The Sunshine Pillow: Young Love and Life's Choices

By Carla Whitacre Mayer

Carla Whitacre Mayer is the Program Manager of Education & Outreach at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, where she spends her days among the letters, photographs, and objects—like this pillow—that make up the Hemingway family story. She's currently writing a biography of Grace Hall Hemingway. When she isn't chasing Grace's story, she runs her own genealogy research business, Family Story Finder.

Summary

A handmade pillow, found 130 years later in an archive box, tells the story of how Ernest Hemingway's parents fell in love — including the opera career at the Metropolitan Opera Grace Hall nearly chose over marrying Ed Hemingway. Before she left for New York to study music, she left him a gift: a round satin pillow. His pet name for her was Sunshine, and he'd call it his Sunshine Pillow.

Essay: The Sunshine Pillow

We found it in a cardboard box: a hundred-and-thirty-year-old satin pillow, round, cream at the center, with ruched fabric circling outward, its folds catching the light like sunbeams. We were inventorying the Marcelline Hemingway Sanford Collection at the Oak Park Public Library when it turned up, unlabeled. It took some digging through old letters to understand what we were holding — and to understand it, you have to go back to a schoolyard in Oak Park in 1886.

Grace Hall was the new girl at Central School when her family moved from Chicago that year. Her father was a cutlery merchant in Fulton Market, supplying the thriving meat trade that shipped pork and beef to the far corners of the country by rail. Her parents had once lived on the western edge of Chicago, bordering open prairie, but over the years the city crept past their door until the prairie was a memory. The bomb that ignited the Haymarket Affair exploded just a block from her father Ernest Hall's office—and not long after, the long-considered move to the suburbs finally happened. Her uncle Miller Hall had already settled his family in Oak Park, and her aunt Annie Roome lived nearby. Grace's parents and extended family had all been born in England, and their expatriate clan had always kept close.

Ed Hemingway couldn't help but notice the new girl at school. Her light brown hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion only set off her natural charm and poise, and she quickly earned a reputation for a singing voice Ed thought sounded like an angel's. Grace, for her part, had noticed Ed too — mostly with a passing sense of pity for the hand-me-down clothes that left too much of his wrists and ankles showing.

When Grace's parents decided to build a Queen Anne Victorian across the street from Ed's house, it was inevitable the two families would see more of one another. While Grace's father was out of town, her mother, Caroline, oversaw the finishing touches on the new house, and young Ed began offering his services — running errands, escorting Caroline to functions — quickly securing himself a stellar reputation with Grace's family.

Ed went on to Oberlin College after high school, visiting the Halls whenever he was home. During the Christmas break of 1892–93, he took Grace ice skating, and the spark finally caught. That spring he announced he would leave Oberlin for Rush Medical School in Chicago. "We shall be real neighborly, shan't we?"[1] Grace wrote him when she heard the news.

That same year, Caroline suffered a devastating setback: she began losing the use of her lower body. The family would later attribute it to some form of cancer, though no contemporaneous diagnosis survives. Caroline and her family traveled to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, hoping the rest would help her recover. While there, Grace pressed Ed with some pointed questions by letter. His family kept a strict religious code — no smoking, drinking, or dancing. "Do you believe theater going to be wrong?"[2] she needed to know — a real deal-breaker for a girl who'd been attending the opera since she was a babe in arms.

We have no record of Ed's answer, but we can assume he passed the test. Their courtship ebbed and flowed for two more years. As Ed neared the end of his medical training, he took a residency in Scotland in the summer of 1895. There, watching a young family — husband, wife, small child, utterly absorbed in each other — he decided he'd be a fool not to propose.

He came home to find Caroline's condition had turned grave. She died in September. In the weeks after, Ed took Grace on long carriage rides behind her family's horse, Prince, trying to comfort her. On one ride, working up the nerve to propose, he found himself talking with Grace about their life goals when Prince suddenly stopped. They looked around for the trouble and found themselves staring at a sign: Justice of the Peace — Marriages Performed. It was as if Prince couldn't stand another minute of Ed beating around the bush. They both laughed, and Ed proposed.

Grace had long planned to study opera in New York under Mme. Luisa Cappiani, a retired prima donna who coached singers in the Metropolitan Opera and certified teachers in what she called the Cappiani Method—a technique built on the diaphragm, rather than the throat, to produce the enormous sound opera demanded. Grace accepted Ed's proposal on one condition: time to study with Cappiani first.

Before she left for New York in early January 1896, Grace dropped off a package at Ed's house, meant to be discovered after she'd gone: a handmade round satin pillow, cream at the center, ruched fabric radiating outward. Ed knew instantly what it meant. His pet name for her had always been Sunshine, and he would call it, for the rest of his life, his Sunshine Pillow.

