Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [177]
“I suppose I ought to hang it in my boudoir, but I won’t,” she told Webber. “Don’t you think that a large photograph is enough for me to have in my boudoir?”
Kate had certainly tried her best to tolerate Joseph’s outbursts, to tend to his health, and to be with him when he permitted it, aside from the one time when she declined the Mediterranean cruise. But it was a Sisyphean task to please him. Only the year before, Kate, preoccupied with managing the house and children, had let a stretch of time go by without writing to her absent Joseph. “For two weeks you did not write me one word even inquiring whether I was dead or alive,” Joseph wrote to her. “Do you think that was right? You know you have the power to keep me awake, that I chafe and worry and brood over the conduct of yours.
“Again,” he continued, “after all it is supposed to be the first business of a wife to be interested in the comfort and condition of her husband who is absolutely without family and as helpless as I am.” Then, resurrecting his old complaint, he told Kate she never did what he asked. “You like to emphasize the word ‘order,’ my order, or your order, when you refer to my wishes or when I refer to them, especially a wish that is habitually trampled upon and disregarded. I wish you would not do that because it reminds me how utterly ignored my wishes are.”
By March, Kate had enough of Jekyll Island—and Joseph—and returned to New York. She may also have had an ulterior motive for leaving. She was having an affair. Pulitzer’s new man, Arthur Brisbane, offered Kate the adoration she could not get from her husband, who was embroiled in his battles with real and doubtful demons of ill health. Only just in her forties, Kate remained an immensely attractive, outgoing, and gregarious woman. She loved parties, culture, and life, while her husband was becoming a recluse.
Her separation from Joseph made it easier for Kate to take a lover, but discretion remained a necessity. “I do not discuss my actual work, much as I should like to, in these letters, because such discussion would give too clear a key to the authorship of these writings should one of them go wrong,” Brisbane wrote to Kate in 1895, in a letter that he signed only with the initial “H.” Brisbane’s ardor was unmistakable. When they planned a rendezvous between Boston and Bar Harbor, he wrote, “That will be one of the most eagerly anticipated journeys I have ever made.”
“I could go on writing you for hours, for you are in my mind, and I like even the imitation of talking to you,” he wrote in another letter. “The longer you are away from me, the more I want to see you, and the more real and necessary you seem.
“What a shame it is that we have not the power of telegraphing ourselves from place to place. We shall have that power sometime. If we had it now, I should send myself by wire instead of sending this letter by mail, et alors, tu sais ce qui t’arriverait.”
In April or early May, Kate discovered that she was pregnant. But whose child was it? It had been seven years since her last pregnancy and the birth of her sixth child since marrying Joseph. It seemed possible that Joseph was the father now, as Kate might have been on Jekyll Island at the time of conception. However, considering Joseph’s condition and mood, it was unlikely.
Brisbane allegedly told David Graham Phillips that the child was his. In his clandestine correspondence with Kate, he expressed worries about her health. “Had you taken care of yourself, you would be in good condition now,” he wrote. “You are not good to yourself. I wish you would care as much about your own health and future as you do about mine. It would be a good thing for you and for me.
“Do be a good sensible girl and take care of yourself. Some of these days we shall have some fun. Keep your health for that.”
Joseph never doubted that the child was his.
In May, Pulitzer went