My Own Two Feet Part 5

Then one spring day I found in our mailbox a letter from the University of Was.h.i.+ngton. I had been accepted by the School of Librarians.h.i.+p. My Wordsworthian heart leaped again. I dashed off a note to my parents and waited for Clarence to call from Bedding and Linen.

By now all English majors were feeling tired and overwrought. Jane invited me to Mill Valley for spring vacation so we could study for the Comprehensive together. Perhaps we did, a little. Mrs. Chourre, aware of the monotony of dorm food, prepared us a lunch of waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. I recall going for a walk with Jane and climbing a hill covered with wildflowers. We lay in a field of California poppies and lupine that had the fragrance of grape bubble gum and let the sun drain away our tensions. Wildflowers, suns.h.i.+ne, quiet, and the company of a dear friend-it was a lovely afternoon far from the pressures of Cal and of my family.

The Chourres invited Clarence to come to Mill Valley for Easter dinner. They made him welcome, obviously approved of him, and smiled upon us. There was laughter at the dinner table, and the family enjoyed one another's company. If only my family could be like this, I thought.

The memory of the Chourres and of serene Mill Valley with its lupine and redwood trees helped sustain me on the trip back to Berkeley and the dread Comprehensive, the first half of which I feared most of all. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Everyone said these were the most important writers, and I had eluded Milton as if he were chasing me with a knife. A graduate student called Stebbins's English majors to a meeting in the living room and offered to coach us. None of us could afford his services.

We all bought A History of English Literature, by Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, translated from the French, which was considered the definitive text. Couldn't the English write their own history? I wondered as I opened it to the section on Milton. My thoughts tumbled, words seemed to make no sense, I could not concentrate. I could only sit at my desk and stare at Stebbins's underwear flapping in the breeze on the garage roofs. When the man next door poured sorrow into "Solitude" on his saxophone, I put my head down on my desk. I dreaded the exam, I dreaded Sherwin-Williams covering the earth, I dreaded Mother bearing down on me with her disapproval of Clarence, whom she had never met.

Then Mrs. Cochran, understanding of all the girls' problems, told me that Stebbins was going to rent rooms to women attending summer school and would need a chambermaid. I s.n.a.t.c.hed the opportunity. Mother had little enthusiasm for my doing menial work, but since I would be doing it in California, where no one in Oregon would see me, she admitted the money would help toward my nonresident tuition in Seattle. She gave the neighbors the impression I was to be a receptionist.

At breakfast the morning of the Comprehensive, we English majors, hollow-eyed, silent, and unsmiling, gathered sympathetic looks from others, as if we were about to have major surgery from which we might not recover. We then collected our freshly filled fountain pens and our blue books. On the way out, I saw a letter from Mother in our mailbox. I left it there.

In the chemistry building, scene of our ordeal, mimeographed questions were pa.s.sed out. The major question was something like "Discuss the influence of history on English literature." Most English majors had studied history as a minor, but I had not taken history in college and had skimmed lightly over it when it was brought up in English cla.s.ses. Silly me. A number of students read the questions and left the room, but I tried to thaw my numb brain and plunged in, spreading my knowledge thin.

The second question was about sonnet sequences. I could think of many sonnets but not in sequence. There was Shakespeare, and there was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but who else? Could I manage to work in the influence of Petrarch? I couldn't keep my thoughts focused. They drifted to the dreaded letter waiting in the mailbox, to Clarence, to anything but sonnet sequences. I felt as if the Campanile, with each pa.s.sing hour, was knelling disaster. Nevertheless I wrote something, I can't imagine what.

The Stebbins English majors, relieved, exhausted, and surprised that the sun was still s.h.i.+ning, compared notes on our way back to the dormitory. Jane taped a sign on her door: "An English major knits up the raveled sleave of care." In room 228 I read Mother's anti-Clarence letter and fell asleep.

In addition to the second half of the Comprehensive, I still had one more exam to take, Advanced French Grammar. I felt exhausted, confused, and incapable of remembering a single idiom. The night before the French exam, Clarence came to Stebbins to try to rescue me. We sat in the living room while he drilled me on grammar and idioms, and I tried to cram into my head a semester's work, desperate to make it stick until I had taken the exam the next day. When Clarence left, I felt as if he were taking my crammed knowledge with him.

