My Own Two Feet (12 page)

The next evening the train, late arriving in
Portland, waited on the east side of the Willamette River while a bridge was raised for a ship to pass through. There was nothing to do but watch the Sherwin-Williams sign, a paint can outlined in electric lights pouring paint made of hundreds of electric bulbs over a huge globe of the world. The words
COVER THE EARTH
lit up, the lights were extinguished, and the pouring of electric paint began again. Hypnotized by the sign, I wanted to sit on the prickly train seat for hours rather than move on into Union Station.

When the ship passed by, the bridge closed and the train crossed the river. My eager parents had arrived early because, as Mother explained, “We like to watch the people.” Mother's mother, Grandma Atlee, proper in her old-fashioned hat and gloves, was sitting quietly, waiting.

“Where's Grandpa?” I asked, puzzled. Mother explained that she had not wanted to tell me during finals, but he was in the hospital with what had turned out to be inoperable cancer and Grandma was now living with us. I appreciated her consideration, but the news was a shock. Somehow I had expected my grandparents to live forever.

There was another surprise. Dad had bought a car. He explained that when he lost his job and had to sell his car in 1929, he held back some
money that he invested in General Motors stock, which had increased in value until he could afford another Chevrolet, now a necessity because of my grandmother.

On the drive home I inhaled the fragrance of a new car and confessed that I was not doing as well at Cal as I had expected. I knew I could count on understanding from Dad, but I was not so sure about Mother. Here was another surprise. She said gently, “Too bad. You'll do better next time.” I hoped I would.

Whenever Dad turned a corner, Grandma whispered, “Oh, Lordy!” Except for a brief time when, over Mother's protests, Grandpa had bought and wildly driven a Model T Ford, Grandma had never ridden in an automobile until she came to live with us. Grandma called me Mable, Mother's name, and referred to Dad as “that gentleman.” Our amusement covered sorrow. I had known my grandmother's memory was failing, but I had not expected it to drift so far away.

The next evening, because neither Mother nor I could drive, a friend drove us to St. Vincent's Hospital to see my grandfather while my father stayed with my grandmother. My dear, kindhearted, funny Grandpa, drugged into half-sleep, lay in a narrow bed in a cheerless room. He
opened his eyes, said, “Mable,” and sank into deep sleep. Could he possibly know how much he meant to me? Memories overwhelmed me: Grandpa holding me on his knee and teaching me arithmetic before I started school; Grandpa's vegetable garden, where I had loved to pick up new potatoes when he turned over the soil; Grandpa's strawberry bed; Grandpa behind the counter of his general merchandise store measuring coffee into the red coffee grinder, cutting slabs of Tillamook cheese with a small guillotine, and weighing out bulk tea and oatmeal; Grandpa letting me help myself to gumdrops and cutting off “remnants” from bolts of fabric so I could make doll clothes; Grandpa joshing with drummers who came by train with heavy trunks to sell bolts of fabric, thread, stockings, corsets, and all the things my grandmother sold on her side of the store. That evening was the last time I saw my grandfather. After that I stayed with my grandmother while Dad drove Mother to the hospital.

In spite of her grief, Mother did not forget my social life. An Anglophile because she had loved her English grandparents so much, she was interested in the Commonwealth Fellows and asked many questions about them before she got down to what was really on her mind. Did I still
see Clarence? Yes, I did, but not exclusively. She repeated that I would be wise to drop him. After all, he was Catholic. Why did I no longer mention Jack? I told her, with wry amusement, the story of Jack the Bounder. At first she was shocked that such a man would be a member of the Masonic Club, where she had counted on my meeting nice young men. Then she said with a sigh, “Well, I suppose it was good experience for you.” I agreed. From Jack I had learned to trust my instincts.

Claudine's return from Dee for her Christmas vacation was a relief from the sorrow and tension at home. I usually spent afternoons at her house, where we had privacy because Mrs. Klum was often out playing bridge. Claudine, never one to complain, did drop bits of information that I pieced together. Teaching in an isolated sawmill town was an experience she endured rather than enjoyed, even though she liked her first- and second-grade children, a number of them Japanese. She and an uncongenial teacher shared a room in the house of a young married couple who lived outside town. The wife packed their lunches, which every single day consisted of sandwiches made of white bread and bottled sandwich spread of mayonnaise and chopped pickle with no meat, not even bologna. Dessert
was always a piece of chocolate cake. Dinners were not much better. Once a week she served wieners and sauerkraut.

