Free Reluctant Genius by Charlotte Gray Page A

white pinafores, fastidious manners, regular attendance at the local Presbyterian church (and dark suspicions of “papism”), and the prospect of following their mother into lives of refined domesticity. His eldest daughter was Gardiner’s favorite, but Mabel was an attractive child, with her apple cheeks, sparkling gray-blue eyes, and serious manner. She was also the most bookish: she would sit for hours with a picture book, for example, or converse gravely with her father about her toys.

Mabel (right), with sisters Gertrude (left) and Grace (center), was always a bookish, serious child.
    The crisis in Mabel’s life erupted in January 1863, when she accompanied her mother to New York to visit her McCurdy grandparents in their tall brick and brownstone house near Washington Square. The visit had begun happily—as soon as Mabel walked up the steps and under the elegant fanlight of Number 10 East 14th Street, she was embraced by her doting grandfather, Robert McCurdy. She showed him her latest treasure, a postcard picture of Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb, two midgets currently on display at Barnum’s American Museum of Curiosities. A day or two later, though, Mabel fell ill.
    “Our dear little lovely and loved one has been and still is alarmingly sick,” Robert McCurdy wrote to a niece on February 6. “She was taken 12 days since with scarlet fever…. [A]fter a few days it assumed a malignant type and her whole system seemed poisoned, her throat swelling very large, her mouth, eyes and nose almost closed and her breathing difficult.” Death hovered over the McCurdy mansion, and the servants went about their business red-eyed and scared. A quarantine notice was pinned to the big oak front door announcing that scarlet fever had struck the household and discouraging all visitors. Straw was scattered over the cobblestones to muffle the sound of carriage wheels. Mabel’s father, Gardiner, was summoned from Massachusetts as her mother and grandparents watched the child “bravely struggling for life, with alternate hopes and fears.” At first Mabel kept trying to speak, even asking her mother if she thought Jesus wanted little girls to say their prayers when they were so sick they couldn’t. But soon the effort of breathing and swallowing made talk impossible. Gertrude and Gardiner Hubbard began reliving the grief they had felt fifteen years earlier, when their infant son had succumbed to fever. They knew that even if Mabel pulled through, she could be left blind, hearing-impaired, or brain-damaged. All the physician could prescribe was “nourishment, watching and faith.”
    By mid-February the crisis had passed, but the little girl remained inert and unresponsive. When Gertrude Hubbard stroked her daughter’s damp brow, she was almost inclined to accept the doctor’s gloomy prediction of permanent brain damage. A few days later, however, Gertrude noticed that Mabel’s eyes now focused on her and followed her movements. Six weeks after the onset of fever, there was a breakthrough. Gertrude showed Mabel her treasured picture of Mr. and Mrs. Thumb. Mabel murmured, “Little lady.” Gertrude realized that the disease had not affected her daughters intellect, but it had left her completely deaf. Mabel was soon asking, “Mamma, why don’t you talk to me?” With tears in her eyes, Gertrude put her face close to her daughter’s so that Mabel could see that the problem was not with her mother’s speech but with her own hearing.
    Mabel and her mother remained in New York for several more weeks that spring, as the child slowly regained her strength. Outside the bedroom windows, the city stirred as the days lengthened. Passersby hailed each other across the street. The chatter of children chalking games onto the paved walks of Washington Square, one block away, drifted through the warm April air. As Gertrude gazed out of the window of her parents’ house, she could hear newsboys yell out details of President Lincoln’s latest