Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down
to essentials, and that essential shaped for good.
—KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The city of Memphis sits on an eastern bluff of the Mississippi River across from the green floodplains of Arkansas. At the turn of the century, eighty-four steamboats routinely plied the great waterway, carrying not only passengers but the biggest supply of lumber and cottonseed products in the world. “John J. Murphy,” alias William Boothe, established himself with his “wife” and children in this thriving business climate, hoping to prosper as a salesman and become financially independent, so that he could devote himself exclusively to the study of the violin—again his most consuming passion.1
The “Murphys” appear to have settled at 635 Walnut Street, in a neighborhood of small clapboard houses, not far from the railroad tracks. Half of the population of Memphis was black, and the sight of Negroes doing menial work instilled in Clare, at four, “a sharp taste of the bittersweet ‘aristocratic’ Southern white attitude of superiority.” Ann Snyder took advantage of this cheap domestic help, lightening her household responsibilities but increasing her boredom. She longed for the excitement and unpredictability of New York, and whenever the need for brighter vistas grew overwhelming, she would leave the children in a Catholic nursery and disappear for a few days. Clare missed her acutely, and was unconsoled by the lace-edged holy cards the nuns gave her at bedtime. During one of Ann’s mysterious absences, Clare had a bloody nightmare. She dreamed of lying under a staircase in a small room whose only light came through a casement of red and purple stained glass. Suddenly, the window opened, and a witch, hovering in a round basket, reached for her, took her to the moon, and cut her throat.2
Returning home after such visions of mutilation (she would be tormented by them for the next eighty years), Clare had to endure real-life horrors. Her parents’ relationship was deteriorating, and one night she awoke in tears to their loud quarreling. When William picked up his daughter to calm her, Ann snatched her away. He grabbed back, she snatched again. In the ensuing struggle, the little girl crashed to the floor.3
“I never drew a happy breath in my entire childhood,” Clare later claimed, remembering the insecurity and deprivations of these years. Yet there were tranquil moments. She played under blossoming magnolia trees, whose “pungent sweet fragrance” on the summer air would always fill her with nostalgia. Sitting on her father’s knee, she learned to read, using books from the Little Leather Library as primers. At night she enjoyed Ann’s telling of the German story “Struwwelpeter,” about a cruel boy with endless hair and fingernails. While being tucked into bed, she listened to her mother singing a lullaby, “The sun and the stars and the angels.”4
Ann Snyder also crooned popular love songs, or melodies from the operettas of Franz Lehár, as she went about her chores. She had a romantic streak and, despite William’s modest income, a taste for jewelry and fine clothes. Somehow, even in times of privation, she managed to deck herself with furs and feathers. Clare loved to watch her preening at her dressing table, with its glittering pin tray, nail buffer, and silver-backed brushes.5
Ann Snyder “Murphy,” c. 1907 (Illustration 2.1)
In 1909 John J. Murphy, who apparently did not profit by Memphis’s economic boom, moved his young family to Nashville, in the hills of middle Tennessee. The town was a prosperous capital and port, at the hub of numerous turnpikes bringing produce to the Cumberland River for shipment around the world. Its skyline was dominated by a blue-gray limestone state house—a perfect model of Southern Greek Revival architecture. Commercial development, in contrast, was eroding the impressive houses along Eighth Avenue, Nashville’s main thoroughfare, but William managed to rent a holdout at No. 308.6
He took a job as manager of a factory making a soft drink with the unappetizing name “Celery-Ade.” Its offices at 101 Church Street overlooked the river and the old Fort Nashborough stockade. Simultaneously, he rented a studio nearby to pursue his musical ambitions. Fearing that the name Murphy—or, for that matter, Boothe—was not exotic-sounding enough for a concert artist, he chose the pseudonym “Jord Murfé” and set himself up as a teacher and freelance player. An advertising handbill from this period portrays him heavy browed and distinguished, balancing his instrument above the legend “Violin Virtuoso.”7
William Boothe, alias “Jord Murfé,” c. 1909 (Illustration 2.2)
William’s incessant practicing dismayed Ann, who saw her hopes of middle-class security slipping away if Maestro Murfé became a full-time musician. His habit of exercising his fingers on the dining table so annoyed her at breakfast that she threw a saltcellar at him one morning. He began to study Tartini’s difficult “Devil’s Trill” Sonata, whose screechy scales and sinister twangs disturbed Clare’s often feverish sleep.
