Seized by the Sun Read online

  Another doctor in New York City examined Gertrude and said her tongue was too short. He offered three devices guaranteed to cure stuttering. The first was made of silver, inserted in the mouth, and worn around the neck. The second was a narrow, flattened tube of silver that fit across the roof of the mouth. Finally, there was a disk with a projecting silver tube that was placed between the lips. They were to be alternated until the cure was complete.

  Vreeland considered these gadgets and may have tried them with Gertrude. Being a skeptical inventor and lifelong stutterer, he didn’t have much faith in them.

  The next specialist they visited was James Sonnet Greene, medical director of the National Hospital for Speech Disorders in New York. Greene believed that stuttering was not a speech disorder but a nervous disorder. To Vreeland, this sounded too much like her mother Laura’s mental illness, and he would not have his daughter branded as mentally deficient. As a stutterer himself, he felt this diagnosis reflected on his own mental health, and he was not prepared to accept this notion.

  Then they found Samuel Potter, a medical doctor and also a stutterer. Following his guidelines, Gertrude spent two to three hours daily on breathing exercises and vowel-consonant practice. Vreeland patiently helped his daughter and hired a special nurse to provide the required therapy. Nothing seemed to work.

  Despite the challenges that came with Gertrude’s stuttering, she also experienced some joyful times as a child. She became close to the household’s two live-in servants, Maggie and Thomas. They came from Virginia, and they held Gertrude and her sisters spellbound with their stories. Gertrude could sit for hours listening to Maggie’s tales, and she watched with amusement as Thomas fell asleep in the middle of doing just about anything, including peeling potatoes. Her sister Elizabeth later wrote that the Tompkins girls never knew the last names of “this dear, sweet” couple.

  Christmas brought excitement and joy that broke through the atmosphere of formality in the Tompkins household. After a breakfast the family trooped up the street to the home of the girls’ grandmother Rosaline, Laura’s mother. The living room door was closed, but through a crack they could see the glint of a bicycle or the wheel of a doll carriage. When the whole family was assembled according to age (youngest first), Laura played a march on the piano, and the children entered the room. Stockings were hung in a line across the marble fireplace. Only one gift was opened at a time. It was an hour of feverish excitement and fun for young Gertrude. After that, the family attended services at the Episcopal church.

  Following a bountiful turkey dinner, they gathered in the parlor and played charades and word-guessing games. They also peered at Roman ruins through a stereopticon, a device that gave a three-dimensional appearance to specially printed photo cards. Christmas evening ended with a game of musical chairs, the family laughing and jostling for seats. On several Christmases, relatives of Thomas and Maggie joined them.

  Gertrude became attuned to nuance, dialect, and lively expressions at a young age. Elizabeth noticed how Gertrude was able to repeat snatches of poems and songs without stuttering. Gertrude sang, “Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.”

  The family continued to search for stuttering cures. The book Stuttering and Lisping by Edward Wheeler Scripture had appeared in 1913. Using Scripture’s guidelines, Gertrude was diagnosed by yet another doctor as having a type of stuttering caused by anxiety. Anxiety wasn’t quite the same as Greene’s “nervous disorder,” and Vreeland could accept it because he knew from experience that stuttering and anxiety went hand in hand.

  As part of Scripture’s regimen, mild tonics of arsenic, quinine, and strychnine were given to little Gertrude. Many medicines of the day contained lethal as well as addictive ingredients. A nurse provided cold rubs, lukewarm or cold baths, sprays, moist packs, and massage. Gertrude was taken to Atlantic City for sea baths.

  Despite some moments of joyful respite, the constant rounds of doctors and treatments during her youth made young Gertrude unhappy, everyone in the family agreed.

  2

  CHILDHOOD UPS AND DOWNS

  Jersey City is home to the Bergen School for Girls, founded by Gertrude’s grandmother Rosaline Bentley Towar and several of her civic-minded friends back in the 1870s. There was no question where Gertrude would be educated. The rambling school was a mile from her home. Six-year-old Gertrude walked there and back with her sisters every day. The classes were small, just eight girls in each, “so it was wise to do your homework every night,” wrote her sister Elizabeth in her memoir, From There to Here.

