Maiden Flight (16 page)

Harry and I were just settling in after our honeymoon when a letter arrived from old Mr. Lahm. He too had just come away from Dayton and had been treated to a lengthy harangue about my running off with Harry and leaving poor Little Brother in the lurch. How I would love to have been a fly on the wall
that
time! Mr. Lahm's sympathy and understanding touched me very deeply. It was such a warm, friendly letter, recalling the old days when Father and Will were with us. Some way he manages to create an atmosphere that makes Will seem almost alive. Like father, like son! Young Frank—Lieutenant Lahm he was back then—was the soul of kindness when Orv was in the hospital at Fort Myer and I went out to nurse him. He found me an inexpensive hotel nearby, came every day to see how Little Brother was getting along, and even took me out to dinner. Fancy how many tongues
that
set wagging!

Hearing again from Mr. Lahm set loose a raft of memories—of Will and Pop, of our trips to Europe and my maiden flight that time in Pau, of Orv and his smashup and our happy family life in Dayton,
of Hawthorn Hill and what it meant to each and every one of us. All that is water under the bridge now—and what's left behind is a sad little pool of heartache and regret. Sometimes, in my imagination, I walk through that house, looking for Little Brother and at all the dear familiar things that made my home. But I never find Little Brother, and I have lost my old home forever, I fear. When I married Harry, I forfeited the right to share in Orv's triumphs—or his troubles either. In all my happiness about my brothers there is a sadness nowadays and, in my pride, a realization that I have no part in it.

It's a full-time job to manage all my troubles—not that I've been such a notable success at it. Thankfully, my Oberlin work keeps me from brooding. Doing double duty as class secretary and trustee can put a terrific strain on the nerves, but I was glad for the distraction during those first few months in Kansas City. President King announced his retirement that fall, and all winter and spring were taken up with committee meetings to pick his successor. I had to make several trips to Oberlin and Cleveland, but never stayed longer than absolutely necessary. Even now I want to get out of Ohio as quickly as I can. Lorin has been pressing me to come to Dayton to see his family, and I have a tempting invitation from my dear friend Agnes Beck—but I couldn't go there yet. I don't see how I ever can—but I'll not worry about that now.

Agnes's letter made me good and homesick—almost the first time I have felt really homesick since moving to Kansas City. I want to go back to Dayton very much. As long as I'm here, though, I mean to make the best of it. I'll not give in to those old feelings of tiredness and good-for-nothingness. Just look at Agnes: she is a beautiful character and full of intellectual interest, but she stayed home to care for her grandmother instead of going to college. She became an excellent
teacher and has two lovely daughters, but she has always tried to do too many things and hasn't managed her affairs well. The result is that she has always overworked and been in turmoil. Life has been rather hard for her, and she looks worn and a little restless. I so often think what she could have been, under different circumstances. I shouldn't wonder that people say the same of me when my back is turned!

What Agnes needs is someone to smooth over the practical things and give her leisure to pursue her own interests. Isn't that what I've done all my life—first for Pop, then for the boys, and now for Harry? They do say that behind every good man stands a good woman. Harry, I know, doesn't need me in the same way that Little Brother does, especially now that he's a big man at the
Star
. It does my heart good to see him getting the wider recognition he deserves. In the opinion of Louis Lord—hardly an impartial authority, I admit—I am married to “one of the most influential editors in the country.” Listen! Not many women get to call themselves the wife of such a paragon. And what do I do all the time Harry is writing his “influential” editorials and hobnobbing with high-muck-a-mucks in Washington? I stay at home and pick out new china for the house!

I'm not complaining, mind you—Harry is everything people say he is, and more—but life in Kansas City isn't quite the dream-come-true that I imagined. For starters, I have entirely too much to fret about—and too little to do. Maybe that's why I felt so run-down when we got back from New York. I came down with the most terrific cold. My throat swelled up and I was nearly deaf in my right ear, until finally I thought I'd better have the whole works examined. Of course, the tonsils were ordered out—I saw
that
coming a mile away! Harry was with me most of the time I was at the hospital. He got his editorial pages made up in advance and so
could be away from the office. I was uneasy about a general anesthetic, for no particular reason, and asked for a local anesthetic instead. I didn't dread it much, but I regret to say that I nearly fainted after it was all over!

I have been increasingly impressed with the terrible strain that Orville's attitude places on Katharine. She puts up a brave front, but the ordeal is clearly taking a toll on both her health and her spirits. When she was young, she had a bout with tonsillitis that prevented her from finishing high school. Afterward she suffered from frequent sore throats. By the time we got married, the discomfort had become so severe that she agreed to be examined by my old college roommate in Cleveland. He diagnosed the problem immediately, and she finally had her tonsils removed here in Kansas City. Why she didn't have the operation years ago is a mystery to me. When it comes to heeding the voice of reason, she can be as hard of hearing as her brother.

