—
BY JUNE 1893, Maud had scraped up sufficient money from her sewing work to send enough to Julia for train fare so that she and Magdalena could get out of the Dakota heat and spend the summer in Syracuse with Matilda. The plan was for them to stop and stay a couple of days in Chicago with the Baums en route. When Julia and Magdalena stepped off the train, Maud was surprised to see how much her niece had sprouted up. She was almost as tall as her petite mother, her long legs sticking out like skinny pokers. Maud noticed that she was wearing an unbecoming dress of faded blue serge. Maud frowned. Had she known, she would have sewn a new traveling frock for her niece.
At twelve, Magdalena had grown longer and thinner, as had her face, accentuating her eyes—still that startling violet, ringed with spidery black lashes. Her shiny golden hair had a straight part down the middle and was tightly plaited, her face and hands were clean, and but for her worn dress, she looked like an ordinary young girl, a far cry from the waif Maud had greeted at the Aberdeen depot five years earlier.
“Auntie M!” As soon as Magdalena caught sight of Maud, she bolted away from her mother and flung her arms around Maud. Then, letting go, she looked around. “Where’s Uncle Frank?”
“Your Uncle Frank is away, traveling for business. He was so disappointed to miss seeing you! He sends his love.”
Frank had been crushed to miss Magdalena’s brief visit, but Maud knew that he was given his schedule and was expected to follow it without asking questions.
Magdalena looked temporarily crestfallen, then beamed. “That’s all right. I’m so excited to see you.”
Maud turned anxiously to Julia, and saw that her eyes appeared free of the patent medicine fog. “Julia, darling. I’m so glad you were able to come!”
“It is a relief to get away,” Julia confessed. “I’ve grown used to the life out there, but it will never feel like home.”
Back at the house, Maud watched as her sister took in the Baums’ reduced circumstances: the shabby neighborhood, her threadbare furniture, the pile of unfinished pieces of sewing.
“I’m surprised to find you living like this,” Julia said with an air of disapproval.
“Living like what?” Maud said. “Frank is working hard, and so am I. Perhaps this is not the most elegant abode we’ve ever lived in, but I’ve tried to make it comfortable.”
Where Julia was disapproving, Magdalena was enchanted by every novelty, from the cockroaches to the communal water pump to the rowdy street urchins who roamed outside.
“Edgeley is so tiny that if I stretch my hand out the window, I can reach all the way to the end of it. Chicago takes up the whole world!”
After the children were put to bed, Maud and Julia sat down together in front of the fire.
“How are you managing, Julia?” Maud asked.
“Not so bad, all things considered,” Julia said. “It’s much easier now that we’ve moved to town.”
Unable to make a living at farming, they had lost their claim. James moved them into the tiny town of Edgeley, where he had secured a position delivering horses for a livery stable. The Carpenters still wanted for money, but life in town was not as isolated, and Magdalena was able to attend school. As Maud beheld her sister, she felt a melancholy ache under her breastbone. Ten years old when Maud was born, Julia had always seemed more like a second mother to her. She remembered her sister’s funny face, framed with a frizz of tawny curls, always popping up when she needed something—ready with a bandage for her skinned knee or to match a lost mitten. That girl had been replaced by the woman before her. Worn out, arthritic, her hair now almost entirely silver. At least her eyes were clear. Ever since leaving Dakota, Maud’s fear for Magdalena had sat like a black pit at the base of her heart. Seeing her sister appearing lucid again made her feel a little better.
“I’m glad to see you looking well.”
Julia’s hand shook slightly as she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I’ve weaned myself from the patent medicines,” she said. “I’ve been following the precepts of Mary Baker Eddy—Christian Science, are you familiar with it?” She continued without waiting for Maud to answer: “It teaches one to manage illness and pain without medicines.”
Maud gazed into her sister’s eyes and felt relief wash over her.
“And what about James. Is he…keeping steady?”
Julia looked away from her sister. “He travels quite a bit—for business—and sometimes we don’t see him for weeks at a time….I’m sure you know how that is now that Frank is on the road?” Julia glanced around as if to take in, once again, the modest house, the shabby furnishings, the street filled with peddlers and lurching horse-drawn carts.
Maud flushed crimson. A little voice in the back of her head told her to bite her tongue, but she couldn’t. Her words came out in a furious rush: “Frank never drank to excess. He’s never pointed a gun at my heart. He’s never failed to treat me with kindness. You’ve made your choices, Julia Gage, but don’t you ever equate them with mine!”
Julia colored, then studied her hands, suddenly meek. “Magdalena is a great comfort to me. She’s an excellent student. The best student in our little school. I buy her books instead of dresses. She’s clever like you and Mother, and just as determined.” Julia paused, then continued. “I’m doing my best, Maudie. I’m trying to be strong for Magdalena.”
“You see to it that she gets an education,” Maud said, her eyes flashing. “Promise me right now that you’ll keep her in school. If she ends up dropping out of school to be a farmer’s wife, I swear I will never forgive you. I’ll not have that girl assigned to a life of drudgery.”
Julia looked reflectively at Maud. “You are speaking as a woman who dropped out of college to run away with a theater man? You are speaking as a woman who asked her family to scrimp and save to pay her tuition and then gave it all up—for what?”
“For what?” Maud said sharply. “For love! Which is a good reason. But I don’t know what you’d know about that.”
Julia sniffed. “You will never understand, Maud.”
“You’re right, Julia! I don’t understand. But you take back what you said about Frank right now. He was brilliant at the theater, and he’s a good, good man.”
Julia opened her mouth as if determined to argue, then thought better of it.
“All right. I’ll grant you that. Frank’s a good man. He’s good-hearted. I’m grateful that he paid for our tickets so we could take a break from that godforsaken place.”
Maud picked up her embroidery basket.
“You think that Frank paid for those tickets?” she said. “Then you know nothing of the power of women. Now, you solemnly swear to me right now that come hell or high water, Magdalena Towers Carpenter will stay in school as long as her heart desires, and I’ll get to work making that poor ragamuffin a new dress. I’ve enough scraps here to sew her a brand-new summer frock of pretty pink lawn.”
At the sounds of the words “new dress,” Magdalena’s pixie face appeared between the rungs of the upstairs banister, scrubbed bright, with a big smile.
Julia stood up, creaking a bit as she raised herself from the chair.
“Magdalena! What are you doing up?”
“Nothing!” Magdalena said, and then she muttered, loud enough for Maud to hear, “Except that I’m going to go to school forever and get a brand-new pink dress!”
CHAPTER
24
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
1897
Seven years after their move to Chicago, the Baums had left behind their dingy row house on Campbell Park and settled into a modest home in a safe, middle-class neighborhood near Humboldt Park. Even their youngest, little Kenneth, had started school. As the boys grew, Maud continued to hope for a girl, but month after month passed with no signs of another pregnancy. For a long time, each monthly cycle brought fresh disappointment, and then one morning, in the looking glass, she noticed afresh the silvery strands that now threaded through her hair, and she realized that her time for creating new life had most likely passed.
Matilda arrived for her annual visit a few days before Thanksgiving. Her winter visit to the Baum family had turned into a tradition, but this year, she had almost canceled her trip, she’d recently been so ill. So Maud was anxious to see her mother in person.
Maud waited impatiently for Frank, who had gone to pick up Mother at the train station. She hated it when her roast chicken was out of the oven too long before she served it—the skin got soft.