UNFORTUNATELY AND PERHAPS PREDICTABLY, no sooner were the Pattersons reassembled back in Chicago than their marriage resumed its muddled course, though with one seeming improvement, and not a small one either, noted by Alice in a letter to her mother-in-law. “I seldom see J until past the dinner hour,” she wrote, “but at least he is in good spirits and clear of eye.” Since many of their recent problems had been attributed to Joe’s fondness for stopping off at a bar or hotel or one of his clubs for the proverbial drink with friends, which then sometimes led who knew where, the part about being “clear of eye” at least seemed partial good news. It also might have struck Alice as a positive development that her husband, who not that long ago was writing editorials for a socialist paper and associating with Reds, had apparently found a place for his interests and energy at the family Tribune; where he had a small office, down a corridor from the newsroom, in which he put together the Sunday edition, with the help of his secretary, a young Irish Catholic woman called Mary King, whom he had inherited from a departing executive and once described to Alice as “extremely efficient, with plenty of good ideas of her own.”
But this is Alicia’s story, and at the time she knew little of any of these matters beyond the facts—facts as they seemed to her—that on the one hand her father, who had seemed so jolly and close at hand in Germany, was now again so distant as to be nearly invisible, and that her mother, who was usually all too visible though never exactly close, had lately spoiled everything by putting her in school with Elinor. Could anything be worse? It turned out that yes, it could. Mother was pregnant; of course not a word anyone would use in front of the children. The stork, it was explained, would soon be flying in with a baby brother to be named Joseph, though probably he could be called Joe.
One month before the stork’s arrival, the girls were sent down on the train to their grandmother’s house on Dupont Circle, accompanied by yet another governess and instructions to be good and mind their manners. Since goodness and manners minding were skills at which Elinor excelled, this was not likely to be a problem, even at Dupont Circle, where there were many precious objects to be careful about and rules to be observed. Indeed, Nellie Patterson was quick to write Alice of her gratitude for the presence of her granddaughters, although mentioning only one of them, Elinor, whose sweetness and amiable deportment were apparently equaled only by her beauty. Seven-year-old Alicia was not unnoticed, however, swiftly becoming the bad child, refusing to heed Mam’selle or any of the domestics or even Grams, not only with hair permanently unbrushed, dirty hands at table, in fact no discernible table manners at all, as her grandmother reported, but also with somewhat criminal or at least delinquent tendencies: using a pillow to toboggan down the broad marble banisters, hiding in the dumbwaiter, assaulting the chandeliers in imaginative ways. Things were no better on returning to Chicago, to the house on Bank Street, which the stork had obviously visited, though perhaps carelessly, depositing baby Josephine in the crib intended for baby Joseph. Predictably Elinor smoothly glided into the charming role of “Little Mother,” earning coos of approval from the real mother, whereas Alicia, not so long ago the reigning “Baby,” descended into tears and tantrums at any, or even at no, provocation. Worse still, she took her new persona to school, the relatively accommodating and progressive Francis Parker School, causing the headmistress to write Mr. and Mrs. Patterson one of those grimly polite and dreadful letters, suggesting that “Miss Alicia” might be better served at “an institution with greater structure” than her own.
Thus, with the usual inconveniences associated with such rearrangements, and in the middle of the school year, too, late in January 1914, Miss Alicia was transferred from Francis Parker to the more regimented University School on Lakeshore Drive. Roughly one month later, on February 20, with probably less outward signs of disturbance, Patterson himself left, the first in a sequence of departures, bound this time for Houston, Texas, and then on to Veracruz, Mexico. Houston was the assembly point for a U.S. Navy battle squadron as it prepared to attack—on the orders of President Woodrow Wilson—a force of some eighteen hundred Mexican “insurrectionists” who were in fact troops belonging to the sitting Mexican government (of which we disapproved), who currently held the post office and several waterfront warehouses on the Gulf of Mexico at Veracruz. In due course, after the arrival of navy cruisers off the Mexican port, the Mexican soldiers were impressively dislodged from post office as well as warehouses by eight or maybe ten shells, and then by the much-photographed wading ashore of two companies of U.S. Marines; which more or less constituted the Battle of Veracruz, after which a patriotic U.S. Congress handed out a total of fifty-two Congressional Medals of Honor—about half as many as were awarded in all of World War II.
As to why the presence of the Sunday editor of the Chicago Tribune was personally needed at such a faraway adventure, Patterson’s first dispatches to the paper were prefaced with a note from “The Editors,” explaining that their Veracruz correspondent was “a veteran reporter who in his present position as editor of the Sunday department is also leading The Tribune’s pioneering newsreel camera crew in pursuit of motion-picture news opportunities.” It was certainly true enough that Joe Patterson was an early appreciator of film, movies, motion pictures in general, and that the Tribune’s newsreel teams were among the first and best in the business. But there was truth of another kind in baby Josephine’s observations, years later as a grown woman, that “Poppa pretty much walked out the door after learning I wasn’t a boy. It was a time when the roof started to fall in on all of us.”