Had She But Known Read online

  CHAPTER 3

  School Days, Rule Days

  Mary couldn’t remember when she learned to read, but she did retain a distinct recollection of her first day in school. This was a memory she could have done without.

  All she did was pick up her slate pencil. Then—whap! The teacher was behind her, rapping her over the shoulder with a ruler. Mary Roberts, barely six years old, had committed the enormity of using her left hand! Being born left-handed could hardly be called a sin, but it was treated like one in the classrooms of the time. Pupils wrote with the right hand, and that was that. However great the struggle, the aberrant child must be forced to conform to the norm.

  Mary did learn to write with her right hand. Over her long lifetime she was to pen miles and miles of manuscript—short stories, poems, articles, plays, novels, travelogues—always at top speed with a strong, rightward slant, dipping her fountain pen into the bottle when the ink wouldn’t flow fast enough to keep up with her. Regardless of how her multitudes of readers ate up her output and clamored for more, Mary seems too often to have been beset by a feeling that whatever she did wasn’t quite good enough. She, the ultimate workhorse, must keep trying harder, taking on more responsibilities, pushing herself to the ultimate limits until she collapsed under the strain and had to have another operation.

  How much of this endless driving was due to that first-grade teacher’s sense of duty, how much to Cornelia’s little switch, how much to Grandmother Roberts’s pitiless credo, how much to an innate something in Mary herself, can never be sorted out. Pretty soon Dr. Freud would be pioneering the concept that great neuroses from little traumas grow. Freud may have reckoned without the saving grace of humor. Certainly Mary’s funnybone was well developed.

  However, she found little to laugh at during those early years at school. The rickety wooden firetrap where she spent a sizable chunk of her childhood was probably less noisome than the average lazar house but, from Mary’s description, not much. Classrooms were poorly ventilated, inadequately lighted, indifferently cleaned. Sanitation in the true sense of the word did not exist. Open toilets in the small bricked-over school yard were the children’s only recourse; how they managed on stormy days is perhaps best not dwelt upon.

  Any notion of trying to make the classrooms attractive and inviting would have been dismissed as sentimental balderdash. Children were not to be coddled, not to be nurtured as individuals. They were simply receptacles into which a certain number of facts had to be stuffed each weekday from nine to twelve and from one to three. When they got into the upper grades the afternoon hours became one to four. And they were to sit still and behave themselves the whole time, or else. Eventually some progress-minded humanitarians pushed through the innovation of a fifteen-minute recess. This sent the whole school crowding together out into the inadequate school yard. With barely room to move, much less to play, they stood around like sheep waiting to be called back in.

  Compared to big, dirty Pittsburgh, Allegheny was something of an upper-class community, and upper-class communities did not neglect the arts. Once a week, therefore, old Mr. Flack with his long white beard and his tuning fork came to give the kiddies a music lesson. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Flack must have retired or died, or else he only taught the smaller children. Great was Mary’s surprise on her wedding day some years later to discover that the big, jolly Mr. Rinehart who had supplanted Mr. Flack during her high school days was one of her new brothers-in-law.

  Music lessons were probably the bright spot of the school week; for Mary the writing teacher’s lessons were the darkest. Even after she’d conquered the problem of right hand versus left hand, learning the Spencerian system was for her unadulterated torture. Spencerian script was pretty to look and easy to read, but it strictly forbade any hint of individuality. To achieve this splendid nullity, the forefinger must be curled just so, the wrist kept flat as an ironing board, the Saturn, Apollo, and Mercury fingers must rest lightly but not too lightly on the paper.

  This period was the only time of the week when inkwells were filled and steel-nibbed pens passed out. Woe to any rude boy who yielded to temptation and dipped the end of a girl’s pigtail in the ink or flipped a spitball from the end of his pen! He would be marched forthwith to the principal’s office and given a thrashing with the long rattan that played so large a part in the educative process. It was, in fact, generally assumed by the pupils that the principal’s sole function was to keep the pant seats of young miscreant males well-dusted. Girls, of course, wouldn’t dare misbehave in any serious way; their minor infractions could be dealt with easily enough by the teacher’s ever-ready ruler.

