At Sister Marietta’s Party
“The flirtish tiger lily coyly invites. Its message is: ‘I dare you to love me’”
--The Message of the Flowers.
The wreck of a broken chair, an awkward fourteen-year-old boy struggling to his feet and trying to regain his shattered composure - a strange picture for a woman to carry with her always as her first vision of the Man among men. And yet this picture is mine. I can bring back the laughing faces of the boys and girls who stood around him as the dainty chair collapsed under his muscular bulk, his face flushing as he laughed with them. I would not wish to forget that party at the house of Sister Marietta Walker.
In the interests of the young people attending the church conventions at Lamoni, Sister Marietta was devoting her beautiful old home to an entertainment oat which those who came in from a distance were the guests of the young people of the town.
It was a typical Iowa town, having that air of quiet prosperity peculiar to the Corn Belt. The old Walker home stood at the top of the hill near the church, and was set back from the road among fine old evergreens. Sister Marietta herself was a gentlewoman and a scholar, and there was that spiritual quality and dignity about her poetry that is not often met with in these days of Edgar Lee Masters and Walt Mason.
She and her lovely daughters now gathered the sons and daughters of the townspeople around them to make a party for the youth of the church. The parlors were filled with gay and dainty little misses in flowered muslins and wide ruffled organdies, and group after groups of high-spirited and good-looking youngsters wandered happily over the broad porches and lighted lawns.
The plain child with the long brown hair and the simplest of dresses, who seemed constantly to draw around her the gayest groups with her charming enthusiasms, was the daughter of a poor missionary, while, with the curious lack of caste which has characterized the society of the church from that time to this, the wealthy real estate trader’s slow-spoken little girl helped contentedly in the kitchen. Similarly the sons of a retired farmer and the banker’s son played checkers at the same board with a poor widow’s boy, the handsomest and best-mannered little rascal in town in spite of the fact that his father had left him many years before to the care of a frail mother, who could only weave carpet rages and sell garden stuff for their support.
Most noticeable among them all, however, was the boy, Fred Smith. He sat over a chess game with a serious-minded friend all during the early part of the evening, but later when he joined the group in the library, I found myself watching him. I somehow sensed that aside from their games and conversation, the others, too, were watching this big, broad-shouldered fellow, who in spite of his dutiful attempts to be gracious to the out-of-town guests seemed strangely out of place at a party.
It has always been so. Not that he is truly unsocial – it is only that there have been so many thing which have interested him more than the social contact with people. His mind has been too busy with the serious side of existence and with the big problems of the future. Even at that first party I became aware of the preponderance of his intellectual interests, and the manner in which that great brain functioned.
We were placing quotations from the classics and Fred Smith, who happened to be sitting near me, wrote away steadily until, glancing up and seeing that the rest of us were chewing our pencils, it occurred to him that it might be nicer to let one of the girls or a visitor win. Accordingly he stopped writing at once and gave up his paper, leaving the remaining questions unanswered.
He was already too late. I, having early acquired my Shakespeare and Browning with the other necessities of an education from a conscientious mother, had managed to tie, but not to win from him. We “drew cuts” for the prize. He may have intended it so, or it may have been by chance, but I won the draw and received his congratulations before the crowd. This was my first public appearance with the man who wife I later became and whose companion I have been through many years of public service.
Public service! That has been our life. He has been a sincere and a consecrated servant of his people, if a sometimes misunderstood leader, since his ordination into the church at about the time of our marriage. And before, yes, many years before –
From the first he was marked for a great man and a prophet, for the priesthood since the days of Melchisedec and Aaron, they say, has descended through the eldest son. There had been an older boy, David; but Frederick was the oldest living son of Joseph, who was the oldest son of Joseph, the founder of “Mormonism.”
A chubby barefooted boy, padding through the hot dust of a country town’s Main street, just such an unimportant little Middle West town as has known the boyhood of many a man whose name is now listed among the nation’s greatest men, he was frequently reminded of the responsibility which overshadowed his future.
A husky, athletic little fellow he was, a leader even then, with the genius to organized all sorts of small deviltries, and ready to take the blame for the whole gang if the occasion demanded, but he was never permitted to forget.
Often he stopped in the quiet street to let the soft dust work up comfortingly between his toes. Sometimes an old man accosted him as he passed, a gentle old man with a flowing beard and a kind bright voice, or perhaps it was a gentleman who was not so old, stern and soldierly, but with a saving sense of humor in his eyes, or a tall and stooping figure with a voice of keen righteousness.
“You will not forget, Freddie,’ admonished the old gentleman –oh, so many times a hand passed over the curly, sweaty head as one of them pointed out to him his destiny. “You will remember, Freddie, that you will some day have a great work to perform, when you shall succeed your father.”
And the boy would raise his wide brown eyes respectfully, for these men were his father’s friends, and with no trace of personal feeling in his manner he would answer simply, ‘No, sir I shall not forget.’ And he would trudge off sturdily on his errand.
Even as I, at this party where we first met, looked upon him as the son of the prophet whose people were assembled in conference, so was he expected to sacrifice his personal pleasure for the happiness of his father’s official guests, and he did so cheerfully, until the party at last broke up, and the young people wandered away in little groups, out across the shadowy lawn.
Then this great boy came to me, carrying his tuba which he had play in the band earlier in the evening, and asked me if he might walk wit me to where my sister and I were staying.
“My mother does not want me to go out with Strand boys,” I objected. “And besides, I should be years older. Why, I am not out yet!”
“Out of what?” he demanded.
“Out –“ and then I, who was finding myself a little interested, though quite without my intending to be, by the appearance and manners of this rather unusual young fellow, hesitated. I did not like to say, “out in society, don’t you know,” so I finished, “out of high school of course.”
He stood very straight, strangely at ease on the open lawn with the moonlight glinting on the big horn under his arm.
When I saw that he did to answer, I considered how the people at the party had looked upon this boy, their president’s son, almost as something which they owned in common; I recalled how his father had visited in our home from the time my sisters and I could remember, and I thought how his father’s father and mother had known my father’s father and mother. Presently I said: “I’ll run and tell the girls.”
He seemed pleased, but because I sensed his willingness to do what his duty to his father demanded and yet how determined he was not to accept anything at the hands of his father’s friends which was not done to him for his own sake, I would add by way of explanation, just to tease him: “It will be all right Fred, I am sure because you are Brother Joseph’s boy.”
We walked three blocks extra—or was it four?--that night to reach the house in which I was being entertained.
I did not see this boy again until he had become a man. But he has told me that he saw me once when I was seventeen.
He was reading proof in the church publishing house when I next visited Lamoni. He has told me that as I passed his office one day on business for my mother an older man who worked at the same desk with him looked up and remarked:
“Do you know, whenever I see Mrs. Cobb and her daughters, I am reminded of a bed of pure, white lillies.” That was when I was seventeen.
I say when I was seventeen—when we were seventeen, for there is only a few months difference in our ages. It has been fortunate for me, perhaps, that I had the moral backing of a slight seniority. My husband is a natural leader, but, as every child must know, the best argument in the world is, “I know better. I’m older than you.”
I suppose if I had always remained oblivious to his weaknesses—I will not say faults, for I have no intention of admitting that he has any real faults—I might still impress him, as I did his associate when I was seventeen, as a sweet, white lily.
There is a little doubt in my mind, however, if, even at seventeen, the comparison was particularly applicable to the girl Fred Smith chose for his wife. Purity? Yes. That certainly, for I was raised by a woman with a Puritan’s code, and I have had the courage to live up to my ideals even in the face of an easy age. Gut the other connotations of a white lily—meekness, unending solemnity, the odiousness inane sanctity! Besides,, I have loved him to well. For his own sake I have sometimes felt it my duty to remind him of certain sins of omission and commission, and, curiously enough for such a broad-thinking man, in the face of his apparent unwelcome for my suggestions. I say apparent. That is because that awe-inspiring stare with which he so frequently disconcerts the person speaking to him is largely a near-sighted habit.
I will confess, however, that he has at times a rather unsatisfactory manner of accepting criticism. Frequently, when I have called his attention to some matter of more or less importance, he has heard me through without comment, almost without a sign that he has heard me, until I did to care to press the point further, or he himself has changed the subject seemingly as secure in his former position as if I had never spoken; only I have learned sometimes months or even years later that he had taken my suggestion.
Mr. Smith’s father was color blind. I have heard the boys tell many times how he has started to eat green cherries from the tree, thinking they were ripe, and how in winter he would always give Fred’s green wollen mittens to Hale, whose mittens were red.
Of course it would not be scientific, according to Mendel’s law, to suggest that my husband is color blind like his father; but I have often noticed in him what I might call a lack of color sense, or perhaps it is merely a failure to appreciate color values, which amounts to almost to the same thing. Red is not green to him, but it is red, whether it be rose, maroon, crimson or brick.
Consequently, I have sometimes wondered if, in quoting the man who likened my to a white lily, he was not making a mistake in the color of his lily. Even at that, and whether or not he agrees with the unknown writer who fancied that its message if, “I dare you to love me!” my husband has often told me that the tiger lily is his favorite flower
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