Autobiography of Margaret Sanger - Margaret Sanger

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architect was introduced. “This is William Sanger.”

      The three of us bent over the plans. The doctor was the only one unaware of the sudden electric quality of the atmosphere.

      At seven-thirty the next morning when I went out for my usual “constitutional,” Bill Sanger was on the doorstep. He had that type of romantic nature which appealed to me, and had been waiting there all night. We took our walk together that day and regularly for many days thereafter, learning about each other, exploring each other’s minds, and discovering a community of ideas and ideals. His fineness fitted in with my whole destiny, if I can call it such, just as definitely as my hospital training.

      I found Bill’s mother a lovely person—artistic, musical, and highly cultured. His father had been a wealthy sheep rancher in Australia. When you travel anywhere from there, you practically have to go round the world, and on his way to San Francisco he had passed through Central Europe. In a German town he had fallen in love with the Mayor’s youngest daughter, then only fourteen. When she was of marriageable age he had returned for her, and it was from this talented mother that Bill had derived his fondness for music and desire to paint.

      Bill was an architect only by profession; he was pure artist by temperament. Although his heart was not in mechanical drawing, he did it well. Stanford White once told me he was one of the six best draftsmen in New York. He confided to me his dream of eventually being able to leave architecture behind and devote himself to painting, particularly murals. I had had instilled in me a feeling for the natural relationship between color and symmetry of line, and sympathized not merely with his aspirations but was intensely proud of his work. Some day we were going to be married, and as soon as we had saved enough we would go to Paris, whither the inspiration of the great French painters was summoning artists from all over the world.

      These plans were nebulous and had nothing to do with my abrupt departure from New York. One afternoon, about four o’clock, I was standing under a skylight putting drops in the eyes of a convalescent patient. Unexpectedly, inexplicably, the glass began to fall apart. Almost by instinct I pulled my patient under the lintel of the door. A great blast followed and pandemonium was let loose; the ruined skylight went crashing down the stairs, plaster and radiators tumbled from the walls, doors fell out, windows cracked.

      I rushed to the bed of the man who needed my first attention. He had been operated on for a cataract only a few hours previously and my orders had been not to let him move too soon lest the fluid in his eye run out and damage his sight permanently. But he with the other terrified patients was already on his feet.

      Rounding up all those under my care and checking their names took several minutes, and while I was still trying to quiet them, ambulances from other hospitals came clanging up. By the time I had ushered my charges down to the ground floor, a way had been cleared through the debris of fallen brick and wood. Since mine were not stretcher cases I was able to crowd ten of them into one ambulance, and we were taken to the New York Hospital. Not until I had them all safely installed did I learn what had happened to our building. A tremendous explosion in the new Park Avenue subway had practically demolished it, and it had to be evacuated.

      I returned to White Plains, where Bill came up frequently to see me. On one of our rambles he idly pulled at some vines on a stone wall, and then, with his hands, tilted my face for a kiss. The next morning, to my mortification, four telltale finger marks were outlined on my cheek by poison ivy blisters. The day after that, my face was swollen so that my eyes were tight shut, and I was sick for two months; since my training was finished, I was sent home to convalesce.

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      For a while I stayed at Corning, and then went back to New York to start nursing in earnest. On one of my free afternoons in August, Bill and I went for a drive, and he suggested we stop in at the house of a friend of his who was a minister. All had been prepared. License and rice were waiting. And so we were married.

      The first year is half taken up with love and half with planning a future together which is to endure forever. These dreams feed youthful ambitions, but they seldom can come true in their entirety. In our case the obstacles arose with undue speed.

      I was not well. I was paying the cost of long hours in mother’s closely confined room and of continuous overwork in the hospital. Medical advice was to go West to live, but I would not go without Bill, and he had a commission which kept him in New York. Accordingly, I was packed off to a small semi-sanitarium near Saranac where the great Dr. Trudeau, specialist in pulmonary tuberculosis, was consulted.

      Existence there was depressing. A man might be talking to me one day, full of life and spirit and hope, and the next morning not appear. The dead were ordinarily removed in the quiet of the night, and the doctors made no comment. In this gloomy environment I rested, preparing myself for motherhood. The flood of treatises on child psychology had not yet started, and even the books on the care and feeding of infants were few. But I read whatever I could.

      Just before it was time for the baby to be born I returned to the little apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue at 149th Street, then practically suburban. Taking every precaution, we had engaged four doctors in a row. Dr. Schmid had said he would perform the ceremony unless it came at night, in which case his assistant would have to take charge. The assistant had provided that, if he were not available, his assistant would be on call, and this assistant had another assistant to assist him.

      When towards three o’clock one morning I felt the first thin, fine pains of warning, Bill tried one after the other of our obstetricians—not one could be located. He had to run around the corner to the nearest general practitioner. Due almost as much to this young doctor’s inexperience as to my physical state, the ordeal was unusually hard, but the baby Stuart, given Amelia’s family name, was perfectly healthy, strong, and sturdy. I looked upon this as a victory, although it was only partial, because I had to go right back to the mountains. It was a wrench to leave again so soon and at such a time, but I could not believe it would be for long.

      With Stuart and a nurse I took rooms in a friendly farmhouse near a small Adirondack village; I did not want the baby in the midst of sick people, and, moreover, I was not welcome at Saranac itself, since Dr. Trudeau did not like to have in residence patients whose illness had progressed beyond a certain stage. One of the most important parts of the treatment was stuffing with food. I was being filled with the then recognized remedy, creosote, and gulped capsule after capsule, which broke my appetite utterly. Still I had to pour down milk and swallow eggs, and always I had to rest and rest and rest.

      At the end of eight months I was worse instead of better, and had no interest in living. Nan and Bill’s mother were summoned, and two of Dr. Trudeau’s associates came to see me. They advised that I should go nearer Saranac and be separated from all personal responsibilities.

      “What would you yourself like to do?” they asked.

      “Nothing.”

      “Where would you like to go?”

      “Nowhere.”

      “Would you like to have the baby sent to your brother, or would you rather have your mother-in-law take it?”

      “I don’t care.”

      To every suggestion I was negative. I was not even interested in my baby.

      The two doctors left. The younger, however, apparently not satisfied with the professional attitude, returned almost immediately, not so much in a medical capacity as one of anxious friendliness. I was still sitting in the same state of listlessness. He laid his hand on my shoulder quietly, but I had all the feeling of being violently shaken. “Don’t be like this!” he exclaimed. “Don’t let yourself get into such a mental condition. Do something! Want something! You’ll never get well if you keep on this way.”

      I could not sleep that night. I had been rudely jolted from my stupor by the understanding doctor. Obviously preparations were being made for a lingering illness which would terminate

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