East to the Dawn (2 page)

It was in one of these houses, a fine Gothic structure that pioneer settler Alfred Gideon Otis had built for his bride, Amelia Harres Otis, that their daughter Amy Earhart waited to give birth on July 24, 1897, in the midst of a heat wave that had kept the temperature hovering near a hundred degrees for days. Amy had come from Kansas City, Kansas, where she and Edwin Earhart made their home, and now was installed in her childhood bedroom on the second floor, watched over and cared for by her parents and the servants, the cook Mary Brashay, and the old coachmangardener Charlie Parks, both of whom had worked for the Otises since before Amy was born. Next door was Amy's aunt, Amelia Otis's older sister, Mary Ann Challiss, dubbed the “Queen” by her husband William for her imperious ways, who was so different from retiring Amelia.

Amy, a reed of a woman with wonderful thick chestnut hair, looked
frail but was not: before her marriage she had been a fine rider and the first woman to reach the summit of Pikes Peak. Her mother, a plain-looking stout lady who claimed never to have done anything in her life more strenuous than rolling a hoop, was by contrast timid. But there were plenty of people around to help her see her daughter through the ordeal.

Nearby lived Mary Ann's and William's numerous progeny—Amy's first cousin and childhood friend James Challiss and his wife Rilla; and half a block away James' elder sister Ida Challiss Martin, stolid, competent widowed wife of the governor, with her seven children. Other relatives—cousins, nephews, nieces, relatives by marriage—were spotted about the town. There was a doctor in attendance. Amy's younger sister Margaret, who had cared for their recently deceased great-grandmother Maria so well and carefully, was also home. It was as nurturing an environment and as safe a situation in which to give birth as nineteenth-century America could provide.

For those who believe in omens, the signs were propitious for the birth, for one of the sharpest electric storms in a long while hit the town that afternoon and cracked the heat wave. “The sky turned the color of tin, the air stood stock still,” Rilla Challiss recalled, and there was no twilight, for a violent rainstorm began as night fell. By late evening the storm was over, the stars were out, the air clear and cool. The break in the weather made it easier for everyone. At eleven thirty P.M. on that last July Saturday, Amy gave birth to a strapping, healthy infant, nine pounds—a lot for a girl.

The baby was baptized Monday, October 10, twelve weeks later, also in Atchison rather than in Kansas City, and for that event, too, there was a memorable weather change. This time it was rain, breaking a six-week dry spell that had threatened the harvest. “The blessed rain,” proclaimed the headline in
The Atchison Globe.
It would have put everyone in a good mood. The site was the Otises' place of worship, Trinity Episcopal Church at Fifth and Utah Street, a handsome Gothic church faced with irregular limestone blocks with great arched doorways and soaring stained-glass windows designed by Richard Upjohn. A twin of Upjohn's Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street in Manhattan, it still made an imposing statement as the century was drawing to a close. It was the handiwork of Amy's father ; he had been the prime mover as well as the largest contributor in the parish, and Amy and her brothers and sister had all been baptized there. The gray light that filtered through the stained-glass panes of the church barely illuminated the black walnut beams and pews fashioned from trees that grew in the Missouri River valley; no one cared.

It was a small, intimate gathering that was assembled, as was the custom among nice Atchison families. The baby was dressed in the same lace
christening dress her mother had been baptized in twenty-eight years before. When the Episcopal minister, the Reverend John Henry Molineux, pronounced the chosen names, Amelia Mary, then intoned, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” and sprinkled the infant with holy water, placing her in the Episcopal Church, the Otises must have been pleased but relieved as well, for they had managed to symbolically erase all vestiges of the Lutheran religion in which Edwin Earhart had been raised and all influence of his father, the Reverend David Earhart, who was one of the most revered Lutherans in Kansas. If Alfred's aim had been to make it look as if the Earhart heritage didn't exist, he succeeded.

As Amy had been baptized Amelia (but always called Amy) after her mother, now her daughter, too, was baptized Amelia. Edwin was recognized in one detail only, his daughter's middle name: Mary was for Edwin's mother.

It was perhaps inevitable that in all these early choices, it was Amy's family rather than Edwin's that prevailed. Hers was a powerful family. Along with their relatives the Martins and the Challisses, they were the powers in the town. Her austere father, “the Judge,” as he was called, one of the first Atchison settlers, had had a hand in organizing and running just about every institution in the town, including the banks, the rail lines, and the gas company. Now, at seventy, he was still a force.

Undoubtedly the thoughts of many, as the christening ceremony progressed in the muted light, would have turned to another of Amy's family—her grandmother Maria Grace Harres, extraordinary both for her vigor and her intelligence, who had lived with the Otises at North Terrace and died just months before. This baby was the first of Maria's issue to be born after her death. Maria had set her stamp on her amazingly numerous progeny, providing a network of sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins—four generations of descendants centered in Atchison, radiating across Kansas, reaching all the way to the governor's mansion, the governor's wife being her granddaughter Ida. It was through Maria that the Otises were related to all the people that mattered, most of them the offspring of Amelia Otis's sister Mary Ann. Maria had lived to see the birth of twenty grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. Over the years the generations had gotten into a chronological muddle; Amelia Earhart, born less than a year after Maria died, was merely a great-grandchild.

