussion, he became distracted by the titles on Bell’s bookshelf. He later described the scene that delighted him:
Mr. Bell was at his charming best on these occasions, for he enjoyed his guests, drawing them out with courteous and interesting questions. You were conscious of his dominant personality the moment he entered a room; his thick grey hair curled back from a high, sloping forehead, and he had a full beard and extraordinary eyes, large and dark, under heavy eyebrows. Mr. Bell was tall and handsome with an indefinable sense of largeness about him, and he so radiated vigor and kindliness that any pettiness of thought seemed to fade away beneath his keen gaze. He always made you feel that there was so much of interest in the universe, so many fascinating things to observe and to think about, that it was a criminal waste of time to indulge in gossip or trivial discussion.
Bell loved the discourse, but the real purpose of the salon was to forge bonds between different disciplines, where overlap could yield new discoveries. A chemist meeting an entomologist, or an environmentalist brainstorming with an engineer. Fairchild’s first Wednesday Evening salon brought about two lasting relationships of his own.
The first was with Alford Cooley, the government’s civil service commissioner, who had enviable status as a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s “tennis cabinet.” The group, as Cooley explained to Fairchild, was informal, a friendly alternative to Roosevelt’s stuffy panel of serious advisers. A profile of the tennis cabinet in The New York Times described the group thus: “The President joked, they laughed; the President talked, they listened; the President played tennis, they lost.” Cooley, whom the paper described as “the strenuousest of the strenuous,” and the four other members of the faux cabinet were so close to the president that they advised Roosevelt on matters ranging from statecraft to spelling, and were the influential force behind adding “In God We Trust” to American coins.
It was through Cooley that, one day in April of 1903, Fairchild first came to meet Roosevelt. Little is recorded about their interaction except that the president, skilled at putting people at ease, congratulated Fairchild for the work he had done on America’s behalf. Roosevelt made an offhanded suggestion that planted itself in Fairchild’s mind, that a man of such worldly knowledge and experience could be useful if he stayed still for a while, and particularly in Washington.
The second person Fairchild came to know at Bell’s salons was of a different sort. She was his age and fair skinned with long brown hair and slender fingers.
Bell’s plan lurched into motion. After several Wednesday Evenings at the Bell mansion, Fairchild received an invitation to Gilbert and Elsie Grosvenor’s house for an intimate dinner. It was Bell’s idea, and he asked his daughter to arrange it. When the places were assigned, Fairchild found himself next to Elsie’s younger sister, Marian Bell, who, at twenty-three and with her hair in a bun, was worryingly unmarried. Marian was still young by any standard, but her family’s high status drew attention to what might have been unremarkable in any other family.
Marian knew about the setup on account of her loquacious sister, Elsie, but Fairchild did not.
Elsie and Gilbert served dinner, and then stayed quiet. Marian was fascinated by art the same way Fairchild was by science, and for two hours, Fairchild listened as she described her love of sculpture and her trips to New York. Fairchild imagined that a girl so articulate was certainly spoken for.
But before the group disbanded for the evening, as if according to plan, Elsie Grosvenor worked into the conversation that her sister was not yet engaged.
An earlier Fairchild, obtuse and birdbrained, may not have picked up on such an unsubtle disclosure. But now he had a well-formed social awareness, an instinct he had honed over years talking with all kinds of people and in all kinds of situation. Elsie’s aside was all it took.
“I left the house, my mind in a whirl,” Fairchild wrote of the evening. It’s conceivable that Fairchild believed he’d never find himself coupled, that he’d begun his adult life a bachelor and would end it that way as well. He once carried on a cursory engagement with a woman in Maine, to whom he was reasonably attracted, but not enough to curb his constant travels. His greatest influence had been Lathrop, who demonstrated in their years on steamships that life could be exceedingly well lived without a wife.
Fairchild’s reaction to Marian, however, suggests that he simply hadn’t met the right woman, one who could both challenge his instincts and put him at ease. And then, as if someone answered a prayer he hadn’t prayed, here came someone as engrossing as she was radiant, who oozed poise and a charisma so pure it nearly drowned Fairchild’s attention. “Concentration proved difficult,” he wrote, describing his walk home. Plant introduction was no longer his sole object of affection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Brain Awhirl
Fairchild toiled for days about how to talk to Marian. He wasn’t so much intimidated by her well-regarded family as he was baffled by what to say. Among all the things Barbour Lathrop had taught him in their years circling the globe, how to speak suggestively to a woman hadn’t come up. With his hairline beginning to recede, Fairchild considered himself not particularly handsome—an assessment Marian later confirmed (“his intellect” had caught her attention first). But he had already demonstrated his strong upbringing and heightened sense of manners. And perhaps most important for a man seeking the affections of a woman, that he could be interesting by being interested.
He now lived at 1440 Massachusetts Avenue in another boardinghouse, this time squarely in the center of social Washington. It was one block from the National Geographic meetinghouse, six blocks from the White House, and four blocks from the Bells’ mansion, where Marian lived with her parents. Even amid wisps of winter, it was an opportune distance to express his affections in hand-delivered letters.
