Finding Dorothy

by Elizabeth Letts

  By now, Matilda was traveling all over the state to canvass in tiny towns and on lonely farms. As the vote approached, Frank worked himself into a fever pitch of excitement, convinced that this one thing, this one single thing, could turn the tide of misfortune that had beset Aberdeen. The South Dakotans were going to embrace women’s suffrage, and then, magically unfolding from this one great event, the rains would come and the town would bounce back, and all would be well.

  Maud waited up on the nights when he came back late from the printing press, now smeared with ink, as he’d been forced to let the typesetter go to save money. With fewer subscriptions, Frank worked just as hard for a third less money. Maud had been scrimping on everything.

  She guarded these quiet evening hours when the children were in bed and Frank was not yet home. With the three children, Maud felt as if she never got a moment’s peace. This day had been particularly trying—baby Harry was teething, and Robin and Bunting had done nothing but squabble all day. When at last all three boys were settled, the dishes washed and put away, and she had finished sweeping up, Maud collapsed gratefully into an armchair and picked up a novel. Soon she was carried away to the Scottish Highlands, forgetting her cares for a moment.

  Unfortunately, the blissful interlude was short-lived. As soon as Frank burst in the door, his words came out in a torrent. Although Maud loved Frank dearly, right now she wanted to steal a few more quiet moments before heading up to bed, and she hoped that more conversation could wait until the morning. She had never expected to miss those long, peaceful hours she had once spent in the Sage Library, her books lined up next to her, lost in a Shakespeare play or an epic poem, but now she sometimes wished she had a place like that to slip away to, where no one would interrupt her while she read.

  “Hello, darling,” she murmured as he stooped down to kiss her on the cheek. She smiled, tapped on her book, and said, “I’m just going to read for a few more minutes.” Frank, however, seemed to have been storing up speeches all day, and, undeterred, he prattled nonstop as he took off his hat and scarf.

  “You see, Maud,” he went on, “people just need to have a little bit of imagination. The problem of rain seems insurmountable now, but there is enough water in the James River to irrigate a hundred thousand acres, and the technology already exists to do it—artesian wells. And it’s not just wells. The world is changing so quickly. We’re just ten years away from the twentieth century, and the pace of technology is moving along so fast—faster than the speed of our imaginations. See what the iron horse did to this part of the world? Imagine that soon the iron horse might fly through the air like a mighty iron Pegasus! Machines will till the fields! Farmers can just stroll down Main Street, stop for a shave, and return home to find a silo full to the top. You remember why we came here, Maud? It was promise. It was a blank slate. It was a town to build the right way from the ground up, where men and women are equal citizens, so there’s double the energy to get things done.”

  “Perhaps we don’t need to solve all this tonight?” Maud kept her eyes on her book.

  “This is the turning point, my dear!” Frank exclaimed, so dramatically that Maud looked up and studied him. What was agitating him so? He was making a rapid whirling motion with his hands, as if he were responsible for the spinning of the world itself. His gray eyes were almost black, and the whites of his eyes flashed in the dim room. He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up like a lion’s mane. The heels of his shoes tapped furiously as he paced the floor.

  “The vote will save us! Mark my words, darling! In three years, we’ll most likely be up to ten thousand subscriptions and wondering why we don’t have more. All we’ve got to do is have a little imagination. Why can’t the citizens of this one-horse town do as I do? Why can’t they push the curtain aside and peer just a little bit into the future?”

  Maud tried to quiet her growing feeling of impatience. She had snapped at the boys several times today, and she feared that soon she would snap at Frank, too. Reluctantly, she placed a bookmark between the pages and looked up at him. His eyes were feverishly bright. He paced back and forth in the small parlor, gesticulating wildly. There was a dark ink smudge on his left cheek.

  “I don’t know, Frank dear,” Maud said soothingly, hoping to calm him so that she could return to her book. “Why don’t you sit here by the fire for a moment. I’m sure we will not solve all of Aberdeen’s problems, nor secure the vote for women, this very night.”