Amy, sweet, compliant, pretty, even though in love with Edwin, was totally preoccupied with her own family. Now, that preoccupation showed in the way she entered the presents Amelia received in the baby book. She
listed the gifts: three silver spoons, three gold pins, an entire wardrobe, a gold ring, a bracelet, a silver comb and brush, a pillow. And then, tellingly, “Best of all her grandmother's undying “love and devotion.”“ And then the very last entry, her own gift, the crib quilts her grandmother Maria had made for her when she had been born. There is no mention—no mention at all—of any Earhart gift. And yet one must presume that the Reverend Earhart would have given something, and certainly that Edwin would at the very least have given
his
“love and devotion'”—he was a very affectionate and demonstrative father, but Amy didn't think it worthwhile to mention.

Amy did think it important to write down the old truism regarding the day of the week a baby is born. What she inscribed is such an accurate description of her daughter's future life that one must speculate upon the possibility that an early family myth, strongly reinforced, can influence the subsequent personality development of a child. Amelia was a Saturday child. Amy, who never worked a day in her life, daughter of Amelia who never worked, and of Amelia's mother Maria, who never worked, carefully wrote down, “But Saturday's bairn must work for a living.”

Maria Grace Harres was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1796; she died in Atchison September 17, 1896. Her parents, the Graces, ship-owners, were English Quakers who came to America with William Penn. Maria attended the dame school; legend has it that she was chosen to throw flowers in General Lafayette's path when he visited Philadelphia. She had married a Prussian, Gebhard Harres, who fled to America to avoid being pressed into the army. Gebhard, six foot four, with curly hair, was a tool-maker, designer of steam-powered pistons, and such a good craftsman that, according to family legend, he had impressed Robert Fulton. There is no photograph of Maria as a young woman, but a photo of her in later years shows her distinctive high forehead, which her daughters and their issue inherited, and piercing eyes. Gebhard must have been quickly drawn to her; she certainly was to him. Amy Earhart wrote, “He thought Grandmother the most beautiful woman in Philadelphia and I judge she must have been very good-looking, as he was. Mother said people used to turn and look at him often, as he walked along the street.

But Gebhard was a Lutheran. “Marrying out of meeting,” they called it when someone married someone of another faith, and by Quaker law such an action caused the person's name and record to be erased from Quaker records and the person shunned. It was not a step for a weak-willed
woman to take. One can only speculate upon the misery this caused—being ostracized by the dominant religious group in a city so preoccupied by religion that it stunned the visiting Englishwoman Frances Trollope, into writing, “The religious severity of Philadelphian manners is in nothing more conspicuous than in the number of chains thrown across the streets on a Sunday to prevent horses and carriages from passing.... Spain, in its most catholic days, could not exceed it.”

Nonetheless Maria and Gebhard made the decision to remain in Philadelphia, and although Maria was separated from her Quaker heritage, she never separated from the basic tenets of the Quaker faith—the idea of service was part and parcel of her being.

Gebhard became a successful cabinetmaker and before long was able to move his growing family into a large three-story house on the corner of Northwest Tenth and Catherine Street. It was one of the handsomer Philadelphia houses of the day, boasting front steps of white marble, a silver door knocker, and a rarer touch of opulence, a white marble frame around the front door. Seven servants helped Maria keep up the establishment and care for her family. Their five children, Mary Ann, Amelia, John, Charles, and Theodore, grew up in ever-increasing luxury, the children of privileged parents in America's most cosmopolitan city. But amassing wealth did not turn Maria into a frivolous woman; she started the family vocation of caregiving. She was a gifted and courageous healer, “a natural born nurse,” who nursed stricken friends back to health during the 1832 cholera epidemic that killed a thousand people as it swept through Philadelphia. She also cared for victims of smallpox (against which she had been vaccinated) and because of her superb health gradually acquired the reputation of being immune to all infections. And indeed no one—not one of her children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren or nephews or nieces—could ever remember seeing Maria ill.

The upper-class young ladies of Philadelphia were singled out by Frances Trollope, who was notably unimpressed by most of what she saw in America, for the “delicacy and good taste” they exhibited in their dress.

Two of those cosseted young women, Mary Ann Harres, the eldest, and her younger sister Amelia, would as young brides move out west to Atchison, Kansas—to the very edge of civilization. It was a wrenching change. Mary Ann, married, the mother of two children, moved first. At some point Amelia Harres went west to visit her, and there she met Alfred Otis. On April 22, 1862, in Philadelphia, Amelia and Alfred were married. The wedding announcement in
The Philadelphia Enquirer
was days late and incomplete, mute testimony to a nation in the midst of the Civil War and absorbed by the great battle being fought at Shiloh in Tennessee. Alfred
and his bride traveled by steamer up the Missouri to Atchison, making way against the river swollen by the rains and melting snows of spring. Amelia would have seen the ragged islands in the wide muddy river and the still mostly forest-covered shores that Francis Parkman had seen and written about just ten years earlier.

Alfred was an interesting, bright, complex, difficult man, also of a distinguished lineage. At the time he was born, in Little York, New York, in 1827, his family had already been in the New World for generations. John and Margaret Otis, Puritans, emigrated from Hingham, England, to Hingham, Massachusetts in 1631. Their descendants, Alfred's forebears, were among the first trained doctors in colonial America, early graduates of Harvard and Yale. But as Alfred well knew, there were other Otises, distant cousins also descended from John and Margaret, who were much more famous and much more distinguished: James, the famous patriot who in 1761 so eloquently proclaimed the basic colonial principle that “taxation without representation is tyranny” in the Council Chambers of the Old State House in Boston, and James's nephew, Harrison Gray Otis, the Federalist senator whose elegant red brick house would become one of Boston's enduring landmarks. Alfred falsely claimed them as his forebears. So enamored was Alfred of this idea (he named his firstborn son, who died in infancy, Harrison Gray) that he implanted in his children the belief that they were descendants of James.