  As far as fact-stuffing went, Mary conceded that her school didn’t do too badly. A pupil who made it safely through the lower grades could read, write, and cipher; most could spell at least the easier words. They knew a little bit about geography, they could see on the map that other countries than their own came in different colors. As to where they actually were and whether Allegheny had any real connection with a larger world, none of them knew and few stopped to wonder. Their history lessons taught that the British were mean and wicked and the Indians no better; Mary felt it her patriotic duty to hate redcoats and redskins alike. It took her years to realize how wrong both she and her teachers had been.

  This sort of teaching allowed no room for original thinking. The star pupils were those with the most retentive memories. To a quick-witted, imaginative child like Mary, the average school day must have seemed like a foretaste of the Bad Place her grandmother preached about. And when she got home, she had to sit down at the scarf-draped Hardman piano and practice for two hours.

  Mary thought then and later that she’d have been far better off being given the chance to stay outdoors and play. Of course she would have, but mothers were assumed to know best. A parallel might be drawn here between the piano lessons and those starched ruffles that had wrought so cruelly on little Mary’s nether regions during her first riding lesson. Cornelia wanted not only the necessities but also the frills for her pretty daughter, the advantages that she herself, growing up on a farm, had never been able to obtain. That an advantage might involve a sacrifice seems not to have occurred to her.

  Mary, in her unpublished manuscript To My Boys, told a pathetic story of coming home earlier than usual after school one day and finding her mother at the dining room table with a strange man sitting beside her. He was a penmanship teacher; this was a respected occupation in that heyday of the curlicue when being able to write a beautiful hand was a mark of distinction. Some who mastered the Spencerian hand went on to become virtuosos of the swoop and swirl, to invent embellishments, even to raise the written work to an art form by, for instance, writing out the words of the Gettysburg Address so as to form the unmistakable shape of President Lincoln’s face.

  Cornelia’s aspirations probably did not go that high. Mary was old enough by then to understand why her mother aspired at all: At this time, Tom Roberts’s work took him out on the road a lot, and his letters home were written in an elegant, flowing hand. Cornelia, a lover of beauty, had been ashamed to reply in her unformed schoolgirl scrawl. She did learn the Spencerian method but she executed it in her own distinctive way, perhaps because the teacher thought Mrs. Roberts too grown up to slap with his ruler. Instead of connecting the letters with the mandatory swinging curves, she left each perfectly formed character sitting in its own little space like a miniature picture at an exhibition, to be viewed and admired for itself alone as she herself might have liked to be.

  Getting back to basics, Mary received another and a potentially grimmer lesson before she ever entered the classroom. She was sitting on her grandmother’s front steps one day, dressed up like a china doll as usual, when a strange woman came along and stopped to ask if she’d like some candy. Naturally Mary wanted candy, so she took the stranger’s proffered hand and off they went, much farther than the little girl had bargained for. And still no candy. Mary grew tired, she began to cry. A
t that, the woman relieved her of a little turquoise brooch and ring she was wearing, shoved her into an old privy, and ordered her to stay there.

  Mary was not all that docile a child, and an abandoned backhouse is not an amusing place to be. She stood it as long as she could, then, still crying, wandered out into the road and found a policeman to lead her home to her frantic parents. A few days later she was taken down to the mayor’s office and shown some photographs. One was of a woman named Kate, whom the grown-ups seemed to think was the guilty party. What did Mary say?

  Being an amiable and obliging child, she said what they wanted to hear and Kate was duly arrested. For a long time afterward, though, Mary was to wonder whether she’d fingered the wrong woman.

  Maxims of an improving nature were rife in those sententious days, so Mary must surely have heard that a burned child dreads the fire. But the words took on new meaning for her one Saturday night. Cornelia’s zeal for cleanliness applied as much to her young daughters as it did to her lace curtains. Every night of the week they got sponge-bathed in the china bowl from the washstand, standing up in it when they were small enough, doing the best they could as they grew bigger. But Saturday was real bath night, when the tin bath was set up in the kitchen, the water in the stove boiler was heated, and the little girls were given a thorough scrubbing.

  One night, as Mary climbed out of the tub, her wet foot slipped on the shiny linoleum. She sat down hard on the red-hot stove, and dreadful blisters arose. For what must have seemed like ages, she had to lie on her face in bed, having her burns surgically dressed by the family doctor on his rounds while little sister Olive told everybody who’d listen precisely what had happened. When the sufferer was finally able to go back to school, she got awfully tired of being asked by the boys if she wanted a cushion.

  Generally speaking, Mary seems to have retained few memories of her early classmates, except that some were white and some were colored (her word), and that none of them seemed to notice or care who was which. She did retain a vivid impression of a certain girl with the enchanting name of Birdie Berry, however. Birdie was the local bread baker’s daughter. One day she and Mary were walking home from school, quite amicably until they got to a house where the Scottish maid once a year hired a bagpiper to parade back and forth on the pavement, making incredible sounds (again Mary’s words). At that point, Birdie wheeled around and landed her classmate a stinging slap.

  Mary never did find out what prompted the blow. She wondered about that slap off and on for the next seventy years or so. To add to the mystery, Birdie was always affable as could be when Mary got sent to the bakery shop for a loaf of bread and Birdie happened to be serving behind the counter. Evidently the baker’s daughter had no qualms of conscience about the scar she’d left on poor Mary’s tender young psyche.

  CHAPTER 4

  Life and Death Along the River

  As a child, Mary seems to have been remarkably apt at soaking up the minutiae of her ambience. Her ability to create the atmosphere of a place, to humanize her characters with believable details, would play no small part in her development as a compelling novelist. Thanks to her reminiscences, we have a clearer picture of the Allegheny that used to be: a tidy city, even tidier after clean-burning, inexpensive, virtually work-free natural gas had replaced smelly oil lamps and messy, smoky, heavy-to-lug soft coal. It was a red-letter day when Mary watched her mother fill a coal grate with whitewashed bricks and turn on the new gas log.

  Admittedly, with horsecars and horse-drawn carts, carriages, wagons, traps, sulkies, and buggies for transportation, with cattle still being driven through the streets to the abattoir, the streets could hardly be called pristine despite the legions of sparrows that did their willing best to dispose of the heaps of droppings. However, the litter that accumulates on modern city streets was not seen then, largely because packaging was still a thing of the future.

  There were no beer cans to toss around; beer was sold over the bar, or in bottles, or else you brought your tin pail to the family entrance and the bartender pumped you a dime’s worth for home consumption. Newspapers were too precious to throw away, for they came in handy in many ways: as insulation, as fly swatters, as tinder to start a fire, as temporary mats to protect a fresh-scrubbed floor from muddy feet. They got cut up for dress patterns or to make spills. Mary remembered cutting papers into strips, then rolling them into long, tight spirals. A jarful of such spills sat on everybody’s mantelpiece, to be used for lighting the gas log or a father’s after-dinner cigar.

  Everything at the grocery store was sold in bulk, measured out from a bin or a barrel with a scoop or by the handful, weighed on the grocer’s scale, and wrapped in paper or dumped into a brown bag that would be recycled in one way or another. As the family errand girl, Mary went often to the grocery store to buy some needed item, such as a replacement for one of the gauzy little mantles that diffused the gaslight so prettily but were prone to catch fire from the candlelike flame inside if they got tilted the least bit askew.

