A Girl from Yamhill (11 page)

Miss Crawford, radiating health, was apparently as bored with
Healthy Living
as her class. One day she suddenly closed the sensible text, laid it aside, and with her fingertips resting on the front desk in the center row, began to tell us a story about a man named Jean Valjean, who lived in France a long time ago and who had spent nineteen years as a galley slave for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry nieces and nephews. We all perked up. We knew about galley slaves from pirate movies.

Miss Crawford's cheeks grew redder, and her face became incandescent with excitement, as she went on and on, telling us the story in great detail. Nothing this moving had ever happened in school before. We groaned when the bell rang.

“Children,” said Miss Crawford, “I shall continue the story in our next class.”

Nature study became the best part of school. Chipmunks still raced, a home of a trapdoor spider was added to the nature display; but all that mattered to us was
Les Misérables
. On and on we traveled with Jean Valjean, hounded by Inspector Javert all the way. Fantine, her little daughter, Cosette, and the wicked Thénardiers all became as real as, perhaps more real than, our neighbors. We gasped when Fantine sold her beautiful hair to pay the Thénardiers for the care of Cosette. Even the most terrible boys sat still, fascinated. Unaware of social injustice in our own country, we were gripped by Victor Hugo's story of social injustice in nineteenth-century France.

Some parents—but not mine—listening to us retell at the supper table the marvelous story Miss Crawford was bringing to our imaginations, began to object. Storytelling in school was improper. We were there to learn, not to be entertained. Telephone calls and visits were made to Mr. Dorman, who was a very wise man. Of course we should be studying
Healthy Living
, and so we
did. However, at least once a week Miss Crawford came to our auditorium class to continue the story.

June came, summer vacation was about to begin, and she had not finished
Les Misérables
.

“Don't worry, children,” she said. “I'll be here when you return in September.”

True to her word, Miss Crawford was waiting when school started, and took up where she had left off. Well into the eighth grade, the story of Jean Valjean came to an end. Miss Crawford began another novel by Victor Hugo,
Toilers of the Sea
.

By coincidence, the next year one of Mother's cousins, Verna, who had become a librarian, sent me a copy of
Les Misérables
, which she inscribed in her beautiful vertical handwriting: “A book that you may enjoy someday, if not now, Beverly.” I had already lived the book and did not read it for many years. Then, as I read, Miss Crawford was before me on every page. She seemed not to have missed a single word.

I often wonder why this particular book meant so much to an eccentric Oregon teacher. Had someone in her family suffered a terrible injustice? Had her repeated warning about perjury come from some experience in her own life? Or had she perhaps spent her childhood in isolation on a farm where the works of Victor Hugo were
the only books available? And why did she suddenly feel compelled to share this novel with a class of seventh-graders? Whatever her reasons, I am profoundly grateful to her—and to the wisdom of Mr. Dorman for circumventing unimaginative parents and allowing her to tell the entire book in such detail. My copy has 1,222 pages.

Aunt Dora and Uncle Joe, because of her health, moved from sagebrush country to a farm near Molalla, about thirty miles from Portland. Aunt Dora invited us out to see a rodeo, the annual Molalla Roundup. I found this invitation exciting, something to brag about to Ralph.

When we arrived in Molalla on a hot summer day, Uncle Joe said he had been unable to buy five seats together. He offered to sit with me so my parents and Aunt Dora could sit together and visit. Uncle Joe and I climbed to the top of the bleachers while the others sat down in front.

The heat was unusual for Oregon. Cowboys riding bucking broncos and roping steers churned up clouds of dust. The spectacle was sweaty,
dirty, and, at first, fascinating. Gradually it grew monotonous and the heat and dust stifling.

Uncle Joe bought me a bottle of Orange Crush, which I held in one hand as I drank through a straw. Uncle Joe took my other hand in his. Having my hand held did not seem unusual. In Yamhill, I had often walked down the street with an uncle holding me by the hand. However, because of the heat, I wiggled my hand free of his. I could not make conversation with this uncle and was glad when the rodeo ended.

On the ride home, Mother remarked, “It does seem odd that Joe could not get five seats together.”

Dad said, “I thought so, too.”

I did not bother to mention Uncle Joe's trying to hold my hand. The incident was dropped. It seemed of no importance.

