Although Maud was familiar with Frank’s flights of fancy, she worried to see him so keyed up, so certain that this one thing would change the tide of fortune. The lesson she had learned from her mother’s activism was that votes for women were astonishingly hard to obtain, for the simple reason that not a single member of the fairer sex could vote her own enfranchisement into law.
“Patient! Maud, tell me you are not suggesting that we be patient! Patient while the crops burn and the banks fail and farms are foreclosed and people leave town and the dream—the great American dream—the great promise that a person can make his own way—or her own way—unencumbered—burns along with it? How can we be patient?”
“You want to talk to me about patience, Lyman Frank Baum? How about you come home and spend a day in my shoes? You want to cook and clean and sweep and mend and count out pennies to every merchant? You want to make peace among the children and put salves on their sore gums and rock the baby on your hip all day? Don’t talk to me about patience! How long do you think we mothers will have to wait to get our fair share of ‘the dream,’ as you call it? Why, we can’t even vote!”
Frank suddenly looked weary, his face gray, dark bags puffed under his eyes, where once his skin had been youthfully smooth. He sank into a chair near the fire.
“Please, let’s not fight, Maudie.”
“This is not a fight, Frank. This is me stating my opinion about something I know a great deal about.”
Maud picked up her book, opened it pointedly, and scanned a few words. But the mood was now broken.
“When I was at Cornell, I had nothing to do but read books all day,” Maud said. “I chose a different life, and you don’t hear me complaining about it, do you?” She snapped her book shut, stood up, walked across the room, pulled back the hearth screen, and dropped the novel into the flames. Frank stood up, his eyes wide in horror.
“Maud? What on earth? You’re burning a book?”
She spun around and looked at him furiously. “I’m a woman. Why should I read? I might be happier if I couldn’t! At least then I wouldn’t be able to read the newspapers when they report that men have once again refused to give women the vote!”
Frank stared into the grate as the book’s leaves separated and their edges lit up orange with flames, then looked back at Maud, dumbfounded.
Maud glared back at him, put her finger over her lips, and said, “Don’t you dare say a word!” She turned and marched up the stairs, leaving Frank alone in the middle of the room as the odor of the burning leather binding filled the air. She heard his voice, calling halfheartedly up the stairs behind her, “Don’t be ridiculous, Maud. Of course women will win the vote.”
* * *
—
SUFFRAGE FOR THE WOMEN of South Dakota lost by a landslide, garnering only twenty-two thousand brave men’s votes in favor, with forty-six thousand opposed. When the final tallies came in, the mood in the Baum household was bleak. For her own part, Maud was disappointed but not surprised. She had watched this cycle of hope and disappointment play out so many times in her life. Frank and her mother, however, were devastated. Matilda had stayed in the capital, Pierre, while the vote was counted. When she returned, she was uncharacteristically quiet. She sat all day with her Key to Theosophy book in her lap, reading meditatively, and Frank seemed deeply depressed. The agitation, the feverish energy, the flights of fancy that had propelled him through the last few months, were gone. He ducked into the house late in the evening, strangely quiet. He was gaunt, and the bags under his eyes had become a permanent feature. At night in bed, he turned his back to her. For the first time since their marriage started, she felt him pulling away.
“Frank, darling,” she whispered to him late one night. “Where have you gone?”
There was no answer.
Frank began sleeping in, and he didn’t go into the newspaper office until midday. At night, he hunched over a pad of paper until late, filling reams of pages with his writings. As she tried to fall asleep, Maud could hear the furious scratching of his pen, but she dared not interrupt him, as he would simply look up at her with a dazed expression and then go on with his writing.
In the mornings, he took to lounging about in his dressing gown, drinking coffee and reading the Chicago newspapers, quoting snippets aloud to Maud, bothering her as she tried to keep up with her daily housework. Her mother, meanwhile, did nothing but read and correspond with members of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Every day, the post brought dozens of letters—some from women who were leaders in the movement, others from the group’s rank and file. Matilda speared each letter with her silver letter opener, sat reading and clucking in dismay, and then carefully penned her responses. With Mother and Frank underfoot, it was even harder for Maud to get her work done, and she wished that one of them, either of them, would find some occupation outside of the house.
One morning, she was in the kitchen kneading bread when Frank called through the doorway: “The Columbian Exhibition is going to bring the future right to our doorstep. They are planning the biggest electrical exhibition in history. Pretty soon, you’ll be loafing off and a machine will knead that bread for you. Do you realize how much all of this will change the world? But the people in Aberdeen just don’t care.”
Maud noted the new, bitter tone to his voice.
Frank kept writing, more and more feverishly, burning the kerosene lamp until the wick went low and the light sputtered out. Maud had stopped reading his editorials, but she sensed that he was using the newspaper now, more and more, as a place to express his feelings, his strong views about everything: about the coming of technology, the fate of the town. She missed the tender moments they had shared while she was waiting for Harry’s birth. Now Frank seemed to scarcely think of her.
While Frank was on a tear, Matilda had remained uncharacteristically quiet. One day Maud came upon her mother sitting in the parlor, an abandoned half-sewn christening gown for Jamie folded in her lap. She was murmuring something under her breath.
“What are you doing, Mother?”
Startled, Matilda dropped the dress. “Connecting to my spirit guide,” she said. “Trying to speak to baby Jamie.”
The next day, Maud found a seam ripper and tore the little dress apart. She took the blue satin ribbon, rolled it up, and replaced it in her sewing basket; a few minutes later, she picked up the ribbon and threw it into the stove.
Matilda’s fascination with theosophy was increasingly drawing Frank in. While Maud tended to the household, her mother and her husband spent hours immersed in conversation about the possibilities that alternate worlds existed, just next to our own, and that people could learn to sense them and even cross from one to the next and back again. Maud despaired of getting Frank to pay attention to the world they lived in now—the one where there were mouths to feed and bills to pay, laundry to wash and fold, and children to tuck into bed.
Frank brought a copy of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer home each week. At first, the newspaper had been fun to read. The first several pages were standard boilerplate—copy he purchased to fill the pages—but he had also written amusing accounts of Aberdeen’s social goings-on and some opinion pieces about the affairs of the day, and most of it had been quite fun and lively. Now, though, the pages were filled with fantastic stories of flying machines and mechanical people and electric contraptions that did the work of people and wells that pumped themselves and irrigated the fields. Frank kept saying that folks in Aberdeen lacked imagination, that there was a fantastic future and it was right around the corner. But Maud knew that the people of Aberdeen were too occupied with the present to concern themselves with a fantastical future. Every day another merchant closed his doors; every week she saw another family piling their belongings on a wagon and leaving town.
Frank’s readers surely wanted a solid weather forecast, an assurance that the bank was solvent, and a loan to buy wheat seed, not stories of talking machines, just as Maud wanted money to buy groceries, shoes for the children, and to keep a roof over their heads, not her mother’s stories about a golden path that led to enlightenment.
At last, Matilda boarded the train to return to Syracuse. Maud found that she was relieved to see her go.