“The child is ill,” Ann complained. “Why don’t you stop?”
“She doesn’t have to listen,” William bellowed, remorselessly fiddling on.8
While Clare suffered from the occasional lack of his consideration, Ann felt a constant victim of his neglect. In revenge she discouraged any interest her children might have had in classical music. As a result, David remained forever indifferent to his father’s muse, and Clare, though she had rudimentary piano lessons, and even mastered Grieg’s Opus 12 Albumblatt, grew up unable to carry a tune.9
Ann’s dislike of William’s obsession with music was symptomatic of her growing disillusionment with him. He, in turn, blamed her for rearing both their son and daughter “in an atmosphere clouded with hatred for me.” At this early stage, however, he could still enchant them with his breadth of information and omnivorous appetite for life. Time spent with Father, no matter how brief or illicit, was fun. After school they would sneak down to his office and monitor his burgeoning collection of bottle tops decoratively lining the walls, or watch the giant Celery-Ade vats being rinsed out in the adjacent plant. When clean water temptingly filled one, they climbed a ladder and tumbled in for a swim.10
Clare underwent a more serious immersion when a group of Negroes “baptised” her in the river. To be thrust, by powerful hands, deep beneath the surface might have frightened a more timid child. But she found that she relished strange, even dangerous experiences.11
Soon she was restricted by more rigorous discipline than her parents imposed. Having turned six in the spring of 1909, she registered to attend Ward Seminary that fall as “Clare Murphy.” When the dread first day came on September 22, she resisted mightily, screaming and stamping and refusing to go in. “It seemed to me a great indignity, even a cruelty, to be forced to get an education.”12
Actually she could count herself privileged. Nashville’s three-hundred-pupil Ward Seminary (later Ward Belmont College) was one of the best preparatory establishments in the South. William at least saved on uniforms, since Clare was one of its minority of day girls and could wear ordinary clothes. The main campus, located on her street in the heart of town, included a library of over four thousand books and a roof garden with swings and tetherball stands. Twelve nearby acres were set aside for tennis and basketball courts, croquet lawns and hockey fields. There were flower-lined paths for walking and a handsome pergola for reading.13
Clare’s first day at Ward began at 10:30 A.M. with an address by Dr. Thomas Carter of Vanderbilt University, on a topic that would turn out to be the life strategy of the little girl sitting red-eyed and resentful at his feet. He spoke at length on “The Investment of Power.”
By noon the temperature had climbed to eighty-five degrees, and wilting pupils were rewarded with the news that they could stay away the next day to visit the State Fair. For just ten cents’ admission, they would be able to watch a vaudeville act, a horse show, an ostrich race, and a band concert. There would also be whistles to blow, balloons to pop, and saddle-pony rides. Finally, at dusk, the whole town could see a fireworks display so spectacular it would make the warm air vibrate.14
Once school reconvened after the holiday, Clare adjusted with difficulty to a new world of chapel services, rigid lessons, and organized sport. She was already an avid reader, but routine study seemed to inhibit her. By now she was used to the spontaneities of her semi-bohemian parents. A class photograph survives of this first year at Ward, showing Clare Murphy cross-legged on the floor, looking small and tentative. Her first report, dated June 1910, recorded an undistinguished string of S’s (for Satisfactory) in reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, and story work. By the following summer, she had mastered the art of success in school, advancing to A’s in all subjects, including English grammar and geography. Her second class picture shows her a plumper, taller child, with eyes knowledgeable beyond her eight years. Clare was too intelligent, and had witnessed too much family discord, to survive the loss of innocence unscathed.15
William was delighted with her precociousness, not to mention a well-advanced “spirit of humorous analysis.” She had unusual powers of retention, and at seven amazed him by reciting a whole chapter of the Book of Genesis. Although not quite a “prodigy” by his severe standards, she had enormous curiosity and was “the best listener of any child who ever lived.”16
Clare “Murphy” (above: front row, extreme left; below: second row, with hair bow) at Ward Seminary, 1910–1911 (Illustration 2.3)
Unfortunately, father and daughter never had time to fulfill their potential empathy in Nashville. William distracted himself with yet a third job, merchandising a newfangled product called “G. Washington Refined Soluble Coffee” for the Southern Coffee Company. In this he was fatally ahead of his time, as he had been marketing pianos. Not for thirty years would instant coffee become popular among Americans. The product sat on the shelves, and his commissions dwindled.17
Music offered relief but little reward. Telltale signs of restlessness and wanderlust began to appear in William’s behavior. After the end of Clare’s second school year, in the summer of 1911, the “Murphys” left Nashville abruptly and headed for Chicago, in what Clare later described as “greatly reduced economic circumstances.”18