Somehow I got through the final and, when it was over, exhaled what little I had learned about Advanced French Grammar. On the postcard I had enclosed in my blue book, Madame wrote: "Mademoiselle, vous n'avez pas etudie." She kindly let me escape with a C, probably because I was a senior.

Then came the day when those of us who had taken the first half of the Comprehensive could telephone the English office to ask for our grades. When I gave my name, the secretary said, "E."

"What?" I asked, aghast. I had never heard of such a grade.

"A, B, C, D, E," she said. For a moment I thought she might go on down the alphabet to an even stranger grade, possibly K.

"Oh" was all I could say, and I hung up and fled to Jane's room to confess and seek comfort. She was as appalled as I and, never having heard of an E, was sure I had misunderstood. She offered to call the English office and inquire.

"Didn't I give out that grade?" asked the secretary. Jane explained that I couldn't believe it. The secretary confirmed that my grade was indeed an E, but she did say the Comprehensive would be given again during summer session and I could try it again.

Jane tried to comfort me, pointing out that we still had the second half of the Comprehensive ahead of us, and the two grades would be averaged, so there was still hope. But how, I wondered, did Cal average an E? I felt like a failure, a guilty failure. My parents' hopes were on my shoulders. I broke the news to them and found Mother sympathetic. She said it was a good thing I was staying in Berkeley for the summer so I could repeat the exam. I knew I was too exhausted to take the exam again, so my only hope lay in The Novel, the subject I had chosen for the second half of the examination.

The day came; I climbed the steps of Wheeler Hall on heavy feet and waited for the questions. There was only one, a statement rather than a question: Discuss the Novel. For three hours I discussed the Novel and emerged exhausted as the Campanile began to play a merry tune. This time when I called the English office, I learned that my grade was a B, which wiped out the disgraceful E and gave me a D as a final grade. I would graduate. I hoped Cal wouldn't squeal to the University of Was.h.i.+ngton.

Dad drove to Berkeley alone to attend my graduation. Mother felt she could not entrust the care of her mother to anyone else. The notebook in which he kept a record of his expenses shows that he drove to California inland and returned by the coastal route, thus making the most of his trip. Although he had never spoken one word of complaint about my grandmother living with us, he did not send my mother so much as a postcard during his two weeks of freedom. He and Clarence were friendly when I introduced them, and we enjoyed dinner together. We were more comfortable without Mother.

Graduation in the Memorial Stadium. More than two thousand of the Cla.s.s of '38 in our caps and gowns lined up behind the professors in their colorful regalia, leaders made sure we were in the right order, and when the time came for us to receive our diplomas, Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the university, handed mine to me and said, "Congratulations to you." I was free. The whole thing was so well organized that we each received the right diploma. Clarence refused to take time off from Bedding and Linen, where he was paid by the hour, to attend commencement. I picked up his diploma for him at Cal Hall.

Graduation night. An orchid arrived from Clarence, followed by Clarence himself in Ken's tuxedo with the bow tie untied because Clarence did not know how to tie it. Dad let us take his car, and after stopping at a gas station for an attendant to tie the dangling tie, we were off across the Bay Bridge for a night on the town. Dinner at the Fairmont, dancing at the Palace, more dancing at the Mark Hopkins, where we went to meet friends and made the mistake of sitting down. A waiter handed Clarence a bill for four dollars. What for? "Cover charge, sir," said the waiter. Four dollars just to sit down-we had never heard of such a thing. Fortunately, Clarence had four dollars left as well as twenty-five cents for the bridge toll.

The next day, after a lunch of crab Louis, a meal Dad remembered for years, we took him on a tour of San Francisco. It was a day we all enjoyed. I was happy to see the two get along and sorry to say good-bye to my father the following morning.

Like Cinderella after the ball, I turned into a chambermaid. I often wonder why I remember Cal with such affection.

Photographic Insert II..

The Campanile.

