CHAPTER 2
MANGOES IN PANAMA
1861–1903
THE BABY ARRIVED RED-FACED, fat, and squalling to Elizabeth’s bed on Salmon Street. When it was time to weigh the newborn, the nurse who accompanied the doctor discovered she’d failed to bring her scale. Let was summoned. In a few minutes, he arrived at the bedroom door with the kitchen scale, its tray lined with an old damask napkin. Though exhausted, Missy (Let’s name for Elizabeth) would have been furious, he knew better than probably anyone, had he allowed a decent one to be soiled.
The scale’s needle wrenched and fluttered beneath the squirming baby. At last the point settled on a number: thirteen pounds! The doctor declared the boy fine and healthy; the attending nurse, who recorded the weight in her daybook, raised her eyebrows and declared she’d never seen so large an infant delivered. John Beard’s daughter, nineteen-year-old Lucille—called Lucy Bird—took the swaddled infant from Let and set him in a bassinet. A kind of glowing halo crowned Elizabeth: her hair in its customary large bun, frayed and glistening with sweat.
On a dark morning in this same bed last February, Elizabeth had seen the slack body of her stillborn boy wrapped entirely in a blanket—legs, arms, face. This time, she had made sure to fatten the child in her womb: on roast chickens with cream gravy, Let’s Welsh rabbits and apple charlottes, and a daily tumbler of beer. Elizabeth, forty-two, was at last a mother—of a plump, towheaded boy with skin folds so extravagant he looked regal. After all, it was the reason she’d even agreed to marry John five years and one month ago, so she would conceive and bear a child. They had said she was too old. This baby showed they should never have doubted her.
She kept her Episcopal prayer book on the bedside table. Still, she appealed not to God but to a fate that had been mercurial enough to deliver her, a poor English girl, to this raw and restless place, this Oregon.
The next day, Wednesday, May 6, 1903, the Morning Oregonian ran a single birth notice.
BORN.
BEARD—May 5, to Mr. and Mrs. John A. Beard,
749 E. Salmon St., a son.
At Trinity Episcopal Church, they’d christen him James Andrews, the middle name for John’s father, Andrew Francis Beard, as well as John’s middle name, so the “s” made it plural. Besides, James Andrews sounded lordly.
The bearer of this name with the majestic onus would come to know this about his mother’s life: that it was a never-ending revolt against anyone who ever tried to enclose her.
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ON JANUARY 7, 1861, in a small village near Westbury in Wiltshire, England, Mary Elizabeth Jones took her first furious breaths. She was one of twelve children born to Charlotte and Joseph Jones. Though not desperately poor, the Joneses brought Elizabeth, as she’d be called, into a world of limited prospects. Maybe she’d grow up and hope to marry a farmer; maybe go into service, become a domestic for a rich family as did her father, who was a gamekeeper at a great country house. With luck, she’d wed a man with a skilled trade (perhaps a fine, sturdy blacksmith) and produce a dozen children of her own.
Westbury nestled under the cliff of Salisbury Plain. On the weekly market day, stalls splayed out before its austere town hall, built of buff stone. In the distance lay the famous white chalk horse, tattooed on the green flank of a hill, with graceful spindle legs and bottleneck muzzle. Tourists assumed it to be the work of industrious Druids, but for centuries it had been re-scribed and altered by restoration until the Westbury White Horse likely bore little resemblance to the image the ancients had cut. It was as if mythmaking—a culture of shameless reinvention—manifested on the very landscape into which Elizabeth was born.
The Joneses were restless. When Elizabeth was still only a toddler, the family moved to Hawarden Castle, Prime Minister William Evart Gladstone’s country estate in Wales, where Elizabeth’s father had secured a berth.
As gamekeeper, Joseph was allowed a cottage to live rent-free on the estate grounds. Every eight or ten days, the Jones family received an allotment of large, craggy Coburg loaves fired in the estate’s oven. Young Elizabeth’s diet didn’t stray far. Most days she ate stale bread: crusts, days old, pulped in boiled water so they softened and swelled into a rough, sticky porridge. Her father’s position gave the Joneses privileges. They kept a garden just big enough to grow cabbages and onions, got an occasional egg and an even less frequent hen. The bird would be too old for laying but was ripe for neck-wringing, plucking, and boiling. Handfuls of flour bullied the cooking water into a thin and copious gravy, which, ladled over more crusts, yielded a gray, stringy dinner for Sundays. Elizabeth was obstinate in her hatred of it.
