Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Late in October, 1908, June’s seventy-year-old father travelled to California for a surprise visit to his sister, intending to go on from there to Tucson for a hunting trip.⁷⁰⁴ On the twenty-fifth a telegram came from Santa Barbara saying he had fallen ill. Further messages followed, and were copied into June’s diary: “Father simply acute asthma, slowly improving. Dr. says able few days go Tucson or home with nurse. Will wire when he starts.” “Quieter night, some improvement. Weak, nervous, somewhat irrational. Breathing fairly easy.” “Encouraging day yesterday. Restless delirious night. Weaker.” At 1:15 in the morning of October 31, June's father died.

On the train bringing the body eastward, Ernest wrote an awkward letter to Reverend Robert Stuart MacArthur of New York’s Calvary Baptist Church, justifying a religious ceremony despite the fact his father hardly ever set foot in church. In part he blamed “the conditions of my father’s health which did not permit of much social intercourse outside of his family.” But it was also true, “He was never a church member, because he felt that he could not subscribe consciously to certain dogmas and beliefs which he considered to be a requirement of membership.”⁷⁰⁵ The funeral services were held at Glenheim, and special trolleys brought the guests from the 1:55 train out of Manhattan. The pallbearers were a veritable army of meat packers: the manager of the T. H. Wheeler Company, three men of the National Packing Company, Edward Chapman of the Adams-Chapman Company, and several other men of prominence.

June’s diary is blank for the next seventeen days, although she had not skipped writing in it even once for many years. “I could not write during the last heart-breaking days. Our relations and friends all gathered round and helped us all they could. Mother tries to keep up with a beautiful brave spirit for the sake of the rest of us. The tribute of flowers to Father were wonderful, and letters and messages pour in from the many who love him and whom he had helped.” Glenheim went into a deep mourning. The women gave away some of their more colorful clothing, trips to town were curtailed, and the family avoided its usually grand Thanksgiving celebration. As June said, “It seemed better for our family not to try to be together and so to feel more than ever the great vacant place.”⁷⁰⁶

Five weeks after her father’s death, June accepted an invitation from Will to attend church with him, and she much enjoyed the sermon given by “Gypsy” Smith. Afterwards, he returned to Glenheim for dinner, and the stage was set for more frequent visits. Two days after Christmas, he came again and read her extracts of a book he was writing, Life’s Day.

Based on lectures he had given at Chautauqua, this popular book would be organized by the simile that a life is like a day, with its dawn, morning, midday, twilight, and night. He found hope in every phase of life, denying that the last portion must be an agony of terror and incapacity. “As the close of Life’s Day draws nearer, and the ‘House Wonderful’ is seen to be weakening and ready to fall, it does not follow that the immortal tenant must be growing feeble or old. The experience of time, study and work, trust and faith, may have been keeping the soul fresh and bright year by year. Some men are old at thirty, others young at eighty.”⁷⁰⁷

The chapter on “night” would be short, asserting that physicians were agreed that death itself was usually painless and accompanied by a blessed unconsciousness. Will’s abiding religious faith blended with his medical science, and he quoted a fellow surgeon who said death should be considered our best friend, “not dreaded as the messenger of evil, but welcomed as a companion who will lead us into paths of pleasantness and reveal to us the joys for which we have been longing all our lives.”⁷⁰⁸

“After the night,” Will wrote, “comes a new Day, and that ‘only because of having died, does one enter into life,’ the life of the more glorious, the Eternal Day.”⁷⁰⁹

While Will was again entering June’s life, Lucy and Mrs. Smith were savoring Russia. “We stood one day under the vaulted dome of a great cathedral and sang a simple Christian hymn, and heard the volume of sound, grander than our voices had given forth, that the mysterious echoes returned to us.”⁷¹⁰ From a distance they saw Czar Nicholas and the royal family, then in Sweden they watched Kaiser Wilhelm and King Oscar riding together. Carriage rides in Norway, followed by brief sojourns in Holland and Germany brought them to Paris where they met Will, who had not seen his mother for nearly a year. They motored through rural France, crossed the Channel and hurried through London, Oxford, Cambridge and Chester, before crossing the Irish Sea to stop with old friends who had an estate outside Dublin. When Lucy docked at Manhattan, she tendered her resignation from the Mission Society.