The mill town was cold and lonely. Claudine and her roommate corrected papers in the evening and went to bed early. There was nothing else to do. There was no library, not even a bookmobile. The only way out of Dee was to ask the highway patrol for a ride to Hood River, where Claudine could catch a bus to Portland. I could see that she dreaded returning. She was wistful about my life at Cal, and her eighty dollars a month seemed like a fortune to me.

When I had to admit that Stebbins's monthly fee had been raised, my parents were shocked. What I had considered a challenge, they considered a hardship. I insisted I was able to manage, but Dad said, “I can scrape up another six dollars a month.” He also scraped up money for a wristwatch for Christmas.

It was a sad vacation. My nervous mother was exhausted from trips to the hospital. My gentle grandmother, confused in her new home, sat in a chair by the dining room window. “She has nothing to do,” said Mother, and snipped holes in our sugar-sack dish towels for Grandma to mend, work she enjoyed. Her stitches were as tiny and neat as the stitches in clothes she had made for
me when I was in the first grade. The memory of her marriage of over sixty years was gone. She never once mentioned my grandfather, whom she had married at the age of seventeen to escape a stepmother. Now she had only one memory left, a memory of her childhood in Michigan. When friends came to visit, she would sit quietly, apparently interested in the conversation. Then, when there was a pause, she would smile and say with pride, “Father gave the land for the school.”

I was not sorry to board the Southern Pacific for Berkeley even though I was confused and worried about my future, the one subject Mother had not cross-examined me on, and with all her troubles, I could not add to them by admitting that Cal's library school would not find my grades acceptable, that after feeling the atmosphere of the place, I did not even want to be admitted. Teaching? No, I did not want to teach. My grammar school days had left me with several bitter memories, but I knew others had memories far more bitter. I did not want to become an unhappy memory to children trapped in a classroom. Children were free to come and go in a library.

I tried but could not imagine a future for myself as the train pulled out of the station and the Sherwin-Williams sign drenched the earth with electric paint, retrieved it, and drenched it again.

Returning to the cheerful confusion of Stebbins was a relief after the tense, sad days in Portland. Then, on January 17, my grandfather died. Mother wrote that he had tried to climb over the bed railing, fallen, and contracted pneumonia. “It was a blessing,” Mother said. “Pneumonia is an old man's friend.” Poor Grandpa, so nimble as he climbed up and down a ladder to reach merchandise on the top shelves of his store, which had become the town's center. I couldn't bear to think of this kindhearted eighty-five-year-old man suffering alone on a cold hospital floor.

Grandpa's death was a sad start for a new semester. Mother, worn-out from hospital visits, the care of my grandmother, and the disposal of
my grandfather's store and the post office building he owned, did not remember that I no longer received money from him. I missed his monthly five dollars. But I held to my vow of never asking for money, so I shortened more skirts, and Mrs. Cochran paid me to make her a silk dressing gown she could slip into when she had to get up to unlock the front door for girls who had overstayed the two-thirty deadline. (Most, however, bypassed Mrs. Cochran by climbing in the ground-floor windows of accommodating friends.)

With one exception, my second-semester courses were the same as the first. Because I was not giving up on becoming a children's librarian and writing children's books, I decided courses in education might be useful. Unfortunately, Education 101, History of Education, was a prerequisite for any course in elementary education.

History of Education was the sort of class that began with students counting minutes, hoping the professor would be late, for Cal had an unwritten rule that if a professor was ten minutes late, students could leave. This one was always on time. All I remember about the uninteresting, to me, lectures was the professor's several references to Saint Simeon Stylites, who lived on top of a pillar for thirty-six years to call attention to
the evils of his time. I do not recall why this uncomfortable saint was mentioned at all.

What I do recall is the paper the entire class was required to write on one subject, “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” This paper had to be twenty-four pages long. Not twenty-three, not twenty-five. Twenty-four. Fortunately, I was fresh from Plato the previous semester, but I resented every word of that paper, every footnote, every
ibid
., every
op. cit
., and longed to add one footnote, “I thought of this myself.” Footnotes in foreign languages, according to the wisdom of Stebbins, always impressed a reader, but I couldn't work one in on Plato. Someday,
someday
, I vowed, I would write entire books without footnotes.

For some masochistic reason, I felt I should take a course in physical education even though this was not required of juniors. I have no idea why I felt this way because students got plenty of exercise climbing stairs and hurrying up and down hills. I chose Fencing, which surprised and amused athletic Clarence. Nevertheless, épée in hand and protected by a wire-mesh mask and quilted plastron, I lunged, parried, and thrust my way to a surprising B. Touché, Clarence Cleary! The educational residue of this course was a critical attitude toward fencing in movies. Very
sloppy, most of it seems to me, but then I did not have to duel my way up and down staircases.

At the end of my junior year, I took the train once more for Portland, where Sherwin-Williams still covered the earth. I was filled with ambition to study for the Comprehensive, that literary doomsday for English majors.

Because Cal's spring semester ended in May and the University of Oregon's in June, Virginia, a high school friend, invited me to come to Eugene to stay at her sorority house and attend a dance. She had rounded up the brother of a boy I had known in high school to escort me. I drove to Eugene with Bob, her fiancé, a young man I had introduced her to several years before.

That weekend in a sorority house was quite different from life at Stebbins. A number of girls were engaged to be married, which seemed the fashionable thing to do in those days when many Oregon parents sent their daughters to college to “catch a husband,” an expression I had never heard applied to Cal. The girls were not treated like adults. Immediately after the dance they were expected to return to the sorority house, where the housemother stood at the door. There were no kisses, no lingering goodnights. The girls slept on a sleeping porch in double-decker bunks like those in the Camp Fire Girls' summer camp,
and most girls had their own busily ticking alarm clock. On school days the ringing must have been even more annoying than the thumping, whacking steam radiators of Stebbins Hall.

The dining room was attractive and homelike, but conversation was not as lively as that of Stebbins girls, probably because the housemother, unlike Mrs. Cochran, presided. After breakfast we attended a softball game and a beery fraternity picnic. I was glad I was attending Cal.

I had a glimpse of Claudine before her school was out. She had decided she could not face another bleak year in Dee with sandwich-spread sandwiches and chocolate cake, so one Saturday she took a carsick bus trip down the Columbia River Highway to Portland, a ride that did not make most Oregonians carsick because they stopped and got out of their cars to admire every waterfall along the way. Once again Claudine's mother and a friend drove Claudine to a suburb to be interviewed by a school superintendent, who was also the owner of a roadhouse. It was late afternoon, but he and his wife were dressed for work, he in a tuxedo and she in a long evening dress. Claudine was ill at ease and so, apparently, was he. After a few hurried questions, he said, “Take off your coat and walk around the room.” He was used to hiring dancers, not teach
ers. Embarrassed, Claudine did as she was told, and she was hired. She returned to Dee to finish the remaining days of her bleak school year.

I tried to do some reading that might be useful in taking the Comprehensive, but somehow I had trouble concentrating. My mind wandered from Milton to Clarence and to Berkeley, where I could in my “right hand lead with thee, the mountain nymph, sweet Liberty,” the only lines from Milton that I could remember, and ones that I had learned in high school.

Sweet Liberty was scarce in Portland that summer. While Mother shopped or went to the library, I stayed with my grandmother and knit a red dress with yarn I had been able to buy when Miriam admired the pink silk dress I had knit at Chaffey so much that she asked to buy it. I also sewed, making a dress for myself and a dress for Mother. I helped can, or “put up,” tomatoes, peaches, and string beans in the steamy kitchen, an annual chore.

I was lonely and missed Claudine. When her semester ended in Dee, she decided to take her savings from eighty dollars a month and attend summer session at the University of Washington. This surprised me. While I had been traveling up and down the coast, Claudine had stayed close to home.

While Claudine was gone, Olive Miles, a neigh boring school friend, and I stayed with Grandma for a week while my parents went to the beach so Mother could rest. I shopped and cooked while Olive took care of Grandma, helping her dress, guiding her to the bathroom, helping her to bed. We both listened politely whenever Grandma told us, “Father gave the land for the school.”

With Claudine gone so long and other friends working, the summer seemed endless. I missed the leisurely days at Puddin', and I felt guilty because I could not bring myself to study Milton.