By the time Joseph found a new position at a country house in Ireland, to which the Joneses trekked across the sea, Elizabeth had found the will to escape. She learned to wander off in the evenings, at suppertime, to the cottages of Irish workers on the estate, for bowls of steaming potatoes they shared with her. (In the hierarchy of country houses, a gamekeeper had status; it wouldn’t do to shoo away his child.) Elizabeth loved potatoes, desired them boiled so the skins burst and the flesh cracked open and crumbled a little. Their texture was plush and floury, the flavor like clean, sweet dirt. The woman of the house, if she were kind, dribbled on some rich and slightly tangy milk (once, on some saint’s feast day, Elizabeth even received some salt herring). These illicit potatoes had a vividness she did not find at home. One of her siblings would always have to find her and drag her back home.
The Joneses’ condition was untenable (too many mouths to feed on too little), and Elizabeth was proud, willful, and in need of taming. When the girl turned nine, her aunt Clara (reasonably well off and childless) arrived from London to take her to live in the city. She and Elizabeth’s uncle, who owned a shipping company, would give her advantages. And they would make her yield to a more structured and purposeful life than Elizabeth had known as a semisavage country girl.
London in 1870 was a city of putrid fogs, choked with the soot and burnt-iron reek of more than three million daily coal fires that made every outdoor surface feel oily. At her aunt Clara’s table, Elizabeth faced meals of paucity—not from lack of money but as a systematic way to constrain the girl’s spirit.
Her new guardians were Christian fanatics, followers of the British Holiness Movement, modeled on American evangelism. (In 1878, English acolytes would found the Salvation Army.) Elizabeth was forced to memorize Bible verses and other pious texts, renounce stubbornness, kneel before an invisible Jesus. The food they gave her imposed virtue through mandatory thrift: funky-smelling vegetable consommés (actually yellowish water left from boiling cabbage), thin soups of barley and scrags of mutton, and endless plates of kedgeree, with all manner of rubbish scraps fried up with the rice and oily fish. Laced into obedience, under heavy gored skirts and itchy, high-necked blouses, she pondered escape.
In 1878, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth spied a chance to free herself. By accident, she’d met a woman visiting London from Toronto; they’d stayed in touch by letter, and before long, Elizabeth became tenacious in her desire to get to Canada. Eventually the captain of a steamship in her uncle’s line agreed to give her secret passage to Montreal on a steamship that carried emigrants westward across the ocean before returning to Liverpool with a cargo of timber.
It was a six-week voyage. Elizabeth endured the cold, the pitching of the boat, and the meals of bread or hard biscuit, oatmeal, and tea that tasted of tin.
In Montreal, there was confusion, a rush for the terminal and the Toronto train: darkness and cold, the shouting of porters and screaming of children, masses of people packed together. Elizabeth waited on the freezing platform. There was no waiting room for those traveling emigrant class, and the train’s cars were locked until just before leaving.
Toronto was a hive of new-brick houses, raw in sunrise. There was the smell of burning wood, not coal, and rutted streets as yet unpaved, choked with mud and carts. She arrived at the house of the lady she’d met in London, her deliverer. The woman offered Elizabeth a bedroom and told her she could stay as long as she cared to. Meals were copious. Elizabeth gorged on pork, corned beef, and potatoes; on buttered muffins, and cakes spread with cream and jam—luxuries previously unthinkable. Even the bread, made of flour milled from Alberta wheat, was astonishing. What other pleasures might this vast continent reveal?
At eighteen, Elizabeth landed her first position: as governess to the family of a military officer and his wife. They were about to embark on a long tour of the United States and needed someone to manage the children during the trip. For the next two years, then, Elizabeth would see the northern half of America, its states and territories, through the windows of trains that jagged westward. Her view of this startling new country would be from the narrow, plush chairs of day coaches, with one eye on the young ones in her charge, in a welter of soot and the grit of plowed-up prairie sifting in through the open ventilators.