At the age of forty-nine, William Boothe (who continued to call himself “Murphy” or “Murfé” for the next several years) seems to have gone north in a last-ditch attempt to pursue a musical career. According to his daughter, he secured “a good job” playing for the Chicago Grand Opera Orchestra, at least during the 1911–12 season. Good or not, the job paid nothing through the long off-season. He had to supplement his income, as in Nashville, with teaching fees and odd sales commissions.19
In an attempt to overcome high living costs, William rented a small apartment on the South Side, at Forty-first Street and Indiana Avenue. It stood between the once-elegant mansions of Grand Boulevard and the slaughterhouses, glue factories, and hair works of Packingtown. Periodically drifting from the west came a reek of animal flesh and blood, “rancid, sensual, strong,” in Upton Sinclair’s words, along with acrid smoke from gigantic chimneys.20
Clare’s most indelible impression of her new neighborhood was of “a man peeing against the wall” outside her window. David, a streetwise boy, looked back on the South Side as “an obscene and outrageous environment,” a breeding ground for prostitutes. Or, as he later phrased it to Clare, “a fit background for an inhabitant of La Belle Fleur Maison.”21 Such euphemisms were their private way of skirting what they both suspected, but dared not say, about their vampish mother—her sudden absences, her budget-defying wardrobe, and her cunning evasions.
At eight, Clare was still too young to guess what David, at nine, precociously knew of the world beyond Indiana Avenue. But she was aware of festering local tensions between Lithuanian, German, and Irish migrants, not to mention an all-pervasive fear and dislike of Negroes, as palpable here as in Tennessee. One evening she and her brother were skating along lower Michigan Avenue when they approached a huge black man in a white sweater. “Oh look,” David said, “there’s Jack Johnson.” Clare stared at the boxer with such fascination that she smacked into a tree and winded herself. Johnson picked her up and began gently slapping her back. A white policeman appeared at once. “Why are you molesting this young lady?” Only David’s explanation of what had happened, and his precise identification of Johnson as the owner of a saloon, Café de Champion at 42 West Thirty-first Street, saved the great heavyweight from arrest.22
Clare’s other childhood recollection of a brush with celebrity was evoked by the remembered sound of Mary Garden’s voice filling the Chicago Auditorium, where William played. Clare had the feeling—probably illusory—that her seductive father and the star of Salomé were lovers. At all events, he sent her to the Blackstone Hotel with a bunch of long-stemmed American Beauty roses for Miss Garden. Close up, away from the footlights, the soprano looked shockingly unglamorous. She presented a cream-smeared face to be kissed, and Clare noticed that she had “terrible skin.” In return for the kiss and the flowers, Garden reached into a cage and gave her young visitor a canary.23
In spite of William and Ann’s diminishing regard for each other, life on the South Side maintained a semblance of normality. Providing her children with the best education possible remained Ann’s priority, and somehow the estranged couple found the means. In the fall of 1911, David entered Racine College, Wisconsin, an Episcopal school with a strong emphasis on military training. Its regimented discipline helped curb his rebellious, roving nature but led to a lasting suppression of his more sensitive qualities, which would have disastrous consequences.24
Clare, meanwhile, enrolled in the prestigious Latin School for Girls. It was uptown, on Division Street, yet high-speed cable cars were able to whisk her there quickly from the Thirty-ninth Street stop. Before long she was reciting “amo, amas, amat” with children from prosperous North Side homes. She also took classes at the Art Institute and became a compulsive sketcher, producing pastels of its views over train tracks and lake. A painting set of twenty colors gave her endless pleasure, and she showed some signs of artistic talent.25
Since so much of William’s meager income was spent on schooling, the children could not look forward to many toys that first Christmas in Chicago. Clare coveted an expensive doll she had seen in a department store. “The saleswoman let me hold it. And then I never got it.” She also longed “more than life” for a dog but received only a stuffed collie.26
David fared better, with a BB gun that aroused envy in his intensely competitive sister. He gloated about his masculine prerogatives, saying he would grow up to be a soldier while she would be always “just a girl.” Clare fiercely resented this implication of female inferiority, knowing that she was more than his equal, except in size and strength. Soon he would have to confront the reality not only of her greater poise and social ease but of her creative gifts and extraordinary intelligence. Soon, too, Clare would become aware that the path to recognition and fulfillment might be hampered by her being the “wrong” sex. The only reason she could see why David might consider himself superior was that he had a “dinglebat” and she did not.27
Brother and sister declared a temporary truce when the “Murphys” took their 1912 summer vacation at a resort on the shores of Turtle Lake, in northwest Wisconsin. There both children made friends with a lumberjack, who taught them to shoot porcupines and squirrels. Clare kept pace with David, running barefoot through the dense woods, climbing trees, hunting birds, paddling canoes, and fishing the fecund waters. Wearing only a dress, she fearlessly slid down a ramp after some corduroy-clad boys, then spent an embarrassing session with a doctor, having splinters removed from her bottom.
