Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [192]
It was left to Butes to inform the World. “Grieved to tell you poor Lucille just died,” he telegraphed Norris. “Chief much broken. Send him no business.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
YELLOW
In the early morning of January 2, 1898, a private train lumbered from the railyard in Bangor, Maine, and headed south to pick up the Pulitzers at the Mount Desert ferry. The family had already held Lucille’s funeral service at Chatwold, and all that remained now was to accompany her body home to New York. Two days later, on a cold morning, they gathered before a plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx that had been purchased fourteen years earlier for Lucille’s baby sister Katherine. Reverend William Stephen Rainsford, the rector of the tony St. George’s Church, read from the Book of Common Prayer as fine snow swirled in the breezes and thousands celebrated the early opening of the skating season in the adjacent Van Cortlandt Park.
This was the second time the Pulitzers had buried a child. For Joseph, the ritual was a sorrowful return to his own childhood, when he saw all but one of his eight siblings go to the grave. Now, he was staggered by the loss of Lucille. For years afterward, Pulitzer looked for ways to commemorate her life. At first, he settled on establishing a perpetual Lucille Pulitzer Scholarship at Barnard College. In the end, he quietly dedicated one of his two most famous legacies to her. Only the inscription in the floor of the marble foyer of the Columbia University Journalism College reveals that the famous school was built in the “memory of my daughter Lucille.”
In death as in sickness, Lucille had brought Joseph, Kate, and the children together in a single place at a single time.
The moment didn’t last long. Joseph left immediately for Jekyll Island with two of the children. Kate returned to the house on Fifty-Fifth Street and to the care of her physician. She remained indoors for a month until her doctor convinced her that a trip would be beneficial. She enlisted her much-favored cousin Winnie Davis, who, never having married her Yankee beau, had come to spend increasing time in Kate’s company. Together, with Ralph, on leave from Harvard, they departed for a sightseeing journey in Egypt.
Meanwhile, Joseph remained in deep seclusion on Jekyll Island, with his faithful Dr. Hosmer, Butes, and a few aides for company. In a tender moment, he sent Kate an unusually warm message that included no reproaches. “Darling,” she wrote back, “your telegram gave me great pleasure as any word of tenderness from you always does.” Knowing that her communication would be read aloud, she continued, “Dr. Hosmer must hide his blushes now—I slept with it under my pillow. I think I forget I am an old married woman with five great children.”
The warmth between the two dissipated as Joseph’s mood once again turned dark and frantic. He wanted Ralph to be working at the paper in New York rather than traipsing through Egypt with Kate. He became obsessed with this idea and didn’t trust his secretaries to forward his orders. “He took the cable to the office himself as he evidently suspected Butes might not send it,” Hosmer wrote to Kate. “The sudden change followed an attack of indigestion after two hours of work in his usual overwhelming style.”
Five hundred miles due south from Jekyll Island, on the moonless night of February 15, 1898, Lieutenant John Hood took a seat on the port side of the battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Bay. As chief watch officer, Hood had the duty of keeping vigil. His charge, the largest ship in the harbor, was the white-hulled Maine.* President McKinley had directed it to Havana two weeks earlier in a high-wire act of diplomatic and symbolic gestures aimed at placating the growing ranks of American supporters of Cuban independence while at the same time averting