In Theda Bara's Tent (as Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly)

CHAPTER SIX

The Elizabeth Home was required to provide for children in need until the age of fourteen, the age when it became legally possible to quit school. For most of the residents, this was not a problem because they wanted to leave school. Freckles, for instance, was pursued by the truant officer until the day he turned fourteen. He then packed his bag, hugged the living daylights out of me at the train depot and said I was the best friend he had ever had and that he would never throw away the orange swan beak I had given him.        

       After the train pulled away, filling the sky with smoke, I saw his mother in the shadow of the maple tree next to the station house. She was a bedraggled creature, too young to have a fourteen-year-old son. She stood there forlorn before coming toward me, probably for consolation. She assumed I was sad about Freckles leaving, but I wasn’t. Now I had other friends, Oscar and Bruno, two energetic pals who lived with their parents in town. They were impatient with Freckles, with his slowness and his devotion to me. Freckles waited at the edge while we talked about the books we read, Wrecked on Spider Island, Search for Silver City, Captured by Apes. Freckles tagged along when we dug mushrooms and compared them to pictures in our guidebook, delighting most in the ones that would kill us. He tried to contribute when we discussed Lieutenant Robert E. Peary, the Arctic explorer photographed with icicles in his beard. Peary was searching for the North Pole and believed he would find it sticking out of the earth. Freckles asked, Why dont he ice skate to the pole? I am ashamed to report that I pretended not to see his mother the day Freckles left Haverhill. 

When I was thirteen and about to graduate from elementary school, some of my teachers encouraged me to work hard in high school so I could earn a scholarship to college. None of them mentioned the inconvenient fact that I couldn’t stay at the Elizabeth Home past the age of fourteen. I assumed, because I vaguely believed all adults were in some sort of club together, that the teachers had spoken to Lady Mother and that some special accommodation was being arranged for me. Maybe they were going to let me stay at the home in exchange for tutoring the younger children. Then I would go to Yale and come back to visit wearing a beanie like Elsie Cogswell’s brother.

The population at the Elizabeth Home was always transient—kids coming in, kids going out—but lately, there were many more coming in than going out. I was surprised to hear that they were not from Haverhill but from Amesbury, Newburyport, Georgetown and other cities close by. At the same time that there were more mouths to feed, it was obvious that our volunteers had lost interest. The women who had bustled about when I first arrived were now championing the cause of womens suffrage. Members of the bedding committee, instead of showing up with more sheets, now marched in parades holding signs that read Good Wives and Good Mothers Make Good Voters. When the comedian Felix Honey performed a skit called The Suffragette Family, the women picketed Louies theater. Felix Honey Belittles Women and Womens Suffrage Is No Joke” read the signs. Volunteers who had brought food to the home now stood on the street holding placards for the opposition: Suffragists Are She-Males and The Vote Is a Burden and If Men Have Failed in Government, It Is the Fault of the Women Who Trained Them. One stout woman stood on a soap box saying, We are not afraid of the masculine woman but have grave fears for the woman who confuses the work of man and woman and attempts to do both.

The population of Massachusetts was growing so fast that orphanages across the state were overcrowded. The rule, when I arrived in Haverhill, was that each town had to take care of its own. In wealthy towns, the orphanages were well supplied and comfortable. In towns where the citizens were too poor to be generous, the orphanages were less than adequate. So the wealthy towns had to take in children from the poorer towns. The problem with this result was it took away the feeling of personal responsibility from the good citizens of prosperous towns. Our benefactors resented having to support the children of strangers. It was one thing to have a little boy like me left at the home by an immigrant worker nobody knew but quite another to have to support lots of alien children who would also overburden the local public schools. The bankers, coal magnates and shoe-manufacturing tycoons of Haverhill ceased to feel that the Elizabeth Home was their personal cause. I remember Lady Mother’s distress when our roof began to leak and no one came to fix it.