My Own Two Feet Part 6

"Where's Yakima?" I asked, and learned that it was a town in central Was.h.i.+ngton, hot in summer, freezing in winter. The chance of a job! Who cared about the weather?

Back in Portland, I sent off a letter of application, adding, at Mother's wise suggestion, that I could come to Yakima for an interview. An answer came by return mail, Dad took a day off, and we drove over two hundred miles up the Was.h.i.+ngton side of the Columbia River and through brown hills to a town of about ten thousand people with fruit orchards to the west, dry rolling country to the east, and dominated by a monument to the Depression, the rusting skeleton of an unfinished fourteen-story hotel. The thermometer in a filling station where I changed into a white suit in the rest room registered 110 degrees. Dad dropped me off at the Carnegie library, where I was interviewed in the children's room in the humid bas.e.m.e.nt by Miss Helen Remsberg, the librarian, and by the entire library board. Feeling presumptuous, I inquired about living accommodations even though I did not have the job. Miss Remsberg told me that one staff member lived at the YWCA, where she shared a kitchen.

Two days later I received a letter saying I was hired to work six hours a day in the children's room and two hours in the adult department beginning September 1 at a salary of one hundred ten dollars a month "because living was higher east of the Cascades." I was rich! Or soon would be.

Dad arranged for me to take out a seventy-five-dollar bank loan to get me through the first month until payday. I packed the remains of my shabby college wardrobe and, leaving behind my c.u.mbersome typewriter, boarded a bus bound for Yakima and independence. When I arrived, however, I was told there were no vacancies at the Y for more than a few days. What to do? I bought a newspaper, consulted advertis.e.m.e.nts, and saw that my soon-to-be riches would not stretch to cover apartment rent. I finally found a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Johnson, a single woman, thin and intense, who showed me a large pleasant room with an outside entrance and an old-fas.h.i.+oned library table, just the place for writing children's books on the portable typewriter I planned to buy as soon as I paid off my bank loan. I would share a bath with Mrs. Johnson, who slept on a couch in the dining room. On the evenings I worked at the library she suggested I eat dinner at Wardell's Percolator, a restaurant close to the library and noted for pies. I rented the room, expecting to stay only until there was a vacancy at the Y.

My first dinner in the boardinghouse was a shock. All the boarders were men: two from the Was.h.i.+ngton State Employment and Security Office, two younger men who were clerks for the Cascade Gas and Light Company, a st.u.r.dy old man who dug graves, and one or two others. They were as surprised as I. Conversation was friendly but strained, and after a dessert of ice cream made with canned milk, I fled to my room to write letters. This went on for several evenings until Charlie Walker, an older man who worked at the employment office, knocked on my door and asked if I wouldn't please come out and share the living room. Then the gravedigger brought me a bouquet of dahlias, the colors of jewels, from his daughter's garden. After that I felt more at home. The men called me Bunzy, except when I made what I thought was a sophisticated black dress. Then they called me the Widow.

Perhaps because I thought my stay was temporary, my parents did not object to my living in a house full of men. Clarence, familiar with boardinghouses, now says he felt I would be protected. I was. Charlie referred to the two men from the gas company as the "young Upshots" because one of them confused "upstart" with "upshot," beginning sentences with, "The upstart of the matter was..." On hot September evenings after work, the Upshots invited me to swim in an irrigation ditch. The swift current gave me a delightful sensation of being an excellent swimmer as it carried me downstream. I walked back.

During the time I lived in what Charlie called "Mrs. Johnson's caravansary," some men moved out and others moved in. One man who rented the downstairs front bedroom was so disliked by the other men that whenever he started upstairs to the bathroom, one of them would pop out of his room and beat him to it. Amused, I asked Charlie why. He merely said, "He has a dirty mind." He did not stay long. Dinnertime, which Charlie referred to as the Take Your Hand Off My Knee Literary Club, was full of laughter, but no one put his hand on anyone's knee. Several of the boarders supplemented our diet with trout, venison, and pheasant. Times were hard, and Mrs. Johnson appreciated the contributions to her table but asked us not to mention them outside the house. As I ate the game, I felt like a Pilgrim.

