Front matter

Harper & Brothers Publishers NEW YORK AND LONDON 1928

A PRESIDENT IS BORN COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY FANNIE HURST PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. A-C

TO THE MEMORY OF HENRY STEPHEN SCHUYLER

The author takes occasion to make grateful acknowledgment to the Schuyler family, and to Senator Bettina Schuyler Sterling in particular, for the privilege of access to the diaries of the late Rebekka Schuyler Renchler.

It has been a task requiring the utmost delicacy to step lightly through the aisles of her pages; and only because of the great interest that centers around even the minutiæ of the life of David Schuyler, has the author ventured to quote from so precious and so private a family-document.

By virtue of this handsome grant of access to the diaries, the public again becomes beneficiary of the Schuyler family.

A PRESIDENT IS BORN

All footnotes herein appended are excerpts from the private diaries of the late Rebekka Schuyler Renchler and are quoted with the permission of her granddaughter, United States Senator Bettina Schuyler Sterling, in whose possession they are.

A PRESIDENT IS BORN

Twenty-two sat down to dinner on a Thanksgiving afternoon at four, 1903, in the House on Sycamore Street.

It might have been the house in Downing Street so far as its centrifugal significance was ground into the consciousness of the men, women and children gathered about its board.

For thirty years it had stood on the outskirts of a town that lapped out toward it like a constantly encroaching tide. It was then virtually the last house in Centralia. Always had been. As you drove into town, the two-story wooden structure of tower, ell, bulge and gable, marked the beginning of the principal residential street. As you left town, a half mile or so beyond the Schuyler fifteen acres of homestead, a city-limits sign was painted against a whitewashed slab of stone. Later, a large sign the shape of an open book announced:

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING CENTRALIA. THIS SPOT MARKS THE SITE WHERE CELERON DE BIENVILLE IN 1749 PLANTED A LEADEN PLATE AND TOOK FORMAL POSSESSION.

CENTRALIA OFFERS UNPARALLELED FACTORY AND FOUNDRY SITES AND PEERLESS WATER POWER ADVANTAGES. SEE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. WRITE FOR BOOKLET.

Six children and several of the grandchildren had been born in the House on Sycamore Street. The second-story front, a deep room with a bay window formed by a tower that was filled with an indoor vine of myrtle that grew in a flower box, held in its timbers the first squalls of Mathilda (deceased at two weeks of age), Rebekka, Clara, Henry, Phil and Emma Schuyler.

Two of Rebekka’s children had been born in that front room. Clara had come from St. Louis for the purpose of having her first-born see its first light of day in that room of double walnut wardrobe that reached to ceiling, hand-painted window shades, washstand with a pink-and-white bowl and pitcher, toothbrush-mug, and grooved soap-dish that had stood dry since the cedar closet had been made into a bathroom.

To open your eyes upon that room was to greet the retinas with a pair of china spittoons on the white hearth; oval portraits of Austrian Schuylers, in oval brooches or square-cut spades of beard; a pair of steel-engravings of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Signing the Declaration”; a horsehair and walnut-backed armchair, in which the Old Gentleman always sat, and that by its shape was to suggest to Henry Schuyler, as long as he lived, the figure of his father crouched into it for his annual cold, a gray-striped blanket across his shoulders, and his feet immersed in steaming foot tub the shape of a kidney and with a tin bottom that plunked.

The solemn double bed with pillow shams the pallor and shape of headstones, was covered with a patchwork quilt of tulip-and-leaf design that Mathilda Schuyler had brought as dowry to Heinie Schuyler when she married him in an Austrian village called Holdstein. On holidays it was piled with the mufflers, the top-coats, the tippets, muffs, baby-leggings, small-boy sweaters, and the little-girl cloaks of the homecoming clan.

It was as if the walls of this house, which had been outgrown practically the first year of its occupancy, would burst its sides for need of expansion, on that Thanksgiving afternoon, for instance, when the Schuylers, twenty-two strong, sat down to dinner at four.

That meant that Schuylers from as far as Springfield and as wide as St. Louis, with their wives, husbands and children, were home for the holiday.

