Around the World on Two Wheels

by Peter Zheutlin

  Mollie attended Catholic schools until she was in her late teens. In 1911, in her early twenties, in a startling though perhaps not surprising act of rebellion, she converted. But Mollie didn’t simply convert to Catholicism, she became a nun and was, forever after, known as Sister Marie Thaddea of Sion. Mary asked me to refer to her as Sister Thaddea wherever possible in this book.

  The violent impact of Sister Thaddea’s conversion on her family is clear from a profoundly bitter letter I obtained from the archive of the Nostra Signora di Sion at the Vatican in Rome. Written to Sister Thaddea on November 14, 1912, by her brother Simon, then twenty, it is a blistering indictment of her conversion. “Had you pierced my heart with a murderous bullet, or with the glistening blade, I shouldn’t have felt the pang of pain any stronger,” he wrote. His life, he said, had been forever ruined by the “curse” Sister Thaddea (whom he referred to throughout as Mollie) had inflicted on the family. He foresaw a life of degradation in carrying the burden of Sister Thaddea’s “secret” to the grave. And he despaired for his parents, Annie and Max. “With pain and sorrow I watch my…harried young mother strive to keep up a home under almost, in fact under impossibly removable obstacles. With a pain of intenseness I see her daily, go to work. God! It’s terrible, it’s frightful. Insanity is a joy compared to this. Can’t you realize the extent of your damage, my dear sister.”

  The letter continues: “Your father is no longer gray, he is ‘white.’ Your mother and mine is no longer gray. She is ‘white.’…You are driving inch by inch, a mother to her grave. Do I speak truthfully? Positively. And a father also. Mollie, I predict you will be a murderess in a very short time. Did God command us to kill or did He say? ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

  It is clear from Simon’s letter that Annie had regaled her children with stories (again with a grandiose twist) about her bicycle journey as they were growing up. Simon saw her as a heroine and took a sarcastic tone with Sister Thaddea for not recognizing it: “You forget who your mother is; the world famous globe girdler has no charm for you, has she: a woman who was good enough to interview every living ruler and sovereign in the world. God, how can you remain away as you do?”

  The letter also suggests Simon suffered some form of abuse during his years in Catholic school, explaining perhaps why his letter is so filled with rage. “Mollie, I spent eight years of my life amongst those people who claim to be good by closing themselves up, when their leader told them to go out into the world and preach ‘good’ and ‘virtue’…I know their innermost secrets, and some day the world will be startled; both sexes I make no exceptions. The armies of the nations will rise against them. Do you want to be of them?” Indeed, Simon appears to have foreseen today’s clergy sex-abuse scandal.

  His pleas that Sister Thaddea reverse course were to no avail. She eventually found her way to Saskatchewan, where she lived most of her life in Prince Albert, and later in Saskatoon, teaching school and living in a convent. When Sister Thaddea’s letters arrived home, Annie and Max would recite Hebrew prayers and burn the letters. As far as they were concerned, their daughter was dead. They never saw or spoke with her again, and to ensure the Catholic Church wouldn’t receive any of her money, Annie disinherited her eldest daughter.

  “After Mollie’s defection, so to speak, the only god that my grandmother knew would have been a god she feared,” Mary told me. “I never had a sense that my grandmother relied on any kind of god, or that she even believed, but she had a great fear. I remember that whenever my grandfather took me as a little girl to shul, my grandmother would cry. Now I realize she was crying for Mollie.”

  One can imagine it wasn’t easy for Sister Thaddea, left motherless for fifteen months only to be dispatched to a Catholic boarding school at a tender age shortly after her mother’s return. Indeed, her obituary in a Saskatoon newspaper reads, in part: “Why an American girl of 21 years started a new life under a new religion on the cold Canadian prairies will never be told. Mother Superior Noreen…a pupil and beloved companion of Sister Marie [Thaddea] said: ‘Her decision to come west was made a great many years ago, but a few old wounds might be opened and a few feelings hurt if too much probing were done…. A sister and niece[Mary] still live in New York.’”

  Perhaps it was the shame they felt about Sister Thaddea that kept Annie and Max from sustaining contact with their relations in Boston, my branch of the family, and the secret of their eldest daughter was very tightly held, at least from Mary, for decades. Mary didn’t even learn of her aunt’s existence until 1961, when Mary was thirty and Sister Thaddea was in her seventies. A family friend let the secret slip.

  Though Annie and Max never saw or spoke with Sister Thaddea again, and Annie had disinherited her, they gave tacit approval of her sibling’s ongoing contact with her. In 1961, Sister Thaddea traveled to Montreal for a conference. It was Mary’s thirtieth birthday and her mother, Frieda, telephoned her aunt there. Mary heard her mother say, “Hello, Mollie. It’s Frieda. Yes, I know it’s Mary’s birthday and I’m going to let you talk to her.” She then handed the phone to a stunned Mary. “Her voice was my grandmother’s voice,” Mary told me, “and I started to cry.” Indeed, in recounting this episode Mary began to cry quietly again.