That winter, Aunt Dora invited us to come out to Molalla for Saturday dinner, a midday meal on the farm. We could spend the night and drive home on Sunday. Mother, tired of cooking, accepted with pleasure. Dad looked forward to exploring the farm. I took a book with me.

Saturday night, after I went upstairs to bed in the cold farmhouse and lay shivering, weighed down by heavy woolen quilts while my body warmed the sheets, Uncle Joe burst into the room, thrust a folded sheet of paper into my
hand, planted an urgent tobacco-smelling kiss on my cheek, and said, “For God's sake, don't show this to anyone!” and left. I was terrified.

Innocent of any knowledge of sex, I knew something very wrong was occurring. I was too frightened to get out of bed, fumble in the dark for the overhead light, and read what was written on the paper. Uncle Joe might burst in again if he saw a light. My stomach churned in fear, and I scrubbed my cheek with the sheet. This was not uncle behavior. All my other uncles were kindly, affectionate men, but they did not sneak into my bedroom to shove notes at me or kiss me in the dark.

When my parents came upstairs, I heard Mother say, “Why don't we take Dora and Joe back to town with us?”

“No!” I called out in a whisper. “Please, please, don't!”

Neither parent caught my fear. “It will make a nice change for Dora,” said Mother, who was always sympathetic to farm women.

“She works pretty hard out here,” agreed my father as they went into another bedroom and closed the door. I lay in fear of the man who had become an evil stranger.

In the morning, Uncle Joe did not take his eyes off me, but I managed to whisper to Mother,
“Please don't take them back with us.
Please
don't.”

Mother merely gave me an impatient look. I could not find an opportunity, or was too frightened, to read the letter. Uncle Joe was watching every move I made.

That day I rode back to Portland in anguished silence between Mother and Aunt Dora, the letter clutched in my hand inside my pocket, while Aunt Dora and Uncle Joe made plans to take Mother and me to a movie the next day before they caught the bus back to Molalla. I spoke up. “I don't want to go to a movie.”

Dad was beginning to be irritated by my behavior. “Of course you want to go to a movie,” he said.

Still I could not bring myself to read that letter. I am not sure why. I know it repelled me. Perhaps I was afraid of what I might find in it. That night I slept on a cot in the attic because my room was used as a guest room. Monday morning I stayed upstairs as long as I dared, listening to the sounds from below.

When Mother and Aunt Dora were in my bedroom, and Uncle Joe was in the living room, I ventured downstairs and into the kitchen, where I finally got up my courage to unfold the letter, a sheet of tablet paper filled with pencil writing. I caught the last words, “Your lover, Joe,” before
the writer of the letter was beside me, his dark eyes glittering like coal.

I fled to the bedroom and sat down on the bed with the letter crushed in my fist behind my back, while Mother and Aunt Dora continued their conversation, oblivious to my distress. Uncle Joe followed and sat down on the bed beside me. Smiling at the women, he twisted my arm and pried the letter from my fingers. I shrank from him.

“Why, what's the matter?” Mother asked at last.

Uncle Joe answered for me. “I just wanted to know what Beverly wanted for Christmas.” A lie. This branch of the family did not exchange Christmas gifts.

Aunt Dora kindly asked what I wanted for Christmas. I couldn't think of anything. Uncle Joe announced he felt like going for a walk. The women continued their discussion of clothes. I did not want to speak out in front of my aunt.

When time came to leave for the movie, Uncle Joe returned.

For once I defied Mother. “I will not go to the movie.”

“Of course you will,” she informed me, her mouth tightening into a straight line.

“No I won't,” I contradicted.

To avoid a scene, Mother had to give in. The
three of them left, and I was alone, trying to sort out my frightened thoughts.

However, true to habit, halfway to the corner, Mother made some excuse for returning to the house. She was furious. “Beverly, I don't know what gets into you sometimes!” she began. “It wouldn't hurt you to be nice to your aunt and uncle. You don't often see them, and they think a lot of you. How can you be so selfish?”

“I am not selfish,” I said, angry because no one had listened to me and upset at being accused of not being nice to my aunt, whom I loved.

I told her about the kiss, the letter, my twisted arm, the way she and Dad ignored my agitation.

Now Mother had to listen. She was appalled at what she heard. “Beverly, I am sorry. I had no idea” was all she could say as she hurried off to prevent her in-laws from returning to see what had happened to her.

That evening, Mother was heartsick and said she could hardly bear to sit through the movie beside Joe. “Poor Dora,” she said. “Married to that man.”

Dad was furious when he heard the story. “I always knew Joe was no good,” he stormed. Sometime after he had calmed down, he must have told my aunt what had happened, for after my experience, none of my girl cousins was ever
left alone in a room with Uncle Joe, and he was watched whenever he was near.

I never saw my lovely aunt again, but when I was married, she sent me an antique quilt made with tiny, tiny stitches; and once after Joe's death, when she was very old, she wrote me a letter in exquisite penmanship answering some questions about family history Mother had passed on to her.

The most puzzling part of this unpleasant episode of my girlhood was Mother's failure to give me any information about sex. My understanding of the word “lover” came from fairy tales read when I was younger, and yet I sensed from Uncle Joe's behavior, from his glittering dark eyes, that the word had a meaning I did not understand and that the meaning held evil for me.

Badly frightened, without understanding exactly what I was frightened of, I did not know how to ask.

Our class was changing. A quiet boy who sat in front of me had so much trouble with arithmetic that he began to cry during an important test. The tears of a boy thirteen years old distressed me so much that, for the second and last time, I cheated in school. I slipped him some answers.

A bitter, scowling boy across the aisle from me spent his days drawing, in elaborate detail, guns and battleships. He made me uneasy, and perhaps made Mrs. Drake, our eighth-grade teacher, uneasy, too, for she left him alone. Teachers were there to teach, not to solve, or even discuss, personal problems.

The boys who were so awful in the sixth grade and terrible in the seventh grade became really
horrible
in the eighth grade. They belched; they
farted; they dropped garter snakes through the basement windows into the girls' lavatory. In the days before zippers, a boy could, with one swipe of his hand, unbutton the fly of another boy's corduroy knickers—always in front of girls who, of course, nearly
died
of embarrassment while the red-faced victim turned his back to button up. Mrs. Drake said, “Something has been going on, and you know what I am talking about, that has to stop.” When Mrs. Drake was not looking, “something” went right on.

The horrible boys, whose favorite epithet was “horse collars!” shouted “Hubba-hubba!” at any girl whose developing breasts were beginning to push out her blouse.

Some girls changed, too, and were considered “fast” because they took to wearing lipstick and passing around two books,
The Sheik
and
Honey Lou: The Love Wrecker
, books I scorned. These they ostentatiously read on “those certain days” when they sat on a bench in the gymnasium while the rest of us twirled the Indian clubs or marched while Claudine pounded away at “Napoleon's Last Charge” on the battered piano.

I was engrossed in
Jane Eyre
, but Claudine peeked into
The Sheik
and reported, “Gee, kid, there was this sheik who kidnapped this girl and carried her off to his tent in the desert. He laid her on a bed, and when she woke up in the morn
ing, he was gone, and then she discovered a dent on the pillow next to her, and she knew he had slept in the same bed with her. Wow!' Our innocent imaginations were incapable of filling in the crux of this scene. A dent in the pillow was shocking enough. Yipes!

The horrible boys refused to accept the lessons in conformity the art teacher was struggling to teach. This time we were taught to letter, first on squared paper and then in cut-out letters. We cut out, all in blue-green and pale orange paper, the silhouette of the entrance to the Oregon Caves and the words “Oregon Caves,” which we pasted to the front of manila folders to hold our essays for open house. However, some of the boys rebelled by rubbing their rulers hard and fast against the edge of the table in the art room. They did not set the tables on fire, but they did produce smoke, which impressed me. As a Camp Fire Girl, I had been unable to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Our teacher refused to give in and send the boys to the principal's office.

Boys were worst of all on the days girls had cooking lessons. We brought most of our ingredients from home in our cooking baskets, neatly covered with clean napkins. Whatever we cooked we took home—if we could get it there. As soon as school was out, hordes of ravening boys, who
had spent their double period of manual training working up appetites while sniffing cooking odors, descended on the girls. I tried to make a quick getaway, pedaling furiously on my bicycle with wooden wheel rims warped by sun and rain, while horrible boys grabbed at the basket swinging from the handlebars. Sometimes I succeeded.

