1891
Maud gulped repeatedly and took deep breaths through her nose. She was not going to cry in front of the boys. Disembarking from the train in Chicago’s dazzling new Grand Central Station had set the boys to chattering, as had the trolley through downtown. In every way—size, scope, people, number of buildings—everything here in the great city surpassed Aberdeen. Maud had marveled at the crowded streets, the giant edifices, the avenues of grand houses. It was all gleaming and modern and beautiful.
But eventually their hansom cab had clattered out of the new part of the city and reached the western neighborhoods, the part that had not been affected by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It was late March, but patches of sooty snow still clung in some of the alleyways, and a brisk wind cut through the curtains of the cab. Soon they were passing along an avenue lined with rows of narrow, shabby buildings that tilted against one another as if too exhausted to stand up on their own. The streets teemed with grubby children. Mothers gathered around communal water pumps, bundled up in bulky skirts with kerchiefs tied around their heads. When, at last, the cab pulled up in front of 34 Campbell Park, Frank announced in a cheerful voice, “We’re home.” And Maud, struggling not to let her true feelings show, took in the grubby clapboard-and-brick row house that was to be their new home.
The inside of the house was as dreary as the outside. The building had neither indoor plumbing nor a connection for gas. At night, the interior was dim and eerie, lit only by the flickering of kerosene. When Maud looked out the windows, she saw brick walls. But she did what she could to make it into a home. She scrubbed until the rooms were clean and smelled fresh. Frank hung a cheap reproduction of Millet’s The Angelus over the water stain on the parlor wall.
At the end of the first week, Frank came home and spread the newspaper across the kitchen table. “Here it is, right here. My story about moving day has landed on the front page!”
Maud looked at the newspaper, searching for Frank’s name.
“I’m afraid they didn’t include a byline—but they will soon,” Frank said.
“Where’s your pay?” Maud asked, barely glancing at the newspaper.
Frank fished into his coat pocket and handed her some bills and coins. She looked at them in disbelief. Frank had secured employment with the Chicago Evening Post, one of the crop of new newspapers struggling to carve out a niche in the fast-growing city. He’d told her that he would be paid a salary of twenty dollars a week.
“This is seventeen dollars and fifty cents,” Maud said, not even trying to keep the sharpness out of her voice. “Where is the rest of it? I can’t pay the rent or the grocer or the fishmonger with seventeen dollars and fifty cents!”
“I’m so sorry, Maud. They promised me twenty dollars, but they didn’t pay me as much as they said they would.” He was apologizing, but his tone was light, as if this were an inconsequential matter.
“Do you understand,” Maud replied icily, “that this is completely unacceptable?”
Frank looked taken aback. “But what am I supposed to do?”
“Tell them you are to be paid twenty dollars a week, as agreed upon. If they say no, then walk out the door. We are not in the business of providing charity to the Evening Post. You need to bring home twenty dollars a week. If they won’t pay you properly, then find someone who will!”
“That’s easy for you to say, Maud!” he said, his eyes flaming. “Do you really think it’s so simple? Why don’t you try it yourself! I’ll stay home and look after the children and you find us a way to make ends meet!”
Maud’s face flushed red, and her eyes flashed.
“Watch me!” She marched out the door, slamming it shut behind her.
* * *
—
WITHIN TWO WEEKS, Maud had drummed up enough fine embroidery work to close the gap. When Frank came home at night, he found the boys bathed and put to bed, the house spotless, and Maud hunched over her sewing basket, her eyes red from straining under the flickering kerosene lamp. Every night, Frank begged her to come to bed, but she shook her head angrily. The next day, she was up before dawn, starting again.
This was where life had led her—to this drafty, freezing, unpleasant house. She was taking care of the children, cooking all of the meals, toiling over tiny stitches of lace, while he spent the day downtown, looking dandy in his Prince Albert jacket. When Frank came in, later and later each evening, Maud didn’t even glance up as he trudged past her silently with a hangdog look on his face. They had been married for nine and a half years, and through all of their ups and downs, the one thing that had held steady was their mutual affection—but now her goodwill was slipping away. Frank had let her down.
Maud fought a constant battle against the filth that surrounded them. As April turned to May and June, the chilly winds gave way to humidity and torpor. When the wind blew in from the west, it brought the scent of the stockyards; when it blew in from the east, it carried the reek of the sewage-filled river. Not surprisingly, there was a typhoid epidemic rampant among the city’s children. Every few days, she saw the pair of black nags pulling the hearse stop in front of one of the neighboring tenements. She was afraid to let the boys out of her sight.
At night, when she lay in bed, she imagined the vast open west the way it had looked during their first spring in Dakota, before the drought, before all the troubles. She pictured the pale blue bowl of the sky and heard again the soft song of the wind in the prairie grass. Now outside her windows day and night she heard a constant chorus of horses’ hooves and streetcars trundling by, of shouting peddlers and crying children. But the loudest noise of all was the one in her head. What if Frank was right? What if they should have waited it out in Aberdeen? Maybe Maud could have found embroidery jobs there, too—although she knew that was silly. No one had a spare dime for crewel and lace. She had agreed to come to this teeming, feculent city, but if one of the children succumbed to the fever, she would never forgive herself.
One evening, Frank came home and started up his usual fantasizing, regaling the children with stories about the coming scientific future that would be wrought by electricity.
“You boys need to see the financial district at night! Every building between LaSalle and Adams lit up like a tree at Christmastime, and every bit of it is electricity! Twice as bright as gas lights!”
“A house with gas lights would certainly serve us well enough.” Maud looked up from her sewing. “Better than kerosene.”
“And that is only the beginning of what electricity can do!” Frank continued, as if Maud hadn’t spoken. “Mark my word, there will be electric trolleys and electric trains, electric staircases—”
“What’s an electric staircase?” asked Bunting.
Frank leapt up and walked to the banister, where he leaned against the newel post. “You’ll take a step onto the bottom stair, and the electricity will make the stairs do all the work. You’ll just ride on up, pretty as you please.”
“Can we have one like that in our house?” Robin piped up.
“Certainly,” Frank said grandly. “No need for gas for your mama—we’ll have electricity, and when she’s tired and wants to go upstairs, why, the electric stairs will just carry her right up!”
Maud was studiously ignoring Frank’s soliloquy, but as she heard him declaim all this nonsense to the boys, fury burned in her breast.
In her anger, she pricked herself with her needle. To her horror, she saw three drops of blood spill onto the white lace. She would never get the spots out! She’d have to start over, wasting the cost of the fabric and thread.
“See what you’ve made me do!” Maud cried out.
Her tone was so sharp that Bunting’s lip quivered, Robin burst into tears, and Harry started wailing.
“What are you yelling at Daddy for?” Bunting said in an injured tone. “He’s just trying to make things nice for you! Lights so your eyes won’t get tired and electric stairs to carry you up to bed.”
Maud stood up. Blood was rushing in her ears, and she couldn’t even think straight.
“He will do no such thing!” she cried. “Don’t listen to your father. The stories he tells you boys are just fairy tales. None of it is true! We live here on Campbell Park, in a shabby old house. Your mother is a seamstress, and your daddy writes newspaper articles for a few cents apiece. There is no shame in the truth. Let’s accept our lot and make the best of it, shall we?”
Frank’s expression was startled. Wounded. “Maudie darling, don’t. Please don’t. You’ll just discourage the boys. We’re in a temporary setback—nothing more. Why not a house with electric stairs? Can’t a body dream?”