Once in New York, Grace wrote him: "I wonder if the soft, restful pillow does not remind you of the place where you lay your dear head when Sunshine's arms are around. Did it make you happy, my own true love?"[3]

Grace had earned real local renown for her voice back in Chicago, but every talented arrival on New York's doorstep runs the risk of being ignored. Grace wasn't. Cappiani was impressed from the start—and grew visibly disgruntled when Grace revealed she had no intention of pursuing an opera career. It wasn't for lack of desire; she'd dreamed of it her whole life. But she and Ed had talked before she left, and he'd made it clear he didn't think that theater life would be good for her—too hard on her nerves, "nerves" being the era's catch-all term for health. "…We agreed," he wrote her, "that you would not go away for too much glory of admiration [sic] or conspicuous talent, for you pay most dearly, but rather you were in search of rest, health, sleep, instruction and self-development in its broadest sense."[4]

Given his family's strict religious convictions, Ed was likely uneasy, too, with the Victorian mystique surrounding prima donnas as sirens who seduced men with their voices. One Victorian study of prostitution in London used the term "prima donna" for a certain class of high-end sex worker.[5]

Grace agreed to Ed's terms, but not without extracting concessions of her own. Most middle-class women stopped working the day they married; Grace made clear she intended to keep working as a concert soloist and choir director, and to run her own music studio. Ed agreed readily—as the oldest son of a father often away on business, he'd long been his mother's right hand in running the household. He cooked, and by today's standards would have been called a "foodie" well before that was an acceptable thing for a man to be. Grace promised her wages would cover the household staff; Ed agreed to manage the house itself. For the era, it was a remarkably modern arrangement.

Cappiani, meanwhile, seemed determined to show Grace exactly what she'd be giving up. She introduced her to William R. Chapman, who directed two of New York's most prominent choirs, the Rubinstein Club and the Apollo Club. On Cappiani's recommendation, Chapman auditioned Grace as lead soloist for an Apollo concert at Madison Square Garden less than two months after she'd arrived in the city. Chapman and Cappiani both believed she had a real shot at replacing the retiring contralto Scalchi at the Metropolitan Opera and urged her to stay in New York long enough to find out. When word of their urging reached Grace's father and Ed, both pushed her to come home instead—her newly widowed father was planning a trip to Europe that April and wanted her with him.

Every young couple absorbs its own ideal of true love from the culture around it, and for Grace and Ed, that ideal came from a novel: John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), whose hero and heroine, John Halifax and Ursula March, they discussed so often in their letters that they took to calling him simply "our John." "I would rather have been the author of that book than any queen on earth," Grace wrote, "but next to her, I would choose to be a woman such as Ursula March, one who should shed the pure light of her life on all around her, making the world better for her having lived."[6] Critics panned the novel when it appeared; readers ignored the critics and made it a sensation anyway.

At her own crossroads, Grace held Ursula March up as a kind of north star. In the novel's central turn, Ursula stands to inherit a fortune, but her duplicitous uncle threatens to withhold it if she marries John Halifax, a man beneath her station. She forsakes the money without a second thought. In letter after letter, Grace reassured Ed she would do the same—that she would never trade true love for worldly fame—and urged him to rest his head on his Sunshine Pillow and think of her.

Grace had hoped to stay in New York six months; she cut the trip to three when her father asked her to join him in Europe. Before she left, an old friend confronted her about walking away from a stage career, and Grace's answer could have come straight from Ursula March's mouth. "I have just discovered the completeness of life," she wrote Ed, recounting the exchange. "I am willing to have all the jagged corners rubbed off my hemisphere that it may mould into a perfect rounded whole with that other half sphere."[7]

Which brings us back to the box. A hundred and thirty years later, the Sunshine Pillow is still here — the colors dulled with age, the sunburst folds still holding their shape — a testament to young love and life’s choices.

[1] Grace Hall to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, June 11, 1893, Hemingway Family Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT.

[2] Grace Hall to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, November 6, 1893, Ernest Hemingway Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

[3] Grace Hall to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, February 7, 1896, Hemingway Family Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT.

[4] Clarence Edmonds Hemingway to Grace Hall, February 27, 1896, Hemingway Family Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT.

[5] Bracebridge Hemyng, "Prostitution in London," in London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4, ed. Henry Mayhew (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1862), 213.

[6] Grace Hall to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, February 22, 1896, Hemingway Family Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT.

[7] Grace Hall to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, January 18, 1896, Hemingway Family Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT.