My Own Two Feet Part 4

Students' worries over grades still puzzled me. Except for that D in Botany, which had been changed to a B+, I had never really worried about grades. If a subject interested me, I earned an A; if it did not, I plodded through to fulfill requirements and earned a B. After all, like Mother, I had my pride. It had not occurred to me that all the students at Cal were equally good, even better, or they wouldn't be there.

Now I heard worried conversations about professors who "graded on the curve," which seemed to have different meanings for different professors but appeared to mean that for every A a D should be given, the number of B's should equal the number of C's. This seemed unjust to me. Did professors never find themselves with a cla.s.s of brilliant students, all of whom deserved A's? Apparently not. Some students were labeled by others as "D.A.R.s," which stood for "d.a.m.ned Average Raisers."

I still was not worried about grades, and so one afternoon when I had free time I climbed the stairs to the School of Librarianship to inquire about courses that might be useful to a children's librarian. The secretary eyed me with such a haughty look that I lost my confidence and felt exactly what I was, an immature student in bobby socks.

"The school offers little in children's work," she said and added, "Are you an A student?" in a tone that implied she was sure I wasn't.

"Well-no," I admitted. "So far A's and B's."

She said, "I'm sorry," which she obviously wasn't. "The students in the School of Librarianship are almost entirely A students." She turned her attention to the work on her desk.

Abashed in my bobby socks, I left. As I descended the stairs I felt defeated and then angry. How dare this woman treat a student, any student, with such arrogance? My wavering confidence stiffened. I was sure I had something to offer, and I was not at all sure straight A's would have anything to do with it. I returned to my room, wrote to the University of Washington for a catalog of their courses in librarianship, and got on with my studies.

The course that I looked forward to three times a week was The Novel, taught by Professor Benjamin Lehman, who had once been married to the actress Judith Anderson, which impressed his students. At first I was dubious about Professor Lehman because he began by speaking out against students who worked their way through college. In Europe, he said, students devoted all their time to their studies. I thought of the men who had started the student cooperatives at Cal. They had been so determined to go to the university that they had worked in the fields all summer and were paid in produce, which kept them going through the first year while they organized the cooperatives and attended cla.s.ses. Although Professor Lehman's remarks seemed cruel to me, his course came to mean more to me than any other course I have ever taken.

Professor Lehman was a short, slightly stooped man who entered the cla.s.sroom at the last minute, faced the cla.s.s from behind the lectern, and delivered fascinating lectures on novels, beginning with Pamela, the first of fourteen or fifteen novels we read that year. At the end of the lecture he turned and walked straight out the door. One sentence that he repeated has stayed with me all my life, and I often think of it as I write: "The proper subject of the novel is universal human experience." A phrase that has also stayed with me is "the minutiae of life," those details that give reality to fiction. It is a long leap from Peregrine Pickle, Tristram Shandy, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and all the other novels we studied that year to the books I was to write about Henry, Ramona, and Leigh Botts, but I know, if others may not, that the influence of Professor Lehman is there. I was so pressured, however, that I studied Tom Jones without realizing it was a funny story, and I was not the only one.

For English 117I, Shakespeare, I have checked in my text eight plays that we read that semester. English 117J, "designed primarily for juniors whose major subject is English," dealt with nine more plays, as well as Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and the relationship of his work to the Elizabethan theater and to contemporary thought and literature. Both courses were taught by Professor Guy Montgomery, a little man who wore a beard like that on the well-known bust of Shakespeare. He gave more life to the works of Shakespeare than my former teachers. I could compare because I had already studied Macbeth in high school and junior college. I am probably the only student in the United States to major in English without studying Hamlet. With the dread Comprehensive looming, I read but never actually studied it.

Philosophy 5A and 5B were taught by Professor Pepper, who p.r.o.nounced idea as if it had an r on the end and said he would automatically fail anyone who wrote examinations in green ink. We read Lucretius and Plato the first semester and Berkeley, Tawney, Hume, and Dewey the second semester. The large cla.s.s was divided into discussion groups that met once a week. In one of these groups I wrote down a discussion in my section. I wish I had kept it because it revealed that no one, student or section leader, had any idea what he was talking about.

In choosing my German course I took the advice of Stebbins girls: Never study a foreign language from someone with a name in the same language because the course will be much more difficult. I chose to take the course from a Mr. Corrigan, who in spite of his Irish name turned out to be a blue-eyed blond. I plodded along with a cla.s.s of mostly men who were planning to be engineers or medical students.

The subject matter of Developmental Psychology was interesting, but the professor was not. He had tan hair, wore a tan suit and tan tie, and spoke in a monotone that I thought of as a tan voice. I suspect he did not enjoy teaching undergraduates and was eager to get back to his graduate students, a common failing of Cal professors.

Midterm examinations were enlightening. On the way to cla.s.s we stopped at the corner drugstore to buy blue pamphlets in which to write our examinations, which were to be graded by "readers" who were graduate students. Professors, it seemed to me, did not stoop to read examinations, although, to be fair, they probably did read those their readers considered best-or worst.

Stebbins circulated a myth that it was possible to outwit a reader by writing "Second Blue Book" on the front and writing one brilliant last sentence inside. This was supposed to make the reader believe he had lost the first blue book, which would fill him with such guilt that, rather than admit to carelessness, he would give the student an A.

Several days after midterms, the blue books were piled alphabetically on the floor outside cla.s.srooms. When I collected mine, I was shocked. Instead of A's and B's, I had sunk to B's and C's. What was wrong? Obviously, I must work harder, and others felt the same way. We no longer sang on our way to the library or played games on the lawn of the Pacific School of Religion.

One of my problems was the tremendous amount of reading in small print required in English courses. The print in the Oxford Standard Edition of Shakespeare was finer than that of the Bible. The print in many novels we read was also fine. German, in those days, was printed in Gothic rather than in Roman type, which was difficult to read with the best of eyes. Once more I broke my vow of never asking my parents for anything and wrote home saying I needed gla.s.ses. Once more Mother wrote that I was not to wear gla.s.ses. I should drop out of school and come home. Why? Probably because she wanted me home and did not want my appearance marred by gla.s.ses. So I struggled on, unable to afford gla.s.ses and unaware that Cowell Hospital, always sympathetic to student health problems, might have helped.

Second midterms were not much better than the first. And then finals. A saxophone player in the apartment house next door poured sorrow into "Solitude." I sat at my desk and looked out at the limp, dejected underwear dripping in the rain on the clotheslines. Evenings, from time to time and for no reason, male voices would call out, "Pe-e-dro-o-o-o," a sad and lonely sound, a Cal custom whose origins were lost, if not in the mists of time, in the fog of San Francisco.

Tension mounted at Stebbins. Some students stayed up all night to study, or tried to. One girl took a pill to keep awake all night, and at breakfast reported, "It was horrible. I desperately wanted to sleep and couldn't." Another girl, who had been issued one sleeping pill by Cowell Hospital, told us, "I woke up feeling as if I hadn't slept at all."

In those days, before ballpoint pens, we filled our fountain pens, emptied them, and refilled them just to make sure. We self-addressed postcards to enclose in our blue books so readers could send us our grades before official grades came out. Then, as was the Cal custom the first day of finals, the Campanile tolled "An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the morn'."

Pessimists brought bottles of ink in case their pens ran dry. Sometimes a student without a watch brought a noisy clock that ticked on the nerves of the rest of the cla.s.s. Mimeographed sheets of questions were pa.s.sed out. The professor ostentatiously left the room, for Cal operated on the honor system. We read, contemplated, estimated time for each answer, and began to write. I did not have a watch, so I had to rely on my time sense. As we wrote, someone's pen was sure to leak and a profane word was whispered. In every exam I have ever taken, someone, almost always a man, arose from his chair long before the Campanile struck the hour, dropped his blue book on a table at the front of the room, and walked out, leaving the rest of us to wonder if he was brilliant and found the exam so easy he finished quickly or if he found the exam so difficult it was hopeless.

The honor system seemed to work in all my cla.s.ses except German. As soon as the instructor left the room, answers were whispered back and forth and, once, announced to the whole cla.s.s. I gritted my teeth, tried to tune everyone out, and clung to my honor even though I knew I would never excel in German.

At Stebbins we watched the mail for postcards. Most of us were disappointed, although the reader for Psychology 170 added a kind note to my postcard telling me I had written an excellent final but he could not give me an A because I had not done well in the first midterm. He gave me a B. I had a respectable B average, but where were all the A's I was used to?

