Reluctant Genius (46 page)

Mabel Bell handled all the family’s domestic and financial affairs.

In the 1890s, according to Mrs. Foraker, Washington society was ’as brilliant as any that ever America has produced.” Mrs. Foraker’s husband was Senator Joseph Benson Foraker, the Republican boss of Ohio and a close friend of William McKinley, who would serve as president between 1897 and 1901. This meant that Mrs. Foraker had a front-row seat on events and could see how everything was getting more lavish—the ceremonies at presidential inaugurations, the hospitality offered by an expanding diplomatic corps, the size of government. The formidably well-upholstered Mrs. Foraker noted with pleasure in her memoirs how “the rich, spectacular New York-crowd-with-the-names came over, took big houses, gave extravagant parties and exotically quickened the pace…. Never again shall any of us see such abundance and cheapness, such luxurious well-being as prosperous Americans then enjoyed.” Mabel wanted Elsie and Daisy to be part of this Gilded Age world. She worried that, stuck in Baddeck, they would never find suitable husbands. But unlike the well-connected Forakers, the Bells’ tenuous connections to the administration and frequent absences from the city made them marginal to the social swim. And without Alec, Mabel felt doubly handicapped as she tried to infiltrate Mrs. Foraker’s brilliant circles. Not only was Mabel deaf, she was also too diffident to be a grande dame.

In March 1896, Mabel gave a ladies’ luncheon party in the Bells’ Connecticut Avenue home, with guests seated at five tables, each with different-colored flowers, lamps, cloth, and centerpiece. The social effort was a strain. “I felt so incapable of taking hold of the crowd and with a smile and strong cheery word directing them and commanding them as a true hostess should!” she reported to Alec, who was puttering away in his Beinn Bhreagh laboratory. But Mabel had been determined to make it work: her purpose was to make the contacts necessary for Elsie’s launch in the coming season. “The lunch was very handsome and yes, very expensive,” she continued. “It will be the last and I think it will help me. Almost all the ladies were Society People and mothers of next year’s debutantes, people whom it was necessary for me to know.”

As usual, the Bells spent the summer together at Beinn Bhreagh. In the fall of 1896, Mabel and Elsie returned to Washington for a social offensive. “Debutante and tea and reception cards are beginning to come in thick and fast,” Mabel wrote to Alec. Five hundred and fifty people were invited to Elsie’s coming-out ball, held at 1331 Connecticut Avenue on December 7. Mabel pleaded with Alec, “You must come in plenty of time.” On the big night, at least 450 guests arrived at the house, which, with her mother’s help, Mabel had transformed into a fairyland. Despite the month, huge bouquets of delphiniums and chrysanthemums (from the greenhouses at her parents’ Washington home, Twin Oaks) decorated the entrance hall and dining room. On the dining tables, silver epergnes overflowing with grapes and oranges gleamed in the flickering light of tall candles in elaborate candelabra. The library’s Turkish carpets had been rolled up and the hardwood floor polished to a high gloss for the dancing. Best of all, Alec had arrived two days earlier. Resplendent in white tie and tails, he hailed each new arrival with a cheerful and irresistible warmth. As usual, welcome from such a famous man melted the snobbish crust of even the grandest Washington family. “The party seems to have been a success,” Mabel wrote with relief the next day to Daisy, who was at boarding school. “Elsie looked very pretty indeed…. Dancing began about twelve and continued until two.”

With Alec in Washington, the pace of the Bells’ social life intensified further. Despite Alec’s professed dislike of the capital, the capital loved the inventor of the telephone. Alec was invited to dinners at the Cosmos Club, the gentlemen’s club on Lafayette Square where his flying crony Samuel Langley was a permanent resident. He revived his Wednesday-evening get-togethers with the city’s men of science. And in April 1897, the Bells struck up a friendship that would prove momentous. Dr. Edwin Augustus Grosvenor was an acquaintance of Mabel’s father who had recently addressed the National Geographic Society. This was a rather stuffy organization that Gardiner Hubbard had established in 1888 for the “increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” It held meetings every other Friday during the winter about anything that caught its august members’ fancy—geology, the weather, anthropology, mineralogy—and also published a journal that was, in its early issues, “often tedious and sometimes somnolent,” in the words of its historian Robert M. Poole. Bound in muddy brown and filled with close-set gray text, it was an irregularly published compilation of papers by society members.

Professor Grosvenor had been invited to tell the National Geographic Society’s members about Constantinople. He and his family had lived in that city for twenty years, and he had taught history at Robert College, an American school there, before returning to the United States and a teaching post at Amherst College. A few days after his talk, he called at 1331 Connecticut Avenue to meet the famous Dr. Bell, and stayed on for dinner. The neat, weather-beaten academic, with his trim goatee and precise manner, enthralled the Bells with his stories of Greek-Turkish clashes and Eastern customs. He was so interesting, Mabel told her daughter Daisy, “that Papa has forgotten deaf-mutes etc. for awhile.” Professor Grosvenor also told the Bells about his identical twin sons, Gilbert and Edwin, who were students at Amherst College. He invited Elsie and Daisy Bell to attend the twins’ graduation from Amherst, later in the spring. Mabel responded with an invitation to the boys to visit Beinn Bhreagh in July. They were “certainly fine fellows,” she told her mother, “clever and manly with no nonsense about them.” She far preferred both of them to some of Elsie’s other admirers—particularly one who, she confided to Alec, was said to be “mean and not careful about paying his little card debts.”

That autumn, Alec once again managed to spin out the season in Cape Breton. He had the perfect excuse this time: Lord Aberdeen, the governor general of Canada, and his wife, Lady Aberdeen, had announced that they wanted to make a visit to Canada’s Maritime provinces and that they would be delighted to call at Baddeck and take lunch with the Bells at Beinn Bhreagh. Baddeck was festooned with bunting for the occasion, and Their Excellencies were met at the wharf by militia bands and a swarm of schoolchildren. The vice-regal couple was satisfyingly glamorous in the eyes both of the village’s royalist residents and of Mabel, a good Yankee Democrat. Lord Aberdeen himself was like a tiny chattering wind-up doll, oblivious to everyone around him but his formidable wife. Lady Aberdeen towered over him, chivied her husband through the ceremonies, and radiated grandeur as she sailed through the program. It was raining so hard that the road to Beinn Bhreagh was a sea of mud, but the Aberdeens arrived safely at the Point. There they were served a gargantuan lunch, including local oysters, mutton chops, and duck breast, but Mabel found Lord Aberdeen, she told her mother, “the most fearfully nervous man I ever met. He could not keep quiet a moment, [and] talked incessantly.” The diminutive, high-strung governor general took a great fancy to Alec and Arthur McCurdy, with whom he had “a beautiful time … talking flying machine and sheep.”

Alec had several new enthusiasms in 1897. The first was for glass tubes, which he regarded as a far more efficient way of drinking soup than spoons. (His wife reluctantly told him he could use them when they were alone at Beinn Bhreagh, as long as he made sure they were washed after each use.) Next, Alec returned to the vacuum jacket that he had developed in 1881 after breathing difficulties had caused the death of his infant son, and decided to test it on one of his sheep. Underneath Alec’s rather sentimental benevolence, there was a cold, clinical streak when it came to pursuing science: this experiment involved deliberately drowning the sheep, then trying to revive it. The experiment was a success on the second go-round, but not before Alec had lost not only a sheep but also one of his Baddeck workmen, who stomped off the headland, muttering to himself about black magic.

Then Alec became fascinated by the new medical technique of X-rays. A man had arrived at the local doctor’s office in great pain because a needle was embedded in his foot. The doctor asked Alec if the telephone probe that he had developed for President Garfield could be used. Alec knew Roentgen’s work with X-rays and determined to try the technique. The sufferer, a tall, simple-minded fellow called Donald McDonald, was overwhelmed to discover himself in the famous Dr. Bell’s laboratory, with an imposing bearded figure pulling a woolen sock onto his leg and an assistant carefully arranging a camera above the offending foot. Then the party repaired to the Point for dinner. “Donald must have had a lovely time listening to all the doctors’ conversations of the pros and cons of cutting him up,” Mabel reported to Daisy. Finally, McCurdy produced the photograph, which showed the needle in poor Donald’s big toe. It was removed the following day.

X-rays, flying machines, sheep—there was so much, Mabel sighed, to keep her husband at Beinn Bhreagh, and none of these ideas appeared to offer any hope of a quick commercial payoff. But in December, there came news from Washington that had both Mabel and Alec hurrying south. Mabel’s father, seventy-five-year-old Gardiner Hubbard, was dying. In recent months, the once-energetic entrepreneur, who had served as regent of the Smithsonian Institution and played a leading role in several organizations, including the Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, had visibly aged. Suffering from diabetes, he had withdrawn into his family and his collection of Napoleonic prints.

The idea of losing him panicked Mabel. “He is not old as men go nowadays,” she wrote tearfully to a friend. “I cannot see why my father should be ill past recovery.” Gardiner Hubbard had been a pillar of good sense and equable temperament in his daughter’s life, a vivid contrast to her impractical and volatile husband. He was the person she could thank for making sure that she lived in the hearing world and that Alec secured a patent on the telephone. When Gardiner finally passed away on December 11, Mabel was distraught. “I cannot believe that he is really gone, it must be all some dreadful nightmare from which I will awake and go and tell Papa and over which he will laugh in his quiet, humorous, amused way.” She refused to accompany Alec on his return to Beinn Bhreagh the following spring, remaining at Twin Oaks to help her mother with Gardiner’s papers. “Twin Oaks is horribly sad and lonely without my father,” she told a cousin. And when she finally arrived in Cape Breton in the summer, the ache lingered. She wandered around her garden, remembering how he had advised her where to plant hydrangeas, marigolds, and sweet peas and how to construct an arbor. “I never ceased to miss him daily and hourly at Twin Oaks, I miss him scarcely less at Beinn Bhreagh.”

Alec’s own mother had died the previous year, but he had weathered that loss far better than Mabel was able to absorb her father’s death. Eliza Bell had died quietly in her Georgetown home, aged eighty-seven, with her only surviving son by her bedside. Since then, Alec and Mabel had seen even more of Melville Bell, who was now as dependent on Alec as he had once wished Alec to be on him.

Perhaps it was his wife’s profound grief that finally persuaded Alec to drag himself away from his Cape Breton aerie. In November 1898, he agreed to abandon sheep and flying machines and to accept the invitation from the emperor of Japan. He, Mabel, their two daughters, and Charles Thompson sailed off across the Pacific. Japan was undergoing a great spurt of modernization under the Meiji dynasty, and the inventor of the telephone was treated with almost religious reverence. “There’s nothing like coming to Japan to find out what a big man my husband is,” Mabel told her mother. “For his sake the children and I are received with such tremendous attention that I at least am beginning to think myself a very big personage indeed.” The emperor himself granted an audience to the famous Dr. Bell, and there were Chamber of Commerce banquets in all the major cities to honor “Bell-san.” Soon, as Mabel enthusiastically snapped away with her new Brownie camera, Elsie and Daisy were addressing their father as “Daddy-san.”

Although appreciative of the hospitality and respect shown him, Alec was less enthusiastic about the country than was his wife, because he was big in every sense. “He thinks crucifixion couldn’t be much worse than having to sit on his knees for two hours at a Japanese dinner that smelt good, but which he couldn’t get to his mouth! … He had to double up and then bow down over his knees as low as his back would allow and then try to eat off the floor. It didn’t help to see all the other Japanese guests just as comfortable as possible and have to chat and laugh while the perspiration was dropping like rain on the floor from pure agony. At present his one idea is to escape from another threatened banquet.”

Rickshaw travel was as challenging as chopsticks. Apart from the discomfort of squishing his 245-pound bulk into the flimsy little vehicle, he could not help wondering what would happen if the “little fellow in the shafts” slipped and lost control as he pulled his distinguished passenger down a steep incline. He confided to Charles Thompson, “I cannot get used to a man pulling me about in those terrible things, especially when I see that fellow begin to perspire.”