Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

Nebraska. “It was just a little bit of a town, where nothing much ever happened, just a little country town with one packing house and a few thousand people, farmland all around for miles.” Her mother was Eloise Coe and her father Franklin P. Ireland, a lawyer from Newburyport, Massachusetts. We would lean against her chair, trying to imagine what it was like to grow up in a time and world with scant electricity and no cars at all. In good weather the Irelands harnessed their team of matched bay horses, Claude and Cora, to a trap; in winter Claude and Cora pulled the sleigh. For her fifteenth birthday, Grandsarah was given her own horse and trap, and thought she would faint from excitement. The only paved road in Nebraska City was Main Street, which was laid in brick along the ten or twelve blocks of its shopping and business district. The horse-drawn fire engine was the great attraction in town—“nothing else to get excited about.” There was no place to swim except the Missouri River and that was too dangerous. The weather was “hotter’n hell” in summer and subzero in winter. In the daytime Grandsarah wore checked gingham dresses with petticoats and drawers and in the evening she wore organdies with puffed sleeves. (Bridget and I nodded approval.) Although she had no brothers or sisters, she was never lonely. There were parties and dances everywhere, all the time. The Irelands often covered their twenty-foot fishpond with oak planks, waxed them, and danced.

Grandsarah went to boarding school but never finished the last year because she was beginning to fall in love with Will Hayward, the son of Monroe Leland Hayward, U.S. Senator from Nebraska. Grandsarah first met Will when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one, a dashing young graduate from the University of Nebraska where he had starred on the baseball and football teams and was president of his class of ’97. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Will exhibited signs of the adventurous streak that was to underscore his life, and promptly gave up his new law practice in Nebraska City and volunteered for service. He was placed in command of the 2nd Nebraska Infantry as captain and, after serving through the war and the Philippine insurrection, was mustered out in 1901 as a colonel.

Grandsarah thought he was irresistible, with blue eyes and a dimple in his chin: “The best-looking man I ever saw—always took good care of himself, played football night and day.” After divesting herself of another beau, she married him in March, 1901, when she was eighteen. The wedding created an uproar in the Ireland family, who thought she was much too young, but her father stormed and wept to no avail. The Haywards were a clan of Baptists as diehard as the Irelands were Episcopalian; a compromise was reached, according to Grandsarah’s directive, in which she and Will were married by a Baptist minister (“I didn’t care who did it”) in an Episcopalian ceremony (“not as boring”). They moved into a two-story house that Will had had built for her, and right after they were married, he brought home the first car in Nebraska City, a Locomobile. On September 13, 1902, she gave birth to Father. He was much adored, being an only child, and his nurse from infancy, Mary Coots, stayed on with Grandsarah for the next thirty years just to keep an eye on him.

Will Hayward, in 1901, became Nebraska’s youngest county judge. A newspaper account of the period said, “He was an ardent bowler and paid for a telephone booth at the bowling alley so when someone wanted a marriage license he could be called to the courthouse.” He ran for the State Congress in 1910 and was defeated. Grandsarah used to say he never got over it. To mend his broken heart, they went on a trip around the world. With Father in tow, they traveled by boat from San Francisco to Japan and China, making their way back through Europe. Although Father was only eight years old, he had persistent memories of the journey, highlighted by his various illnesses in every country they passed through.

When they returned to the United States, the Haywards, accelerated by a new sense of discovery, moved to New York City. Grandfather joined the law firm of Wing & Russell, and Grandsarah took ballroom ice-skating lessons every day in Central Park. Father went to school at Horace Mann. Still, despite the lure of pretty shops and a bracing social climate, life wasn’t moving quickly enough. In 1911, Grandsarah went back to Omaha, Nebraska, and divorced Will Hayward. (“I just got bored with him and he was probably as bored with me.”) Her family and friends were scandalized; divorce was immoral and totally improper. Grandsarah, high-spirited as always, married a very wealthy man, Shepherd Schermerhorn, the vice-president of the United Fruit Company. They lived at 375 Park Avenue and traveled to South America every winter. Father, allegedly hating them all, went to a series of boarding schools—Garden City, Pomfret, and finally Hotchkiss, from which he graduated.

Grandfather, meanwhile, distinguished himself as a lawyer and soldier. Appointed Assistant District Attorney under Charles S. Whitman, then District Attorney, he ran Mr. Whitman’s successful campaign for Governor of New York in 1914. He went to Albany as Governor Whitman’s counsel and became Public Service Commissioner of New York in 1915, a position he resigned in 1918 to devote all of his time to the black 369th Infantry Regiment of Harlem, which he recruited, trained, and then commanded. The 369th was among the first fighting units to land in France; it served at the front under fire for 191 days, the longest period of fighting endured by any unit of the American Expeditionary Force. Highly regarded by the French, the regiment was sometimes used as shock troops because of its striking power. It was cited for valor and, after the Armistice, became the first Allied unit to enter Germany.