Maud set aside her ruined sewing, holding her pricked finger.
“Sure.” Maud’s voice shook. “We can dream of things that might come true. But when you stick your head in the clouds and tell the boys that you are going to give us things that don’t even exist yet, instead of focusing on the here and now and figuring out the simple things like how to put food on the table, you know what that makes you?”
Frank did not answer. The boys were silent, witnessing the tornado of their mother’s fury with terror.
“That makes you nothing but a humbug!” Maud said. “Plain and simple!”
Frank had no response. He stood there, staring at Maud as his face turned ashen, the tips of his ears bright red.
“Now,” Maud continued, “you run along up to bed, boys—and don’t expect any electric staircase to take you there. This is our life. Right here, in this house, in this city, and we are going to make the best of it.”
No one moved. At last Frank said, “You heard your mother—it’s time to go to bed!” He shooed the boys up the stairs and then turned to follow.
Maud said nothing, just threaded a new needle, preparing to restart her sewing.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, Frank came into the living room, knelt down, and clasped Maud’s hands.
“I’ve let you down. I’m sorry.”
Maud’s eyes filled with tears.
“I’m going to make it up to you,” he said. “I’m not sure how, but I promise.”
Upstairs, the baby started to cry.
“I need to go tend to Harry.” Maud jumped up and turned her back on Frank, not looking him in the eye.
“I know,” Frank called to his wife’s back as she ran up the stairs, “you think I’m nothing but a humbug! But I’ll figure something out—something real. I promise.”
* * *
—
THREE DAYS LATER, when Maud came home from delivering her finished embroidery to the home of a lady in a nicer neighborhood, she found Frank entertaining the three boys, a large trunk filled with samples of fine china open on the table before him.
“You see, madame,” Frank said, holding a teacup to his lips and taking an imaginary sip. “For one as refined as you, only a fine teacup will do.”
“Hey, that rhymes!” Bunting cried.
“Well, I can do better than that!” Frank said.
“A fine lady of Chicago
must not sup
with anything less
than a china teacup.
If the pattern of flowers
is Pitkin & Brooks,
the neighborhood ladies
get admiring looks.”
Frank waggled his eyebrows. “Or perhaps it should be will steal them like crooks…”
While Frank rhymed, baby Harry was reaching out. He grabbed a saucer and almost managed to pull it over the edge of the table. Maud dashed forward and snatched it away just in the nick of time. Harry started to howl.
“Frank, what on earth?”
“Mr. L. Frank Baum, salesman, Pitkin & Brooks fine china,” he said.
“You found another job?”
“Thirty dollars a week, plus commissions,” he said. “You were right, Maud. This is a big city. All you have to do is knock on enough doors.”
“Salesman?”
“Traveling salesman. My territory reaches as far east as Cincinnati. I leave tomorrow.”
Maud sank into one of the kitchen chairs, unsure how to respond to this bit of news. Certainly, they needed the money. But she dreaded the thought of Frank hitting the road again, and Maud, expecting again, had an aching back and swollen ankles at the end of every day. At least when he came home, he helped out with the children. Sometimes by the end of the day, she had grown so weary that she snapped at them. Bunting was growing up, almost nine. She could barely keep track of him as he roamed the city streets after school—and she had trouble making him mind. It was easier when Frank was around.
Frank peered at Maud with concern. “Maud, I thought you’d be happy. You told me to find another job, and I did it. I asked myself, Frank Baum, what’s the one thing you’ve ever been any good at? Being a salesman, that’s what. I figured that if I could sell something as dull as Baum’s Castorine, then certainly I could sell something beautiful like floral-patterned china.”
Frank was gazing at her with a look of utter helplessness, and Maud felt a stab of remorse. She could see what her husband was doing. He was giving up what he loved more than anything—writing—so that he could go out and make money for the family. He was returning to the very life he had tried so hard to shed. It was a puzzle to her. Why did the two things that mattered most to him have to conflict? Why must his love of writing and theater and art compete with his love for his family? She remembered Matilda telling her not to run away and marry an actor, but it was only now that Maud really understood: the part of Frank that made him an actor was the part that she had fallen in love with, but it was also the part that made him so ill-suited for the things of this world.
CHAPTER
23
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
1893
“Put on your finery, my darling Maud, we are going somewhere!” Frank had burst into the house one Saturday afternoon with an air of high excitement.
“Don’t you even say hello, Frank?” Maud asked, crossing the room to kiss him in greeting. Frank had been away for two weeks, and she hadn’t expected to see him until later in the day. He had sent a letter saying he’d be arriving on the six o’clock train, and now here he was, in the house at two in the afternoon.
“You’re early,” Maud said.
“I managed to reschedule my last sales call.” Frank’s eyes were twinkling.
By now, all four boys had gathered around, even toddler Kenneth, who had been born a few months after they’d arrived in Chicago.
“I’ve brought a little something for each of you,” Frank said.
He fished deep in his pocket and pulled out four shiny copper pennies, and laid them out in a straight line on the table.
“Frank?” Maud was always wary of Frank’s fits of generosity. Though their financial situation had improved over the last couple of years, she still budgeted Frank’s earnings down to the last cent, then added the meager sum she earned from her own work. With her economies, she had set enough aside to purchase a lamp, and was just twenty cents short of the nice Persian rug she’d been saving up for.
“What did you bring for Mama?” Robin burbled.
“Emeralds!” Frank shouted.
“Emeralds. Frank! What on earth?”
Frank’s eyes were merry. “Maud, get your coat. We’re going out!”
“Frank. We can’t just ‘go out.’ No one is here to watch the children.”
Frank clapped his hands three times, and the doorbell jingled.
“What is that? Someone at the door?”
He made a big show of crossing to open it.
Outside stood one of the neighbors who sat with the children sometimes.
Maud tried to frown, tried to come up with a word of protest, but she could find none.
* * *
—
IN THE JUNE SUNSHINE, the blindingly bright, ornate buildings of the White City, erected for the Columbian Exhibition, stood out against the blue of Lake Michigan. They stood in line to buy the fifty-cent tickets, with Maud clucking all the while at Frank’s spending habits. The family had already visited the fair once, and they’d had a wonderful time. Two visits struck her as extravagant.
“Maud, I’ve had a great couple of weeks. I earned a five-dollar commission. We’ve got to have some fun every once in a while. And there’s something I’ve got to show you.”
They made their way through the crowds and across the park so fast that Maud had no time to stop and look at anything until they arrived at the electric pavilion.
“It’s in here,” Frank said, pulling Maud into the phonograph display.
There was a line of people waiting to approach an upright wooden box shaped like a lectern. Frank explained that the device was called the Kinetoscope. The fellow at the front of the line was peering through what looked like binoculars into the interior of the box. Maud saw over and over again that as each person looked inside, they pulled away, gasped, laughed, or exclaimed, and then leaned toward the eyepiece again.
“What is it?” Maud asked.
“I’m not going to tell you. You have to see it for yourself.”
Frank and Maud had waited in line for almost two hours when at last it was Maud’s turn. She stood next to the box, bent over, and peeked inside. The operator pushed a button.
Maud gasped. Inside the box, there were three tiny men—blacksmiths—hammering on an anvil. She drew her head away, and there she was, standing in front of the box, with Frank by her side. She put her head down again—it wasn’t possible. It seemed that the men were moving inside the box. Black-and-white photographs that moved.
Frank took his turn next, and begged for a second turn, and then a third, until the people standing in line behind them started to clamor for him to move along.