They returned to Gramercy just before June and her mother left Glenheim for a while, to shake off their gloom, and moved into a hotel in New York City. Upon arriving, June discovered a welcoming bunch of violets from Will. The weather of that mid-January was bitterly cold snow mingled with pouring rain. On Monday, June and her mother went to a women’s meeting at the Madison Square Church at Lucy’s invitation to hear Dr. Avison, the missionary “hero of Korea” who had been her host in Seoul, and the next day Lucy called on them. On Friday, Dr. Bainbridge took June to call on a poor Chinese family in Chinatown, “a most interesting experience” that also involved a motor car drive and a dinner of chop suey. Sunday she saw him again, and on Monday she called on Lucy and Helen. This intensive contact with the Bainbridges was broken the next day, when various Wheelers swept June down to Atlantic City.

But a week later, Will telephoned to say that his mother and sister would also come down. Soon they were taking chair rides together, having pictures taken, working picture puzzles, and generally behaving like a united family on vacation. When June and her mother returned to New York City, on their way to Boston, Will brought June along on several professional calls, before giving her dinner at her hotel. In Boston a host of relatives commiserated over the death of June’s father, which made it all the more difficult to keep brave and cheerful. From Boston, June returned to Glenheim via New York, where she again saw Will.

After a lapse of two weeks, June invited him Glenheim for supper, but Helen telephoned that he had been injured in a subway accident and was quite ill from blood poisoning. June visited Helen two days later, and the next week June saw Will who was “sitting up and getting well.” The following Sunday afternoon, all the Bainbridges came out to Glenheim for supper. Finally, June’s period of grief was over, and she reentered the active life she had known before her father’s death, attending the local Women’s Institute and resuming Sunday School teaching. When she came down with the grippe, a beautiful box of flowers from Will urged her recovery. On Easter Sunday, her mother bedridden with laryngitis, June was well enough to sit up while Will read to her.

Contact with the Bainbridges tapered off a bit, and the swarm of potential suitors attempted to reestablish itself around Glenheim, including the indefatigable Mr. Barker. June saw Will twice early in May, and had tea with Helen and her friends at the Hotel Knickerbocker. June ignored her thirtieth birthday, not because of her advancing age but because she was reminded of the happy times she had with her father. On June 29, she wrote in her diary, “Ernest and I are to dine this evening in town with Dr. Bainbridge and his sister. It will be the first time I have been away from mother at dinner since last fall.” After “a delicious dinner,” they drove about town while the doctor made calls, then visited Lucy before returning June to Glenheim long after her mother had gone to bed.⁷¹¹ The next day Will took train for Chautauqua, soon followed by Helen and Lucy.

A telegram brought June a sudden blow; the baby boy of her cousin Gertrude Wheeler Beckman was dead. Within hours, June was on her way to Niagara Falls to comfort. Will wrote: “You have had so much of sorrow and sadness in your own life this past year that it must depress even high spirits and tend to dim the brightness of life. I know when a number of serious cases come to me and I have to take hold with heart as well as brain, that life becomes indeed gloomy after the stimulus of helping other is gone. But we must count as blessing the call to help, the chance to do such service, and then realize that any depression afterwards means natural tire, a reasonable reaction: But here I am preaching before I realized it. Enough! You are so near why not run down for a few days.”⁷¹²

Respecting formalities, Lucy sent the invitation, and Helen met June in Jamestown, a one-hour trolley ride away. June enjoyed the scenery, which she felt was quite pretty, and took a room in the Hotel Atheneum. After supper, Will escorted her to a band concert, and then they drove all around the grounds of the Institute, followed by a quiet walk. Helen gave her another tour the next day, and after a mid-day dinner she enjoyed sitting on the porch with Lucy. Will returned her to Jamestown on the trolley, where they had a private supper before she resumed her journey homeward.

