I loved my Aunt Clara and I also loved my independence. A year or so after my short stay with her, I decided that I would show my parents I could walk to her house on my own without escort. Aunt Clara lived at 119th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, about half a mile southwest of us. And so one summer morning I took off. I walked briskly, filled with excitement. I knew I was breaking rules, but I also knew I had to prove to “them” that I could be on my own. I noticed very little en route—the idea was to get there as quickly as possible. Within ten minutes I appeared, unheralded and unannounced, in Aunt Clara’s apartment. Her first words were “Does your mother know you’re here?” When I said no, she phoned my mother immediately, but my mother had not yet noticed my absence and had not had time to worry. As for me, I had made my personal declaration of independence.
I was a tomboy from early on and played street games with the boys—tag and hide and seek, Red Rover and cops and robbers. One of the boys, Dickie Loeb, lived in the same apartment house. He was three years my senior but we became good friends. In fact, he initiated me into two of my most memorable early adventures.
As I look back now, I see that those adventures not only reflected my Harlem life but foreshadowed the life that would follow. On a bitterly cold winter’s day Dickie suggested that we earn some money by shoveling snow. We rang the downstairs doorbell of a brownstone on our block and made a deal with the lady of the house, who was clad in a red jumper. We would shovel the snow off her areaway for thirty-five cents. She agreed. Dickie, about ten, and I, about seven, picked up our shovels and set to work. There were piles of snow settled on the paving stones, and it took us at least an hour to clear the area. When we were finished we rang the bell again to collect our fee. This time the lady who answered was wearing blue. She said she had never asked us to shovel the snow and she refused to pay anything. I was already making up a little story to explain what had happened. “I think she changed the way she looks and put on another dress just so she wouldn’t have to pay us,” I fantasized. Then we came to a decision: “Let’s shovel it all back.” It took us another hour, but right had been done, and that was important.
Dickie was instrumental too in the matter of my first paid job. A Mr. Joseph owned a small newspaper stand on the corner opposite our apartment; we could see it from our windows. One summer, probably the one after the snow-clearing episode, Dickie told me that Mr. Joseph needed an assistant and wanted one of us to “man” his stand. I must have been about eight then, and I was consumed with an unholy desire to beat Dickie and get the job. School—I attended P.S. 128—was over, and a long summer loomed ahead. I listened carefully to Mr. Joseph’s stipulation. “Whoever gets here by 7 A.M. will get the job.” Dickie’s forte was never punctuality, and I easily got the job, having set my alarm a good hour early.
The relatives fumed. In fact they sent delegations to assure my mother she would be haled to court if she allowed me to take a paid job. She was as adamant as I. She understood my desire to command that corner post. More important, she knew that she would be able to determine exactly where her often wandering daughter was—by merely glancing out her window. I got the job—and held it. Newsprint filled my nostrils and my soul. The variety of dailies and weeklies astonished me. There were racing papers and sporting papers and financial papers and story papers and foreign papers and of course plain newspapers. Most of them sold for two cents.
One halcyon day, while I was superintending the stand in my khaki bloomers, a man put down two cents for a daily paper. I handed it to him. Then he put down a dime. I asked him what it was for, and he answered, “That’s for you.” I did not understand. He had paid two cents for the paper he wanted, and he was giving me ten cents for handing it to him? How could that be right? It made no sense to me. “It’s for you,” he repeated with a smile, and he walked away. I was overwhelmed. This was what was called good fortune. This was what happened in fairy tales. I raced home later to tell my mother, and I think from that day on I became an optimist.
In between such ventures and adventures there were piano lessons—customary for girls from middle-class families, regardless of their inclination or talent. Every Monday Professor Frank paid us a visit and sat next to me at the upright Knabe in the living room. Sometimes my parents listened to the performance. My first was a rendition of “To a Robin,” my father occasionally humming along: “Robin, why do you sing, beautiful songs of the springtime? Tell me, where is your mate, singing both early and late?” Throughout, Professor Frank stoically controlled his disappointment at my complete lack of musical talent. He probably was intrigued—as I still am—by my costume. For some reason now lost to memory, I insisted upon wearing my Indian costume for my piano lessons. It consisted of long khaki pants, a tan beaded jacket, and a wide head-band from which sprouted Indian feathers.
