Had She But Known Read online

  One way and another, the clan was branching out. John’s wholesale wallpaper business was making money hand over fist; Sade wanted a home of her own and, of course, got it, a tight little house just around the corner from Mother Roberts. Its great advantage was the stable at the back. Sade, for all her delicacy, was a fine horsewoman, and John was as good or better. They kept a trap in the summer, a sleigh in the winter so that Sade would get to show off her new diamond ring and sealskin coat in fine style. After a while, they moved out of the city to a much nicer house in Sewickley, where Mary was often invited to spend weekends with them.

  It was from John that Mary received her love of horseback riding and her loathing of trotting races. Watching Uncle John drive his two-wheeled sulky along a racecourse for hours on end was a desperate bore; getting to sit in her aunt’s sidesaddle on John’s big bay, Charlie, was a thrill beyond belief. For Mary’s debut as an equestrienne, clever Cornelia had fashioned a miniature habit with a long skirt and a fitted basque but had given no thought to those starched ruffles on her daughter’s little underdrawers. Mary returned from that first ride badly blistered but once the agony had passed, she was quite ready to try again. In years to come, her uncle’s early lessons were to serve her in good stead.

  CHAPTER 2

  Breaking Up and Moving On

  John Roberts showed his Covenanter blood more than his siblings did. He’d grown up tall and thin, dour and reserved, inflexible, sometimes irascible. Nevertheless, John was the one whom everyone else turned to in a pinch. These pinches were usually financial, and John never refused to shell out; though sometimes his words to the wise were sufficient. In later years it would be sensible Uncle John who steered Mary on the course that would bring her fame and riches.

  The exodus from Diamond Street continued. Cornelia was becoming eager for a change, a second daughter in such close quarters was definitely one too many. Tom was his own boss now; he’d taken on a sewing machine dealership. The ladies who sat in his downtown showroom, shirring and topstitching to demonstrate what fun it was, had been attracting new customers. This was definitely the time for a move.

  Like John, Tom didn’t take his family far, only to another little brick house a short walk away. One of four in a row, the house he’d rented looked to the casual outsider much like the other three. To Mary there was all the difference in the world.

  She could not recall the actual moving, but she retained a vivid memory of being there by herself in the new house. Her parents had parked her in front of the kitchen stove to keep warm and out from under their feet while they dealt with the agonies of getting settled. The stove was new and shiny black. Burning coals glinted from behind the half-open slits in the damper slide. She could smell the linseed oil from the new oilcloth on the floor. Now, she knew what the word home really meant.

  Looking back, Mary wrote that she thought her father had instigated the move in order to get away from his mother. That seems likely, although all the young Robertses must have felt the constraint of living with so implacable a conscience. Mary remembered an awesome encounter she’d had with her grandmother when she was very young. She’d woken up late one night and wandered out into the sewing room, startled to find the old lady still sitting there with a piece of unfinished work in her lap, holding a needle up to the light from the overhead gaslamp. Mrs. Roberts’s one good eye was squinted up in a painful struggle to see the tiny hole into which she must poke the thread. Her blind eye, reduced to a whitish blur by some old injury, stared straight ahead. She might have been one of the Norns. Mary sneaked back to bed.

  Until Olive came along, Mary had been the only child among a congeries of generally well disposed grown-ups; she must have had her share of petting and spoiling. Still, the bars were always around her. She mustn’t go uninvited into other people’s bedrooms, she mustn’t bother the somehow frightening hired seamstresses of whom she caught glimpses sometimes through the open door of that cluttered, ill-lighted back room where the sewing machines were kept. She must be a good girl at all times, particularly on the Sabbath, when everybody was expected to remain aloof from worldly diversions.

  His mother’s house rules must have rankled Tom especially. Although Mary in her memoirs called her father an agnostic, Tom sounds more like an atheist, as rigid in his own way as Mrs. Roberts was in hers, refusing to entertain even the possibility of a deity or an afterlife, setting himself in vehement opposition to his mother’s unswerving belief in a God of wrath who kept a fiery pit well stoked for the unredeemed.

