by Mary Oppen
The boy with whom I had broken off before I went away to Corvallis met George and me as we walked home after dark the next evening. He had some high-school toughs with him, who held me and beat George, blacking his eyes. When we finally got home Mama and I did what we could for George’s eyes; next day my brothers came to the house and said, after seeing us holding hands, “If Mary wants him,” and went away. Eleven years later, on a visit to Grants Pass, an old lady came up to me on the street. “Please,” she said, “can my boy come home?” My brothers had said to the boy who had beaten George, “Leave town and never come back.”
George went home to San Francisco and went to work in one of his father’s theaters. I continued to work in my family’s store, saving money to leave again. This time I planned to go to San Francisco to enter nurse’s training. George and I wrote frequently, and finally Nellie, who had moved to Berkeley, invited me to come to Berkeley to live with her. I discussed the idea with my brothers and mother, but my mother opposed my going. When I went for my trunk I found it on the front porch, and the door closed; I left without seeing her. At a bus station in northern California I met a salesman who sold shoes to my brother, who persuaded me to return for my mother’s permission. Back I went again to Grants Pass; it took many attempts to leave that town.
I had decided against marriage. I considered the marriages of my three brothers to be disastrous traps into which they had fallen. My mother remarried and divorced several times after my father’s death, and I was shocked and shocked again at her choices. I accepted the necessity of earning my own living, which did not seem difficult, and when I met George I was prepared to simply step out of the life I had been living the day before and to live my life with George. My plans for myself had offered no solution to the problem of loneliness and the possibility of being unloved; George and I would be complete, a mated pair, with the strength of our intelligences, our passions, and our sensibilities multiplied by living our lives together. If I had consented to live in Grants Pass, of course my life would have continued; but I had glimpsed a different reality, a different vision of what is possible. A world in which I would find conversation, ideas, poetry, peers—this I am sure did not exist for me in Grants Pass.
Intuition operated in each one of us within my family while we lived together, but we were not articulate in discussions or analyses. An expanded discussion that began to get too serious caused restless movements and uncomfortable embarrassment. The one who was not initiating the discussion would invariably rise to escape—I still find myself going to the sink and turning on the water, or leaving the room. Now I can deliberately return and face the discussion, but years passed before I learned that such depths or heights were not going to destroy me. My family’s conversations were gossipy, and judgments were made based on acute observation of all that went on around us. My mother and Paul, especially, were wickedly witty and hilarious in their judgments of the townspeople of Grants Pass who had rejected us. My sisters-in-law were not admitted equally into the tight group of my mother and brothers; when my sisters-in-law were present, I don’t think the ribald and scathing wit was quite so sharp. Mama did not trust a female to the same degree that she trusted her husband and sons. Even I made her uncomfortable; she was afraid of me, and she had more than a little apprehension that I felt superior to her and intended to achieve a life that was outside her concept of a life.
Within the family we did not dwell on each other’s foibles; our little ways were known and tolerated, and mentioned only in anger or when necessary. Like a primitive tribal defense of territory, my family closed ranks and presented a united attitude to any threat from the outside world. Criticism within the family ceased when any one of us was threatened; no one asked me why I had so willfully got myself expelled from college.
I do not think my life would have followed the same paths if Papa had not died when I was fifteen years old. My family’s judgments were, in some degree, judgments that bolstered our ebbing class position after Papa’s death; I cannot place such attitudes within the family before his death. While he was alive more discussion took place, reasons for things were made clear, more ideas were proposed to circumvent the unfriendly manners of our fellow citizens in Grants Pass. For instance, Papa had begun to invite acquaintances from Montana, from Seattle, and from among his mother’s friends in Los Angeles, where he regularly visited; he invited them with the express purpose of getting them to come and live in Grants Pass. The Whorleys, loyal friends of my mother and brothers, came to Grants Pass because of my father’s urging, and I even discerned what I thought were plans for a marriage between me and the Whorleys’ son, but both he and I viewed this match-making with wariness and amusement. Our family would have been less notorious in the town had Papa lived; he probably would have eventually become a leading citizen. But Mama and Paul became the harum-scarum leaders of the remnant of our family, while Noel and I withdrew in reserve and watched. Paul was anarchic and destructive, perhaps by his own choice, and Mama would grow nearly hysterical with pent-up emotions which she expressed to Paul in zany schemes to get rich quickly: a turkey farm, a gold mine, a lily plantation, and her several brief marriages. I never knew any of her husbands, and not one of them was ever part of the intimacy she maintained with my brothers.
This was the atmosphere to which I returned and in which I worked two more months. Then, with my mother’s permission and three hundred dollars in the bank, I set off for San Francisco. When I got off the train at the Berkeley station there was no one to meet me; George was waiting in Oakland. I went to Nellie’s house, where George found me, and I moved into George’s San Francisco hotel room, but I was not registered in the hotel, and one day the manager knocked on the door and told me I must leave. I had been writing, and I was sitting in a sea of paper. From the hotel we went up to Myrto’s on Telegraph Hill; Myrto ran a restaurant at the top of Union Street, and she also befriended all artists. She gave us the garret above the restaurant, where we were not disturbed, even by the police raids, which periodically searched the restaurant for liquor. These were Prohibition times, and Myrto would come running up the stairs to hide the liquor under our bed.
