Finding Dorothy

by Elizabeth Letts

  Frank brushed his moustache with his thumb and forefinger, eyes twinkling. “Of that, I’ve no doubt.”

  Maud forged on bravely: “I won’t let you or anyone else order me about or tell me what to do!” She watched him uncertainly, wondering how he would react to her sharp words. Would he withdraw his proposal immediately? At that exact moment, Maud realized just how much she didn’t want him to. But to her relief, he just laughed softly, reached out, and squeezed her hand.

  “I wouldn’t dare order you about,” Frank said. “And I don’t want you to quit Cornell. We’ll wait until you graduate—I would be very lucky to have an educated wife.”

  “That’s what everyone wants.” Maud pouted. “For me to be educated.”

  Frank was studying her anxiously, leaning closer.

  “If I have to,” Frank said, “I’ll give up the theater. I’ll settle down and find a more respectable line of work.”

  “No, Frank! You can’t give up the theater,” Maud said in a rush. “It’s the love of your heart!”

  “I do love the theater! But you are the love of my heart. I don’t want to choose, but if I have to, I’ll choose you. I know, you don’t have to tell me that your mother does not want her daughter to marry a man with nothing but sawdust and pins and needles in his head.”

  “Pins and needles?”

  He leaned closer again. “To prove that I’m sharp.”

  Maud giggled. “I know lots of fellows at Cornell. They may be chasing diplomas, but many of them are fools. They are not clever enough to invent whole new worlds, as you do. Don’t quit the theater—that would be like chopping off one of your hands! Why couldn’t I come with you?”

  “My life is just a series of departures,” he said. “We pack up and leave, a new town every few days. It’s a wonderful routine, but not for a typical woman. No one knows you. You live your life among strangers.”

  “You think I’m a typical woman?” Maud asked seriously. “My notoriety trails me as stubbornly as a severe case of lice.”

  Frank laughed aloud. “I’m open about the time frame, but not about the answer,” he said.

  “And how exactly do you intend to compel me?” Maud said archly.

  “Not by force,” Frank answered. “By power of persuasion.”

  Maud thought of a million words of protest, but instead she blurted out, “I’m persuaded, Mr. Frank Baum. In spite of my best intentions, I’m persuaded.”

  * * *

  —

  MATILDA WAS, AS USUAL, so intent on her writing that when Maud stepped through the doorway to her study, at first she didn’t even look up. When she did at last, for a moment her gaze was miles away.

  “What is it, dear?” Matilda said absentmindedly, turning back to her notebook and jotting down a few more words. Maud waited for her mother to finish, knowing that she needed Matilda’s full attention.

  “Do you need something?” Matilda asked a full minute later, when she looked up from her writing again. Outside the window, Maud could see her mother’s daylilies blooming in the garden.

  “Mother, I have something I need to tell you. Frank has proposed marriage, and I’ve accepted. We’d like to be married as soon as possible.”

  Matilda flew to her feet so quickly that she knocked over her chair. Trying to stay calm, Maud bent over to right it.

  “What ever can you mean? You can’t give up on your education—I will not have my daughter be a darned fool and marry an actor!”

  Maud had pictured that she might someday need to have this conversation with her mother. She had imagined so many words of protest from her mother—she had imagined the various ways her mother might admonish or cajole her to finish her degree—and, even worse, she had imagined the look of crushing disappointment that might come over her mother’s features. But she had not imagined that her mother would take this aggressive tone with her—nor that she would attack Frank, the love of her life.

  “Well then, Mother, I suppose you won’t be seeing me anymore!”

  Matilda stared, her expression severe. “What are you saying, Maud?”

  “Well, I intend to marry Frank, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want a darned fool around the house, so I guess you won’t be seeing me anymore.”

  Maud kept her eyes fixed directly on her mother’s. Matilda stared back, brows knit together in a tight line, until, slowly, Maud started to see signs of laughter playing around her mouth and eyes.

  “Well, I guess I taught you to be independent!” she said.

  Maud threw her arms around her mother so vigorously that Matilda lost her balance and landed back in her desk chair, Maud almost collapsing on top of her.

  “No diploma?”

  Maud shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mother. It’s just not what I want.”

  A single crease appeared between Matilda’s brows and her eyes clouded, but to her credit, she smiled, stood up, and grasped Maud’s hands in hers. “Well, you won’t obey me, so don’t go obeying him, either…”

  She cupped her hand under Maud’s chin. “Marriage is serious business. A woman submits herself to a million indignities when she marries, and only a man’s own rectitude can protect her. She has so few protections under the law.”

  “Mother, Frank is a good man, and I’m no fool. Please don’t worry about us—just give us your blessing if you’re so inclined.”

  “I’m not inclined,” Matilda said. “But I can see you’ve set your mind to it, so consider yourself blessed.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE the wedding, Maud’s mother came into her bedroom carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper. She shut the door.

  “It’s time for us to have a small discussion,” Matilda said, settling herself on the edge of the bed.

  Maud unwrapped the paper and found a small book entitled A Woman’s Companion. She looked up at her mother. “What is this?”

