The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  If sexual affairs before marriage were more likely in the city than in the country, they were hardly unknown in conservative, rural areas, either. The clues are few and scattered, but you can find them. Saddest of all are the criminal records testifying to the deaths of young, unmarried women who sought abortions. One such woman was Rosa Petrusky, whose story was discovered in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society in the early 1990s. Rosa died in 1896 after an affair with a farmer’s son left her pregnant and the young man took her “along the road,” as she told it, to a doctor who had “done something to her, had probed her womb.” There are characters in fiction, like Willa Cather’s Ántonia, who has a baby out of wedlock when the feckless train conductor she’s supposed to marry reneges on his promise. (“Another girl,” the narrator observes, “would have kept her baby out of sight,” but Ántonia insists that her daughter’s portrait hang in a “great gilt frame” on the wall of the local photographer’s shop.) There is a remarkable diary kept from 1876 to 1880 by a young man named Rolf Johnson, whose family settled on the plains of Nebraska. In one town he frequented, he ran with a “sporting” crowd who shared with him pictures of the “fast women of the town stark naked.” Rolf writes often about his visits with a young woman named Thilda, whose parents disapproved of him, probably with good reason. “Weather foggy and misty,” reads one diary entry. “Received a note from Thilda inviting me to call this afternoon as she would be alone. Called and found her all alone, her folks having gone visiting. Spent the afternoon very pleasantly and staid until about ten o’clock this evening, and we played ‘love in the dark’ as we lighted no lamp not wishing to be watched from without through the windows.”

  But Florence was on the other side of that early-twentieth-century Rubicon. She had been born in 1880. For a young woman like her, from a small town, sex before marriage would have been a very daring matter, something that might have made her feel as though she were standing on the edge of a windswept cliff, exhilarated and frightened. Where would a couple like Florence and Ed, I couldn’t help wondering, even have had sex? Cars hadn’t yet exerted their revolutionary effect on American courting habits, freeing young couples from the porch swing and the watchful eyes of their parents. No one in Brainard even owned an automobile till 1908. There was the hotel, but it was a bustling place, and Mary Talbot was an intimidating presence, up and down the stairs in her black taffeta, calling out orders to the hired girls and clipped greetings to the traveling men. In the late spring, when Florence must have gotten pregnant, it was warm enough, perhaps, to lie down in a field of green wheat. And nighttime at the turn of the century was even more of a friend to a rural couple hungering for each other’s bodies than it would be later. There were no electric lights at all on the streets of Brainard till 1907, and most of the residences glowed only with kerosene lamps in 1901. Love in the dark was always a possibility.

  Of course, women were supposed to be virgins when they married; they were supposed to guard what one medical text of the day called “the largest diamond in the crown of youthful virtue.” A publicized extramarital pregnancy meant ruinous scandal chiefly, it need hardly be said, for the woman. Still, if the couples who succumbed to temptation remained couples and married soon enough, secrets could be kept, reputations preserved, mores undisturbed. Florence and Ed’s trouble was that their marriage did not come soon enough. By November, Florence would have been showing. It may have broken Mary Talbot’s heart to send her dear girl away, but it must have been a comfort to know that people in town wouldn’t be whispering about the belly under Florence’s wedding dress. Or maybe there was another concern at work: Mary was a widowed mother running a hotel frequented by single men, and she didn’t want them getting any ideas about the kind of girl Florence was. Maybe she even worried that a pregnant young woman on the premises would give the hotel she’d worked so hard to build up a bad name. And if that was true, then given what happened afterward, the knowledge that she had made a business-minded calculation about her daughter’s life might have haunted Mary for the rest of hers.

