From This Day Forward (22 page)

 

CR: The gardener who tended our citrus trees had three little girls, and he was already worried. When I would go to America I would bring back sheets and things for their dowries. And they were still babies.

 

SR: The “cultural crunch” I was talking about affected many marriage customs. Greek girls would come in from the villages to Athens for school or work. In the normal course of things they would have romances and sexual experiences. But some of these young women were still expected to go back home and marry a man that their family had picked out for them. In the more traditional areas, the mother-in-law, the mother of the groom, had the right to inspect the bride to make sure she was a virgin. That led to a thriving business among plastic surgeons who would recreate hymens for these deflowered brides. I recently interviewed a woman on the radio who described a similar situation in New York, where young women from Latin cultures have the same operation revirginizing themselves before getting married.

 

CR: These conflicts could be very painful. One woman we knew, who had moved her family to Athens in order to work, told us her daughter had been engaged and engaged meant sex was permissible. Then the guy broke the engagement, at
which point the girl was unmarriageable. She was eighteen and her mother said, “I don't know what to do about it. I would know what to do if we were back on the island.” Which meant murdering the guy. And no local island jury would have convicted her.

 

SR: Living abroad put extra stress on many marriages, but fortunately, we found many of the trials and tribulations pretty funny.

 

CR: When Steve's boss came in from New York, we decided to entertain him at home, which was a big deal. We had invited fancy people, cabinet members and diplomats to meet with the foreign editor of
The New York Times
. The day started as a disaster when I got up in the morning and found a note from the latest baby-sitter saying she had left to go home to Australia. She was supposed to be helping me with the dinner. I cooked a big turkey and whipped up lots of interesting salads because it was hard to keep everything hot. A friend of ours dropped by during the day, the wife of the
Times
correspondent in Beirut, who had evacuated to Athens with her children during the civil war in Lebanon. We went into the kitchen so I could get organized, and I realized the turkey was missing. Where was the turkey? It was the centerpiece of the meal and it was nowhere. Gone. It had disappeared from the kitchen. I looked outside and there was a stray cat dragging my turkey. The cat had come in through the kitchen window and taken the turkey out the same way. I dashed outside, reclaimed the turkey, brought it back inside, and washed it off. The cat had only gnawed on the bottom of the turkey, so when I turned it right side up it looked just fine. I pleaded with my friend, “Steve's job is in your hands. If you ever tell what I've done with this turkey, he's finished!” I had no choice. The stores were all closed. It was the turkey or nothing. Fortunately, I had been very good to this woman and she said, “I promise you, I promise you!”

 

SR: After she left Beirut, there were times her husband couldn't reach her by phone, but somehow he could dial through to my Telex. Occasionally he would call me on the Telex and say, “Would you call my wife on the phone?” I would call her and read her messages he typed out on the Telex. She would reply and I would type back. So I was the link between these two people who were not having a happy time in their marriage. The husband would write, “Tell my wife I love her.” And I would say, “He says he loves you.” And she would say, “Tell that creep to get back to Athens in the next two days or I'm leaving.” I would type out, “She says she loves you, too.”

 

CR: We kept that marriage together for a year longer than it would have survived otherwise, though eventually the couple did split. But in that situation families always helped each other out because the pressures and the dangers were very real. The father of one of Becca's friends was an undercover CIA agent, and when the station chief was assassinated right before Christmas one year, my first instinct was to call the mother of Becca's friend and offer to help, because I knew the station chief's widow would need her. But we had never openly acknowledged that we knew her husband's real job. It was a dilemma. Finally, I called the house and, without any explanation, offered to take her little girls for a few days. She was deeply grateful and in fact no explanation was needed. It's one of those situations where actions matter and words get in the way.