These were her last days of purely careless childhood, and she looked back on them in old age as “the only happy ones I ever knew.”28
Although a photograph of Ann Snyder at Turtle Lake shows her smiling broadly, over a row of just-caught fish, she was by now completely disenchanted with William Boothe. Clare was of the mature opinion that “lust, rather than love, had brought them together.” But there was more to their impending split than waning sexual attraction.29
The truth—which for the rest of her life Clare was unable, or unwilling, to face—was that her parents, variously self-styled as “Mr. and Mrs. Franklin,” “Mr. and Mrs. William Franklin Boothe,” and “Mr. and Mrs. John J. Murphy,” were still not husband and wife. Nor would they ever be. Certainly no record of their marrying or divorcing has been found in any of the states they called home. Legal cohabitation was impossible in New York as long as Laura Boothe survived, since William had been the guilty party in court proceedings. His likely reason for taking refuge in the South, under an assumed name, was intent to evade alimony. But lacking valid identification as John J. Murphy, he could not hope to marry Ann in Tennessee or Illinois. In any case, by the time they reached Chicago the liaison had so soured that the question of cementing it was futile.
Ann’s most urgent problem, now that David and Clare were approaching puberty, was their illegitimacy. She grew angry, even vengeful, towards the once-debonair man who had wooed her over the wine tables of Broadway. Then, he had been a prosperous executive in his prime, irresistibly handsome and sexy. Now, eleven years later, he was an aging salesman, a vainglorious fiddler, a drinker prone to self-destructive whiskey binges.30
Ignoring his protestations, Ann made her plans for flight. She had not risen above the deprivations of Hell’s Kitchen to settle for the life of a fallen woman with two bastards in a Midwest slum. She was still only thirty. With her good looks and charm, she felt sure of attracting a richer and more reliable man in the East.
Opportunity presented itself in September 1912, when Ann’s father, now living in New Jersey, fell seriously ill. Taking the children, she went to visit him. That she had no intention of coming back was clear, since she simultaneously transferred David from Racine College to Repton Military School in Tarrytown, New York. As time passed and it became obvious to the children that they were not to be reunited with their father, Ann told them that he had absconded with Mary Garden.31
She also gradually changed her persona from “wronged wife” to “widow,” telling new acquaintances that her husband had died. The children came to believe this too, fiction hardening to fact in their susceptible minds. Sixteen years later, shortly before his actual demise, William would write Clare his version of the “divorce,” pretending too, for her sake, that she was legitimate. “Your mother did not love me when she married me.” Nor had he forsaken Ann, “unless going on the road to make a living for you children could be construed as desertion. She left me. As long as you children might live, I would never have left.”32
Ann Snyder—who had a way, which her daughter eventually emulated, of reversing and sentimentalizing unpleasant facts—documented some of her experiences in short stories, composed of equal parts fantasy and harsh reality, and from time to time she described herself as “a writer.” Clare’s first glimpse into her mother’s imaginative world occurred shortly after their arrival in New York. While they were waiting at the Hudson ferry terminal to cross over to Hoboken, Ann went to the ladies’ room, leaving on the bench beside her daughter a typed manuscript entitled “The Return.” Handwritten on the back was “A. C. Boothe, 1-188 Indiana Avenue Chicago c/o Murphy.”33 Clare began to read.
