CHAPTER 4

Time Out

1933–1937

For there is no friend like a sister.

—Christina Rossetti

IN THE SPRING OF 1933 Grace Frick returned to a Kansas City that was under the control of Tom Pendergast’s political machine. According to an online political exhibit of the University of Missouri, “Louisiana had Huey Long, New York had Tammany Hall, and Chicago had Daly, but for sheer gall, guts, and greed, no town could match the political machinations of Kansas City’s Thomas J. “Boss Tom” Pendergast. From honest hard-working ward heelers to ruthless office seekers, Pendergast held the city’s political players in the palm of his hand for nearly two decades.”1 Tom had come to Kansas City from St. Joseph, Missouri, in the late nineteenth century to join his brother James “Big Jim” Pendergast, a saloon owner and political strongman, and Tom initially enriched himself in the liquor trade by setting up gambling establishments.² After Big Jim’s death, he was elected to his brother’s former seat on the city council. Jim’s political organization grew increasingly powerful, and increasingly corrupt, under Boss Tom’s stewardship. Like many machine politicians, Pendergast traded jobs for favors, rigged elections, rewarded the loyal, and punished those who crossed him. Though he did not enrich himself by dipping directly into city coffers, the influence that he exercised over elections, bond issues, and city officials brought many a lucrative contract to businesses he owned. While the rest of the nation struggled under the weight of the Depression in the early 1930s, Kansas City built a new county courthouse, city hall, police headquarters, and a municipal auditorium using Pendergast materials.

Upon her return, Grace joined the National Youth Movement, an independent organization of young, college-educated citizens formed to oust the Pendergast machine.³ For two years she served as the group’s subchairman in the Eighth Ward.4 Their effort failed in 1934, when four people were killed and several injured in polling place violence.⁵ Two years later sixty thousand “ghosts” registered to vote in Kansas City, handing Pendergast another triumph.⁶

It was during the bloody election of 1934 that Grace had a personal run-in with Pendergast’s minions. She had driven to the polling place, eager to vote against the slate of Boss Tom’s loyalists. Always attuned to what was going on around her, Grace suddenly realized that the man ahead of her in line was attempting to pass himself off as a neighbor of the LaRues who had died the previous year. In other words, he was putting into practice the proverbial recommendation of machine politicians to “vote early and often.” Grace could not keep quiet in the face of what she knew to be an act of fraud. Challenging the voter’s false identity, she promptly found herself escorted from the polling place by local police. Given the unprecedented level of election-related violence that day, things could have gone a lot worse. But Grace would never forget what it felt like to realize that the very officers responsible for ensuring her safety and protecting her rights as a citizen were cogs in the Pendergast machine.⁷

Like all machines, Pendergast’s eventually broke down. And women ran the campaign to destroy it. Many businessmen did not dare oppose Pendergast for fear of never getting another government contract. Women, however, could fly under the radar. They handed out cookies at the polls along with leaflets supporting reformers. They pinned little brooms to their dresses, symbolizing their desire to sweep the city clean of political corruption. (Some of the crusaders arrived at the polls with real brooms!) In April of 1940, operation “clean sweep” finally succeeded, as the Kansas City Star put it, in giving Pendergast and his candidates “the bum’s rush.”⁸ Nearly three hundred election workers and Pendergast lieutenants were tried for election rigging and related charges. Not one was acquitted. Boss Tom himself went to prison for income tax evasion.⁹ His hold on Kansas City had finally been broken.

Meanwhile, things had taken an unexpected turn in the LaRue household. Grace’s cousin Nancy Gallagher had graduated from Notre Dame de Sion High School in Kansas City in June of 1931.¹⁰

The Sion order was founded in Paris by a Jewish convert to Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century. Its distinctive early commitment was then, as it still is today, to “make no distinction between Latin and Greek, Moslem and Jew.”11 When the Sisters of Sion built their first campus on Locust Street in 1929, their establishment was considered a “school for the daughters of the area’s elite families.”¹² It is still flourishing today.

The LaRues were Presbyterians, and Uncle George had served for many years as a trustee of Kansas City’s Second Presbyterian Church.¹³ Nancy and Grace were both brought up Protestant, but Nancy’s father was Catholic, and Nancy had originally been baptized in that religion.¹⁴ The year after her high school graduation, Nancy decided to become a Catholic nun. She entered the novitiate in September of 1932 at the mother house of the Sisters of Sion at 61 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Paris.¹⁵ Frick at the time was beginning a challenging semester at Yale. Nancy’s departure was frowned on by all the members of her family, but the young woman had just turned twenty-one, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her.

