Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (31 page)

William and Molly Grayston with daughter, Gertrude, Springfield, Missouri, 1889 . An observant reader may see in this and the following two photographs of calmly posed people, forever locked safely within the old frames, an appearance of orderly lives showing no hint of the unfathomable madness that can afflict a human existence in the click of a cosmic shutter.

The marriage collapsed after four years, and Grayston was granted a divorce. His petition says:

[Plaintiff] faithfully demeaned himself and discharged all his duties as the husband of defendant and at all times treated her with kindness and affection, but that defendant, wholly disregarding her duties as wife of the plaintiff, has during the greater part of said married life, abused, wronged, and mistreated the plaintiff in various ways by calling him vile names and applying to him opprobrious epithets.

The mother, as was then the nearly unbroken practice, retained custody of Gertrude.

Having prevailed in the divorce but lost his daughter, his wife, and his home, Grayston left Springfield and his law practice for two years of roaming the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, supporting himself by writing newspaper dispatches about the metallurgical resources being discovered there.

When his mind cleared, William returned to law and moved to Joplin in 1892, just ahead of its second mineral boom. He was an outsider and a Freethinker in a religiously conservative region, yet he became a respected stump-speaker for selected Democratic candidates, and he spoke on behalf of both the Law and Order League and the Anti-Saloon League. He espoused certain early Spencerian notions of evolutionary social progress (“A people’s condition may be judged by the treatment which women receive under it”). He supported the early positions of William Jennings Bryan, long before the Great Commoner’s descent into simplistic antievolutionary views. (As geologists began reading the ancient fossil records, Bryan later said, “It’s better to trust in the Rock of Ages than know the ages of rocks.”)

Less admired by Grayston were Joplin men like Thomas Connor, an illiterate Irish-immigrant saloon keeper down at the state-line settlement of Seneca (“Hell on the Border”) who purchased at a dime on the dollar six-hundred acres that proved to be rich mineral lands he quickly leased to eastern companies. Through a good investment and blind good luck, Connor became the first millionaire in Joplin and got the attendant title of “First Citizen.” Shrewd enough thereafter not to rely on luck, he bought the local waterworks and the Joplin Hotel which he subsequently would raze to build on the same site a monument to his own name, the luxurious, eight-storey Connor Hotel. He died just before its completion. Years later, in 1978, on the very morning before it was to be imploded to make way for the public library where I sat reading about it, the hotel, as if anathematized, suddenly collapsed on its own accord, killing a worker at that accursed intersection of Fourth and Main.

Unlike old Tom Connor, Grayston had no spare dimes and his luck may have been blind but it wasn’t good. Instead, he had only a remarkably relentless curiosity always in pursuit of reason, a mind driven by the conviction that evolution could be shaped to benefit humanity. (Spencer: “All is well since all grows better.”) Grayston’s capacity to be disturbed by public vice and corruption was unsurpassed in Joplin, and his stump speeches and lectures and his flow of words endeared him to some while making him a vexing pariah among the town fathers, those men of secret-handshake societies, those eating aged porterhouse steaks while cutting deals with figures written on the white tablecloths of the House of Lords. Grayston’s success in persuasion made him a man to be watched, because he could prove dangerous.

William Grayston, 1896.

His looks, his impassioned speeches, even the sense of danger surrounding him, drew glances from a petite blonde, a seventeen-year-old “of remarkable beauty widely known as the Belle of Joplin.” (Quotations, except where I note otherwise, come from 1901 and 1902 issues of Jasper County newspapers.) Although her family was of less than modest means, she was the niece of a recent Lieutenant Governor and the daughter of a former Joplin fire chief. Her name was Pearl Payton.

Almost exactly twice her age, William married Pearl five months after they were introduced, and ten months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter. Although Grayston was prominent for his public speaking, his law practice was not sufficient for the family to have its own home, so they moved into the cramped Payton boardinghouse run by Pearl’s mother. There, after a year, marital deteriorations began between William and Pearl, each unfathomable to the other.

As Grayston’s dashing mystery faded for his wife, she was left only with what was truly remarkable about him: an individualistic mind happy to explain the usefulness and implicit morality of truths discovered through scientific method. He spoke about the justness of pensions for miners’ widows and about the ways universal suffrage was in accordance with social evolutions necessarily carrying requisite dissolutions; he showed her distinctions between credence and reason, superstition and demonstrable evidence. He pointed out how civic criminality aborts democracy, and he asked her ideas on why liberty and happiness did not always proceed from the pursuit of the public weal. He suggested, were a Heaven to exist, it likely would have to be of human creation. He, if selectively, quoted Spencer: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”

But to Pearl, William might as well have been speaking Bantu; she grasped his mind as a queen bee does the mind of the beekeeper. And he too was baffled. One night, after their third separation, he wrote his father:

I lay in bed, . . . thinking as to how it was that my wife, who I knew and felt was one of the sweetest and best meaning little girls in all this world; how it was that the things that made me shudder did not even interest her, but failing to impress her as they did me she seemed to think I was only irritable, and kindly asked me not to think ahead and borrow trouble, but just to go along and let the world run as it wants to run. Her words sounded as if flowing from an inexhaustible fountain of kindness and good will, and my heart ached from the depth of the same feelings for our daughter’s welfare; but oh! how differently we looked at things! I wondered and wondered, “Why is it we look at things so differently?”

On his business trips, Grayston frequently carried along their little daughter, and he read to her and tried to explain the world by looking at facts and evidence; what he could not be to his first daughter, he tried to be to his second. During his absence, the young mother seemed satisfied to be unencumbered by the demands of a four-year-old and unaffected by gossip about how she longed to make up for a youth too soon given up.

After the first brief separation and reunion, William began to believe their life might be better in a city where he wouldn’t be a notable nonconformist at odds with the temper of the town; where he wouldn’t be a Freethinker in perpetual contest with the mining and commercial factions of the knights and fellows of loyal and ancient clandestine orders running Joplin. A man with such auspicious promise surely could make a more significant social contribution if the eternal struggle to create open minds and generous hearts could be taken beyond lesser issues of booze and keno and doxies. Wouldn’t Kansas City or St. Louis be a better place for his family, his practice, and the quest for social justice? In the spring of 1900 he crossed the state, his little girl with him, to stay with his sister while he looked for ground for a new life in St. Louis. He was gone seven weeks.

Returning to Joplin and the pinched room in the Payton boardinghouse, William had scarcely set down his luggage and laid out gifts for Pearl before she told him about her divorce petition alleging an “impossibility of compatibility” and claiming his travels to find the family a new home constituted nonsupport.

He was thunderstruck. How could that happen? Where had such a decision come from? Yes, Herbert Spencer said evolution must be accompanied by dissolutions, but such a turn of events seemed beyond Spencerian reasoning. Once again, he had to leave the house. He rented a dollar-a-night room in the Forney Hotel downtown, not far from his Main Street law office now shared with his younger brother and new partner, George.

Attorney and believer in inductive method, seeker of evidence, William began investigating the source of Pearl’s action. As he took down depositions, he narrowed the circle of influence on her, then reduced it again until at last it pointed to a single source: the roomer down the hall, the big and well-dressed man, he of dark hair and eyes, the black-mustached widower six years younger than William, a migratory man whom Grayston himself had brought into the boardinghouse after learning the fellow, president and superintendent of the Joplin Waterworks, was looking to move from his twenty-dollar-a-week lodging to something cheaper. Although a comparative newcomer from New York City, he wasn’t needy by any means, yet for some reason he took Payton’s eight-dollar-a-week room in East Joplin, across the tracks of the Kansas City Southern Railway.

That peculiarly minimal twelve-buck difference doesn’t seem to have been William’s first clue to Pearl’s behavior, yet he couldn’t have been unaware of rumors the widower was sweet on Mrs. Grayston. But the second clue was, you could say, conclusive: the man paying for Pearl’s divorce petition was the lodger himself, Superintendent George Grant Bayne, and the attorney representing her was Bayne’s lodge brother, Thomas Dolan, whom William had faced off against in court on several heated occasions, a man, like Bayne, with more influential connections than genuine friends.

Grayston told Bayne to get out of the Payton home, but the superintendent refused, as he also refused to address any questions about Pearl’s petition. On several occasions, William told the footloose Bayne to move until eventually he was telling him not just to leave the house but to
leave town.
Each time, Bayne’s answer was silence.

Gossip increased: how Bayne and the Belle of Joplin had been seen hugging and kissing near the window of his room in the Payton home; how they’d been spotted riding snuggled in a buggy over in Byersville. Hardly anyone questioned why a man of means and position would remain in the humble boardinghouse, because every gossip
knew
the reason was to stay close to Pearl.

The only change the superintendent made was to begin carrying a hammerless .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, a pocketable revolver made for the sole purpose of killing a man. Later, Bayne alleged he took up the pistol only after William told him to get out of Joplin or he’d “shoot him down like a yellow dog.” Grayston, a member of the Law and Order League, owned no weapons.

Over the next many weeks, William’s investigations convinced him that his wife was innocent of any intimacies, and he continued to work for their reconciliation until, growing desperate, he tried to force negotiations by writing up a “cross suit” asking for custody of their daughter. On someone’s advice, Pearl refused, so William rewrote his suit to ask for only rights of visitation in the event of a divorce, but he didn’t file that second one. Pearl remained intractable, refusing to proceed with her divorce petition beyond filing it, although she still allowed him to take their daughter on his business trips. Yet, on someone’s counsel, Pearl kept the threat hanging above William. But why?

Grayston was determined he would not lose a third child, certainly not to some rover whose business dealings, he had discovered, couldn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny. Unearthing the truth, he believed, would surely lead to a way of protecting what he most loved, his little girl.

His investigations made it easy for him to dismiss the gossip, but his insistence on Pearl’s innocence did not silence rumor, nor did it keep people from interpreting the bad blood between him and Bayne as nothing more than a love triangle. Wasn’t adultery, said the tittle-tattle, the reason the interloper, too craven to answer Grayston, carried a pistol instead of simply moving out of a dismal room? What’s more, in the face of Grayston’s charges and threats, wasn’t Bayne’s long and perfect silence de facto proof of his dalliance? Wouldn’t a younger, larger man,
if innocent,
take some action against his accuser?

For almost eighteen months, things dragged on without resolution. On the nineteenth of November, 1901, in that same letter to his father, William cryptically encouraged him to “read between the lines” and closed saying he would soon send more:

A year ago last spring I was preparing for a business trip to St. Louis, and lay awake thinking of the awful corruption in Joplin and how terrible it would be for me to allow my little daughter to be educated in the schools of East Joplin unless the atmosphere of those schools should be radically changed. As I lay thinking most intently, and my little daughter huddled in my arms, waiting for her mamma to come to bed, I thought I would speak of this feature of the matter to my wife and listen to her views. . . .