Miriam, my roommate at Stebbins Hall Jane on the steps of Doe Library at Cal Clarence in 1938, wearing the same tie he was wearing when we met (He still has it.) Clarence keeps his eye on the ball after work in Bedding and Linen.

En garde at Cal.

My Cal yearbook picture, cla.s.s of '38.

I escape from Cal.

A happy afternoon in Golden Gate Park with Dad and with Clarence's orchid on my shoulder Grandma Atlee after she came to live with us.

Grandpa Atlee, Uncle Henry, Cousin Zed.

PART TWO.

Children, Customers, Soldiers.

Library School.

After my narrow escape from Cal, the physical work of a chambermaid was a relief. I moved to a first-floor room next to Mrs. Cochran and, when she was out, answered the door and showed rooms, thus keeping Mother partially honest. I made beds, cleaned bathrooms, ran the vacuum cleaner, counted laundry. Fortunately, not all the forty-one rooms were rented.

To earn my meals I worked an hour before dinner in a men's boardinghouse across the street, where I had various duties: setting the table, making salad, cutting two colors of Jell-O into cubes and heaping them into sherbet dishes so they would look like more dessert than they actually were, ironing s.h.i.+rts for the landlady's sons. She ran a tight boardinghouse and once reprimanded a summer student from Stanford for asking for b.u.t.ter when he already had jam for his toast, a scene that reminded me of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. Jamless or b.u.t.terless, I was happy to be self-supporting, standing on my own two feet for the summer.

Soon after I started my humble ch.o.r.es, Clarence was offered a position by the new Department of Employment in Sacramento. Sat.u.r.days he came to Berkeley by train, staying at Skipper's boardinghouse, and we went to a movie in the evening. On Sunday mornings, when he helped me by running the vacuum cleaner in Stebbins's living room, Mrs. Cochran watched him and said, "He will be so good to you." Afternoons we walked in the hills.

My work was physically strenuous. Sheets were heavy when carried up- and downstairs. Kleenex and bobby pins were a chambermaid's nightmare because the vacuum cleaner inhaled them, clogging the works. Once, when there were few occupants, I ripped up the stair carpet and retacked it so the worn part was no longer on the edge of the steps but at the back, thereby keeping one of Stebbins's a.s.sets from depreciating for another year.

Teachers were pleasant occupants, most of them tidy in their habits, except for a few bobby pins on the floor. Some of them took an interest in me, and when I said I was going to the University of Was.h.i.+ngton for graduate work but didn't know where I would live, one teacher said she had been a student there and had taken a room in the home of Miss Ruth Entz, a kindergarten teacher. She gave me the address. I wrote to Miss Entz, who replied that they had not rented the room for some time but would rent it to me for eight dollars a month.

My future was taking shape as I grew thinner and thinner from hard physical work. Jane invited me to come to Mill Valley for a couple of days when summer session ended. I accepted, which inspired Mother to write: "It is plain to see you are not anxious to see your parents." This made me angry. I had worked hard, and I was tired. I stood up to Mother and went to Mill Valley for two blissful days of good company and delicious food, including jam and b.u.t.ter on toast. Those two days gave me strength to return to Berkeley and board the train for Portland.

The train was unusually late, Sherwin-Williams covered the earth many times before we crossed the river, and when my parents met me, I remarked that the trip had been tiring. Mother said kindly, "You'll never have to go back again."

I was speechless. Did Mother think I was going to forget Clarence? Obviously, that was what she was counting on.

Mercifully, I had less than a month before school started at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, where I was determined to live on the thirty-five dollars a month Mother said she and my father could spare, adding, "That little bit of money you earned isn't much help," a remark that cut deep when I thought of how hard the work had been.

Mother, a firm believer in my wearing red to attract men, had bought some bright red woolen fabric for a dress that I suspected she hoped would attract so many men I would forget Clarence. The way red flannel is used for frog bait, I thought with amus.e.m.e.nt.