  As it turns out, a secret had been kept from Sister Thaddea, too. When Mary was born, her aunt had begun sending her birthday presents, but those presents were intercepted by Mary’s parents. When Mary turned nine, Sister Thaddea learned for the first time that her niece did not know she existed.

  Mary showed me photographs of Sister Thaddea in her nun’s habit. She also shared with me long, beautiful letters written in a neat hand that she and her mother received at the time of her aunt’s death in 1961, letters from Mother Edeltrude, the Reverend Mother at St. Mary’s Convent in Saskatoon. Sister Thaddea sounded not unlike Annie from Mother Edeltrude’s description. “You just can’t imagine how we miss her,” Mother Edeltrude wrote, “she was so outlandish in her ideas at times…She was a great entertainer.” The same could have been said of Annie, of course.

  Shortly after I met Mary in November 2003, I contacted St. Mary’s Church in Saskatoon and was put in touch with Sister Catherine Seeman, who had known Sister Thaddea. She wrote me from “a house for our aged Sisters,” as she described it, and told me she first met Sister Thaddea while living in Prince Albert Convent from 1944 to 1947. Sister Catherine told me of “House Journals” that were kept at St. Mary’s Convent, and she offered to go back and transcribe portions that pertained to Sister Thaddea. The journal entries begin in 1913 and continue, with great poignancy, right up to the last days of Sister Thaddea’s life in November 1961. The journals are mostly the daily comings and goings of the Sisters. But, the entry for November 17, 1961, was somber: “M. Thaddea was anointed as a precaution.”

  For me, the most poignant entries were dated August 31 and September 23, 1961, the latter just two months before Sister Thaddea’s death. “Rev. Mother received a night letter from Sr. Thaddea who is visiting Montreal telling of a phone call from New York when not only her sister Frieda and her husband spoke to her but also Mary, her niece, who had just learned of the existence of her aunt,” read the first. “This was looked upon as a miracle.” The entry for September 23 is equally moving: “All rejoice with M. Thaddea who received a letter (the first) from her niece Mary.” Sister Thaddea died two months later, on November 27, having found in the Church the love and acceptance that had eluded her in childhood.

  Until I read these transcripts to Mary, she knew nothing about how the joy of her “meeting” her aunt had been recorded a continent away in the House Journal of a small convent on the Canadian prairie. Mary’s letter was surely a comfort to Sister Thaddea in the last weeks before her death. Another circle, and a wound that opened on June 25, 1894, when Annie took off on her bicycle, had been closed.

  WHENEVER I RIDE my bike, and often when I am not, my thoughts drift to Annie, to the remarkable life she led, and to the family—my family—that she sometime
s left behind. I marvel that fate somehow brought Annie and me together and gave me the privilege of telling her story, a story virtually lost over the generations, not only to history but within my family, too. Before taking my own journey with her I had no idea it was possible to become so involved in the life of a person I’d never met, a person who had died six years before I was born. I have to admit that I love her, like one loves a slightly off-kilter old aunt, even though my focus has been on her life when she was just in her early twenties. She’s like a relative who dropped in for a visit and ended up staying, but it is a most welcome stay.

  The process of resurrecting Annie’s story was endlessly fascinating because every tiny shard of evidence had to be held up and examined to see where else it might lead. It was, in essence, one long scavenger hunt and it was really great fun to pursue Annie across time and space. It was also, at times, very emotional. Some discoveries were more illuminating than others, of course, and finding Mary after months of genealogical detective work was the most exciting of them all. Second only to finding Mary was the discovery, in her basement, of Annie’s original slide show. In fact, Mary didn’t even know it was in her basement. She thought the slides had been discarded years ago. But her husband, Paul, remembered, and when he came upstairs with two dusty boxes of lantern slides, slides I had read about in the old newspaper accounts, I was absolutely astonished. Piece by piece, bit by bit, Annie’s legacy was reappearing, literally, from under the dust of history. For me, as a writer, her story has been the story of a lifetime—hers and mine.

  Over the past four years, no matter how much I learned about Annie, and no matter how much material I unearthed, I was and remain frustrated that there is so much I don’t know and that cannot be known because so much has been lost to time—a diary (maybe), letters (surely), and the memories of those who knew her but who are now long passed. But I always believed that Annie’s story needed to be told using whatever remnants of her life I could find, not only because it illuminates the larger story of women at the turn of the twentieth century—but because it’s such a hoot! What I wouldn’t give to have just one evening to talk to Annie, to ask her my questions, and to listen to her tell tales of her much heralded spin around the world more than one hundred years ago.

  Appendix

  On October 20, 1895, Annie’s first-person account of her journey appeared in the Sunday World of New York. The article was a full six columns wide on the front page of the World’s special Sunday features section, and was accompanied by two large sketches, one drawn directly from a photograph Annie had taken at Root Studios in Chicago (see the photo insert).

  It is possible that Annie’s professional relationship with the World was forged as early as July 1894, when she spent nearly a month in New York City after leaving Boston. Although it is never mentioned in any other newspaper accounts of her trip, the editorial lead to Annie’s account in the World claimed that on her journey she carried only a skirt, a pistol, and “a document of credentials from the Sunday World.”

