I squared my shoulders as I answered, “I’m good, Papa.” With Papa, there were only good days and great days. On bad days, he wanted to know how I aimed to turn things around to finish out with some good.
He nodded, still eyeing me. “Any trouble from those toughies by the lumberyard today?” he asked. Papa’s seawater eyes searched my own as he asked it—he’d taught me boxing, sparring with me in our yard. I was to defend myself anytime the local crowd of bullies gave me, or anyone with me, a hard time walking home from school past the lumberyard.
“None,” I said, shaking my head decisively. It was true; I hadn’t had trouble with them since I’d clocked the leader as he’d tried to taunt me earlier that school year.
“That’s a good girl,” Papa said, nodding once. “Like I said, we Posts don’t fall down just because someone shouts louder or hits first.”
Was he still talking about me? I wondered. The Kellogg family had certainly shouted loud and hit first. Dr. Kellogg and his brother saw my father as not only a copycat but also a traitor, and they’d say so to anyone who would listen, even going so far as to falsely claim that Papa had poached their recipes.
But their foul tactics hadn’t worked. Papa hadn’t backed down, and he hadn’t yielded an inch. He was far more agreeable and good on the business side of things than the aloof, rigid Dr. Kellogg, and that was why my daddy now counted among his close friends our new vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, as well as other giants, like Henry Ford—who was always asking Papa to do business with him on his new horse-free buggy—and Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, William Howard Taft, and other leaders of the day. China’s formidable empress, Tz’u-hsi, had taken to eating Grape-Nuts each morning and now ordered boxes of the cereal for her entire court. So did Queen Victoria’s rakish son, England’s new King Edward. Battle Creek was being called Cereal City, and Papa rivaled only the world-famous Dr. Kellogg as its favorite son.
But while Papa’s fame was rising in Michigan and beyond, and though he’d made countless wives happy, there was one wife who was not happy with C. W. Post. I was now old enough to understand what previously I had only indirectly sensed, to grasp what I was seeing as I watched my parents’ marriage fray. Though she’d nursed us both back from illness, Mother had spent the recent years suffering from her own poor health. She complained regularly of crippling migraines and fraught nerves. When her body wasn’t suffering, her mood often was, and melancholy had taken up a permanent residence in our home. It came as some relief that she was often gone to Chicago for doctors’ appointments and St. Louis for rest cures.
With Mother’s regular absences and periods of bed rest, Papa had overseen my upbringing throughout recent years, telling me that he’d raise me up to be “as proficient with dance cards and teacups as with machinery and balance ledgers.” And it seemed he had a lesson in mind for me that day. “Budgie, do you remember the Hinman girls?”
“Of course, Papa,” I answered. Mr. Hinman had been my dance instructor just a year prior, at a well-regarded studio in downtown Battle Creek. His daughters, Isabelle and Gertrude, had been popular local beauties, admired in town before Mr. Hinman had sent them to some fashionable finishing school out east.
“They attended the Mount Vernon Seminary,” Papa said.
“Yes, sir,” I said with a nod, still not certain where this lesson might be going.
“Do you know where Washington, D.C., is?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
He arched an eyebrow, prompting me to go on. And so, shoulders pulled back, I recited all that I could recall from our civic lessons in school: “Washington City is our nation’s capital, named for our first president and situated on the Potomac River between the states of Virginia and Maryland. Though the area was once primarily swamp and marsh, it was decided in the compromises between the Framers when drafting our United States Constitution that a new capital of the United States should be designed—”
“Good.” Papa nodded, lifting a hand. “That’s a good girl.”
I beamed; his approval would never stop being my favorite source of warmth.
“Well, Budge, it’s a long way away, that’s for sure.” He paused a moment, pressing his clean, callused hands together. “But that’s where you’re going to go.”
“Washington?” I asked after a moment. It was a distant point on a map, a place I’d studied only as a list of facts but had never seen. “But…the high school right here in Battle Creek allows girls,” I stammered. Why would I leave home? I didn’t want to leave the farm, the barn, the chicken coop, my friends in town, Shorty and Uncle Cal as constant visitors. I didn’t want to leave the Post headquarters and warehouses. I didn’t want to leave Papa.