For two days the rich sweetness of mincemeat stewing in its sluggish juices had wound aromatically through the house. To even stir the colloid mass required Mathilda to grasp the long iron spoon as you would a broom, with both hands, and haul it around and around the pot. Sometimes Trina, who had come to the Schuylers a slim chip of a hired girl and, now twenty-five years later, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, helped. But at the period of this Thanksgiving, Trina was already entering the last seven years of her life, and varicose veins had set in, rendering her chair-ridden the greater part of the time.

And so Mathilda, who had weighed ninety pounds when she was married and now weighed one hundred and one, swung her heavy chores practically alone, importunings of the Old Gentleman and his children to the contrary notwithstanding. As a matter of fact, Henry often said of her that she seemed to take a sort of sadistic pleasure in flaying her endurance; in pulling her muscles at the dragging of heavy objects until she could feel the bones of her arms leave their sockets; in straining the wires of her tough little body at doing the lifting of a strong man. When Mathilda was forty-eight she was shriveled in the way that women no longer allow themselves to grow old. But she could carry a galvanized washtub of hot water or a one-hundred-and-ten pound sheep across a meadow and glory with fierce, straining eyeballs, as her very heart seemed to leave its moorings.

There were two hundred and eighty cookies this Thanksgiving, baked by Mathilda by lamplight before dawn. Pepper drops and cinnamon squares (especially baked because they were Leslie’s favorites) and aniseed. The sunshine cake was of a specially-prepared flour, and saccharine instead of sugar (son-in-law Sam Holly was overweight and obliged to reduce when his heart began to flutter), which everyone declared, for purposes of cheering Sam, was even better than if prepared with Mathilda’s usual and wickedly-rich ingredients. There were candied yams, candied apples on sticks, sweetbreads in individual ramekins, turkey dressing of citron, chestnuts and walnut meats. Cranberry sauce that had jellied the star-shape of the mold. Cider that stung like all of an autumn outdoors. A pitcher of eggnog with a fine peppering of cinnamon. Hot biscuit, the size of a silver dollar, that went into the mouth at one plop (the Old Gentleman smothered his in maple syrup). Kale boiled with bacon rind. There were six pumpkin and six mince pies alternating, standing in rows on the pantry sill.

Mathilda naturally alternated them that way. She liked making little patterns of her days and her quiltings and her procedures.

Rebekka Schuyler Renchler had sent over, from her farm, a gallon pail of apple-butter, a batch of zimmtkuchen the shape of soldiers, camels, and stars for the children’s table, and five bushels of winesap apples, the yield of her own orchards that had come to be known locally as “Rebekka Wines.”

The Phil Schuylers, as usual, brought down a hamper of Mullane’s Taffy; Phil’s annual contribution to his father of a quart bottle of Kümmel, and more cookies, his wife’s specialty. Sugar ones with jam hearts.

There was a story abroad in Centralia that one Thanksgiving, Mathilda had sent these jam-hearted cookies to Annie Milliken, who in turn, with a Thanksgiving Day superabundance of her own, had sent them over to a school-teacher friend who had innocently completed the circle by sending them around to the Schuylers as a Thanksgiving Day offering.

Be that as it may, the circle of giving in Centralia was anything but a vicious one. Henry Schuyler used to say, in the dry fashion he had, that more glasses of jelly changed hands in Centralia during a holiday-week; more pies and tarts under snowy napkins; more batches of cookies and mincemeats in Mason jars, than there were stocks bandied back and forth on a busy day on the New York Stock Exchange.

Centralia loved to bite with careful front teeth down on its neighbors’ cookies, mince them finely until taste squirted along the tongue. And appraise.

One of Emma’s hazelnut tortes, tried and true to occasions of birthday, anniversary, and that chilled moment when the newly-bereaved family returns from the cemetery, stood on the sideboard beside the silver ice-water pitcher with sweating sides, that was mounted like a patent rocker and tilted in its frame for pouring.

Emma had baked it that morning in her white-enamel range, the first in Centralia, that had just been installed in her fine new red-brick Georgian house, that stood on exactly the opposite end of Sycamore Street from her parents. It was made out of double cream, that torte, and seemed ready to burst its steep sides and melt into a viscous pool of its own richness.

There was the kind of superabundance of food that palls before it tempts. That was why Henry Schuyler, who abhorred waste, never came downstairs on these holiday fêtes until after the mumbled grace, the fruit cocktail, the chicken soup, and the creamed oysters in pâté cases.

Just before the fowl was brought in, usually one of Rebekka’s eighteen-pound gobblers, with protruding legs in jolly white-paper caps, Mathilda rapped against her water-tumbler three times with her fork.

That was the signal for Henry, whose room was directly above the dining-room, to put down his Leatherstocking Tales, Carlyle’s French Revolution, or Fiske’s American History, knock his pipe empty into the coal bucket, remove his feet from the nickel-plated rim of the base-runner, and go downstairs to mid-afternoon dinner.

They hung on his digestion like leaden weights, these post-convivial afternoons, causing him to fall asleep later with a newspaper over his face, noxious dreams and the goose-fleshing memory of the sound of steel carving knife and fork, criss-crossing, crawling across his befogged doze.

At the coming of the fowl, the Old Gentleman began his invariable sharpening of the hartshorn knife against the rod, curdling the air in a fashion that gave Henry nervous shudders, and, ever since she was old enough to remember, had sent the goose-flesh flashing along Rebekka.

“Father, please!”

“Puppa, you know how Bek and Henry hate it. Trina sharpened them out in the kitchen.”

That was the signal for the Old Gentleman to wield the wicked knife, jerking a turkey leg backward and slithering into the soft flesh, with a rush of juices.

“Here, Mother, you want the part that goes over the fence last.”

The family was pretty well reconciled to this moss-grown overture. All except Emma, who would invariably pucker her pretty blonde brows and come out in no uncertain terms.

“Father, that’s not one bit funny! It’s disgusting! Besides, Mother doesn’t really like it. That’s her way of denying herself white meat.”

The small, bewildered face of Mathilda Schuyler, there in the midst of her five progeny of unusual heft, would begin to pale and wilt under the dicker. Their vitality sapped hers. Her daughters, with their heavy shoulders and strong legs and strong neck-columns. Phil, who in his late twenties was already so rotund as to know his watch pocket by touch rather than sight. Henry of brown brawn, but no fat.

It was a fluttery old face, that of Mathilda Schuyler. Like a curtain in a breeze.

It was a face which the Old Gentleman, sly, wry, bold, and humorous behind his own square trim of white beard, usually regarded with precisely the expression with which he now regarded his grandchildren.

Only, this day, there screwed itself into the old man’s eyes, as he observed her from his place opposite her end of the long table, something sly. The old man became a little faunal. A naughty old faun.

“Emma’s right, Mathilda! From now on I’ll serve you only with white meat. It’s good for what ails you.”

“Why?” said Phil, who made rapid, cracking noises up the stalk of a celery stick. “Isn’t Mother well?”

“I’ve never seen her look better,” said Rebekka into the flash of quick anxiety that went around the table. “Mother has gained pounds!”

Rebekka was five-feet-ten, weighed one hundred and seventy, and had no fat. Level of eye, level of strong, firm bosom. Level of brow, from which she wore the enormously thick brown hair coiled unstylishly on the top of the back of her head. Level of voice, too. One of those low, middle-register people. Without being masculine, there was something rather Socratic about the head of Rebekka Renchler. A brow that jutted firmly over the deeply-molded roofs of eye sockets. A fine, strong, fierce nose. Mouth brackets.

It was characteristic of the family to discuss any one of its members as if the individual under scrutiny were not present. It was particularly a family habit to discuss Mathilda over her head.

“Father!” said Rebekka suddenly, and then again sharply, “Father—what?”

There was no denying it. Above the square white beard that hung like a muslin curtain from the Old Gentleman’s chin, were two round dots of color. A shrewd, old, sly face, trying not to look abashed, and humorous eyes, twenty years too young for their weather-beaten setting that kept radiating lines.

