Dreamers of the Day (2 page)

For Papa, it was a matter of honor that he keep his employees working and make his creditors whole. That determination left hardly any time or money for his family. Mumma soon found it difficult to hide our circumstances, but Papa steadfastly refused help from her brother, a bachelor attorney with money to spare.

“Foolish pride,” Mumma called that. “How am I to run a proper household with what you bring home?”

“Others are worse off,” Papa said, time and again. “We shall manage without charity.”

“Easy for you to say,” Mumma would mutter, and the household would go very quiet, unspoken accusations loud in our minds.

Then one day a sympathetic neighbor lady remarked, “Your poor husband, working so hard! It’s just not fair that he should have to pay back money others stole.”

Something snapped inside Mumma. I could almost see it recoil in her. “I’d rather see Howard in his coffin,” she said, “than fall to the level of the men who bilked him.”

From that day on, Mumma made every penny count and did so with a zeal that awed us. She gave up our subscription to the family pew at church, and we found cheaper seats in the back. “God will hear our praise and prayers,” Mumma told us, “no matter where we sit.” If there was no money for tickets to attend an uplifting lecture, she went to the library for a book and read it aloud in the evening. If there was not much for supper, she would pop corn for us; it was a whole grain and filling. She raised chickens and collies, sold eggs and puppies for extra income. She gardened and canned the produce. She sewed uniforms for students at the Cleveland Training School for Nurses, and used the blue-and-white-striped scraps for the patchwork quilts that kept her children warm at night. She was so thin, so weary, on her feet from dawn to dusk. It seemed to me that she was all alone and yet so brave! What if something happened to her? Something awful?

I wanted to keep Mumma safe. Young and useless as I was, I tried to help but succeeded only in wearing out her threadbare patience. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh. “It’s easier for me to do it myself than to take the time to teach you.”

Looking back, I am sad to realize that I never thought about keeping Papa safe; it never occurred to me to worry about that benign but absent figure. When at last he had worked himself into an early grave, the business was out of debt. Mumma took over, bereaved but eager to put her own ideas into play. “Your father was not a fool,” she told us children on the way home from the funeral, “but he had no head for business.” And Mumma certainly did.

Her first move was to renegotiate arrangements with suppliers. “Thank you for your consideration,” she’d tell them in her small, sweet voice. “There are those who’d be happy to take advantage of a poor widow with three children to support.” Once she’d struck a bargain, her brother, John, wrote ironclad contracts to enforce the deal. “No more handshakes,” Mumma told us grimly. “Those weasels will cheat you every chance they get.”

I gladly accepted my duties as the “little mother,” as the phrase of those times had it. I was proud to be trusted at last with household duties for which Mumma had no time. I cleaned and cooked and mended as best I could, gratified that I was less a burden to her than before and that I could sometimes make our dear mother’s life easier. If she was too tired to notice my efforts or rated them poorly done, it was only because she worked so hard for us at the factory and she had high standards for everyone.

I was the eldest child, born a year before Ernest and three years before our sister, Lillian. Of Lillie Mumma would often say, “We saved the best for last.” And who could disagree? Strawberry blond and spritely, Lillian was like fireworks: bright and quick and colorful. She was a precocious chatterbox at two, following me around the house like a puppy and talking all the while. Once, when she was not quite three, we stood hand in hand, watching Ernest burn trash out back. I remember this so clearly! Lillie pointed at the sparks that rose skyward from stirred embers and piped, “Look, Agnes! Baby stars.”

I adored her, but our brother was not so charmed. Lillian was fearless at four and took Ernest on in sibling squabbles, quoting from the Bible as she boldly scolded him for striking her because he simply could not think fast enough to hold his own in argument. At five, she wrote a letter to God, asking Him to take good care of Papa; her penmanship was already better than Ernest’s. She skipped first grade, sailed through second, and won the spelling bee that year, competing against her elders. When she skipped a grade again, Ernest sulked, humiliated by a younger sister who was his equal or better in all things academic, but I was grateful for her precocity. She would read aloud from my textbooks while I washed dishes or hung out laundry. Without Lillie’s help, I never could have stayed in school.