Two weeks later, with her mother in tow, June boarded a train to Chautauqua. Lucy and Helen had originally planned to leave before then, but the courtship of June had become an important family project so they met the Wheeler ladies at the station.⁷¹³ Practically immediately, Will had to rush away on medical business. The day after arriving, June and her mother took breakfast in bed. Mrs. Wheeler was so exhausted that Will examined her professionally, and Lucy escorted June to a concert in the great amphitheater. The next day, June accompanied Lucy to a most interesting lecture on missions given by Mrs. Montgomery, and in the afternoon she was entertained by Helen. In the evening she went the medical rounds with Will and held his horse while he made calls, then they walked again.

The next day Helen came down with tonsillitis. Lucy took June to another lecture, and in the evening June again “played bridling post for the doctor,” watching his horse while he made house calls. She found a third lecture in Lucy’s company was as delightful as the others. Helen was slowly recovering, and she enjoyed great talks with Mrs. Wheeler. On Sunday, church was held in the big amphitheater, then the ladies rested on the porch through the afternoon and evening.

At nine in the morning of August 9, 1909, June watched Dr. Bainbridge conduct his annual “Question Box” at the House of Philosophy, where he answered the audience's medical questions, and in the afternoon she heard him lecture. Two days later, Lucy took her to hear Will shout to a large audience in the Hall of Philosophy about the progress of medicine since ancient times in preventing and curing infectious disease. “Every age has its harvest of the new,” he said. “Our times are no exception. We should remember, however, that only a very small part of the much which seems so plausible will long endure.”⁷¹⁴ A week later, on her last day at Chautauqua, June inspected Will’s hospital and entered the operating room while he was at work on a desperate case. After tea with Lucy at the Colonnade, June and her mother took the trolley to Westfield, where they caught the train toward home.

Back at Glenheim, June tried playing the piano again, after so many months, but a great wave of loneliness swept over her. At the beginning of September, Helen arrived for a stay of three days, then Will and June enjoyed walking through the glen before he took the Lusitania. From England he wrote June not of love but of serums, radium, electrical fulguration — and the joy of hearing Harry Lauder sing on the stage after so many pleasant hours listening to him on the “Victor” machine.⁷¹⁵ Will motored for ten days across England with sociologist George Edgar Vincent, son of the founder of Chautauqua.⁷¹⁶

Lonely when her brother Ernest left for business in Dakota, June called on Lucy and Helen and ordered a new felt hat. A rival suitor named Walter Gifford was very much in evidence in this period, and June dined with Senator Dillingham and his immigration commission. As soon as Will returned from overseas, he and Lucy drove out to Glenheim for dinner. A regular pattern set in. Every week or two June would have supper with Will. At other times Lucy might call her, or she might get together with Helen. But Barker, Gifford, the Senator, and all manner of friends and relations filled her days with social activities as well. Often she saw more than one of her suitors in a single day, as when she attended Walter Gifford’s party in the afternoon and went to the theater that evening with Will. On another occasion a Mr. Kellog of Princeton took June to the theater in the afternoon, while Will and Lucy snared her for a lovely night drive to Flushing.

One evening, Will and Lucy were riding slowly home to Gramercy in a taxicab, running east on Nineteenth Street, as a touring car belonging to Sol Brill was speeding north on Irving Place. At the intersection, the taxi turned north, the car turned east, and despite the drivers’ most frantic efforts, the two vehicles smashed. Will was on the side hit by the car, but Lucy’s side was rammed against a lamp post, so they both were badly shaken and cut by shattered glass. A newspaper said, “The taxicab in which they were sitting was put out of commission and Mrs. Bainbridge had to be assisted around the corner to her home and be put to bed. She suffered from bruises, cuts and shock, and it was feared by the family that she might have internal injuries.”⁷¹⁷ Within a few days, however, both Lucy and her son had recovered, and the incident was merely another warning of mortality.