 

SR: After more than three years in Athens we had to decide where we were going to go next. When we first went abroad, we had told
The New York Times
that we wanted to live in Asia, and they had penciled us in for Bangkok as our next post. But I had been in heavy travel jobs for close to nine years, and I was tired of it. I kept remembering a famous story told by another
Times
correspondent in those years named
Henry Kamm. Kamm's little boy had noticed that when his father left on a trip, he always carried his little blue portable typewriter. So one time he wanted his daddy to stay home so badly he hid the typewriter. The parents tore the house apart until they finally found it in the back of some closet. I didn't want my kids to start hiding my typewriter. So as the time came closer to go to Asia, I balked.

 

CR: I was dying to go.

 

SR: But I felt I was missing a lot of the kids' lives and I didn't want to live that way anymore. Besides, I had always wanted to go back to Washington. That was the place where I felt my career would grow and flourish. And since I was not a career foreign correspondent and not proficient in languages, I was not high on the foreign-desk priority list for a new assignment. So when I turned down Bangkok, things got pretty tense. We were not getting any clear answers about our future and the
Times
had already named my successor in Athens.

 

CR: He was there measuring the drapes.

 

SR: The kids were increasingly upset about it and one night, literally in the middle of the night, I got a phone call from the new Washington bureau chief, Hedrick Smith. He said, “I hear you're having trouble finding another foreign post. If you want to come back to Washington, I'd really love to have you as part of my team.” After months of not feeling wanted by the powers that be in New York, I was thrilled to have someone offer me a job that I had always dreamed about. Cokie had a different view.

 

CR: We took a vacation trip to Yugoslavia over July Fourth of 1977, and that was when we had it out about coming back
here. Lee wrote a postcard to Steve's parents saying, “I wish my parents would stop yelling at each other.” I dutifully mailed it. I didn't feel it was my job to censor his communication with his grandparents. I had reached a point where I was proficient at being a foreign correspondent's wife. I had carved out a good life. I did my pieces for CBS Radio and wrote for several magazines and did my community service; I had put together a package of things that worked for me. I felt that our kids were still young enough and our parents were still young enough for us to be away for a few more years and not have it disrupt anyone's lives very much. The learning experience was incomparable. I was particularly eager to go to Asia because I had never been there, and I've still never been there except to Japan. I know myself well enough to know how I learn. If I'm living somewhere, then I'll read every single book ever written about it and get involved in the culture and learn a huge amount. But I'm never going to sit here in Bethesda and read a book about Thailand. It's not going to happen. I thought moving to Asia would be a wonderful opportunity and I was certain I could find my place. I had figured out how to do this. I was traveling with Steven a certain amount of the time, and when he was away, the kids and I had our own routine. In fact, when he finally did move back in full-time, I gained about twenty pounds. I was not used to dinners every night. To me, moving to Bangkok seemed like absolutely the right thing to do. On the contrary, moving to Washington seemed like the worst possible thing to do. To me it was like dying. I was coming back to where I grew up. I was thirty-three years old and it was like being buried alive. I didn't want to do it.

It wasn't fair to Steven because I expected him to make a new adventure possible for me through his job. I didn't consider myself master of my own fate. I remember feeling helpless and blue, and not knowing quite how to get myself out of it. I went to the archaeological museum to cheer myself
up and I passed by a store with a pretty dress in the window. I thought, buying that would give my spirits a boost. But then the dress ended up costing more than I usually spent, and that just depressed me more. When I told Steve about it, he stole out and bought me the dress. As silly as it might seem, that made me feel a good deal better. At least he showed he cared, even if he couldn't do anything much to fix the problem.

I suppose I could have been expected to think it was my turn, that I would want to go back and restart my career. But I didn't feel that way at all. I was doing enough that interested me so that I didn't feel stultified in any way. We didn't need the money of a full-time career because we could live abroad on a
New York Times
salary quite nicely. So I didn't feel that pressure to work. But the minute we got back to the U.S., that pressure was very real.

