Chapter 3: The Pivot
Navigating the Plot Twists of Life
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Release Date: July 9, 2024
Aimee Henry was 16 when her guardian, a cold and disapproving society matron whom she called Aunt Martha, told her the truth about her parents. The revelation had been heartlessly delivered over the winter break of 1907.
"Your father and mother were never married. The sin of a child born out of wedlock is something you can never live down. They may be dead, but the burden of their sin — it will be on you for as long you live." 1
Aimee was still reeling from the devastating news when she returned to boarding school in late December.
The newly revealed shame of her birth was likely still fresh enough to prevent her from looking classmates in the eye and silencing her voice when they asked how her holiday in Baltimore had gone.
And the question of what others knew about her that was such a black secret had been answered — she was both an orphan and a bastard, and they'd known all along.
It's hard to imagine how profoundly Aimee's world had tilted.
She may already have come to grips with the possibility of being an orphan. After all, that assumption was at the core of the many lies Aimee had been telling her classmates at Mrs. Mead’s School ever since her arrival in 1905. However, that she'd been born out of wedlock may never have crossed her mind.
Suddenly, the storylines of Hester Prynne, the fallen woman in The Scarlet Letter, and Harriet Smith, the illegitimate child in Emma, must have felt painfully personal.
In Austen's Harriet, especially, Aimee may have seen herself and her future. Despite the boarding school educations and her guardian's wealth, she was neither fish nor fowl, caught between two worlds. And, just as Mr. Elton had refused to accept Harriet into his family, Aimee understood high society would never welcome her — someone for whom no lineage could be claimed or leveraged — into their ranks.
I can't help but wonder if Aimee realized then how betrayed she'd been by her guardian.
Mary Martha was a society dame; perhaps better than anyone, she understood the back-biting one-upmanship, the paranoia, and the caustic elitism of her social peers.
She must have known Aimee's illegitimacy disqualified her from acceptance into proper society. People who introduce themselves as the great-great-grandchild of someone else, who make decisions about marriages and businesses, about who their friends are, and where they live based primarily on family lineages and bloodlines would never welcome a bastard into their fold.
Yet Mary Martha had sent Aimee to some of the best boarding schools in New England, schools in business to prepare their female students for lives as society hostesses and wives of wealthy and powerful men. And she had cruelly led Aimee to believe that was her future, knowing full well it was not.
With the hindsight of history, Mary Martha's intention seems clear — by stripping Aimee of any sense of identity or belonging, she sought to make good on her threat that Aimee would forever suffer the burden of her parent's sin.
And in so doing, cut off any awkward questions that might come up in the future.
Despite Mary Martha's betrayal and the resulting ridicule and isolation she must have endured, Aimee remained at Mrs. Mead's School for Girls for another year and a half, leaving at the end of the 1908-1909 school year. While the New York socialites around her were scheduling debutant balls and making plans to marry men of similar means and ambitions, Aimee was slowly finding a different way forward.
In the year following her departure from Miss Mead’s, Aimee would enroll in and then leave Dalhouse University Halifax Ladies College in Halifax, Nova Scotia; return to Linden Hall Seminary as both a student and a long-term visitor; and meet a man who would change the course of her life – John Harold Morecroft
Born outside London in 1881, John was just six when he, his parents, and seven siblings immigrated to America. The family settled in Syracuse, NY, where John's father, Thomas, worked at a cement factory, and the children attended public school.
In 1904, John graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and almost immediately began his career as a college instructor, first at the Pratt Institute and later as an assistant professor at Columbia University in New York City.
By all accounts, John was both brilliant and ambitious and already beginning to build a reputation as a visionary electrical engineer obsessed with the expanding field of radio technology by the time he and Aimee met while both were holidaying on Block Island, RI sometime during the summer of 1910.
When Aimee returned to Baltimore, John sought permission to visit her at Archibald’s and Mary Martha's three-story, Renaissance-style mansion on St. Paul Street.
It's not hard to imagine what happened next.
John had spent nearly his entire life in the Syracuse home of his working-class parents. And although Columbia University was one of New England's most prestigious universities, as an assistant professor, John's lifestyle was of a different sort than even the students he taught, much less a famous Baltimore attorney and his Boston society wife.
Later, Aimee would recall John’s first visit to the Taylor home, saying he was “much impressed by the silver, the servants and style in which Mrs. Taylor lived.”