Katharine doesn't share my confidence in the skill and knowledge of doctors. That makes us even, because I don't share her faith in the consolation of religion. In my view, it's not a question of believing or disbelieving any particular dogma. The notion of a beneficent, all-knowing deity simply strikes me as inconsistent with everything we know about mankind's propensity for evil. Katharine long ago gave up attending church regularly, but she can't quite bring herself to reject the possibility of an afterlife, however slight it may be. She says speculation is more interesting and generally more satisfactory than a dead certainty of nothing ahead.
I expect she'll cling to that last vestige of irrational hope to her dying day, just as she refuses to face the fact that she and Orville will never be reconciled.

My “rationalist” religion is one of the few bones of contention between us. As the daughter of a God-fearing bishop, Katharine naturally considers Unitarianism no kind of religion at all. Before we were married, she said it would be a test of her love to see if she could get along with my Unitarian friends. I recall how indignant she was when I told her our minister had agreed to serve as Sinclair Lewis's religious adviser while he was in Kansas City writing
Elmer Gantry
. And she let me know in no uncertain terms what she thought about my hanging out with the fundamentalist preachers and freethinkers in Lewis's “Sunday school class.” The only reason she read the novel when it came out was because Mr. Lewis had the publisher send me a complimentary copy. She insisted she would never have spent two dollars and fifty cents for such “trash.”

Well, as Katharine says, religion will always be something to scrap about when other subjects fail us.

I had lived in Kansas City only a few months when Harry took me to Oberlin for President King's retirement party and to see our friend William Allen White get his honorary degree. We had pushed hard for Mr. White's nomination and considered it quite a coup to win over several of the naysayers on the committee. Mr. White has many sterling qualities—for one thing, he hasn't a trace of smartiness, which is more than I can say for Sinclair Lewis and his ilk. If you ask me, though, his political biographies
don't amount to so very much. The one of Calvin Coolidge is so sentimental—too racy and breezy. I often think he doesn't know much of what he's trying to talk about. As for his
Woodrow Wilson
, Mr. White admits that he had no special information on the subject—he even cautions readers not to treat it as a “source book.” I should hope not! I can't imagine anyone taking such a potboiler seriously.

If Harry ever set his mind to write a book of that sort, it would be a very different kettle of fish. He is so much more solid and substantial and
sensible
than William Allen White—and his ideas are more interesting too. I can't help thinking his religious upbringing has a lot to do with it. In my humble opinion, Harry is far more deserving of recognition and awards than Mr. White or any number of other so-called celebrities I could name. He's not swelled-headed about it, either—that's what I admire most about him. When he got his honorary degree from Oberlin, back in 1917, he didn't puff out his chest and put on airs as most men would have done in his shoes. He didn't make any to-do about it at all, in fact. As I recollect, we celebrated the occasion by letting Lorin drive us out to the ball game after the award ceremony!

Still, Mr. White is unquestionably distinguished in his own way, and I painted him in glowing colors in my letter to President King recommending him for the degree. I pointed out that he was one of our leading contemporary writers, that
Woodrow Wilson
had been generally reviewed as one of the outstanding biographies of recent years (ha ha!), that his writings are constantly sought by the best magazines, and so on. Little white lies mostly, not out-and-out whoppers—but they seem to have done the trick. Mr. White got his degree and was thoroughly pleased about it, and all was
well in the end. He is one of Harry's oldest and dearest friends, so I have to tread carefully whenever I have anything less than unalloyed praise for him.

When it comes to politics, though, I have to admit that few newspapermen hold a candle to the “Sage of Emporia.” Harry invited him and Mrs. White out to the house that summer along with some colleagues from the paper. The men could scarcely wait to get up from the dinner table so they could rush off to the
Star
office and discuss the upcoming election. I 'spect they felt the subject would bore us womenfolk—as if I hadn't sat around with Orv and his scientist friends often enough not to be intimidated by “men's talk”! I know how deadly a bunch of American men can be when they can't, or won't, talk anything but business. My women friends try hard to discuss books and so on. They don't usually have any ideas of their own and they are kind of pathetic, but at least they
want
to talk about something. What do their husbands expect? When women are so occupied with taking care of houses and children that they
can't
think of anything else and never get out among other people, of course they are not interesting. I don't know what can be done, but I know that having the vote has already done a lot toward making men take us seriously.

