WHEN ALICIA’S FATHER—eleven months at the front, with gas-scarred lungs and a Distinguished Service Medal—returned to Chicago on December 20, 1918, it was a moment she remembered all her life. A cold, bright morning, with the four Patterson females, mother and three daughters, in their winter coats and hats, waiting in cavernous Union Station for the overnight from New York. The train was hours late, which only added to the strain and excitement of the moment, but then there he was, walking down the platform in his army greatcoat. “Big as ever,” as Alicia recalled it, “but older, weathered, and with a limp in one leg where he said he had been kicked by a supply mule. Mother lately seemed to have acquired this wry little smile, one side of her mouth turned down, and she had on that little smile just then. As I remember it, at one point he said ‘I got really scared over there,’ as if, I thought later, trying to share something with us, or at least with her, from the dark places he’d been to, and mother coolly saying ‘Joe, I thought nothing scared you,’ just throwing it right back. But we had a glorious Christmas that year, I think maybe the best ever, with a big tree and colored glass balls….Poppa brought a new Caruso record for mother, also a new Victrola to play it on, and perhaps to balance-out Caruso he came home one afternoon with a large, green, squawking and cursing parrot.” But then three weeks later, in January, right after New Year’s, he was off again.
Back to New York was where he said he was going, and “on Tribune business” was pretty much all he told them about it. “It was just dreadful when he went right off again,” Alicia remembered. “I begged and pleaded, and it felt like we were all crying, all over the house, but I think it was mostly me. Mother was just quiet and cold, and I don’t know what was going on with Elinor.” In due course it would turn out that Patterson’s extended sojourns in New York were for the purposes of launching a new newspaper, his own tabloid, which first appeared in May 1919 as the Illustrated Daily News. It was printed on rented presses in Lower Manhattan and, though financed by the Chicago Tribune, was viewed by Tribune trustees as a small, speculative venture almost certain to lose money; indeed Patterson’s mother and aunt Kate had only reluctantly agreed to put up the money because they’d been assured by their advisers that it would generate useful tax losses. Of course, the way matters evolved, more or less from that time on, with the nearly instantaneous success of the Daily News, Joe Patterson vanished as a regular parent; perhaps not exactly vanished, because he would reappear constantly, back and forth between New York and Chicago, though from his family’s perspective mostly forth. But after early 1919, he was gone, no longer really there, in the kind of fundamental way that if you were a child, you knew something was truly different, that one kind of life had stopped and another had started, even if none of the grown-ups would tell you what kind of life that might be.
As for Alicia in those days, there remains an April 1919 letter from Patterson to his mother, trying his best to make things sound as if her grandchildren’s lives were normal, even prospering. “All are doing very well,” he blithely wrote. “Elinor is sometimes a bit moody as befits her age, but you will be pleased to know that Alicia has turned a corner, passing her exams or most of them, and seems to be coming into her own as an equestrienne. Mr. Rasmussen, the riding teacher, says she is the best young rider he has seen, not scared of anything. One tough kid, if you ask me.” At the time, at least among families who could afford it, almost everyone could ride, could sit or handle a horse correctly, as Alice Patterson and certainly Elinor could do. But few females then rode athletically or embraced riding as a sport, with its immediate and unladylike risks—the jumps, the falls, the bruises and breaks. Patterson was an athletic horseman himself, in his own fashion; an enthusiastic polo player who could also ride to hounds, not graceful but fearless and fond of taking chances. Would it after all be such a surprise if his second daughter, the one who was not an American Beauty rose, who was not naturally cool and self-contained like her mother and older sister, might conceivably, for no reason at all, begin developing an identity in which fearlessness and risk taking were paramount, where being a tough kid was a goal to play for?
There is a saying about time healing all wounds, which like most such sayings is probably true enough except when it isn’t. Time at any rate was surely moving faster and to better purpose just then for Joseph Patterson, whose Daily News with its splashy photos of actresses and gangsters, its “ordinary guy” approach to sports and sports heroes, its “new woman’s” regard for homemaking practicalities was selling more copies almost day by day, than for the quartet of Patterson females left by the hearth in Chicago. In point of fact Alicia was not doing well at school or even well enough; she had turned no corners academically. But she could and did throw herself into horseback activities, both at Mr. Rasmussen’s riding academy in town (located where the John Hancock Tower now stands) and out in Libertyville. And she lived for the periodic, all-too-brief, inevitably disruptive reappearances of her father in their seemingly abandoned Bank Street house, materializing out of the distant jazzy grandeur of New York, with his gruff and sometimes goofy manner, his pretending not to notice Mother’s disapproval, and most of all for the sense he gave her of someone who—despite his overt and courtly attentions to Elinor and little Josephine—basically “got” her the way no one else did, where nothing more needed to be said about it.
BUT THEN AS ONE YEAR rolled into the next, as the strange new rhythms of the diminished household settled almost into routine, everything shifted once again. Father didn’t show up for a long time, and then he was in and out of the house, and without his usual leather valise, as if he were staying somewhere else. Mother too seemed in a new phase, often out of the house herself, and when she was in she was even less fun than usual, not infrequently in the company of Aunt Florence, she of the dramatic hats and loud reedy voice echoing through the downstairs rooms, proffering advice (as was her habit) on anything and everything. The truth of the matter was that, if there now seemed to be an inchoate and unspoken feeling in the air at Bank Street of another shoe having somehow dropped, it was probably because one had; perhaps nothing so satisfyingly tangible as a shoe, perhaps something more in the nature of rumor, gossip, smoke, though the kind of smoke that all too often indicates a fire.
The rumor, gossip, smoke in question, not to be too metaphoric about it, were reports of varying substance and detail blowing in from the East, such as had lately reached even the wife-is-the-last-to-know ears of Alice Patterson, to the effect that her husband, in moving to New York, had acquired not only another paper but another woman. Ironically, as well as perhaps puzzlingly to those who didn’t know him, the alleged usurper was in most ways the opposite of what Alice might have expected: some dazzling sophisticate from the fleshpots of Gotham. In fact she had a name, and besides we have already met her: Mary S. King, his now thirty-one-year-old former secretary at the Tribune’s Sunday department, lately moved to New York as assistant editor at the Daily News and now Patterson’s second in command and apparently much else besides.
Of course none of this marital mess was revealed to the children, either talked about with them or even mentioned in their presence. Alice Patterson was at heart too disbelieving of the situation, also much too pained to take action. Her big sister, Florence, however, was not one to take such matters lying down, or in this instance to let her younger sister lie about passively, feeling sorry for herself. Accordingly, in October 1921, more than a month into the school year, Elinor and Alicia were suddenly yanked out of the University School, and with trunks and suitcases packed by Mother in a flurry of tissue paper and tears, with Josephine and her nanny in the rear, with Mother pulling them along from the front, they made still another transatlantic escape to the supposedly soothing environment of Europe: first a week of shopping and museum trudging in Paris; then off to Switzerland and the sedate correctness of Lausanne, where the two older girls were boarded at Mme. Gautier’s École Internationale, to resume their schooling. Alicia hated everything about the new arrangements from the start: certainly prim Mme. Gautier herself, most of her equally prissy fellow students, then the tragic lack of riding (for herself, that is, since she or somebody had forgotten to pack her riding stuff), and perhaps most of all the farawayness of her father. She wrote him incessantly, detailing her loneliness, making jokes about Mme. Gautier, begging him to come and rescue her, and of course reminding him to be sure to bring her riding gear when he came to join them at Christmas. But come Christmas break, he never showed, eventually replying to her distraught letters with a confusingly self-pitying letter of his own: “Dear Alicia, you bet I miss you too…besides, for your information, you are practically the only person anywhere who is writing to me now. I think Josephine quit writing when she changed nannies, and Elinor stopped writing for some other reason, ditto mother.” When school resumed at the École Internationale, Alicia was once again in constant trouble. She wrote her father that “Mother now is threatening to stay in Europe for another year,” and vowed that she herself would “stow away on a ship” to get back to him. When nothing else appeared to work, she climbed out of her dormitory window after curfew and escaped briefly into town, causing the headmistress finally to expel her. But Mother was still in no mood to return to the all-too-American Midwest, and instead moved everyone to England, to a country inn at Stratford-on-Avon, there to obtain the benefits of a six-week Shakespeare festival.
THE LITTLE GROUP CAME BACK to America in mid-September 1922, with Patterson there to meet them on the New Jersey docks: perhaps not a great reunion, since his jaw was almost swollen shut from an abcessed tooth, and from that or other causes he seemed especially distracted, though probably better than none. He stayed long enough to escort them across the Hudson and see them into a hotel, but then he was gone; and then suddenly, as it were, Mother, Elinor and Josephine were also gone, or about to get on a train back to Chicago; and Alicia was now on another train, heading south to Baltimore, from which city arrangements had been made by Nellie Patterson for her to be met at the station and then driven out to St. Timothy’s School for Girls, where (the school year having already started) she had been enrolled in the fourth form, or tenth grade. In days to come she received a letter from her mother, back in Chicago, combining advice as well as uplift: “Make up your mind that you are going to like everything and that people are going to like you, and you will see that they will. But if they see you whimpering and wearing that bleak and angry expression you get when things do not go your way, I am afraid your schoolmates will decide that you are not a good sport. So try to be sweet and polite always. It is not so hard as all that, and believe me it pays. And remember, it is not how someone else behaves to you that matters, it is how you behave towards them. Love, Mother.”
Her father went down to visit in October and reported back to Alice: “Alicia seems to be doing all right, but I can’t help but notice that she has already collected a whole bunch of new bruises and scars….The fact is, I never saw such a child for damaging herself. Her latest achievement was to slide down a rope fire-escape from an upper story, in some way losing her grip so the rope burned through her fingers almost to the bone.” Alicia hung on at snooty, snobby “St. Tim’s” almost to the end of the year. But her grades were poor and not improving, and her disposition for rule breaking was not showing any signs of true repentance. The final straw, it appears, was the discovery in her footlocker of a copy of Anna Karenina, at the time prominent on the school’s list of forbidden books because of its scandalous subject matter, and perhaps characteristically (though unknowingly) sent to her from fellow troublemaker, and Tolstoy enthusiast, Poppa Joe Patterson. And once again she was out.