Mother was concerned. “Why don't you write?” she suggested.

My mind was a blank, but I did write. I wrote letters to Clarence, who was working full-time in Bedding and Linen during the summer. This was not what Mother had in mind.

Clarence wrote that he wanted to telephone me. What would be a good time? A long-distance call—I had never talked long-distance. I wrote that he should call me on Friday evening because that was the time my parents left to do the week's marketing while I stayed with my grandmother.

At dinner that evening, because I was so excited, I foolishly remarked that Clarence was going to telephone me about seven-thirty.

Mother went rigid with disapproval. “We don't have to shop this evening,” she informed me.

I was bewildered. “But you always go to market on Friday night.”

“We are not going to be driven out of our own house,” she said.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. When Jane had expected a long-distance call from a man, the entire Chourré family climbed into their car and went for a ride so she could have privacy.

The minutes ticked by on my grandfather's clock on the mantel as we all sat silent, tense. The telephone rang and I answered, glad to hear Clarence's gentle voice but furious because Mother and Dad were listening to every word I said. We talked briefly before I burst into tears, tears because he was so far away, tears because I was not allowed a few minutes of privacy. The call was short. I did not want to waste Clarence's money on tears.

Afterward I went to my room, threw myself on my bed, and wept in anger. There was silence in the living room until Dad came in, sat down on the bed, patted my back, tried to comfort me, and said he was sorry. I did not see Mother until the next morning. Never one to apologize or admit she had done anything wrong, she was tight-lipped and our conversation was stiff.

Claudine's return from the University of Washington was a relief. I could go to her house in the afternoon. She reported that she had taken all the music she could crowd in and had excelled in every course except one. For some reason as illogical as my taking fencing, Claudine, who could play anything she heard on the piano, had taken a course in the clarinet. Perhaps she was influenced by Benny Goodman, for this was the beginning of the Swing Era. She said all she could get out of the clarinet was a squawk. I reminded her of the time she had tried to give me piano lessons. As I struggled, she said, “Just
play
it.” My playing made her so impatient we finally gave up. We found this episode funny, and whenever we faced difficulty, told each other to “just
play
it.”

I soon had an opportunity to try to just play it. One afternoon when a letter from Clarence slid through the mail slot, I sat down in the living room to read it. Mother, sitting on the davenport, looked up from her book to watch me. When I had finished the letter and returned it to its envelope, she asked with a sprightly smile, artificially sprightly I knew, “Well, what does he say?”

“Oh, nothing much,” I answered, and added in an attempt at conversation, “His roommate
wants to move into an apartment next semester and wants him to go along.”

Mother dropped her book and sat up straight. “You are
not
to go to that apartment,” she informed me.

I was astonished. Obviously, I had done a poor job of just “playing it.” “I wasn't planning to,” I said quite truthfully because such an idea had not entered my head. The apartment, I guessed, would be on the south side of the campus in a run-down Victorian house with peeling paint.

“Just see that you don't,” said Mother. “No nice girl goes to a man's apartment.”

I considered this remark. Once Wilfrid and Campbell had invited Miriam and me for dinner in the attractive apartment they shared on the north side of the campus, an area that had been destroyed by fire in the 1920s and rebuilt with modern homes and apartment buildings. The table was tastefully decorated with a stack of cans of Campbell soup in honor of Campbell. Perhaps it was his birthday. The evening was innocent, and Miriam and I remained as nice as when we had accepted the invitation. Probably we left soon after dinner because Miriam went to bed so early.

After learning of the apartment, Mother grew more intense. At dinner, with her mouth set in
a straight line that gave the meal a trial-like atmosphere so familiar from high school days, she informed Dad that Clarence was moving into an apartment. No wrath was brought down upon my head. Dad accepted the news calmly. Later, he took me aside and said quietly, “It's a good idea to be careful about going to a man's apartment.”

“Of course,” I said, noting that he didn't say I should not go. He just said I should be careful. Dad trusted me and felt I was sensible enough to make my own decisions.

Finally the day came for me to leave. On the way to Union Station, with Grandma in her hat and gloves saying, “Lordy!” every time we turned a corner, Mother said, “Under the circumstances, most parents wouldn't let you go back to college.”

I didn't answer. All I wanted to do was get on that train and escape, even if it meant facing the Comprehensive.