  Sometimes Mary was on an errand of mercy. Cornelia was prone to violent sick headaches, which we today would call migraines. The grocer had one of the few telephones in the neighborhood, and luckily the doctor had another. After Mary sent her message, the doctor’s horse would come trotting up, the doctor would climb down from the buggy with his scuffed black leather satchel in his hand, sit down beside the bed, take the patient’s pulse, and say, “Stick out your tongue.”

  Old habits die hard. Decades later, the famous and distinguished Mrs. Rinehart shocked a renowned New York doctor by automatically offering to stick out her tongue.

  Despite its tidiness, despite the boon of natural gas, the lack of man-made litter, and the notable housekeeping of its energetic housewives, Allegheny was still not a clean city. There was always that great cloud of soot belching over from the steel mills across the Allegheny River and up the Monongahela. Well protected as they were by long black stockings and high-buttoned boots, Mary’s and Olive’s feet were always black by nightfall. At the turn of the century, when fashion decreed that a woman’s skirt should trail the ground regardless of what she might have to drag it through, there must have been a small horror story under every ruffled petticoat.

  But a dirty city was a wealthy city. The Pittsburgh mills were going full blast and more labor was needed to work them. Immigrants were arriving by the trainload, lugging the feather-beds and other oddments that they’d managed to bring from the old country. Speaking no English, they looked blank and confused, easy prey to the company men who rushed to herd them into the less than hospitable company houses and got them signed on to the payrolls before they realized what they were letting themselves in for.

  The men soon caught on to the hard, dangerous work; learned how to survive among the roaring blast furnaces, the great cauldrons of molten metal, the red-hot ingots. They learned never to sit down on anything before spitting on it first, to speak a little English, to drink their liquor steel worker-style, a slug of whiskey then a gulp of beer. As time went on, they formed committees, started small newspapers in their own languages, joined the National Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers as pioneers in the trade union movement. It was in Homestead, a borough of Allegheny County that had been intended as a lovely residential area and taken over by the mills, that their union struck against the Carnegie Steel Company.

  The year was 1892, the strike went on for 143 days, one of the longest and most doggedly maintained strikes in American history. On July 6, exasperated by the workers’ continued demands for a living wage and less inhumane working conditions, the company bosses sent in two hundred men from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In the ensuing riot, seven men were killed and twenty or more wounded. The governor mobilized the entire state militia and marched it into Homestead. The strike was broken, the smokestacks belched again, and the workers picked up their lives as best they could. In years to come, Mary Roberts Rinehart was to express herself publicly and fo
rcibly on the side of the mill workers.

  For now, her world was her neighborhood. Next door to the Robertses lived a bearded, gentle man with a lovely smile. He was deaf and dumb, nevertheless he was an insurance salesman. His spinster sister kept house for him, he wrote out policies in a clear, elegant hand—Spencerian, no doubt—and carried a little pad of paper and a pencil with him at all times. On meeting a neighbor, he would jot down on his pad an appropriate comment about the weather and hand it over in smiling expectation of a return comment. This could be a trial for young Mary, who was then still struggling with her left hand—right hand problem. She used to avoid the deaf man whenever she could, but she was always ashamed of herself afterward.

  The last house on the row was rented by the Farleys, a family of four curmudgeons who never spoke to anybody, never sat out on their front steps in hot weather as was the custom among their neighbors, never did much of anything as far as Mary could find out. Her curiosity about the surly Farleys was never to be satisfied.

  Next to this house of mystery sat the steam laundry, where a girl sat feeding collars and cuffs into a mangle, hour after hour. Mary heard her screams the day she caught her hand between the hot rollers, and ran to see what was happening. After that, Mary often saw the girl through the window, her sleeve pulled down over her stump, doing what tasks were possible to a person with one hand.

  There was also a butcher shop, where an amiable German and his wife doled out thin slices of sausage to children who came in on errands with their mothers. Their daughter was less amiable; one night she chopped both her parents to bits with a cleaver, anticipating the Lizzie Borden tragedy by a decade or so. Mary reached back to this episode many years later in 1933, when she was writing The Album.