23
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 really 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.
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!”