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THE CITY ELIZABETH SAW from the deck of a steamer, as it heaved through the waters of the Willamette River in 1882, was green but hardly pastoral, a place where an imperative of progress cut as deep as mole plows through wetland prairie. Portland was not so much a city as a coalescence of wooden structures. Houses rose on dank ground, amid the stubble of tree stumps. The din of nails pounded into wood continued after nightfall, and everyone was feverishly converting into US greenbacks the boundless yields of timber and salmon, and harvests of orchard fruit and wheat from soils unsapped by intensive farming.
North Street downtown had well-set brick façades, under Gothic pinnacles and Italianate domes, but when the masonry ended Portland still felt like a settlement. With a population of 18,000, it was smaller than Salt Lake City or Poughkeepsie, but its numbers had more than doubled in the previous decade and would do so again in the subsequent one. Across the Willamette in East Portland, beyond the trestled streets crisscrossing sloughs and creeks, new clapboard houses stretched along grids planted with elm and sweet-gum saplings. Snow-flanked Mount Hood seemed to step back to make room for new arrivals hustling for work in logging camps or on seine-haulers, and those who scrambled for provisions before spreading out to claim their 160 cleared acres under the Homestead Law.
At the boardinghouse where the family settled in for a long stay, Elizabeth ate vegetables like none she had tasted, most bought from the Chinese truck farms on the west side, down behind the shanties in the bend of a creek. There were turnips so delicate and crisp Elizabeth ate them raw, like apples, savoring the feral sweetness and mustard bite—she had only ever known turnips as large watery things boiled into pulpy submission. There were fine red carrots and celery, white with a faint cast of green, blanched in black alluvial soil. She gorged on extravagantly musky late-summer strawberries so ripe, and with so much intrinsic sweetness, that all they needed to reach transcendence was a dribble of Guernsey cream, hauled across the Willamette from East Portland.
Then bad news arrived by letter: a death in the family of Elizabeth’s employers. They would have to begin the return journey at once. Elizabeth, though she had little money and no friends, decided to remain in Portland—this wild, fertile place of energy and ambition.
She took small jobs to get by. She found a family, the Maxwells, who needed a governess for two young girls. A. L. Maxwell was high up in the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company. He was big and buttery, with a Prince of Wales beard—a gentleman, in other words—and Mrs. Maxwell was kind. The Maxwells were closer than any family she’d known.
In 1885, thinking she might marry a man she’d known as a girl, twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth returned to London. After seeing him, however, all she wanted was to escape England again. She traveled back across the Atlantic, back to Portland and the Maxwells.
In 1886, Mrs. Maxwell told Elizabeth that a woman she knew, Lizzie H. Curtis, was looking for someone to help manage her stylish boardinghouses in San Francisco. The girls were old enough to board for their schooling; there was little for Elizabeth to do. Mrs. Maxwell thought it was a fine plan for her to live in San Francisco for a time and learn how to run an elegant house, especially since Mrs. Curtis wished someday to open one in Portland. Elizabeth would be perfectly situated then for the position when the time came.
In San Francisco, Mrs. Curtis’s main house (twenty-four rooms, a mix of singles and bay-windowed alcove suites) was on Post Street near Polk. She operated a second, more select house on Sutter just east of Larkin: large private suites smartly furnished, with an attached stable for residents who kept private carriages. The quality of the cooking made her houses stand apart from the throng of competing residences. “Superior table,” Mrs. Curtis stressed in advertisements placed in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Excellent board.”
San Francisco’s boosters called their city the Paris of the West. In 1886, it was the undisputed economic and cultural center of the Pacific Coast and an epicurean capital with a surplus of French chefs and Italian pastry cooks. Elizabeth oversaw a dining room where residents savored plates of roast veal tongue, the slices drenched in rich, mahogany-colored brown sauce. They were treated to chicken braised with ham and mushrooms, the cooking liquid reduced and enriched with cream; to chowders made with clams carted down from Bolinas Bay, and salads of local crab dressed with olive-oil mayonnaise rich in egg yolks. They gloried in terrapin stew and mock turtle soup braced with sherry or Madeira, and wiped their bowls with swabs torn from hot rolls. They paused to breathe in steam rising from brandy-laced soufflés rushed from the oven and took extra helpings of pound cake sliced to reveal a terrazzo pattern of candied citron and glacé fruits.