I made the red dress before I took the train to Seattle. In a taxi on the way to the address on Miss Entz's letter, I saw that Seattle was a beautiful city of autumn leaves, lakes, and, in the distance, snowcapped Mount Baker. Elderly Mrs. Entz met me at the door and showed me to my room, which was small, with lavender walls and green woodwork. There were no windows but instead a gla.s.s door onto a balcony that looked into a cherry tree with yellowing leaves. The room was furnished with a narrow iron bedstead and, for a dresser, a piece of furniture so old-fas.h.i.+oned it had a cupboard for a chamber pot. My desk was a card table. The room seemed bleak, but it was also only eight dollars a month. It would do.

Miss Entz, I soon learned, was one of the kindest, most generous women I have ever known. The larger front bedroom was rented to a very old couple, the Coffins, who eked out a living on the husband's tiny pension from a Canadian university where he had taught history. He spent his days at the public library, where he was writing a history of the world. Mrs. Coffin cooked on a hot plate in a closet, but more often Miss Entz carried upstairs ca.s.seroles of stew or other hot dishes. If she hadn't, I doubt they would have had enough to eat. Whenever Miss Entz and her mother listened to cla.s.sical music on the radio, I would find Mrs. Coffin, huddled on the stairs in the dark, listening. As I picked up my mail, an almost daily airmail letter from Clarence, from the newel post, she would say, "That young man had better save his money and buy an annuity." I didn't tell her that he was so extravagant he enclosed airmail stamps for my letters to him.

The School of Librarians.h.i.+p was in Suzzallo Library, a cathedral-like building that seemed elaborate after Cal's neocla.s.sical Doe Library. In the main room of the library school we were a.s.signed desks in predictably alphabetical order with our names neatly typed on white paper and pasted to green desk blotters.

There were forty-eight women and two men in the cla.s.s, fewer than half direct from undergraduate work. Most had worked in libraries, saved money, and aimed for professional credentials and higher pay. The women referred to the school as the Cloister, and "the Missionary Spirit" was a phrase we often heard from instructors. I soon discovered to my chagrin that I had suffered needlessly through Advanced French Grammar. This university counted quarter, not semester, units.

The first quarter we all took the same cla.s.ses. Fortunately, memories of the Ontario Public Library rea.s.sured me that being a librarian was more interesting than learning to be one. Cataloging exasperated me because I do not have an orderly, logical mind and could not see why it was important to snoop behind pseudonyms to find an author's true name. Why should Mark Twain always be cataloged under Samuel Langhorne Clemens with a cross-reference card from Mark Twain? Reference work was enjoyable. Each week we were given ten questions and the resources of the university library to find the answers in a sort of intellectual treasure hunt. Once, when I was wearing the red dress, a man who worked at the reference desk actually whispered, "You look like bait in that dress." He did not, however, turn into a prince.

Children's Work, the reason I was there, was under the guidance of a nationally known faculty member, Miss Siri Andrews, who had a round face and round gla.s.ses and wore a round silver medallion on a chain around her neck. Her courses took me back to my childhood. The slogan of children's librarians was "The right book for the right child." Adult Book Selection was taught by Miss Ruth Worden, a gray-haired woman who always wore navy blue suits and white blouses with touches of handwork on the collars, like baby dresses. She frequently used the expression "A rattling good tale" when referring to popular fiction. I looked forward to both Book Selection courses, but it was Miss Worden who gave me a feeling of inspiration for librarians.h.i.+p.

My days fell into a pattern as fallen leaves grew soggy, the weather damp and cold, and the morning air smelled of coal smoke as furnaces were fired up. After a breakfast of tomato juice, a sweet roll, and a carton of milk in my room, I walked a mile to Suzzallo Library. At noon I went with other students to the Commons, an inexpensive cafeteria run by the Domestic Science Department, where I drank another carton of milk and ate a sandwich cut into three parts, each with a different filling. I came to like the peanut b.u.t.ter and banana on raisin bread section and saved it for dessert. As we ate our meager lunches and watched drama students, scripts in hand, emote over cups of coffee with soggy napkins folded in their saucers sopping up spills, we discussed the finer points of cataloging and invented an imaginary series of books for our instructor to catalog: six volumes, each with a different editor or sometimes two, one of whom wrote under a pseudonym and the other under her maiden name, some volumes translated from foreign languages and requiring translator cards, each volume with a preface by a different author, etc., etc. This sent us into gales of laughter as each of us thought of an addition to make the a.s.signment more difficult. Such is the sense of humor of librarians. We also had earnest discussions on the finer points of grammar.

