On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never was there such a
father. Even the trained nurse, hardened to new fathers by years of
experience, admitted that she never had seen any one take parenthood
quite so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if the baby
was surely breathing. We were in a very quiet neighborhood, yet the next
day, being Fourth of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each
report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash out and vehemently
protest to a group of scornful youngsters that they would wake our son.
As if a one-day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a giant
fire-cracker went off under his bed!
Those were magic days. Three of us in the family instead of two--and
separations harder than ever. Once in all the ten and a half years we
were married I saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own
affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in Oakland and he
announced that he just could not stand the bond business any longer. He
had come to dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the boy
and me was not worth the whole financial world put together. Since his
European experience,--meeting the Webbs and their kind,--he had had a
hankering for University work, but he felt that the money return was so
small he simply could not contemplate raising a family on it. But now we
were desperate. We longed for a life that would give us the maximum
chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided that University work
would give us that opportunity, and the long vacations would give us our
mountains.
The work itself made its strong appeal, too. Professor Henry Morse
Stephens and Professor Miller of the University of California had long
urged Carl to go into teaching; and at last we decided that, even if it
meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our days, at least we would
be eating what there was to eat together, three meals a day every day.
We cashed in our savings, we drew on everything there was to draw on,
and on February 1, 1909, the three of us embarked for Harvard--with
fifty-six dollars and seventy-five cents excess-baggage to pay at the
depot, such young ignoramuses we were.
That trip East was worth any future hardship we might have reaped. Our
seven-months-old baby was one of the young saints of the world--not once
in the five days did he peep. We'd pin him securely in the lower berth
of our compartment for his nap, and back we would fly to the corner of
the rear platform of the observation car, and gloat, just gloat, over
how we had come into the inheritance of all creation. We owned the
world. And I, who had never been farther from my California home town
than Seattle, who never had seen real snow, except that Christmas when
we spent four days at the Scenic Hot Springs in the Cascades, and skied
and sledded and spilled around like six-year-olds! But stretches and
stretches of snow! And then, just traveling, and together!
And to be in Boston! We took a room with a bath in the Copley Square
Hotel. The first evening we arrived, Nandy (Carleton, Jr.) rolled off
the bed; so when we went gallivanting about Boston, shopping for the new
home, we left him in the bath-tub where he could not fall out. We padded
it well with pillows, there was a big window letting in plenty of fresh
air, and we instructed the chambermaid to peep at him now and then. And
there we would leave him, well-nourished and asleep. (By the time that
story had been passed around by enough people in the home town, it
developed that one day the baby--just seven months old, remember--got up
and turned on the water, and was found by the chambermaid sinking for
the third time.)
Something happened to the draft from the home bank, which should have
reached Boston almost at the same time we did. We gazed into the family
pocket-book one fine morning, to find it, to all intents and purposes,
empty. Hurried meeting of the finance committee. By unanimous consent of
all present, we decided--as many another mortal in a strange town has
decided--on the pawnshop. I wonder if my dear grandmother will read
this--she probably will. Carl first submitted his gold watch--the baby
had dropped it once, and it had shrunk thereby in the eyes of the
pawnshop man, though not in ours. The only other valuable we had along
with us was my grandmother's wedding present to me, which had been my
grandfather's wedding present to her--a glorious old-fashioned
breast-pin. We were allowed fifty dollars on it, which saved the day.
What will my grandmother say when she knows that her bridal gift resided
for some days in a Boston pawnshop?
We moved out to Cambridge in due time, and settled at Bromley Court, on
the very edge of the Yard. We thrilled to all of it--we drank in every
ounce of dignity and tradition the place afforded, and our wild Western
souls exulted. We knew no one when we reached Boston, but our first
Sunday we were invited to dinner in Cambridge by two people who were,
ever after, our cordial, faithful friends--Mr. and Mrs. John Graham
Brooks. They made us feel at once that Cambridge was not the socially
icy place it is painted in song and story. Then I remember the afternoon
that I had a week's wash strung on an improvised line back and forth
from one end of our apartment to the other. Just as I hung the last damp
garment, the bell rang, and there stood an immaculate gentleman in a
cutaway and silk hat, who had come to call--an old friend of my
mother's. He ducked under wet clothes, and we set two chairs where we
could see each other, and yet nothing was dripping down either of our
necks; and there we conversed, and he ended by inviting us both to
dinner--on Marlborough Street, at that! He must have loved my mother
very dearly to have sought further acquaintance with folk who hung the
family wash in the hall and the living-room and dining-room. His house
on Marlborough Street! We boldly and excitedly figured up on the way
home, that they spent on the one meal they fed us more than it cost us
to live for two weeks--they honestly did.
