Woman of Valor (4 page)

After losing his own business, Michael worked occasionally for the two surviving stonemasons in town, but his love of talk and drink kept him from steady employment, and the sharp deterioration in his circumstances steadily undermined his authority at home. He was finally forced to rely on his sons to get him a job in the glass factory. This domestic crisis may help explain one of the most chilling of Margaret's autobiographical passages—a transparent allegory of oedipal tensions—that conveys her hopeless confusion when the barriers that normally separated men and women, parents and children, were broken down in her own household.

The year was 1892, and Margaret's four-year-old brother had died from pneumonia. Henry George McGlynn was named for two of his father's heroes, the tax reformer, whose wholesale contempt for the perquisites of private property made him anathema to the church, and a maverick Catholic priest, Father McGlynn, who had supported the Corning glassworkers. The little boy had never been baptized, and Anne feared for his damnation, her grief inconsolable for days following the burial. Believing with the phrenologists popular in his day that the human face is a reflection of a transcendent soul, Michael determined to fashion a mask of the dead child. Enlisting Margaret's assistance, he apparently set off late on a pitch-black night on the long walk to the cemetery, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with tools and plaster of paris. Her job was to stand guard and give warning if anyone approached, while her father, in flagrant violation of laws of church and state, uncovered his son's coffin and made a cast of the dead boy's head and shoulders. The two worked in secret for several nights and then presented the sculpture to a tearful but appreciative mother.

Real or invented, the story characterizes Margaret as the child chosen to conspire in an audacious and illicit act, quite beyond the more narrowly circumscribed universe of her mother and sisters. This was an initiation into her father's independent, even reckless, world, and as his accomplice, she was made to sanction Michael's impetuosity, his emotional extravagance, his contempt for authority. Many years later when she wrote about the incident, she could still recall the remorse she had felt on discovering a lock of human hair stuck in the plaster model. She had found it perfectly lifeless and of no comfort whatsoever. Her father may until then have inspired absolute fealty, but no more.
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Her autobiography also reports an explicitly erotic recollection from this time in her life, which may even more clearly reveal the overladen nature of her emotions. The rather innocently told story of a first “sex awakening” recalls her terror at waking on a cold winter night from a feverish, typhoid-induced sleep to find Michael in the bed beside her. An advocate of homeopathic medical remedies, he almost always served as his family's doctor and had apparently fallen asleep on the sickbed watch. His heavy breathing alarmed her, and she dreaded that he might awaken before she could summon her mother to the rescue. But instead he rolled over in his sleep taking the covers with him and leaving her in the cold, feeling at peril—as she put it so many years later—as though she were “falling,” the sensation Freud often discovered in dreams of women and associated with anxiety about sexual defilement.
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Michael had given Margaret morphine to reduce her pain and fever, and the then commonly prescribed drug may have accounted in part for the intensity of her memories when she awoke and when she wrote about the incident so many years later. Exactly how old she was and what weight attached to her father's actual seductions or her subliminal fantasy can never be clear. We do know, however, that he was indisputably a lusty man, and that he openly lavished affection on his wife, who seems herself to have been responsive to his advances. Even as an aging widower, he still enjoyed chasing “a gray haired lassie” every now and then, or so he wrote in an unabashed letter to his eldest daughter, Mary. A dandy fellow by the standards of his day, he dressed in starched white shirt, coat, and tie, even when pictured at work engraving a monument, and Margaret, for all her reservations about aspects of his behavior, seems to have been genuinely drawn to him. She also took from him a positive and strong sensuality of her own, recognizing in herself the inherent attractiveness that only a daughter who has felt herself especially beloved by her father may ever be capable of feeling. This response certainly distinguished her from her sisters, two of whom never married, while the third, Ethel, after a teenage marriage and divorce, lived with a man but openly disdained the oppressiveness of marriage and placed little value in romance.

Still, no matter how deeply Margaret may have been drawn to her father, she never learned to trust him, and this surely was Michael's most enduring legacy. However much he beguiled her, he failed her miserably as a parent—as a reliable model of male industry and authority. She would eventually learn to satisfy her own erotic strivings and court the seductions of men, but she would never allow herself to be defined by them, as women of her generation were expected to do. She would fall in love and marry twice, yet never be beholden to these relationships. She would, indeed, maintain the goal of empowering women to live independent, self-fulfilled lives as her social mission for half a century.
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Michael Higgins's rather pathetic decline placed a heavy burden of self-reliance on his oldest children, whose labors, in turn, rescued his family. The price they demanded for assuming this premature responsibility, however, was a high degree of industry and ambition and some measure of conformity to prevailing standards of social behavior and religious belief.

Corning's hillside community of industrious Irish immigrants provided the Higgins children with their first real friendships and role models outside the home. In Margaret's memory, the girls she met there were especially intelligent and fun-loving. They ridiculed the frocked parish priests, even as they went to Mass every Sunday and provided her a model of adolescent comportment far more acceptable than her father's peculiar extremism. The registry of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Corning records the baptism of thirteen-year-old Margaret Higgins on March 26, 1893, little more than a year after the extraordinary grave-digging incident, but the latter event never found its way into her autobiographies.