  “November 4, 1890,” Frank said, ignoring her suggestion. “Once women have the vote, they will vote sensibly, my dear Maud, as you would do, and Aberdeen will be set on a right path to the future.”

  “Frank.” Maud was growing exasperated. “We all hope to see women win the vote, but the success of the movement is far from certain. This is your first time dabbling in these waters. Just think of it: Mother and her friends have been working for this all their lives and have yet to see it come to pass. You have to be patient.”

  Although Maud was familiar with Frank’s flights of fancy, she worried to see him so keyed up, so certain that this one thing would change the tide of fortune. The lesson she had learned from her mother’s activism was that votes for women were astonishingly hard to obtain, for the simple reason that not a single member of the fairer sex could vote her own enfranchisement into law.

  “Patient! Maud, tell me you are not suggesting that we be patient! Patient while the crops burn and the banks fail and farms are foreclosed and people leave town and the dream—the great American dream—the great promise that a person can make his own way—or her own way—unencumbered—burns along with it? How can we be patient?”

  “You want to talk to me about patience, Lyman Frank Baum? How about you come home and spend a day in my shoes? You want to cook and clean and sweep and mend and count out pennies to every merchant? You want to make peace among the children and put salves on their sore gums and rock the baby on your hip all day? Don’t talk to me about patience! How long do you think we mothers will have to wait to get our fair share of ‘the dream,’ as you call it? Why, we can’t even vote!”

  Frank suddenly looked weary, his face gray, dark bags puffed under his eyes, where once his skin had been youthfully smooth. He sank into a chair near the fire.

  “Please, let’s not fight, Maudie.”

  “This is not a fight, Frank. This is me stating my opinion about something I know a great deal about.”

  Maud picked up her book, opened it pointedly, and scanned a few words. But the mood was now broken.

  “When I was at Cornell, I had nothing to do but read books all day,” Maud said. “I chose a different life, and you don’t hear me complaining about it, do you?” She snapped her book shut, stood up, walked across the room, pulled back the hearth screen, and dropped the novel into the flames. Frank stood up, his eyes wide in horror.

  “Maud? What on earth? You’re burning a book?”

  She spun around and looked at him furiously. “I’m a woman. Why should I read? I might be happier if I couldn’t! At least then I wouldn’t be able to read the newspapers when they report that men have once again refused to give women the vote!”

  Frank stared into the grate as the book’s leaves separated and their edges lit up orange with flames, then looked back at Maud, dumbfounded.

  Maud glared back at him, put her finger over her lips, and said, “Don’t you dare say a word!” She turned and marched up the stairs, leaving Frank alone in the middle of the room as the odor of the burning leather binding filled the air. She heard his voice, calling halfheartedly up the stairs behind her, “Don’t be ridiculous, Maud. Of course women will win the vote.”

  * * *

  —

  SUFFRAGE FOR THE WOMEN of South Dakota lost by a landslide, garnering only twenty-two thousand brave men’s votes in favor, with forty-six thousand opposed. When the final tallies came in, the mood i
n the Baum household was bleak. For her own part, Maud was disappointed but not surprised. She had watched this cycle of hope and disappointment play out so many times in her life. Frank and her mother, however, were devastated. Matilda had stayed in the capital, Pierre, while the vote was counted. When she returned, she was uncharacteristically quiet. She sat all day with her Key to Theosophy book in her lap, reading meditatively, and Frank seemed deeply depressed. The agitation, the feverish energy, the flights of fancy that had propelled him through the last few months, were gone. He ducked into the house late in the evening, strangely quiet. He was gaunt, and the bags under his eyes had become a permanent feature. At night in bed, he turned his back to her. For the first time since their marriage started, she felt him pulling away.

  “Frank, darling,” she whispered to him late one night. “Where have you gone?”

  There was no answer.

