An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

20 The Galley Slave

After bidding Europe farewell, Douglas arrived back in Miami in January 1920. It was a different place from the city she had left fifteen months earlier, and she was a different woman. She was wiser in the ways of the world, had sharper instincts about people and the institutions and the events of their creation, and had stronger opinions about society and politics. She also soon began to find her writer’s voice and finally to sort out her personal relationships with men. She had recently ended her engagement to be married, not to Kenneth Rotharmel but to her Red Cross colleague, Frederick . In Paris, their friendship had taken the form of an amatory relationship. He fell in love and proposed a number of times before she unhappily gave in. They left Europe together and sailed back to the States, where she was expected to meet his mother and daughter. When she did, reality sank in. She told Frederick that she would not be content living in Pennsylvania , hoping that the revelation would end things. He instead offered a concession that complicated matters: he and his daughter would move to Florida. Marjory needed to find some distance to reflect. She left to visit Carolyn Percy, who was living and teaching in Greenwich Village. The Galley Slave [ c h a p t e r t w e n t y 274 ] part two Escaping Frederick’s orbit and spending time with Percy brought only temporary relief. Douglas was expected in Taunton for Christmas, an emotion-laded holiday in Massachusetts. The absence of her sweet mother weighed especially heavy, and her once vigorous grandparents seemed to have aged beyond reason. Daniel and Florence were in their nineties, and Daniel would live only three more years. Little had changed otherwise. Her high school with its grand tower and observatory, the public library of quarried limestone, and the Harrison Street house with Daniel’s fruit trees were as she remembered them. The acrimony and backbiting were also the same. The visit left little emotional space in which to reconcile her predicament with Frederick. Florence and Fanny pulled Frank Stoneman to the center of Marjory’s male problems. They wanted Marjory to stay in Taunton. But she was tired of others trying to direct her life, and she left Taunton behind for the time being and Frederick forever. Unlike five years earlier, when she had first taken the train to Florida, she was excited about going to Miami. She now felt rooted to the region; she was going home. Rotharmel was back in Miami, too, after having spent six months in the Midwest. Two months after her return, friends hosted a party in their honor. Marjory and Kenneth were again an item. But Rotharmel was struggling with the memory of the war, which had taken the lives of more than half the men in his squadron. Posttraumatic stress, then known as shell shock and usually left untreated, shadowed him, leaving the world in peacetime unsettling and unmanageable. He drifted from one job to another. Much of the time he was sullen and distant , and he and Marjory began to see less and less of each other. When a friend offered a job in Evanston, Illinois, he decided to take it. Marjory was still in love but had come to realize that the two would never be together. One of her World War I stories, written years later, offers what seems a wishful alternative outcome. In “The Message to Hassan Beg,” Polly Andrews , a fine but fragile young Red Cross worker, goes to Europe in search of the young lieutenant whom she loves. She braves travel on horseback across physically dangerous Albanian terrain to reach him in Elbasan. With a tender promise, the lieutenant expresses his gratitude to those 20. the galley slave [ 275 who had helped her on the journey: “I’ll take care of her, the best possible care—from now on, myself.” Marjory was convinced that ending her relationship with Kenneth was for the best. She did not again want to abandon herself, her independence and her profession, to a man’s love, an unshakable distraction from everything else in life. From Mobilizing the Mid-Brain: The Technique for Utilizing Its Latent Power, published in 1924 by Frederick Erastus Pierce, she copied in her diary a line that had personal relevance: “Marriage as a goal is passive, unless coincidentally with the...