Cal gave us a month's vacation between semesters, so we did not feel we should be writing papers or studying for finals like Oregon students. Miriam and I washed our windows; I packed my bag, said good-bye to Clarence, and, discouraged, took the train to Portland for my first Christmas at home since I was in high school. I was ashamed. My father had borrowed on his life insurance to pay my nonresident tuition, my mother frequently reminded me of the sacrifices she made for me, and now I was not living up to their expectations. Sleeping in a Pullman car was difficult. I dozed, and at Dunsmuir, in the middle of the night, the train backed and b.u.mped as another engine, facing backward, was added to the rear to help push the train over the mountains. It reminded me of the pushmi-pullyu, an animal with a head at either end in the Dr. Dolittle books I had read and reread as a child.

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 pa.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.kly train seat for hours rather than move on into Union Station.

When the ship pa.s.sed 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 j.a.panese. 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 sc.r.a.pe up another six dollars a month." He also sc.r.a.ped up money for a wrist.w.a.tch 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 st.i.tches were as tiny and neat as the st.i.tches 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 cla.s.sroom. 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.

Two Vacations.

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, bypa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic 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, epee in hand and protected by a wire-mesh mask and quilted plastron, I lunged, parried, and thrust my way to a surprising B. Touche, Clarence Cleary! The educational residue of this course was a critical att.i.tude 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 fiance, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 teachers. Embarra.s.sed, 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 ch.o.r.e.

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 Chourre 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 circ.u.mstances, 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.

Clarence and the Comprehensive.

The bells of the Campanile, and even the smell of catsup, lifted my spirits when I returned to Cal. Red roses from Clarence delivered by a florist, the wildest extravagance, lifted them even more. I kept the roses until their petals faded to dull purple and finally dropped softly to my desk. Clarence invited me to dinner at his apartment, and of course I went. Steak, boiled potatoes, and canned corn. The place was as dreary as I had imagined, with one room, a kitchen not much larger than a closet, and a bath. The one decorative touch was a sock filled with tennis b.a.l.l.s suspended from the ceiling light fixture. Clarence and Ken used it for a punching bag.

The immediate problem at Stebbins was our choice of courses. We thumbed our General Catalogues, asked one another to give us the lowdown on professors of courses we were considering. Several girls said, "Why did I ever choose this major?" and changed majors, letting themselves in for a heavy schedule if they were to graduate in May.

From the list of courses "designed primarily for seniors whose major subject is English" I chose Chaucer. Milton lurked on the list, but since Chaucer was a one-semester course, I felt I could postpone Milton for a few months. Other English majors said I shouldn't miss The Age of Johnson, a great course. I followed their advice. I also chose Advanced French Grammar, not because I thirsted for more irregular verbs, but because the University of Washington School of Librarianship required more units of French than I had on my record. Having endured History of Education, I was now ent.i.tled to enroll in Elementary Education, which Jane was also taking. I still needed three more units. I longed for a course in household arts but did not have the prerequisites. I had, I discovered, prerequisites for very little. I finally settled on Anthropology 105, The American Indian, as the most possible course open to me. Besides, I reminded myself, all knowledge is useful to librarians.

Elementary Education offered unexpected entertainment, not because of the professor, an interesting, kindly man understanding of both children and teachers, but because of a student, an older woman, an experienced teacher who, like other out-of-state teachers, was working toward a California credential because California salaries were higher than those of other states. She arrived at the morning cla.s.s with liquor on her breath and interesting comments to make. The project method of teaching was in fashion at that time. Choose a project such as American Indians that interests children, and they will be so eager to learn they will read, and so eager to build a tepee they will learn arithmetic. The experienced teacher never hesitated to speak out. "What are we supposed to do with all this garbage if they ever finish their tepee?" she once asked. I could picture the tepee made of sticks covered with brown paper or old sheets. How would the children make it stand up? Another memorable remark was "We would be too tired to go dancing after a day with all that junk." Jane and I found this course especially interesting for the wrong reason.

Advanced French Grammar was something to dread, for I had not studied French grammar for two years. The small cla.s.s was taught by Mme Habis-Reutinger. The students were all girls, most of them members of sororities, many of them with excellent accents from having studied French in private schools. A couple actually had been to France. The cla.s.s, for me, was a nightmare of idioms and elaborate grammatical constructions. I dreaded being called on to read aloud. Eventually I was. In a small voice I stumbled along as best I could, and when I finished, Madame smiled and said, "Oh, dat is so sweet." A kind woman, she did not call on me to read aloud again.

