by Alice Arlen
As for Patterson himself at this point, he might fairly be described as active on many fronts, a jack of several trades though proverbially still master of none. The farm of course took up much of his daytime energy, and while some of it was going well—sometimes quite well, other times not too badly—he was discovering (as had much of humanity before him) that farmwork was never done, that last season’s good luck could just as easily turn bad for no discernible reason, and that just waiting for the alfalfa to grow could somehow cost you money. As for politics, his second (or was it his first?) vocation, despite his heartfelt dreams of social justice he could scarcely pretend much surprise at Socialist candidate Eugene Debs’s disastrous showing in the presidential elections, or for that matter the general rejection of the Socialist ticket across the country. “My impression of the Socialist faction in Illinois,” he wrote in a rueful farewell to the Daily Socialist, “is one of endless bickering, argument, and in-fighting between persons who would rather out-talk one another than advance their cause.” This left a third vocation remaining, one in fact where he was finally beginning to see a little success. For his novel, Little Brother of the Rich, had been published in March 1909, and while its publisher, Reilly & Britton, was a Chicago firm and thus its readership was mainly in the Chicago area, all the same the book had brought appreciative reviews (“A timely and sardonic satire of spoiled Eastern collegiates…,” said one) and sold eleven hundred copies, enough to compel a third edition. There was even talk of a stage adaptation for a trial run in Chicago, before moving east to New York’s Broadway. Out in Libertyville, Joe Patterson now took to disappearing into his study soon after dinner, remaining behind the closed door until late at night, with the only sounds in the dark house, as Alicia remembered, being the “machine-like metallic clatter of the typewriter keys and the almost cheerful ping of the carriage bell.”
· 10 ·
SOONER OR LATER Patterson would have had to return his exiled family to the city, if only to put his children, beginning with Elinor, into a proper school, at least one that offered a broader field of study than governess-taught rules of posture and memorization of the kings of France in chronological order. Stubborn as he was, however, and determined to try things on his own and not be pulled back into his family’s spheres of influence, he might have stayed longer at the farm, tending to his tractor and his typewriter. But then on April 1, 1910, the sudden, unexpected death of his father changed many things for many people: one of those seemingly out-of-nowhere grand disruptions that turn out to shift the riverbeds of family narrative.
In truth, for some time Robert Patterson had been viewed, at least by those paying attention, as not the strongest iron in the fire: For years he had suffered from increasing “attacks of melancholia” as people then called depression, which lately had only been getting worse and, combined with a long habit of solitary drinking, regularly sent him off on covert visits to spas and sanatoriums as far away as Europe. Then, too, in recent months he had felt the mounting pressure from the Tribune’s two principal owners, his wife and her sister, Kate, to find a buyer for the paper: in other words, to sell the hallowed though financially struggling daily for cold profit, and not only out from under his own editorship, but also, as he saw it, in direct violation of the trust once placed in him by his father-in-law, Joseph Medill. Even so, as wintry March held the Midwest deep in snow, Patterson showed no outward signs of unusual problems. Late in the month he had traveled first to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to be near his ailing eighty-nine-year-old mother, then on to Philadelphia, where she was brought with pneumonia, and where in fact she died on the morning of April 1: a doubtless sad though neither surprising nor untimely event that, as a minor Chicago-related news item, began slowly to make its way back to the Midwest via the Morse code signals of the telegraph system. But barely five hours after old Mrs. Patterson’s death, a new report was being received at Tribune headquarters in Chicago by means of the newer, speedier, codeless circuitry of the telephone: Robert Patterson himself had just been found dead, alone, in his Philadelphia hotel room.
In those pious judgmental times, the good people of Chicago (and most everywhere else) had little tolerance for suicide, least of all the suicide of such a pillar of the community. Promptly both family and Tribune put out an official explanation that Robert Patterson had died from “a stroke of apoplexy” brought on by the same “winter fevers” that had just felled his mother. Although there were surely many who suspected otherwise, and some in the inner circle who seemed to know more than a thing or two about what else might have been found in that hotel room. In his biography of Robert McCormick, The Colonel, Richard Norton Smith quotes an April 2 message to McCormick from his mother, Kate: “I’ve just heard RP is dead—alone of course. He died of an overdose of Veronal. I say this in case I do not go to Chicago for the funeral for I do not want to.”