George and I were both writing, and George was also attending a prep school in Oakland in order to enroll in the university at Berkeley in the fall. We dined in one or another of the many Italian restaurants in North Beach; Prohibition had not changed the habits of the Italian community, and we were always served red wine with dinner. After dinner someone from the family would bring out an accordion to play for the guests, often for only George and me. The first time I was not sure George could dance, but he looked at me, we stood up, we took one step together, and we danced. These small restaurants had a floor perhaps as large as a table top, but whenever we could make the opportunity, in our first years together, we danced. Later in the San Francisco night, George and I wandered over the city, walking through the tunnel down by the fishing pier and out to the Golden Gate. We also went swimming with friends from Telegraph Hill; we swam naked from the little beach beside the Sausalito Ferry pier below the Ghirardelli Factory. George and I were happy to be together—it was a delight to make love or just to talk with friends or with each other.
George got up at the last possible minute in the mornings to run to catch the ferry to Oakland. I stood at the top of the hill to watch him run down the wooden stairs to the Embarcadero and all the way to the Ferry building. Later in the morning I attended Heald’s business school; nurse’s training was no longer a consideration since George and I had decided to live together and to write, but I felt I had to gain skills to support myself.
Most of the land on top of Telegraph Hill was vacant and grassy, dotted with shacks or houses where young people lived; poets, artists and writers lived among the Italian householders with their gardens and goats and chicken. One of these, a friend of ours and a poet from Texas, was also an expert book thief—his greatest exploit was picking up a rare edition of Edna S
t. Vincent Millay’s poetry at the entrance of a bookstore, then selling it at the exit of the same store. I also liked Market Street in San Francisco; I had found in my first experience in a city that I liked being with people in crowds, and there were so many people, never quite touching, on crowded Market Street.
I had arrived in July, and at the end of August Miss Lawlor, George’s father’s secretary, told George that his parents were expected home soon. A woman was legally of age at eighteen, but a man was not, and we were sure that their plans for George did not include me or poetry. We decided to hitchhike to New York. George’s friend Don, who owned the Model T, drove us to Riverside, and while he sat in the car and waited we got our first ride and were driven away. We were continually given rides, meals and money; we were offered work and we were asked to stay. It was a friendly world we found from the first step we took together. Generous describes the world we found when we stepped out into it together.
We were in search of an esthetic within which to live, and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our own country. We had learned at college that poetry was being written in our own times, and that in order for us to write it was not necessary for us to ground ourselves in the academic; the ground we needed was the roads we were traveling. As we were new, so we had new roots, and we knew little of our own country. Hitchhiking became more than flight from a powerful family—our discoveries themselves became an esthetic and a disclosure. The people we met, as various and as accidentally met as thumbing a ride could make them, became the clue to our finding roots; we gained confidence that this country was ours in a sense which we hadn’t known under our parents’ roofs. The sense was not only a patriotic but also a personal one, for as people generally accepted us, we felt comfortable and at home in our country. I have never felt so at home in any other land.
There are endless stories to recount. Two men with a great Dane in the back seat picked us up once. They were on their way to water their new date-palm orchard in the desert. It was August, and as we watched the great Dane run in circles on the desert under the full moon, the men opened the sluice-gate to let irrigation water run into their orchard before we slept on the back seat of the car.
When three men going across the border to gamble picked us up, we went along with them to a gambling place in Mexicali, where one of them handed me a stack of silver dollars. I had never gambled; I stood and laid down dollars as the croupier picked them up.
We were picked up by a young man in a Model T who ran narcotics into Los Angeles from Mexico in a fast car; he was on a return trip now in an inconspicuous car, and he took us through deserted Indian country, where Indians were moving with dignity on the desert. We saw Indians going to market dressed in velvet blouses with gauzy scarves blowing in the wind, the braves and young girls riding horseback, the women and children walking. We passed through lead and copper mining districts in desperately poor country; it was only a glimpse and we felt we had to come back again sometime. George was sleeping when the young man said to me, “Sister, you two better get married—you are crossing State lines, and they may pick up your boyfriend on the Mann Act [white slavery] and you will be left waiting on the jailhouse steps.”
Often we were told to move on. There were many young people, boys and men roaming the roads of the country. The terms had changed since my brothers’ wanderings, from “riding the rails” to “hitchhiking” and from “hobo” to “hitchhiker,” and our traveling was all by automobiles on the highway. We met no other girl on the road, nor any couples like us. I was not asked for sex; we must have been traveling in an aura of innocence, perhaps because we were so innocently in love. We sneaked into a YMCA where our driver had rented a room for one person! We slept in odd corners, and we washed up in gas station restrooms; we ate when we had money or when someone gave us a meal.