Anthropology 105. After a cla.s.s in a building at the bottom of the campus, I raced uphill to a small building at the top, pausing for a few words with Clarence, who was heading downhill. I usually arrived after all the seats had been taken, sat on a cold steam radiator, and left the cla.s.s with a corrugated bottom. The course was taught by a lecturer, Alfred Metraux, a famous anthropologist, although I did not realize it at the time. As I recall, he taught at Cal only a semester or two, and I was lucky to have chosen his course, for he was a fascinating man in spite of a heavy French accent. He skipped quickly over North America and lectured on South America, where he had actually lived with the tribes mentioned in our textbook, a book he seemed to regard as a nuisance. I remember his vivid account of a ship dropping him off at Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, a raw and windy place where the native inhabitants had not discovered that their animal skins would be warmer if they wore the fur inside. With a rueful laugh, Mr. Metraux told how cold he had been and how he was afraid the ship would forget to pick him up, leaving him stranded in that bleak place forever.

Alfred Metraux did not often laugh and obviously did not enjoy teaching. He was particularly irritated by one member of the cla.s.s, a graduate student in anthropology, a neat, earnest, precise woman who always sat in the middle of the front row. Whenever Mr. Metraux mentioned in his French accent an unfamiliar term or tribal name, she raised her hand and said, "Excuse me. How do you spell that?" Through gritted teeth he spelled it. When mid-terms came, he gave her a C, shocking all the graduate students, who could not get C's and remain graduate students. I have often wondered what her final grade was and if Mr. Metraux left her career in shards as he fled Cal for jungles.

Chaucer, the smallest cla.s.s I had at Cal, was given in sections of twenty students. I was fortunate in choosing Professor Arthur Brodeur, who was recommended by Stebbins girls. He was a handsome, gentlemanly man with white hair who read from The Canterbury Tales and The Book of the d.u.c.h.ess in a rich and musical voice. Professor Brodeur endeared himself to me by his punctuality in keeping office hours and because he stood when I entered. No other professor had shown me such courtesy. He patiently discussed possible subjects for a paper I was to write, and when I left his office, he again rose to his feet.

Next to The Novel, my favorite course at Cal was The Age of Johnson, taught by a.s.sistant Professor Bertrand Bronson. Students referred to the course as The Age of Bronson. The text was the Oxford edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson in very fine print. Instead of our reading straight through, Professor Bronson divided the book, a.s.signing reading according to subject, which made the eighteenth century extraordinarily vivid. Several years later I happened to meet Mrs. Bronson and told her how much pleasure her husband's course had given me. She smiled and said, "I'll tell him. He often wonders." And I had thought insecurity was an affliction of students, not professors.

While I divided my time among Clarence, American Indians, eighteenth-century England, and solving problems in pupil behavior in Elementary Education, Miriam continued to study with cold, blue feet and was rewarded. One day she took a rich-looking envelope from our mailbox, and when she opened it, she found she had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. And in her junior year! The motivated girls of Stebbins Hall, who had the highest grade point average of any students on campus, were proud of her. She borrowed a Phi Beta Kappa key and went off to the initiation with the best wishes of all of us. I felt that anyone who could get out of bed at four o'clock every morning deserved to be honored.

Another Christmas vacation. All I remember about it is snow in Portland, Mother's exhaustion in caring for my grandmother, and her disapproval of Clarence. Dad did not comment on Clarence. I a.s.sumed his feelings were neutral. When I returned to Stebbins, Miriam told me she was moving out to share a room with her sister, who had enrolled at Cal. This was a shock, for Miriam and I had lived peacefully with our unusual study schedule and had enjoyed good times together. She, too, was in emotional turmoil. Wilfrid wanted to marry her. She wanted to finish college. The terms of his Fellowship required that he return to England at the end of the semester. Finally, after much anguish, she decided to give up her senior year, marry during the summer, and finish college in England. I missed her.