  “I’m not surprised you’ve never seen it before. Mr. Anthony Comstock, the United States postal director and, I might add, a vehement anti-suffragist, has outlawed this useful book, and others like it. He’s made it a crime to send this kind of information through the mail. But within its pages you will find the secret of how to limit your family size.”

  From her skirt pocket, she extracted a small lacquered box. Inside was a round sponge, about two inches in diameter. Attached was a piece of silken thread.

  “Soak it in carbolic acid,” Matilda said. “Enter it inside your womanhood and push it all the way against the mouth of the womb. When you are finished, you can extract it by pulling on the thread.”

  Maud stared at the small sponge with a mixture of queasiness and fascination.

  “Will it work?”

  “Applied diligently, it may delay—but nothing prevents,” Matilda said, “except abstaining from a man’s embrace.”

  “But, Mother…!”

  Matilda held a finger up to her lips. “Say no more. Children are a blessing, but God has given us a brain, and we are not prevented from using it to help us organize our lives.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE EVENING OF November 9, 1881, Maud stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at the bright faces of the guests assembled there. All of Matilda’s friends from the suffrage society were there. Mrs. Stanton was turned out in yards of tiered lace that made her look like a wedding cake. Skinny Auntie Susan wore a plain black dress, and her hair was pulled back so tightly that it seemed to draw her eyebrows farther apart. The string band tucked into one of the upstairs rooms started to play the wedding processional, and all eyes turned upon Maud as she slowly descended the staircase. When she reached the bottom, Papa, thin and pale, but out of bed for the occasion, slipped his arm through hers. Maud steadied herself against him before she took the few steps necessary to reach the parlor.

&nbs
p; Frank, in his gray morning coat, stood regal and tall.

  She faced him, her heart all atremble.

  “Do you take this man, to love and to cherish and to honor…?”

  Maud and Frank proudly spoke their identical vows (omitting the word “obey,” as they had agreed), and Frank eased the ring over her finger. In that simple exchange, Maud realized, she had slipped out of the person she had been and turned into another person altogether.

  CHAPTER

  12

  ON TOUR

  1881–82

  Two weeks later, after a brief honeymoon in Saratoga Springs, Maud had already started to get the rhythm of traveling with the company of The Maid of Arran. Each day, another train, a ruckus of hammers and nails, the loud chatter as the actors applied their face paint and the musicians tuned their instruments and the stage crew fiddled with the sets. Every evening, the thrill of sitting in the back of the theater, watching the curtain rise. Every night, the cast gathering together, drinking coffee or whiskey, and hashing out the finer points of the night’s performance, and even later, Frank and Maud locking themselves into another hotel room, stripped bare with no shame, and finding each other’s embrace.

  Late one night, they lay close in an uncomfortable hotel bed that sagged in the middle. Frank’s steady breathing comforted Maud, the moonlight whitening the expanse of his chest, bare under an unbuttoned nightshirt. Through the windows, Maud could see the stars glittering in the sky, and she marveled that these were the same stars she had seen through her window at Cornell and yet now she saw them from such a different place. She rolled back toward her beloved, burying her face in the hollow of his neck as his arms encircled her. If these were the bonds of marriage, then she was happily bound, and happy to throw away the key.

  In Tuscaloosa, Frank and Maud awoke before dawn, realizing that they were covered with itchy red spots. They had been so eager to find each other after a long night that Maud had neglected to check the mattress for bedbugs, and now every inch of their skin was welted with bites. Fortunately, Matilda had sent Maud on her journey with a small kit filled with her natural remedies, among them a soothing Vaseline-and-lavender salve. Maud lovingly stroked it all over Frank’s bare body, and then he did the same to hers. For the next three days, they were so itchy they could barely sleep, and by the time they reached St. Paul, Minnesota, they both had dark rings under their eyes and kept dropping off to sleep whenever they sat down.

  Their stage director, Carson McCall, a ruddy Scot, poked fun at them as they fell asleep over coffee in a diner near the Prestige Theater in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

  “Not getting much sleep at night, are ya, ya two lovebirds?”

  Maud blushed to the roots of her hair, but Frank just smiled smooth as could be, placed one hand over Maud’s, and said, “I would certainly say we are not!”

  * * *

  —

  SEVERAL MONTHS INTO THEIR life on the road, Maud had grown so used to traveling that she could hardly remember what it felt like to stay in one place. Early one morning, she and Frank sat, knees bumping, across from each other in the dining room of a cheap hotel in Peoria, Illinois, where the Baum Theatre Company was currently settled for a few days. Between them was a small table covered with a dingy cloth. The window was pushed open and the pleasant early spring sunshine brightened the dreary surroundings, but Maud had hardly touched her coffee, and the bun on the plate was uneaten. The sight of its shiny surface made her feel queasy.

  Maud had received a letter from Julia, who’d written from her new homestead in Dakota. Her account seemed fantastical—she described swarms of mosquitoes as dense as fog, a vast treeless landscape buffeted by high winds and hail the size of goose eggs, a one-room shanty so spare that when she’d arrived it had no windows and no roof. When Maud tried to conjure an image of her sister in those circumstances, all she could come up with was the sight of Julia with a sick headache, lying in her four-poster bed with a mustard plaster over her forehead, groggy from her medicine.