Nancy made the transition from the postulancy into the novitiate on May 14, 1933. In that era, novices of Notre Dame de Sion were required to give up their given and family names and take new names to express their new identities. It was customary to choose a religious name in honor of a saint or family member, and the Sisters of Sion traditionally included Mary in their names. Nancy seems to have chosen to honor her father, John Gallagher, in calling herself Sister Marie Yann. By the time she entered the religious life in 1932, Gallagher had died.16 Since names containing John were popular because of John the Baptist, Yann, a Breton equivalent, may have been the only available expedient.¹⁷

The family estrangement must have been hard for both Grace and Nancy after Nancy took the veil. The two girls had grown close during the summer of 1918, when their mothers, May and Cora, were dying. In mid-1934 the LaRues decided that the time had come to heal the family rift. Their younger niece had been away for nearly two years and showed no signs of abandoning her vocation, so they made a plan to visit her with Grace. Aunt Dolly LaRue left for France in July, stopping in Italy and Switzerland en route. Grace and Uncle George sailed to France together on the SS Bremen, leaving New York on August 4 for the six-day crossing. On arriving in Cherbourg, Grace and her uncle boarded the boat train to Paris, where they took rooms at the small but upscale Hôtel Wagram. An artifact from that time preserved now at Petite Plaisance suggests that Grace and Unk had originally planned to stay at the Hôtel Claridge, where Grace may have gone with Phyllis Bartlett in 1928. It is a postcard featuring a photograph of the Claridge overlooking Sunday strollers on a wide, pedestrian-only stretch of the Champs-Élysées. On the back Grace had jotted down the names of four other fashionable hotels. First on the list is “Hôtel Wagram, 208 Rue de Rivoli,” and next to it the phonetic pronunciation “Vogram,” for use by a still timid French speaker in a Parisian taxicab.18 After a short stay in Paris, Grace and her uncle joined Dolly at Évry-Petit-Bourg in the French countryside between Paris and Fontainebleau.¹⁹ Sister Yann was on retreat there at Sion’s Grandbourg Convent with her fellow novices, who would make their first vows in the fall.²⁰

With the family duly reconciled, Dolly, George, and Grace returned to Paris for another brief stay at the Hôtel Wagram before going their separate ways. George left for New York and Kansas City on August 21. Dolly took a side trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, then followed her husband back home. Grace visited Oxford again, then stayed long enough in London to do “a bit of study” at the British Museum and attend a performance of Alfred Sangster’s The Brontës at the Piccadilly Theatre.²¹ Her next stop was Cologne, Germany, a city whose nineteenth-century tensions between Roman Catholics and Prussian Protestants cast an ironic reflection on the LaRue family rupture that had just been set right. This was Grace’s first visit to the country of her German ancestors, though she did not travel to Salzwedel. But she did go from Cologne down the Rhine, staying at youth hostels along the way—quite a change of pace from the likes of the Claridge or the Hôtel Wagram.

Dolly LaRue’s youngest sister, Georgia—known to Grace as Aunt George—was also in Europe at this time. Then in her midfifties, Georgia was sometimes called the femme fatale of the Self family for her good looks and flirtatious nature. Grace met her in Munich in September. From there the two women traveled to Vienna, where Grace, a music lover, remained a bit longer than her aunt before returning to France. The two met up again in Paris and left for the United States together on October 10 aboard the SS Île de France, with its four-deck-high Grand Foyer.

No one knows how much progress Grace had made on “The Early Poetry of George Meredith” during the year off from school that she was supposed to be devoting to her dissertation. But she wanted to return to Yale that fall and put her nose to the grindstone. Instead of heading west with Aunt George, Grace stayed in New York, where Ruth Hall had an apartment. Ruth had been hired by a leading law firm in that city, Sullivan and Cromwell, and had been working there for three years. Both women were looking forward to Grace being nearby in New Haven again.

That agreeable prospect was not to be realized, however. No sooner had Grace caught her breath in New York than a telegram arrived from Kansas City announcing that George “Unk” LaRue had had a stroke and was gravely ill. There would now be no question of returning to Yale. Grace left for home on the next train.22

George LaRue’s health only worsened over the next several months; in June of 1935 Grace wrote in her chronology, “Unk at very lowest point.” The years that followed were neither productive nor pleasant for Grace. Things got so bad that on one alumni report she listed her occupation as “nursing”!²³

Grace did participate in the Kansas City Wellesley Club in the 1930s, where she worked on the scholarship and fund-raising committees. But despite her fond attachment to her alma mater, she did not attend her tenth reunion, held in June of 1935. One of her British friends, Margaret Bottrall, who had been at Yale with Frick as a Hartness Commonwealth Scholar, sent her a long, detailed letter in late 1934 about her recent marriage and exciting relocation with her professor husband to Singapore.²⁴ Grace, meanwhile, was treading water.