My next roommate was a beautiful girl, a French major with a broken heart, who seemed to do very little studying. She said she had a photographic memory, which made French easy for her. I liked her and feel I should somehow have been a better friend to her, but like many seniors, I was in too much of an emotional snarl. I often found her weeping over a bundle of letters and some dry, crumbling roses. Late in the evening she sat cross-legged on her bed, a French book on her knees, mentally photographing vocabulary while she put her hair up in thirty-two pin curls.

Early in the second semester I sent off my application, along with my hopes, to the School of Librarianship at the University of Washington. I was disheartened because I was not distinguishing myself at Cal, although today, as I look at my transcript, I can see that at that time I had a respectable B average, higher if all my Chaffey A's were included.

Clarence, in the meantime, had completed his required units midyear, or, as we said, he was a member of the cla.s.s of 1937. Because he had been entirely self-supporting during some grim Depression years, he had spent six years in college. Now he said he was tired of studying, of not having enough money, and so, along with many other students, he took civil service examinations. In those days government jobs were coveted because they offered security, and the hope of many students was to become a P-1, Junior Professional a.s.sistant. Bedding and Linen was not Clarence's life ambition, and at that point he was no longer sure what was.

One damp evening after an a.s.sembly Dance where Clarence had sung into my ear "our" songs, "Does Your Heart Beat for Me?" and "You're the One Rose That's Left in My Heart," we walked up the hill past Stebbins to sit on a sheltered wall overlooking Strawberry Creek. The pressures of Cal and of barely having enough money had ground me down to the point where I did not expect to be accepted by the University of Washington. What next? Back to Portland and Mother's relentless supervision? I felt hopeless.

Clarence took me in his arms and said that when he found a job, we could do something about it. We could get married. In those Depression days we had not discussed marriage or even love, although I might have guessed he loved me because he sang so tenderly in his beautiful tenor voice while we danced. I had not allowed myself to think of love and had always thought of marriage as something far in the future. Now, suddenly, I knew I loved and wanted to marry him. We sat in the cold and dark with rain drizzling down and the creek gurgling below us and talked a long time. I was still determined to become self-supporting and to work a year before marriage. He agreed this was probably a wise decision on my part. I also said I would not join the Catholic Church, that I felt my heritage was as valuable to me as his was to him, and the religious education of children would be his responsibility. He said that was all right with him, that he knew I was not cut out to be a Catholic. When he finally said good night under Stebbins's porch light, we lingered longer than Stebbins's propriety considered appropriate.

With Clarence on my mind, I still could not face Milton. The second semester I enrolled in The Age of Swift and Pope, taught by a young man considered a rising star in the English Department. He spoke in a high voice, waved a cigarette in a long holder, and talked about Inglish poy-tree. I stayed in the course long enough to discover that Alexander Pope had written "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" and "A little learning is a dangerous thing," lines that I had a.s.sumed belonged to Shakespeare. I counted up my units and discovered I would have enough to graduate without Swift and Pope and the waving cigarette holder. I would have more time to study for the Comprehensive. I could even read Milton.

One spring evening, with Milton in hand, I walked up the hill to sit with the little girl in the house with the spiral staircase. I read to her from Winnie-the-Pooh and was settled in a comfortable chair, a rare treat for a student, and there I made the biggest mistake of my life. I put Milton aside and wrote a letter to Mother and Dad telling them Clarence and I planned to marry after I had gone to library school and had worked a year.

Although I should have been prepared for Mother's answer, which came by return mail, I was not. She wrote a brief, angry letter telling me they would give me their answer in a week and to remember I had promised I would never marry Clarence. I had done no such thing. I had said, early in our acquaintance, that I had no intention of marrying him, and at that time I didn't. After a dismal week a letter arrived telling me that by marrying Clarence I would be disloyal to my family and to my religion. My parents would not give me their approval. Mother, house-bound with the care of my grandmother, had nothing to do but brood and write letters I dreaded opening.

Pressures weighed more heavily on me. I could scarcely stay awake after lunch. Jane, always understanding, suggested I take a nap in her room so she could wake me in time for my two o'clock cla.s.s. While calm, organized Jane studied quietly at her desk, I fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion until she woke me, and I went off to The Age of Elizabeth, which I had chosen to follow last semester's The Age of Johnson and allowed me, filled with guilt, to avoid Milton. Elizabethan love lyrics were preferable, but I did skip one a.s.signment, the only a.s.signment I ever skipped, Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. I still feel that I should read it, but I know I won't.