Yes. I think of evening chapel at the Seminary: the day girls are gone; the organ plays; the boarding department stands up in its poorly fitting colored-silk dinner uniforms to sing the dirge for the day (“Now the day is o-over, Night is dra-awing ni-igh,” my favorite), whereupon our principal, Miss Preston, dark-eyed, in a polka-dot dress, kneels down on her stout knees at her prayer-desk and clears her wattled throat to begin the Collect for Aid against Perils, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, o Lord,” in her deep New England voice. Stubby Miss Preston is a Smith woman; her favorite hymn is Number 117 (Bunyan’s “He who would valiant be”); she cries easily, like her billowy blue-eyed counterpart, Madame McQueenie, the acting Reverend Mother of Forest Ridge; they are both fond of taking repentant girls onto their slippery laps—Miss Preston’s, usually silken in the evening, being worse. Now our voices follow hers in the General Confession: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us”—how true! Chapel and study hall, Church of Rome and P. E. merge. I listen to the scratch of pens, the bell of the surveillante, the soughing of the organ, the creaking of pew benches, and I could weep for it all, for the waste of it.
Those hard-working women, our teachers, not always brilliant themselves, gave a sound education, tried to inculcate good morals and a respect for excellence, and accomplished hardly more than a finishing-school. What they taught (like the art of making buttonholes we had to master in sewing class in the convent) was never used afterwards. Or only by that tiny percentage that was going to teach school itself or find some other employment for Boyle’s Law and the subjunctive after French verbs of saying, thinking, and the like, when uncertainty is conveyed. Annie Wright prepared you for college, that was the idea, but you did not need any special preparation to go to the University of Washington, and in my year—1929—only two of us went on to an institution that required College Boards. The Ladies of the Sacred Heart made no pretense of college preparation; they had a so-called College Department, consisting of two years, for the tall, blue-ribboned older girls like the Lyons sisters, and that was it. What both schools imparted to their graduates was something like old-fashioned “accomplishments,” but these were mostly out-of-date (those buttonholes!) or bizarrely irrelevant to the future lying ahead. Was Latin prosody a grace that would sit prettily on a girl who was going to marry a lumber executive? And the pas de chat and correct ballet positions we were taught at the convent, the schottische and polka we got at the Seminary, how were we going to use them? In the years of the tango and the Charleston, we were learning clog-dancing.
In a sense, I suppose, I was the chief beneficiary of Forest Ridge and Annie Wright in that I was able to find a use for what we learned. I don’t mean that Sans Famille and “Belling the Cat” served to get me into Vassar, though, multiplied, evidently they helped. I mean that I was peculiarly fitted to “get the good out of” the convent and the Seminary, not because I was more gifted or cleverer than my classmates but because, thanks to Garfield’s plebeian incentives, I was an intellectual by the time I reached Annie Wright. And no one else was.
I will explain. A superior education, such as, on the whole, we got in those private schools, can only be used by those it was not intended for. By the fluke of having gone—for a single year—to a big-city high school, I happened to be one of them. The point of a private school in the U.S.A. is to represent in its curriculum the purest conspicuous waste. Unlike the English public schools, our private schools do not aim to prepare a ruling class to govern—the exception used to be Groton. Our usual private schools are not vocational schools even in that remote sense. If there is anything “exclusive” (aside from the cost) in the whole system of private education, it is the exemption of a class of students from evident vocational goals. Some at Annie Wright strove harder for grades than others, but this seemed to be a matter of temperament, rather than need. There were no grinds (that I remember) among us. As with high jump and shot-put, the act of surpassing rivals in doing a sight translation was performed for its own sake or for purposes of showing off. I am not saying that there were no professions besides teaching for which Latin could not some day be useful. There was medicine, for instance. In our class at Annie Wright, besides a future French-teacher, we had a future doctor. Yet if those two girls—and I—profited from the curriculum, it was through the fact of being—or becoming—anomalies.
Just to make it clear: I am in favor of the teaching of Latin and Greek, plus one modern language, on the secondary-school level or even earlier. It is probably the best way of teaching history—Western history, evidently, to which as a nation we can claim an inheritance. But I believe that this has no meaning, even as a Utopian dream, unless the entire nation’s children are given the “basics” of a culture we all share, as Jews and unbelievers, like it or not, once shared the culture of Christendom. When the classics are offered as ornaments or status symbols for the few, they become otiose, and this had happened at some point during the Coolidge era: the public high school of a New England mill town, say Fall River, Massachusetts, on the retirement of its old-maid classics teacher, ceased offering Latin and even Greek to the progeny of mill workers and thus obliged the owners, who wanted “advantages” for their children, to send them “away” to school. (This was a sign, evidently, of an impoverishment of our culture as a whole. It is the same with food: in countries with a superior cuisine—France, Italy, China—allowing for regional variations based on climate, everybody eats the same diet, though the rich have more of it and more often; in nations famous for bad cooking—England, the U.S.—rich and poor have utterly different food cultures.)
For Latin to be rescued from oblivion (to which even the Church has relegated it), there would have to be general agreement on its absolute value and desirability—not just some faint persuasion of its utility, such as the argument now put forward that it can help teach ghetto children English, however true that contention may be. The average intellectual today has no Latin; indeed, he may have no language other than English. Though the class of intellectuals can trace its ancestry to the clerks and pedants of the medieval and Renaissance “schools,” learning is no longer an earmark—it is optional, and the lack of it avoids confusion with the horde of academics. Here is a better criterion: an intellectual, as opposed to a dutiful classroom performer but like the “upstart clerks” of Elizabethan times, is always self-made. Finally: it is a mistake to think that an intellectual is required to be intelligent; there are occasions when the terms seem to be almost antonyms.
But to return to Garfield. Instead of study hall, there was an auditorium in which school assemblies were held, though not every morning, and sometimes the school band played. Since you were expected to study at home, you did not have your own desk here in which you kept your books and equipment. We each had a locker for that purpose, and we hung our coats, scarves, and so on, in an adjacent hall lined with hooks. I cannot remember what provision there was for overshoes and rubbers; it hardly ever snowed in Seattle, but it rained a lot.
Nor can I remember where and how we ate. I think some brought school lunches, to be supplemented with milk from the school cafeteria, and some brought money and bought food there, and a few bought more glamorous and unwholesome food in nearby eating-places catering to the fast crowd. Certainly we did not go home for lunch. And what strikes me now, looking back at that big high school, is a sense of being adrift, having no settled place in it.
It was mainly not having a desk, I imagine. In the grade-school “room” and the study halls of boarding academies, the pupil’s desk holds the tools of his trade (“Student”)—pen nibs, blotters, ruler, compass, books, pencils, erasers, plus the usual contraband—and bolts him firmly into the system. For all eternity I am the eighth-grader who sits next to one of the Berens twins, pretty, dark Louise, and behind “Phil” Chatham (whose father’s name, spelled “Ralph,” is pronoun
ced “Rafe”), on the dictionary side of the room, four rows from the front, where the Mistress of Studies is on watch. In chapel, it was height that determined your place: big girls in the back pews, little girls in front. The effect to be made, entering two abreast in procession, was the main concern of our supervisors. Since growing girls grow at different rates, continual readjustment was required. This was particularly true at the Seminary, where our principal had processions on the brain. On a great occasion like Founder’s Day, prepared for by many a rehearsal, suddenly at the last minute a teacher with a measuring stick would pass along the double line of girls and move some of us ahead or back; then another teacher would move us again.
At table, evidently, we had our established places. A Seminary “table” consisted of ten or twelve girls moving every second week to sit with a different teacher till the “top” table headed by the vice-principal, Miss Justine Browne, was reached, after which new tables were formed. By what sort of shuffle those combinations were made up, nobody knew. Why the “two Gins”—Virginia Barnett and Virginia Kellogg—were sometimes put at the same table, although roommates, while I repeatedly drew one of my bêtes noires—a pale, spectacled, black-haired, sneering underclassman by the name of Catherine MacPherson—was beyond understanding. In general, if there was a principle to be discerned, it was the negative one of keeping friends apart, to insure that Miss Preston’s golden rule of “M.C.G.” (“Make Conversation General”) would be maintained. In the Forest Ridge refectory, conversation was limited by having to be in French, by retreats (when the only utterance permitted was “Passe le sel”), by Lent and Advent, and by sudden arbitrary silences imposed by the surveillante’s clapper. There, too, our place at table was not chosen but assigned. It was all decided for us and sealed by our napkin ring marking the spot like the name-tapes sewn to our clothing. Similarly, with our library book, the precise hour of our weekly bath (which we took under a canvas shift so as not to have to see our bodies), we occupied the station to which God or some Madame in her infinite wisdom had seen fit to call us. Garfield, by contrast, was a churning millrace of apparent free will.
Here the classrooms were long, and we sat in rows, rather than around an oak table, seminar-style, as we had at the convent. In those long classrooms, the teacher, up front by the blackboard, seemed a great way off, and it was possible not to be called on if you made yourself small. I was quite often unprepared. In freshman English, we had the Old Testament and Ivanhoe—both boring. Instead of the English history and French history, with kings and favorites, that I had learned by heart in the convent, Garfield started us with World History, which did not have any interesting people in it—nobody like Warwick, the King-Maker, Jack Cade and Perkin Warbeck, or Ganelon, the traitor. The result is that I can still name you the rulers of England and quite a few of their prime ministers, down to whiskered Lord Palmerston; the Capets and Valois did not stick with me so well. At the Sacred Heart, in eighth-grade French, I had been memorizing Victor Hugo (“Cette étoile de flamme,/ Cet astre du jour,/ Cette fleur de l’âme,/ S’appelle l’amour”); Garfield’s Intermediate French was all exercises and grammar.
At home, having finished Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” I felt I had outgrown my grandfather’s library. Pickwick Papers, one of his great favorites, had put me off Dickens for years to come. I had loved A Tale of Two Cities, when it was read aloud to us during sewing class in the convent by a tiny, Irish-accented Madame, and some of Oliver Twist, but I could not abide “Boz” and refused to open anything with a name like Martin Chuzzlewit. In my school crowd, insofar as I had one, nobody read; our entire mental apparatus was bent on grading boys and girls in terms of appearance, dress, antecedents, though the last category was not too important unless it conferred mystery. Our curiosity, such as it was, centered on a white-faced fat boy who had entered with us and was said to be a “morphodite.”
Except for the few boys who played musical instruments, it was unusual for Garfield’s students to have “interests.” There was a girl who painted—a dainty blonde named Ebba Rapp who wore uneven hemlines and a jabot—and I went to her house for her to do my portrait, a pastel head-and-shoulders that my grandmother kept for a long time. But I don’t remember ever entering our Seattle art museum; nor did I go to a concert till much later, when they had “Symphonies under the Stars” at the stadium in the University, with Michel Piastro conducting. Yet Seattle was an artistic town. It had a Ladies’ Musical Club, run by my great-aunt Rosie, who had gone to Vancouver once with Chaliapin, the Cornish school of drama and art, which also offered eurythmics, a stock company, and (soon, if not already) a repertory theatre run by Mr. and Mrs. Burton James. But none of this seems to have “related” to the adolescent population, which entertained itself by eating sodas and sundaes, swimming and diving in the various lakes, playing popular records, and going with dates to the movies—something my grandparents would not let me do.
