Scholarly Pursuits

by M. Louisa Locke

  Laura knew Caro’s father had been dead set against his daughter pursuing such an unfeminine profession. She never quite understood this sort of attitude about women and medicine. In her experience, it was women who did most of the nursing and dosing of patients within their own homes and communities. Why not get the education to become professionals? Annie’s physician was a woman, and Laura had been very impressed by everything Annie had told her about Dr. Brown.

  Caro shrugged. “I wouldn’t say he changed his mind, voluntarily. That was Grace’s doing. In the letter she wrote that I needed to follow my dreams and that the means to do so were at hand—if I would ask my aunt to tell me about my own mother’s will and my inheritance.”

  “What?”

  “Turns out that my mother’s will stipulated that the money she got when she sold my uncle Robert her share of the family farm should be held in trust for me until I was twenty-five. The will also made my father executor. When my mother died, he made my aunt Jean promise not to tell me of the contents of will, convincing her that it would just increase the conflict between us. Of course he was right. I would have insisted that I see the will, which clearly stated that the trustee could distribute money for educational purposes.”

  “But he didn’t do that?”

  “No, I had to earn my way through the University of Nebraska and then teach for four wretched years in order to save enough money to come out west to join Grace and prepare for medical school. Savings which my expenses in returning to Nebraska on the express train severely depleted.”

  “When do you…”

  “Turn twenty-five? I turned twenty-five last October.”

  “And your aunt still didn’t tell you then?”

  “My aunt Jean believes that breaking a promise is nearly as sinful as breaking one of the Ten Commandments. But when my twenty-fifth birthday came and went, and I never mentioned anything about the will…she began to worry. Finally, one day after Grace came back home, she told Grace about the will and asked if I had mentioned getting any money. She still hesitated to break her promise, but Grace, even as she was dying, was looking out for me. My aunt feels that breaking a promise is sinful, but she believes that lying is an even bigger sin. So when I finished reading the letter and asked her point blank about my inheritance, she broke down in tears and showed me her copy of the will.”

  Suddenly Caro’s dress and the trunk at the top of the stairs filled with clothing made sense to Laura. “Did your father have any explanation for why he didn’t execute the will when he should have?”

  “No, but then I didn’t speak to him directly.”

  “You did finally get your inheritance?”

  “Plus interest. I retained a very good Chicago lawyer, who was happy to suggest to my father that a quick settlement would be much less embarrassing than a trial where I would testify that, while my father had been denying my written requests for funds to pay my tuition and fees, he was having no difficulty buying expensive baubles for his mistress.”

  “Oh no, Caro, I don’t know what to say. How long had you known about…”

  “His mistress? Forever. His affair started before my mother died. I can never forgive him for that. As for the woman herself? I suspect she was the one who demanded that I continue to be sent to the Nebraska farm every summer after my mother died. For that I find myself rather grateful. But that is neither here nor there. The question is, now that we have Grace’s blessing, and I have the funds to stay here as long as need be, what should be our next step be to root out this force for evil on the Berkeley campus?”

  Seth smiled at Kathleen Hennessey when she opened the door and said, “Good afternoon, Miss Kathleen. I wondered if Miss Dawson was at home?”

  “Oh, Mr. Timmons, sir, I’m sorry. Miss Laura isn’t here. And I’m afraid I don’t know when she plans on returning. I believe she did say she wouldn’t be back in time for the usual study session. And Miss Celia isn’t home yet from visiting her family, although she is probably going to be here soon. Would you like to wait for her in the parlor?”

  “No, no, that won’t be necessary. No reason to tell anyone I stopped by. Was just an impulse, on a fine day like today, I thought Miss Dawson might like a stroll. But I must be going.”

  Seth turned and went down the steps to the street, feeling like a fool.

  Why did I say that about not telling anyone I had stopped by? Like it was some secret. I wonder where Laura’s gone?

  He hadn’t been to many of the Sunday study sessions this past month. Ned was too frequent a participant, and it was painful to watch how desperately Celia worked to keep him on task. And he didn’t like the way Ned pressured Laura to correct his school work.

  Plus, when he did come for a study session, he felt he had to come up with some new explanation for why he hadn’t shown up in time to take the noon-time meal with Laura and the other boarders. On top of that, he’d never quite figured out how to tell her about working with her brother, which had also gotten in the way of him having dinner with her on Saturdays.

  What had he been thinking when he didn’t tell her immediately? He had planned on telling her the following Saturday, but he had barely made it to Hank’s Restaurant because he’d needed to finish a filing job that Nate’s uncle, Mr. Hobbes, had given him. Flustered by being late, he plain bungled it. That would have been the perfect way to tell her…explain why he was late. But he’d come up with some stupid excuse instead. Then he kept trying to find the right opening to bring it up as they ate. Before he knew it, he had to leave to make it to his printing job on time.

  Another week went by, and the more time that passed, the harder it got to tell her.