The first morning, as I climbed the library steps to report for work, I need not have been so nervous. The staff was welcoming. Miss Remsberg, I soon learned, was firm, kindly, and fair. When she reprimanded me she always began with the word fetish. "I don't want to make a fetish of printing, but you must improve yours on registration cards." She once reprimanded me for referring to "my department" by saying, "Miss Bunn, no part of the library is any staff member's private property."

Miss James, the cataloger and reference librarian, had a look of antique elegance as she came to work with artificial violets pinned to her fur collar and wearing matching purple gloves. She had a serious, orderly mind, and I am sure she considered me frivolous. We three professional librarians and Mr. Royer, the janitor, were always called by our surnames, all others by their given names: such was the hierarchy of librarians.h.i.+p. Charlotte, in charge of circulation, grew beautiful flowers for the library and always included a bouquet for the children's room. She kept me alert, for it was she who caught any errors I made. There were others: Hazel, a widow who worked part-time, a WPA woman who mended our tattered books, NYA girls who shelved books.

And then there was Berneita, an a.s.sistant and the only staff member to call me by my first name. From practical experience she knew more about books and children than I, but she was always tactful, willing, and enthusiastic. Whenever I was swamped with children checking out books, I had only to push a b.u.t.ton that set off a buzzer upstairs, and Berneita, smiling and eager, came flying down the steps.

The children of Yakima. I shall never forget them. In a one-library town, the children's librarian meets all sorts of children: bright, healthy children of doctors and lawyers, children of unemployed millworkers, sad waifs whose poverty-stricken parents were past caring, garden-variety middle-cla.s.s children such as those I had grown up with. At first many children puzzled me by calling me what I understood as "Stir." Then Berneita explained that they came from Catholic schools and were in the habit of addressing their teachers as "'Ster," short for "Sister." French Canadian children laughed at my p.r.o.nunciation of their names. To them "Lemieux" was p.r.o.nounced "Lamear."

Individuals stand out in memory. One was a junior high school girl with red-rimmed eyes who had read every book of fiction in the children's room. The labels "teenager" and "young adult" had not yet placed young people in a separate social cla.s.s. I took her upstairs and introduced her to the staff members, who helped her find adult books. A shy, shabby little girl presented me with a bouquet of lilacs. "Did these grow in your yard?" I tactlessly asked. "No, I just picked them," she answered. Wilma, Hazel's daughter, always brought her little brother to story hour, where they sat in the front row, their bright, interested faces an inspiration to a storyteller. A desperate father, furious because his son owed four cents on an overdue library book, shouted at me that his son's teacher had brought the cla.s.s to the library and encouraged the children to take out books, so she should be responsible for the fine. I could have argued the point but instead quietly told him to forget the whole thing. The look of shame on the boy's face was too much to bear. I never saw him again.

Most vividly of all I remember the group of grubby little boys, nonreaders, who came once a week during school hours, marching in a column of two from nearby St. Joseph's School. Their teacher, 'Ster Bernard Jean, said their textbooks did not interest them and perhaps library books would tempt them to read. I soon learned there was very little in the library the boys wanted to read. "Where are the books about kids like us?" they wanted to know.

Where indeed. There was only one book I could find about kids like them, kids who parked their earm.u.f.fs on the circulation desk in winter and their baseball mitts in summer. That book was Honk, the Moose, by Phil Stong, a story about some farm boys who found a moose in a livery stable. All the boys liked that book because it fulfilled another of their requirements. It was funny. As I listened to the boys talk about books, I recalled my own childhood reading, when I longed for funny stories about the sort of children who lived in my neighborhood. What was the matter with authors? I had often wondered and now wondered again.

Children applying for their first library cards gave original answers to the question "What does your father do?" One little girl answered promptly, "He mows the lawn." Another girl gave the question serious thought before she said in triumph, "He types." Her mother, who was waiting to see how her daughter answered, explained with amus.e.m.e.nt, "He's an attorney."

Then there was a six-year-old girl, who, when I asked her father's occupation, answered, "He's a cat skinner."

"Does he stuff them, too?" I asked.

"No," said the child, impatient with the stupid librarian. "He skins cats!" she insisted.

I gave up, wrote "Cat skinner" on her application, and handed her a library card.

An NYA girl who was shelving books approached me timidly and said, "Pardon me, Miss Bunn, if you don't mind my saying so, a cat skinner is a man who runs a Caterpillar tractor."

Payday! One hundred and ten whole dollars that I had earned myself. When I received my first paycheck, I went downtown on Sat.u.r.day night, a busy, colorful time in Yakima when Indians, many of the women with papooses on their backs, came into town from the reservation. I window-shopped, thinking of all that I could buy but settling on underwear and pajamas, which I never had enough of because they didn't show. I had money left over to start a savings account. After a few more paydays I paid off my bank loan and bought, finally, a portable typewriter for writing children's books. The trouble was, I didn't have time to write them. I made one attempt at writing a chapter about Puddin', but soon found I had too many other things to think about-letters to Clarence, stories to learn for story hour, books and library periodicals to read. Most of my evenings I read, read, read. There was so much I needed to learn, so many books to become acquainted with.

I could not forget my desire to write. When a publisher's representative from Macmillan came to the children's room and told me I looked like someone who could write a book, and if I ever did, he would like to send it to Macmillan for me, I was so flattered I let him take me to lunch, an incident I did not mention to Miss Remsberg, who was cool toward book salesmen. "I am not going to let salesmen select books for the library," she often said.

Sat.u.r.day story hours began the end of September. I was to tell stories for three weeks of a month, and Berneita would take over the fourth week. The first week I had an attack of stage fright even though I had rehea.r.s.ed two stories at home and in the half hour granted me in the staff room just before story time. Unfortunately, Miss Andrews had trained us to rehea.r.s.e in front of a mirror, which did not help. In the staff room mirror, my hair, my lipstick, my appearance suddenly seemed all wrong.

As I was about to face my audience, Charlie walked into the children's room and presented me with a gardenia to celebrate the event. That gardenia gave me courage, and the story hour was a success in spite of the distractions of adults standing at the back of the room to listen, borrowers going in and out, fussy infants. I learned to concentrate on the faces of the children and to shut out everything that was going on in the room.

With the help of one of the Upshots I began to learn stories quickly. He enjoyed reading aloud. After he read the story I had chosen, I told it back to him while he prompted me. Soon I no longer needed his help. Not only did I tell stories in the library; in summer I told them in parks, where I competed with shouts and splashes from swimming pools. The Five Chinese Brothers, by Claire Huchet Bishop, was the most popular of the sixty-two stories I learned while in Yakima, and I told it many times. In 1939 and 1940 the Dionne quintuplets were in the headlines, which may have been one of the reasons children so often asked for the story about "the five Chinese twins."

Not all my storytelling was successful. I still cringe at the memory of my first visit to a small school outside Yakima's city limits. Using bus fare from the library's petty cash, I rode with my armload of books to the end of the line and enjoyed a pleasant walk the rest of the way on a road lined with sumac turning red in the autumn sun. My repertoire was limited, but I felt secure in my preparation of a story for the first graders, The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle and Who Was in It, by Carl Sandburg. In the cla.s.sroom I introduced myself and began the story, which contained such lines as "They chubbed their chubbs and looked around and chubbed their chubbs again." The words nearly froze in my throat. The cla.s.s, children of migratory workers, all looking blank, staring at me as if they thought I was speaking a strange language. The expression on the face of the teacher standing at the rear of the room was no help. Somehow I got through that story, but that visit taught me always to find out something about an audience before speaking.

Other visits, to six public schools and two Catholic schools, were more successful. Children always made me feel welcome, possibly because my visit freed them from arithmetic or spelling, and I enjoyed introducing children to books. One small boy laughed so hard at my rendition of Horton Hatches the Egg that he fell out of his seat. When I stopped at an interesting point in a book talk, someone always asked, "What happened next?" and the rest of the cla.s.s wanted to know, too.

There were other library activities that required preparation at home and prevented me from writing. Once a month I took over the library's weekly radio broadcast; cla.s.ses walked to the library for instruction in the use of the card catalog; during Book Week I spoke to a.s.semblies at the two junior high schools; and before school was out, I visited the elementary schools once more to talk about the summer reading club, an event probably more educational for a new librarian than for the children.

To earn a certificate, each child had to read eight books of suitable reading level and tell me about them. No taking the easy way out with picture books allowed. Everyone who joined was given a card with a picture of a clown holding eight balloons. After telling me about a book, the reader was given a colored sticker to cover a balloon. When school started in September I visited schools once more to hand out certificates to proud readers of eight books. Listening to Yakima's children tell me about the books they had read gave me valuable insights into the children and their reading.

While the atmosphere of the children's room was always lively, the two hours a day I spent in the adult department were quite different. The Depression was even more in evidence. The reference room was a haven for old men who came to read the newspapers we hung on wooden sticks. On rainy days one man dried his socks on the radiator. Housewives came for escape reading, a struggling writer for advice; so many people sought answers for a puzzle contest that they hoped would win them fortunes that we finally had to refuse to answer contest questions. Some people could not afford to pay two cents a day on overdue books and left empty-handed while we recorded their fines on tiny slips of paper pasted to their registration cards. They could not renew library cards until all fines were paid, a system that worried the whole staff, for it denied books to people who needed them most. When I left Yakima, Miss Remsberg was conferring with the city attorney to see if the system could be changed.

My tasks in the adult department were varied: registering new borrowers, finding books for readers, telling people they could not bring their dogs into the library, answering reference questions. Berneita explained that if a question asked over the telephone had an embarra.s.sing answer, I could go into Miss Remsberg's office to say, for example, that "whales suckle their young." I soon learned to respect the Department of Agriculture bulletins, which were easy to use and invaluable in locating the period of gestation in goats or the cure for cabbage blight.

One seeker after knowledge asked me if there wasn't an older librarian who could find the answer to her question. I called Miss Remsberg, who explained with amus.e.m.e.nt that I was a library school graduate and well informed on the latest in reference work. Another time, when I found an answer, the borrower looked at me with skepticism and took the same question to Miss James, who looked up the answer, the same answer I had found. Even though my youth did not inspire confidence in everyone, I once wrote gloomily to Jane that in another year I would be a quarter of a century old.

There was another aspect of library service, not taught in library school. This I thought of as Fear of Taxpayer. When reading book reviews, or especially books, during lulls, the staff always kept a pencil and a pad of paper slips at hand. Otherwise a sharp-eyed taxpayer might think we were enjoying ourselves. Discarding battered books also brought on Fear of Taxpayer attacks. In those Depression days a WPA worker mended torn pages with rice paper, replaced ragged spines with buckram, on which she lettered author and t.i.tle with white ink, and protected them with sh.e.l.lac, and did what she could to hold books together. Libraries at that time did not have plastic to protect books' original jackets. Children's books too far gone for library shelves but still hanging together, more or less, were given to teachers from rural schools too poor to buy books. What to do with the rest? If they were sent to the town dump, they were sure to be seen by a taxpayer, who would complain that the library was throwing away books. If Mr. Royer tried to burn them, the glue in the bindings gummed up the furnace. Once Miss Remsberg solved the problem by asking me to make the smelliest, most tattered books worse. I ripped bindings and poured ink on pages. She then presented the books to the library board, and with official approval to back us up, we sent the books to the dump.

Because Yakima was so isolated, small events took on excitement out of proportion to their importance. When Sally Rand brought her feather fans to Yakima, the elderly gravedigger horrified Mrs. Johnson by inviting her to go with him to see her dance. Mrs. Johnson went, but not with him. I did not go, but I heard earnest discussions about whether or not Sally Rand was really naked behind her fans. Miss Remsberg's comment was "Well, I suppose she's part of the American scene."

The day nylons appeared on the market, the library staff went out in their lunch hours to buy the miracle stockings-reputed to dry in twenty minutes if rolled in a towel. The wonder of it all! When Gone With the Wind, originally a long movie with an intermission, came to Yakima, the whole town turned out. In the library the stack of reserve cards for the book was several inches thick.

One morning I received a telephone call at the library. It was Bob telling me that Virginia had died of a ruptured appendix. I was stunned. They seemed to have so much, to be so happy, and now Virginia was to be buried in her wedding dress.

Fall turned to winter. On rainy nights when I worked until nine, a car parked in front of the library often blinked its lights, a signal that one of the men from the boardinghouse had come for me so I wouldn't have to walk home in the rain.