Even so, when the time came, imperious Kate McCormick was on the train from Washington, unable to pass up the opportunity to deck herself in mourning and take her place in the front pew of what, even by the overblown standards of the day, had become a mammoth and bizarre ceremony: a double funeral no less, with twin coffins—aged mother and melancholic son—lying side by side in the wreath-decked transept of the Second Presbyterian Church, tout Chicago in attendance, and with surely much discreet murmuring among the rows of distinguished mourners. According to Alice Patterson (who had it from her husband, who heard it from his mother), at the close of the proceedings, with Kate McCormick installed beside Nellie Patterson in the receiving line, Kate had turned to her sister—one billowy, bosomy galleon to another—and gruffly whispered, “Well, Nellie, you got ahead of me this time”: a heavy-handed drollery referring to the fact that her own failed, bullied, alcoholic husband remained so incoherently and inconveniently alive in a sanatorium in Virginia.
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STILL A SMALL CHILD, Alicia had little to do with such grown-up goings-on. Older sister Elinor, tall for her age, and of course beauteous in bereavement, was taken to the church in a new dress, with velvet bows in her hair. Alicia stayed home in Libertyville, with a lifelong, muddled set of memories, many of them around the word “death,” which as a child who had grown up among farm animals she was not hearing for the first time, though never before had she heard it accompanied by such adult explications and silences. However, one clear memory she retained pretty much forever was of her father in tears—a unique and startling sight, and doubtless a true memory since, in that era of painfully undemonstrative relationships, Robert Patterson’s abrupt decampment must have left his once-rebellious son with a hodgepodge of discordant feelings. This was a situation not helped by a reading of his father’s will, which conveyed a final dour message from the deceased: a request that “my son Joseph Medill Patterson return to the estate my gold cufflinks which were a valued gift from my own father.”
All the same, discordant feelings or no, momentous changes were soon in the making, set in motion by an impromptu visit from cousin Robert McCormick to Patterson’s farm in Libertyville. McCormick showed up early one afternoon, only a few days after the funeral, in a giant Hudson touring car, driver and vehicle equally mud splattered from the spring thaw. McCormick was slightly younger at thirty years old, unusually tall at six feet four, though broad of beam and somewhat soft and awkward. Trained as a lawyer, he was officially treasurer of the Tribune, a largely honorific title without real authority, serious responsibilities, or even salary. Patterson, as we know, was a sometime gentleman farmer, part-time dabbler in left-wing politics, currently an aspiring novelist and playwright who, however, had lately been given the news that his stage adaptation of Little Brother, which had played for six weeks at a theater in Chicago’s Loop, had been turned down for Broadway. Therefore, when Cousin Bert proposed to Cousin Joe, both men stomping around in the steamy horse barn to keep warm, that the two of them should now do the unthinkable and step into the void and disarray at the Tribune, partly to preserve the family busines
s, partly to gain a little financial traction for themselves, Patterson was of a mood to give it a try. The crucial question was, Would their mothers—who controlled everything, and who had wanted to sell the paper—agree to such a plan? The answer came over the next week. Yes, provisionally: That is to say the two “boys,” as Kate and Nellie insistently called them, would each be given “significant responsibilities” at the Tribune, positions to be reviewed and renewable after one year.
· 11 ·
PATTERSON AND MCCORMICK were cousins, both graduates of Groton and Yale, though they were by no means kindred spirits. Bert McCormick was a conservative Republican, also something of an Anglophile, given not only to wearing English suits but also to going about in full English hunting gear, complete with riding crop; Joe Patterson, as we know, was a barely reformed socialist, who sometimes forgot to wear socks with his shoes and often looked as if he had slept in his clothes. Luckily, however, their teaming up on the floundering Tribune was already proving to be a successful experiment, with Bert bringing order to the business side and Joe increasing advertising with his new, expanded Sunday edition; as a result, even before the first year’s trial period was over, the two normally querulous Medill sisters seemed well satisfied with the results.
