A Girl from Yamhill (16 page)

When my junior year in high school began, I wanted to continue with ballroom dancing because we were about to learn the tango. I pictured myself slinking along like one of Rudolph Valentino's movie partners, a most unrealistic dream because none of the boys in the class would be good slinkers. Gerhart said he had had enough. Mother said I did not need to tango.

I lost the annual lipstick set-to, but I won the debate over my course of study in a year in which we were now given more choice. United States history and English were required, but Mother could not understand why I preferred journalism to solid geometry, though she conceded that it might be of use to a writer. Why I wanted to study French instead of plunging ahead into the
pleasures of Cicero and Virgil in Latin was beyond her. “French!” she said. “What on earth is the use of studying French?”

I did not know why I wanted to study French. Perhaps I recalled Mrs. Williams from Halsey Street with her interesting accent and tales of Paris, or perhaps I was thinking of Miss Crawford's telling of
Les Misérables
. No one in our neighborhood expected to actually go to France, and courses were aimed at acquiring a reading, not a speaking, knowledge. I took French.

I also enrolled in a class called “Clothing,” an act of self-defense. I had begun to make my own clothes because Mother's sewing was so careless she did not bother to pull out basting threads. School was interesting, more interesting than Gerhart.

Miss Anderson, our journalism teacher, chanted “Who, what, where, when, and why” and “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy” in a class less structured than any class I had known. Even though I still had trouble with outlines, journalism taught me to set words on paper faster and with better organization than I had been able to do before. Writing “30” at the end of our copy made us all feel very professional.

Junior English, in addition to
The Century Handbook of Writing
, began with mock meetings held in accordance with Roberts'
Rules of Order
,
followed by a sentence-by-sentence dissection of Edmund Burke's
Speech on Conciliation with America
.

Debates followed. I do not recall the exact title of my assignment, but it was something like, “Resolved: Chain stores are a menace to society.” Inspired by Grandpa Atlee's dread of chain stores, I researched and delivered a stirring speech denouncing chain stores as evil and calling their employees “human automatons.” (I smile at this memory whenever a chain store employee notices my name on my check and tells me how much he or she enjoyed my books when growing up.) My partner and I lost the debate, but I was voted best speaker. Grandpa would have called his only granddaughter a humdinger.

And then there was Gerhart, still Gerhart.

I enjoyed high school football games with the rest of the mob, returning home late for supper and hoarse from cheering. I was pleased with my journalism beat—the school cafeteria and the Biology Department—and proud of my first published stories: an interview with the cafeteria manager and a story on the comparative chest expansions of the football team. Gerhart poked fun at both of these articles.

Because he often worked nights, he had free time during the day. He began to pick me up at school at the beginning of the lunch hour, driving
me home for what Mother called “a good hot lunch,” which was usually eggs
à la
goldenrod, and delivering me back to school in time for class. At first this seemed convenient. Then I understood that Gerhart's real motive was not my hot lunch but showing boys at school that I was his property.

I began to take my lunch to school once more and to make excuses to prevent Gerhart's coming over in the evening: a paper to write, a French test the next day, poetry to memorize. He came, but he did not come into the house. Mother reported that he often sat in his car parked across the street, watching to see if I stayed home. Mother found his possessiveness both amusing and flattering.

Mother, who once told me I was seeing too much of Gerhart, began to say, “Now, you be nice to Gerhart. He's lonely, and he's been good to you.”

Had he been good to me? As Mother pointed out, we saw only movies he wanted to see, never those I wanted to see, not even Katharine Hepburn in
Little Women
. And what about his sulking at losing at two-handed bridge and his continual ridicule of activities I enjoyed? More and more, I did not want to be nice to Gerhart. I edged away from him, sitting as far away from him as I could whenever I went out in his car.
Other boys my age began to appear more interesting.

At school, I had casual, joking friendships with boys, but these were not the boys who asked me to go to school dances or to the movies. Three boys from school did take me out, but they were shy, serious, and awkward. The boys were disappointed in me, too. Away from school, I was shy, serious, and awkward. Inviting them into the house for something to eat did not occur to me, probably because Mother did not suggest it.

A Reed College freshman I shall call Roger, who was introduced to me by a classmate, invited me to a dance held in the Reed College Commons. Roger turned out to be more interesting than high school boys, even though his dancing was worse than mine. He loped to some mysterious rhythm all his own, with great enthusiasm and sweat on his brow.

When he brought me home, he parked his grandmother's Franklin in our driveway and sat with his hands resting on the steering wheel. Finally I asked, “Aren't you going to get out and open the door for me?”

