“This is seventeen dollars and fifty cents,” Maud said, not even trying to keep the sharpness out of her voice. “Where is the rest of it? I can’t pay the rent or the grocer or the fishmonger with seventeen dollars and fifty cents!”
“I’m so sorry, Maud. They promised me twenty dollars, but they didn’t pay me as much as they said they would.” He was apologizing, but his tone was light, as if this were an inconsequential matter.
“Do you understand,” Maud replied icily, “that this is completely unacceptable?”
Frank looked taken aback. “But what am I supposed to do?”
“Tell them you are to be paid twenty dollars a week, as agreed upon. If they say no, then walk out the door. We are not in the business of providing charity to the Evening Post. You need to bring home twenty dollars a week. If they won’t pay you properly, then find someone who will!”
“That’s easy for you to say, Maud!” he said, his eyes flaming. “Do you really think it’s so simple? Why don’t you try it yourself! I’ll stay home and look after the children and you find us a way to make ends meet!”
Maud’s face flushed red, and her eyes flashed.
“Watch me!” She marched out the door, slamming it shut behind her.
* * *
—
WITHIN TWO WEEKS, Maud had drummed up enough fine embroidery work to close the gap. When Frank came home at night, he found the boys bathed and put to bed, the house spotless, and Maud hunched over her sewing basket, her eyes red from straining under the flickering kerosene lamp. Every night, Frank begged her to come to bed, but she shook her head angrily. The next day, she was up before dawn, starting again.
This was where life had led her—to this drafty, freezing, unpleasant house. She was taking care of the children, cooking all of the meals, toiling over tiny stitches of lace, while he spent the day downtown, looking dandy in his Prince Albert jacket. When Frank came in, later and later each evening, Maud didn’t even glance up as he trudged past her silently with a hangdog look on his face. They had been married for nine and a half years, and through all of their ups and downs, the one thing that had held steady was their mutual affection—but now her goodwill was slipping away. Frank had let her down.
Maud fought a constant battle against the filth that surrounded them. As April turned to May and June, the chilly winds gave way to humidity and torpor. When the wind blew in from the west, it brought the scent of the stockyards; when it blew in from the east, it carried the reek of the sewage-filled river. Not surprisingly, there was a typhoid epidemic rampant among the city’s children. Every few days, she saw the pair of black nags pulling the hearse stop in front of one of the neighboring tenements. She was afraid to let the boys out of her sight.
At night, when she lay in bed, she imagined the vast open west the way it had looked during their first spring in Dakota, before the drought, before all the troubles. She pictured the pale blue bowl of the sky and heard again the soft song of the wind in the prairie grass. Now outside her windows day and night she heard a constant chorus of horses’ hooves and streetcars trundling by, of shouting peddlers and crying children. But the loudest noise of all was the one in her head. What if Frank was right? What if they should have waited it out in Aberdeen? Maybe Maud could have found embroidery jobs there, too—although she knew that was silly. No one had a spare dime for crewel and lace. She had agreed to come to this teeming, feculent city, but if one of the children succumbed to the fever, she would never forgive herself.
One evening, Frank came home and started up his usual fantasizing, regaling the children with stories about the coming scientific future that would be wrought by electricity.
“You boys need to see the financial district at night! Every building between LaSalle and Adams lit up like a tree at Christmastime, and every bit of it is electricity! Twice as bright as gas lights!”
“A house with gas lights would certainly serve us well enough.” Maud looked up from her sewing. “Better than kerosene.”
“And that is only the beginning of what electricity can do!” Frank continued, as if Maud hadn’t spoken. “Mark my word, there will be electric trolleys and electric trains, electric staircases—”
“What’s an electric staircase?” asked Bunting.
Frank leapt up and walked to the banister, where he leaned against the newel post. “You’ll take a step onto the bottom stair, and the electricity will make the stairs do all the work. You’ll just ride on up, pretty as you please.”
“Can we have one like that in our house?” Robin piped up.
“Certainly,” Frank said grandly. “No need for gas for your mama—we’ll have electricity, and when she’s tired and wants to go upstairs, why, the electric stairs will just carry her right up!”
Maud was studiously ignoring Frank’s soliloquy, but as she heard him declaim all this nonsense to the boys, fury burned in her breast.
In her anger, she pricked herself with her needle. To her horror, she saw three drops of blood spill onto the white lace. She would never get the spots out! She’d have to start over, wasting the cost of the fabric and thread.
“See what you’ve made me do!” Maud cried out.
Her tone was so sharp that Bunting’s lip quivered, Robin burst into tears, and Harry started wailing.
“What are you yelling at Daddy for?” Bunting said in an injured tone. “He’s just trying to make things nice for you! Lights so your eyes won’t get tired and electric stairs to carry you up to bed.”
Maud stood up. Blood was rushing in her ears, and she couldn’t even think straight.
“He will do no such thing!” she cried. “Don’t listen to your father. The stories he tells you boys are just fairy tales. None of it is true! We live here on Campbell Park, in a shabby old house. Your mother is a seamstress, and your daddy writes newspaper articles for a few cents apiece. There is no shame in the truth. Let’s accept our lot and make the best of it, shall we?”
Frank’s expression was startled. Wounded. “Maudie darling, don’t. Please don’t. You’ll just discourage the boys. We’re in a temporary setback—nothing more. Why not a house with electric stairs? Can’t a body dream?”
Maud set aside her ruined sewing, holding her pricked finger.
“Sure.” Maud’s voice shook. “We can dream of things that might come true. But when you stick your head in the clouds and tell the boys that you are going to give us things that don’t even exist yet, instead of focusing on the here and now and figuring out the simple things like how to put food on the table, you know what that makes you?”
Frank did not answer. The boys were silent, witnessing the tornado of their mother’s fury with terror.
“That makes you nothing but a humbug!” Maud said. “Plain and simple!”
Frank had no response. He stood there, staring at Maud as his face turned ashen, the tips of his ears bright red.
“Now,” Maud continued, “you run along up to bed, boys—and don’t expect any electric staircase to take you there. This is our life. Right here, in this house, in this city, and we are going to make the best of it.”
No one moved. At last Frank said, “You heard your mother—it’s time to go to bed!” He shooed the boys up the stairs and then turned to follow.
Maud said nothing, just threaded a new needle, preparing to restart her sewing.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, Frank came into the living room, knelt down, and clasped Maud’s hands.
“I’ve let you down. I’m sorry.”
Maud’s eyes filled with tears.
“I’m going to make it up to you,” he said. “I’m not sure how, but I promise.”
Upstairs, the baby started to cry.
“I need to go tend to Harry.” Maud jumped up and turned her back on Frank, not looking him in the eye.
; “I know,” Frank called to his wife’s back as she ran up the stairs, “you think I’m nothing but a humbug! But I’ll figure something out—something real. I promise.”
* * *
—
THREE DAYS LATER, when Maud came home from delivering her finished embroidery to the home of a lady in a nicer neighborhood, she found Frank entertaining the three boys, a large trunk filled with samples of fine china open on the table before him.
“You see, madame,” Frank said, holding a teacup to his lips and taking an imaginary sip. “For one as refined as you, only a fine teacup will do.”
“Hey, that rhymes!” Bunting cried.
“Well, I can do better than that!” Frank said.
“A fine lady of Chicago
must not sup
with anything less
than a china teacup.
If the pattern of flowers
is Pitkin & Brooks,
the neighborhood ladies
get admiring looks.”
Frank waggled his eyebrows. “Or perhaps it should be will steal them like crooks…”
While Frank rhymed, baby Harry was reaching out. He grabbed a saucer and almost managed to pull it over the edge of the table. Maud dashed forward and snatched it away just in the nick of time. Harry started to howl.
“Frank, what on earth?”
“Mr. L. Frank Baum, salesman, Pitkin & Brooks fine china,” he said.
“You found another job?”
“Thirty dollars a week, plus commissions,” he said. “You were right, Maud. This is a big city. All you have to do is knock on enough doors.”
“Salesman?”
“Traveling salesman. My territory reaches as far east as Cincinnati. I leave tomorrow.”
Maud sank into one of the kitchen chairs, unsure how to respond to this bit of news. Certainly, they needed the money. But she dreaded the thought of Frank hitting the road again, and Maud, expecting again, had an aching back and swollen ankles at the end of every day. At least when he came home, he helped out with the children. Sometimes by the end of the day, she had grown so weary that she snapped at them. Bunting was growing up, almost nine. She could barely keep track of him as he roamed the city streets after school—and she had trouble making him mind. It was easier when Frank was around.
Frank peered at Maud with concern. “Maud, I thought you’d be happy. You told me to find another job, and I did it. I asked myself, Frank Baum, what’s the one thing you’ve ever been any good at? Being a salesman, that’s what. I figured that if I could sell something as dull as Baum’s Castorine, then certainly I could sell something beautiful like floral-patterned china.”
Frank was gazing at her with a look of utter helplessness, and Maud felt a stab of remorse. She could see what her husband was doing. He was giving up what he loved more than anything—writing—so that he could go out and make money for the family. He was returning to the very life he had tried so hard to shed. It was a puzzle to her. Why did the two things that mattered most to him have to conflict? Why must his love of writing and theater and art compete with his love for his family? She remembered Matilda telling her not to run away and marry an actor, but it was only now that Maud really understood: the part of Frank that made him an actor was the part that she had fallen in love with, but it was also the part that made him so ill-suited for the things of this world.
CHAPTER
23
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
1893
“Put on your finery, my darling Maud, we are going somewhere!” Frank had burst into the house one Saturday afternoon with an air of high excitement.
“Don’t you even say hello, Frank?” Maud asked, crossing the room to kiss him in greeting. Frank had been away for two weeks, and she hadn’t expected to see him until later in the day. He had sent a letter saying he’d be arriving on the six o’clock train, and now here he was, in the house at two in the afternoon.
“You’re early,” Maud said.