Afternoons most of us studied at our desks until three o'clock, when we were granted the privileges of the faculty room, where we could have tea and two Ritz crackers for two cents. I looked forward to that tea and those crackers. About five I left school. Because other students lived in boardinghouses or at home, I sometimes ate dinner alone in the Commons, but more often I chose a coffee shop or cheap restaurant on University Way, where I was fueled by creamed chicken on toast or hamburger steak. Then I returned to my lavender and green room to study and to write letters.

The high point of my day was picking up my mail from the newel post. Mother's letters were no longer amusing, but Jane, working for her teaching credential at Cal and reading blue books for an education professor, wrote long, entertaining letters about life at Stebbins, which I read and reread. Miriam, now married to Wilfrid, wrote from London. She was disappointed that British universities would not accept her Cal credits. Connie had moved to Berkeley to be near Park and was working at a San Francisco advertising agency while he earned his master's degree. Norma upset her family by insisting on marrying as soon as she earned her teaching credential rather than working a year first. Virginia wrote that she and Bob were getting married in the spring and wanted me to be a bridesmaid. Claudine felt teaching in a Portland suburb was an improvement over a mill town. Letters prevented loneliness.

Miss Entz must have guessed that my budget was stretched to its limit, for she said her mother would be glad to prepare me a breakfast for twenty cents on school days. Dear Mrs. Entz. She served me juice, hot cereal with raisins, a coddled egg, b.u.t.tered toast with jam, and milk. I ate at a card table by the living room window while Heidi, their dachshund, sat up on her hind legs and wavered around on her long spine until she fell over, only to rise and try again. Those breakfasts sustained me through the year.

My eyesight became an increasing problem. The print in Mudge's Guide to Reference Books was even finer than my Shakespeare text at Cal. I began to have headaches. Once more I wrote home, more forcefully this time, and said I had to have gla.s.ses. This time Mother gave in. Perhaps my father interceded. I received the money and went to an ophthalmologist recommended by Miss Worden. There I learned that not only was I nearsighted, I had an astigmatism in one eye. When I put on gla.s.ses and walked out onto the street, I walked into a new world. I could see individual bricks on buildings, street signs were suddenly legible, lines on the sidewalks were sharper. My headaches left me, and I no longer squinted to read Mudge.

Then, at the end of the quarter, Miss Worden called me into her office. "Miss Bunn, you have done excellent work in Book Selection," she said, "but I am giving you a C because you looked bored."

I was speechless. Graded on my facial expression-I couldn't believe it. I may have been tired or hungry, but I was not bored. If her course had been Cataloging, I might have understood, for teachers of Cataloging are probably used to students looking bored. I don't know what I said, not much, and left her office as quickly as possible.

In the 1930s students did not rebel, probably because we were afraid to. We had too much at stake and, in our eagerness to prepare for security and a better future, were much too humble. When in the 1950s students began to rebel at Cal, I recalled a number of injustices to students and wished my generation had had the same courage. I doubt if any student today is graded on a facial expression, has graduation depend on composing an original tap dance, or is required to write twenty-four pages on "Plato: Teacher and Theorist." Cal's dreaded English Comprehensive has been abolished.

Except for my grade-C face, which did not expel me from graduate school, my grades returned to my pre-Cal A's and B's. The second quarter, we chose our field of librarians.h.i.+p. Miss Siri Andrews, a precise and thorough teacher, limited her cla.s.ses to six students, who met in her office. She gave us a project we worked on the rest of the year, designing a children's room in an imaginary public library in a town of ten thousand and selecting the basic book collection. We began by searching for articles on the number of books desirable for the population, the average size of books, the length of shelves to hold them, the arrangement of furniture. Then we selected books by cla.s.sification, reading all the reviews we could find, typing cards, with notes and sources for each book, working in a small room full of clattering typewriters and walls lined with donated books the university did not know what to do with. One t.i.tle I recall was Men, Marriage, and Me, by Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

When Christmas vacation came, I went home to Portland. Clarence had worked overtime so he could come to see me for a few days. This meant his first meeting, or confrontation, with Mother, which I dreaded. Dad and I drove to the station to meet him, and when we walked through the front door, Mother, smiling, made an entrance from the kitchen. She was wearing the pink dress she had made for me and that I had mentioned I had worn the night I met Clarence. I had left it in my closet when I went to Seattle. I was shocked and then angry. When I was alone with Mother, I demanded to know why she was wearing my dress.

"It's the only thing I have to wear," she said.

This made me even angrier because, even though her wardrobe was limited, it was not true. What was she trying to accomplish? I have often wondered.

It was an uncomfortable time. Clarence was courteous, and Mother made some awkward attempts at conversation but quickly saw she could not manipulate him as she had Gerhart.

Dad was generous about letting Clarence drive the car, so we went everyplace I could think of to go. New Year's Eve we went out to dinner with Virginia and Bob. This time it was Virginia's turn to be shocked. Her mother had reserved the table next to ours for herself and Virginia's father. I suspected she wanted to look over the man I had imported from California. After dinner, when we were alone, Clarence slipped a cigar band on my finger and told me that someday he would replace it with a real ring. I still have the cigar band.

Christmas vacation was not an enjoyable time for any of us, and I was glad to escape into cold, bl.u.s.tery Seattle, where a gale sweeping across the campus was sometimes so strong I could lean into it and its force would support me, an experience I found exhilarating. All Seattle weather, no matter how raw, was exhilarating after four years of California's blander climate.

Snow fell. "Mother Hulda is shaking out her feather bed," I wrote to Jane. This was a reference to a German folktale from Miss Andrews's course in Storytelling, in which we had to stand in her small office and tell to the cla.s.s different types of stories-myths, legends, folktales, and modern fairy tales. Facing the sardonic looks of our peers in a small room was disconcerting, but when we went off to a branch of the Seattle Public Library, we found telling stories to children much easier because we could see pleasure on young faces.

Winter calmed and faded, the sun shone, and walking to the campus under trees sending out leaves was vitalizing. When the cherry tree outside my gla.s.s door was in bud, it was time for the cla.s.s to divide and go off for a month of practice work. Several of us went to Portland, where I lived at home and against my will was involved in being a bridesmaid, while the others lived in a small hotel near the library. I was eager to do well in practice work and pointed out to Mother that although Virginia and Bob were good friends, being a bridesmaid took time and was an avoidable expense. Mother dismissed my argument by saying that this was something she and Dad wanted me to do. Mother loved weddings, and I disliked arguing with her, so I became a bridesmaid.

Virginia, a most considerate bride, chose shades of pink for our dresses because her matron of honor had been married in a pink dress that she could use again. Virginia chose a similar pattern, and her Depression bridesmaids set to work on yards of pink chiffon, which slipped and slithered as we sewed.

Practice work, I was sure, was going to be much more interesting than struggling with chiffon, and I approached with eager antic.i.p.ation the library that had meant so much to me. Weather, however, presented a problem. After a gray and dismal winter, the sun melted the clouds, the sky was blue, trees and flowers bloomed, birds twittered, and children played outdoors. They did not come to the library.

Collectively, the librarians who supervised practice students were kind and even entertained us with a luncheon, but my first week in the children's room of the main library was uncomfortable because the children's librarian was hard put to keep me busy. I read shelves, which meant seeing that books were in correct order, the most boring of library tasks. I was handed stacks of catalog cards to alphabetize, work I tried to make last as long as possible. Whenever a child entered, I offered to help find a book that he or she might enjoy and sometimes succeeded, unlike another student, to whom a little girl said, "Excuse me, but I think I can find a book faster myself."

I spent my lunch hours finding sandals, having them dyed to match my dress, meeting other bridesmaids in a shop that made us hats, pancakes with roses made from material from all our dresses surrounded by ruffles that matched our own. Mother also gave me errands, "since you are overtown." All I really wanted to do was sit down during my lunch hour.

