Frank pulled a shiny one-dollar coin from his pocket and laid it in the palm of Maud’s hands.
“We are going for a ride in the sky.”
For once, Maud couldn’t say no. She couldn’t give another speech about counting pennies. She held tight to Frank’s arm as he paid for their tickets and they clambered aboard the giant wheel and settled into their seats.
Maud had never before felt so exhilarated as the wheel swung up into the sky. Her stomach lurched, then settled into pleasant butterflies. The wheel climbed higher and higher, and when it reached the pinnacle, they seemed to hang in the sky. The entire expanse of the White City was laid out below them, glittering with thousands of bright white electric lights. It was as if the night sky on the dark Dakota prairie were now spread out below them in all its sequined glory. As the cage hung there, rocking gently, Frank reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a pair of spectacles. “Quick, put these on,” he said. He slid the spectacles into place, and Maud gasped. The entire dazzling White City was transformed into a bejeweled sparkling expanse of emerald green.
“You see it?” Frank said.
“Oh, Frank! It’s beautiful!”
“Emeralds!” he said.
Frank cupped his hand around the back of her head and kissed her so passionately, right there, in front of everyone, that as the wheel dropped down again, she could no longer tell if the flying sensation came from the car’s movement or from the stirrings of her heart, thawing, so slowly, from the ice that had encased it for the last three years.
* * *
—
AFTER DESCENDING FROM THE Ferris Wheel, Frank and Maud strolled along the crowded avenues of the White City, mostly silent. As she looked at her beloved husband’s face, she felt as if she were twenty years old again, a Cornell coed, smitten with the most handsome young gentleman in the world. So much had happened between them, and yet, here they still were.
After a long stroll in companionable silence, Frank stopped and turned to Maud.
“The only thing I ever wanted in life was to be my own man, to have my own business, work for myself, earn my own fortune, and be beholden to no one. Your father kept his own shop, my father started his own business, my brother founded Baum’s Castorine Company. But at last, my dear Maud, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am simply not fit for that life. I can sell other men’s wares and make a decent living—or not so decent, I confess, but enough to keep a roof over our heads and the boys in shoes and clothing. And even if I’m chained down, my mind can still be free, can’t it?”
“Of course it can, Frank.”
“Maud, you are the kindest and most patient woman that God ever put on the face of the earth, and I think I never would have proposed to you at all if I’d known it was my fate to take you out of your elegant home in Fayetteville and drag you hither and yon, and still find myself unable to keep you in the fashion that you so well deserve.”
Maud reached out and placed her index finger gently upon his lips.
“Please don’t,” she said. “This day has been enchanted, this night magical. Please remember that I walked right out of my home with both eyes open because of one thing. I wanted to be with you. That has never changed.”
“Then can I just ask one small thing? Just a tiny thing from you, Maud?”
Maud stiffened a little bit. Was he going to propose another wild plan for their future?
“In a place like Chicago, it’s easy to feel like a tiny piece of a huge machine, as if a man is no more than a single rivet in a giant structure like the Ferris Wheel that spins on a motor that the rivet has no control over. We can shout and roar and try to make ourselves bigger than we are, but in the end, we are just rivets. Yet at the same time, we’re part of something that is big and fancy that transports us to the future itself, and that is Chicago. Where men are small, but they are also part of one of the grandest experiments that mankind has ever known.”
“And womankind,” Maud added.
“Of course, womankind,” Frank said.
“So, what do you want from me?” Maud asked. From their vantage point on the promenade, the lit-up White City resembled the magical block city Frank had constructed that first Dakota Christmas, as if the stuff of fairy stories had come to life. Frank’s tall, slim frame was shadowed against it, his face dark except for the whites of his eyes.
“If you could just…” Frank paused. Maud could tell that he was searching for the right words.
“If I could just…?”
“If you could just try to have faith in me,” Frank said.
“But, Frank! How can you say that? Of course I have faith in you…it’s just that…”
“Just what?”
