A Secret Gift (23 page)

R
achel DeHoff’s life was a testament not only to the virtues of hard work but to the promise and reality of social mobility that had drawn so many to America. She had lifted herself out of the ranks of the poverty-stricken, where she had been born, and provided her children with lives of promise. As a woman, her achievements were all the more noteworthy, having overcome not only a lack of formal education, the Depression, and widowhood, but the many societal obstacles placed before her gender. But for every Rachel DeHoff there were many more women, no less intelligent or industrious, who could not surmount the barriers before them, barriers made all the more formidable by the Depression and the scramble for jobs and scarce resources.

Many of these women, talented and willing to work long hours under wretched circumstances, came to resent the unfairness of an economic system that was rigged against them. For a woman to succeed it was not enough for her to be a man’s equal. She must be better than him—or find another way around the system. Many of the women who wrote to B. Virdot faced just such a challenge.

Edith Marie Saunders, like Rachel DeHoff, was a woman of great determination, not someone who was looking for, or willing to take, a handout. She was born on May 12, 1909. Her early life was fraught with emotional and financial setbacks that toughened her up but also left her resentful. Her parents divorced when she was a child. She dropped out of school and at sixteen entered into a miserable marriage that lasted only a few months—just long enough for her to contract a venereal disease that left her unable to have children. She was struck by a car, which broke her collarbone and so damaged her leg that the doctor told her she would never walk again. She proved him wrong.

Edith was the oldest of three children and the only girl. Her childhood was briefer than most. Following her parents’ divorce, she found herself burdened with adult responsibilities. Something of a tomboy, she played ball with her brothers in the alley, but books were her refuge and her salvation, as they were for her mother, Minna. After the divorce, Minna sold the children’s literature series “My Book House” door-to-door. Minna Saunders wrote of her own childhood, “I used to go into the apple orchard, put apples in my pockets, and climb a tree and read Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

She passed that passion on to her daughter, Edith. “I loved to read and always had books hidden in my room,” Edith Saunders wrote years later. “When I thought everyone was asleep, I would turn my light on and read for a long time.”

Independent, strong-willed, and miffed that what few breaks there were in this life favored men over women, Edith Saunders steered her own course. In 1932, as the Depression deepened, she left New York City and returned to Canton to help support her mother and younger brother, Jim. She invested her savings in a small mom-and-pop grocery store and for a time did well enough. The three of them lived in an apartment in the rear of the store. But the Depression caught up with them. At the time she wrote to B. Virdot, Edith Saunders had nothing.

Two days later, Sam mailed a check for five dollars to Edith Saunders. It was forwarded and caught up with her a few days later.

In the letter, Saunders obliquely compares herself to “Tish,” an apparent reference to the redoubtable spinster Letitia “Tish” Car-berry, the heroine of the popular mystery novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart. It was Rinehart who said of life, “a little work, a little sleep, a little love and it’s all over.” At the time Saunders wrote her letter, she was twenty-four, stooped beneath the weight of the Depression, and suppressing the yearning for it to be “all over.”

But Edith Saunders’s life was just beginning. The themes she touched on in her 1933 letter to B. Virdot would resonate throughout her long life. Whether because of her parents’ divorce, her own disastrous first marriage, the unscrupulous man who cost her a fledgling business, or her justifiable perception that men were given an unfair advantage, Edith Saunders sought and held the upper hand over most of the men in her life.

She married five times and in each divorce emerged with that much more of a treasury. Her exes did not fare so well. Among them was a senior engineer at Chrysler, Steven Lazorshak, husband number four. Edith Saunders would settle in the exclusive Bloomfield Hills suburb of Detroit and live in an expansive brick house with a manicured courtyard and a pool. (She would later marry the gardener, Paul Lemieux, husband number five.)

“Nothing,” she had written in 1933, “builds morale and inspires self confidence and courage like money in one’s purse.” Edith Saunders became a bona fide millionaire, perhaps not entirely self-made, but a millionaire nonetheless.

But it was not just about money. She had also been determined to make up for the educational deficit of her youth. “I had never finished high school and regretted that very much,” she wrote decades later. So, in her midfifties, she studied for six weeks and earned her General Educational Development diploma, or GED. She then went on to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English. She taught English literature in high school for years.

Edith Saunders died in 1999 with a long string of men’s names after her own and a sizable estate. But even in death, she left behind a legacy that reflected what stirred her to write to B. Virdot in 1933. To her two brothers, Robert and James, she left only one thousand dollars each and a hand-written note in the codicil to her will suggesting it was more than they deserved. Ten years after her death, there is still property from her estate unclaimed in the hands of the state of Michigan, which is seeking her heirs.

And finally, perhaps stung by the shady businessman who cost her a business in 1933, she endowed the Oppenheimer-Mancuso (Lazorshak) Award at Central Michigan University, established in 2000. A member of the class of 1965, she funded it from her estate. The one-thousand-dollar prize goes to “a senior philosophy major who submits an outstanding essay on the subject of the necessity for teaching ethics and/or character development in the elementary grades.”

As a twenty-three-year-old woman, Edith Saunders had hoped to better her position in life through business, but the Depression and a predatory businessman scuttled that dream. One after another, her marriages failed or ended, but each provided her another rung toward financial stability and social ascendancy. Five marriages later, she was a millionaire, had acquired the education long denied her, and found a profession that gave her a measure of autonomy and pride.

She was hardly the first to recognize that marriage could act as a kind of social elevator that could carry one either up or down. Her first marriage, brief but defining, had taken her into the depths; the subsequent ones were more to her advantage. B. Virdot—Sam Stone—was no less aware of the role marriage could play in one’s social and financial fortunes. His mother, Hilda, had often pointed out that she had married beneath her in accepting Jacob’s hand, and that had she done otherwise, she might have averted much of the heartache and hardship that followed. That lesson was not lost on Sam. In marrying Minna, he took a major step upward, and won for himself social acceptance in circles that until then had been beyond his ken. It did not mean he did not love her, but to win such position with a ring and to gain a lifelong tutor in the finer things of life—literature, music, and manners—made the union all the richer. What Minna got in the bargain was a man of great heart and a student eager to improve himself.

T
hose efforts at self-improvement did not begin in Canton but were fully realized there. Exactly why Sam Stone first came to the town is not known. More than a dozen years of his life are largely unaccounted for. From Pittsburgh, he wandered from state to state, boardinghouse to boardinghouse. A niece says he spent time in West Virginia. It was there that he likely did his unpleasant work in the coal mines. In 1914, then twenty-six years old, he was living in Kenosha, Wisconsin, working as a salesman in Block Brothers department store—the Block Brothers were themselves Jewish immigrants. Two years later, he was managing S & J Gottlieb Dry Goods in the same city. From those years only a single scrap of paper survives, a sheet of stationery from a shoe store on which Sam had copied a poem by the Cleveland, Ohio, poet Edmund Vance Cooke. It is titled “How Did You Die?” The first stanza reads: