No. 71

Chas. in 1884 about Testing

Stewart King c/o

John C. Davant, Attorney

501 Cleveland St.

Clearwater Florida

December 20, 1939

Dear Stewart,

Your grandfather, Henry #1, the patriarch in Bath, New York, was now an 83-year-old widow. If he were to ever see the land that he purchased in 1854 and all the work that Charles had done for the family in Iowa, he had better get to it.

Your mother said that it was time to sell.

May 27 1884

Dear M--When Father arrives in Clinton send me a telegram. My application in process. Still more tests. Esther cross with me but energetic with babies. No room for Father to stay long. I’ve made arrangements with Knapps should their sickroom be open. Father won’t get rest here with the colic and crying. After I’m done testing in Dubuque, might extend hotel stay a few days for sickroom myself. Yours – Chas.

“The real reason he was coming to Iowa,” she said, “Was to set eyes on his grandson and namesake, that boy.” This was the oldest child of Charles, was now eight years old, they called him Boy Henry or Henry #3.

Henry #2 (they called him Hank) was the brother of Charles, whom your mother called “Prodigal,” not only cashed out of his rightful inheritance to chase gold, but he rejected his father’s dreams. There was a reunion, but no male offspring in Bath with the surname.

“Well, he respected what he saw, the work ethic,” she added, adjusting her pillow, “And he respected enough to see it with his own eyes and to instruct Boy Henry about what work was.”

“Hank left home for Australia with a man who also lacked impulse control,” Mary said. “This was when Charles was about eight or nine years old, but still too young to play substitute at the mills, except after school. Charles preferred the general store and its access to candy, traffic, and friends, and girls.”

When Hank finally did return from Australia, twelve years later, it was in the last year of the Civil War.

“It was Val who we all watched at that time, with such reverence,” she said.

Val was the oldest. He stayed. Kept the machine and the machines running. The hardest worker of all, precisely because he was so close to the father.

When your mother told me that Val was the one most quiet about his contributions, and prone to long periods of silence, I remembered the prayer of my youth to St. Joseph.

“Val also ignored my letters. Never answered a one. Always got Rebecca or Ellen to respond to me, and their loyalty was strangely to him and would not provide any real information, only surface niceties."

It was 1865 when Hank came home. It happened to be good fortune that Charles, who served as a Marine, was granted a furlough at that time and was able return home to Bath and enjoy his older brother.

Your mother said, “I’m told it was a happy occasion."

Hank was physically and financially broken, and once again, your mother said, a wad of worry and burden to the family, whispering, “He isn’t exactly my favorite person.”

So, Stewart, let me rearrange my chronology of Charles as it is now seems to me this time is of special interest.

After the Civil War Charles moved to Iowa to take over the family investments, perhaps thinking that more of the family might move there, as your mother and father were doing very, very well financially and now here I was attending as their domestic in their mansion. Were the others going to move there if Charles could make a go of it? I don’t know. But it was sure a revival of spirits Charles announced his firstborn was to be not only a boy, but Boy Henry.

“Boy Henry was the prize,” Your mother sighed, shifting her body in the bed, adding something about “right men” or “holy men” or something I didn’t understand.

“Charles lit up whenever he talked of his boy Henry,” she said, opening her hands and waving them in the air.

But the more she talked about the boy, even she, too, was lighting up with something breathless and free, positive emotion, nearing adoration, well it was something I rarely saw in your mother, so I recall it, as the sun poured into the room as she was talking about Boy Henry.

She said, “You know, just stating the obvious here: I had three handsome sons of my own. But they all, especially Charles, talked incessantly about his son. My own sons not only had unwavering aspirations and actually demonstrated competency, with ribbons. You name it: Athletics, calculations, military history, and a genuine vocation for high adventure. They didn’t just carry or inherit this responsibility, which is all boy Henry could do.”

She continued, reaching for her glass of water, “It was if this “royal beatitude” like “boy Henry.”

I handed her the water, “Thank you, Minnie. You know, one of the worst arguments I ever had with Charles was when I, God forgive me, inflicted upon the boy a silly nickname to “reduce him” to one syllable to save time.”

And she let it rip, "You must know it by now Minnie, or he would have never even thought to have dragged your pathetic story into my fine house, that Charles is the most sensitive person ever. You’d think that being a Marine and having been able to withstand being yelled at and all that gun work, and my husband agrees, well, he will always be my little brother and need my counsel, we know this, for this particular weakness. He cannot escape that truth.”

