outranked him. She had also been on her own longer, spending much of her life taking care of anyone who seemed small and vulnerable.
Jose’s own parents had come to the rough mining country of the American West from other hardscrabble places: her father from the West Virginia coal country and her mother traveling from Ireland as a girl of sixteen. The couple had three children before Jose’s mother, Maggie, died when Jose wasthree and a half. By the time Hubert Dolan, a hard-drinking miner, also passed on three years later, his youngest, a baby boy, had died before him. Josephine and her younger brother Walter entered a Catholic orphanage in Helena.
There she stayed for a year, protecting her little brother as best she could among the institution’s harsh nuns, before her father’s married sister in Anaconda, Alice Kelly, suffered a crisis of conscience in the form of a guilty dream. Josephine’s dead mother, Maggie, appeared to Alice and pleaded with her to free her daughter from the orphanage, which she did, despite already having a very crowded houseful of her own children. (Walter was not rescued along with Jose, though he did survive.)
Jose was about seven when she came to live with her cousins the Kellys in Anaconda. “Captain” William Kelly was an executive in the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and his house made an interesting vantage point for the local labor wars. She attended school through the eighth grade (just one grade less than Hammett) and entered nursing training at a Catholic hospital in Butte, where she endured a second round with strict nuns at fifteen. When America entered the war, she enlisted with a friend and saw some of the world beyond Montana, landing finally at the new sanitarium near Tacoma.
Remembering his months at Cushman years later, Hammett stressed the rowdy pastimes of the men, their late-night card games and dark pranks such as tossing metal trays clanging over the barrier to frighten the shell-shocked patients. Jose recalled instead the well-mannered man who liked to read when he wasn’t following her around the grounds. In February 1921, after almost four months together, Hammett was transferred to another U.S. Public Health Service hospital, a stricter one atCamp Kearney, outside San Diego, whose climate was thought better for respiratory cases. “Which lunger are you taking out now and dragging into town when he should be sleeping?” he wrote his favorite nurse on February 27. “Or are you storing up a little sleep before you start off again?”
On paper, it is a one-sided courtship. Hammett purged or eventually lost Jose’s letters to him, the very ones he clearly suffered waiting for, but her coy, romantic confidence is implied in his answers: “What I would like to write would be a letter of the most passionate sort—one that would knock you off your chair—but I remember you saying that you were going to cut one bird off your list because his (your traveling man) letters were too loving; so I think [I]’ll play safe.”
Remembering Cushman, he wrote her in early March while awaiting her next letter:
The worst part of the day is when the clock shows 740 P.M., and I know that I should be down in front of the office, in the rain, waiting for Josephine Anna. Six O’Clock worries me, also—occasionally, when I figure it’s time for your afternoon off and I should be standing on the People’s Store corner, still in the rain, cursing you because you are fifteen minutes late and haven’t shown up yet. I’ll never awake at eleven, or I reckon I’d be thinking we ought to be out on the bridge—in the rain, of course—staging our customary friendly, but now and then a bit rough, dispute over the relative merits of “Yes” and “no.” 2
This dispute clearly went back and forth, at least sometimes leaning toward yes. After hinting in several letters that she didnot feel well, Jose left Cushman for an unexplained visit home to her family in Anaconda.
Jose’s own parents had come to the rough mining country of the American West from other hardscrabble places: her father from the West Virginia coal country and her mother traveling from Ireland as a girl of sixteen. The couple had three children before Jose’s mother, Maggie, died when Jose wasthree and a half. By the time Hubert Dolan, a hard-drinking miner, also passed on three years later, his youngest, a baby boy, had died before him. Josephine and her younger brother Walter entered a Catholic orphanage in Helena.
There she stayed for a year, protecting her little brother as best she could among the institution’s harsh nuns, before her father’s married sister in Anaconda, Alice Kelly, suffered a crisis of conscience in the form of a guilty dream. Josephine’s dead mother, Maggie, appeared to Alice and pleaded with her to free her daughter from the orphanage, which she did, despite already having a very crowded houseful of her own children. (Walter was not rescued along with Jose, though he did survive.)
Jose was about seven when she came to live with her cousins the Kellys in Anaconda. “Captain” William Kelly was an executive in the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and his house made an interesting vantage point for the local labor wars. She attended school through the eighth grade (just one grade less than Hammett) and entered nursing training at a Catholic hospital in Butte, where she endured a second round with strict nuns at fifteen. When America entered the war, she enlisted with a friend and saw some of the world beyond Montana, landing finally at the new sanitarium near Tacoma.
Remembering his months at Cushman years later, Hammett stressed the rowdy pastimes of the men, their late-night card games and dark pranks such as tossing metal trays clanging over the barrier to frighten the shell-shocked patients. Jose recalled instead the well-mannered man who liked to read when he wasn’t following her around the grounds. In February 1921, after almost four months together, Hammett was transferred to another U.S. Public Health Service hospital, a stricter one atCamp Kearney, outside San Diego, whose climate was thought better for respiratory cases. “Which lunger are you taking out now and dragging into town when he should be sleeping?” he wrote his favorite nurse on February 27. “Or are you storing up a little sleep before you start off again?”
On paper, it is a one-sided courtship. Hammett purged or eventually lost Jose’s letters to him, the very ones he clearly suffered waiting for, but her coy, romantic confidence is implied in his answers: “What I would like to write would be a letter of the most passionate sort—one that would knock you off your chair—but I remember you saying that you were going to cut one bird off your list because his (your traveling man) letters were too loving; so I think [I]’ll play safe.”
Remembering Cushman, he wrote her in early March while awaiting her next letter:
The worst part of the day is when the clock shows 740 P.M., and I know that I should be down in front of the office, in the rain, waiting for Josephine Anna. Six O’Clock worries me, also—occasionally, when I figure it’s time for your afternoon off and I should be standing on the People’s Store corner, still in the rain, cursing you because you are fifteen minutes late and haven’t shown up yet. I’ll never awake at eleven, or I reckon I’d be thinking we ought to be out on the bridge—in the rain, of course—staging our customary friendly, but now and then a bit rough, dispute over the relative merits of “Yes” and “no.” 2
This dispute clearly went back and forth, at least sometimes leaning toward yes. After hinting in several letters that she didnot feel well, Jose left Cushman for an unexplained visit home to her family in Anaconda.
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