“It’s just that—well, you see, you are a good salesman, and you earn enough for us—we don’t need so much. Anything extra, the little things, I can earn enough from my sewing to put something aside. You are too hard on yourself.” Maud didn’t mention that she also always set aside money to save for Julia, no matter how little.
Frank reached up and rubbed his thumb against Maud’s cheekbone.
“No, Maud. I’ll do what I have to do as long as I have to, but I promise you that somehow, someday, I’m going to do better for you. I may not have figured out how yet, but one day, I’m going to find a way. I want you to feel just the way you felt as we were sweeping upward on the Ferris Wheel, and teetering all the way at the top, where you could gaze out as far as the eye can see. I want you to see emeralds.”
Maud opened her mouth to protest. To tell Frank once again that what he had given her was more than enough, even if his flights of fancy had sometimes led them down a difficult path. The hard times were not what she remembered about their life together. It was the moments, incandescent, transcendent—the silvery arc of a theater light, a marching band skidding across a Dakota sky, a rainbow against storm clouds, the nighttime expanse of the White City suddenly transformed into a kingdom of glittering jewels—when she could catch a glimpse of a world beyond. This vision, this second sight, was what Frank Baum had given to Maud. Without him, she trod along the pathways of the ordinary. A molten heat shivered down her sides, her knees went weak, and her cheeks grew hot. There was nothing she could do about it. This was the man she loved.
* * *
—
BY JUNE 1893, Maud had scraped up sufficient money from her sewing work to send enough to Julia for train fare so that she and Magdalena could get out of the Dakota heat and spend the summer in Syracuse with Matilda. The plan was for them to stop and stay a couple of days in Chicago with the Baums en route. When Julia and Magdalena stepped off the train, Maud was surprised to see how much her niece had sprouted up. She was almost as tall as her petite mother, her long legs sticking out like skinny pokers. Maud noticed that she was wearing an unbecoming dress of faded blue serge. Maud frowned. Had she known, she would have sewn a new traveling frock for her niece.
At twelve, Magdalena had grown longer and thinner, as had her face, accentuating her eyes—still that startling violet, ringed with spidery black lashes. Her shiny golden hair had a straight part down the middle and was tightly plaited, her face and hands were clean, and but for her worn dress, she looked like an ordinary young girl, a far cry from the waif Maud had greeted at the Aberdeen depot five years earlier.
“Auntie M!” As soon as Magdalena caught sight of Maud, she bolted away from her mother and flung her arms around Maud. Then, letting go, she looked around. “Where’s Uncle Frank?”
“Your Uncle Frank is away, traveling for business. He was so disappointed to miss seeing you! He sends his love.”
Frank had been crushed to miss Magdalena’s brief visit, but Maud knew that he was given his schedule and was expected to follow it without asking questions.
Magdalena looked temporarily crestfallen, then beamed. “That’s all right. I’m so excited
to see you.”
Maud turned anxiously to Julia, and saw that her eyes appeared free of the patent medicine fog. “Julia, darling. I’m so glad you were able to come!”
“It is a relief to get away,” Julia confessed. “I’ve grown used to the life out there, but it will never feel like home.”
Back at the house, Maud watched as her sister took in the Baums’ reduced circumstances: the shabby neighborhood, her threadbare furniture, the pile of unfinished pieces of sewing.
“I’m surprised to find you living like this,” Julia said with an air of disapproval.
“Living like what?” Maud said. “Frank is working hard, and so am I. Perhaps this is not the most elegant abode we’ve ever lived in, but I’ve tried to make it comfortable.”
Where Julia was disapproving, Magdalena was enchanted by every novelty, from the cockroaches to the communal water pump to the rowdy street urchins who roamed outside.
“Edgeley is so tiny that if I stretch my hand out the window, I can reach all the way to the end of it. Chicago takes up the whole world!”
After the children were put to bed, Maud and Julia sat down together in front of the fire.
