A Girl from Yamhill (12 page)

About this time I wore Mother down and was allowed to shed forever my woolen underwear, and in the nick of time, because I had to try on the dress I was making in domestic science so Miss Campbell could mark the hem. Now my underwear would not show.

Our eighth-grade graduation took place in our classroom without parents present. From my seat by the window I could see Mount Hood, which was out on that sunny June day. (In Portland we spoke of Mount Hood as being “out” on clear days, as if it had popped out of the ground like
a gopher.) The class waited, excited and expectant, for Mr. Dorman, who finally arrived, carrying a handful of paper diplomas, to make a short, friendly speech. Fernwood had prepared us to be good citizens, he told us.

With forty and sometimes more pupils in a class, our teachers had taught us the fundamentals of survival in society. Every one of us could read. We had learned to speak distinctly and correctly and to cope with the arithmetic necessary for daily life. Girls were capable of making their own clothing—not that many wanted to—and to prepare simple, nutritious meals. Boys had learned basic carpentry, and some had even built tables with hand-rubbed finishes, which we all admired as they proudly bore them home on the last day of manual training.

School was a businesslike place. Teachers and parents expected us to learn but not to think for ourselves; we expected to be taught. Our textbooks were practical-looking and of a size comfortable for the hands of children in the grades in which they were used. No one, not even ourselves, expected school to amuse us, to be fun, or to be responsible for personal problems. The appreciation of music and art would have been considered expensive and unnecessary by parents.

Of the sixteen teachers who taught us in eight
years, most were pleasant, firm, and impersonal, which was the attitude we expected of teachers. The Gregory Heights director of the PTA program was never my teacher, only a painful childhood memory. She and Miss Falb, who switched my hands with her bamboo pointer, were the only teachers who ever touched me, but I probably leaned against Miss Marius because I loved her so much.

As I listened to Mr. Dorman and walked to the front of the room to accept my diploma, I was already imagining myself in the long corridors of the Ulysses S. Grant High School.

With our diplomas, Mr. Dorman handed each of us a small buff card, our first adult library card, a symbol marking the end of childhood.

A
t the age of six I dislike this yellow organdy dress because it is scratchy. Mother is ashamed of my socks. We move to Portland shortly after this picture is taken
.

Two Halsey Street sisters stand to my left on the day I enter the first grade. I am anxious because one girl is prepared with flowers for the teacher and I am not. Will the teacher like me?

At age seven my Yamhill smile begins to fade. Mother is disappointed because my socks show in this picture, paid for with a free coupon
.

In the fourth grade Evelyn, the older girl who played “Rustle of Spring,” and I are outfitted as tin soldiers for the operetta. Our puttees slip and have to be rewound, but we make it through the performance
.

Grandpa and Grandma Atlee stand apart in their general merchandise store. I peek into the right of the picture. Mother, who destroyed almost all pictures of herself, removed herself from this one with scissors.

Mother's determination holds our lives together in this house on Thirty-seventh Street.

When I am in the eighth grade, a friend's mother suggests taking this picture of me for a Christmas present to Mother, who, instead of being pleased, is angry. She has told me to avoid this friend, whom she considers “common
.”

The summer of 1930 began happily. Claudine and I, after my family moved to Thirty-seventh Street, became friends. I learned that she was a talented pianist and plump from lack of exercise because her kneecaps sometimes slipped out of place, causing her to fall.

The first thing we decided to do, on a warm summer day when the air of Portland was rich with the rotten-cabbage smell of paper mills, was use our new adult library cards.

We timidly approached the adult half of the book collection, choosing almost at random before we slipped back to the children's side of the room for old favorites.

After the library, Claudine and I went to the drugstore for Cokes before we walked back to her
house, where we settled ourselves on her taupe mohair davenport to read in companionable silence.

But then, in a week or so, Claudine and her mother went out to the Pudding River, which they referred to as Puddin', where the Klums had a cabin. The Miles girls all seemed busy and did not invite me to their house. I was lonely but not discontented. The library supplied me with books. High school lay ahead.

One evening, when Mother and Dad were drinking their tea and I was reading the newspaper in the living room, I sensed a terrible icy silence settle over our house, a silence that chilled me with fear. Something was wrong, terribly wrong.

Mother broke the silence with one syllable of despair. “Oh!” I heard Dad push back his chair, go into the bedroom, quietly shut the door, and throw himself on the bed. Why? I was terrified.

Mother came into the living room. “Daddy has lost his job,” she said softly. “The bank is dismissing the employees it took over from the West Coast National and has given them two weeks' notice.”