 

SR: It was a very hard decision. I had been gone from Washington at that point for twelve years. I felt that it was time to start focusing on what my long-term career would be, covering politics and policy in Washington and around the country. Another foreign assignment, as interesting as it would be, was a sidestep. I think in all honesty that Cokie had other feelings about Washington. I think this was the one place in the world where she was known as Cokie Boggs, Lindy and Hale's daughter. While her father had been dead for five years, his memory was still strong and her mother was a member of Congress. As we said earlier, there was a real value to a young couple moving away and being on our own and not having to live up to the expectations of family, particularly a famous family like Cokie's. I also think that Cokie was concerned about coming back into the job market. She was obviously very accomplished as a foreign correspondent's wife; she was also increasingly accomplished as a journalist. She had done a lot of radio reporting.

 

CR: And TV. A good bit of TV.

 

SR: And magazine writing. In fact, as we were coming back, a major piece she had written about Turkey for the
Atlantic
magazine was just being published.

 

CR: That helped.

 

SR: In retrospect, it's astounding to think she was insecure about competing in the Washington job market, but I do think that was part of her concern.

 

CR: Of course it was. It was a huge part of my concern. First of all, I didn't even want to have to be in the position to go look for a job. I'd done that before. It's horrible. I didn't want to do any of it. The only part that appealed to me at all was being near our extended family. Ironically, I thought that going to Bangkok was more familiar than coming back to Washington. I didn't know what it was going to be like to be a grown-up here, raising children here, all of that. It was going back to my childhood in a way. I didn't know how any of that was going to work out and I didn't much want to learn.

 

SR: Cokie was obviously wrong about her job prospects but she was right about one thing. Once we returned to Washington we would never leave. More than twenty-two years later we're still here, still in the old family house where Cokie grew up, and we were married. Bethesda is not as exotic as Bangkok, but it's home.

NEW PLACES, NEW ROLES

PIONEER MARRIAGES

The move west—early in the country's history across the Appalachians, later across the Rockies—made marriage a necessity. Men moving to set up homesteads knew they needed women in order to make it; they couldn't expect to clear the land, build the house, plant and tend a garden, care for the animals all by themselves. The living was hard, but the lure of making it someplace new appealed to American men from the beginning. Their wives often objected to being uprooted from home and family, as their letters and diaries tell us. Even so, hundreds of thousands of them eventually did make the difficult and dangerous trek across the prairies and peaks. Between 1840 and 1848, fewer than nineteen thousand people went to settle California, Oregon, and Utah. By 1860, almost three hundred thousand more had joined them. The discovery of gold accounted for much of that migration, but the real pull of the West was toward the land—a place to possess, and make produce, and pass on to children. Those dreams could not come true without marriage.

Every time America pushed westward, the men went first. They so outnumbered women that they would advertise for wives. In the early 1800s, Nettie Harris, a young woman in upstate New York, answered an ad in her local newspaper: “Every respectable young woman who goes to the West is almost sure of an advantageous marriage, while, from the superabundance of her own sex in the East, her chances for success are not greater than those for disappointment.” Off she went on a flatboat for Iowa with about forty other women. A magazine of the time described what happened when they arrived at the dock: “The gentlemen on shore make proposals to the ladies through trumpets: ‘Miss with the blue ribbon in your bonnet, will you take me?' ‘Hallo, that girl with a cinnamon-colored shawl! If agreeable, we will join!' The ladies in the meantime are married at the hotel, the parties arranging themselves as the quire sings out, ‘Sort yourselves, sort yourselves!'” Romance clearly did not enter into the picture.

Once married, these women could expect to work alongside their husbands in the business of survival, while they struggled physically and emotionally. Bearing babies every couple of years was the norm; too often so was burying them. Bearing the loneliness of the isolation of the farms was sometimes almost as trying. The women's letters are filled with longing for their mothers and sisters and female friends. They seized on any opportunity to socialize, especially weddings. And these hardscrabble pioneers loved to dance. All of that comes through in their records.

What's hard to glean from their writings is how husbands and wives felt about each other. And there's no going back and asking them, so we are left with their own scant renditions. Some of the diaries are downright funny in their sparseness of language. When Amelia Stewart Knight left Iowa for Oregon with her husband and seven children in 1853, she kept an account of her days on the trail, as many people did.
But she never tells us that she's pregnant for her eighth child, until the last entry, after five months of traveling. What she does tell us about is the weather.