“I managed to reschedule my last sales call.” Frank’s eyes were twinkling.
By now, all four boys had gathered around, even toddler Kenneth, who had been born a few months after they’d arrived in Chicago.
“I’ve brought a little something for each of you,” Frank said.
He fished deep in his pocket and pulled out four shiny copper pennies, and laid them out in a straight line on the table.
“Frank?” Maud was always wary of Frank’s fits of generosity. Though their financial situation had improved over the last couple of years, she still budgeted Frank’s earnings down to the last cent, then added the meager sum she earned from her own work. With her economies, she had set enough aside to purchase a lamp, and was just twenty cents short of the nice Persian rug she’d been saving up for.
“What did you bring for Mama?” Robin burbled.
“Emeralds!” Frank shouted.
“Emeralds. Frank! What on earth?”
Frank’s eyes were merry. “Maud, get your coat. We’re going out!”
“Frank. We can’t just ‘go out.’ No one is here to watch the children.”
Frank clapped his hands three times, and the doorbell jingled.
“What is that? Someone at the door?”
He made a big show of crossing to open it.
Outside stood one of the neighbors who sat with the children sometimes.
Maud tried to frown, tried to come up with a word of protest, but she could find none.
* * *
—
IN THE JUNE SUNSHINE, the blindingly bright, ornate buildings of the White City, erected for the Columbian Exhibition, stood out against the blue of Lake Michigan. They stood in line to buy the fifty-cent tickets, with Maud clucking all the while at Frank’s spending habits. The family had already visited the fair once, and they’d had a wonderful time. Two visits struck her as extravagant.
“Maud, I’ve had a great couple of weeks. I earned a five-dollar commission. We’ve got to have some fun every once in a while. And there’s something I’ve got to show you.”
They made their way through the crowds and across the park so fast that Maud had no time to stop and look at anything until they arrived at the electric pavilion.
“It’s in here,” Frank said, pulling Maud into the phonograph display.
There was a line of people waiting to approach an upright wooden box shaped like a lectern. Frank explained that the device was called the Kinetoscope. The fellow at the front of the line was peering through what looked like binoculars into the interior of the box. Maud saw over and over again that as each person looked inside, they pulled away, gasped, laughed, or exclaimed, and then leaned toward the eyepiece again.
“What is it?” Maud asked.
“I’m not going to tell you. You have to see it for yourself.”
Frank and Maud had waited in line for almost two hours when at last it was Maud’s turn. She stood next to the box, bent over, and peeked inside. The operator pushed a button.
Maud gasped. Inside the box, there were three tiny men—blacksmiths—hammering on an anvil. She drew her head away, and there she was, standing in front of the box, with Frank by her side. She put her head down again—it wasn’t possible. It seemed that the men were moving inside the box. Black-and-white photographs that moved.
Frank took his turn next, and begged for a second turn, and then a third, until the people standing in line behind them started to clamor for him to move along.
Once outside, Frank couldn’t stop talking about it. “That’s the future, Maud. Right there. The future.”
“It’s fascinating,” Maud said. “No doubt about that, and yet, I don’t quite understand what it’s for. Real moving people are all around us. Why do we need to see them moving in a picture?”
“Because—oh, Maud. Do you r
eally not see it? Everything it touches becomes immortal!”
Maud shrugged. She liked the morning light shining through the elms at home in Fayetteville; she loved the way the clouds skidded across an endless Dakota sky. She didn’t need a photograph or a moving picture to remember it. She did not understand what Frank saw in this machine.
Maud wanted to linger and look at the displays, but Frank was dragging her along at a rapid clip, as if he had a specific mission. In the distance, the giant Chicago Wheel, studded with its thirty-six swinging cars, loomed up against the sky. When they had brought the boys to visit the fair, they had stood for hours, mesmerized, watching the wheel lift the lucky riders high into the air, then gracefully turn, each seat balancing so that the riders remained level even as the world turned. Frank had explained, to the boys’ fascination, how the engineer, Ferris, had designed the wheel to rival the grand Eiffel Tower in Paris. At first everyone had been afraid to ride it. The spindly steel spokes didn’t look as if they could support the massive lacquered cars, fitted with grilles, that could hold up to sixty people at a time. But Frank had read all about the wheel in the newspapers, and he explained that the structure was based on the most modern mechanical and electric techniques, including a double-sized Westinghouse air brake, just like those used on trains, as a safety feature. The idea of soaring through the air had intrigued the boys, but Maud had to put her foot down. They had paid fifty cents each to gain admission to the park, and another fifty cents each for five tickets to ride the Ferris Wheel was out of the budget. They would have to watch from the ground.
This time, Frank hustled her along without stopping for a second look at anything, until they reached the base of the giant wheel. The sun was hanging low over the lake now, the sky turning brilliant shades of purple and orange, and the fair’s white buildings tinged with pink. Then suddenly, in an explosion like fireworks or a hundred shooting stars, the entire wheel burst into a confetti of electric light that danced and shimmered as the wheel spun through the air.
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