At one spot where we had been let out, we were desperate for a ride. The Sheriff said, “You can’t thumb rides in this town. We need bean-pickers, and if I see you again I’ll take you to the bean-pickers camp.” We did not want to pick beans, especially under a Sheriff’s threat, so we stopped a car full with a family of Mexicans, and the little abuelita in the front seat rearranged the children and said to us, “Pase, por favor.”
Tired and sleepy and with only a dollar in George’s pocket, we asked for a room in a run-down hotel. We noted that the bed had only one sheet, but we slept soundly, and in the morning we talked in the doorway with a black girl in red silk stockings, who was as young as we were. She asked, “Have you any money?” and she insisted that we take a dollar for breakfast. Another time a traveling salesman who picked us up paid for a room for us. People took care of us; they worried about what would happen when we left them.
One night, very late, we were still on the highway and very sleepy, and in the moonlight we stumbled into a little building beside the road. In the morning we found that we had slept in an abandoned chicken house. We brushed ourselves off and walked into Tucson—not the Tucson of today with irrigation and green fields, but a poor desert town.
Although I had a strong conviction that my relationship with George was not an affair of the State, the threat of imprisonment on the road frightened us, so we went to be married in Dallas. A girl we met gave me her purple velvet dress, her boyfriend gave us a pint of gin. George wore his college roommate’s baggy plus-fours, but we did not drink the gin. We bought a ten-cent ring and went to the ugly red sandstone courthouse that still stands in Dallas. We gave my name, Mary Colby, and the name George was using, “David Verdi,” because he was fleeing from his father. The judge mumbled along, and after he had finished George fished the ring out of his pocket.
“Oh,” said the judge, “that’s an entirely different ceremony.”
“But we are married, aren’t we?” said George. “Suppose I put the ring away.”
“Do that,” said the judge.
Our Texas friend from Telegraph Hill had given us a letter to the poet laureate of Texas, Jan Isbelle Fortune. We found her in a small house with her husband and her three children. She invited us to sleep on her living-room floor and made us welcome. Her husband, hinting that he could give us jobs, explained to George several times that he was the foreman in the National Biscuit factory, but neither of us had thought of that kind of work, and a factory was entirely outside our experience. We did not respond to his restrained offers, but went downtown to look for jobs. We asked for a meal in return for dishwashing, and the man said, addressing George, “I know, I know, your family threw you out for marrying a girl who isn’t Jewish. What is your family name? Oh yes, I think I know your grandfather. I will have jobs for you if you come back tomorrow to eat Rosh Hashanah dinner with us.”
“What is Rosh Hashanah?” I asked George as we walked away from the restaurant.
“I know it is a religious holiday, but I don’t know the ritual,” said George. We went back the next day and ate with the family of the restaurant owner, who had plans for our future. He offered help to a fellow Jew as unquestioningly as if George was related to him; he accepted me too, nor did his wife or brother-in-law demur.
His plan was for George to work in the brother-in-law’s factory. He said, “You can do bookkeeping, of course, and you can learn cutting. Mary can go to work hemming handkerchiefs—she knows how to sew, of course.”
I was afraid George might lose a finger in the electric cutting machine, which cut through fifty or sixty thicknesses of cloth at one time, but I went to work in the brother-in-law’s handkerchief factory (for of course I could sew), and I was soon earning the three dollars a day that he had assured me I would earn. George found a job in a theater doing the same kind of work he had done in his father’s theaters. The clothing industry was just starting in Dallas, and had we followed their plans, who knows? We might be Neiman-Marcus today.
George and I were both writing all through these times. Jan Fortune suggested that we try to sell some of our
work, so we sent out two poems each to Holland’s Farm Journal, a Texas paper. We each received a check for twenty-five dollars. A slip of paper in the envelope for me said, “Payment for two poems concerning Death.” George, when I asked him, remembered one of my poems—
After I am dead
and you wonder
where I am and you see
the dark blue wood-smoke
in dark green evergreens
climbing over their tops
and disappearing perhaps you will know
where I am
but I think not
I stopped writing. We were deeply immersed in ourselves during these fast-crowding experiences. The time and the urge to write did not come again to me until I was working on translations of St. John of the Cross in 1971 or 1972. I have quite often translated poems I wanted to read from the original French or Spanish. The St. John translation was so poor in every version I could find that I began to make what I called “transpositions.” From that I began to write again; my readings in the prophets brought me back to a search for my father, who had read Sirach, Ezekiel, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and other parts of the Bible to me. It was as though pent-up emotions were waiting to be released—I wasn’t aware of all I remembered until I tapped at the door and memories came flooding in. Apparently nothing is forgotten, but all is waiting to be called forth; I think I have reached a safe age from which to release these memories which have troubled me over the years. Perhaps they would not have been released for the asking when I was younger.