That's about the closest we ever get to sentiment. Then it's back to the weather, through May, June, July, and August.

The trials of the trail—the disease, death, the danger of children falling out of wagons, getting run over or lost, the fear of Indians—are well documented in letters and diaries. Everyday life stories are harder to come by from a taciturn and proud people. One scholar in the field calls it “the history of the inarticulate.” Fortunately, some of the pioneer women managed to find their voices and tell the stories of their marriages.

George and Keturah Penton Belknap: Always a New Frontier

Even in the early days of this nation, people from many different countries came together to form uniquely American unions. One of Keturah Penton's father's parents was English, the other Irish; one of her mother's parents was Swedish, the other Dutch. Raised in New Jersey at the time of the Revolution, Johon and Magdalena Burden Penton migrated to Ohio in 1818, to what was then the frontier. The trip meant a wagon ride over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, where they then went by boat to Cincinnati. About sixteen miles away, in Hamilton County, Penton bought land and found work helping some nearby settlers thresh wheat. His wife and oldest daughter would spin flax in the winter for summer linens, wool in the summer for winter warmth.

The fifth child, Keturah, was born in 1820, and started keeping a journal when she was fifteen years old. She recounted how the family lived in a log cabin until she was six, then moved to a farm near Cincinnati, where her father truck-gardened and brought his produce to market every day. Everyone in the family worked. At night, after a day on the farm or at the market, the boys shucked corn to sell as meal. The girls helped on the land, hired out as baby-sitters and
dishwashers to more fortunate settlers in the area, and spent their evenings spinning and knitting. When Keturah was sixteen, the family moved again, this time to northern Ohio, one hundred and twenty-five miles and five long days by road from Cincinnati. The new move meant more backbreaking work, building the log cabin and clearing the land. To help make ends meet, Keturah hired out as a housekeeper for seventy-five cents a week, and a washerwoman for twenty-five cents a day. That was her life, and what she expected to remain her life until, at the age of nineteen, she listened to some motherly advice.

One day, as she was getting ready to go care for a sick neighbor, Keturah's mother lingered over her tea and Keturah “thought she looked a little sad. Like she wanted to say something that was hard to say.” After some coaxing, her mother blurted out, “Kitt, if I was you I would get married and be fixing up a home for myself and not be a drudge for the whole country. There is plenty of these fellows that want you and could give you a good home, and with the tact you have you could soon have a nice place of your own.” Keturah objected, insisting that she didn't want to leave her parents. Her mother counseled that if Keturah could better herself, she had no objections. “They could get along very well now they had land enough cleared to make them a good living on, and if I stayed till they died, I would be an old broken down old maid and maybe so cross nobody would want me and then would be kicked about from one place to another without any home.” It's a pretty good summary of the attitudes about marriage at the time.

Given permission, Keturah started husband hunting. First prospect: a young preacher on the circuit. But the presiding elder of the church warned her against him, telling her “not to waste my talents on so unpromising a youth.” She got rid of him in short order. “The next one that appeared on the scene was a rich young doctor, but he was too lazy to practice and he did not know how to do anything else. He had been
raised in the South and had slaves to wait on him. So he was no good.” Then came “an old bachelor with hair as red as fire. He had two sections of land and lots of money. He said it was waiting to be at my disposal, but he was too stingy to get himself a decent suit of clothes. So he was shipped pretty quick.” Finally, along came a man in a stovepipe hat. George Belknap had decided to come to a church meeting at the Penton house, even though there was another meeting at his own, a thinly veiled excuse to start calling on Keturah, with visits that “became more frequent and more interesting.” That's about as close to romance as we get.