By fourteen, I could see my life laid out before me. While Mumma ran the business, I would keep house for her and Ernest and Lillie. Later, I would become the sort of maiden aunt who lived in a spare bedroom and helped in the raising of nieces and nephews.

Marriage seemed out of the question—even then, when I was so young. You see, Ernest and Lillie were handsome persons with Mumma’s red-gold hair and Papa’s bright blue eyes. I shared their coloring and—in favorable light, from certain angles—a similar cast of feature, but for me, you must imagine a young Eleanor Roosevelt: bucktoothed, weak-chinned, strong-minded, with a father’s bony angularity in place of a mother’s delicate prettiness.

But Eleanor married,
you might protest.
Why, her husband became president!

Add, then, my freckles, considered a dreadful defect in those days. Next, be discreetly disconcerted by my crossed eyes blinking behind round spectacles.

Ah,
you think now.
Ah, I have the picture. Poor Agnes…

In 1899, our little household changed forever. Ernest shocked us all by running away to join the army, taking with him Papa’s mechanical talent and a firm desire for the male companionship our high-pitched feminine household did not afford him. I knew Ernest was unhappy at the factory, but he was barely seventeen and I’d never imagined he would simply up and leave home. Poor Mumma was beside herself when she discovered his note.

A few weeks later, she summoned me to her office to make her own announcement. After careful consultation with her brother, she told me, she had sold our Papa’s patents and the factory itself to White Sewing Machines, a Cleveland concern with a reputation for plain dealing and decent labor policies. This decision realized sufficient profit to provide an income. There would be enough, Mumma informed me, to send both of her daughters to Oberlin College, one of the first coeducational academic institutions in America. Lillian’s fine mind had already taken in all that our small school had to offer; she would be a good deal younger than most of our classmates, but we would matriculate at Oberlin together so that I could look after her. At Oberlin, Mumma expected, Lillian would find an educated young man worthy of her.

“And you, Agnes, will need a profession.” Mumma looked toward my left eye, ignoring the right, which turned in when I was feeling tired or upset. “I have decided that you shall earn your teaching certificate. Well? Speak up. I should have thought you’d be grateful. Your nose is always in a book.”

Well, yes. I loved to read, histories especially, but I had never imagined having enough money to go to college. I had begun, instead, to dream of going to the city, of making myself useful to society.

“Mumma, don’t you remember? I—I told you I was thinking I might like to do settlement work.”

She hardly moved. “Are you telling me that you do not wish to attend Oberlin with your sister?”

“Well, you see, Mumma, Miss Jane Addams thinks that those who serve the poor do better by going directly to work with the people who need us. She thinks we should avoid the snare of endless preparation—”

Mumma folded her thin hands in her lap and looked out the window, blinking rapidly. “Agnes, I am all alone,” she whispered. “I thought when Ernest left me that I could count on you to behave.” She shrugged helplessly. “It appears that you have become more self-willed than ever. And to think that I sold the business for you!”

To this moment, I can remember the wave of shame that washed over me. “Mumma, I didn’t know you planned to sell the business! Settlement work wouldn’t require any tuition money, so I just thought—”

“You thought.
You
thought! Without asking anyone’s opinion, let alone approval. Oh, Agnes,” Mumma said with a gentle melancholy that froze my heart, “you are as bad as your brother. I expected more from you. What will become of Lillian if you won’t go to Oberlin with her? Is your happiness worth your sister’s misery?”

If she had shouted, it might have been different, but Mumma was so small, so fragile. I always felt that if I used my strength, I might break her. Now I, who had only ever wanted to please, had hurt her so cruelly! Settlement work suddenly seemed like a pastime for silly rich girls who had nothing at all in common with me. I swore that teaching would suit me perfectly, that it was a marvelous opportunity, that I was wicked not to be grateful right away. Nothing I said made any difference. Before I knew it, I was weeping at her knees, begging for forgiveness.