With notebook and a pencil at the ready, Elizabeth diligently kept track of menus and whatever recipes she managed to wheedle from the cooks.
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YEARS LATER, James would wish he’d listened more closely to his mother’s stories of how she met Stella Chase Ainsworth. Perhaps at one of the San Francisco theaters she talked about: the Moorish Alcazar or majestic California; the ornate Baldwin or perpetually crowded Tivoli Opera House, with its fearsome lobby panorama of the Siege of Vicksburg.
Stella Ainsworth, twenty-four, made her acting debut at the California Theatre as Juliet. She had a high forehead and dark eyes, full lips, and a thin nose that ended abruptly in an uptwist. She’d grown up in a prominent Illinois family; her great-uncle was the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. She moved west to Oakland to marry Edward Ainsworth, scion of a well-off family in the grocery business. Despite becoming Mrs. Ainsworth, Stella harbored dreams of the stage, of landing in the stock company of one of the big New York theatrical outfits, perhaps Augustin Daly’s or Wallack’s. After her honeymoon, she took acting lessons. The Daily Alta California theater critic’s take on Stella’s debut turn as Juliet was less than ecstatic. She pressed on anyway.
In May 1888, not long after she and Elizabeth would have met, Stella received some longed-for news. The impresario John Augustin Daly invited her to New York that September to audition for his stock company. Stella asked Elizabeth to travel with her. Stella planned to sail to Panama on the Pacific Mail steamship Granada; from there, she would take the train north across the isthmus to Aspinwall (now Colón) on the Caribbean and board a connecting steamer, the Acapulco. Once they reached New York, Elizabeth could return to California by rail. It would be the adventure of their lives.
Elizabeth first needed Mrs. Curtis’s permission to be away from the boardinghouse for six weeks or longer. In the end, she didn’t ask. Elizabeth just . . . left. On the night of July 10, 1888, she and Stella set off together from San Francisco on the Granada: a grand lark. And an illicit one, since Stella was abandoning her husband and Elizabeth was disappointing not only Mrs. Curtis but Mrs. Maxwell, her patron, who had vouched for her. As the Granada pushed off from the pier at First and Brannan Streets, Stella and Elizabeth—as if one woman—undid their ties to respectability.
In later life, James spoke guardedly to his closest confidantes about his mother’s sexuality. He knew she was queer, although he and Elizabeth had never spoken frankly of it. But in stories of their adventures, Elizabeth flashed the fact of her love for Stella like a signal she knew James would be capable of decoding. His mother was of a generation that conceived of sex in ways different than his. For Victorians, queerness was not an inherence, a gift (or a curse) at birth, but a moment’s acquiescence to passion: a surrender anyone was capable of. For Elizabeth, queer liaisons were the result of circumstance and weakness, falling prey to a moment’s foible. James would come to know his mother’s sexuality—her love for vibrant, beautiful Stella—as a thing of both joy and sustained regret.
The Granada lingered a few days at San Pedro in Los Angeles. Stella and Elizabeth disembarked at Mazatlán, Manzanillo, and Acapulco to look around. At Panama City, they left the ship for good.
She and Stella rode out to where the old Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps oversaw the canal that men were clawing from collapsing mud. Surely it would never be finished. Strangest and most spectacular of all were the fruits they ate: ferocious-skinned alligator pears with flesh as smooth and rich as custard, pineapples ripened on the stalk, and succulent golden mangoes, with a fragrance finer than that of the ripest peach.
For years, Elizabeth would tell stories of Panama and the Caribbean: the Bahamas, St. Thomas, Key West. James understood it as the one time of pure happiness in his mother’s life. He would think of Elizabeth’s voyage in almost mythical terms, his mother’s journey to discover foods of a vividness and intensity previously unimagined. It was a lesson James absorbed, if only unconsciously: how to ascribe to food all the thoughts and feelings too dangerous for one to avow openly.