  Just after the wedding, Ed and Florence settled in Pittsburgh. For Ed, who loved meeting new people, and who had dreamed of a wider ambit, the city offered a welcome jolt of freedom and energy. He quickly secured a job as a streetcar conductor, work that suited his amiable extroversion. For Florence, a delicate mama’s girl who was warmly attached to the people she loved but shy with strangers, it must have been harder to feel at ease. Ed had always been restless on the farm where he grew up, and he knew he didn’t want to be a farmer, but Florence had liked her little prairie town. Even its scouring winds brought a bloom to her pale cheeks. Perhaps she felt the relief of not being gossiped about in a place where few knew them, and where she and Ed could represent themselves as having been married longer than they had been. But she must have been lonely and homesick, too, especially in a city so manifestly uncongenial to a country girl.

  With a population of 320,000, Pittsburgh in 1902 hadn’t yet made it into the top ten biggest American cities, but it would certainly have made it into the top ten most polluted. Smoke from the open-hearth steel mills and coke plants covered the city in a perpetual mantle of darkness. A walk through downtown streets meant brushing away cinders and soot that sifted down from the sky onto shoulders and hair, and streetlights often had to be turned on during the day to cut through the speckled gloom. The nineteenth-century writer James Parton described the city as “hell with the lid taken off.”

  Ed and Florence, just after they were married.

  The young couple lived in a boardinghouse that may have reminded Florence of the hotel she grew up in, but without her mother. On February 8, 1902, she gave birth to a baby boy at the Homeopathic Medical and Surgical Hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. The setting itself was a reminder of how far Florence was from home. City hospitals were dismal, disreputable places, and it was predominantly unwed mothers and the poor who gave birth in them. Most better-off married women had their babies at home, attended by a midwife or a family doctor, and usually with female relatives on hand. Over the course of the century, as standards of cleanliness improved and infection rates fell, hospital delivery emerged as the safer, more modern way to go. In 1900, less than 5 percent of births nationwide took place in hospitals, but by 1939 half of all births and 75 percent of urban births did. Florence evidently had no one in Pittsburgh to whom she was close enough to ask for help; Ed would have felt ill-equipped to assist at his baby’s delivery, even if men were willing to do such a thing at that time.

  The handwritten birth registration for my father has a line for what it calls “color” and records that this male baby was white, and that his parents’ birthplaces were Plattsmouth and Brainard, Nebraska. But the spot for the baby’s first name was left blank, as though his young parents were too overwhelmed to give it a thought. Somewhere along the way they chose Lyle, an unusual and romantic sort of name that belonged to no one they knew. In fact, they weren’t quite sure how to spell it, with the result that Lyle would go through the first twenty or so years of his life as Lyel, or Lysle, or more common, Lisle, with the s silent.

  When Boy Henderson, a hearty, healthy, full-term baby, was about three months old, his mother fell seriously ill with what turned out to be typhoid fever. This was one of the quintessential infectious diseases of the nineteenth-century city, a disease that spread through contaminated food and water in places where the sewage disposal consisted of dumping human waste into rivers that doubled as municipal drinking water supplies. Pittsburgh had one of the worst typhoid problems in the country until the city started filtering its water supply in 1907; typhoid began a retreat that led to its virtual elimination there by the 1920s. Other big cities that adopted modern filtration systems experienced similar declines, though in the early twentieth century, people who carried the germ without exhibiting symptoms continued to spread typhoid. (The most famous of these “healthy carriers” was Mary Mallon, aka “Typh
oid Mary,” the Irish immigrant cook who was forcibly quarantined for twenty-six years on an island in New York’s East River after she’d infected more than fifty people.)

  Typhoid typically lasted for about a month—whether it killed you in that time period or you survived it—and signaled its arrival with a high fever, headache, and malaise. Diarrhea and cramps followed. Sometimes patients were affected by delirium, which could make them agitated; for this reason, typhoid was also called “nervous fever.” Even before the disease struck her, Florence surely spoke of going home. And once she was ill, it was heartbreakingly clear to Ed what his young wife wanted: she wanted her mother. Her mother, who could snap a sheet like a sail in a stiff wind and tuck it in as smooth as a skipping stone; her mother, whom Florence could remember standing by her bed when she’d been feverish as a child, holding a glass of lemonade gleaming with tiny pearls of condensation; her mother, with her big, chapped hands, cool and heavy on Florence’s forehead, pressing away the hot, pulsating lights behind her closed eyes; her mother, who would pull back the curtains in her room to reveal a bright blue square of prairie sky. Her mother, who would know what to do.