Mumma’s face remained the same: gallantly, if imperfectly, concealing her suffering as she recalled every sin, every promise broken by a tiresome, dishonest child. “Go to bed,” she said finally, and sadly, still refusing to look at me. “And in the morning, try to be more cheerful. You owe me that much, at least.”

And in the end, I was glad that Mumma’s wisdom prevailed. Studying at Oberlin College was a great opportunity, and teaching was a profession that suited me well. Indeed, everything went according to her plans for Lillian and me—with a single small detour when I enrolled in Professor Douglas Cutler’s course “History and the Old Testament.” No one was more surprised than I when Professor Cutler found something in me to admire. And no one was less surprised than I when he found even more in darling Lillie to desire.

Douglas was in his thirties, a doctor of divinity, and a match for Lillie’s intellect and Christian conviction. The moment I introduced them, it was love at first sight. They made such a handsome couple, full of plans and aspirations. Shortly after their engagement, Douglas informed us that he’d been offered a position at the American Mission School at Jebail, just north of Beirut in Syria, which in those days stretched all the way to the Mediterranean seacoast. Lillian’s excitement over the news could hardly be contained, but Mumma wept and pleaded with Douglas to turn the offer down. She could hardly bear to think of her favorite child so far away, she told him. She had been so happy to believe that she would have a son-in-law to count on, what with her own dear Howard dead and her wicked son, Ernest, gone. It was awful to hear her distress, but Douglas had already signed the agreement, and a contract is a contract, as Mumma understood.

As for me, well, gracious! It had long been my dream to visit Egypt and the Holy Land, and now my very own sister would be living there, as the wife of a scholar and missionary! What could be better? I would miss Lillie desperately, of course, but she promised to write home every single week and tell me all about her travels and her life.

The wedding was to be in June, a few days after graduation. Lillie insisted that I serve as maid of honor. Eventually I gave in, though I was careful to remove my glasses and keep my eyes downcast for the wedding portrait, presenting neither my profile nor my eyes to spoil the photographs.

Lillie and Douglas spent their honeymoon walking in the footsteps of Jesus, and afterward, they took up residence in Jebail. That September, I left Cedar Glen as well, moving a few miles away to Cleveland, where I had accepted an appointment with the public school system. As you can imagine, Mumma was distraught at being left all alone, so I had a telephone installed for her and made sure the billing went to me. “You can call as often as you like,” I told her.

“And let those operators listen in?” she sniffed. “No lady would do such a thing!”

She was getting on in years by then and reluctant to introduce an outlandish modernity to her home. Even so, I believe she was somewhat consoled to know that if she had a need pressing enough to summon a daughter, I was close by and lived right on the trolley line.

The district had assigned me to Murray Hill School in the Cleveland neighborhood known to all as Little Italy. The children in my classroom were mostly immigrants. Some of their fathers were quite rough, and nearly all the parents were illiterate. Few believed that education was worthwhile beyond the fourth grade.

“Pushcart Tony,” Mumma called that kind, though most of them were day laborers, not fruit and vegetable vendors. “Foreigners are taking this country over,” she’d say.

“They didn’t sail on the
Mayflower,
” I’d answer, “but they came here as soon as they could.”

“Well, I don’t know about
that,
” Mumma always said.

This remark was never capitulation, you must understand; nor was it ever an admission of ignorance.
You’re wrong,
she meant,
but I don’t care to argue about it.

“And don’t think I haven’t noticed—that school is right next to a settlement,” she let me know. Alta House wasn’t really a settlement, of course. It was more of a community center with a playground and a gymnasium with a swimming pool. It was named for John D. Rockefeller’s daughter Miss Alta Rockefeller, and it really was quite respectable, though Mumma never entirely believed that.

Each year, I am proud to say, there were two or three children who truly blossomed in my classroom. Often these were the most resistant in September: cocky little boys who wanted to look tough and were afraid to fail, or awkward little girls who hardly dared believe that they’d be good at anything. With no children of my own to love, I had to be careful about letting my emotions run away with me. If my affection and attention were noticed, the boys and girls I liked best would be called “teacher’s pet” and there’d be trouble for them on the playground. I quickly learned to be evenhanded in the classroom.