Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [20]
It was in LaSalle that Carrie Tracy first sensed the physical intolerance her husband displayed toward alcohol, a characteristic passed to both John and his brother Will through the Guhin line of the family. Carrie herself never drank and her husband rarely did so at home, but when he did the results were immediate and profound. There is no evidence that John Tracy was a mean or even a disagreeable drunk. Drink, in fact, may well have brought out his genial side, but he was prone to disappear, leaving Carrie at home alone, sometimes for days, with no word as to where he was. Without the sobering influence of his father at hand, John developed a reputation at the bank as being unreliable. Then there was a whispered story within the family that he had been caught with his hand in the till. Within a year they were back in Freeport, where John’s father had gotten his son his first job out of college as a teller at the State Bank, and where he now settled him as a bookkeeper with the St. Paul.
The home of John D. Tracy and family, Freeport, Illinois. (SUSIE TRACY)
Living in the same house with John and Mary and Jenny and Will and Andrew was trying for the two of them—especially Carrie, who was used to grander things—and the close quarters got downright stifling with the birth of a ten-pound boy on the morning of June 15, 1896. The baby was baptized Carroll Edward Tracy, with his aunt and uncle serving as godparents. Shortly thereafter, John and Carrie moved in with the Browns, where there was considerably more room and staff, but where the atmosphere was no less strained or uncomfortable. On the whole, it was a better arrangement than before, but the Browns were a starchy bunch, sociable but distant, and John’s occasional binges didn’t endear him to his in-laws. When a job opening presented itself in Milwaukee, John Tracy pursued it with all the charm and resolve he could muster, and when the time came to again say goodbye to Freeport, the relief all around was palpable.
It wasn’t long after the Tracys’ arrival in Milwaukee that Carrie learned she was once again with child. Merrill Park was a vast improvement over Freeport, a modern neighborhood with conveniences and open space and plenty of kids. It was just far enough from the center of town to offer a pleasurable blend of urban and rural living. There were no saloons or livery stables, Sherburn Merrill having thoughtfully placed deed restrictions on such enterprises (as well as any other businesses “detrimental to the interests of a first class residence neighborhood”). The city center was just minutes away, yet one could stroll due east a block and gaze down into the Menomonee Valley, four miles long and a half mile wide, and see virtually every kind of industrial operation, from breweries to grain elevators to tanneries, stockyards, and flour mills. Carrie’s pregnancy took her through a relatively mild winter, and although she was hoping for a girl, the result delivered by Dr. O’Malley on Thursday, April 5, 1900, was another boy. Carrie made no effort to hide her disappointment, and found it impossible to come up with a name for the child.
As the unmarried girl in the family, it fell to Jenny Tracy to ensure the baby got baptized, and it was on Sunday, April 22, that she and her brother prepared to take the seventeen-day-old boy to St. Rose’s for the sacrament.
“What are we going to name him?” she asked Carrie.
“I’m so disappointed that he’s a boy,” Carrie moaned. “He was supposed to be ‘Daisy’ after my good friend Daisy Spencer.”1
“Why don’t you call him Spencer and honor Daisy that way?”
“Well …” said Carrie in a dispirited tone, “that’ll be all right.”
Jenny was so relieved to have a name