During my next two weeks, in the branch libraries, rhododendrons bloomed, and the weather was still glorious, beckoning children from houses and schools but not enticing them to the library. I enjoyed the children's librarian in the first branch. She picked me up at home and drove me to the library and took me out for hamburgers for lunch. But what was she to do with me? She handed me a stack of catalog cards and said, "Sit here with these in your hands so that old bag will think you're doing something. Just keep away from her." The "old bag" was the librarian in charge of the branch. The children's librarian took me off to visit schools to escape the librarian's watchful eye.

When I went to the next branch, the sky was still cloudless, and Mount Hood was a pristine white cone. The children's librarian was pleasant but downhearted. She told me that when she first started to work in Portland, an older librarian said to her, "My dear, you look so young and fresh, and before you know it you will be wearing bifocals and arch supports." This children's librarian was looking for another position.

My first day I was to work from one to nine. The branch librarian immediately accosted me with "Did you bring a lunch?" Well, no, I hadn't. I a.s.sumed that I could get something to eat in a neighborhood coffee shop. She sighed and said, "Well, I guess I can take you out someplace." I felt like a nuisance.

I was disappointed and disillusioned by my experiences in the Portland Library a.s.sociation, as the library was called at that time, before it became the Multnomah County Library. There was, however, one glorious day at the end of my month that restored my faith, a day on a bookmobile on its trip up the Columbia River Highway with a brisk, friendly librarian. Farmers' wives who waited with armloads of books greeted us like old friends, and while I checked out the new supply of reading material for their families, the librarian recorded requests to be brought on the next trip. We stopped at a sawmill town near Bridal Veil Falls where workers, wives, and children, all friendly and eager, came aboard. On the way back to Portland we stopped at Governor Meier's summer mansion, overlooking the Columbia River. The smiling servants came out to exchange their books. It was a beautiful, encouraging day that restored my faith in librarians.h.i.+p and left me with a lasting interest in bookmobile service.

In the midst of all this were wedding preparations, the selection of a wedding gift, the rehearsal dinner, and finally the wedding. When the bride's mother appeared, she, too, was wearing a long pink dress, but hers was expensive, with a pleated skirt that gave Virginia's bridesmaids, by contrast, a loving-hands-at-home look. On the way home afterward Mother "talked over" the wedding the way she had once talked over my high school social life: who attended, what they wore, who said what to whom. The next morning I posed on the front lawn in my pink chiffon with my still-fresh bouquet. The neighbors came out to watch, and one told Mother, who told me, that "Beverly looks terrible, her health all gone."

Once more I was glad to escape to Seattle.

In a few days Miss Worden called me into her office. She had the report on my practice work on her desk. She took off her gla.s.ses, pinched the bridge of her nose, put them on again, and told me what had been written about me. The librarian in the central children's room recorded that I was slow in filing; the "old bag" said she did not believe I was interested in children's work; the librarian in the second branch thought I was in poor health because I leaned on things. Leaned on things? I did have a pair of new pumps that pinched and probably leaned on something while I wiggled my toes, although I could not recall having done so.

I was devastated. All my years of ambition and hard work seemed wasted. I thought of Dad borrowing on his life insurance, Mother's sacrifices while she cared for my grandmother, all the creamed chicken I had eaten in the last months, all the kind people who had helped me along the way. The Portland Library a.s.sociation, which had meant so much to me for so many years, had rejected me. I was exhausted, a complete failure. Miss Worden was nice about it, though. She let me go into the faculty rest room to dry my tears in private.

Next Miss Andrews called me into her office. I dreaded facing her and decided to speak first. "I didn't do very well in my practice work, did I?"

She smiled and said, "I would like to see you start in the Los Angeles Public Library system. They are looking for a children's librarian and are willing to waive the residence requirement for you, but you would have to go to Los Angeles to take a civil service examination. Could you do that?"