The piece turned out to be an eight-page story written in overripe style. Its plot was standard woman’s magazine melodrama, but the details were significant, at least to Clare. There was an unhappy urban wife, a drunken husband, a secretly planned desertion, a rancorous farewell note, a collecting of jewels, and a parting glance at a silk-covered bed, followed by disappearance into the night. There were also shabby scenes of working-class penury, intermixed with plentiful sobs, sighs, and aching limbs.
Clare puzzled over the manuscript’s autobiographical implications. What was her mother’s purpose in writing it? The return address suggested it had been a rejected submission to some periodical. Why had she so obviously left it on the seat for her daughter to see? Did she hope it might explain that—whatever difficult times lay ahead—there would be no return to William Boothe?
Ann made no mention of the manuscript when she came back, and Clare, sensing that it sublimated matters “too painful” to discuss, kept her own silence. By tacit agreement, she also kept the story.34
Both of them knew that Ann Snyder’s lifelong quest for soothing sheets, symbolized by the silk-covered bed of her protagonist, was not to be gratified any time soon. Their immediate destination held, at best, only the prospect of coarse cotton ones.
Clare would make this Hoboken Ferry trip many times over the next few years. She was always entranced by the flotsam and jetsam of the wide river. Its battered, bobbing boxes and crates, irradiated by the sun, reminded her of “whimsical little barks.” But cold nights were coming, when the surface would turn black and oily, and heave with shapes that looked to her like “evil deeds in a dark life.”35
John and Louisa Schneider—who still spelled their surname the German way—lived on the third floor of a house at 107 Sixth Street and Park Avenue in Union City. As Clare walked for the first time into the kitchen, where they spent most of their time, she registered a series of impressions so photographic that they stayed with her forever. She saw her grandfather’s blue eyes and bloated face reflected in a cracked shaving mirror propped up against a milk bottle. In one dropsical hand he held a large razor, while with the other he steadied a bowl of water in his lap.
Elsewhere in the little apartment, she noticed a hairy animal’s foot, carved out to serve as a plant pot, a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm in a spiked helmet, and two Dresden china figures of a boy and girl. She imagined these last to be David and herself, “as prince and princess.” The whole place breathed Bavaria and her Teutonic heritage.36
It was clear to Ann, if not yet to Clare, that John Schneider, who was suffering from hepatic cirrhosis and endocarditis, had not long to live. During the next seven months, he filled the long days of invalidism by teaching his granddaughter whist, cribbage, and bezique. Grandmother Louisa taught her German songs.
Du, Du liegst mir im Herzen!
Du, Du liegst mir im Sinn,
Du, Du machst mir viel Schmerzen
Weisst nicht, wie gut ich Dir bin.37
In “Onion” City, as local children called it, Clare had a taste of the intense neighborliness of the ethnic poor. She would drop in on the baker’s family upstairs, and on warm evenings sit on the steps outside the tenement, reading a newspaper and talking to people as they came home from work. One immigrant with pierced ears, impressed by the nine-year-old’s grasp of world affairs, admiringly told the Schneiders, “Your Clara is a frisch kid.”38
Clare was hypnotically attracted to Saturday night nickelodeon movies. The first play she saw, performed by the Hudson Theatre Stock Company, seemed so real that when the villain stepped up to the footlights, it “scared the bejesus” out of her.39
Ann Snyder was struck by Clare’s obvious love of drama and noticed that she closely resembled the curly-blonde “child sweetheart” ideal of so many contemporary entertainments. Needing money badly, she somehow secured her nine-year-old daughter a Broadway job, as understudy to none other than Mary Pickford. The play, produced by David Belasco, was a three-act fantasy entitled A Good Little Devil. Pickford was cast as a young blind girl, with Ernest Truex as her adolescent lover. Lillian Gish (lured away at twenty-five dollars a week from D. W. Griffith) floated around the stage as a fairy.40 Devil opened at the Republic Theatre on January 8, 1913, to favorable notices, and ran for four months. Unfortunately for Clare, the star’s health was robust, so she only got to kiss the delectable Mr. Truex (who was actually twenty-two) in rehearsals.
Throughout that winter and early spring, John Schneider’s health worsened. Clare went to see him towards the end of her theatrical stint. On April 14, she heard a strange sound, “like the clapping of horses’ hooves,” coming from his bedroom. It was the death rattle. He was only fifty-one years old.41
Grandmother Louisa prepared to move to other quarters in Weehawken, and Ann set about looking for permanent accommodation of her own in her native city, which she had left, with more promising hopes, six years before.