Fighting for Life Read online

  Whether in town or country things were simply and generously managed in my world. The whole family were always going on visits into the country, old-fashioned, pre-commuter Dutchess County country, perhaps to a relative’s house, perhaps to that of a prosperous farmer who was a client of Father’s. The home was always a lovely old place and completely innocent of heating in the bedrooms. The family were usually realists and slept in woolen sheets all winter. But, winter or not, we city folks, who also were guests of honor, had beautiful home-woven linen sheets on our beds and froze to death in consequence. It was worth it, however, in view of the breakfast you would get after arising and dressing with your breath smoking in front of you. You breakfasted in the comfortable great kitchen, cheek by jowl with the huge Dutch oven where the bread was baked and all the other cooking done over the roaring fire; breakfasted on huge bowls of oatmeal, ham and eggs, sausages, pork chops, steak, fried potatoes, stacks of hot biscuits and mounds of griddle cakes. Those breakfasts are among my most vivid childhood memories and I cannot today pass the old Perkins place on the South Road without a nostalgic feeling for the wholly lovely week ends I have spent there. There’s no denying it, children are greedy little things and to make an impression on their stomachs is the surest way to be remembered.

  At appropriate seasons, in town, there were candy-pulls, more formal luncheons, dances galore with the fast and swooping waltzes, the polka and the redowa, for dancing was active exercise in those days. We had many cotillions then with gay favors, cotillions which we began in our dancing-school days and I kept up until I left home. There were the gay balls which followed the annual visits of the Yale or Harvard or Amherst College Glee Club to our town. One of my loveliest remembrances is of the year when I was lame and the entire Amherst Glee Club came up to our house in the afternoon and gave me, as sole audience, their entire program of the evening’s concert to which I couldn’t go. In the summer, in later years, there was tennis; I became a fairly acceptable player and won many tournaments in the Hudson River towns. I do not mean that all this happened when I was a child. It is all mixed up in my memory for, until I was seventeen, the world was a unit with no gaps or turning points. It all seems very hectic and gay as I look back upon it.

  Of course I can find a few special characteristics creeping out, if I look for them. Trying to make it up to Father for being a girl, which went right on even after the next arrival delighted the household by being a boy, did turn me into a tomboy type in the early days. I was an enthusiastic baseball player and trout-fisher and still like both of these amusements fifty years later. My pet reading was neither Elsie Dinsmore nor fairy stories, but the classic stories of Horatio Alger, Jr., and Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus as it appeared in that lovable old magazine, Harper’s Young People. The circus was very important in my life. The night before the circus came to town, my brother and I always went to bed with strings tied to our toes and dangling out of the windows. Our confederate was the local Poughkeepsie bad boy, whom we were forbidden to know and whom, in consequence, we cultivated on every possible occasion. As soon as the circus arrived, he ran to our house and jerked the strings. We got up, dressed and crept out and went down to the circus lot where they were unloading elephants and erecting tents with shouting and heaving on ropes and hammering in stakes with smashing sledge hammers, all in the weird, savage light of kerosene flares. Then, so dazzled and excited we felt a little sick, back we stole just as it was getting light, undressed and got back into bed in time to be summoned from below: “Children! Get up at once or you will be late for school!” Lots of Poughkeepsie youngsters would be unaccountably drowsy in school on circus day, but they were all boys except me. And for weeks after the circus left my brother and I did nothing but play at being “Mademoiselle Jeannette and Monsieur Ajax, the World’s Most Graceful and Daring Aerial Artistes” on the trapeze in our play-house.

  My brother and I also collaborated in the manufacture and use of tick-tacks, particularly for the stirring up of two rather timid middle-aged ladies who lived next door. Our style of tick-tack consisted of a long cord, a small pebble and a pin. You put the pin in the window sash so the pebble dangled against the pane and then stood far off and gently twitched the other end of the cord, which made the pebble rap insistently on the glass—tap-tap-tap . . . tap-tap-tap . . . until the frightened ladies roused up, the gas was lighted, and quavering voices were heard: “Who’s there?” As soon as there was any risk of detection, you gave a hearty tug on the cord, which pulled out the pin and removed all traces of the crime. Occasionally we moved farther afield and stirred up other mystified households.