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FROM NEW YORK, Stella was to travel upstate to see family in Hammondsport, on the shore of Keuka Lake. She would spend the weeks before her audition for Augustin Daly with relatives. It was unthinkable that Elizabeth, a single woman with no money, status, or family connections, would meet Stella’s family, so she rode the train west to Portland and back to Mrs. Maxwell. But Elizabeth was quickly off again, to Kansas City to look after Mrs. Maxwell’s ailing sister. Elizabeth would soon be thirty. Her situation was as tenuous as it had ever been. She made up her mind to do what every woman was expected to do. She resolved to marry.
She returned to Portland and found a husband, a man named John Brennan who had a shop and a consoling income. He also had the early signs of tuberculosis—“consumption,” as it was known. Elizabeth adopted a role she knew well, the woman of brisk purpose and maximum efficiency. Fourteen months after becoming Mrs. Brennan, Elizabeth was a widow.
Just as Elizabeth again began to ponder her future, word came that Lizzie Curtis was finally preparing to open a boardinghouse in Portland. Portland was now a stop on the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railway, and the new residents who streamed in needed accommodations. Mrs. Curtis had sold her boardinghouses in San Francisco and put everything up for auction: the mahogany dressers, horsehair mattresses, and ladies’ desks. She prepared to start fresh in Portland.
Though Elizabeth had deserted her three years earlier, Mrs. Curtis hadn’t forgotten what a sharp manager she was, how she dealt with the residents politely yet firmly, understood good food, and assumed all chambermaids and cooks were merely waiting for a mistress’s back to turn before sneaking off to nap in vacant beds or loiter on back stairs. Elizabeth never took her eye off anyone. Mrs. Curtis wrote to Elizabeth to say all was forgiven and to please come work for her again.
The Portland Curtis, managed by Elizabeth Brennan, opened in 1892 at the corner of Twelfth and Morrison Streets, four blocks from the stupendously chateauesque new Portland Hotel, and even nearer to the Empire and Bungalow Theatres. It was a moderately fashionable district, close enough to downtown to appeal to business and professional men. In ads, Mrs. Curtis appealed to bachelors and “transients” (short-term guests) who appreciated the kind of superior table she had perfected in San Francisco.
Before long, Elizabeth began calculating how she could open her own hotel, a place like the Curtis only better, if only because she, Elizabeth, would own it.
Her old mentor A. L. Maxwell was now speculating in real estate. With his help, Elizabeth purchased a building: a four-story Queen Anne boardinghouse on Thirteenth between Morrison and Yamhill, just two blocks from the opulent seven-story Hill-Ton.
It was shabby and needed work. Mr. Maxwell found her an architect. Elizabeth resolved to call her house the Gladstone, both for the eighty-one-year-old scarred lion of British politics and to honor her father’s stint as a gamekeeper on Mr. Gladstone’s Welsh estate. Besides, the Englishness of the name gave it a certain feeling.
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THE GLADSTONE OPENED IN 1896 with two dozen guest rooms, some occupied by boarders Elizabeth poached from the Curtis. The common areas had the rich and fashionable glimmer of Carpenter Gothic in polished redwood: manor-house paneling in the drawing room, dados studding the walls and chamfers softening hard-edged trims, wallpaper patterns dissolving into shadows beneath the high ceilings, and fantastical knobby braces anywhere an archway yawned. In the drawing room, there were parlor palms in blue-and-white Chinese jars and ferns cascading in the front windows: adornments that flattered young couples harboring ambitions for the Hill-Ton or the Portland; the midlevel office men, accountants and managers who aspired to respectability; widows compelled to give up their own houses, who complained about the most trifling things; and fastidious single women in middle age, living off inheritances.
The mistress of a good hotel learned to keep her boarders’ secrets, acknowledged by necessity the vast range of human appetites, and became an actor in little face-saving dramas. Gladstone residents included a lady who drank and liked to have a small table under her place in the dining room on which to set her brandy flask. (Throughout luncheon and supper, she would lower her delicate china tea cup out of sight for discreet spiking.) There was the bookkeeper fond of meeting young men in Lownsdale Square Park on Sunday afternoons and bringing them home to entertain with sherry in his room, and the retired factory manager getting more and more addled, whom Elizabeth would assist back to his suite while explaining he was merely tired from reading.