A week passed before Fairchild decided his first move. At the Grosvenors’ dinner, Fairchild had mentioned that he had amassed a personal collection of Javanese batik cloths, pieces of material with geometric designs made by molds of hot wax. Marian showed a hint of interest in the artistry she had only read about and never seen, so Fairchild sent over a small parcel of sarongs, which, in a breathless letter he rewrote twice, he clumsily offered to give her as a loan, not quite a gift.
Miss Bell,
The plain colored sarongs are from Siam and seem of mixed silk and cotton but the figured ones are from Java—that fairest of all Earth’s islands—and they are Manchester cottons only. But how transformed they are by those soft browns and yellows from the tropical forests. . . . Please keep these as long as you like, they are for your study. If you want Java, yes, I will be delighted to get them for you. Isn’t the weather gorgeous among the trees?
With best regards.
David Fairchild
Marian sent a cursory thank-you note.
After several more days, the best plan Fairchild could concoct was to invite her to visit his office. Fitting with the times, but perhaps not his intentions, he suggested she be accompanied by a chaperone.
Courtship in the early 1900s proceeded at the pace of a groggy house cat, nimble in ways but overall slow and unsure. Only recently, in the waning years of the 1890s, had courting begun to change from a transaction to a pleasurable activity—an innovation so meaningful it took on a new term: “dating.” This was largely the effect of gender imbalance, which allowed a smaller pool of women to be selective among an abundance of men.
Had Marion lived a decade prior, her parents might have matched her with a suitor based on their compatibility: a man to support a household and a woman to run it. But n
ow, in 1904, a year when half the population of the United States was under twenty-three, burgeoning couples wanted more, and women could afford to be choosy. It wasn’t uncommon for a woman to feign illness, play hard to get, even end a relationship prematurely to test a man’s true devotion. Physical attraction hadn’t arrived as a top priority, but it still mattered. The Reverend Joseph Bush had written a manual on marriage and courtship circulated widely in the United States. “If, in marrying, you get nothing but a pretty face, you make a bad bargain,” Bush wrote. “Beauty wears out, but breeding is in the bone and, in choosing a partner for life, regard should be had to what will last.” His recipe for a lasting union was to seek someone with a refined soul, a large heart, and a noble mind. The opposite of all of these qualities should be avoided.
On Thursday, January 5, 1905, Marian visited the Department of Agriculture with her grandmother Gertrude Mercer Hubbard, who at seventy-seven retained an aura of pearled glamour even after having been widowed for seven years. An awkward hour passed as Fairchild toured Marian and Mrs. Hubbard around the building, at one point taking them to the high-altitude attic that once housed the fledgling Office of Seed and Plant Introduction. One imagines him nervous and stiff, reduced to an insecure teenager, avoiding eye contact and the natural flow of conversation to kick himself mentally for the inanities exiting his mouth. The three stood in front of a planter box growing a woody climbing vine just beginning to show tender white flowers. He explained that it was from West Africa and a candidate for a new American garden shrub. He was, however, too modest to mention that just months prior he himself had been on the coast of West Africa in Sierra Leone. Even if he had wanted to boast, he seemed to lack the capacity to know how.
A few days later, Fairchild learned from mutual friends that Marian would be attending the Washington Charity Ball hosted by the Washington Junior League at the New Willard Hotel. Fairchild’s age, just shy of thirty-six, put him on the upper end of beaus, but he decided to go anyway. When he tried to fill his dance card for the twenty waltzes and two-steps, he found only five women willing. He danced with the first four—one of whom was married—and then stood at the wall watching Marian be spun around the room by other men. When his turn came, the band played Strauss’ “Wiener Bonbons” waltz, the longest song of the night. The way Fairchild mixed up his steps made Marian laugh. And by the end of the song, he had worked up the courage to ask her to dinner. He wrote “supper” in his dance card next to Marian’s name, as if he’d need the reminder to remember.
* * *
—
Marian wasn’t prone to falling in love. She had reached her mid-twenties with only one young man making suggestive advances, which had annoyed her so deeply that her parents wondered if she was interested in men at all. The only man who had captivated Marian’s attention was the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, a New York artist who would one day be asked to carve the faces of four American presidents into a granite mountain in South Dakota. Borglum’s studio was in New York, and after being granted an apprenticeship, Marian made regular trips north to see him.
Marian had been drawn to the way Borglum’s hands moved over the medium, be it rock or clay, and she particularly liked the moment the subject began to reveal itself—a nose, a face, a smirk. Marian watched him build busts of saints and apostles for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine near Central Park. In 1904, with her eyes wide, she watched him work on a sculpture of seven stampeding horses that would later end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She delighted at Borglum’s brilliance, the explosive way he was never satisfied. Once, he shattered a collection of finely sculpted angels when a critic off the street innocently suggested they looked “feminine.”