On one of his calls, Belknap announced that his family was preparing to sell their place and move west, and “if we went along we must bring matters to a close pretty soon. So him and mother had a long talk out by the well that evening in the moonlight, and before morning it was settled that we would be married on the third of October, 1839. So then we had to get ready for the wedding and also for the journey.” The journal tells us nothing at all about the wedding, but a good deal about the journey. Two weeks after they were married, Keturah and George set out in a two-horse wagon, traveling through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, camping out along the way, buying food from farmers. They expected to spend the winter in Rushville, Illinois, until they heard about some property they could buy from the Indians in Iowa, so they hazarded a mean snowstorm, with Keturah driving the horses and George driving the stock, rushing to claim the land. They bought the parcel, with a house on it, from a family who had not yet finished paying the Indians. Collecting enough cash to make the final payment meant working all the time. The men planted and made rails, the women cooked and made cloth. Keturah did the spinning, her mother-in-law the weaving. While the men tended the fields, the women tended the farmyard, collecting enough eggs and making enough butter to sell as well as eat.

Even in those hard times, the young married couple un
derstood that it was important to get away for a bit. “George and I are going to take a vacation and go about ten miles away to a campmeeting. There are four young men and two girls going with us, but I made them promise there should be no sparking.” The young people behaved admirably and that fall each of the girls was married to one of the men. After the meeting, Keturah announced, “Now we have had a rest and have got strengthened both soul and body—we will go it again.” Back to work, day and night. But it was paying off. The hogs sold well, there was enough wheat to sell as flour, and their dreams of building the first frame house on the prairie seemed close to reality. In between planting and harvesting, they would work on the house. Oh, and by the way, “August the 20th, harvest is over and we have the sweetest little baby girl. We call her Hannah.” The house wasn't ready for that winter, so it was another season with the in-laws. But Keturah was coming into her own; her Christmas dinner was a great success. The next spring she hosted a party for twelve “nice old ladies.” After chicken and pound cake like her mother used to make, “my name is out as a good cook, so I'm alright, for good cooking makes good friends.”

Companionship on the prairie made life bearable, and George appears to have been an amiable husband. After spinning yarn during the day, in the evening Keturah would twist it for weaving, “while George reads the history of the U.S., then we read some from the Bible together and have prayer and go to bed feeling that the sleep of the laboring man is sweet. My baby is so good and she don't seem much in my way.” They moved into their new house, and all seemed perfect with the birth of a boy in March 1843, but then, in November, little Hannah died of “lung fever.” Keturah called it the first real trial of her life, and she expected to spend the winter mostly in the house. Fortunately for her, weekly prayer meetings were held at the Belknaps', so she could regularly
see her neighbors. A year later another baby boy arrived, but six months after that, Keturah passed “through another season of sorrow” when their three-year-old boy died. Then, in a few months, the arrival of a baby girl brought this sad journal entry: “We have another baby, such a nice little girl, only six pounds at first and it is a month old, not much bigger than at first. It has never been well, so we have two children again for a while, neither of them are very strong.” In the same entry, though, Keturah goes on to give the news. “The past winter there has been a strange fever raging here. It is the ‘Oregon fever,' it seems to be contagious and it is raging terribly. Nothing seems to stop it but to tear up and take a six month trip across the plains with ox teams to the Pacific Ocean.”

The Belknaps resisted the fever for a while. They went east instead, on a trip to see Keturah's parents. She and the baby were both sick, and she was heartsick knowing once she went back to Iowa they would be Oregon bound—there was no way to hold back the men once they heard of new lands to conquer—and she would never see her parents and old friends again. “It was hard for me not to break down but they all thought in about two years we would come again.” On the way back west she boarded a train for the first time, for a seventy-five-mile trip that took half a day, which greatly impressed Keturah because a wagon would have taken three days. Once they arrived in Iowa, everyone was bustling, getting ready for the trek west: “the loom was banging and the wheels buzzing and trades being made from daylight till bedtime.” The Belknaps' house had been sold, but she didn't want to move in with her in-laws until it was time to go. “For the first time since our marriage I put my foot down and said ‘will and won't.'” They moved into another house, and there, their baby girl died. “Now we have one puny boy left. So now I will spend what little strength I have left getting ready to cross the Rockies.”