Managing, keeping her gaze on all the things perpetually at risk of coming undone, was what Elizabeth did best: the new waitress pocketing the silver nutcrackers, or the market girl sending scarred and desiccated asparagus when Elizabeth had taken pains to set aside the fattest and juiciest ones. Elizabeth had made sure everything at Mrs. Curtis’s hotels ran smoothly, and she was determined to make the Gladstone do the same.
The problem was, Portland was not San Francisco. In the Northwest, there was no immigrant brigade of French and Austrian and Italian chefs jostling for places in restaurants. In the sprawling West, there were no finer restaurants than San Francisco’s. European cooks needed a level of ambition to travel to the Pacific Coast. The ones who stepped off in Portland rarely stayed. They’d move on to San Francisco for status and a stellar wage, or to Dawson City in the Yukon to become rich fueling the appetites of the Klondike Gold Rush. As a result, Mrs. Curtis’s Portland kitchen was in constant flux. It was no different at the Gladstone, where good chefs scattered like silverfish in the glare of a switched-on cellar light.
Even for Portland’s middle class, Chinese cooks and servants were essential to a smooth domestic life. The Maxwells had “Charlie” (whatever his birth name was, Mrs. Maxwell thought it distasteful). He arrived at dawn or earlier each morning, in the dark, and stoked the fire in the range and boiled and strained the coffee, set up the dining room for breakfast, scrambled the eggs and fried the ham, shouted to the vegetable man Lam when his cart rolled in from the western truck farms. Charlie did everything diligently and cheaply, the cooking and pantry drudgery and the washing up, all day, until Mrs. Maxwell had her cup of tea sent up at ten each night.
In 1890 and still in 1900, Portland had the second largest Chinese settlement in the United States, smaller only than San Francisco’s. Before and after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, San Francisco and other West Coast cities saw white riots against the Chinese—Celestials, as they were known—and even bloody massacres. Until 1900, Portland was relatively hospitable to men from China, thanks to the political influence of elites like the Maxwells who depended on cheap Chinese labor.
Ships from Canton arrived often at the Portland docks, disgorging a trickle of men who slipped off, disappeared into the tenement buildings and gambling parlors along Second Avenue in Chinatown, and then surfaced to look for work. Elizabeth resolved to find a Chinese cook who did as well or better than the French drunks who stole from her and inevitably cut out.
With the Gladstone and the social blessings of the Maxwells, Elizabeth achieved a kind of respectability. She made the acquaintance of Clara Summers, a small, wrenlike woman with severely smoothed-back hair and wire spectacles. Her husband, General Owen Summers, was respected in business, politics, and the local militia. Clara had an air of privilege tempered with a blunt sense of humor bred on the Midwest prairie where she had been raised. Clara knew of a Chinese-born cook named Jue Let who might serve perfectly for the Gladstone.
Jue Let helped out in the kitchen of the Summers residence whenever Clara needed to throw a big party. A man of middle age, he cooked with skill and composure. Elizabeth took him on. He soaked up every recipe in her notebook.
Let hired an assistant cook, a man named Gin. Then came a pastry chef, Poy, whose hands and timing were so deft his puff pastry rose in the oven like a bellows slowly expanding to fill with air. Poy’s sweet, buttery tartlet shells had the delicate texture of crisply molded sand, implausibly holding their shape.
Clara showed Let how to make a properly gelatinous terrapin stew. It called for sherry and the diamondbacks’ livers and small intestine and eggs, if the cow turtle shipped to you happened to have any of the latter. (The reptiles had become fiercely expensive; by the mid-1890s, the wild ones, sent on the train from Savannah via New York, had been almost entirely fished out from the brackish marshes.) Terrapin meat simmered in stock until it relaxed to jelly, after which Clara made a liaison with chicken eggs and cream to thicken the poaching liquid. The addition of sherry both acidified and perfumed the rich sauce.
It was likely that Let already knew how to cook a turtle with rice whisky and medicinal roots and herbs, a traditional Cantonese tonic for health and longevity. Clara’s tutorial was on how to cook terrapin so it would be acceptable to white families—a dish in the canon of American food—though the tradition of cooking turtles in Guangdong, where Let came from, was far older and more complex than that of the American South.