That was the Old Gentleman’s method of laughter. Behind the beard, that was slightly yellow about the mouth, the lips, heavy and of a raspberry red, remained mobile. It was the sunburst of lines at the ends of his eyes that kept radiating a sort of heat lightning of laughter.

“Once a good strong woman,” said the Old Gentleman, letting his naughty old gaze spray over his wife, “always a good strong woman.”

“Not at all, Father!” said Rebekka. “Mother’s endurance at fifty-three is simply amazing, and see how frail she looks. Every one of us is big enough to carry her off single-handed, and yet she goes on from break of dawn until bedtime, slaving, slaving away as if things were no different now than when we were children growing up.”

“Ah, she’s a good one!” said the Old Gentleman, winking his two eyes simultaneously at his wife, who fluttered. “She’s a good one all right!” And, incredibly enough, made a screwing noise with his tongue and slid his naughty, bright-blue, humorous, twinkling eyes.

“Puppa, don’t do that!”

“Don’t do what, Mathilda?”

“That! That!” echoed Emma, who could cry from being made nervous by what she considered her father’s none-too-subtle sense of low comedy. “With your eyes, Father! It’s—it’s horrid! What is it, dear, makes you do it?”

“Your Mother’s a good one, Daughter! That’s all! Don’t we sit down to table, twenty-odd of us—Thanksgiving?”

“Yes, Father!” said Emma faintly, and regarded her mother for the moment as if she were going to cry now.

“Pass Mother the gravy,” said Rebekka, in her low, rather hoarse voice. It was her way of sparring off for the group of them a moment that threatened to become sentimental.

“No, serve the boys, Puppa.”

“No, the Mama comes first!”

“Please—the boys——”

There was something about the mere idea of her brood assembled, that could send the tremulous wavering along Mathilda’s voice. Probably the unbelievable precariousness of it. Six children into the world with perfect sequence except for the infant mortality of the first-born, Mathilda. Nine grandchildren without a casualty. Except perhaps Leslie. And yet Mathilda sometimes wondered, regarding the boy’s pale head and his eyes that looked tranced as if with enchantment at what they saw, if he could be classed a casualty.

Rebekka, though, who had borne him, must have thought so. Her eyes, when they looked at this boy of hers, seemed to pour inward, leaving them staring, like empty lake-beds.

Leslie, who was twelve, sat at the younger children’s improvised table under the stairway.

At the oval-topped table in the sitting-room, which ordinarily held the four-pound family Testament and a pair of brown porcelain pug-dogs, chipped from being hidden by this or that one of the Schuyler girls, only to be unearthed again by Mathilda, were Rebekka’s Steve, who at eleven looked like the young San Sebastian, and who, to his grandfather’s delight, could quaff cider like a sailor, licking his lips and drawing his arm across them; and Rebekka’s only daughter, a pretty, fair girl, whose dark eyes flashed a curious contradiction to her placid, taffy hair.

It was as if, on holidays, the family thus assembled, the old House on Sycamore Street must fairly burst its weather-colored sides of hubbub.

The Old Gentleman loved the hubbub. It flowed over him with the voice of a world he had peopled. The town, the county, and even the state bore testimony to Schuyler progeny.

Rebekka’s model stock-farm, High Ridge, was one to which the entire state pointed with pride.

Phil Schuyler was already, though destined for temporary defeat, a moving figure in what were to be spectacular land deals in the history of Springfield. Henry Schuyler, who coveted no man’s office, had twice been approached to run on a Republican ticket, once for Congress and once for District Attorney, and frequently, Cincinnatus-like, had been called from his small environment to his state capital, and twice to Washington, on a point concerning certain legalities of water control.

Yes, the Old Gentleman loved the hubbub of his progeny about him, and today somehow, with the two polka-dots out on his cheekbones and his eyes in that faun-like crinkle—there was something about the Old Gentleman——

Rebekka, who was fond of saying that she knew her father like a book, and who bartered heifers with him in the open cattle-marts, who housed his sheep for him in winter in exchange for the second crop of his South Meadow of alfalfa, and who carried a pot of her own concoction of cocoa butter in her great leather reticule, for his finger-tips, which cold split terribly in winter, kept sitting more and more stiffly at his right.