Long before I took my job I can remember the smell of newsprint when my father brought the paper home and I read the cartoon strip about Little Mary Mixup, the smell of library paste in school, the thrill of attending a performance at the Alhambra, a one-act in which two children had to walk through a pitchblack tunnel before they could emerge into the sunshine—darkness leading into light. But all the while the neighborhood was, as I often heard my parents say, deteriorating. A move was imminent. By then my father, who had been a manufacturer of vermouth with a huge establishment on West 57th Street (“Something to learn: Buy your vermouth from M. R. Stern”), had been forced by Prohibition into another business—bakers’ supplies. The end of the First World War had ushered in an era of apparent prosperity. The 1920s were rolling along in their dazzling, optimistic, but ultimately destructive course. And Harlem was no longer attracting the German Jewish population with whom my family was most comfortable. We moved downtown and settled in an apartment on Ninety-ninth Street down the hill and close to Riverside Drive. There, my adolescent years would be spent. From there I would eventually walk each day to Barnard College, and after my brother’s marriage and my father’s death I would live on there with my mother until her death. The area was pleasant, prosperous, bourgeois, and the view of the lordly Hudson was always stirring. I would write several poems in its praise.
At nearby Joan of Arc Junior High School I formed a close friendship with Shirley Phillips, a friendship based in large measure upon our shared addiction to writing poetry. By then we were each writing a minimum of a poem a day, supplemented upon occasion by prose “rapsodies” [sic] to our English teacher. When, somehow, a copy of the Columbia University Bulletin of Information sailed into our ken, we scanned it and lit upon the entry for English s15, English Prosody. This was described as a three-point “course in verse writing.” Particularly enticing was the promise that “poems of students will be discussed in class. The discussion will deal mainly with images as the foundation of poetry, and with versification.” The course would be given in Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall by Mr. H. N. Fairchild.
Although we knew little about versification, our lines were certainly filled with dazzling images, and there could be no greater bliss than to have our poems discussed in class. Shirley and I, now in our early teens, duly presented ourselves, that summer in the 1920s, to Mr. H.N. Fairchild. I would later learn that Mr. Fairchild possessed a delicate sense of humor, but he betrayed no sign of it when we applied for admission to English s15. We took the whole course and received his candid criticism of our endeavors. My poem to John Masefield he judged “not without merit,” though my “metre breaks down.” Next to my line “Your thoughts are pure as April rain,” Mr. Fairchild wrote: “He used to work in a saloon.” Not least among the little ironies of my life is the coincidence that I would re-encounter Mr. Fairchild in a few years’ time. When he spied me in the corridor of Barnard College he would remember me. “You’ve arrived at last,” he said. There he would become one of my mentors in the English Honors course.
Meanwhile, back at Joan of Arc Junior High School, I embarked one memorable summer upon my first trip abroad. When my mother’s
sister, my maiden Aunt Annie, and two of her friends decided upon a European tour and offered to take me along, my parents made the proposal. I could have the choice between this journey to distant lands or four summers in camp. Never suspecting that my life would be punctuated by annual book-buying trips abroad, I chose Europe and, in the company of the three single ladies, clutching my red leather-bound octavo entitled MY TRIP ABROAD, embarked on the S.S. Stockholm June 30, 1925.
That diary, still in my possession, hides, though not quite successfully, the homesickness I suffered from start to finish of the two-month trip. Still, as soon as we sailed; I entered the record with the usual exclamatory opening:
Well, we’re off! The gangplank is lifted and caps and handkerchiefs wave in the breeze! Although, without, the climate is superb, my heart is not so light, as I think of the departure from my parents and brother. But I shall conquer this feeling! We have already dined, and now we have walked the deck, rather than to lie in the chairs.