And so the legend at the Gladstone became that the adept Jue Let learned from the wife of General Summers her secret for perfect terrapin stew. The dish did not find definition in Let’s skill so much as in Clara’s pedigree, and her kind patience in communicating what she knew. In truth, the Gladstone’s terrapin stew showed how Let, like other immigrant domestics in Portland, had learned to survive: by choosing not to challenge a narrative about his presumed ignorance.
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BY 1897, Elizabeth was attending services at Trinity Episcopal Church, a structure that appeared to be the work of Gothic forest gnomes: slender pointed arches and a spire-topped tower with a finial cross vaulting high above the canopy of red alders and bigleaf maples. Trinity’s parishioners were some of Portland’s oldest pioneers, those like Clara Summers, who boasted of her family’s journey along the Oregon Trail. Clara made it her mission to find a new husband for the widowed Mrs. Brennan.
Owen Summers was wiry and white-haired, with a mustache he displayed like an animal trophy, the ends waxed into tusklike points. As a young man in Illinois, Summers had fought with a Union cavalry regiment in the final months of the Civil War; later he fought the Sioux in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Eventually Summers settled in Portland, started a crockery business that made him rich, and scared up a volunteer militia that eventually would become the Oregon National Guard. As with most of Portland’s elite, his politics were Republican. Because of that, and since Summers knew the import market (especially Chinese porcelain), President Chester Arthur appointed him United States appraiser for the port of Portland, where most West Coast–bound ships from China docked.
In 1893, the general appointed a thirty-four-year-old assistant, a man who seemed capable enough and loyal, though lacking the kind of ambition that might pose a threat. Likewise a Republican, John Andrew Beard had enough political savvy to have been elected mayor of Lebanon, a flour-mill town in Linn County eighty miles south of Portland, though he was born in Scio, a village of sheep ranchers.
Clara came to see her husband’s assistant as a man assailed by tragedy, with a broken heart. In 1896, John lost his wife, Emma, and before that a daughter, Genevieve, though he had another who survived, thirteen-year-old Lucille. Clara sensed a perfect match: the solid, faithful John, so besieged by melancholy, and the lively widow Elizabeth. The charming Mrs. Brennan, fastidious in the running of her boardinghouse, and with a figure she showed off through fine corseting, would surely bring John happiness and comfort.
This seemed especially true since John always looked so rumpled and perspiring, with a stiff, too-small collar he wore in obvious agony. In theory, his mustache was as thick and commanding as General Summers’s, but it was limp and untrimmed, as Clara noticed when she had him for tea (not long after he started at the Custom House). It was a mustache easily glazed with milky tea and readily clotted with crumbs from her best seed cake. And for the hour he endured Clara’s company, with her ceaseless clucking about her pioneer ancestors and civic exertions, John had worn a serious and at times sour expression, as though it pained him to do anything else but think of his work. Clara knew he needed a woman’s graces, just as she knew that Elizabeth would blossom under the rigorous attentions of a good man.
Elizabeth still wanted a child. She was thirty-six; time was weighing on her. Clara happened to mention that John’s salary was $1,800, a plush yearly income—a figure that could give a couple some independence from one another. Perhaps Elizabeth could tolerate another husband after all.
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THE NEWSPAPER CALLED IT one of the prettiest weddings of the season, though that was part fawning, since there were notables from society and politics in attendance. At 9:30 on the morning of April 12, 1898, General Owen Summers, soon to leave with the Second Oregon Volunteer Infantry Regiment for the Philippines front in the Spanish-American War, walked Elizabeth down the aisle of Trinity Church to her waiting groom. Elizabeth’s matrons of honor were Clara Summers and Mrs. W. T. Gardner, a prominent committeewoman for the Boys and Girls Aid Society. The bride wore not some joyful flowery ensemble but rather a plain traveling suit. After the service, the new Mr. and Mrs. John Beard retired from the church to the organ strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” They honeymooned around Puget Sound and on a few islands in British Columbia and were back in Portland within two weeks. Elizabeth had far too much to do at home.
Even before the ceremony began, Elizabeth knew she was making a mistake.