Girls were beginning to rebel, too, making Miss Campbell, our thin, harrassed domestic science teacher, the victim. Miss Campbell's favorite word was “tend,” as in “White sauce tends to lump if not adequately stirred.” When she announced that our class was to give a demonstration on table setting and napkin folding at a PTA meeting, she learned that many girls tended to object.

“That's not fair,” someone said. “You can't make us stay after school when we haven't done anything wrong.”

“Boys don't have to stay after school,” someone else said. “Boys can get away with anything they want.”

A girl named Joanne, a blonde who lisped, defied Miss Campbell. She stood up and said, “You can't make me thtay after thcool,” and walked out of the basement classroom. Miss Campbell ran after her, leaving the rest of us humming with excitement. What would happen to Joanne? Would she be expelled?

Miss Campbell, looking grim, returned alone. The next domestic science period, Joanne was in class, but she did not stay after school to take part in the demonstration.

Teacher-pleaser that I was, who also felt sorry for Miss Campbell, I did not object to folding a napkin for the PTA and was assigned the hardest part of all, the proper way to fold a large damask dinner napkin, which I pretended to iron at an ironing board set up on the stage.

“Always iron the right side of the napkin last,” I said, educating our mothers and teachers. “This tends to polish the design in the damask.”

I held up the folded napkin to polite applause from the audience and, I suspect, to the relief of Miss Campbell, who, during the remainder of the year, was faced with teaching us the correct way to patch a garment, work a neat buttonhole, darn a sock so it wasn't lumpy, and make a dress.

Mother, a pillar of the PTA, was dissatisfied with school. Not enough homework was assigned, a complaint she had made since I was in the third grade. If we didn't rush about from room to room, we would learn more. Perhaps she felt that folding a damask napkin in domestic science was not sufficiently intellectual. When she was a girl, this was taught at home, not in school. She announced she was going to visit school to see for herself what was going on.

I was horrified. School visits by mothers were for the first and second grades, not the eighth grade. I could not live down such a visit, ever. I would
die
.

“You won't do anything of the kind,” said Mother. “Mr. Dorman says parents are welcome anytime.”

Why didn't nice Mr. Dorman keep his mouth shut at PTA? I lived in dread of Mother's being as good as her word and bringing disgrace down upon me. But the visit never took place.

Mother and Dad had worries more serious than what went on at Fernwood. Each evening after I left the dinner table to read the newspaper, they lingered over tea and spoke in worried voices of subjects that did not interest me—high tariffs, the stock market, Wall Street, banking.

Dad began to come home from work with his shoulders stooped, his face heavy with worry.

Some Portland banks closed their doors when too many depositors began to withdraw money. What if this happened to the bank where he worked? That year the West Coast National Bank did not give its annual Christmas bonus, a frightening omen. We depended on that bonus and had plans for every cent.

As it turned out, the bank was bought by the larger United States National Bank, an institution that promised to keep the West Coast em
ployees. Dad had me sell the two shares of West Coast stock he had once given me, and with the proceeds bought me, at a great bargain, an ancient typewriter with an extra-long carriage for typing bank forms. I would need it when I became a writer.

Dad moved next door to his former bank to stand on another marble floor. We feared a run of worried depositors withdrawing all their money from this bank, where my father was responsible for order in the lobby.

And then in October 1929 the stock market crashed. Except for school, everything seemed to come to a halt. All around us, men began to lose their jobs. The Miles family lost their money in the stock market. Grandpa Atlee wrote that the logging camps and lumber mills around Banks were shutting down, an ominous sign, for Oregon's economy depended on the lumber industry.

At school we charted estimated expenses for a family of four with an income of $2,500 to $3,000 a year. We learned to write checks, borrow money, read interest tables, and compound interest semiannually. We learned the difference between stocks and bonds; we studied real estate as an investment, property insurance, and income tax.

The Stone Arithmetic Advanced
told us, concerning income tax: “In 1924 the
normal rate
on
incomes up to $6000 is 2% less the amount of the exemption.” Mother looked at my arithmetic book and remarked with bitterness, “There aren't many people around here who earn six thousand dollars a year these days.”

In spite of what was going on in the country, Fernwood trained us to save money. One of the banks started a school banking program with a teller, the boy who was best in arithmetic, in each class. We brought our bank books to school, along with nickels, dimes, and quarters to deposit in our accounts. One boy often brought a whole dollar. Speculation on the size of his account was the talk of the class.

