East to the Dawn by Susan Butler

relied on Margaret. It was she who had cared for Maria and then, on a visit to her brother in Colorado Springs, had nursed first Grace and then William. Margaret had then returned to North Terrace bringing with her Annie, who had become her ward. But Margaret had no intention of staying—she was twenty-eight and engaged to Clarence Balis, a Philadelphia businessman who had been patiently waiting for years for her to set the date. Now, having done all she could for her family, there was no further reason to postpone the wedding. The thought of losing their kind daughter, their ray of sunshine, and in addition the orphaned granddaughter who would go wherever Margaret went (including her honeymoon, Margaret’s own children always suspected) was more than Amelia Otis could stand. Even Alfred was dismayed.
    As the years passed, he had become increasingly withdrawn. “Dignified and of aristocratic bearing” was the way a reporter for The Atchison Globe delicately described Alfred, but to his children and grandchildren he was cold, remote, and impatient at best. At sixty-four he had suffered a complete mental breakdown. Mental illness was little understood at the time; softening of the brain and neurasthenia were the usual words used to describe the condition. Hospitalized in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1892, fully expecting to die, he went so far as to make a will, but within two years he had recovered and was managing his own affairs. But from then on he suffered recurrent bouts of depression. “He realizes fully, to use his own language, that he has passed the three score and ten and that the autumn leaves are thick about him. He seems to have no bodily ailments like so many old folks have, but there is nothing I wouldn’t give or do to give him ‘a quiet mind and a contented spirit,’ ” wrote a younger brother sorrowfully after spending time with him.
    Now Margaret’s departure weighed heavily even on Alfred, who confided his anguish to another brother, Charles: “It grieves me to tell you but it is a fact all the same that if nothing unforeseen happens she will be married in the late spring or early summer to a Philadelphia man.... He has been here and gotten our consent as we believe him to be noteworthy and everything a gentleman ought to be but I feel pretty badly about it though I do not mean to be selfish at all.”
    Margaret married Clarence Balis on June 5, 1900, and moved to Philadelphia. Alfred became increasingly morose, and Amelia Otis increasingly lonely. Amy was relatively nearby, only fifty miles distant in Kansas City, but she was again pregnant and so could not help; on December 29 Muriel was born. With her new infant to care for and Amelia just three, Amy had more than she could handle. The solution was at hand to
lighten Amy’s chores in Kansas City and Amelia Otis’s spiritual burden in Atchison—to send Amelia, her namesake grandchild. Again young laughter would fill the house. And so at three Amelia Earhart was bundled off to Atchison. There, as her mother had, she puttered around in the kitchen mindful of Mary Brashay, the Irish cook, grown fatter as well as older over the years, and prowled the grounds under the watchful eye of the gardener Charlie Parks, who had strung the lanterns for her mother’s coming-out party. She learned to stay away from her crusty grandfather. It worked beautifully for everyone concerned.
    Millie Otis, whom her Millie Earhart called “Grandma,” grown stouter with the years, was now in her sixties. Her great interests in life were her children, her grandchildren, her gardens, and the church. When she moved out west, she had carried with her three volumes filled with the dance tunes and sentimental songs popular in Philadelphia at that time. She kept those volumes—those remnants of her eastern society life—with her always. She finally gave them not to any of her own children but to Millie Earhart, who,