I could go to the movies with them, sitting in loge seats—a torment; I did not wish to look “different”—to the Saturday matinee of the stock company with my grandmother and one of her sisters, go shopping with her in her electric, take a family ride in the Chrysler around Lake Washington after Sunday lunch, pick out “Marcheta” to myself on the piano, persuade my married uncle’s friends to hear me recite “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” play practical jokes on the telephone (“Have you got Prince Albert in a can? Well, let him out”), and once or twice a year go to a tea-dance at the DeMolay Temple (Masonic) in ribbed silk stockings with a coerced partner who, like me, had never learned to dance. I could send in coupons from the cheap magazines I read for samples of nail polish, freckle cream, bust-developer, put Cutex nail polish on my mouth in the guise of lipstick when I thought my grandmother was downtown, make messes in the kitchen trying over-ambitious candies like marshmallows—a sticky, gelatinous mixture hopefully (note correct use of word) cut in cubes and rolled in floury sugar. I had dropped piano lessons on leaving the convent; the only sport I knew how to do was swimming (breast stroke, side stroke, overarm side stroke; no crawl); I was unaware of masturbation—except maybe for boys? In short, I had no real occupation, and my sole real interest—the stage—required an audience.
At Garfield I tried out faithfully for skits and playlets that were done outside class hours under the coaching of a teacher. This was independent of the regular school play (Dulcy, that year, by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, starring a “Dumb Dora”); it was more like what is now called a workshop, held in a disused classroom in the school basement without lights, scenery, or costumes, and with only a faithful few signing up for it regularly. I hardly know how to tell this, but one afternoon, in a sketch we were doing—for practice, with only the teacher watching—I was cast as Larry Judson’s wife. Yes, the captain of our football team. He was a senior with dark-reddish curly brown hair, reddish-brown eyes, and well-cut manly features, possibly a dimple in the sturdy chin. If I remember right, he played end, my favorite position. What possessed the teacher to cast me, a freshman and only thirteen, opposite Garfield’s idol, with whom I was secretly in love? And that was not all. In the playlet he had to put his arm around me and hold me to his chest, though the “heart” he pressed me to was a little too high for my head to rest against without stretching—I had not yet got my full growth.
That this should have been happening to me was so like a dream that today I ask myself whether it was not a dream. Odd that a football star would want to be an actor. And yet there was Paul Robeson, who had been All-American at Rutgers and then played on Broadway (1923) in The Emperor Jones. In any case, after that, Larry Judson smiled at me whenever he met me in the mid-morning tidal flow around the bulletin boards in the main hall—a faint, full-lipped smile that told me, I guessed, that he remembered. And once, it seems to me, as I was skirting the school playfield, a ball thrown or kicked by him hit me in the midriff, making me feel like St. Francis receiving the sti
gmata. But this memory is very fuzzy. I am not sure whether it was a football or a baseball or even a tennis ball and maybe I have imagined the whole thing. When I was sent off to the Seminary, I lost sight of him. I only know that he did not become an actor, did not play football for the U, perhaps did not go to the U. I wonder whether anyone still alive, besides me, remembers him treading the boards at Garfield and could tell me what became of him.
But I truly did play his wife; all at once I am completely sure of this, for I have recalled an odd detail. That dark-brown suit, almost chocolate-colored, a real man’s suit, smelled when he “clasped me to his heart.” It was not an armpit reek of stale sweat announcing that the suit needed a trip to the cleaner’s; it was more of a closet smell, as though the suit had been hanging quite a while in an airless space. And it was somehow a mature smell, reminding me now of the collective B.O. of my grandmother’s clothes when I got a whiff of them all together in her closet. It belongs to the aging process; I have noticed it on my own clothes in these last years when they have spent a winter in an unopened closet without benefit of mothballs. Maybe it has something to do with the oily or tallowy secretions of the sebaceous glands. Could my “husband” have been wearing a middle-aged man’s suit? That might have been passed on to him from an uncle who had died? I try to recall whether it was two-piece or three-piece. Did I encounter any vest-buttons in our hug? I am not sure. All I can bring back is a sense of the color and heaviness of the cloth, which “put age on” him, giving him a sedate, settled look.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 28