He grinned and said, “That bit of chivalry is outmoded. Women are capable of opening car doors for themselves.”

Secretly I agreed, but, having taken a stand, I
felt I could not back down. “I won't get out till you open the door,” I informed him.

“And I am not going to open it for you,” he said.

I sat and he sat.

Mother, I was sure, would be waiting to lecture me, “What will the neighbors think with you parked in the driveway with a boy until all hours?” I had to find a way out of this impasse, and fast. I finally rolled down the car window and climbed out without opening the door. Roger then got out of the car and walked me up the steps.

For the next couple of years, Roger occasionally took me loping around the floor of the Reed College Commons or the dance floor at Jantzen Beach, an amusement park popular with the high school and college crowd. We never argued about his opening the door again; I opened it myself. Instead, we argued about kissing.

One evening, when Roger brought me home, he asked, “May I kiss you?”

“Of course not,” I said. Girls did not kiss boys quite so readily. Besides, I was self-conscious about my mouthful of wire.

“You're overcompensating,” Roger said. “You want to kiss me so much you are afraid to.”

“That's the dumbest thing I ever heard,” I told him in indignation.

If he had kissed me without asking, I doubt
that I would have minded. As it was, we never kissed. We argued. Roger made me realize there were men who were much more interesting to talk to than Gerhart.

Unexpectedly, something happened to take my mind temporarily off boys. Miss Burns, the chairman of the English Department, called me into her office and asked me, as president of the Migwan Club, to take charge of writing the script for the Girls' League Show, which was to raise money for a scholarship. All girls in school automatically belonged to the league. She suggested Jane Welday, a bright girl with a sense of humor, as another writer. The show was to involve as many school clubs as we could work in.

Jane and I concocted a script called
They Had to See Europe
. We worked hard and fast, taking turns writing episodes that involved stereotypical characters: Joan, a debutante, seeing Europe with her father, D. Saunders Clarke, “president of the First National Bank of Scappoose”; Bob, a handsome young chemist in love with Joan; a mother with a spoiled little girl; two comic spinsters; a stowaway poet; and a pair of comic detectives, Oscar MacSnarf and Homer J. Butterbottom. This drama, which involved love and stolen jewels, took place on the deck of a ship represented by a railing with a life preserver in front of the curtain. At the end of each scene, the auditorium would be
darkened, the ship's railing hoisted out of sight by the stage crew, and the curtains opened to reveal the travelers in a different country.

When the script was complete, Mrs. Graham, the biology teacher in charge of the production, said to me, “Beverly, you are just as pretty as the girls who get all the attention around this school. Miss Burns and I want you to play the leading lady.”

I thought of myself as a plain girl with an unruly permanent wave, no lipstick, and a mouthful of glittering bands and wires, but now—well yes, thank you, Mrs. Graham, I would be delighted to play the leading lady.

As I walked home with Claudine, I was elated. No one had ever called me pretty before. I suddenly felt pretty. Pretty me! Pretty me!

This was one day I did not stop at Claudine's house. I hurried home to tell Mother; I telephoned friends. Mother, as pleased as I, told our next-door neighbor. “Good for you,” everyone said. “It's time someone other than the same old clique received some attention.”

Just before supper, the telephone rang. I answered. The call was from a girl prominent in Girls' League. Maybe some of the girls were becoming less snobbish, I thought. Then she said, “Some of us have been talking it over and have decided you should drop out of the show.”

I had trouble believing what I was hearing.
“How come?” I finally asked, my pleasure turning to bewilderment and then to anger.

“Because you don't have the clothes to play the part,” she informed me.

Bolstered by one of Mother's maxims from my childhood, “Show your spunk,” I did not agree to withdraw.

This insulting call infuriated Mother. She began to relate the incident by telephone to her friends, always concluding with, “I don't know whether to have her go through with it or not.”

Finally I told Mother I had every intention of going through with the show. But how? Fortunately, others rallied in my behalf. Our next-door neighbor offered a Spanish shawl, fringed and embroidered in silk, for an evening wrap to wear over my own bias-cut white satin formal, my one treasured luxury. Virginia, my most prosperous friend, said, “Bev, you can borrow any of my things.” Her clothes were made by a dressmaker.

I overheard Mother whisper a surprising statement to Dad: “If she has it in her to go ahead and be somebody, we should back her up.” She never made such statements to me.