Even though, she added, “You know that Boy Henry was conceived out of wedlock? Remarkably, it made no difference to anyone,” she said, “Like it should.”

So, now this time when after your grandmother died and your grandfather thought it was time to visit Clinton, there was tremendous excitement. Your mother said all her friends and the store’s employees knew her father was from the East for his impractical hat and vest were so crisp. The way he carried himself, she said, always made heads turn. But no one harmed the great man as he still knew how to be fierce looking whether in the wild or among natives or strangers, something he learned as a young man surveying the upper Finger Lakes with his father.

It perturbed your mother that your own father had out of town business precisely when her father came out west, but it was often that way, she said, and there was nothing she could do about it. They needed the money it brought in, and certainly her father respected that.

The old man was rightly impressed by her fine home and baked goods, your mother prepared a great spread of goodies like she had as a young girl again. Still, she sighed to me, that it didn’t take her long to recognize a restlessness in the old man, saying, "Oh he was anxious to get to Grundy and Cedar Falls, and to at last rub dirt and check on the horses and meet the Boy Henry."

I wondered, “What did he mean by application? What trial?”

As your mother told me about it, I framed your grandfather as both proud and relaxed, satisfied that he could at last see with his own eyes, without any rushing or agenda, and not have to talk about it, but to set down with his kind, loving eyes toward his son Charles, what with his son not even able to say anything of this dark matter while his mother was so ill in her final years: that Charles had married a girl who was losing her mind.

Your mother added, “And that Charles was duped into taking on a faulty bride, who had a bunch of bad apples for brains, why, she had no needle skills, no swiftness.”

Your mother said she was sworn to secrecy from talking about it when she travelled to Bath and instead was forced to talk incessantly about fabrics, lampshades, and superfluous comings and goings of old friends that she was no longer friends with anymore but couldn’t stop herself from comparing those in success and those without means for lack of proper choices early in their young adulthood.

Mary told me she burned a great deal of ears for Charles, but he would have to pay her later. Charles was indebted to her, she said, for her significant role in hiding the truth about Esther from friends in Bath. Charles was the only one that thought Esther might get better, as the baby was still nursing, but more so because he wanted to put off dealing with what to do with the children if she would have to be institutionalized.

That’s what Mary told me, that he was impractical, a procrastinator, and if he hadn’t from the very start put off his looking for a wife for so long when he got to Grundy County, if he hadn’t got to it in a bigger city, like Clinton, where there were Episcopalians, well, he may not have had to take the one overripe apple thrown at him as a consolation prize... By the time he met Esther he was 31 years old, and, as she said, “already on the downhill side of the life’s ride.” He had no goals, she said, "And was running low on angels."

The application took place in Dubuque, where the testing was done for railway postal clerks. Only those with financial means for travel expenditures or political friends, which were more lucrative, could apply for it required several days of weeding out those with no stamina for the labor and mental acuity.

Charles, and this application process I later learned from our long talks when it happened to be just us two in that mansion, as he visited with me as I ironed or polished silver.

There was a call for these men to be of a certain weight and height, so as to fit the equipment, of course, but they had to dismiss those men who had bad eyes, heart, lungs, limbs, nervous systems, and no intellectual ability for top performance when on a moving train in poor weather and with bad lighting.

One thing Charles mentioned to me, in a rare moment of affection, was an opportunity to pull me out for my poor handwriting, which would improve over the years precisely because of this criticism.

“Minnie,” He said, “Imagine doing all of the acrobatics of a railroad postal clerk while being expected to make no mistakes in reading your hand?”

Candidates had to prove they could remember town locations, routes, and schedules while reading the old cursive writing back when they had no standards for addressing and of course there was a great deal of money transferred and some clerks who served as guards, like this Marine, would be perfect candidates.

Charles had no time to explain all of this to Esther nor did he care to, for it would be a waste of effort. But he did report to Mary regularly.

He never stopped the flow of truth to Mary as she demanded updates. If they were not provided, she threatened to drop in on Esther and to bring in the neighbors. Because he was so methodical a correspondent, she must have stayed behind. Of course, you boys were too young, Stewart, and even if she had a servant, and she never said much to me about Esther, so I don’t think she ever visited him and by the time she had the mansion, but perhaps your mother travelled only to the hot spring resorts for her rheumatism.

She sent him magazines, though, in the areas of self-mastery.

--Miss Minnie

2025 Copyright Christine Friesel