“How are you managing, Julia?” Maud asked.
“Not so bad, all things considered,” Julia said. “It’s much easier now that we’ve moved to town.”
Unable to make a living at farming, they had lost their claim. James moved them into the tiny town of Edgeley, where he had secured a position delivering horses for a livery stable. The Carpenters still wanted for money, but life in town was not as isolated, and Magdalena was able to attend school. As Maud beheld her sister, she felt a melancholy ache under her breastbone. Ten years old when Maud was born, Julia had always seemed more like a second mother to her. She remembered her sister’s funny face, framed with a frizz of tawny curls, always popping up when she needed something—ready with a bandage for her skinned knee or to match a lost mitten. That girl had been replaced by the woman before her. Worn out, arthritic, her hair now almost entirely silver. At least her eyes were clear. Ever since leaving Dakota, Maud’s fear for Magdalena had sat like a black pit at the base of her heart. Seeing her sister appearing lucid again made her feel a little better.
“I’m glad to see you looking well.”
Julia’s hand shook slightly as she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I’ve weaned myself from the patent medicines,” she said. “I’ve been following the precepts of Mary Baker Eddy—Christian Science, are you familiar with it?” She continued without waiting for Maud to answer: “It teaches one to manage illness and pain without medicines.”
Maud gazed into her sister’s eyes and felt relief wash over her.
“And what about James. Is he…keeping steady?”
Julia looked away from her sister. “He travels quite a bit—for business—and sometimes we don’t see him for weeks at a time….I’m sure you know how that is now that Frank is on the road?” Julia glanced around as if to take in, once again, the modest house, the shabby furnishings, the street filled with peddlers and lurching horse-drawn carts.
Maud flushed crimson. A little voice in the back of her head told her to bite her tongue, but she couldn’t. Her words came out in a furious rush: “Frank never drank to excess. He’s never pointed a gun at my heart. He’s never failed to treat me with kindness. You’ve made your choices, Julia Gage, but don’t you ever equate them with mine!”
Julia colored, then studied her hands, suddenly meek. “Magdalena is a great comfort to me. She’s an excellent student. The best student in our little school. I buy her books instead of dresses. She’s clever like you and Mother, and just as determined.” Julia paused, then continued. “I’m doing my best, Maudie. I’m trying to be strong for Magdalena.”
“You see to it that she gets an education,” Maud said, her eyes flashing. “Promise me right now that you’ll keep her in school. If she ends up dropping out of school to be a farmer’s wife, I swear I will never forgive you. I’ll not have that girl assigned to a life of drudgery.”
Julia looked reflectively at Maud. “You are speaking as a woman who dropped out of college to run away with a theater man? You are speaking as a woman who asked her family to scrimp and save to pay her tuition and then gave it all up—for what?”
“For what?” Maud said sharply. “For love! Which is a good reason. But I don’t know what you’d know about that.”
Julia sniffed. “You will never understand, Maud.”
“You’re right, Julia! I don’t understand. But you take back what you said about Frank right now. He was brilliant at the theater, and he’s a good, good man.”
Julia opened her mouth as if determined to argue, then thought better of it.
“All right. I’ll grant you that. Frank’s a good man. He’s good-hearted. I’m grateful that he paid for our tickets so we could take a break from that godforsaken place.”
Maud picked up her embroidery basket.
“You think that Frank paid for those tickets?” she said. “Then you know nothing of the power of women. Now, you solemnly swear to me right now that come hell or high water, Magdalena Towers Carpenter will stay in school as long as her heart desires, and I’ll get to work making that poor ragamuffin a new dress. I’ve enough scraps here to sew her a brand-new summer frock of pretty pink lawn.”
At the sounds of the words “new dress,” Magdalena’s pixie face appeared between the rungs of the upstairs banister, scrubbed bright, with a big smile.
Julia stood up, creaking a bit as she raised herself from the chair.
“Magdalena! What are you doing up?”