Speaking of children, that summer
we had a visit from the Bulgarian Haskells—Harry's missionary brother, his wife, and three of their ten children. They were touring the country on furlough, and Edward plied us with stories about the folk school they run in a village called Pordim, somewhere out in the foothills of the Balkans. It was a strenuous time for us, I can tell you, but we survived. If I had to judge from their activities on that occasion,
I'd say the children of missionaries were no less inclined to Goopish
behavior than the common garden variety. I gave the little boy a piece of my mind when he splattered water from the kitchen faucet all over the floor. That was just plain careless of him, and if there's one thing I can't abide, it's carelessness. I'm afraid I lost my temper and blurted out, “It's ridiculous—we have enough work without having any more.” Maybe it's no bad thing after all that I have no children of my own!

It was a mortifying experience to attend commencement exercises as the husband of Oberlin's formidable “lady trustee.” I never had any doubt that Katharine was a woman to be reckoned with, but to watch President King and his fellow worthies pay court and hang on her every word made me feel smaller than ever for having brought her into exile here in Kansas City. All I can say is, if the college trustees expect Mrs. Henry J. Haskell to roll over and rubber-stamp whatever they propose, they are in for a rude awakening. President King got a taste of Katharine's medicine the time he let one of her favorite professors go to Amherst without a fight and notified the trustees only after the fact. She made it known that the professor in question was the kind of teacher Oberlin could ill afford to lose, and that President King could put that in his pipe and smoke it—or words to that general effect.

To be sure, Katharine and I have the greatest respect and affection for President King. After his retirement was announced, I was moved to write him a letter saying how much his teaching and example had meant to me over the years. King was an advanced liberal of his day—advanced almost to the point of heresy, even
at a progressive school like Oberlin. I recall a course in freshman psychology he taught in '92, when he openly espoused the theories of Darwin, and a course in evolution that he gave a year or two later. The interest in philosophy that he aroused in my senior year has remained with me. Since then hardly a year has passed that I have not read one or more books on philosophical subjects—mostly popular ones, to be sure, but books that have enlarged my experience considerably.

One time—it must have been in my junior year—I had a long talk with Professor King, as he was then, about religion. Suffice it to say that it was not a subject I was particularly eager to discuss with any member of my own family. I was in the throes of a spiritual crisis and had been having second thoughts about taking the missionary pledge. I confessed to Professor King that I felt out of place remaining in a church a large part of whose creed I didn't believe. I found it increasingly difficult to go along with my parents' belief that the Bible is to be interpreted literally; that if one part is rejected, the rest must go; and that God must of necessity have preserved men from error and left a word directly from himself. As I saw it then, and still see it now, the only ground of acceptance of any part of the scriptures is their reasonableness.

King is a kind, tolerant, and sympathetic man. He told me he was sure I believed the fundamental things, that my great aims were the same as those of the church, and that he saw no reason for my leaving it. To a young man beset by doubts, his words of wisdom were consoling, if not altogether persuasive. Eventually, I did come to a parting of the ways with the Congregational Church. Isabel and I felt more at home among the Unitarians, to the lasting chagrin of some of my family and friends. Bill White and Katharine
take a dim view of my apostasy. On one occasion, when I must have drunk the cup of bile to the lees, I told Bill I thought the world was a good deal of a mistake and that perhaps God would be justified in wiping the slate clean and starting over again, though I wouldn't be particularly hopeful over the results.

Now, Bill happens to be blessed with the ability to see a silver lining in every cloud. That, I take it, is his religion in a nutshell. Every time he accuses me of harboring a “grouch on God,” I come back with my standard reply: that we are simply calling the same thing by different names. My notion is that none of us lives to himself; that each of us has purposes and needs and loyalties extending far beyond our individual lives. Katharine and Bill call that enveloping whole God, and so can remain members of the Congregational Church in good standing. The real cleavage is between those who refuse to recognize obligations beyond their own interests and those who do recognize such obligations—not between those who use one terminology and those who use another.

Nor, in my experience, is this merely an abstract philosophical debate. Ever since I stood by helplessly and watched Isabel grow more and more frail from one day to the next, until I scarcely felt her weight when I carried her upstairs to bed, the problem of evil has seemed to me as a practical matter insoluble. Bible or no Bible, it is inconceivable to me that any all-powerful and allegedly beneficent deity would permit such tragedies to happen. The only consolation I found in Isabel's unfailing strength and good humor was the realization that joy and suffering are inextricably bound up together in the human condition. On this point, at least, Bill and I are in agreement. When young
Mary White had her fatal horse-riding accident, he didn't give way to grief as most fathers would have done. Instead, he sat
down at his desk and turned out a column for his newspaper about Mary's immortal soul “flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.”

His words have the ring of eternal truth. Katharine too possesses a joyous soul, but she suffers deeply over Orville's attitude, and there is not a thing in the world that any of us can do about it.