She would also claim John proposed to her a short time later, saying, “He asked me, but I did not care to.” 2
Throughout 1910 and into 1911, Aimee divided her time between Baltimore and Herndon, VA, often staying with a woman named Mary Elizabeth Buell Cockerille. Elizabeth was 18 years older than Aimee, and married to James Cockerille, a local real estate developer. Elizabeth, James, Aimee and Elizabeth’s brother, Thomas, were often mentioned together in the local society pages. There were, however, no mentions of John.
By the fall of 1911, Aimee was back in Baltimore, and enrolled in the University of Maryland Hospital Training School. Established in 1889, the school offered a two-year live-in nurses training program which prepared young women to become private duty nurses as well as work in hospitals.
Given Aimee’s situation and past, it’s not a surprise she gravitated toward nursing.
It was a respectable career, and it paid better wages than many other positions available to independent women of the day. And Aimee may have viewed it as a path to financial stability apart from Mary Martha, as well as one that didn't require her to marry.
Beyond that, she may have been influenced to go into nursing by Amelia Wright, Mary Martha's live-in nurse. Amelia had befriended and watched over Aimee as a little girl, and also throughout her boarding school years. Not a lot is known about their early relationship, but it appears it was one Aimee valued. In coming years, she would reach out to Amelia numerous times for support.
On the other hand, it’s possible Aimee saw in the sisterhood of nurses a ready-made and accepting family to which she could belong, something she'd been searching for her entire life.
Whatever ideals, hopes, practicality or even sentimentality that drew Aimee to nursing, the reality of the profession was unlike anything she'd ever experienced.
Gone were the lazy weekends and unscheduled free time of boarding school, or the carefree days after graduation. Aimee and her fellow nursing students participated in rigorous formal instruction daily from October through May and were expected to work twelve-hour shifts at the hospital with just one-half day off a week.
A 1912 U.S. Bureau of Education bulletin on the educational status of nursing had this to say:
“This practical work… is in many of its aspects unusually exacting and fatiguing; much of it is done while standing, bending, or lifting; much of it is done under pressure of time and nervous tensions, and to a considerable degree the physical effort which the students must make is accompanied by mental anxiety and definite, often grave, responsibility. Viewed from this standpoint, real nursing is difficult, exacting work, done under abnormal conditions, and all the extraordinary, subtile (sic), intangible rewards and satisfaction which are bound up in it for the worker cannot alter that fact.” 3
Although Aimee would later say she attended nursing school for two years, there’s little evidence she lasted that long. Sometime in the late spring of 1912, emotionally exhausted, and battered and bruised by the sheer physicality of training, Aimee ended up as a patient at Baltimore’s Union Protestant Infirmary.
At some point during that stay, Alice Frances Bell, Aimee’s nursing school instructor, stopped by to talk to her former student. Realizing Aimee wouldn't be finishing out her training, Miss Bell likely asked her about any plans she might have for the future and then, perhaps out of idle curiosity, asked Aimee about her relationship with Mary Martha.
In her weakened condition, Aimee said out loud the conclusion she’d been coming to since 1907.
"Maybe she's my mother."
Copyright 2024 Lori Olson White
So, did you see that coming? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the story is coming along and where you think it might be headed next. Let’s get together in the comments and discuss.
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Chapter Endnotes
1 International Feature Service, Inc. Great Britain, “Astonishing Secrets behind the Morecroft Fight for Millions — and the Bar Sinister; Sworn Statement of the Dainty Divorcee that She is the Natural Daughter of Rich “400” Widow, Whose Vast Estates She Would Share after Harrowing Experiences in Schools, Hospitals and Sanitariums while kept in the Dark,” Star Tribune, November 25, 1928.
2 “Astonishing secrets behind the Morecroft fight for millions — and the bar sinister; Sworn statement of the dainty divorcee that she is the natural daughter of rich “400” widow, whose vast estates she would share after harrowing experiences in schools, hospitals and sanitariums while kept in the dark,” Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, November 25, 1928.
3 US Bureau of Education, Bulletin 1912, No 7. Whole Number 47, Educational Status of Nursing by M. Adelaide Nutting, Washington government Printing Office 1921 P 30.
I had thought about that possibility early on, but wow! what a heartless social climber Mary Martha is if she is indeed her mother.
I didn't see that coming! It might account for something I was thinking mid-way through, which was "What darkness lives in a person's core that would allow them to say such cruel things to a young woman?"