  Elizabeth described the active lives of the Tompkins children and recalled, “The mile walk to school, church, dancing school or music lessons etc. was normal. There were at least a dozen tennis courts in the nearby park and excellent ice skating on the lake there…. Between the edge of the park and the Jersey meadows was a wild strip which we explored each spring for wild flowers and migrating birds.”

  At first Gertrude found school pleasant, but her stutter soon changed that. When a teacher asked her to stand and read aloud, she flushed with anxiety and fear. She stuttered and stammered but successfully completed the page and sat down, among the titters of the other little girls.

  Then she began to hear the other children chanting in the schoolyard at recess or on her way home:

  My n-n-n-name is Little Gertrude

  And I-I-I-I am only three

  Some p-p-p-people say I stutter

  And n-n-n-no one cares for me

  My m-m-m-m-mama used to stutter

  When she m-m-m-married papa, too

  It t-t-t-t took three days to marry,

  ’cause the p-p-p-p preacher stuttered too.

  She could never ask others to understand and help her. Her father’s self-reliance and prideful ways were her ways, too. There was one bright spot: study of Latin and French began early at Bergen School, and Gertrude soon discovered that she seldom stuttered in foreign languages.

  At home most mornings, the Tompkins girls were awakened by Maggie. After combing their hair and dressing, they trekked downstairs for a breakfast of hot cereal, supplemented by a tablespoon of sweet Maltine (a malt-based supplement) and cod liver oil, both considered guarantees of good health.

  Each day after school, Gertrude and her sister Elizabeth walked hand in hand to Grandmother Rosaline’s. The wealthy widow’s imposing mansion sat on a hill that would later be called Jersey City Heights. The estate had stables, a large vegetable garden, extensive lawn and flower beds, and curved driveways with entrances on both Bentley and Harrison Avenues. Rosaline was a petite woman, but her voice came from deep within and her word was law. “Our whole family revolved around her,” wrote Elizabeth.

  Rosaline was said to be the last person in Jersey City to be driven by horse and carriage. Lady, the horse, clopped her way down Harrison Avenue, weaving between the honking autos as late as 1920. Grandmother Rosaline was old-fashioned and rigid. When two cousins from New York came to pay their respects, Grandmother Rosaline refused to allow one of them inside because she had recently divorced. The divorced cousin was left outside to pace the porch.

  Entertainment, 1920s Style

  Radio blasted into American homes in the 1920s. People listened to sports, comedy shows, and music. The first commercial radio station was Pittsburgh’s KDKA, established in 1920. Three years later the country would have more than 500 commercial stations.

  Movies were silent—accompanied by a piano or organ—until 1927. That year The Jazz Singer introduced synchronized sound. By the mid-1920s more than 50 million people would go to the movies each week—the equivalent of about half of America’s population. Huge and elegant theaters were built all over America.

  The phonograph also became popular in the 1920s, replacing the piano, a mainstay of family entertainment since the 1800s.

  Laura insisted that her daughters pay daily respects to their grandmother. They were told to ask how she was and what she was doing. If Grandmother Ro
saline was in good spirits, the girls might be invited to stay. Sometimes she read to them from the Bible. On exceptional days, Rosaline allowed Patrick Fitzpatrick, her sometimes-sober gardener and chauffeur, to take them for a carriage ride.

  Most days, Gertrude passed the time in the rooms of her own house. Thomas and Maggie and her sisters kept her busy as her mother lay in bed with severe headaches. Gertrude explored the dark, fragrant rooms of the cellar, where canned fruit and vegetables and coal were stored. Here was also a tiny bathroom used by the servants. Gertrude liked the fragrance of a tin of sweet-smelling powder that Maggie used to dust her underarms. Gertrude prowled the top floors, sneaking into Maggie and Thomas’s bedroom, examining the little corn husk dolls the maid had collected.

  As she grew older, a new sound filled the Tompkins’s house. The family listened in rapt attention to voices and music that were broadcast from a radio in the living room. Gertrude learned to love classical music almost as much as she loved reading books.