As the weather grew colder, an open-air ice rink opened a few blocks from the boardinghouse. On my Friday afternoon off, I rented a pair of skates and took a lesson, wobbling around the rink on the arm of an instructor. When I told this at dinner, the Upshots laughed. Who needed lessons to skate? Determined to learn, I bought a pair of figure skates and a season ticket to the rink, an act that gave me an attack of Depression guilt because these were for fun, not survival. To my surprise, in my new skates, whose leather was not softened by wear, I skated off without a wobble. I then made myself, on Mrs. Johnson's sewing machine, a red skating skirt with red bloomers. "It's Miss Bunn!" children shouted, surprised at seeing a librarian in a short red skirt. I skated alone on Friday afternoons, and evenings I sometimes skated with the Upshots. When I worked until nine o'clock, we often skated until midnight. A timid skater who could not risk breaking bones in those days before medical insurance, I found exercise both soothing and stimulating as I went round and round to The Skater's Waltz or Bonnie Baker singing "Oh Johnny, Oh!"

The temperature dropped even lower. As I walked to work, the heavy fog that settled over Yakima froze and fell like dainty snow. Then real snow began to fall, and the ice rink had to be swept frequently. Skating in falling snow is exhilarating, but I soon changed from my short skirt to ski pants. Ski pants! I actually had money for ski pants, but of course I bought them on sale.

At Christmastime, Clarence traveled by train and bus to Yakima. In my eagerness to see him I went to the station much too early, fidgeted until the bus pulled in, and there was Clarence, in person, right there in Yakima. I took him to the boardinghouse, where one of the men who had gone home for Christmas had offered him his room. We sat on the living room couch, and as the radio played, Clarence produced a small velvet box, opened it, and slipped a diamond engagement ring on my finger. We kissed and without speaking rose and began to dance to the music of the radio. Before he returned to California we decided to marry the next December in San Francisco.

I let several months go by before mentioning my ring to my parents. As I expected, when Mother received the news, she wrote in anger, which left me depressed. I worked out my feelings on the ice rink.

The next June, Miss Remsberg and I planned to attend a library conference at Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood. Urged on by the Upshots, I decided to be brave and fly to Portland, and one of them drove me to the airport so he could actually see the inside of an airplane. The plane took off, b.u.mping down air currents down the windy Columbia River Gorge to Portland, where Mother and Dad were excited to meet someone getting off an airplane at the Swan Island airport.

When I told them that Clarence and I planned to marry in December, Mother looked sad, but I was shocked by Dad's anger. Although I knew he was not enthusiastic, he usually could see my side and be understanding and supportive. Now I realized that because Mother wrote all the letters, I had not known the depth of his feelings. They refused to announce our engagement, and the next day I was glad to escape by bus to the conference at Mount Hood.

To me the highlight of the conference was seeing Dell McCormick accept the Young Readers' Choice Award for his book Tall Timber Tales, which I had used with success with my little troop of nonreaders. I was awed to hear a real author speak and would have been even more awed if I had known that someday I would win the same award and win it more than once.

After the cool mountain air in Oregon, the summer heat of Yakima was dehydrating. Life was speeding up. I told Miss Remsberg that I was leaving in December, so she wrote to Miss Worden at the university about a replacement. Miss Worden wrote back, "I can guess what Miss Bunn's next move will be."

Talk of war was increasingly serious. World War II had begun in Europe. Charlie was haunted by his memories of the First World War, when he had left his premed course at the university to volunteer with his fraternity brothers. He had been a.s.signed to caring for the dead on the battlefields of France, an experience so devastating he was unable to continue his medical studies when the war ended. That summer of 1940 he suffered so badly with allergies he finally had to go to the Veterans Hospital in Walla Walla to recover.

In September I was given a two-week vacation (with pay!). After a few days in Portland, where Mother and Dad were cool toward me, I fled by train to Sacramento, where Clarence had managed to take his vacation at the same time. We spent a few days with his mother, who had retired and lived in a cabin in the foothills of the Sierra. With her car we drove to the Bay Area, where I was greedy for the sight of the Campanile against brown hills and the silhouette of San Francisco across the bay. Clarence stayed with his sister in Oakland or his brother in San Francisco, and I slept on a too-short couch of Connie and Park's, who were now married. I was sad to miss Jane, who had found a job, not as a teacher, but as a secretary to a high school in Southern California. Clarence and I attended the Exposition on Treasure Island, danced at the Mark Hopkins, and much too soon it was time to return to Yakima and the library.

One day a couple of weeks later I received a telegram at work. Expecting news of someone's death, I opened it with shaking hands and read, COME BY AIRLINER STOP WILL WIRE AIRFARE STOP CLARENCE. I had worked my year, and Clarence had been reluctant to see me leave after my vacation. I knew Mother and Dad would never give me a wedding. Suddenly I was angry and weary of trying to appease them. Why not get married now? Life was fragile; Virginia, the happy bride, had died so suddenly. Why should Clarence and I wait any longer?