  Frank began sleeping in, and he didn’t go into the newspaper office until midday. At night, he hunched over a pad of paper until late, filling reams of pages with his writings. As she tried to fall asleep, Maud could hear the furious scratching of his pen, but she dared not interrupt him, as he would simply look up at her with a dazed expression and then go on with his writing.

  In the mornings, he took to lounging about in his dressing gown, drinking coffee and reading the Chicago newspapers, quoting snippets aloud to Maud, bothering her as she tried to keep up with her daily housework. Her mother, meanwhile, did nothing but read and correspond with members of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Every day, the post brought dozens of letters—some from women who were leaders in the movement, others from the group’s rank and file. Matilda speared each letter with her silver letter opener, sat reading and clucking in dismay, and then carefully penned her responses. With Mother and Frank underfoot, it was even harder for Maud to get her work done, and she wished that one of them, either of them, would find some occupation outside of the house.

  One morning, she was in the kitchen kneading bread when Frank called through the doorway: “The Columbian Exhibition is going to bring the future right to our doorstep. They are planning the biggest electrical exhibition in history. Pretty soon, you’ll be loafing off and a machine will knead that bread for you. Do you realize how much all of this will change the world? But the people in Aberdeen just don’t care.”

  Maud noted the new, bitter tone to his voice.

  Frank kept writing, more and more feverishly, burning the kerosene lamp until the wick went low and the light sputtered out. Maud had stopped reading his editorials, but she sensed that he was using the newspaper now, more and more, as a place to express his feelings, his strong views about everything: about the coming of technology, the fate of the town. She missed the tender moments they had shared while she was waiting for Harry’s birth. Now Frank seemed to scarcely think of her.

  While Frank was on a tear, Matilda had remained uncharacteristically quiet. One day Maud came upon her mother sitting in the parlor, an abandoned half-sewn christening gown for Jamie folded in her lap. She was murmuring something under her breath.

  “What are you doing, Mother?”

  Startled, Matilda dropped the dress. “Connecting to my spirit guide,” she said. “Trying to speak to baby Jamie.”

  The next day, Maud found a seam ripper and tore the little dress apart. She took the blue satin ribbon, rolled it up, and replaced it in her sewing basket; a few minutes later, she picked up the ribbon and threw it into the stove.

  Matilda’s fascination with theosophy was increasingly drawing Frank in. While Maud tended to the household, her mother and her husband spent hours immersed in conversation about the possibilities that alternate worlds existed, just next to our own, and that people could learn to sense them and even cross from one to the next and back again. Maud despaired of getting Frank to pay attention to the world they lived in now—the one where there were mouths to feed and bills to pay, laundry to wash and fold, and children to tuck into bed.

  Frank brought a copy of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer home each week. At first, the newspaper had been fun to read. The first several pages were standard boilerplate—copy he purchased to fill the pages—but he had also written amusing accounts of Aberdeen’s social goings-on and some opinion pieces about the affairs of the day, and most of it had been quite fun and lively. Now, though, the pages were filled with fantastic stories of flying machines and mechanical people and electric contraptions that did the work of people and wells that pumped themselves and irrigated the fields. Frank kept saying that folks in Aberdeen lacked imagination, that there was a fantastic future and it was right around the corner. But Maud knew that the people of Aberdeen were too occupied with the present to concern themselves with a fantastical future. Every day another merchant closed his doors; every week she saw another family piling their belongings on a wagon and leaving town.

  Frank’s readers surely wanted a solid weather forecast, an assurance that the bank was solvent, and a loan to buy wheat seed, not stories of talking machines, just as Maud wanted money to buy groceries, shoes for the children, and to keep a roof over their heads, not her mother’s stories about a golden path that led to enlightenment.

  At last, Matilda boarded the train to return to Syracuse. Maud found that she was relieved to see her go.