Then there was the dear "Jello" lady at the market. I wish she would
somehow happen to read this, so as to know that we have never forgotten
her. Every Saturday the three of us went to the market, and there was
the Jello lady with her samples. The helpings she dished for us each
time! She brought the man to whom she was engaged to call on us just
before we left. I wonder if they got married, and where they are, and if
she still remembers us. She used to say she just waited for Saturdays
and our coming. Then there was dear Granny Jones, who kept a
boarding-house half a block away. I do not remember how we came to know
her, but some good angel saw to it. She used to send around little bowls
of luscious dessert, and half a pie, or some hot muffins. Then I was
always grateful also--for it made such a good story, and it was true--to
the New England wife of a fellow graduate student who remarked, when I
told her we had one baby and another on the way, "How interesting--just
like the slums!"
We did our own work, of course, and we lived on next to nothing. I
wonder now how we kept so well that year. Of course, we fed the baby
everything he should have,--according to Holt in those days,--and we ate
the mutton left from his broth and the beef after the juice had been
squeezed out of it for him, and bought storage eggs ourselves, and queer
butter out of a barrel, and were absolutely, absolutely blissful.
Perhaps we should have spent more on food and less on baseball. I am
glad we did not. Almost every Saturday afternoon that first semester we
fared forth early, Nandy in his go-cart, to get a seat in the front row
of the baseball grandstand. I remember one Saturday we were late, front
seats all taken. We had to pack baby and go-cart more than half-way up
to the top. There we barricaded him, still in the go-cart, in the middle
of the aisle. Along about the seventh inning, the game waxed
particularly exciting--we were beside ourselves with enthusiasm. Fellow
onlookers seemed even more excited--they called out things--they seemed
to be calling in our direction. Fine parents we were--there was Nandy,
go-cart and all, bumpety-bumping down the grandstand steps.
I remember again the Stadium on the day of the big track meet. Every
time the official announcer would put the megaphone to his mouth, to
call out winners and time to a hushed and eager throng, Nandy, not yet a
year old, would begin to squeal at the top of his lungs for joy. Nobody
could hear a word the official said. We were as distressed as any
one--we, too, had pencils poised to jot down records.
Carl studied very hard. The first few weeks, until we got used to the
new wonder of things, he used to run home from college whenever he had a
spare minute, just to be sure he was that near. At that time he was
rather preparing to go into Transportation as his main economic subject.
But by the end of the year he knew Labor would be his love. (His first
published economic article was a short one that appeared in the
"Quarterly Journal of Economics" for May, 1910, on "The Decline of
Trade-Union Membership.") We had a tragic summer.
Carl felt that he must take his Master's degree, but he had no foreign
language. Three terrible, wicked, unforgivable professors assured him
that, if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he
could get enough German to pass the examination for the A.M. We believed
them, and he went; though of all the partings we ever had, that was the
very worst. Almost at the last he just could not go; but we were so sure
that it would solve the whole A.M. problem. He went third class on a
German steamer, since we had money for nothing better. The food did
distress even his unfinicky soul. After a particularly sad offering of
salt herring, uncooked, on a particularly rough day, he wrote, "I find I
am not a good Hamburger German. The latter eat all things in all
weather."
Oh, the misery of that summer! We never talked about it much. He went to
Freiburg, to a German cobbler's family, but later changed, as the
cobbler's son looked upon him as a dispensation of Providence, sent to
practise his English upon. His heart was breaking, and mine was
breaking, and he was working at German (and languages came fearfully
hard for him) morning, afternoon, and night, with two lessons a day, his
only diversion being a daily walk up a hill, with a cake of soap and a
towel, to a secluded waterfall he discovered. He wrote a letter and a
postcard a day to the babe and me. I have just re-read all of them, and
my heart aches afresh for the homesickness that summer meant to both of
us.
He got back two days before our wedding anniversary--days like those
first few after our reunion are not given to many mortals. I would say
no one had ever tasted such joy. The baby gurgled about, and was kissed
within an inch of his life. The Jello lady sent around a dessert of
sixteen different colors, more or less, big enough for a family of
eight, as her welcome home.