Even Henry, who had a way of looking at no one yet seeing everyone, threw his father an occasional glance. Emma was on edge. Ever since she could remember, there had been things her father did that affected her like the scratch of a gold ring across a slate. His way of standing her on the oval-topped parlor table when she had been a child and pointing out her blonde prettiness to visitors. “She’s a good one, isn’t she?” In Emma’s opinion, as if she had been so much heifer flesh. The Old Gentleman’s insistence, during Emma’s second year in High School, of driving up after her in a dirty old phaeton that barely escaped scraping the streets. “The Floozy Flump” they used to call it at school. “Here comes Emma’s Floozy Flump,” would reach her stinging ears. It was precisely the same way she used to feel later, in the days when her husband, Morton Milliken, had been wooing her and the Old Gentleman would sit on the side verandah evenings in his socks, sucking his atrocious meerschaum, just about the time Morton was due to arrive.

That whole group of grosgrained sensations was on a par with what her father was doing to her now. What made him squint so? The face of Mathilda kept fluttering, in the way it had when agitated.

There was undoubtedly in the air the charged quality of something of note about to happen in the Schuyler family.

A Schuyler must be about to be born. Another impending grandchild? Which of the girls was with child? Or, by a stretch of the imagination, was some one, a Schuyler, on the verge of being rebuked? Who?

The sisters and sisters-in-law felt along one another with their eyes. The bright, inquisitive, rather merciless eyes of women who suspect. Rita Schuyler, Phil’s wife, had had her last child. A recent operation had settled that. Well, that left Rebekka. Nonsense! And Clara. No-n-o. Slowly the women’s eyes swung to Emma, who squirmed and felt more and more irritated and could have sobbed her denial.

There came Phil’s dry little bronchial cough that always attacked him when he felt called upon to defend himself before his father. There had been many such stormy defenses. The troublesome time of Phil’s narrowly-averted bankruptcy in a land deal known as the Alleghany Subdivision, against which both his father and Henry had advised. There had been another jam, when Phil, on the inside tip of a street-car franchise, had formed a company to buy up two blocks of Hinshaw Street, only to have the street-car finally run two blocks this side of Hinshaw.

There could be high words between Phil and his father.

And yet the family’s outstanding events had had chiefly to do with celebration. To be sure, there had been family conclave and remonstrance when Rebekka had held out for marrying Winslow Renchler, several years her junior and a sickly fellow. Clara’s marriage to Sam Holly, a city salesman for the great wholesale firm of Hamilton-Brown Shoe Company, St. Louis, had also met a certain mild opposition. Sam Holly was an admirable young man in the good-as-gold sense of the word. He had no vices; and his virtues, although they made you yawn, made you yawn righteously. The name Holly in St. Louis was synonymous with a large dry-cleaning concern. But it was owned by Sam’s uncle, who had never done a turn for his nephew. Sam and Clara had met at the St. Louis Exposition. There was something handsome about Sam, who had iron-gray hair at thirty; and yet, as the Old Gentleman said after reviewing the rather patient-faced young wholesale shoe-salesman when he came wooing to Centralia, he had somehow the face of a man with no future.

Then there was that conclave of a winter five years previous, when Henry had refused the amazing and unsought opportunity to run for Congress on a strong Republican ticket. That had been a blow, even though the Old Gentleman had valiantly come to see his elder son’s point of view. And besides, even the sting of a secret disappointment was practically gone now, in the curious and palmy circumstance of the world finding its way to Henry’s little old one-horse law office up over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street.

The Old Gentleman had shone of eye like this, upon the occasion of the engagements of all Schuylers. Upon the announcement of every one of the impending births of the grandchildren. The day the honor of the request of Henry’s candidacy was announced. Always around this very same table. Only, somehow, never before so much so. This day his eyes went screwing around in his head. Of mischief. Making the occasion, to his children who knew him, seem more and more portentous. Of an ultimate solemnity.