“Nothing!” Magdalena said, and then she muttered, loud enough for Maud to hear, “Except that I’m going to go to school forever and get a brand-new pink dress!”
CHAPTER
24
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
1897
Seven years after their move to Chicago, the Baums had left behind their dingy row house on Campbell Park and settled into a modest home in a safe, middle-class neighborhood near Humboldt Park. Even their youngest, little Kenneth, had started school. As the boys grew, Maud continued to hope for a girl, but month after month passed with no signs of another pregnancy. For a long time, each monthly cycle brought fresh disappointment, and then one morning, in the looking glass, she noticed afresh the silvery strands that now threaded through her hair, and she realized that her time for creating new life had most likely passed.
Matilda arrived for her annual visit a few days before Thanksgiving. Her winter visit to the Baum family had turned into a tradition, but this year, she had almost canceled her trip, she’d recently been so ill. So Maud was anxious to see her mother in person.
Maud waited impatiently for Frank, who had gone to pick up Mother at the train station. She hated it when her roast chicken was out of the oven too long before she served it—the skin got soft.
When the door pushed open, Maud rushed to greet her mother, hugging her tightly. But as she stepped back to take a look at her, Maud was shocked to find her normally robust mother looking unusually frail, and hoped she was just weary from the journey.
Maud tried to make the visit restful for her mother. She cooked the meals she liked best, made the boys stay quiet in the afternoon so her mother could nap, and attended to her every whim. Mother had always been the strongest person she knew—the one who never fatigued, who never complained, who always arrived ready to get the job done. So Maud was happy to have a chance to repay her in some small measure. Still, at odd moments, Maud realized that it had been eight years—eight years—since her mother had arrived in Aberdeen with her obstetric textbook and carbolic acid, determined that Maud would live through the birth of her third child.
How she had seemed like a giant to Maud then, looming over everyone and everything with her impassioned intellect, her fiery oratory, h
er encyclopedic knowledge, and, more than anything, her sheer confidence that the world would eventually bend to her bidding. Seeing her mother looking frail made Maud feel as if the natural order of things had been inverted, herself suddenly older than she had realized, needing to fill bigger shoes, and uncertain if she was ready.
One night, Matilda and Maud were seated in the parlor. Frank was traveling, and the boys were already in bed. Maud was sewing, and Matilda was reading; she set aside her book.
“If it’s not too heavy a burden,” Matilda said, “I would like to confide in you something that has weighed heavily upon me.”
“Of course, Mother. What is it?”
“It’s Julia.”
“What about her?”
“I know you love your sister dearly, and I’m grateful for that.”
“I’m not sure gratitude is called for. Of course I love her. She was always so kind to me when I was a girl. That is a debt I can never repay.”
“She almost raised you. I was so busy with my work.” Matilda stared off into the distance. “It seemed so close then, in the 1870s—we believed that we were just on the brink of securing the vote for women nationwide. I thought it was worth it, for your future, for the future of my daughters, and your daughters…and their daughters. And you were so spunky, so determined, I never needed to worry about you. You were born with the same iron stuff that I was made of…”
Maud smiled. She couldn’t deny it. She had been born tough.
“But Julia—she was different. She was not as tough.”
“Julia is strong in her own way,” Maud countered.
“I didn’t see it at the time. I was impatient with her physical frailty. I was angry at all that was the woman’s lot—the housekeeping, the childbearing, the care for aging relatives…” She paused to snort out a laugh. “If you don’t die in childbirth, then you might lose yourself to grief as you nurse an ailing child. If you and your child survive, then you face a lifetime of toil. And so many women are sickly—nervous disorders, female complaints, sick headaches, which leads to the imbibing of medicines that seem to do more harm than good. I was so impatient with all that. I thought if Julia were made of sterner stuff, she could simply will herself to health. That her headaches made her drop out of school was simply incomprehensible to me.”
Finding Dorothy Page 31