I celebrated my thirteenth birthday on board, and continued to pour into my journal long words in place of short ones, circumlocutions instead of direct statements, and my interpretation of the guide’s explanations:
August 19, 1925. Paris. We drove to Trianon and walked about the peaceful forest and garden of Marie Auntoinette [sic], to which she would flee when weary of court life … At last we … turned to the Grand Trianon which contains many most interesting rooms, one of which is that prepared for Queen Victoria of England, who refused to sleep there, as it had previously been utilized by Duchess du Barrie [sic].
My superlatives were scattered throughout my diary, along with my exclamations at the “WONDROUS” world that unfolded before me, especially at the “wondrous” North Cape:
Hammerfest: NORTHCAPE (aboard S.S. Irma July 28, 1925). We were in reality at the top of the world. High up above the remainder of that wondrous Planet called Earth, we stood, overwhelmed with awe. This renowned North Cape stands majestic and alone, in the waters of the Arctic, and a path extends to the topmost point from which one might proceed to the edge. A number of people ventured on this mysterious quest, in search of the “Midnight Sun,” which we were advised would soon appear … The delicately colored clouds, bordered with brilliant gold, heralded the appearance of that ball of fire, around which the world revolves … On, along its neverending journey, the sun sped, until it was ready to rise to another continent and bring with it the return of dawn, and the departure of night.
After “the final words which I shall write in this little book,” I returned home with my memories, my reports, and a mannish haircut from a Parisian salon—not yet popular back home. It made me the butt of considerable sarcasm at Joan of Arc Junior High School. Shirley was loyal, however, and we quickly resumed our way of life together. Always our adventures were interlaced with our readings in Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Alger, in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. When it came to Little Women, it seemed always a matter not of reading but of rereading. Jo March was our alter ego—or we were hers. And then, too, our junior high school teachers were preparing us for senior high school. One way they accomplished this was by addressing us as “Miss.” The trick was not to giggle when this occurred, to take it in stride—it was part of growing up. It was no child, but “Miss Stern” who was about to enter Hunter College High School.
YOU’RE
SUDDENLY A “MISS”
Madeleine HUNTER College High School differed in three significant ways from most public high schools. It required an entrance examination and upheld high scholastic standards. It was an all-girls school with women teachers. Its principal, Louisa M. Webster, was a paragon of moral virtue.
Yet all this did not dismay me. Hunter College High School, nunnery though it appeared to be, was never a nunnery to me. As one of a small exuberant group of adolescent friends, I was happily unaware of the school’s sequestered nature. One of our group was Helen Keppler, who had attended Joan of Arc Junior High School with me. When Helen suggested we go to see Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway, my mother immediately expressed her approval: “If Helen Keppler wants to see Cyrano, she must be a very nice girl.” She was less enthusiastic about the other members of our circle, regarding their Russian or Polish backgrounds as inferior to hers. Nothing about them bothered me. We attended classes, went to the theater, read poetry, gossiped and giggled, always together.
Mostly, we gossiped about our teachers. We giggled about our math teacher, whom we promptly dubbed Lizzie Poip—short for Perpendicular. In Latin we had a wonderful teacher who was in love with the classics. On her first trip abroad, she told us, she had journeyed to Rome, where she would never forget the thrilling, mellifluous cry of the conductor as the train pulled into the station—“ROMA.” To me—to all of us—she turned Roma into Romance.
Our history teacher inspired Helen, who already had a dramatic flair, to some of her best acting. Miss Ver Planck, descendant of Dutch patroons, was an extremely well-cushioned woman who would enter our classroom, throw her books on the desk, and, before doing anything else, pull her costume into shape by tugging at her corsets. Helen did a great imitation of her. Before Miss Ver Planck’s arrival she would march up to the front of the room, throw her books on the teacher’s desk, and proceed to pull down imaginary corsets. One day, inevitably, Miss Ver Planck walked in during Helen’s performance. Her last.