Mathilda cut the segments of pie, alternating the lemon and the mince, until the children’s table had been served and the Old Gentleman’s match held to the suet pudding, so that the thin blue flicker of lighted cognac began to flit along it, and the children shouted and gouged unruly spoons into the fire-dance.

Candied apples, and persimmons for the game of pucker, and home-made taffy still in the greased pie-pans, were passed around to the youngsters, and after-dinner coffee in large cups to the elders. Curtains were drawn and a pail of coal tilted into the base-burner until it roared. A pair of old silver candlesticks on the two little curlicue shelves of the walnut sideboard were lighted by the Old Gentleman, who held each flame in the shell of his hand until the light grew round and steady. Then Henry, who was six-feet-one, and had arms that dangled to his knees, lowered the swinging-lamp that swung on chains over the table, and lighted the Welsbach. It had once been an oil-lamp before gas became everybody’s commodity. For thirty years, an old buckeye had dangled from it by a string.

Trina cleared the table, aided and abetted by the Schuyler girls, who were cocksure about withdrawing the additional leaves, passing in and out with stacks of scraped dishes, sliding napkins into their rings, crumbing, folding and laying away the tablecloth in its place under the sideboard, and spreading a red rep one with black fringe in its place. Mathilda had her own way of placing the silver fruit bowl, upheld by three silver cherubs and laden with “Rebekka Wines,” in the center of the cleared table. The cherub with the deepest dimple in his chin must always face the South Meadow window.

Then Trina drew the walnut folding-doors, shutting out the children. Against the plate-glass of the door that led from the dining-room to the small side porch, it had begun to snow. Big flakes that whitened the air, but darkened the sky. The slanting roof to the wood-shed was already lightly covered.

Through the heavy, closed folding-doors, the children could be heard making a scramble for leggings and reefers, and fumbling in the hall closet for rubbers and hockey sticks.

“Winslow,” said Rebekka, “hadn’t you better bring Leslie in here?”

“Wait a minute,” said the Old Gentleman, and brought his hand down on his son-in-law’s, pinning it.

“Father!” said Emma and Clara simultaneously, in a sort of bleat, and Phil began to cough in the way he had.

The group about the table tightened into the proportions of the table with the three leaves removed. Mathilda with her timid face and her timid lips lifted to simulate a smile that twisted Rebekka’s heart strings with its pitiableness. Twelve faces swimming up closer in concentration upon the old face above the spade of beard, at the head of the table, with the sly eyes of a naughty boy screwing in his head.

“Heinie!” faltered Mathilda, calling him faintly by a name she had not used since Rebekka had been born.

“Children,” said the Old Gentleman, simulating elaborate innocence of any realization whatsoever that what he had to say was about to splash over the occasion like a dash of ice-cold water from a bucket. “Children, it is a Thanksgiving Day for every Schuyler to remember.”

“Puppa!”

“For goodness’ sakes, Father,” cried Emma, the bright tears in her eyes drying because her eyeballs were so hot and angry, “for goodness’ sakes, Father, the idea of acting—so—horrid. What is it all about, Father?”

“Really, Father, Emma’s right!”

“If you’ll hold your horses,” said the old man on a strangely forced chuckle, “you’ll know.”

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Puppa!”

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes——”

“Sh-h-h, Em.”

“Well, Father?”

“Your mother, children, God bless her, is going to have a baby.”

“Winslow,” said Rebekka, in a voice that seemed to be running out of her like sands out of glass—“awfully silly—but—glass of water—please—I think—I’m going to faint.”

“For Heaven’s sakes, Rebekka, don’t do that!”

“Of course, I’m not! Give me a drink!”

“Puppa,” said Mathilda, and leaned forward to straighten the third cherub’s dimple further toward the window that looked out on South Meadow. “It—it is too hot in here, open—open the window——”

To cross that room, to open that window, was like walking through the buckshot of twenty-two glass eyes, that were looking at the Old Gentleman as if seeing him for the first time.