One morning in mid-August 1940, while preparing to leave home for summer school teaching, Otto stubbed his little toe against the base of his bureau. When he returned home, limping, that afternoon, I asked to see his foot. To our dismay, the toes were black and red streaks ran up his ankle. There was no protest this time as I rushed to telephone my doctor, who came to the house within an hour. He was very grave about the situation, ordered my husband to keep his foot elevated and not to leave his bed for any reason. The doctor took blood and urine samples back to his laboratory, calling me later to report a far-advanced state of diabetes mellitus. The announcement burst upon me like a clap of thunder—so this was his illness—not cancer at all, but an illness which, treated in time with insulin and diet, could be lived with and controlled. I began to hope wildly—the only question was did we have time?
From that day on life was an alternation of hope and fear; crises were interspersed with amazing recoveries only to give way to crises again. Otto developed pneumonia, was rushed to the Winthrop hospital, returned home after two weeks with a practical nurse. I sent Warren to his grandparents’ home, where his young Uncle Frank took him sailing and fishing. Sylvia wanted to remain with us, so the friendly nurse cut down an old uniform for her and called Sylvia her “assistant,” who could bring Daddy fruit or cool drinks now and then, along with the drawings she made for him, which gave him some cheer.
On the nurse’s first day off, Otto suggested that I get out into the sun with Sylvia for an hour; he had all his needs supplied on the table next to his bed. She and I ran along the beach together for only about a half hour, because I felt uneasy about having left my husband. I then took Sylvia over to the Freemans’ house, where she was invited to remain for supper. On my return home I found Otto collapsed on the staircase. He had left his bed to go downstairs into the garden to look at his flowers. Somehow I half dragged, half carried him to his bed. It was a Wednesday and the doctor could not be reached. I gave Otto his insulin injection; he was so exhausted he could eat very little supper. In the middle of the night he called me and I found him feverish, shaking from head to foot with chills, his bed clothes soaked with perspiration. All the rest of that night I kept changing sheets, sponging his face, and holding his trembling hands. At one point he caught my hands, and holding on, said hoarsely, “God knows, why have I been so cussed!” As tears streamed down my face, I could only think, “All this needn’t have happened; it needn’t have happened.”
The next day the doctor came with the renowned diabetic surgeon, Dr. Harvey Loder, from the New England Deaconess Hospital. Dr. Loder listened carefully to my account of the past years of deteriorating health and the events of the day before. He made a careful examination and as he came out of the room, he told me that amputation from the thigh of the gangrened foot and leg would be necessary to save Otto’s life.
As I handed Dr. Loder his hat, he murmured, “How could such a brilliant man be so stupid.”
On October 12 the amputation was performed in the New England Deaconess Hospital. I had arranged for a private room and nurse. The report was very favorable, and I attended some lectures to learn about the care of diabetics. We began making plans for the future which would have to be prefaced by Otto’s getting adjusted to a prosthesis and learning how to walk with it. Dr. Daniel Marsh, then president of Boston University, wrote my husband, “We’d rather have you back at your desk with one leg than any other man with two.” Students volunteered in great numbers to donate blood; everyone was encouraging and helpful. The late Dr. Irving Johnson, and Otto’s former graduate student and friend Carl Ludwig, carried on my husband’s teaching assignments, refusing to accept any remuneration.
The children were going to school regularly, and my mother or Marion Freeman cared for them during the hours I spent with Otto in the hospital. Marion advised me to explain the operation to Sylvia and Warren, for she had heard children in the neighborhood talking about the amputation; therefore, it seemed best for me to prepare them. I emphasized the fact that we hoped that after this Daddy would be well. Warren accepted the news very quietly, perhaps not sensing the reality of it; Sylvia, wide-eyed, asked, “When he buys shoes, will he have to buy a pair, Mummy?”
I had talked with the doctors concerning the type of help a wife must give to restore confidence to a husband who has been mutilated by surgery and I understood the compelling necessity to make him feel a “whole man” and completely acceptable to me. As the days went by, however, Otto avoided any discussion about coming home or trying the prosthesis. The reality of his operation depressed him, and I realized the road ahead would be long and would require much patience.
On November 5, when I left Otto after finding him much weakened, I was told that his condition was serious. My telephone was ringing when I returned home; it was Dr. Loder, who informed me that an embolus had struck in a lung and caused my husband’s death as he slept.
I waited until the next morning to tell the children. It was a school day, and I went into Warren’s room first. As I looked at the sleeping little boy, only five and a half years old, I thought of both children now having to live the rest of their lives with but one parent. I knew that I would have to earn a living, and my mind leapt to the offer my generous parents had made me. “Should Otto not recover,” they had said, “we will come to live with you so that you can return to teaching and the children will be cared for when you are away.” My parents were very young to be grandparents; my mother only eighteen years my senior. They were healthy, optimistic, strong in their faith, and loved the children dearly. My young brother, only thirteen years Sylvia’s senior, and my sister would be close to us—the children would have a sense of family and be surrounded with care and love. This much I could be sure of. All this passed through my mind before Warren, of his own accord, awoke. I told him as quietly as I could that Daddy’s sufferings had ended, that he had died in his sleep and was at rest. Warren sat up, hugged me tightly, crying out, “Oh, Mummy, I’m so glad you are young and healthy!”