  Their mother’s condition worsened as the girls grew older. The demands of a husband and three daughters weighed on her. One day when Gertrude was around 10, Laura refused to get out of bed. For the next two years she would remain ill in bed. Laura received treatment in a small, exclusive sanitarium in Cornwall, a community not far from West Point on New York’s Hudson River. She stayed there frequently and sometimes for prolonged periods; other times she remained with the family.

  While visiting Laura one weekend at the sanitarium, Vreeland found a farm for sale, a place in Mountainville, near Newburgh, New York. It was owned by Mr. Doxey, who had suddenly found himself bankrupt. Glenbrook Farm was 81 acres of woods, meadows, and apple orchards, with an old farmhouse, a perfect retreat for the family’s summers. Vreeland bought the farm, and he built a small house for Doxey and his wife and paid them to stay and farm the land.

  Preparing to move to the farm for the summer involved a joyous melee of family, animals, luggage, swimsuits, and hats. The girls and their English shepherd, Fritzy, climbed into Vreeland’s Cadillac (he would have no other car) and drove the 50 miles to the farm on a warm May morning. There were cheers when Gertrude’s father turned down the dirt road that followed a brook a quarter mile to the house.

  Despite the shadow of their mother’s illness, summers were carefree during the 10 years the family owned Glenbrook Farm. The three Tompkins girls explored, discovering three brooks, and Vreeland named one for each of them. On hot summer days the girls paddled and splashed in the creeks while their father visited Laura at the sanitarium. A tennis court was built at the farm, and the girls were able to tune up their games. Black currants grew abundantly and were fun to eat, their purple juices staining small hands and mouths. At the end of the day the girls were worn out from the sun and ready to be bathed by Marta, the Danish governess Vreeland hired to care for them during Laura’s absence. As she toweled them off, the girls listened with fascination as Marta told them of dancing at Sunday evening balls in Copenhagen.

  Two gardens at the farm produced tomatoes, carrots, radishes, and cucumbers, which Mr. Doxey frequently sent to the family when they were home in New Jersey. Each week he sent a shipment of fresh eggs, which arrived by Railway Express. They raised cows, pigs, and chickens and grew apples and berries. Just before Christmas each year Doxey killed the farm’s hogs and sent some meat to the Tompkins family, including pigs’ feet and pork jowl. Vreeland made the cook prepare all of it.

  Elizabeth wrote of their time on the farm:

  How blessed we were with all those acres to play in—woods, orchards, pastures, three brooks plus all the fascination of a working farm with cows, horses, pigs, chickens, an ice house, barns, a huge garden, a tennis court and swimming in Moodna Creek down the long winding driveway and across the main road. Yellow cream too thick to pour rose in large circular milk pans in the cool cellar off the kitchen. Making butter in the tall wooden churn was no chore at all. The skim milk was either put on the back of the stove to “clobber” or fed to the pigs. Early Sunday morning one of us was allowed to make the ice cream. It was a simple mixture of cream and crushed berries or other fruit from the farm packed in rock salt. Turning the handle a few times was all there was to it. My, how rich and good it tasted.

  Gertrude’s school months were not nearly as carefree as her summers. An average pupil, her days at school were lonely, in spite of the efforts of Miss Van Cleef and Miss Moira, the headmistresses of the school, who exhibited a genuine affection for the girl with the gray eyes. At home she wanted so much to hug her father. She loved him. He did so much for her. She worked at pleasing him, but he remained archly formal and always just out of reach.

  Gertrude’s mother found short periods of calmness and escaped her inner demons when home by working in the garden, enjoying the heady fragrance of the loamy soil and digging her fingers deep into the earth. Each fall she planted the daffodils and tulips that bordered the garden, and she loved dropping each bulb into carefully sculpted cups in the soil. Gertrude helped with the planting.

  The search for a cure for Gertrude’s stutter continued. Yet another doctor prescribed a new regimen. For one week Gertrude was made to keep silent. The second week she was allowed to whisper, louder and louder, until at last she could speak at full volume. It did nothing to cure or even help her stuttering.