  Frank’s long legs barely fit under the table, and each time he moved, he jostled it, sloshing their coffee into the saucers. Maud was reading Julia’s letter aloud. The contents were making Frank chuckle. “ ‘With all of the pain I’ve suffered, I’ve never suffered such agony as I did that night. My dear James, not always so patient, was almost WILD and he prayed aloud, “Oh Lord, give us hail, give us rain, give us snow, give us anything but take away these mosquitoes.” ’ ” Maud kept glancing up at him, and as she read she could feel irritation bubbling up inside her, until finally she flung the letter down on the table between them.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

  “Well, now, the thought of your sister dressed in her fine city clothes, moving at a mule’s pace across the wild prairie, with a black swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around her head. It’s a right colorful image, if I do say so myself.”

  “Frank Baum! How can you say such a thing? She’s describing the most painful night of her entire life, and it makes you laugh?”

  “Vivid language! Brings it all alive!”

  “She’s miserable!” Maud said.

  “She’s having an adventure. You like adventures, Maud.” He gestured at the tawdry dining room, where a drunk was slumped in one corner, emitting a faint snore.

  “Is absolutely everything a lark to you? She’s my sister. I worry about her. Her situation sounds perfectly dreadful to me.”

  “And if you were to write her a letter right now,” Frank said, his tone still mild, “it would begin, ‘My dearest Julia…I’m sitting at a table the size of a postage stamp, drinking three-day-old coffee in the presence of an actor, a tabby cat, a stale breakfast roll, and a flatulent drunk…!’ ”

  Maud let out a snort, and her hand flew up to cover her mouth.

  “You see,” Frank said. “It’s all in the telling.”

  “It’s not in the telling,” Maud objected, stamping her foot under the table. “I’m worried about her! You don’t understand!” Hot tears sprung to her eyes. “Stop teasing me!”

  She jumped up from the table, causing the cups to overflow, the saucers to slide, and a large stain to soak into the dingy tablecloth.

  Frank reached out to touch her arm, but she pulled it away and ran from the room, bursting through the dining room doors, where she almost ran smack into Carson McCall, all red-eyed and wild-haired, as if he had been up all night.

  “Well now, lassie, where are you headed in such a big hurry?”

  Where was she headed in such a hurry? She realized that she and Frank had just had their first fight.

  “To the theater!” Maud said. She ducked past the director and ran up the street until she reached the theater’s back door.

  Picking up her mending basket, she set to working on a frayed cuff and sewed until the rhythm of her needle started to calm her.

  A moment later, a square of light appeared at the doorway and Frank tentatively poked his head in, looking thoroughly abashed.

  Maud glanced up from her mending.

  “Oh!” She had stuck herself in the finger with the needle. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m so clumsy.”

  Frank grasped her hand and held her finger tight until the smarting subsided. “I’m sorry, Maud, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I know.”

  “Believe in Julia. She’s having an adventure. Don’t you think that’s what she wanted when she hitched up with a gentleman ten years her junior and moved to Dakota?”

  “I suppose,” Maud said. “At least she’s gotten out from under Mother’s thumb!”

  “Julia will be fine. Why, I’d love to see Dakota myself. I hope that we’ll be able to visit her someday.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Maud said. “We’ve traveled all over kingdom come—why not Dakota?”

  “Why e
ver not?”

  But looking at Frank’s joyful face only reminded Maud of her secret worry. She had a feeling that their adventuring days might be numbered.

  * * *

  —

  BY MID-MAY THE WEATHER was humid and stifling. Inside a run-down theater in a small town near Akron, the cool of the morning had turned to a suffocating torpor by midday. They were getting set to start performing a new play, called Matches. Frank was convinced that it would be an even bigger hit than The Maid of Arran. Maud watched as he rehearsed the scenes and signaled the piano player to start and restart, start and restart. Frank never quit. He was as eager to try a line the fortieth time as the first.

  Inside the close theater, Maud was starting to feel dizzy, so she went outside, hoping to find cooler air. Out front stood an exhausted-looking pair of black geldings hitched to a jitney.

  Maud looked at the poor beasts with sympathy. There was not a hint of shade on the street. Just then, one of the nags lifted his tail, and the sharp scent of manure waved over her. The street turned first white, then fuzzy, then gray.

  She felt a cool cloth on her forehead and looked up to see Frank’s anxious face peering down at her.

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I went outside to get a breath of fresh air, and then…”

  “Ya keeled right over like an oak struck by lightning,” a dusty-looking fellow wearing a livery driver’s uniform said. “I was standing by my horses, when I seen you come out. Went white as a sheet, and toppled.”

  “I fainted?”

  “It was so hot in the theater…” Frank said.

  Maud sat up. “Thank goodness Mother wasn’t here to see that! She has no patience with fainters.”

  “Here, darling. Take some cool water.”

  Maud took a sip, and then a long draft. “I guess it was the heat.”