Our French teachers endeared themselves to us in different ways. One of them always appeared in riding boots and jodhpurs, sometimes partly hidden by a skirt. Another—Miss Dalton—raved on about the gratifying delights of brioche et chocolat in a French panegyric that inspired us all to rush to Constantine’s and order brioche et chocolat after school. During school hours, to satisfy our adolescent appetites, we kept a communal jar of mayonnaise under one of the desks, each of us dipping a finger in as we felt the urge.
I’ll never forget the incident during Miss Dalton’s French class that threatened to change my future. While Miss Dalton was discussing the subjunctive mood, Helen took it into her head to toss a note to me in which she wrote that she and the great idol of the silent screen, John Gilbert, were having an affair. I immediately replied with a note to the effect that—what a coincidence!—I was going to give birth to Ernest’s child. Ernest was then my imaginary lover, a gentle creature who combined the pure thoughts of John Masefield with the handsome features of Lord Byron. This time the note did not land on target. Miss Dalton saw it, interrupted her meanderings into the subjunctive, and demanded, in clear and unmistakable English, “GIVE ME THAT NOTE!”
On the way home from school I discussed my situation with my friends. It was without any doubt a difficult one. We attended a school where morality was enthroned. If our principal, the strait-laced Louisa M. Webster, saw a girl wearing rouge or lipstick, she simply walked up to her, took out a handkerchief, and wiped the girl’s face clean. And now here was I—pregnant by Ernest. Miss Dalton would certainly decide that I had reached the depths of iniquity and I would be promptly expelled without court-martial. The only other possible decision she could reach was that I was insane. That decision, doubtless corroborated by a physical examination, would also result in expulsion. I had no choice really—I had to face the possibility that I would have to leave Hunter College High School and enroll in some business course at Gregg or Drakes or Eastman-Gaines. Maybe I should start applying right now!
The next day in French class Miss Dalton summoned me to the front of the room. My friends watched in consternation. I walked slowly to my doom. “Please conjugate the verb aimer at the blackboard,” Miss Dalton directed me. I grasped the piece of chalk, resumed my studies at Hunter College High School, and took up my life again. Miss Dalton never said a word, and to this day I don’t know if she read the note or simply ignored my adolescent humor.
Of all my high school instructors the one who influenced me most deeply and whom I adored was Hazel Sebring, my English teacher. Slight, short, olive-complexioned, with dark hair, she seemed to me the
incarnation of poetry. Surely she lived most of the time with the Muse of Poetry. And just as surely I did too. At Joan of Arc Junior High, my English teacher Grace Macdonald had only just begun to enlighten me to the pleasures of poetry with her inspiring reading of Shelley’s “Skylark.” Miss Sebring continued, picking up where she had left off, reading poems aloud every day to the class. Her inspired readings were contagious.
The tangible results of that inspiration survive in a fifty-nine-page pamphlet, bound in stiff terra cotta wrappers, with the label POEMS on the front cover. The title-page reads Poems Written by Students While Attending Hunter College High School. The imprint is “New York, December, 1927,” and the work was printed by the Cumberland Press. The poems are arranged alphabetically by author. My friend Helen Keppler is represented by two short poems, I by three. One of them is the octet on John Masefield, another is a love poem called “Late June,” and the third is an invigorating paean to “This Autumn Day.”
The pamphlet and the poems it contains were all produced by members of the Poetry Club, which I helped found and which Miss Sebring supervised. There is a picture of the club a year later in The Argus, the annual issued by students of Hunter College High School. Dated December 1928, The Argus includes not only poems and brief essays but pictures of the graduates, with mottoes describing them and an unsigned feature entitled “Pen, Pencil and Personalities.” It is stated that “Madeleine Stern was influential in bringing the Poetry Club into being. Her poetry amply justifies the faith which the senior class showed in selecting her as the one most likely to become famous.” I had won a number of medals at Joan of Arc Junior High School but none at all at Hunter; still, the confident assurance of future fame in The Argus was better than any medal, I thought.
Old Books, Rare Friends Page 3