  As Gertrude entered third grade her father tried yet another cure. Vreeland had come across another book on stuttering, this one called Home Cure for Stammerers by George Lewis. As a result, Gertrude’s regimen now included rising at 6:30 AM and drinking a glass of water while dressing. Then she was taken on a brisk walk in the open air, even when the temperatures were below freezing. Breakfast followed but with no coffee or tea allowed. The diet provided only stale bread for breakfast, and it had to be consumed slowly, under her father’s watchful eye. She missed the hot, milky cereal that Maggie fixed for her.

  At noon she was supervised as she sipped one glass of water slowly. At dinner she had to avoid fatty substances and unripe food. Afterward, at Vreeland’s request, she read aloud to the family from Huckleberry Finn: “We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs and looking up at the stars.”

  After a year with no apparent results, Vreeland consulted another doctor. Now Gertrude was made to read aloud through clenched teeth, five minutes each day at first, adding five more minutes until she reached 60 minutes total. Vreeland and Laura both thought it helped, and he encouraged Gertrude to keep at it. She followed this therapy for years. She kept it up to please her father, the man she was certain loved her. Her stuttering continued unabated, but she lost herself in the works she read aloud: Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Scott, and the poetry of William Wordsworth and William Blake. By age 13 Gertrude could often be found curled in an overstuffed chair in the parlor reading, as the sleet of an Atlantic storm buffeted the big house.

  In 1926 Grandmother Rosaline died, succumbing to diabetes. Fifteen-year-old Gertrude watched with morbid interest as her sister Elizabeth, who was said to have a “way” with hair, styled the snow-white tresses of the corpse. At the funeral, the priest whispered to Vreeland that he’d heard that Gertrude’s stutter might have been caused by making her switch from being left-handed to right-handed. This puzzled Vreeland, for Gertrude had always been right-handed. The priest said that if she were made to hold a penny under her tongue, it might cure her.

  Rosaline’s death seemed to liberate Laura Tompkins. The long, assertive shadow of her mother was gone. Laura grew stronger daily, and she no longer remained confined to bed. In opposition to what her mother would have wished, she joined the American Birth Control League (ABCL)—an organization founded by activist Margaret Sanger in 1921 and devoted to encouraging women to take control of their own fertility and reproduction—and even founded a clinic in Newark. Eventually the ABCL would become Planned Parenthood, and Laura remained active in tha
t organization until her death at 93.

  When it came to the sex education of her own daughters, however, Laura had difficulty talking to them. “When I reached the appropriate age she handed me a book [about sex] and that was that,” wrote Elizabeth. Gertrude received a copy of the same book.

  As a teenager Gertrude’s stuttering only grew worse. Sometimes she couldn’t speak for several seconds. As she waited for the words to come, others tried to encourage the words from her lips, saying, for example, “Do you mean ‘hotel’? Or are you trying to say ‘home’?” She felt shamed by her inability to speak as others did. She shrank from people and avoided speaking in class. Eventually, her teachers no longer called on her. Often Gertrude said she was ill and stayed home from school.

  Vreeland found consolation in the fact that his daughter’s stutter was less severe than his own. He cheerfully deluded himself that he could see some improvement and results were soon to come. In fact, his daughter simply resisted speaking. But as she reached young adulthood, the seeds of confidence would be planted in an unexpected place.

  3

  CONFIDENCE GROWS

  Spring brought a flush of emerald to the hardwoods in Jersey City. Gertrude often read in the afternoon sun as her mother worked in her flower beds.

  “Give her enough books, she’ll educate herself,” Headmistress Van Cleef told Vreeland.

  But in spite of her reading, Gertrude’s grades were sinking.

  The family was preparing to move from the home in congested Jersey City to the community of Summit, a suburb to the west. Gertrude feared entering a new school where she would be subjected to new humiliation as her classmates discovered her stutter.

  To make matters worse, she was being deserted by her sister and closest friend, Elizabeth, who was going away to Wellesley College, located west of Boston. (Margaret was already in her third year at Smith College in Massachusetts). Gertrude had become comfortable with the patterns of family living in the big house.