The Depression had come to us. Mother cleared the table and washed the dishes alone. I sensed she preferred solitude to help. I sat filled with anguish, unable to read, unable to do anything.
When Dad finally emerged from the bedroom, I felt so awkward I did not know what to say or even how to look at him. To pretend nothing had happened seemed wrong, but seeing him so defeated and ashamed of defeat, even though he was not to blame, was so painful that I could not speak. How could anyone do such a thing to my father, who was so good, kind, reliable, and honest?

That summer of 1930 was terrible for all three of us. My father wrote letters of application, applied for jobs in person, called on businessmen who had been friendly to him in the bank lobby, and asked if they had an opening or knew of one. Nothing. A man whose life had been farming had little to offer in the city but willingness to work, loyalty, a dignified appearance, and a gracious manner. “Mr. Bunn is a real gentleman” was often said of my father. In Portland his intelligence had been wasted.

Every workday morning he left the house. Late in the afternoon he came home with his shoulders sagging, his footsteps heavy.

Mother searched his face. “Well?” she always questioned.

“Nothing” was his answer. Everywhere men were being laid off, not hired.

The money in our bank account and the last paycheck must be stretched as far as they would
stretch, for every penny counted. Mother fidgeted, figuring on the backs of envelopes: so much to be set aside for property taxes, so much for my carfare to the orthodontist, and when she calculated that bus and streetcar fare cost less than the expenses of driving the car, so much for carfare for my father to look for work.

Mother took inventory of the cupboards, planned Spartan meals—macaroni and cheese, Spanish rice, creamed chipped beef on toast. Because our kitchen had bins for sugar and flour, we had bought these staples in hundred-pound sacks. Fortunately, the bins were full. Mother began to bake our own bread and, for her insatiable sweet tooth, cake, following recipes calling for one egg and the least amount of shortening. She ran out of vanilla and started to use a bottle of almond flavoring—a large bottle. We ate almond-flavored cake; almond-flavored cornstarch, tapioca, and bread puddings; almond-flavored cookies and custard. Mother even made almond-flavored fudge, until she used up all the chocolate. Then, as long as the brown sugar lasted, she made almond-flavored penuche. The Depression, for me, took on the flavor of almond, and to this day I dislike any almond-flavored dessert. When we ran out of tea, my parents drank hot water with supper. We brushed our teeth with baking soda to save the cost of toothpaste. Someone told my
father how to sharpen the blade of a safety razor on the inside of a straight-sided drinking glass. Making one blade last became a challenge. We stopped spending the weekly nickel on
The Saturday Evening Post
, to the disappointment of the boy who earned a few cents delivering it.

Evenings, my father carried a wicker chair out to the front porch, where he sat alone in the long Oregon dusk, sheltered from view by a curtain of Virginia creeper that hung from a wire between the porch pillars, whistling softly to himself, filling every tune with sorrow. Mother and I ached for my father in his despair, and I still grieve when I hear “Bedelia” or “Smile Awhile,” and, most heart-wrenching of all, a song about “the West, a nest, and you, dear.”

I felt so claustrophobic at home that I made my trips to the orthodontist last as long as I dared, wandering through Meier & Frank's department store looking at all the merchandise I could not buy. Almost every day I walked to the library, choosing books for Mother as well as for myself and lingering until I knew Mother would begin to worry.

Early August brought a welcome invitation. The Browns, who had once lived in the Halsey Street neighborhood, invited me to go to their mountain cabin for the weekend as company for their daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth and I slept
on cots in a tent pitched in huckleberry brush under ancient fir and hemlock trees.

That weekend was idle and restful. My tension drained away. As Elizabeth and I lay on our stomachs on a flat rock beside a stream that flowed through maidenhair fern past the cabin and on into the Zigzag River, we watched rainbow trout laze in the pool below. Like boys in Norman Rockwell covers on
The Saturday Evening Post
, we tried fishing with string and bent pins, but the trout were indifferent.

Sunday came. As time approached for Mr. Brown to drive me into Portland, leaving Mrs. Brown and Elizabeth behind, I began to dread going home. I wanted—was desperate—to stay in the mountains, and so I did the unforgivable, according to Mother's standards. I asked if I could stay longer. Mrs. Brown kindly said I could stay for a week.