I consulted Miss Remsberg, who advised me to go ahead because my parents would not change their feelings until after we were married. She gave me an extra day off, but cautioned me that our marriage must be kept secret in Yakima because Berneita was getting married the same week and "Yakima will not stand for two married women on the staff."

Miss Remsberg also said that she did not understand why the children had liked me so much; I treated them the same way I treated adults. Of course. That was the way I had wanted to be treated as a child.

I pulled myself together and flew to Sacramento, where Clarence met me. We drove in his mother's car to Reno, where, with his younger brother and sister-in-law as witnesses, we were married at the Church of Our Lady of the Snows. The next day I flew back to Yakima wondering how I was going to break the news to my family.

As it turned out, I didn't have to break the news. A couple of evenings later, when I was alone in the house, the telephone rang so persistently that I answered, although I did not usually do so. It was Mother. "We see you and Clarence are married," she said.

How on earth...? "Yes," I answered. "How did you know?"

"We read it in the Journal," she said. "And now people will think the worst."

I recall very little of the conversation except that I said, "How did you expect us to get married? You wouldn't give us a wedding."

Mother answered, "A priest wouldn't come to our house, and we could never go to a Catholic church. I dread what people will say." Mother never forgot the neighbors. If neighbors counted months on their fingers, they were mistaken. It was fifteen years before we had children, twins to make up for lost time.

But how did news of our marriage get into Portland's Journal? We had both given fict.i.tious residences. Soon two letters arrived. Mother wrote scathingly of two people trying to hide in a town "the whole world has its eyes on." She also enclosed a three-line newspaper clipping date-lined Reno announcing the divorce of someone from Portland and our marriage with my last name given as Dunn. Mother said I had killed her. As it turned out, no one in Portland recognized our names in the paper. Dad wrote that I need not stop in Portland when I moved to Sacramento.

Worn-out with years of controversy, I responded with a brief note agreeing it was best I not stop in Portland. Mother, in need of saving face, then wrote that I should stop in Portland for an announcement party. This was the last thing I wanted, but I reluctantly agreed to help save my parents embarra.s.sment. I then got on with my work at the library and having neglected dental work done so that I would not burden my new husband with the expense.

Why hadn't I rebelled sooner? Because I felt sorry for my parents, trapped as they were by the Depression, struggling to give me an education. I appreciated all they had done for me and felt indebted to them, but now, at the age of twenty-four, I felt I had a right to make my own decisions.

When Mother was in her eighties, she told one of my cousins, "I wanted Beverly, and Clarence wanted her, and I finally had to let her go." She never did let me go, not really.

In those last months in Yakima, war was on everyone's mind. The young men at the boardinghouse registered for the draft, an event I recall by the seats of their pants as they leaned over the dining room table searching for their draft numbers in the newspaper. Clarence wrote that he had drawn a high number-what a relief! At least we would have some time together before he had to go off to war-if the United States became involved in war. Somehow, it seemed hard to believe.

My last weeks as Yakima's children's librarian went quickly. Berneita and I constructed a gingerbread house for the children's room, and I told Christmas stories. I was sad about leaving the staff and the work I enjoyed. As the day of my departure grew closer, the men in the boardinghouse surprised me one evening at dinner by giving me a set of linen dish towels and several pieces of silver in the pattern I had chosen.

Berneita felt I should have some sort of celebration, so she gave me an announcement party in the new home her husband had provided. She was proud of showing off her silver and Spode, and when dessert, wedding bells of ice cream, was served, each supported a catalog card announcing our marriage. The heading, in proper library form, read: Cleary, Beverly Atlee (Bunn), 1916-.

I don't recall the t.i.tle we gave the book, but I do recall hoping that someday there would be author cards with the same heading in the catalogs of schools and libraries.

My second announcement party, in Portland, was a sad little affair held on a wild, stormy night. Not all the guests could come in such weather. Clarence sent Mother and me corsages, but Mother resisted wearing hers because "it wouldn't do for me to be too dressed up in my own home." Dad and I were tense, but nervous, exhausted Mother managed to smile and tell everyone what a fine young man Clarence was and how pleased she and Dad were over our marriage. It was a difficult evening, but Mother had saved face with the neighbors.

Photographic Insert III.

Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, library-school style.

A tired bridesmaid, "health all gone"

An application picture taken the week we were married Story hour in the park, temperature about 110 One of the Upshots cooling off in a puddle on the lawn of our boardinghouse.

Charlie Walker, a dear and lasting friend from the Yakima boardinghouse.

Claudine at the beach the weekend she met her future husband.

The Sather Gate Book Shop.

We started life together, Clarence and I, in his bachelor apartment on the ground floor of a Victorian house near California's state capitol, where he now worked in the state controller's office. After Clarence carried me across the threshold in proper bridegroom fas.h.i.+on, I saw hanging above the bed a picture of a weary Indian drooping on horseback. The t.i.tle was The End of the Trail. I took the picture down and hid it under the bed, which annoyed the landlady.

I continued to write to Mother and Dad once a week as if nothing had changed. Mother laboriously answered, hunting and pecking on my old typewriter letters that she tried to make cheerful but that made me sad. She could not hide her depression.

Clarence said he wanted me to choose a place to live, and after looking at Sacramento apartments, we finally moved into another apartment in the same building, which I liked to think of as picturesque. It, too, was on the ground floor but was light, airy, and looked out on the backyard and a gardenia tree. I had not known that corsages grew on trees.

One morning, as I struggled to learn to cook on another three-burner-over-an-oven stove, I found a suspicious-looking insect in a cupboard. I captured it and presented it to the landlady, saying, "Is this what I think it is?"

"Oh, my dear, it's a c.o.c.kroach," she said as if I were fortunate to be able to present her with such a gift. "They are so easy to get rid of." She gave me a saucer of borax and told me to put it on top of a cupboard. I did, and never saw another c.o.c.kroach.

Early in 1941 the Bureau of Internal Revenue notified us that we owed twenty-five dollars in income tax. If we didn't pay, our property would be attached. Twenty-five whole dollars? Why? Clarence, calmer than I, explained that because we had both worked the year before, our combined salaries made us eligible to pay income tax. Since our property consisted of an armchair we had bought for five dollars and had reupholstered, a card table, and a floor lamp bought with S&H green stamps, we joked about what the government would do with our property, and paid up.

Then Clarence received an offer of a better position, with the U.S. Navy Cost Inspection office in San Francisco.

"It's a plot!" cried our eccentric landlady. "Working in the state capitol is an honor, and someone is plotting to get his job. Don't go!" We went.

In San Francisco we found a two-room apartment that, in our innocence, we did not realize was on the edge of the Tenderloin. Whenever I stepped out on the street alone, men cruising in cars tried to pick me up. This did not stop me from walking downtown to have lunch with Connie or other friends or climbing over n.o.b Hill to take a WPA course in block printing. On Polk Street, old men with red noses and red hands shucked oysters. Fruits and vegetables strange to me were displayed along the sidewalks. I compared prices and splurged on a papaya, the first we had ever eaten. My experiment with fava beans was a failure, but I was more successful with salsify. For the first time in my life I took an interest in food and cooking. Sat.u.r.day evenings we went to small French or Italian restaurants for dinner. Afterward we went to a theater on Powell Street that showed double features for twenty-five cents.

We enjoyed San Francisco, but when Clarence was a.s.signed to work in the navy office at a s.h.i.+pyard in Alameda, we decided to move closer to his work. Knowing little about Oakland, we took a train to the Fruitvale district, which was joined to Alameda by a bridge across the estuary. We found an attractive, unfurnished three-room apartment on the top floor of a Victorian house. The landlady lent us a bed, and we moved in. The large kitchen window looked out on eucalyptus trees at the end of the dead-end street, or cul-de-sac, as real estate advertis.e.m.e.nts call such a street. A hill rising behind the trees was crowned with a spooky-looking house that could have come from a Charles Addams cartoon.

Neighbors, except for one quiet j.a.panese family, were mostly Italian and Portuguese. The first question women asked me was "Did you go to college?" When I admitted I had, an invisible curtain dropped between us. When I walked to the branch library and returned with an armload of books, I felt as if the neighbors were eyeing me with disapproval. Didn't this woman have anything better to do than read?

There was no time for loneliness. I shopped for a few pieces of furniture, and we traveled by public transportation to visit friends in Berkeley. Then one Sat.u.r.day night, as we waited for a bus, we were struck by a thought: We could buy a car. We were so used to the Depression and traveling by public transportation that such an extravagant thought had never before entered our minds. After searching want ads we found a secondhand Chevrolet coupe for sale just half a block away. We bought it, and Clarence started to teach me to drive.

Because we needed furniture and because I felt I should keep up with children's books, I went to the Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley, where Quail Hawkins was a well-known seller of children's books. I introduced myself and found her instantly enthusiastic about hiring a children's librarian to help during the Christmas rush. She took me upstairs to meet Mrs. Herbert, the store manager, an elderly woman with gla.s.ses so thick she made me feel like a mouse caught in the gaze of an owl. This formidable woman was inclined to dismiss me because I had no selling experience. "But she knows books!" cried Quail, her cheeks beginning to flush.

"But we don't know if she can sell," insisted Mrs. Herbert.

"If she knows books, she can sell them," countered Quail, her cheeks now flaming with emotion.

Quail won out. Commuting by two buses and a streetcar, I went to work for eighteen dollars for a six-day week in the store that had the largest collection of children's books west of Chicago. Quail, I soon learned, was a rapid, omnivorous reader with a retentive memory, a love of books, and a pa.s.sion for persuading others to read them.

Bookselling was full of surprises. First of all I learned, but had trouble remembering, to stand back when punching the cash register so the drawer of that hostile machine would not hit me in the stomach. I learned that information could be located without the use of the card catalog. I learned that it was easier to persuade a customer to buy a book than it had been to persuade a library patron that a book was worth borrowing. When a grandmother asked for a book for a twelve-year-old, I soon caught on that the child was usually only ten but was "as smart as a twelve-year-old," at least in Berkeley.

From Quail I learned to disarm disgruntled local authors who felt the store was neglecting them because their books were not displayed in the front window or who had counted their books on the shelves the previous week and returned to count again and complain that we had not sold a single copy in the entire week. We smiled and said, "We were hoping you would come in. Would you mind signing some of your books?" Authors never minded. Someday, when I found time to write, I promised myself, I would never behave in bookstores like Berkeley's local authors.

The pace was fast. "Count the little brown things," cried Quail my first morning at work. Baffled, I asked what she meant. The Little, Brown publisher's representative was coming, so the number of copies of each Little, Brown t.i.tle in stock must be counted and marked in a catalog so there would be no delays when Quail gave her order. The time of publishers' reps was precious, she explained. To count, we climbed the ladder in the stockroom and crawled on our hands and knees to reach books behind books on lower shelves. In between, we waited on customers, replenished stock, and wrapped books for gifts. Little Golden Books, which sold for twenty-five cents, were a popular item. We wrapped endless copies of The Poky Little Puppy and Saggy Baggy Elephant, but no matter how busy we were, somehow the catalog was counted by the time the publisher's rep arrived.

The work was exhilarating, and the customers in the university town were pleasant-except one. That customer was a world-famous scientist who shall remain nameless. He strode through the store and demanded my name. When he got it, he roared in a voice that must have reached Telegraph Avenue, "Mrs. Cleary, show me the most beautiful book published this year."

"How old is the child?" I asked, trying to find a starting place.

"Mrs. Cleary," he boomed, "I want the most beautiful book of all."

I do not recall the book that satisfied him, but I do recall the difficult forty-five minutes I spent trying to produce it while other customers fumed. When I checked the charge account of the world-famous scientist, I had the embarra.s.sment of asking him to please step up to the office-there was a problem with his credit.

I was to work as Christmas help four different years, which, except for the first year, have mostly blurred into one. Business expanded and so did my pay-ultimately, to twenty-five dollars a week when four of us manned the children's department, and there was no room to stand back when we punched the cash register. Two episodes stand out in memory, besides hiding in the stockroom when the world-famous scientist entered.

When a customer telephoned and asked us to hold a book, the last in stock, until she could come in, we wrote her name on a slip of paper and set the book by the cash register. Sara, one of the saleswomen, noticed that invariably other customers wanted that book. She began to choose slow-moving books and insert slips of paper on which she wrote, "Mrs. Wogus will call." The book always sold even though Mrs. Wogus was a cow in Walter R. Brooks's "Freddy" books.