  In the middle of May 1902, The Brainard Clipper was reporting that the young Henderson couple, Ed and Florence, had returned to town. “Mrs. Ed Henderson is at present confined to her bed at the home of her mother, Mrs. Mary Talbot, with typhoid fever.” Ed was taking care of their baby. If Mary had hoped to conceal the fact that her daughter had given birth so soon after marrying, she must have quickly given up the idea. Social shame was the least of it now. Mary hired a doctor and a trained nurse from Omaha, at what must have been significant expense, to help her tend to her daughter. Then, on May 28, the paper reported that Florence had “been called from earthly life quite suddenly,” four days after she had arrived home. Her condition had continually deteriorated, until “Wednesday evening, about 9 o’clock, when the pain seemed to leave her and her spirit passed peacefully away. Her death was a shock to her many friends here.”

  In her crippling grief, Mary Talbot might have done a number of things. She might have brought both Ed and the baby to live with her; she might have visited him frequently wherever they settled (she was an intrepid-enough traveler). What she did, instead, was brisk and extreme: she snatched baby Lyle from his father, took him to the courthouse in David City, and officially changed his last name to Talbot. She banished Ed Henderson from her life and from his son’s. She was done with him, this man who had made her daughter pregnant out of wedlock, then taken her away to the city that killed her. Never mind that Mary herself might have banished Florence to Pittsburgh; she would never have had to if Ed hadn’t done what he did.

  • • •

  LYLE’S KIDNAPPING by his grandmother was unusual, even in a time and place when custody matters were often handled in rough-and-ready fashion. But in other ways, his upbringing was probably typical of the early-twentieth-century Midwest. He grew up under the kind of child-rearing regime that combined sentimental display, physical punishment, serious regular chores, and a great deal of unsupervised roaming. When he was a baby, Mary dressed him in the long, white, lacy gowns that were just beginning to go out of style for boys, wheeled him around in a grandly filigreed wicker carriage, and had him pose for formal portraits neatly clasping his chubby little hands.

  When he was two, he went to his first Fourth of July picnic—the kind that towns like Brainard took very big. There were long orations by red-faced state senators in straw boaters. There was a greased-pig race—catch the pig, and that was your prize—a slow mule race, a fast mule race, a fat man’s race, and a baby’s race. When Lyle was six, he and all the kids in town participated in an uplifting program about their American heritage. Bohumila Kabourek and Bessie Kavalec sang “Washington and Liberty,” Vladimir Hlavac performed “Revolutionary Tea,” and Lyle was sandwiched between Minnie Bongers and Elmo Dockstader doing an unidentified patriotic song.

  From the time he was small, Lyle was expected to sweep up around the hotel, to deliver messages and newspapers to guests, to light the kerosene lamps at night, and to take his grandmother’s Jersey cow, Babe, out to graze. But he was free, especially on the long, hot summer days when he wasn’t in school, to wander down the unpaved streets and wooden sidewalks, out into the tall grass, and down to the gulches, where a boy could gorge himself on gooseberries and blackberries and wild plums. The prairie was nearly treeless, but when you found a tree, a cottonwood leaning over a creek bed, say, you could lie under it and gaze up at the twitchy shimmer of its leaves and above them the towering banks of clouds that throbbed with light in the vast blue sky. You could doze off to the metallic whir of the cicadas amid the larkspur and chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. You could feel what Willa Cather’s Jim Burden felt when he first came to Nebraska: “motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.”

  It was a funny thing, maybe, for a little motherless boy, but Lyle was a seeker after beauty, wherever it might be found in a spare, rough-edged country town. After he died, my siblings and I found a small box of papers he’d managed to keep from the one-room schoolhouse he attended in Brainard. Among them was a letter he’d written but never sent, from late April 1912, when he was ten years old.