The first two weeks of February, 1910, June was ill, and one of the Bainbridges visited her every day. Lucy brought her knitting to Glenheim, and June felt it was very cozy to have her. The next day Helen brought a collection of puzzles to work out, and on his fortieth birthday, Will came to dinner. Their visits were more frequent now, and occasionally June would see Lucy or Helen. Medical duties prevented Will from attending June’s thirty-first birthday, and soon it was time to go to Chautauqua again. Lucy spent the first night of July at Glenheim, and June saw Helen several times that summer while her brother was away.⁷¹⁸

Lucy went west again in the spring of 1911, and June once more was the guest of the senator in Washington, but she and Will were finally coming together.⁷¹⁹ A week after June’s thirty-second birthday, Mother Wheeler purchased a gold watch from Tiffany for $250.⁷²⁰ It had a sweep second hand with which Will could take the pulse of his patients, and June immediately gave it to him in return for a ring. They privately set a wedding date after Will’s summer work at Chautauqua, but they kept these plans secret from all but a few carefully selected friends and relatives. Will did not want his father to learn about the wedding in time to return from England and cause a dreadful scene.

Will arrived at the Athaneum in Chautauqua to set up his summer practice, accompanied by Lucy who was worn by the summer heat yet still ready to guide him.⁷²¹ He labored furiously to save money for a new future.⁷²² Some nights he slept not all, battling to save a critically ill patient or simply swamped by the numbers of minor complaints that came to his clinic. In one period of sixty-nine hours he slept just five, and at forty-one years he was already a bit old for such a killing pace.⁷²³ In the depths of his exhaustion, he wrote, “How are you really feeling these days June? Way down deep! Surely we both have had the stress and strain in life — are there not to be years of peace, of joy, of happy service before us? I believe there are to be.”⁷²⁴

Lucy assembled the wedding invitation list with two thousand names, and June arranged for Tiffany to engrave the cards. To avoid alerting Lucy's estranged husband, they did not invite his relatives until the last moment, and even delayed inviting the pastor, Reverend MacArthur of Calvary Baptist Church, who occasionally corresponded with William.⁷²⁵ Lucy prepared a small flat for herself at Thirty-Four Gramercy, so the newlyweds could take over the main apartment.

At the beginning of August, Will wrote June about his sister’s failure to find either a husband or a career. “This has been a terrible week - full of hard taxing cases with so much night work. Yes, and the worst of it is that I want it, for the rush means returns and that I must have now as never before. Helen came on unexpectedly staying here only a few hours. Poor girl she could hardly come for the feelings of what she had expected and hoped for this season and was not. Well, she is brave and puts her own sadness in the background for this and the way she is getting all fixed at Gramercy Park. I am sure we all love her the more.” He was still worried about his father. “I shall not say a word to him until we are over and just ready to visit him in England. I am anxious lest he should upset our plans for the trip.”⁷²⁶

The ruse worked, and the lavish wedding went forward on September 9, 1911, with more than two hundred guests but without William Folwell Bainbridge.⁷²⁷ Three days later, the couple boarded the S. S. Rotterdam, in a flurry of polychrome confetti, bound for Europe.⁷²⁸ As they travelled, they gathered new friends, often extending Will’s network of medical contacts.⁷²⁹ In Antwerp they saw Will’s friend, Dr. Hertoghe.⁷³⁰ In a moment of contemplation, they stood on the majestic tower of the Antwerp cathedral, looked out upon Belgium, and tried to foresee the contours of their future together. Even a decade later, Will would recall with regret, “I fear I was then too much burdened with the duties, too much pressed by the worries over the battle of life to make her as happy as she should have been made and joyful in this trip of trips for the girl.”⁷³¹ After Antwerp came Brussels, Paris, London for a difficult encounter with his father, and a tour of south-west England.
Analysis
The fundamental human relationship is that between parent and child. The primary locus of religion is not the church, but the family. God is a parent, and human beings are his or her children. People generally learn religious faith early in childhood, and there is good reason to believe that small children's feelings toward their parents are the model for their adult attitudes toward God. As a popular slogan says, "The family that prays together, stays together."