I was doubtful about borrowing clothes, for Mother had taught me never to borrow anything more than a cup of sugar; but for once, Mother relaxed her anti-borrowing rule. “Virginia is such a good-hearted girl,” she said, and I agreed. I se
lected several dresses, matching, but not quite fitting, shoes, and a coat. Rehearsals, after-school hours of excitement and fun, began. A rumor was started that the boy who was to play the young chemist madly in love with Joan would
really
kiss me as the curtain descended at the end of the show. We both backed away from this during rehearsals.

Mother tried to persuade Gerhart to attend the show, but he refused, I was glad.

The night of the performance, there was a great flurry of being made up (lipstick at last!) by the drama teacher and changing into costumes, everyone busy, important, in a hurry. The house-lights were dimmed by the chief of the stage crew, and on the arm of a portly boy billed as D. S. Clarke, my father and president of the Scappoose Bank, I stepped out before the footlights in front of a full house.

The pair of detectives appeared and accused my father of smuggling jewels. Not having expected to play a part in the production, I was stuck with lines such as, “But, Father—”

Bob, the chemist, appeared and cried, “Joan!”

I cried back, “Bob! You shouldn't be here! The only reason Father is taking me to Europe is to get me away from you!”

This drama continued between acts in Germany, France, England, and Italy, where D. S. Clarke and I squatted and scooted across the
stage behind a one-dimensional gondola while “Funiculi, Funicula” was played by Grant's one accordion player.

The plot hung on D. S. Clarke's seasickness and some curative pills invented by Bob, which he produced when the president of the First National Bank of Scappoose moaned, “Go away, everybody, and let me die!” After one of Bob's pills, the bank president made an instant recovery and asked the price of the prescription from Bob.

Bob: “Nothing, if you will let me marry Joan.”

D. S. Clarke: “Marry her! Young man, you may take her with my blessing.”

My last line was “Father!” as I fell into the arms of Bob, who kissed me rather hastily as the curtain was lowered—but that kiss was long enough to let me know that there were better kisses in the world than Gerhart's.

The curtain rose again. Applause. Bows. The eyeglasses of my parents twinkled from the center of the third row. Afterward friends and several boys I barely knew gathered to congratulate me.

The next week I received a formal note from the league thanking me for my contribution.

Pooh to you, I thought.

Toward the end of my junior year, on a trip to the orthodontist, I detoured into Meier & Frank's personnel office for an application for a summer job as a cashier or elevator operator. Proud of my attempt at helping out and eager for a bit of independence, I told my parents what I had done.

“You are not filling out any application for Meier & Frank,” said Dad.

“But I want to help,” I protested, near tears.

“No daughter of ours is going to be seen working in Meier & Frank,” said Mother.

Everyone was short of money. Mrs. Miles planned to take her girls out to harvest strawberries and raspberries when school was out and invited Claudine and me to go along. Even though I knew the work would be back-breaking,
I was eager to go, to earn money, to be with my friends.

“Certainly not,” said Mother.

“Mrs. Klum is letting Claudine go,” I persisted.

“I don't care what Mrs. Klum is letting Claudine do,” said Mother. “You're not going.” Then she added, “I don't see how Mrs. Miles manages with five girls.”

Just before school was out, Mother telephoned the dean of girls at Grant to ask if someone in the neighborhood wanted a baby-sitter. I was humiliated. If she wanted me to baby-sit for strangers, why couldn't I ask the dean myself? I received a call from a woman wanting me to stay with her two-year-old son for an afternoon. I did not even know there was a two-year-old in the neighborhood. During the Depression, babies were luxuries few people in our neighborhood could afford. The baby next door, with whom I sat when he was asleep, was the only one I knew. Apprehensively, I went to the woman's house. She pointed to the kitchen stacked with dirty dishes I was to wash, peas to shell, the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the living room, dusting to be done. About her little boy her parting words were “I hope you can do something with him. I can't.”

I spent a terrible afternoon. The child was more than I could handle and still cope with
housework. As soon as I put my hands in dishwater, he was out the back door and down the street. I ran after him and carried him, kicking and screaming, home. He refused to take his nap. He threw things. He hit me. Somehow I managed to get through the stack of dishes while trying to keep the child from harm. Late in the afternoon I sat down on the kitchen floor with him and entertained him by getting him to shell peas along with me while I thought longingly of an elevator at Meier & Frank and a real paycheck, even a small one. At six o'clock the mother came home, frowned at the vacuum cleaner still in the middle of the living room, handed me fifty cents, and told me to vacuum the living room before I left.

I felt incompetent and exploited, and I flatly refused ever again to baby-sit for strangers. This angered Mother. Helping out would not hurt me, she said. I wanted to help, but not by being paid a pittance trying to do two jobs at once in someone's dirty kitchen.