  Dear Emil, Come over to my house Sunday. We are going to go violet hunting. Joe Peharek and I are going. We invite you to come with us. We are going down by the old bridge and catch minoes.

  We will get violets and Dutchmans’ breeches. There is a tree in the creek which has a swing on it. We will swing on it. The violets are out, Your friend, Lyel Talbot

  Violet hunting! What a delectable pursuit!

  In general, though, Lyle preferred the attractions of town: Smersh’s drugstore, where they sold penny candy; Rudy Stanke’s meat shop, where he could stand outside with the Czech kids and breathe in the scent of smoked sausages; Hausner’s cigar factory and the Suchy soft-drink factory, where the root beer and sarsaparilla came in glass bottles with rubber stoppers that made a satisfying pop when you yanked them out. Because Bohemian immigrants came from a culture that placed a high value on musicianship, Brainard was, for a town of its size, unusually well stocked with musical groups—several small dance orchestras, a brass band or two—and Lyle liked to go to all the dances where they played. In town, Lyle got up to stuff and always found kids to get up to it with. He put on plays in tents that he made with clotheslines and sheets—one of the advantages of growing up in a hotel was that there were always plenty of linens—casting the Horacek and Smersh kids, the Hvlacs, the Dvoraks, and the Janeks, even when they stammered out half their lines in Czech and he could just barely understand them. He’d charge a penny for tickets to the shows, or if the kids didn’t have a penny, a pin.

  One time, a traveling man who sold chewing gum asked Mary Talbot if he could leave some of his supplies in her cellar till he came back to town. Lyle and his friend Emil discovered the treasure, and started removing gum cartons, one by one, and stashing them around town in secret hiding places. Soon they found they could use the gum like money, offering packages to kids who would do their chores for them. Their barter system proceeded smoothly until the night of the town dance, when Lyle was delighted to find that his gum connection was a magnet for girls. As the evening wore on, and more and more wrappers littered the floor, Mary Talbot figured out where they’d come from, grabbed Lyle by the ear, and steered him all the way home without letting go.

  On another occasion, he became entranced with the labels on the canned goods his grandmother kept in the cellar—painterly renditions of luscious peaches and tomatoes, mighty mountain ranges, noble Indian chiefs. In a fever, he peeled them all off and hid them away in a corner of the barn where he knew he could pull them out to admire in private. When his grandmother sent him down to the cellar for a
can of cherries, and he came back with a can of green beans, she was furious, and when she marched down there herself and saw row after row of blank cans, she knew that for months she would have no idea what she was opening up to cook for the hotel guests each day. She gave him a whipping as rough as the ones she used to give him when he first saw his mother’s hair and didn’t cry.

  Mary Talbot was a stark disciplinarian and a commanding, determined character. But she loved Lyle, and she had her ways of showing it. She’d make him his favorite treat, applesauce and sugar on brown bread. When he turned seven, Mary threw him a party at the hotel in Brainard, with pink cake and ice cream and little paper cups filled with nuts. For his tenth birthday, he had ten boys and ten girls over to play games, tell one another’s fortunes, and watch him open his grandmother’s present, a George Washington costume, with a toy gun and hatchet to go with it.

  She also took Lyle with her on occasional trips to visit her mother and brothers in Wyoming, vividly rugged excursions into the Wild West that Lyle never forgot. To get to Thermopolis from Brainard, he and his grandmother took a train and then a stagecoach. His great-grandmother, with whom they stayed in a house with no indoor plumbing, was a frontier version of his grandmother. Formidable old Maggie Hollywood had gone native in Wyoming—she smoked a corncob pipe and had a cloak made of weasel pelts. Lyle heard whispering about his great-uncle Jack’s having killed a man—in fact, it was worse than that—but Jack must have been capable of enough bonhomie that he did not scare a little boy. In fact, my father knew the saloon-keeping uncle with the beautifully waxed mustache as “Happy Jack” Hollywood, a man who was often in high spirits. Fortunately, my father seems never to have been there when the high spirits, fueled by too many hard spirits, turned to rage.