  By February, their income had slowed to a trickle. Frank had gone around making inquiries about securing more funds to get him through this slow spot, but the local businessmen had given him discouraging news. There were rumors that Aberdeen’s biggest bank, the Northwestern National Bank—whose half-finished brick structure had so impressed Maud their first day in town—might not be solvent for long. Everyone was jittery. If the bank failed, most of the people in Aberdeen and the surrounding county would be wiped out. Frank’s hopes of finding more investors for his failing newspaper were dashed. The locals’ advice to Frank was candid: leave town.

  It was then that Frank, who was normally full of energy, came down with an ague and took to bed, shivering with fevers. A few days later, both boys took sick, and soon the baby was fretful and could no longer sleep through the night. Maud herself began to feel feverish, but she ignored her symptoms, fueling herself on coffee and sugar to save more food for Frank and the boys. Soon, she was lightheaded and exhausted. Standing over the stove, stirring a pot of thin soup with just some flour mixed in to thicken it, she felt woozy. When she opened her eyes, she was lying on the floor with the soup ladle next to her head and Bunting squatting down, crying “Mama,” his eyes wide in fear as he shook her shoulder. The Baum household was in crisis.

  In the midst of all this, Maud received a letter from Julia. Times were hard on the homestead. Julia had changed her mind. She wanted to send Magdalena to Aberdeen, after all.

  Feverish and exhausted, Maud stared at the letter as if from a great distance. She had begged her sister so many times to send her, and yet now she had barely the strength to take care of her own family. She longed to bring Magdalena home, but Frank was too sick to get out of bed, their pantry was nearly empty, and they had no prospects for how to fill it. The small sum of money Mother had left them—all she could afford—was all gone, and T.C. was still out west, with no immediate plans to return to Aberdeen. What if Maud took the child from Julia only to realize that she could not provide for her? There was no work to be had in Aberdeen. Frank would need to hit the road and look for employment elsewhere—until then, Maud knew, the meager stores in the pantry were not sufficient to tide them over. Still, she’d have to make do somehow.

  The next day, her fever abated, leaving her weak and exhausted, but still she held off for a few days, reading and rereading her sister’s letter, tossing and turning at night, barely able to sleep. On the third day, she wrote a letter to her sister and, without showing it to Frank, sent it by afternoon post.

  As soon as he was strong enough, Frank took their last few dollars to buy a one
-way ticket to Chicago. Their dream—Frank’s dream—that a man could find a place for himself if he just set out and looked for the right place to do it was dead.

  And Maud realized the truth: that even after almost a decade of marriage, and three births, her family still had no real place in the world.

  * * *

  —

  A MONTH AFTER FRANK departed for Chicago, he wired that he had found a job and was returning to help them pack up and move with him to the city. He warned Maud that the money to pay for their journey would have to be found by selling off most of their personal possessions. Maud looked around their small home, at their simple furniture and their few wedding gifts, remembering the high hopes she had felt two and a half years earlier when they had arrived here. Those dreams would soon be erased, torn asunder as if a prairie cyclone had come through and blown them all away. But no one could take her memories. She surveyed the comfortable rooms, determined to imprint on her mind the joyful times her family had spent there.

  After Frank returned, Maud traveled to Ellendale, switched trains, and debarked at Edgeley. James Carpenter was waiting for her, but she was dismayed to see that Julia had not accompanied him to the station. At least he appeared sober. He greeted her courteously, if a bit distantly. Maud wasn’t sure how much he remembered about their last encounter, although she remembered it all too vividly.

  There wasn’t much to the town of Edgeley, just some drab frame buildings, a short main street with a saloon on each end, and a few mean houses scattered around in a haphazard fashion. The road out of town led to their homestead, about eight miles to the west. Julia had few near neighbors, and most of them were German-speaking Hutterites from Bohemia who kept to themselves. At one point, Maud and James came upon a slough of water that reflected the sky with a deep slate color, its surface rippled in the breeze like furrows on a plowed field. A flock of Canada geese bobbed on the surface.