Elizabeth had a saddle horse, Brownie, which kept her busy. While she was riding or grooming her horse, I lay in a hammock, staring up at bits of sky visible through the sieve of evergreen branches, swaying gently, thinking of nothing at all. Sometimes I wandered through the woods, chanting as I had learned to chant in our eighth-grade study of poetry:

One day, Mrs. Brown rented a horse for me, so I could go riding with a high school girl whose mother packed us a lunch that included two cantaloupes. We mounted our horses, which I called our “trusty steeds,” and rode off across the Zigzag River into a logged-off area where second-growth timber was beginning to rise out of the magenta blossoms of fireweed. We talked sporadically about life in Grant High School: which were the best courses, who were the favorite teachers, all that I could look forward to.

Still clutching our cantaloupes, we rode on until we came to a ghost logging camp, where we dismounted to eat an early lunch. Carrying cantaloupes on horseback was not practical, we decided. We ate near a decaying shanty that still bore a crude sign: “Haircuts two bits. Bring your own hair and shears.”

Then we rode on aimlessly, up a steep corduroy logging road made of slab wood wide enough for wagon wheels and now silver with age and weather. The sun warmed and relaxed my back.

In midafternoon we turned back, the horses' hooves slipping on the silver road. We did not know where we were; we trusted our horses to take us safely back to the cabins, which they did. I felt I wanted to ride on forever.

At the end of the week, on the highway back to Portland with Mr. Brown, I prayed my father
had found work. He had not. Worse, my parents were angry with each other, which filled me with a fear and sadness I had never before experienced. There had been tension over the sale of the farm, but at that time each understood and sympathized with the other.

This was something different. They argued in front of me. Dad said we would have to sell the house. Mother said flatly, “No we won't. We'll pull through somehow. We have to. If we let go of this house, we are lost.”

Finally Mother gave in. “Go ahead and advertise it,” she said in a voice stiff with anger, “if you must.”

Dad placed an advertisement in the Sunday paper, calling the house a bungalow. “Bungalow!” said Mother to me when he was out of hearing. “This is no bungalow. Bungalows are those cheap little houses out in Parkrose.” She loved her house and was fiercely proud of every inch, from the plate-glass windows in the living room and dining room to the hardwood floors. “The oak came from Siberia,” she always explained when they were admired.

That Sunday was a long, terrible day while we waited for the telephone to ring. It remained silent, so silent that its failure to ring became a jangle to our nerves. At the end of the day, I sensed Mother's triumph. No one was buying
houses; some were losing theirs because they could not meet mortgage payments. We would hang on to ours as long as we could.

My father gave up smoking his pipe to save a few cents. Then he sold the car. I felt, as he must have felt, that we were trapped in Portland forever.

With the sale of the car, I balked at the long walk to Sunday School, where Dad had driven me and picked me up afterward.

“But you must go to Sunday School,” said Mother.

“Why?” I asked. “You and Daddy haven't gone to church since Yamhill.”

“I don't have the clothes for church” was Mother's excuse.

“Do you go to church to worship God?” I asked. “Or do you go to worship clothes?”

Mother laughed and relented. “You have a point,” she said, “and it is a long walk in bad weather.” Spending money on bus fare was out of the question, and then there was the collection plate to think of.

As August wore on with no sign of work, my father grew more depressed and irritable. Late one afternoon, when Mother asked him if he would like potato soup for supper, he flew into a rage. “Don't ask me questions like that!” he shouted. “Don't expect me to make such deci
sions! If you do, I'll eat my meals in restaurants!” He went into the bedroom, slammed the door, and began to sob.

Mother and I sat motionless, helpless, and sick. Then Mother said in a weary voice, “He would have to make decisions in restaurants.” We both knew there was no money for restaurants.

Finally Mother quietly made the soup, but neither of us had any appetite. I thought of the revolver that still hung on my parents' bedpost, and of the bullets that lay on the dresser, and was filled with fear.

Late that evening my father finally came out, looking drawn and exhausted. Mother said softly, “Lloyd, sit down and smoke your pipe.” He smoked in silence and seemed to take comfort.

It's not his fault, I thought in anger.
It's not his fault
.

I excused myself and went to bed, where I tried to soothe myself by thinking of the mountains, the calm of the woods, the graceful trout. Remembering helped, but I felt as if all three of us had forgotten how to smile. I vowed that I would never ask my parents for anything that cost money, a vow I kept.

Mother wondered how she could earn money, but in those hard times no one would hire a married woman. Jobs went to men for the support of families. She did, however, work on the election
board and help take the 1930 United States census. After entering many contests, she won two dollars for Honorable Mention in naming a new brand of bread.