With this conversion Margaret also attended the parish school in the Corning hills and was confirmed there a year later. When she returned to Corning in 1943 as the academy's most infamous graduate, a God-fearing former classmate remembered that she had been an extremely quiet and intelligent student, absolutely ignorant of the “heretical” ways of thought for which she subsequently became known.
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The eighth grade at St. Mary's must also have been the scene of the contretemps reported in her autobiographies with a teacher who ridiculed her for arriving late to school one day, wearing a pair of kid gloves that had been a present from her older sisters. Margaret used this event to illustrate the punitive nature of her schooling in Corning, but it may more clearly identify the humiliation she suffered over an obvious rebuke to the pretentious behavior of a child whose family history was so notorious. The incident, and its proximity to Robert Ingersoll's appearance in Corning, also helps explain the decision to have her complete her secondary education at the Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, a boarding school located across the state in Hudson County, a comfortable distance away from the distractions and tensions at home.
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Founded by Dutch Protestants in the 1830s, Claverack was distinguished by its commitment to offer a special course of instruction for women and by its willingness to make “special arrangements” for children who could not afford to pay the full costs. Mary and Nan Higgins pooled meager resources to cover Margaret's tuition, while she worked in the school kitchen to earn room and board. The total cost was $225 a year—far from inconsequential—but the only real option available to anyone who wished to continue her education beyond the eighth grade when local public and parochial schooling ended.
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The curriculum at Claverack included English, mathematics, natural science, classics, and the arts, along with special preparation for careers in either teaching or commerce. Margaret reveled in this introduction to a rich secular education and, perhaps still under her father's influence, found herself especially drawn to the social sciences, where she presented speeches on women's suffrage, free silver, and other advanced political issues of the day. Her later accounts of this experience are surprisingly sparse, however, for its significance may have been as much social as intellectual. Gradations of class and family background gave way in the leveling atmosphere of the rambling white clapboard dormitory of the boarding school, and for the first time she experienced a confident sense of belonging. She was becoming an extremely pretty adolescent woman, with a soft, charming smile and a slight, well-proportioned figure, and her good looks combined with high spirits and prankish inclinations to win her instant popularity.

Her published recollections and the letters she shared with Claverack alumnae through the rest of her life describe a gay and spirited crowd of students who self-consciously rebelled against the formality and restraint they so strongly identified with the bourgeois culture of Victorian America. Margaret formed intense attachments to several New York City girls, whose sophistication she especially admired, and she later defended the innocence of these infatuations as important steps in her own emotional development. She had several significant male suitors as well—one of them a particularly handsome beau from Long Island by the name of Corey Albertson, with whom she posed for a formal portrait on the school lawn one beautiful spring day.

By the testimony of her closest friend at Claverack, Amelia Stuart, Margaret practically never spoke of home during these years, or later, when the two trained as nurses together. If she rarely talked of her family, however, she remained very much in its debt. Surviving letters to Mary from boarding school, for example, are filled with girlish prattle about vacations and clothes and a boy who sent her bouquets of violets and roses. At one point Margaret enlivened the rather dreary world of her devoted sister and mentor by enlisting her in the fantasy that one day she would become an actress. The two of them even assembled a portfolio of captivating portraits, but when a casting agency requested a record of Margaret's bust and hip measurements, she was rudely awakened to the life of the vaudeville stage in its coarse, practical aspects and abandoned the pursuit. No letters to her parents from Claverack remain, however, and though she later claimed to have maintained a lively correspondence about the curriculum with her father, it seems more likely that, even if distance helped resolve some of the tensions between them, her pampered situation as a student also brought further estrangement.
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By this time Mary Higgins had gone to work in the home of a Corning family named Abbott, wealthy relations of the Houghtons, who owned Corning Glass. There she developed a taste for the habits and affectations of her employers and a secure belief in the virtues of frugality, hard work, and self-reliance. She kept a diary of her work, and occasional entries offer poignant testimony to her fierce determination to dream her dreams, while taking care to observe the proprieties demanded of servants in such a setting. From her entries we also learn that Margaret visited with her when she came home from school and shared in these preoccupations. On one occasion the two girls ate so much food that poor Mary began to worry whether the mistress of the house would return and punish them. Mary spent the rest of her life as a servant without apparent resentment of her station, but Margaret seems never to have lost the hidden injury of this predicament.
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The Abbott home was just up the hill from the town's immigrant community, but with the ascent came more sunshine and space and for Margaret the appearance of a life of leisure and freedom to which the working-class girls down below might aspire. She learned to admire the stylish young mothers of the town's emerging middle-class, who in her memory walked hand in hand with their children on daytime shopping expeditions and in the evenings played croquet with their husbands on the manicured lawns beside their homes. Like many young people raised in poverty, she associated wealth and social status unequivocally with personal fulfillment. She came to believe that money must necessarily bring happiness. Having never felt real solidarity with the working class in which she grew up, no doubt because of her father's eccentricity and unpopular ideas, she was never able to attach real dignity to life within it.
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Still, however far Michael strayed from conventional expectations as a provider for his family, he remained solicitous of his wife's affection, and she of his. Estranged from extended family and community, he made a haven of his home. By Margaret's recollection, her parents' marriage was rich in mutual respect and unusually intimate for its day. She could remember only one occasion on which Anne had rebelled openly at her husband's tendency toward self-absorbed behavior and foolish profligacy—when he allegedly took money his oldest son had earned to buy the family's winter coal and spent it on a dinner to honor Henry George. Yet even then, by her recollection, he was quickly able to woo the light back into his wife's emerald eyes.

Margaret would come to see this willingness to barter strongly held principles for the security of a man's affections as a sign of tremendous weakness in a woman, but, at the same time, her mother remained a powerful presence in her memory, whose quiet indulgence had demonstrated fortitude and resilience in the face of few other options. For Anne Higgins to have admitted disappointment in her husband openly would have been a concession of victory to her parents who had spurned him, her neighbors who censured him, and her children who resented him. And she was apparently far too proud to admit such defeat openly.
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