These observations challenge the wisdom of secularization, because abandonment of religion may remove an essential support from family relationships and leave the individual adrift in a chaotic sea of other individuals who are merely temporary exchange partners for each other, incapable of making enduring commitments that transcend economic advantage. If there is a blindness in the Rational Choice approach to sociology, it is the failure to see that market relations are not the only important bonds that link human beings.⁷³²

Ultimately, family feelings are rooted in biology. Infants have nothing, in the economic sense, to give their parents, yet the parents are willing to sacrifice for their offspring. In the pre-agricultural days when humans gathered and hunted in small groups, families may have been unstable within the embrace of the cohesive band, and religion was loosely organized. For the past six thousand years, elaborate religious organizations have supported family stability. In the modern world, where prosperity entices the individual and mobility threatens all commitments, there is a severe question whether either religion or the family can survive.

Rodney Stark has argued that ancient Judaism and Christianity encouraged higher birth and survival rates than did classical Paganism.⁷³³ Today, large sectors of nominally Jewish and Christian populations lack faith and are failing to reproduce at replacement levels. In contrast, Nathan Keyfitz argues, unsecularized Islam still supports high birth rates.⁷³⁴ At the same time, many religious traditions favor celibacy, at least for monastics or adepts, and thus would seem to discourage population growth. Perhaps religion is a cultural trait that most often increases fertility, although under some circumstances decreasing it, thus having a net selective advantage. For most ordinary people, at least within the Judeo-Christin-Islamic tradition, religion appears to support the formation and stability of ertile families.

Despite the support of their faith, Lucy experienced great difficulty maintaining the integrity of her immediate family, and Will almost failed to start a family of his own. There are several possible explanations for the lateness of Will's marriage. We know that he feared he carried a genetic defect, manifested in his father's obsessions, in his own frequent nervous exhaustion, and possibly in his sister's fatal hydrocephalus. Subsequent generations of the family have speculated that he was emotionally too close to his powerful mother to develop a deep relationship with another woman. We can only wonder about the psychological significance of the facts that his first medical specialty was gynecological surgery, and that as a young unmarried man he demonstrated female anatomy to scores of male students by dissecting scores of female cadavers. But perhaps his reluctance to marry came simply from the tremendous cost, in energy and money, of supporting his mother, sister, and ultimately father, while struggling to give his mother the great honor that might compensate her for the failure of her own marriage.

Religion may not have been the cause of Lucy's family disaster, but conceivably William would not have become so obsessed with his futile project had it not been for the sacred justifications provided by faith. Yet religion certainly helped repair the damage. First, it provided Lucy with a livlihood until her son could support her, then it gave him prosperous clients for his medical practice. June Wheeler was late in marrying, too, and the factor that clinched Will's courtship in competition with other men was their shared Baptist religion. Significantly, Will's ability to provide religious compensators to June after the death of her father was the key to his success. The exchange of religious compensators for worldly rewards is the fundamental dynamic of religious organizations, and thus important also for the most fundamental social institution of all, the family.

Chapter 10:

Desperate Cases

When June returned from her honeymoon, she found their bedroom at Gramercy Park full of great pieces of mahogany furniture, a gift from Lucy. Yet relations with her mother-in-law were problematic. For the first year of June’s married life, Lucy sat down to dinner with them every evening. Will addressed most of his remarks to Lucy lest she feel left out, and they reminisced about occasions June had not shared.⁷³⁵

June was all sweetness and light, the perfect complement to her steel-nerved husband and mother-in-law. “Married people,” she said, “should learn how not to aggravate each other.” When she discovered that Will hated the word “forget” and saw no excuse for failing to remember, she did her best to hang onto important facts and adopted his habit of saying he could not “recall,” implying the lost fact was still locked somewhere within his vast mind. He hated numerical imprecision, so when he asked how many people had been in a group she quickly made up a precise number. “Never lend and never borrow,” he said. “You will lose a friend or make an enemy. Give instead if you want to help someone.” But when someone insisted on borrowing, he would say, “Well, I never lend and never borrow on principal, but I think my wife might lend you something.”⁷³⁶