 McKinley was in his second term of office. On September 6th, he attended
a public reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. A young
anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot him at close range. Czolgosz was an American
citizen, a steel worker, and the son of Polish immigrants. The shot was not
immediately fatal, but the president died of gangrene eight days later, and was
succeeded by his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt.
This year, as I read through the final page proofs of Yankee Daughters, I‘ve again been thinking about various current
events, and also wondering what my characters, who had also lived through the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, would have thought about another act of
violence. But first, I needed to deal with creature comforts. It’s a cold, cloudy, damp morning, and although I know it's November, I'm not ready to
turn on the furnace and admit that winter is here. So I decided to switch on
the gas fireplace for an hour or two to take the chill off. I walked into the
living room, as I've done thousands of times in the past twelve years. I
glanced at the mirror above the fireplace out of long habit. (Who doesn't sneak
a look when they pass a mirror once in a while—not my mother’s daughter,
certainly!)
Then it hit me. The mirror I was looking at once also reflected the image of
William McKinley. How did that happen? The story, once again, goes back to
those eight McCaskey sisters. The McKinley family was from Canton, Ohio, which
you may only know as the location of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But for the
McCaskey girls, Canton was a tempting destination. It sits not far across the
state border from North Sewickley. It was a booming metropolis founded by a
bunch of wealthy steel magnates, while North Sewickley had remained a backwoods
settlement. It was where one went in search of fame and fortune,
apparently. One by one, most of the McCaskey girls found a way to move
there. Now we fast-forward to the nineteen forties. My mother had managed to marry the
boss, and for the first time in her entire life, she had money to spend. She
had left many of her friends behind, but there were always family members near
by. She was particularly close to her sister Florence's second daughter, Helen,
and the two of them enjoyed shopping sprees together.
Helen
had married a man who was related by another marriage to the McKinley family. (Helen’s
daughter Sharyn, my own cousin once removed, provided me with the hand-written family
documents that detailed the relationship.) Helen’s husband was a second-cousin-twice-removed
of ida McKinley, wife of President William McKinley. Since the McKinleys had only two daughters,
neither of whom survived past childhood, Ida's cousins were her only living
relatives. And that’s how Helen and my mother managed to wrangle tickets to the
auction where the McKinley mansion and its contents were being sold off.  Now my mother was one of the original "material
girls." Because she had grown up in great poverty, she valued THINGS. And
at that auction, she fell in love with an antique mirror. It's about four feet
square and surrounded by a frame of gilded (naturally! this was the Gilded Age)
plaster of Paris roses. So she bought it. I have no idea how much she paid for
it, or even how she managed to get the thing home. (Knowing my mother, I’d bet
she just batted her eyelashes at the nearest fellow with a truck.)
The mirror hung in the living room during my entire childhood. When my mother
died, I inherited it, and I entrusted it to a whole succession of Air
Force movers who shuffled us and our belongings back and forth across the
country. The plaster of Paris framework is cracked at all its weakest points,
but the cracks are clean and almost invisible unless you happen to grasp the
mirror at the wrong point -- in which case a rose will come off in your fingers
until you tuck it back in. The silvering on the back has held up remarkably
well. And here it still hangs, over a century old, providing a link between me
and a historical event I knew almost nothing about until last year. My mother's niece's husband's second cousin (twice removed)’s husband.
. . Six degrees of separation, indeed. |
