scribed him as ugly.) He suspected in surer moods that his sense of inade-
quacy might be a reaction to the beating he had taken in Chicago. May
Calvert probably sensed his shyness and took advantage of it. Dreiser’s own
initiative in this regard was to masturbate, in spite of both the Catholic
proscription against such “self-abuse” and the medical myths about the
practice.
Dreiser claimed that he first found a partner in sex one April evening in
Warsaw. The anecdote is not in the holograph of Dawn, but appears in
both its first typescript and the published volume.36 Dreiser was around
fourteen and his alleged partner fourteen or fifteen, a stocky baker’s daugh-
ter of some “mid-European” background, definitely lower on the Warsaw
social register than the girls he described from Miss Calvert’s class. One day
when he found her alone at the bakery, one playful remark led to another
until she dared Dreiser to catch her as she ran out of the store and down a
nearby alley. He caught up with her in a secluded area, they stumbled, and
he found the girl underneath him. She continued to lead the way by help-
ing him unbutton his trousers. After a fit of Catholic guilt and fear of eter-
nal damnation if he died before going to confession, he also brooded on
just what kind of girl she was. Obviously, she was not “a good girl,” but one
of the type his father, if not his mother, had warned him to avoid. In ad-
dition, this first-generation American thought her parents “common—
restaurant-keepers, bakers, foreigners.”37 Once his sense of guilt had passed,
he turned to the more practical fear that the girl had given him a sexually
transmitted disease.
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
1 9
Soon Dreiser had found his first real girlfriend—Myrtle Weimar (“Trego”
in the published version of Dawn), a dark-haired beauty whose father owned
one of the two or three drugstores (and soda fountains) in town. The
thought of being near her or perhaps kissing her during a game of Post
O‹ce at an upcoming party sent him into a paroxysm of sexual fantasy.
Yet even deep in the throes of first love, he was also keenly aware of other
pretty girls in May Calvert’s classroom. Sex, he was beginning to realize,
was not the same as love. The search for female love, true love or the sur-
rogate for mother love, he would later conclude, was for him almost always
somehow the search for sex.
–
Following his great discovery of books, as well as sex, in May Calvert’s
seventh-grade class, Dreiser began to realize that he was no longer the boy
he had been in Evansville. He read constantly and began to articulate his
feelings and observations. His family also soon sensed his intellectual
superiority—perhaps astonished by his near-photographic memory. His
father in particular seemed to detect the subtle changes in his son’s devel-
opment during his infrequent visits from Terre Haute. John Paul “author-
ized” the purchase of cheap sets of the works of Washington Irving, and
soon thereafter agreed to similar acquisitions of Dickens, Thackeray, and
Scott. Not even May Calvert’s disappointing successor at Warsaw Central
High, “a stern, dark, sallow woman” named Luella Reid, could dampen
Theodore’s interest in books and the worlds they opened to him.
Freed from the limitations of parochial schools, he and his youngest sis-
ter and brother seemed to flourish, although Ed, according to Dreiser, was
not much of a reader outside of class. They had gotten to where they could
sidestep their gypsy lifestyle and make some claim to respectability, an im-
age Sarah dearly wanted, at least for her younger children. The older sib-
lings, however, frequently threatened to shatter this image with visits from
a disheveled Rome or the unwanted pregnancy of one or another of her
older daughters. Furthermore, it was about this time that Emma became
involved with L. A. Hopkins, a married man who worked in Chapin &
Gore’s saloon on the South Side of Chicago.
Hopkins and Emma planned to run away together, and to finance this,
Hopkins stole $3,500 and some jewelry from the safe of the saloon. Be-
fore they could flee, his suspicious wife hired a Pinkerton detective and
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
2 0
eventually surprised the couple in bed. Caught in the act, Hopkins ex-
claimed, according to the Chicago Mail of February 17, 1886, “My God!
ma . . . is that you!”38 The news of this adultery easily reached Warsaw,
where the Chicago papers were read more than the local ones. To make
matters worse, because Mame and Sylvia were acquainted with Hopkins
through Emma, Mrs. Hopkins initially implicated them with Emma in
snaring a married man.
Either Dreiser or his editors excised this information from the autobi-
ography, along with the fact that Hopkins—like George Hurstwood of
Sister Carrie, who steals from his employers’ safe after it is too late to re-
place the money—was driven to his crime both by “semi-intoxication” and
“his exceeding passion” for another woman. In this sense, both men steal
by “accident.” Hopkins had been a faithful employee of the saloon for many
years and was about forty when he fled Chicago with the stolen money
and his paramour Emma, who like Carrie was initially tricked into run-
ning away with her lover. Hopkins and Emma also ended up living to-
gether in New York.39
Dreiser’s father, if he ever heard the full story of Emma’s alliance with
Hopkins, would have been outraged, but Sarah and her partial family had
already suªered enough without his patriarchal rancor and managed to keep
the details from him. Once again, as in Evansville, the family’s hard-won
cover of respectability had been ripped away. To reduce their sense of shame,
Mame and Theresa asserted that Emma (described in one newspaper ac-
count of the theft as “a dashing blond [ sic], with an abundance of auburn
hair and good features”) had married Hopkins. Although Emma was never
directly implicated in the theft, certainly she was singled out as the woman
who broke up Hopkins’s marriage and the reason he stole.
Then Sylvia, who was living in Warsaw, got pregnant. Her lover and the
father-to-be was remembered in Dawn as Don Ashley, the son of a War-
saw solid citizen, and a womanizer. His good looks and social position had
swept Sylvia oª her feet, and Sarah may have hoped for a connection to
Warsaw respectability through Ashley. Anxious that her children do better
in life than she had, she was as easily fooled by Ashley as Sylvia was. One
day, she even permitted Sylvia to entertain her young man at home with-
out a proper chaperone. When confronted months later with the news of
her pregnancy, the wily seducer quickly left town on the false promise to
send for her when it was financially feasible. Sylvia briefly contemplated an
abortion, but their family doctor and a friend of the Ashley family lectured
her about “duty and virtue,” while saying nothing about young Ashley’s
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
2 1
duty except to label him a scamp.40 (This family episode no doubt
influenced Dreiser in the writing of the scene in An American Tragedy where
Roberta Alden is similarly lectured by a doctor who performs abortions for
more socially prominent citizens.) Later, when it became clear that Ashley
was never to be seen again, Paul Dresser returned on one of his saving vis-
its, though this time the family spirits were resistant to the usual eªect of
his glorious descents. It may have struck poor Sylvia as wickedly ironic—
surely it did her precocious brother Theo —that Paul was now famous for
the song, “The Letter That Never Came.”
Sylvia was mortified and angry. She may have tried to abort her fetus
with various medicines, a vial of which her prying brother Theo had found
hidden in one of her bureau drawers. Like Mame when she was threatened
with becoming an involuntary mother, Sylvia had hidden the fact from her
parents as long as she could. When the secret was finally out, Sarah—to
avoid the raised eyebrows and stares of her Warsaw neighbors—quickly
sent her daughter to New York, where Sylvia waited out her pregnancy at
Emma’s flat on West Fifteenth Street. The infant, who was named Carl
Dreiser, was soon sent to Warsaw because Sylvia did not want him. Dreiser
remembered the five-month-old’s “endless care.” The man who would re-
main childless never forgot the infant’s “constant wailing” and the many
hours he had been assigned to “‘mind’ it.” The family pretended to neigh-
bors that the child was just another belated sibling, but their ears were burn-
ing with their neighbors’ gossip. Later, Dreiser described his nephew as “an