  Tick-tacks were not, however, part of our Hallowe’en program. Hallowe’en was just a matter of parties where you bobbed for apples and walked backward down the cellar-stairs looking into a mirror for a possible glimpse of your future husband—for girls anyway. The boys were apparently more active, since the horse-block, which then stood in front of every house with the householder’s name carved on it like a tombstone, was usually found next morning overturned into the gutter and a good many gates would be temporarily missing. I always had the impression that part of Father’s and Mother’s idea in giving us Hallowe’en parties was to keep us in the house and out of mischief. We did not wear funny costumes on Hallowe’en, however. That was the custom at Thanksgiving when we dressed ourselves in Mother’s clothes and went to call on our neighbors. Youngsters had little to do with New Year’s except to stay at home in their best clothes and make raids on the sandwiches and cakes which surrounded the open-house punch bowl. Everyone kept open house on New Year’s Day; the ladies stayed at home and “received” and the gentlemen paid calls to all the ladies they knew. A fine old-fashioned custom that called for a steady head. By the time a widely acquainted bachelor had paid thirty or forty calls and drunk a cup of punch to a happy New Year for the household at every port of call, he was likely to be precariously merry and need a good deal of expert steering. I will say for the credit of our visitors, however, that relatively few of them ever disgraced the dignity of the silk hat and Prince Albert coat which was the required uniform for the occasion.

  There are all sorts of memories which come back to me of those carefree days. Our domestic circle had an unusual stability during all my years at home. It is a strange commentary upon the changing servant problem of today when I remember that Bridget, the cook, Mary, the maid, Mrs. Uniack, the laundress, and Frances, our colored nurse of blessed memory, were with us always. Frances was our other mother and my love for and sympathy with and understanding of the colored race date back to her and all she meant to us children. There was Smith’s candy store on Market Street. It is still there but without the presence of William and Andrew Smith with their delectable beards and their great sense of fine citizenship. They may be known now as “Trade” and “Mark,” but to me they were great men and their generosity to the town remains as their monument. There was the old barn on Church Street where they were beginning to manufacture the cough drops which were to make them famous, then little known and made in a primitive way. We children used to go in to watch the black drops coming slowly out on narrow sheets of tin and always went away with our pockets full. There were the afternoons much later when Cornelia Kinkead and I used to visit each other and sit for long hours, each immersed in a book and rarely speaking to the other. There was our mandolin and guitar club ably led by Anna Haight, who was a distinguished musician and who made us able to give rather charming little musical afternoons. There were “progressive” card parties and the old friendships of kindred souls. All muddled memories, stretching over the years of childhood and youth, and all precious as a reminder of a life in a small town for a young girl in the eighties and nineties. Traditional small-town stuff, it may be, but I doubt if the world offers anything better today. It was a good world that I lived in.

  I was thoroughly trained in the business of being a woman. My sister Mary and I went through rigorous education in cooking and sewing; no
superficial bowing acquaintance with cook-stove and sewing-machine, but real work. That was a hold-over from my mother’s education and almost necessary when the corner grocery had little but staples on its shelves and the ready-made dress had not yet developed into a major industry. Twice a year the dressmaker came to the house and stayed six weeks at a time making summer or winter outfits for Mother, my sister and myself, and part of her job was to make seamstresses of Mary and me. I could make my own clothes now, if I wanted to. Modern clothes would be all too simple. I was trained when a dress was a dress, a creation of complicated architecture, stiffened with whalebone, gored, ruffled, covered with darts and loops and fancy stitching.

  Cooking was the same way. Every year we put up a year’s supply of jams and jellies and preserves, and it was a family tradition that no daughter of the house could qualify as on the way to growing up until she could cook a dinner that would pass muster with Father. And he was a severe judge. Father liked his food and had high standards in culinary matters, so I know I am a good cook. I do not cook and I do not like to cook and I have not done it for many years, but I feel quite confident that I could walk out into my own kitchen tomorrow and bake bread that would be a credit to our old Bridget. And I can still manage a coal range, which is becoming a lost art among town-bred young women.

  Summers were mostly spent at my grandmother’s in Dansville, the loveliest of little towns nestling at the head of the Genesee Valley in New York State. Our house in Poughkeepsie was sizable, but it was cramped in comparison to Grandmother’s white-pillared place on Elizabeth Street. There was always plenty of room even though my grandmother had seven children and six of them married and had families and they all sent all of the grandchildren to her in the summer. And plenty of welcome too: I cannot understand how either the house or Grandmother’s patience held together, but it was a sturdy old building and she was the kindliest and least irritable of old ladies and unmistakably loved having us there.

  Every year I revelled in Dansville and the effects will never wear off. Just last year, in the Saturday Evening Post, I read a story by Hugh MacNair Kahler about a small town which gave me a strangely reminiscent feeling; the background was slight but I knew that place. We live now in the Kahler home in Princeton, and the next time I saw my landlord I asked him if he had any particular place in mind when he wrote that story. “Why yes,” he said, “but you have probably never been there; very few people have. It’s a little town in upstate New York called Dansville.” Whereupon it developed that he had been raised in the place and was one of the MacNair grandchildren with whom we Brown grandchildren had played—and presumably fought—summer after summer.

  I have an idea that he has obtained a great deal of material for his stories from Dansville. If it were not for the limitations of this book and the need of getting on to my main purpose in life, I could recite all sorts of minor Dansville sagas, for it is one of those small towns that breed stories. It has a way of staying with you and if you turned me loose today blindfolded in Dansville I should know where I was.

  The old town has changed a great deal in these forty-odd years. The bloomer-clad, skull-capped, Dutch-cut-haired ladies from old Dr. Jackson’s health resort up on the hill are no longer there, and that is a great loss. Dr. Jackson was a fine-looking, white-bearded and jolly old gentleman who had picturesque ideas about health and carried them out to the ultimate degree in this establishment. He frowned on meat, so meat was barred. He believed heartily in eating cereals and fruit, so they were ever present. He made, and had his patients eat, what I believe was the first prepared breakfast food: a really delicious concoction called “granula.” I have often been there for supper. The patients sat at long tables in the dining room, between which ran a narrow-gauge railroad track. The huge bell on top of the building clanged once and a handcar heaped with hard graham biscuit, the inevitable “granula,” and apple sauce appeared out of the sliding doors at the end of the room. That was supper, washed down with copious glassfuls of water. Dr. Jackson believed even more heartily in the curative properties of a spring up on the hillside above the building. It was called the All-Healing Spring and was just good spring water.

  Long ago, Dr. Amelia Bloomer had convinced Dr. Jackson that skirts were a menace to health, so all of his women patients had to wear the semi-Turkish trousers named after their inventor. There also seemed something lethal about long hair, although I never understood just what it was, which made it necessary for the same long-suffering ladies to have their hair cut short in a Dutch bob and wear little skull caps on their heads. They looked very strange and unworldly to this small child. Many of them were apparently sane when observed by an inquisitive little girl down the hill on Dansville’s main street. Maybe the doctor’s regimen did do them some good; at least he never lacked for patients.

  When the doctor died—at eighty-five, a good testimonial for his system of living—his son and daughter-in-law, Drs. James and Kate Jackson, inherited the place and started letting down some of the bars. While they were thinking about this, the Sanitarium burned down. The excitement of this great event prostrated Dansville for days. I was there, at my grandmother’s, at that time. I remember a great glare in the sky and the knock on my grandmother’s door. When answered, it proved to herald a patient from the Sanitarium who, having been unable to walk for years, had been startled by the cry of fire into getting out of bed, throwing her case of jewels out of the window, deliberately picking up the bowl and pitcher from her washstand and walking in her nightgown all the way down the hill. The bowl and pitcher were just one of those queer things people do in emergencies. I can thus vouch for at least one cure effected in the Jackson Sanitarium. They never did find the jewels.

  The Sanitarium was rebuilt in red brick, started up on a much more liberal basis by the younger Dr. Jackson, and prospered exceedingly. The bloomers, the hair-cuts and the skull-caps were discarded and in my medical days I worked there for two summers as a laboratory technician, gaining invaluable practical experience in making analyses and having a very pleasant time. William Dean Howells was there as a patient one summer and having tea with him in the afternoon was a thrilling episode in my young life. The place caught a celebrity like that quite often. Possibly the one that meant the most to me was Louisa M. Alcott. I wish I could remember more about her. She seemed to be just a very gentle and very tired old lady. She was my heroine of all the world at that time, and a proper choice if I was going to strike out on my own in the world, though nothing could have been farther from my thoughts then. For Louisa M. Alcott was, to me, the unattainable ideal of a great woman. Little Women and Little Men were favorite reading everywhere I turned among girls of my own age and “Jo” in Little Women has always been my favorite character in all fiction. I feel a glow of happiness, even today, when I find that these books are still read and loved. And so, to have met Louisa M. Alcott and to have known her, even so slightly, remains one of my precious memories.

  The old doctor’s grandson, also a doctor, inherited the Sanitarium in his turn and liberalized it still more. It is still there; but it was sold recently to Bernarr Macfadden for a health resort, to be run according to his theories. In other words, it has completed the cycle and come back to where it started from: three generations from cracked wheat to cracked wheat. I hope Mr. Macfadden’s patients are as picturesque as old Dr. Jackson’s were, but I doubt it. Anyway, I congratulate Mr. Macfadden upon his inheritance of a fine tradition.

  I know that New York City has lost a great deal of its dash and glamour since the time when the whole family used to go on board the Mary Powell, the queen of the old Hudson River boats, and come to the city for a day of shopping and the theater. Without sounding like a professional admirer of the good old days, I do want to put myself on record to the effect that, whatever its numerous advantages, the modern world does not know how to live as comfortably as did the world of the nineties. There are no more hotels like the old Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we always stayed, with its pala
tial, roomy, black-tiled lobby and its mammoth bedrooms full of carved black walnut furniture (the huge, comfortable beds cured countless cases of insomnia) and those enormous bills of fare in the restaurant, where you ate three meals a day—getting room, breakfast, lunch and dinner for five dollars per person. It would have taken half an hour merely to read the breakfast menu through, so you stopped somewhere down among the tenderloin steaks and baked potatoes and ordered anything you thought of, secure in the well-justified confidence that it would be forthcoming.

  I have a nostalgic feeling for the theater in those days too. After the lapse of years it is impossible for me to get all of the actors into their proper places. (There are plenty of books that will tell you all that, but I know that my education was singularly rich in all the stage could give.) Names come tumbling over themselves in my mind; different years, but all in my younger life. The cozy little Lyceum Theater on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue where the seats all folded back so that the whole theater became a sea of aisles. The grand, and new, Empire Theater way uptown at Fortieth Street and Broadway. Both with magnificent stock companies where each player was a star. Weber and Fields Music Hall and the old Tony Pastor place on Fourteenth Street. I saw Sarah Bernhardt and heard Adelina Patti sing on the last of her many “farewell tours.” There were Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and I saw Maude Adams and Ethel Barrymore make their debuts. The music halls gave their quota: Lottie Collins, whose Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay set all the town singing; Weber and Fields, Blanche Ring, Vesta Tilley, Cecilia Loftus, Della Fox, Willie Collier, Albert Chevalier, Dan Daly, Lillian Russell, Nat Goodwin and DeWolf Hopper. I know I have left many out of this long-ago list but it was a rich galaxy and I am glad to have lived so long if only to have seen and heard them all.