John and Lucy Bird moved into the Gladstone. Their presence proved impossible for Elizabeth. The girl made petulant demands of the waitresses, things Elizabeth wouldn’t tolerate from a paying boarder. It turned out that John had eight blood siblings and as many half-brothers and half-sisters. Nearly all of them showed up at the Gladstone, a crush of Sarahs, Williams, Elvas, Marthas, Charleses, and Freds. They came to make wedding calls and sample the hospitality of the new Mrs. Beard. Elizabeth thought they were boors and yokels and ate like farmhands.
Lucy Bird demanded a new wardrobe of fourteen dresses. When she didn’t get her way, she “borrowed” a silk petticoat from Elizabeth’s room. When she walked out into the street, it slipped from her waist and dropped around her ankles. The mortified girl stepped out of it and hurried away. A friend of Elizabeth’s watched it happen. She retrieved the crumple of taffeta and returned it to the Gladstone. For Elizabeth, it was the final outrage. Less than a year after her wedding, and only three years after she opened it, Elizabeth put the Gladstone up for sale.
Besides Elizabeth’s frustrations with her new husband, by 1899 the Gladstone’s neighborhood had become more competitive than ever for boardinghouses. Mrs. Curtis became fierce competition after she and a partner leased the Hill-Ton and renamed it the Hobart-Curtis. The handsome Romanesque highrise boasted an elevator and a wide front lawn, a chandeliered dining room looking onto the trees and mansion turrets of Vista Ridge, and Mrs. Curtis’s signature fine board. Next to all that, the Gladstone seemed old-fashioned and small.
Elizabeth found buyers for the Gladstone: Mrs. Cornell and Miss Murphy. Perfectly pleasant ladies, Elizabeth noted with satisfaction, though completely in over their heads. Jue Let quit. He told Elizabeth he’d work for her again anytime she might need him, though because he refused to tell her exactly where he lived, she would have to leave word for him in Chinatown.
John, Elizabeth, and Lucy Bird took an apartment on Main Street near Fifth, not far from John’s office. It was close, too, to Chapman Square, a park reserved for women and children, next to men-only Lownsdale Park. (The gender segregation, intended to ensure propriety between the sexes in a frontier town, dated to the 1850s, when the parks opened.) Suddenly with no occupation, save the unpleasant one of raising Lucille, Elizabeth was lost. That fall, she walked in the square with her umbrella, dodging rain, nodding to women, and watching the park’s exclusively female gingko trees turn spectacularly golden. She pondered what might come next.
“I’m going to build a house,” Elizabeth announced to John one evening. “You may live in it, but we’re independent.” She would repair her mistake in becoming Mrs. Beard by carving out a life for herself within the confines of her marriage.
Meanwhile, Portland’s eastward sprawl was expanding. The city had annexed the town east of the Willamette River in 1891, and the Morrison Bridge had been free of tolls since 1895. There was money to be made in buying and reselling land across the river. With Mr. Maxwell (now a real estate speculator) to guide them, and with the profit from unloading the Gladstone, Elizabeth began to buy up empty lots, ten acres in all. She bought on the east side near Belmont Park; north, where the Columbia merged with the Willamette, in St. Johns; and far out in the southeast suburbs beyond Mount Tabor.
In the spring of 1900, Elizabeth began to sell. John’s younger brother Fred bought some of Elizabeth’s lots, and with John as his partner, he built rental cottages.
But there were four small adjacent lots in Hawthorne Park that Elizabeth didn’t sell. They were on East Salmon Street at the corner of Twenty-Second, behind a row of curbside saplings. They faced south along a gentle rise, with plenty of air and light. Elizabeth must have pictured the house she would build here, the garden she could plant and manage with the efficiency and bravado she’d exercised at the Gladstone. She could hire Let to be the family cook. She could host ladies’-committee teas and invite Clara and Mrs. Gardner—with the proper arrangements, even Stella might visit and sit in the shade of the arbor Elizabeth imagined she’d build and nurture. It would be a proper house for raising a child.
And so, on May 5, 1903, Elizabeth’s red, round, thirteen-pound baby wailed his first cries in her room in the comfortable and rangy, shake-covered bungalow she built on Salmon Street, with a separate bedroom for John.