  Tom might rail as he chose, but Mother Roberts knew where the pitchforks were kept, and why. How could Mary ever be good enough to escape the fearsome fate that awaited bad little girls? As children do, she invented small terrors to mask the big one. In the new house, her inner panic settled, not surprisingly, on the back bedroom.

  There were three upstairs rooms. The biggest was where her parents slept, in a grand new walnut bed with a dresser to match. The second was shared by Mary and Olive. The third and smallest was where the hired girl slept, when Cornelia had one. When she didn’t, it was used as a storeroom. That was when the ghosts moved in.

  Live-in maids were not then a luxury reserved for the ultrarich. Lots of immigrants’ daughters and raw girls just in from the farms were glad enough to do housework for board and room and a dollar or two a week until they found better jobs or more lenient employers. Few girls could come up to Cornelia’s standards, so the little back room was often empty and Mary would rush past its door with her heart in her mouth. She never mentioned her private nightmare, but somebody else found it out.

  Tom, by nature and inclination an inventor, a muser, and a ponderer, was always open to new ideas. One day he brought a phrenologist home to supper. Phrenology was quite the vogue in that late-Victorian period; the theory was that, by feeling his subjects’ cranial bumps and hollows, the practitioner could diagnose their psychological strengths and weaknesses. Which bump tipped this man off, he never revealed. But he really rocked young Mary back on her spring heels when he told her there were no such things as ghosts, and she’d better remember it.

  He could also, he said, determine whether a little girl truly loved her parents. Since the phrenologist was the Robertses’ dinner guest, since Cornelia was a truly magnificent cook, and since Mary had been taught to behave herself in company, he could hardly not have awarded her full marks in filial piety. That was when Mary began to think he wasn’t so smart as he claimed to be. Of course she didn’t dare say so.

  Parents brought up in the old Covenanter tradition, along with a good many who weren’t, still believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Devoted mother though she was, Cornelia kept handy a small whip for educational purposes. Considering how many clothes children of that time and class were made to wear, her chastisements may not have been all that painful. Still, to be struck by a grown-up, whatever the provocation, is a hard thing for a sensitive child to handle. Each flick of the switch only reinforced Mary’s secret dread that she wasn’t good enough and never would be.

  Despite the punishments, Mary and Olive had it better than many others of their generation. They were comfortably housed and generously fed. They were dressed like young princesses, thanks to their mother’s skill with the many sewing machines at her disposal. Though Mary couldn’t remember ever once having seen her mother sit down to read a newspaper or a book, Cornelia must have been a remarkably clever, creative woman. She was a cook and homemaker par excellence. She could sew just about anything, including a whole menagerie of stuffed Noah’s ark animals to set around the base of the Christmas tree. The elephant, fashioned of gray flannel with knitting-needle tips for tusks was, to Mary’s mind, her mother’s chef d’oeuvre.

  After her offspring had fled the nest, Mother Roberts had filled their emptied bedrooms with boarders. Her rooming-house venture must not have lasted long, though, for Tom and his wife soon fell into possession of the old rosewood parlor set on which his sisters had flirte
d with their beaux. Cornelia was well enough pleased to inherit the chairs and sofa, but a housewife who not only gave the whole house a turnout and rearranged the furniture every Friday but also sent the hired girl of the moment out to scrub down the brick sidewalk and give it a fresh coat of red wash with her second-best broom was not about to sit still for that dingy old black horsehair. Cornelia put up with it just so long, then she shut the parlor door and warned Tom, Olive, and Mary to keep out. Days later, she flung open the portals and herded them in to view her handiwork.