About six weeks later we called our beloved Dr. J---- from a banquet he
had long looked forward to, in order to officiate at the birth of our
second, known as Thomas-Elizabeth up to October 17, but from about
ten-thirty that night as James Stratton Parker. We named him after my
grandfather, for the simple reason that we liked the name Jim. How we
chuckled when my father's congratulatory telegram came, in which he
claimed pleasure at having the boy named after his father, but cautioned
us never to allow him to be nicknamed. I remember the boresome youth who
used to call, week in week out,--always just before a meal,--and we were
so hard up, and got so that we resented feeding such an impossible
person so many times. He dropped in at noon Friday the 17th, for lunch.
A few days later Carl met him on the street and announced rapturously
the arrival of the new son. The impossible person hemmed and stammered:
"Why--er--when did it arrive?" Carl, all beams, replied, "The very
evening of the day you were at our house for lunch!" We never laid eyes
on that man again! We were almost four months longer in Cambridge, but
never did he step foot inside our apartment. I wish some one could have
psycho-analyzed him, but it's too late now. He died about a year after
we left Cambridge. I always felt that he never got over the shock of
having escaped Jim's arrival by such a narrow margin.
And right here I must tell of Dr. J----. He was recommended as the best
doctor in Cambridge, but very expensive. "We may have to economize in
everything on earth," said Carl, "but we'll never economize on doctors."
So we had Dr. J----, had him for all the minor upsets that families need
doctors for; had him when Jim was born; had him through a queer fever
Nandy developed that lasted some time; had him through a bad case of
grippe I got (this was at Christmastime, and Carl took care of both
babies, did all the cooking, even to the Christmas turkey I was well
enough to eat by then, got up every two hours for three nights to change
an ice-pack I had to have--that's the kind of man he was!); had him
vaccinate both children; and then, just before we left Cambridge, we sat
and held his bill, afraid to open the envelope. At length we gathered
our courage, and gazed upon charges of sixty-five dollars for
everything, with a wonderful note which said that, if we would be
inconvenienced in paying that, he would not mind at all if he got
nothing.
Such excitement! We had expected two hundred dollars at the least! We
tore out and bought ten cents' worth of doughnuts, to celebrate. When we
exclaimed to him over his goodness,--of course we paid the sixty-five
dollars,--all he said was: "Do you think a doctor is blind? And does a
man go steerage to Europe if he has a lot of money in the bank?" Bless
that doctor's heart! Bless all doctors' hearts! We went through our
married life in the days of our financial slimness, with kindness shown
us by every doctor we ever had. I remember our Heidelberg German doctor
sent us a bill for a year of a dollar and a half. And even in our more
prosperous days, at Carl's last illness, with that good Seattle doctor
calling day and night, and caring for me after Carl's death, he refused
to send any bill for anything. And a little later, when I paid a long
overdue bill to our blessed Oakland doctor for a tonsil operation, he
sent the check back torn in two. Bless doctors!
When we left for Harvard, we had an idea that perhaps one year of
graduate work would be sufficient. Naturally, about two months was
enough to show us that one year would get us nowhere. Could we finance
an added year at, perhaps, Wisconsin? And then, in November, Professor
Miller of Berkeley called to talk things over with Carl. Anon he
remarked, more or less casually, "The thing for you to do is to have a
year's study in Germany," and proceeded to enlarge on that idea. We sat
dumb, and the minute the door was closed after him, we flopped. "What
was the man thinking of--to suggest a year in Germany, when we have no
money and two babies, one not a year and a half, and one six weeks old!"
Preposterous!
That was Saturday afternoon. By Monday morning we had decided we would
go! Thereupon we wrote West to finance the plan, and got beautifully sat
upon for our "notions." If we needed money, we had better give up this
whole fool University idea and get a decent man-sized job. And then we
wrote my father,--or, rather, I wrote him without telling Carl till
after the letter was mailed,--and bless his heart! he replied with a fat
God-bless-you-my-children registered letter, with check enclosed,
agreeing to my stipulation that it should be a six-per-cent business
affair. Suppose we could not have raised that money--suppose our lives
had been minus that German experience! Bless fathers! They may scold and
fuss at romance, and have "good sensible ideas of their own" on such
matters, but--bless fathers!