But while profits were on the rise at the Tribune, and Nellie Patterson certainly cared about profits, what she cared fully as much about were what people called “appearances,” short for family appearances, or how things looked and what other people were saying about you. Herself a daughter of hardworking, rule-abiding, and mostly God-fearing parents, Nellie and her sister had inherited the fruits of such hard work and piety, namely the ability to do pretty much as they pleased. But she was chronically distressed by her son and daughter-in-law’s “situation,” by what she kept hearing outright, or “picking up,” about the parlous state of their marriage; and never more so than in that period after their return from Libertyville to town, when stories about Joe’s late hours and drinking, even rumors of possible scandal, increasingly began to reach her at Dupont Circle. By early 1911 she had made another of her decisions, with an authority, mostly unspoken, derived from the monthly allowance she meted out to her son from the Tribune Trust she partly controlled: Joe and Alice must once again go to Europe, to renew and restore their marriage; but this time as a family, and perhaps not so much to England and France, given those nations’ well-known propensities for sensuality and decadence, as to Germany, just then becoming a popular destination for Americans.
Which is why, sometime around the middle of March 1911, Alicia Patterson, not yet five years old (and still called “Baby” by her father) found herself aboard a huge, bewildering steamship—the North German line’s Kaiser Friedrich—plowing through the chop of the Atlantic, bound for an abstract destination called Bremen, in the company of Mother, Father, Elinor, and now a new kind of mam’selle, an unfamiliar, squarish, bespectacled person, in fact not called Mam’selle at all but Fräulein. As someone has surely observed, history is a river of forgetfulness, and one of its many forgettings is that, in the years leading up to the First World War, German Kultur, as people were fond of calling it, with its nonpareil depth in music, philosophy, science, archaeology, and so on, was widely regarded as the apogee of Western civilization. According to the peripatetic author Mark Twain, returning from a monthlong visit in 1910, the German public education system, all by itself, might be considered “an Eighth Wonder of the world,” and with its “resolute humanism” presaged a future “free from the ignorant barbarism of war.” What was good enough for Samuel Clemens (whose Huckleberry Finn had been warmly praised in Germany while being largely scoffed at by the English and unpublished in France) was certainly good enough for the traveling Pattersons, who left Chicago barely speaking to each other, and now hoped to thaw out the tundra of their marriage through the traditional American therapy of self-improvement and keeping busy.
Their plan, such as it was, called for a maximum of movement, mostly by train: east to Hamburg, south to Munich, back up to Nuremberg, then a boat trip down the Rhine to Würzburg and Frankfurt, and finally an overnight sleeper to Berlin. When not being actively transported, the married Pattersons plodded glumly through museums and cathedrals, gazed at much medieval brickwork, attended musical evenings. Meantime the two children were energetically pulled and pushed about by Fräulein, taken out in the morning for fresh air, sometimes to parks with carousels, and almost inevitably band concerts; and in the afternoons or whenever stationary, given lessons in German, both spoken and written, an enterprise much recommended by Nellie, whose view it was that while American young ladies, by which she mostly meant Elinor, might do well enough in the world with a knowledge of French (which Elinor already “had”), they would do even better with an addition of German, by all reports the language of the future.
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ONLY A FEW SCRAPS of written record remain from that mainly well-intentioned expedition. For instance, from Munich a rather plaintive note from Joe to Nellie: “Dear Mother, I write you as a dutiful son but I have nothing to say. We do much traveling and looking about. The days are long and wet, this being Germany. I am frankly eager to be home.” There is also a postcard, or perhaps a souvenir photo, left behind by Alice and not sent to anyone, just a photo of a nameless church on a city street, with a single word on the back in her handwriting, “church.” From Berlin there is part of another letter from Joe to his mother, indicating that his spirits had at least temporarily picked up: “An impressive city, with energy and ambition. Our hotel accommodations v. agreeable, with a view, and not at all noisy. I believe we could learn something from their public transportation arrangements.” But then a sort of postscript: “Had tickets for the Bruckner concert however Alice too sick to attend.”