Then I faced the more difficult task, telling Sylvia, who was already reading in her bed. She looked at me sternly for a moment, then said woodenly, “I’ll never speak to God again!” I told her that she did not need to attend school that day if she’d rather stay at home. From under the blanket which she had pulled over her head came her muffled voice, “I want to go to school.”
After school, she came to me, red-eyed, and handed me a piece of paper, which told me there had been troubling comments from her classmates regarding the possibility of a stepfather. On the paper, in shaky printing, stood these words: I PROMISE NEVER TO MARRY AGAIN. Signed:________. I signed at once, hugged her and gave her a glass of milk with some cookies. She pushed a kitchen chair against the one I was sitting on, sighed as if relieved and, leaning against my arm, ate and drank with relish. That done, she rose briskly, saying matter-of-factly, “I’m going to find David and Ruth.”
I looked at the rumpled “document” I had just signed, which Sylvia had left on the kitchen table, apparently without further thought or doubt, and knew that I never should marry again unless, in years to come, I would have the opportunity to marry a man I respected, loved, and trusted to be a good father to my children and whom the children wanted to have for their father. This was the explanation I gave Sylvia when, as a college student, she had come to know a classmate whose once-widowed mother had remarried very happily for herself and her children. “That document never kept you from marrying again, did it?” she queried anxiously. I assured her that it had not.
At the request of Dr. Loder, I permitted an autopsy to be performed when he assured me that Otto could still be given the “normal” funeral that he had once stated was his wish. When I viewed Otto at the funeral parlor, he bore no resemblance to the husband I knew, but looked like a fashionable store manikin. The children would never recognize their father, I felt, so I did not take them to the funeral, but placed them in the kind, understanding care of Marion Freeman for that
afternoon. What I intended as an exercise in courage for the sake of my children was interpreted years later by my daughter as indifference. “My mother never had time to mourn my father’s death.” I had vividly remembered a time when I was a little child, seeing my mother weep in my presence and feeling that my whole personal world was collapsing. Mother, the tower of strength, my one refuge, crying! It was this recollection that compelled me to withhold my tears until I was alone in bed at night.
Excerpts from a scrapbook autobiography Sylvia made in high school
The week after Otto’s death both children came down with measles, Warren having the added complication of pneumonia and Sylvia developing sinusitis. My father, who had been cost accountant for the Dorothy Muriel Company, lost that position at this time, along with all its other employees, when the company changed ownership. He was beginning to have serious difficulty with his eyesight, and the ophthalmologist informed me that progressive macular degeneration was the cause—a grim prognosis lay in the near future for him.
The whole family, including my brother and sister, were together for Christmas, making that event a joyous one for the children.
In January, through the kind efforts of a former classmate, I obtained a $25-a-week substitute teaching position in Braintree High School, teaching three classes of German and two of Spanish daily. I left home at five thirty each morning, commuted to Jamaica Plain to my friend’s house, then she drove me to Braintree High School, where she held a full-time teaching post. Three times a week I took private lessons in Spanish from a young teacher in Emmanuel College in Boston. Few teaching positions were available and by the end of the spring term I was very grateful to accept an opening in the Junior High School in Winthrop for the coming September.
The following school year I began having difficulty with a duodenal ulcer I had developed during the last two years of my husband’s illness. At the Winthrop Junior High School, in addition to a full teaching program, I was put in charge of all the monies in the entire school: the weekly banking by the pupils (in the second term this was expanded to the purchase of war stamps and bonds by the pupils and teachers), the class and athletic dues. The responsibility of handling and accounting for other people’s money weighed heavily upon me. Along with the air raid drills that occurred frequently after December 7, 1941, and our entry into World War II, this was a tense time.
In the summer of 1942, I was invited by the dean of the Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters to develop a course in Medical Secretarial Procedures. I looked upon the appointment as providential, for it would enable us to leave Winthrop and move as far west of Boston as was possible for a person who had to commute to the city daily. Warren’s frequent bouts with bronchitis and Sylvia’s sinusitis, we thought, might have been aggravated by their proximity to the sea.
It was a serious step to take, for I was leaving the security of a good state pension and starting at the small salary of $1,800 a year (which was not increased for three years and carried no benefits at this time), but I felt that the children’s health was more important than my financial future. I vowed that I would make the course interesting, yes, fascinating, by presenting the stenographic skills as only the first step up a ladder. I wrote to my sister-in-law’s husband, Walter Heinrichs, M.D., who outlined for me a basic course upon which I was to build: nomenclature of disease, basic anatomy and physiology, record keeping and account keeping in a medical office, applied psychology, pertinent problem solving. I added a brief history of the evolution of medicine itself as it emerged from witchcraft, superstition, and religious practices (my A.M. thesis gave me some insight into this as I had written about the personality and work of Paracelsus from sources in English and German literature). I took a course at Harvard Evening School in biology, as well as a general course given for medical secretaries, borrowed medical journals, extracted case histories from these and made up a collection of medical correspondence and records.