My junior year ended. Franklin Roosevelt was running for President. “Wouldn't it be wonderful if he were elected and could turn this country around?” Mother said, not really believing he could.

Mother's old friends from her school-teaching days wrote that they were coming to Portland. She replied, “What a disappointment! We have
to be out of town just when you are going to be here.” We did not answer the telephone while they were in town. “Friends,” Mother said, “cost money.”

My father spent his vacation painting the outside of the house. I heard worried whispers between my parents. How were they ever going to set anything aside for their old age? What were they going to do with Beverly? I wondered, too. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself.

Once Gerhart, in spite of Mother's disapproval, took me to see a marathon dance contest. Those pathetic, exhausted couples dragging one another around the dance floor under the supervision of a smarmy master of ceremonies in hopes of winning a few dollars—and what about the losers? They were desperate, too. This was the Depression at its most degrading. I demanded to be taken home, away from those hurting, shuffling feet.

When Gerhart said he wanted to buy one of the new Ford V-8s, Mother said, “Now, Gerhart, don't you do it. You save your money. You'll need it someday.” As he drove up the driveway in a new V-8, I had an irrational feeling of surprise that he had defied Mother, and a taste of bitterness because he could afford a new car when Dad had been forced to sell ours.

Then Claudine and her mother left for Puddin',
and Gerhart drove off to California to spend his two weeks' vacation visiting his family. I was glad to see him go, so very glad I went limp with relief and faced at last how much I had come to dislike him.

When the Fourth of July came, Mother said, “You should have an invitation to a picnic. When I was your age, boys always invited me to Fourth of July picnics, and we always had a glorious time.”

Even though I felt guilty, a social failure and disappointment to my mother, I did not want to go to a Fourth of July picnic. I wanted a real job, or I wanted to be left alone to lie on my bed in my room and read Willa Cather.

My reading, secluded in my room with the door shut, annoyed Mother. She constantly talked to me through the door and accused me of being snooty. I was not snooty. I was confused and unhappy, and wanted time to think without Mother telling me what to think.

One afternoon, when Gerhart had been gone about a week, I was lying on my bed watching butterflies sip from purple panicles of sun-warmed blossoms on the bush outside my window, and wondering what was to become of me, when Mother called from the dining room, “Beverly, come here a minute.”

As I stepped from the hall door into the living
room, a hand reached out and stroked my hair. It was Gerhart, who had flattened himself against the wall so I would not see him until I was in the room. I was startled and angry, cheated out of another week without him.

“Come on. Let's go for a ride,” he said, or ordered, for Mother was sure to say, “Go on, Beverly. You've been cooped up all day.”

We drove around awhile, ending in the usual place, the Swan Island airport, where Gerhart turned to me and said, “Will you marry me?”

Marry
him? Marriage to anyone, especially Gerhart, was of no interest to me when my life had not really begun. Embarrassed and bewildered, I made my refusal as tactful as I could manage. A proposal of marriage was, after all, supposed to be the greatest compliment a man could pay. Gerhart's jaw clenched. He shoved his V-8 into gear and, without a word, drove me home and left. Mother gave me a sharp look, but I said nothing.

Gerhart did not stay away. I resented his touching me and shrugged away from him. Once, when his grasp was insistent, I startled him by ordering, “Unhand me, greybeard loon!” He obeyed, but must have been mystified by the words from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He had not been required to memorize hundreds of lines of poetry.

One evening, when my father and I were alone in the living room, Dad said quietly, “You know, you don't have to go out with Gerhart if you don't want to.” I don't remember my answer, but I do remember how his gentle words soothed my troubled heart. I knew I had an ally in what had become an intolerable situation, one that was abetted by Mother. Why, when she was so quick to point out Gerhart's flaws to me? I can only guess that my life made her life more interesting, she was trying to relive her youth through me, and she enjoyed her duties as self-appointed chaperone on picnics and trips to the beach.

It was Claudine who unknowingly rescued me. She wrote from Puddin' inviting me to come out for a while.

I was packed and was waiting when Mr. Klum picked me up in his gray Model T sedan, to which he was fiercely loyal because “it gets me where I want to go.” With Spud, a dog he had rescued from the pound for company when he worked nights, we drove out of Portland through Oregon City, turned off the highway at a water tank, wound past meadows of grazing cows, drove through a covered bridge, and on until we came to the Colvins' Pudding River Camp Ground and Picnic Resort and the Klums' cabin, which Mr. Klum called “the shack” in the same affectionate way he called Spud his “pooch.”