Mrs. Drake gave us lessons in algebra to ease us into high school mathematics. “Your teachers won't spoon-feed you the way I do,” she warned us.

In reading, we studied a chapter of
The Mill on the Floss
, by George Eliot; another from
Moby-Dick
, by Herman Melville; Robert Browning's “Incident of the French Camp”; Abraham Lincoln's “Address at the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery”; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” Mrs. Weaver required the memorizing of “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. We hated it. The only twentieth-century selections I can recall were short stories by O. Henry—“The Gift of the Magi” and “The
Ransom of Red Chief”—but of course the century was only twenty-nine years old at that time.

That winter I became ill once more, with what was assumed to be influenza—in those days almost any sickness was called the flu or grippe. When fever, weakness, and sore throat persisted, Mother finally called a doctor. He examined me, felt my glands, leaned on the foot of the bed, and asked, “Mother, does she know about the moon?”

Weak as I was, I was infuriated. He spoke as if I were absent or deaf, he addressed my mother as if she were his mother, and he insulted my intelligence by his silly reference to “the moon.”

I knew very well he was referring to monthly periods. Why didn't the stupid man say what he meant? And what business was it of his, anyway? The old snoop. Mother was angry because he charged five dollars for the visit, even though he had to pass our house on his way to his office, and because he did nothing to help me recover.

After I had been in bed two weeks, Mother sent me back to school because, she later ruefully admitted, she was worn out taking care of me. I felt so weak I paused to rest against every fire hydrant along the way and almost immediately had to return home for another two weeks of fever and weakness, lying in my great-grandfather's four-poster bed, looking out at rain and sleet. Mother began to read me
The Little Minister
, by
James M. Barrie, because for once I felt unequal to reading. Halfway through, she laid it aside. I finished it a few pages at a time.

After my illness—whatever it was, it would be my last for many years—I looked so bedraggled that Mother bought me rouge for my pale cheeks and, every morning before school, insisted on curling the ends of my hair with a curling iron heated over the flame of a burner on the gas stove.

“Yow, you're burning my neck!”

“Stand still a minute, can't you?”

The odor of singed hair filled the kitchen when Mother overheated the curling iron. By the time I had walked to school, because bicycle riding was unsophisticated for an eighth-grade girl, the damp air had usually wilted my curls.

The lingering debilitation of illness subdued me to the point of studying harder, with the result that, on one report card day, Mrs. Drake announced that I was the only member of the class to earn straight E's for Excellent. No one at school held this against me, but Mother said, “You see? You could always earn straight E's if you would only apply yourself.”

About that time, Mrs. Drake confided that she was taking a course in short-story writing. Because she was taking this course, we should
write, too, a paragraph of description. The class groaned.

After some thought, I recalled the moment when the mule deer sprang out of the juniper trees and hesitated in front of our car as the sun was rising over the mountains. I handed in a short paragraph entitled “Sunrise on the High Desert.”

My description was returned to me inflamed with red pencil corrections. Mrs. Drake had changed almost every word. This was a shock. After so much encouragement from Mrs. Weaver, I did not know what to think.

Mother, in a day when parents supported teachers, merely remarked that she did not agree with some of Mrs. Drake's corrections, but she kept the paragraph. Years later, after I had published several books, I ran across it. The morning sun in the clear, cold desert air I had described as “blazing”—not a particularly good word—as it rose above the juniper trees. Mrs. Drake crossed out “blazing” and wrote in “burning,” apparently believing that “burning” was the only acceptable modifier for a desert sun, even the sun on a cold Oregon morning. Perhaps she had read
The Sheik
.

In a negative way, this experience influenced my writing. For years I avoided writing descrip
tion, and children told me they liked my books “because there isn't any description in them.”

Toward spring, Mother began to tell the neighbors, “Beverly has finally begun to perk up,” and a good thing, too, for Miss Helliwell had us hang up our Indian clubs and begin to rehearse calisthenics, identical to those taught in gymnasiums all over Portland, until the important day when girls dressed in white middies and black gym bloomers and boys in white gym suits marched to the Grant High School Bowl. There we joined hundreds of pupils from all over the city and performed, under the leadership of the tan, muscular superintendent of physical education, the calisthenics in which we had been drilled. In a yellowing newspaper photograph, we look more like the youth of Germany than of Oregon.