—
ON THE EVENING OF November 9, 1881, Maud stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at the bright faces of the guests assembled there. All of Matilda’s friends from the suffrage society were there. Mrs. Stanton was turned out in yards of tiered lace that made her look like a wedding cake. Skinny Auntie Susan wore a plain black dress, and her hair was pulled back so tightly that it seemed to draw her eyebrows farther apart. The string band tucked into one of the upstairs rooms started to play the wedding processional, and all eyes turned upon Maud as she slowly descended the staircase. When she reached the bottom, Papa, thin and pale, but out of bed for the occasion, slipped his arm through hers. Maud steadied herself against him before she took the few steps necessary to reach the parlor.
Frank, in his gray morning coat, stood regal and tall.
She faced him, her heart all atremble.
“Do you take this man, to love and to cherish and to honor…?”
Maud and Frank proudly spoke their identical vows (omitting the word “obey,” as they had agreed), and Frank eased the ring over her finger. In that simple exchange, Maud realized, she had slipped out of the person she had been and turned into another person altogether.
CHAPTER
12
ON TOUR
1881–82
Two weeks later, after a brief honeymoon in Saratoga Springs, Maud had already started to get the rhythm of traveling with the company of The Maid of Arran. Each day, another train, a ruckus of hammers and nails, the loud chatter as the actors applied their face paint and the musicians tuned their instruments and the stage crew fiddled with the sets. Every evening, the thrill of sitting in the back of the theater, watching the curtain rise. Every night, the cast gathering together, drinking coffee or whiskey, and hashing out the finer points of the night’s performance, and even later, Frank and Maud locking themselves into another hotel room, stripped bare with no shame, and finding each other’s embrace.
Late one night, they lay close in an uncomfortable hotel bed that sagged in the middle. Frank’s steady breathing comforted Maud, the moonlight whitening the expanse of his chest, bare under an unbuttoned nightshirt. Through the windows, Maud could see the stars glittering in the sky, and she marveled that these were the same stars she had seen through her window at Cornell and yet now she saw them from such a different place. She rolled back toward her beloved, burying her face in the hollow of his neck as his arms encircled her. If these were the bonds of marriage, then she was happily bound, and happy to throw away the key.
In Tuscaloosa, Frank and Maud awoke before dawn, realizing that they were covered with itchy red spots. They had been so eager to find each other after a long night that Maud had neglected to check the mattress for bedbugs, and now every inch of their skin was welted with bites. Fortunately, Matilda had sent Maud on her journey with a small kit filled with her natural remedies, among them a soothing Vaseline-and-lavender salve. Maud lovingly stroked it all over Frank’s bare body, and then he did the same to hers. For the next three days, they were so itchy they could barely sleep, and by the time they reached St. Paul, Minnesota, they both had dark rings under their eyes and kept dropping off to sleep whenever they sat down.
Their stage director, Carson McCall, a ruddy Scot, poked fun at them as they fell asleep over coffee in a diner near the Prestige Theater in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
“Not getting much sleep at night, are ya, ya two lovebirds?”
Maud blushed to the roots of her hair, but Frank just smiled smooth as could be, placed one hand over Maud’s, and said, “I would certainly say we are not!”
* * *
—
SEVERAL MONTHS INTO THEIR life on the road, Maud had grown so used to traveling that she could hardly remember what it felt like to stay in one place. Early one morning, she and Frank sat, knees bumping, across from each other in the dining room of a cheap hotel in Peoria, Illinois, where the Baum Theatre Company was currently settled for a few days. Between them was a small table covered with a dingy cloth. The window was pushed open and the pleasant early spring sunshine brightened the dreary surroundings, but Maud had hardly touched her coffee, and the bun on the plate was uneaten. The sight of its shiny surface made her feel queasy.
Maud had received a letter from Julia, who’d written from her new homestead in Dakota. Her account seemed fantastical—she described swarms of mosquitoes as dense as fog, a vast treeless landscape buffeted by high winds and hail the size of goose eggs, a one-room shanty so spare that when she’d arrived it had no windows and no roof. When Maud tried to conjure an image of her sister in those circumstances, all she could come up with was the sight of Julia with a sick headache, lying in her four-poster bed with a mustard plaster over her forehead, groggy from her medicine.
Frank’s long legs barely fit under the table, and each time he moved, he jostled it, sloshing their coffee into the saucers. Maud was reading Julia’s letter aloud. The contents were making Frank chuckle. “?‘With all of the pain I’ve suffered, I’ve never suffered such agony as I did that night. My dear James, not always so patient, was almost WILD and he prayed aloud, “Oh Lord, give us hail, give us rain, give us snow, give us anything but take away these mosquitoes.”?’?” Maud kept glancing up at him, and as she read she could feel irritation bubbling up inside her, until finally she flung the letter down on the table between them.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“Well, now, the thought of your sister dressed in her fine city clothes, moving at a mule’s pace across the wild prairie, with a black swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around her head. It’s a right colorful image, if I do say so myself.”
“Frank Baum! How can you say such a thing? She’s describing the most painful night of her entire life, and it makes you laugh?”
“Vivid language! Brings it all alive!”
“She’s miserable!” Maud said.
“She’s having an adventure. You like adventures, Maud.” He gestured at the tawdry dining room, where a drunk was slumped in one corner, emitting a faint snore.
“Is absolutely everything a lark to you? She’s my sister. I worry about her. Her situation sounds perfectly dreadful to me.”
“And if you were to write her a letter right now,” Frank said, his tone still mild, “it would begin, ‘My dearest Julia…I’m sitting at a table the size of a postage stamp, drinking three-day-old coffee in the presence of an actor, a tabby cat, a stale breakfast roll, and a flatulent drunk…!’?”
Maud let out a snort, and her hand flew up to cover her mouth.
“You see,” Frank said. “It’s all in the telling.”
“It’s not in the telling,” Maud objected, stamping her foot under the table. “I’m worried about her! You don’t understand!” Hot tears sprung to her eyes. “Stop teasing me!”
She jumped up from the table, causing the cups to overflow, the saucers to slide, and a large stain to soak into the dingy tablecloth.
Frank reached out to touch her arm, but she pulled it away and ran from the room, bursting through the dining room doors, where she almost ran smack into Carson McCall, all red-eyed and wild-haired, as if he had been up all night.
“Well now, lassie, where are you headed in such a big hurry?”
Where was she headed in such a hurry? She realized that she and Frank had just had their first fight.
“To the theater!” Maud said. She ducked past the director and ran up the street until she reached the theater’s back door.
Picking up her mending basket, she set to working on a frayed cuff and sewed until the rhythm of her needle started to calm her.
A moment later, a square of light appeared at the doorway and Frank tentatively poked his head in, looking thoroughly abashed.
Maud glanced up from her mending.
“Oh!” She had stuck herself in the finger with the needle. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m so clumsy.”
Frank grasped her hand and held her finger tight until the smarting subsided. “I’m sorry, Maud, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I know.”
“Believe in Julia. She’s having an adventure. Don’t you think that’s what she wanted when she hitched up with a gentleman ten years her junior and moved to Dakota?”
“I suppose,” Maud said. “At least she’s gotten out from under Mother’s thumb!”
“Julia will be fine. Why, I’d love to see Dakota myself. I hope that we’ll be able to visit her someday.”
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Maud said. “We’ve traveled all over kingdom come—why not Dakota?”
“Why ever not?”
But looking at Frank’s joyful face only reminded Maud of her secret worry. She had a feeling that their adventuring days might be numbered.
* * *