  They saw a lovely new carpet, with lanes of cotton crash tacked over it to be walked on till the first flush of newness wore off. The old parlor set had been transformed by charming slipcovers of rose and white linen. Both the mantelpiece and the piano that Cornelia had bought on the installment plan over Tom’s objections were draped in elegant silk scarves. And on the mantel sat two terra-cotta figures. One was a replica of the Greek Slave, the other was Eve. The girls were ecstatic; Tom only smiled. Eve had her apple, the slave had his bonds, but certain visitors suggested that perhaps those accoutrements were not enough. Much as she hated to, Cornelia added swaths of satin, artistically arranged to strike an acceptable compromise between aesthetics and what was then conceived as morality.

  Moral teachings of the time leaned heavily on the Ten Commandments but trod lightly around the eleventh. People who obeyed Jesus’ admonition to love one another had to be extremely careful how they went about it.

  Mary heard many sad stories, though she didn’t understand most of them until she was grown up. She was fully occupied with her own little world and its small diversions. One of these was, of course, Olive. Four years is a long span between young siblings; Mary was very much the elder sister, but the two of them played together amicably enough. Some of the time, anyway. They folded little wagons out of paper, hitched caterpillars to them with thread, and watched their wagons being slowly pulled around. One could not, after all, depend on a caterpillar to exert much speed. They put their dolls to bed, they cut paper dolls out of fashion magazines. When the girls each got a nickel, they ran to the ice cream parlor and splurged. If they had only one nickel between them, they asked for a single dish and two spoons.

  There were no playgrounds in Allegheny, and there were many restrictions. Even the children’s clothes were restrictive. They wore long black stockings and spring-heeled, high-buttoned boots all year round. Thrifty parents bought the boots a size or so too large so that their little ones’ feet could grow into them. Feet grew to the right size and kept on growing; by the time the boots wore out, they were usually at least one size too small. As a result, most adults suffered from corns, calluses, and bunions that they’d acquired as children. Mary was to have trouble with her feet all her life long, not that it slowed her down any.

  Whatever the weather, children were dressed according to the calendar; or maybe the almanac, Pennsylvania being the state whence had first come those helpful pamphlets that were wont to be hung by a string near the kitchen stove: Bradford’s starting in 1687, the famous Poor Richard’s beginning in 1732. However the yearly date was determined, it came to pass infallibly that upon a certain morning in September, though the mercury might be trying to splash out the top of the thermometer, every child within grabbing distance was buttoned into itchy, long-sleeved underwear that covered him or her from neck to ankles.

  Girls suffered the extra misery of thick flannel petticoats that had a nasty way of bunching up into hard wads over their knees if they tried to run, or even to walk fast. Both sexes scratched their way through the winter, and kept on scratching until the official spring robin announced that today was the day to shed your woollies.

  Parents had somewhat more latitude in their mode of dress. While Cornelia Roberts wouldn’t have been caught dead with a rouge pot in her possession, she was not above helping nature along with a few subtle touches. Mary was enchanted to watch her mother, splendid in a black taffeta evening gown, patting not only her face but also her neck and arms with a powder puff before going out to a party with Tom.

  Now that they didn’t have to be quite so well behaved, young Mr. and Mrs. Roberts were enjoying themselves in new ways. One night they went to see a play—a not very proper play—called The Black Crook. Presumably the hired girl of the moment baby-sat Olive; Mary was to have the special treat of a night on the town with Aunt Ella, her mother’s sister.

  Ella and Mary’s goal was the Pittsburgh Exposition, which was being held in Allegheny. Some wooden halls had been flimsily thrown up for the purpose down by the river, on flatland that would be covered with water in flood time. Tom was one of the exhibitors—he had saleswomen at the sewing machines, shirring and ruffling to the wonderment of many onlookers. Always innovative, he’d included in his display an added attraction, a glass case that contained a little ship on a bright blue ocean. When wound up with a key, the waves would rise and the toy boat would rock and dip just like a real ship at sea. Spectators crowded to watch, and Ella and Mary grew sick of the crush and climbed to the balcony.