Across the ocean Cousin Nancy had taken her first vows at the mother house of Notre Dame de Sion in November of 1934. Shortly thereafter she was sent to Bayswater, England, to train as a teacher. In the fall of 1935, according to archival records, she began to develop lung problems and was sent back to France, to the Sion house at Issy-les-Moulineaux, just southwest of Paris, which was “reserved for invalids of the congregation.” The Bayswater house journal recorded “with affection the departure of Sr. Yann from the community.”²⁵

Grace’s version of what happened to her cousin is reminiscent of what she recalled about the onset of her mother’s fatal illness back in Kansas City. Sister Yann, said Grace years later, “caught a terrible cold in a good drenching rain on a picnic and got TB.”²⁶ Whether that rainy picnic was the culprit or not, Sister Yann did indeed have tuberculosis. Not until 1944, with the discovery of streptomycin, was there a reliable cure for what had long been the world’s most lethal contagious disease.²⁷

As an early 1937 Sionian letter from the mother house in Paris reported, when Sister Yann had arrived at Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1935 she was “already very ill but still able to share in community life, which she held to very much because she had an ardent nature, faithful to the teachings that she received in the novitiate. . . . Twice she went to the hospital, which was a real trial for her because she had one desire: to remain with her religious family.”²⁸ By early January 1937 Sister Yann’s condition was critical. Uncle George, having only partially recovered from his own grave illness, dispatched Grace to France to do whatever could be done for her cousin.

Grace arrived in Paris on February 4, 1937. The next morning she made the short trip to the Sion house at 11 rue Jules Guesde in Issy. Sister Yann’s doctor also came to see his patient that day. The ailing young nun was on her deathbed but alert and able, to Grace’s great relief, to communicate with her cousin. Every available treatment had been tried in vain. After Sister Yann returned from her second stay at the American Hospital, “she received Extreme Unction with great fervour, although she kept hope until the end that a cure was possible.” Two days later, at the age of twenty-five, “dear little Sister Yann died. Miss Frick had just arrived and thus was present for her final moments.”29 Grace spent that day with the sisters at Issy, meeting with a Dr. Blanchart late that afternoon.

As the Sionion letter concluded about Sister Marie Yann,

 

The good Lord himself gave her a great joy. On the eve of her death a cousin that she loved as a sister arrived from America just in time to embrace her. She was a witness to her happiness, while remaining perfectly religious, because her illness made her grow in the love of God. A complaint never left her lips and she had multiplied her sacrifices for the intentions of the Congregation, especially for Kansas City and the Mothers who helped her in her vocation. She was able to communicate until her last day, Sunday, 7 February, and fell asleep as a child in the arms of the Virgin of Sion.³⁰

 

Sister Yann’s corpse was laid in its coffin at dawn on February 9. At eight o’clock the same morning Grace Frick arrived at Issy-les-Moulineaux for her cousin’s funeral mass, which was held in an ancillary chapel there. Mother Théotime rode with Grace in the latter’s automobile to the nearby cemetery where Sister Yann would be buried. Though it had rained all night, the storm had given way to an unexpectedly beautiful morning.³¹

Over the following few days, Grace made two more trips back to Issy. On February 11 she met with a Dr. Fareil, who had been involved in Sister Yann’s care. Three days later, “visit of Miss Frick” is the sole entry in the Issy house journal. On March 8 Grace attended a requiem mass in memory of Sister Yann at Issy-les-Moulineaux.³² Back in Missouri, a similar mass for the former Grace Marian “Nancy” Gallagher was held two days later.³³

One friend of the LaRues and their niece in Kansas City wrote a long, mournful letter to Grace shortly after Nancy’s death. Emily Sophian had graduated from Notre Dame de Sion High School in 1930, a year ahead of Nancy Gallagher.34 She had known Nancy well and was devastated by her death:

 

Dearest Grace—

How good you were to write me! I wanted so much to hear from you that I was almost afraid to hope. And your letter was wonderful. It told me so much I wanted—needed—to know, and although, inevitably, it hurt badly, it helped too a great deal as you must have known it would. I deeply appreciate your getting the bed jacket and flowers for her. You spent the money just as I had hoped you would and exactly as I would have myself had I been able to be there. I’m so glad too that you got the watch. It’s the one thing I wanted. I feel very much in your debt and thank you for everything with all my heart.

In spite of the fact that I was prepared for it, the news of Nancy’s death came as a terrific shock. It left me with a sense of loss intensified rather than lessened by the fact that I felt that I was losing her for the second time. My reaction when she entered the convent was one of such extreme bitterness that I felt for a long time as though I had been robbed of a friend whom I needed and loved above all else and toward whom I never expected to feel the same again. With the gradual passing of the worst of that bitterness came naturally the return of all the friendship I had ever felt for her but it was tinged with an unreality and remoteness that her being a nun made inevitable.³⁵

 

Sophian was incensed by the Sions’ Catholic platitudes about her friend’s death, and she knew Frick would share the feeling. “I can readily imagine what an ordeal this whole thing has been for you,” she said, “and hope that the rest of your trip will compensate for it to some extent.”³⁶

On April 8, 1937, the Sisters of Sion at Issy-les-Moulineaux received a substantial check from Dolly LaRue “for the community.”³⁷ It represented the proceeds of a life insurance policy that the LaRues had taken out on their niece. As for Emily Sophian’s hope that the rest of Grace’s trip to France would compensate “to some extent” for the ordeal with which it began, one is tempted to call it the understatement of the century.