  If it ever existed, Annie didn’t save this document, or it was lost or destroyed. But, it is odd that she never mentioned her association with the World, if there was one, to any reporters.

  Parts of Annie’s account in the World are downright implausible and others demonstrably false. Much is simply unverifiable at this remove. Some of the factual errors are inconsequential—for example, she gives the date of her departure from Boston as June 26, 1894—others are more significant. For example, Annie claims to have made the return trip from Chicago to New York in eighteen days. Since she left Chicago on October 14 that would have put her in New York City on November 2. Yet, on November 2, the Buffalo Express reported that she had just left Buffalo for Rochester the previous day. Other parts of her story are utterly fantastical, especially her brief account of her imprisonment in China.

  Parts of Annie’s account read as a sort of feminist manifesto, but one that reflects the feminism of the 1890s, not of today. While she declares herself the equal of men in her very first sentence, she goes on to assure “her sisters” that the wearing of bloomers, which many saw as unfeminine, would not undermine their prospects for marriage.

  Also interesting is what Annie leaves out of this account. She never explains why she rode west to Chicago, only to return to New York and make her way around the world in an easterly direction. Nor does she provide a timeline, perhaps because that would have allowed readers to readily draw the conclusion that she made most of the trip from France to San Francisco by steamer.

  Nevertheless, her story, like Annie herself, is colorful and filled with drama. While the fact-checking left something to be desired, and such an article would never appear in a reputable newspaper today without a more rigorous vetting, it is quite typical of the sensationalism that characterized journalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the newspapers of the 1890s were perfectly suited to Annie’s purposes. As the first woman to attempt to circle the world by bicycle, she was certainly a legitimate news story by any standard, and the media seized on it. But with her gift for hyperbole and drama, she fed the need that all journalists and editors had for attention-grabbing copy. Fortunately for her, Annie didn’t have to worry about creating a completely consistent narrative as she traveled. In those times, not only was it extremely difficult for a reporter in El Paso, for example, to check news accounts published in previous months in Syracuse, Cleveland, or Chicago, but the premium wasn’t on getting the story “right”; it was on getting a sensational story that would sell tomorrow’s newspapers. Thus, Annie could claim, at various times and depending on the circumstances, to have been a Harvard medical student, a lawyer, an orphan, a wealthy heiress, an accountant, or the founder of a newspaper she sold for a large sum before leaving on her journey, none of which was true, but all of which made her irresistibly good copy.

  What follows is the only account of the journey by Annie’s hand, and it makes for highly entertaining reading. Portions have been quoted elsewhere in this book, but this is Annie’s account in its entirety.

  * * *

  The World

  New York, Sunday, October 20, 1895—Copyrighted by the Press Publishing Co., 1895.

  AROUND THE WORLD ON A BICYCLE

  Nellie Bly, Junior, Makes the Most Extraordinary Journey Ever Undertaken by a Woman

  Shot by Chinese Soldiers and Thrown into a Military Prison by the Japs

  A Remarkable Diary of Fifteen Months in All Parts of the World in her Bloomers

  A young woman of most astonishing courage and determination has just completed a tour around the world on a bicycle. She went all alone and she brings back a practical experience of fifteen months in bloomers. In crossing China and Japan she was shot in the arm by a Chinese bullet on the battle-field of Gasan. Then she was captured by the astonished soldiers and locked up for a time. This young woman carried a skirt wound around the cross-bar of her bicycle and a pistol in the hip pocket of her bloomers, and that was about all except a document of credentials from the Sunday World. Her trip also decided a wager made that no woman could accomplish such a feat. In many respects this unparalleled journey by wheel is more remarkable than Nellie Bly’s record breaking trip around the world in 1890.

  I am a journalist and a “new woman”—if that term means that I believe I can do anything any man can do. Nellie Bly, the readers of the Sunday World all know, went around the world in seventy-two days and beat the record. But she had the comforts of steamships and parlor cars.

  I have been around the world on a bicycle and I think that beats the record of any feminine undertaking to date.

  The first idea of this trip came into my head when I heard in June a year ago of a wager that had been made that no woman could traverse the globe on a wheel. I accepted the burdensome end of the wager and determined to win it. The Sunday World, as usual, was interested in the project.

  I knew nothing whatever about a bicycle. I had never ridden one, and there I had agreed to ri
de one around the world. Of course, the first thing to do was to get a bicycle and learn to ride. Two lessons sufficed for the learning and then I announced my readiness to start.

  Conditions of the Trip

  These are the conditions under which the trip was taken: I was to start from Boston, Mass., with nothing but one suit and my bicycle; was allowed five cents per diem for expenses; was permitted to earn money to defray my expenses in any honorable way other than by my profession as a journalist; was obliged to speak only the English language; was obliged to earn $5,000 over and above my expenses; was obliged to register at certain specified points, and secure the vouchers of the various American consuls that I had reached these various stages in my journey.