  To make matters worse, it seemed to him that the fewer opportunities he had to spend time alone with her, the more difficult he found it to keep his hands off of her. Even when they were in public—riding the ferry, sitting in the study room with Celia and Kitty, even walking up the hill to campus—he couldn’t relax for fear he’d reach out and tuck one of her errant curls behind her ear or slip his arm around her waist.

  He could feel how stiff and awkward he’d become around her. See how puzzled she was when he said he couldn’t make it to dinner on Saturdays. Puzzled, and maybe even a little hurt. And that made things worse, because he knew that having kept his job with her brother a secret, when he did tell her, she would feel hurt.

  That’s why he’d decided to come by today. Ask her to come for a walk with him. Screw up his courage to tell her.

  But she wasn’t home. She never went out on Sundays. What if he were too late? Maybe someone else had decided to ask her to accompany him on this fine spring day.

  Chapter 17

  Thursday morning, March 10, 1881

  Oakland

  “Our Sophomore Year will live in American college lore. A Perfect Olla Podrida, of bogus, grand juries, pistols, indignant faculties and similar parents, private detectives and sophomores conquered but not subdued.” 1881 Blue and Gold Yearbook

  From the moment she and Celia got into Kitty’s carriage this morning, Laura had been debating about what to do. Should she or shouldn’t she tell her friends anything about what she’d learned from back issues of the San Francisco Chronicle about the campus scandals that had resulted in mass suspensions two years ago? She had already decided that she couldn’t tell them the real reasons for her investigation into these events. Unfair to ask them to keep what she and Caro were doing a secret…and too risky that Ned would get wind of what was going on if she did tell them.

  But what if they sensed her excitement…or what she had learned came out later? How would she explain not telling them? Wouldn’t that make them suspicious there was something else she wasn’t telling them? She wasn’t exactly known for her discretion.

  Maybe she should simply repeat the story she had come up with in January, that she was looking into campus life for an article to submit to local papers. That should work. She could say that now that midterm exams were over, she had more
time to pursue her original plan, which was actually the truth. She had already decided to ask Instructor Royce if she could write something about campus fraternities for her end of year composition.

  She didn’t have to mention Caro or Grace at all.

  Her friends already knew that Grace had died…and that Caro Sutton had been her cousin…and that Laura had known about the relationship but respected Caro’s request that she keep that information private. That was old news.

  In addition, when Laura returned to the boarding house from meeting Caro, they simply made polite inquiries into how Caro was coping with her cousin’s death and went back to a heated discussion of whether or not their Latin professor was being unreasonable in the number of pages they were to translate each week. They certainly didn’t seem to think it was strange that Laura had gone all the way to Berkeley to welcome Miss Sutton back to town. Ned had already left, because there was some special dinner being held at the fraternity house that evening, so she didn’t have to worry about him saying something cutting about Grace.

  Seth was a different matter. Wouldn’t you know, this had been one of the first Sundays in weeks that he had shown up at the boarding house. Thank goodness, he didn’t ask her any embarrassing questions. Instead, he did the thing he did with his eyebrows when he felt she was not being entirely forthcoming.

  That memory decided it. Once they boarded the train to Berkeley, where there was some privacy, she would tell all three of her friends about what she’d learned from the Chronicle. If she waited any longer, Seth would guess she wasn’t telling them the whole story. Maybe he would be able to meet her for dinner next Saturday; she could tell him then about Grace’s letter and explain why she and Caro were restarting their investigation.

  She didn’t want there ever to be secrets between them.

  As she settled into her seat on the train, Laura said, “This week I did some research on student life on campus, and you won’t believe what I’ve discovered about our seniors, the graduating class of ’81.”

  She was sitting next to Seth, with Kitty and Celia in the seats facing her. They always tried to get one of these pair of seats that were found at the front of every passenger car so they could easily converse on the last stage of their trip. Leaning forward, not wanting any of the other students on this early morning train to hear what she was talking about, she said, “That class started out as freshmen with just under a hundred students, but I discovered at the Record’s office yesterday that only twenty-four of those freshmen are still registered and expected to graduate.”

  Celia gasped and said, “Three-quarters of them failed? Oh Laura, don’t tell me that! How am I ever to succeed if it’s so hard?”

  “No, no, Celia, that wasn’t my point. You don’t have to worry because you haven’t been spending your days beating up other students and your nights in drunken revelry, which is what this class seems to have done. Not surprising, then, that half of them had already been conditioned out of the university after they took their final exams their freshman year.”

  Seth said quietly, “We’ve all heard upperclassmen brag about the good old days and how this year’s freshman class doesn’t hold a candle to what they got up to when they entered the university. You’re saying they aren’t just making up stories to impress?”

  “No, they aren’t. The class of ’81 went way beyond the usual freshman-sophomore cane rushes and simple forms of hazing like washing someone’s head under a pump. When this class became sophomores, their particular brand of hazing and high jinks got so out of hand that in the fall term one of them was shot and at the end of the year over half of the remaining men in the class got suspended. All of this was written up in a series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and the student paper, the Berkeleyan.”

  Kitty said, “Good heavens! Why did someone get shot?”