In that sketchy phrase, referring to what by then would have been the latest in a continuum of Alice Patterson’s both real and perhaps less real physical complaints, lay the origins of a sequence of improbable happenings that would stick with daughter Alicia for the rest of her life. Improbable to us at any rate, who tend to approach parenthood differently than our forebears. For while many parents today would travel six thousand miles from home with two young children, indeed would do it easily, in a matter of hours, not weeks, doubtless few of these couples, with the mother sick from some undetermined though probably respiratory ailment, would leave the children behind in an unfamiliar pension, in a strange foreign city, in the charge of a not-long-employed governess, with instructions to stay put for possibly several months and improve their German. In defense of Joe and Alice Patterson, it’s worth noting that their decision to leave Alicia and Elinor in Berlin with Fräulein, while they headed westward to Paris (and presumably better health for Alice) was not so unusual for the time. It didn’t surprise Fräulein. It didn’t surprise Nellie, who was soon informed by letter. It didn’t even surprise the two children, who were accustomed (like many of their contemporaries) to spending long stretches of time by themselves, watched over by various domestic “minders.” Besides, what could go wrong? In those days many parents from the privileged classes, with a certain degree of logic, regarded governesses in general, and Fräuleins in particular, as vastly superior to themselves in both the skills and patience required for child raising. What’s more, the children weren’t being left just anywhere; they were being left in one of the world’s great centers of civilization, in Berlin, possibly the most advanced metropolis on earth in terms of science, medicine, culture, street railways, and much else besides.
What could go wrong indeed? Let us count the ways, beginning with the fact that twelve days after her parents’ departure, four-year-old Alicia awoke in the middle of the night, in her bed next to Elinor’s, on the fourth floor of the Gasthaus Lotti, screaming with pain from what would eventually be diagnosed as an ear infection. Then add another fact: that Fräulein, impeccably credentialed as she was in so many aspects of child supervision, was also, as it turned out, a Christian Scientist, one of the mor
e devout believers, one who in a medical emergency, say, would no more seek human (as opposed to divine) medical attention than fly to the moon. And then perhaps a final complication, in that the Pattersons, far from waiting in Paris for Alice to recover from her bronchial problems, had taken a ship back to America and were already in Chicago when a cable reached Joe Patterson from a Mr. Edward Chambliss in Berlin.
Ned Chambliss is one of the happier accidents in this odd tale. At the time he was the Chicago Tribune’s correspondent in Berlin, and one afternoon found himself on the receiving end of a telephone call from a now nameless (though much alarmed) resident of the Gasthaus Lotti, passing along the plight of the little Patterson girl, whose infection by then had reached a dangerous stage but was being left untreated because of Fräulein’s superstitions. Moving rapidly, as a good reporter should, Chambliss first summoned a doctor to see Alicia, then arranged for her to be taken to a nearby clinic, and meantime fired off a cable to Patterson, lately and inconveniently arrived at Tribune headquarters in Chicago. Patterson himself was no slouch at movement, and soon was rushing worriedly, and doubtless guiltily, across the ocean, back to his sick child: a time-consuming reverse travel process requiring a sleeper to New York, then a downtown hotel, a morning’s ferry ride to New Jersey, and then a six-day transatlantic crossing, landing once again at Bremen, from where another overnight train would carry him to the German capital.
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ONE OUTCOME of this sorry business was that Joe Patterson and his younger daughter actually grew closer in Berlin. On his arrival at the clinic he was shocked at how pale and frail she looked, and concerned too by her seeming speechlessness, though much of that would turn out to be temporary, a result of her surprise at seeing Poppy materializing out of nowhere, so large and loud and unexpected, and at her bedside. But soon the unlikely duo, little girl and oversize father, each one kinetic, connective, voluble—each one too, as it would turn out, susceptible to private loneliness, never entirely comfortable in his or her own skin—began for the first time to discover each other, to begin in some ways what would become a kind of lifelong love affair. In his first letter back to his wife, also convalescing, Patterson sounded a note of simple happiness, and even lightness of soul, long missing from his communications, perhaps since his father’s death. Thus: “Today Baby clambered out of bed, insisted on sitting on my lap, then slathered me with moist kisses. She is determined we will speak to each other only in German, which of course I don’t understand, and shrieks with laughter when I get everything wrong. I think we are both much pleased that I am here.” And a bit later: “Elinor has gravely explained to me the difference between ‘mischievous,’ which she says she is sometimes and which means merely naughty, and ‘wild,’ which she says is not merely anything but something a good deal worse, such as ‘wild like Baby.’ By the way, Baby has informed me that she has a poor opinion of the Kaiser, from the way he glares out at everyone from posters all over the city, also that her own real name is Alicia and she wishes not to be called Baby ever again.”