Well! Suddenly I felt much better. Miss Andrews had faith in me, and as far as I was concerned, her opinion was the most valuable. I said I would see what I could do. Since I was so close to my goal, I felt I could ask my parents for a loan because I could repay it as soon as I was working. I wrote home and received a reply from Mother by return mail. They could not afford to lend me the fare to Los Angeles. I did not believe her. My father had received several small pay raises from the bank, and Mother received a monthly amount from my grandfather's estate for my grandmother's care and almost nonexistent expenses. Mother's motive was to keep me as far as possible from Clarence.

As I look back on this episode, I feel I should have asked Clarence for the money, but at that time, in the world in which I had grown up, this would have been a shocking thing to do. It was proper to accept airmail stamps, but money-never. Sadly I told Miss Andrews a trip to Los Angeles was impossible.

The semester was ending. We wrote model letters of application in case we could find a position to apply for. Miss Worden corrected them. She then spoke to the cla.s.s and asked us not to accept positions that paid less than one hundred dollars a month "because we don't want to lower the standards of the profession." She added that this did not apply to Canadian students, who could not expect to earn a hundred dollars a month.

Miss Andrews called me in again and asked if I had enough money to get home. I did, just barely, but as it happened, I had a narrow escape. Forgoing commencement exercises, I packed, secured my typewriter in its crate, I hoped for the last time, said good-bye to Miss Entz and her mother, and called a taxi. When it arrived the driver told me he was no longer allowed to carry trunks. I must have looked so dismayed that he said, "I'll take a chance." He carried my trunk, which had very little in it, and my typewriter downstairs and stowed them in his cab. When we reached the depot, I held aside enough money for my train ticket and gave him all the rest, which wasn't much. The tip for his kindness probably amounted to about thirty-seven cents. He was nice about it, and without a cent to my name, I boarded the train for Portland. A Bachelor of Arts in Librarians.h.i.+p diploma would soon arrive in the mail. I was free of school, ready to go on with my life. All I needed was a job.

A Job and a Wedding.

"Not one more cent," said Mother, and I agreed. Accepting money meant she could control me. Then she showed me a record of the cost of my college education. That hurt. I don't think she meant to be unkind, but I felt she begrudged the money even though I had managed on very little and had earned what I could. I resolved, when I had children, I would give with a loving heart.

Clarence braved my family once more, and during his few days in Portland, Miss Worden wrote of two vacancies, one in Tacoma, Was.h.i.+ngton, and one in Klamath Falls, Oregon. When I tried to type letters of application, I was so tense my fingers refused to hit the right keys. Clarence typed them for me, we mailed them, and went off on a picnic. We picnicked every day he was in Portland. Mother tried to give the appearance of friendliness, but her planned subjects of conversation lacked both warmth and spontaneity.

When Clarence left, I found some comfort in the sweater I was knitting for him with yarn we had chosen and he had paid for. My applications were not answered. With no job and no money, summer and possibly my whole life loomed like an oppressive cloud. Friends were equally dejected. Jane wrote that she was discovering there were no openings for English teachers who had minored in history. Only Virginia, the bride, was happy in her new home.

Each day of that early summer of 1939 seemed longer than the day before. The care of my grandmother was growing more difficult and Mother more depressed. Then Mrs. Klum suggested that Claudine and I spend the rest of the summer at Puddin'. Perhaps she was tired of having an adult daughter living at home. Mother, who did not need the added stress of a discouraged daughter, was glad to have me go. Dad promised he would drive out to the cabin with any mail from a library or from the university. He gave me money for my share of the groceries, money I was sorry to have to accept.

Claudine and I reverted to our high school summers, swimming, reading, knitting, carrying our water, cooking on the woodstove. During the week we waylaid the man who serviced the jukebox to make sure he left recordings of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. Weekends we danced with farm boys or city boys who were camping and earning a few dollars picking beans. As I listened to the clang of horseshoes, the shouts and splashes from the river, and smelled the wood smoke and coffee of campers and picnickers, the stress of five Depression years of college drained away, and I began to feel like myself again.

Then early one evening early in August, our car came b.u.mping down the road. Mother and Dad were smiling, and Grandma, who would not leave the house without her hat and gloves, sat in the backseat looking frightened as the car jounced over potholes. Mother waved a letter. "There's a vacancy in Yakima," Dad said as he climbed out of the car.