  It is not known why any exhibition manager in his right mind got the idea that the pianos should be displayed on a jerry-built balcony, or why the merchant who owned the pianos had been fool enough to agree, or whether it was divine judgment or plain bad luck that set Mary and Ella among the pianos just as the balcony’s too-fragile supports gave way. Why they weren’t both killed is anybody’s guess. Ella sustained a badly broken ankle. Mary crashed facedown on a low spiked fence that surrounded a first-floor display. One of the spikes pierced her chin and came out just under her lower lip. The scar remained, but could not have been very noticeable, as it does not show up in the many photographs that were taken of her in later life. Her worst injury was a broken femur that would keep her on crutches for quite a while.

  Many people must have been injured in such a debacle. Mary and Ella didn’t even rate an ambulance—they were driven home sitting upright in a doctor’s buggy. After some time, reparations were granted. Whatever amount Ella got couldn’t possibly have been enough to compensate for the limp that plagued her the rest of her life. Mary was awarded the magnificent sum of $300 to be put against her education. Mother Roberts drew the natural conclusion that the injuries were a judgment against Tom and Cornelia for their willful flouting of the Eternal Law by going to see an immoral play.

  That the sins of the parents might be so spectacularly visited on their daughter could have been of little solace to a young child who already held a pretty dim view of her grandmother’s vengeful deity. Mary did get some comfort, though, from an unexpected source.

  While she was still fretfully trying to mend, a Russian woman who had done some sewing for Grandmother Roberts came to call and brought her husband, a black-bearded giant with gentle blue eyes. Cornelia was in some doubt as to whether the husband ought to be allowed near her little girl, for he had a dreadful reputation. Whatever a nihilist might be, he was one of them, he’d even been exiled from Russia for being it. Cornelia was, however, broad-minded enough not to hold his strange affliction against him; she rose above her doubts and he became a faithful visitor to the small convalescent, even making Mary a lovely doll’s bureau out of cigar boxes. The varnish he’d put on always got a bit sticky in damp weather, but Mary cherished his gift for years.

  Perhaps it was to get the children away from the perils of the big city that, once Olive was old enough to leave her mother, she and Mary were sent to spend summer vacations at a farm owned and run by a Gilleland aunt and her spinster daughter. Getting the sisters to the farm was no great feat. Cornelia’s cousin, another Maggie, often drove into town; she could pick the girls up in her buggy. Once outside the Allegheny city limits, they were in the country. Somewhere along the road, they went up a grassy lane that led to a low, remote little frame house built on to one large room with an outer wall of logs. This had been part of the original dwelling. Inside was a ladder that led to a loft where the boys of the family had slept.

 
Now the boys were all gone from the farm. Only elderly Aunt Mary and her daughter Cousin Maggie were left, raising their vegetables, fattening their pigs, driving their cows to be milked, setting the milk in the cool springhouse for the cream to rise so that Aunt Mary could thump away at her barrel churn, working the dasher up and down, up and down, until after a long, long time the butter came.

  Mary knew well where the butter went after it had come. Every week on market day, Cousin Maggie came into Allegheny with neat yellow pats to sell, along with eggs and other good things from the farm. Cornelia would come with her market basket on her arm and a daughter or two at her skirts, to buy the week’s groceries and enjoy a brief chat with her cousin. It was interesting to be on the supply side for a change. The two girls would go out with a basket and gather the eggs that the hens laid in the mangers.

  There were other small diversions. Mary made whisks out of old newspapers that she cut in strips and wrapped around a piece of broom handle to shoo away the ubiquitous flies. Twice a week the butcher’s cart came up the lane and Cousin Maggie haggled with the butcher for some thin round steaks fried in batter. (Decades later, Mary would still order them once in a while, just for a taste of the past.) With a bent pin for a hook, Mary fished for minnows in the creek across the road, and brought them back to swim in the rain barrel. Regrettably, they always turned belly-up and she had to scoop their little corpses out the next day, but those minnows made a fisherwoman out of her, then and forever more.

  Sometime during one of her later visits, Mary discovered a cache of dime novels inside a bench in the kitchen. At once she settled down in the rocking chair beside the oil lamp—there was no gaslight at the farm, of course—and proceeded to take another giant step along the road she was to travel.