By October 26, 1942 (the day before Sylvia’s tenth birthday), I had sold the Winthrop house and purchased a small, six-room, white frame house in Wellesley. There were many reasons why I selected Wellesley. Our new home was in a modest section of the town; then the real-estate evaluation and taxes were low. The school system had a fine rating, and Wellesley College, which admitted outstanding students on a town scholarship, might in the future hold opportunity for Sylvia. As my husband had no pension and his $5,000 life insurance had to be used to pay his medical and funeral expenses and for part of the down payment of our new home—the Winthrop house having been sold at a loss—we were operating on a tight margin and had to plan very carefully.
Our proximity to my sister’s home in Weston delighted us all, and my father, who was by now employed in the Brookline Country Club as maître d’hôtel—a position he could manage even with his restricted vision—was able to join us on weekends. As a car was essential in this suburb, we were grateful that Grammy possessed a second-hand one and, when necessary, was a willing chauffeur.
In Winthrop Sylvia had been promoted to the sixth grade, but when I discovered that all the children in that grade in Wellesley were nearly two years older than she, I asked the principal to place Sylvia in the fifth grade. She was very understanding and agreed with my multiple reasons for the request, adding, “It is the first time in my teaching experience that a mother has requested an all-A pupil be put back a grade.” However, it worked out well, for the texts and methods differed completely from those in Winthrop. Sylvia made forty book reports that year for her own enjoyment; became an enthusiastic Girl Scout along with the others in that grade, and continued to take piano lessons, which she had begun at the age of seven.
Sylvia wearing a Girl Scout uniform in her Wellesley home, 1946
Sylvia’s 1944 and 1945 diaries—I always slipped a diary into her Christmas stocking—are full of accounts of school events, shared activities with her friends, especially with Betsy Powley, whose family always had the latchstring out for Sylvia. There were weekend visits in Winthrop with the Freemans and in the summer, camping, swimming, and sailing. Sylvia was writing rhymes constantly and making sketches to accompany them, which she hid under my napkin to surprise me when I came home from teaching. At this time she thought of possibly becoming an illustrator, a dress designer, a writer. Her original illustrated cards with her own verses for occasions of family celebration were a delight for the recipient and have been carefully preserved, as have the original paper dolls for which she made exquisite costumes.
Grampy was so proud of the special-occasion cards she made for him and the poems she had published in the school paper that he carried them in his billfold until they wore out, proudly showing them to his friend, the author William Dana Orcutt, who was interested in Sylvia’s progress.
The junior high school years (1944–47) were the “awkward years” for Sylvia, physically. At fifteen years of age, she attained her full height of five feet nine inches, but it was not until her sixteenth year that she began adding curves to her tall frame. Years later, she said she was glad she had not been “pretty” at this time, or rushed to go steady, for it was in junior high that she developed work habits and skill in her favorite fields of endeavor, art and writing, winning prizes from the “scholastic awards” competitions each year.
My pack-rat tendencies led to recovery of an old theater program, the first play I took the children to. Sylvia was twelve, Warren, nine and a half. The play was Margaret Webster’s production of The Tempest. I told the children I would buy good tickets for us all, including Grammy, of course, if they read the play and could tell me the story of it. I gave Sylvia my copy of Shakespeare’s complete works and handed Warren Charles and Mary Lamb’s version, feeling he was a bit young for Shakespeare. He was indignant and read the play in the original.
The diary for 1945—the end of the war—was the last dated diary. Sylvia now asked me to give her each Christmas an undated journal, because, “When the big moments come, one page is not
enough.”
These were the days when we still were together enough to enjoy long talks about books, music, paintings—how they made us feel. We were critical of our verbal and written expression, for we shared a love of words and considered them as a tool used to achieve precise expression, a necessity for accuracy in describing our emotions, as well as for mutual understanding.
As soon as my children were old enough to comprehend it, I shared with them the belief my husband and I had held concerning the importance of aiming and directing one’s life toward an idealistic goal in order to build a strong inner life.
I explained to them that their father, who felt regret when he accidentally stepped on an ant, had told me he could never bear arms. He would do any type of menial work to fulfill compelled military service, but he could never take another’s life.
Back in our Winthrop days I had read Matthew Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman,” to the children, which Sylvia recalled in a published reminiscence years later, noting the impact of the lines as she wrote:
A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.
Together she and I read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence,” and Sylvia was particularly moved by the lines
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
Between Sylvia and me there existed—as between my own mother and me—a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy. Understanding this, I learned, as she grew older, not to refer to previous voluntary confidences on her part.