  “To give you some background, one of the editorials in the Berkeleyan said that the root of the problem came from the fact that there were so many students enrolled in the class of ’81, they came out the victors in the fall cane rushes, overpowering the sophomores by their sheer numbers. This editorial suggested that, as a result, those sophomores responded by increasing their hazing of the freshmen.”

  Seth laughed. “So you’re saying the class of ’81 then excused their own later behavior by saying, ‘the class of ’80 started it.’”

  “Yes, Seth, I understand your meaning; this makes them sound very much like spoiled children. But that is what the article suggested. The result, however, was that the freshmen did seem to feel that because they’d been hazed by the sophomores, this gave them the excuse to behave badly in return, spending the rest of their freshman year indulging in noisy beer busts and petty vandalism. And, as I said, this may have been why so many of this class failed and dropped out of the university at the end of their freshman year.”

  Celia frowned and said, “They sound like my brothers, each blaming their own bad behavior on the other, then thinking that going out and getting drunk would make it all fine.”

  “Yes, and according to the Chronicle, this behavior riled up the local Berkeley and Oakland residents who had the misfortune of living near the multiple boarding houses and hotels where these students lived. All this general rowdiness culminated in a spectacular Burial of Bourdon at the end of the year.”

  “But don’t freshmen do this Burial of the Bourdon every year?” Celia asked. “Ned told me about it. Freshmen burn copies of their Bourdon’s algebra textbook and put the ashes into a coffin-shaped box and then bury it to celebrate the end of freshmen year.”

  “Well,” said Laura, “this particular year, the ceremony was so elaborate, and the spirits flowed so freely, that the students’ general bad behavior made it to several of the San Francisco papers. However, this was nothing to what happened when the class of ’81 came back from the long summer vacation as sophomores.”

  “You mentioned a shooting?” Seth said, sounding skeptical.

  “Yes, I did. One of the Chronicle articles mentioned that the class of ’81, now that they were sophomores, were unrelenting in tormenting the new freshmen, Grace’s class. Gangs of them made nightly raids on the boarding houses where freshmen lived. They would drag the poor boys out into the street, strip off their clothes, shave off their hair, throw them in blankets, and paint their bodies with noxious substances. Needless to say, law-abiding neighbors complained, but nothing seemed to be done. Finally, one night in October, around forty sophomores surrounded a house where some freshmen had barricaded themselves in a room on the top floor. As some of the sophomores started to climb up on the porch roof to see if they could reach them, the owner of the house shouted that if they didn’t stop damaging his property, he would shoot. Reportedly, they shouted back that they were armed and would reply in kind. Subsequently, the man shot into the crowd, injuring one of the students.”

  “Oh my,” exclaimed Kitty and Celia in unison.

  Seth said, “And that got them suspended?”

  “No, much to the disgust of the person who wrote the article. There was eventually a Grand Jury report, and the man who did the shooting was arraigned for assault…although I couldn’t find out if he was ever tried and convicted for that crime. But nothing seemed to have happened to the sophomores who started it all. There was some suggestion that the students who participated weren’t punished by the school because one of them was the son of a judge who was a member of the University of California Regents.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who that was. I wonder if that student is still enrolled?” Seth said. “And, by the way, how did you find these articles?”

  “When I mentioned to Nate and Annie last weekend that I was finally going to work on an article, Annie suggested I write to Tim Newsome, Nate’s friend who works for the Chronicle, ask if he could look through their files. He came through, and Tuesday I took off work early and met him at the Chronicle offices. He’d pulled out about ten articles covering the last four y
ears. Some were boring discussions about conflicts within the Board of Regents and concerns about how the new state constitution would affect funding, but some of them were quite useful. I even learned that there was a student paper I’d never heard of called the Oestrus, which I found copies of in the South Hall library yesterday. They helped supplement what was written in the Berkeleyan.”

  “So that’s where you were off to after math class,” Celia said.

  “Yes, I didn’t have time to read many of the issues, but I learned the Oestrus was started the spring of ’78, when the class of ’81 were freshmen. From what I could see, the paper was devoted to cataloging all the ways in which university students were misbehaving. There were articles on the reasons why students get conditioned, problems with cheating, commentary on the need for a local temperance society, and so on.”

  “Oestrus, what an unusual name for a paper,” Kitty said. “Latin for frenzy, or perhaps a better definition would be gadfly—someone who drives someone into a frenzy.”

  “Well, this paper certainly seemed to have been driving some of the fraternity men on campus into a frenzy. A number of the articles in the paper had a distinctly anti-fraternity bent, suggesting that the secret societies on campus were behind much the obnoxious behavior on the part of students, blaming them for the hazing on campus and the complaints of the good, law-abiding citizens whose sleep and livestock were under nightly attack. One editorial also argued that these societies were leading even good men into bad ways, which was the chief cause of the significant failure rate among university students.”

  “My goodness, I don’t suppose that went over well with the fraternities,” Kitty said.

  “No, it didn’t. I read a couple of letters to the editor that the Oestrus printed from fraternity men who not only vigorously refuted these generalizations but said the people writing for the Oestrus were just sore because they hadn’t been invited to join.”