Clearly, it was the right side of Marian’s brain that lit up with creative amusement. This confused her family, no one more than her left-brained father, a man whose every action tested hypothesis after hypothesis via the scientific method. Even so, Marian thoroughly admired her inventive father, and he her. “I think [she] is going to develop into a self-reliant and beautiful woman,” Bell wrote his mother in 1892, a few weeks after Marian turned twelve. And she did, largely thanks to her mother’s influence each summer in France or Italy, where Mabel Bell would bring her daughters to concerts, galleries, and museums.
For all the credit granted Bell, the famous inventor had a deficit of affection for his daughters that in later years could be deemed overt sexism. Bell didn’t hide his disappointment that having two daughters would leave no one to carry on the family name (the Bells had had two sons, but both died as newborns). He repeatedly skipped family vacations in Europe with Mabel and the girls to stay home and work on a new idea. In 1898, Clara Barton, the Civil War nurse who founded the Red Cross, invited eighteen-year-old Marian to accompany her to Cuba to treat soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War. Her father thought it would only “wound” Marian and “accomplish no good,” so she didn’t go.
Her father didn’t find out about the apprenticeship with Borglum until Marian had already accepted, which was the only reason she was permitted to do it. And to Marian at twenty-one, New York felt like the center of the world. The more she became engrossed with Borglum’s work, the more she fell in love with the energy of the city. She attended concerts in the apartments of young musicians, often unchaperoned. She mingled with sculptors and architects in Greenwich Village. Twenty years before the arrival of jazz, her parents worried about the raucous, liberal, and undisciplined influences of New York. Alexander and Mabel Bell wanted their daughter to find a husband as much for social appearances as because they hoped it would settle her down.
David Fairchild seemed to be that calming influence. But he wasn’t boring. He was a man of science, a traveler of terrific adventure, whose work was reasoned, methodical, and yet had an element of art, at least to the extent that the work he was doing—brightening the color palette of American agriculture—had never been done before.
* * *
—
The letters kept arriving at Marian’s house, delivered early in the morning during out-of-the-way detours Fairchild took by the Bells’ house to the office. Marian would respond, enamored by the attention, but she was unwilling to equal Fairchild’s more poetic, often unedited pronouncements.
For their first official date, on January 13, 1905, Fairchild took Marian to the Washington Symphony Orchestra to see the Scottish pianist Eugen d’Albert. Fairchild took her hand as d’Albert played Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. And when they left, he tucked the program in his pocket to remember the occasion. He wrote her later that night.
That music was so deep and took such a hold that my brain is awhirl. . . . You were very good to let me hear it and I do like the intoxication of it though it seems very showy and leaves one a bit weak.
David
Marian enjoyed responding with tantalizingly little, but enough to invite more missives.
I like the way you write—it’s very simple and direct.
Marian
There was a lot Marian began to like about Fairchild, and eventually his demeanor became part of his charm. At a party hosted by the Grosvenors, Fairchild flailed his hands while he told a story. He knocked over a candle and spilled hot wax all over his coat, ruining it, but Fairchild continued the story as though he had made the same faux pas dozens of times before. Marian would later note, in longhand, how she enjoyed his resilience in the face of setback, however minor.
In February of 1905, a month that brought blankets of snow, they both took trips away from Washington. Marian left first for Detroit on art business. The collector Charles Lang Freer wanted to donate to the Smithsonian Institution a portion of his personal collection, and Marian, on account of her father’s connections and because she had studied art, was asked by the Smithsonian to inspect the gift. Fairchild, not long after, took the train to Florida. He wrote to her from his Department of Agriculture office, and then once he departed, on any stationery
he could find, at each stop feeling more comfortable with himself, more flirtatious, in the way an uncertain lover finds his footing.
January 31, 1905
Department of Agriculture of the United States
Marian,
Did you ever look at a friend’s photograph through a big microscope? I’m going to look at you through mine—my new one for there is something real about the image that the delicate fashioned lenses cast. This letter shall reach you earlier than the others for it will catch the last delivery. I hope it will find you in the sunshine and not the shade. I send a leaf from a winter’s day which I spent years ago in the Adriatic, with a dear old Italian monk, looking for a new sort of grape which is now growing in California. You will excuse this letterhead note paper will you not? It is some left from the last trip. Now come the letters, more of the artificial moonlight and a tramp home in the snow.
Good night
David Fairchild
Several days later he wrote from Wilmington, North Carolina, on hotel letterhead.
February 13, 1905
There is no use in my trying to deceive myself—each day seems to make your image more and more a part of my life. All day long the rain clouds and the twigs against the sky have been the only things of beauty worth watching and in the beauties of these things your presence has been so fully and so real that I cannot tell you of it.
David
Fairchild wasn’t eager to introduce Marian to Barbour Lathrop, who he feared could undo all of the delicate groundwork he had laid with a single remark, exposing Fairchild as churlish by association. In his letters to her and on their dates together, Fairchild had described Lathrop in terms more cutting than flattering. The nuance of his relationship with Lathrop, the man who both enriched and annoyed him, often simultaneously, was difficult to put into words.