I began to beg to stay home from school.
“I’m surprised at you, Beverly,” said Mother. “Show your spunk and remember your pioneer ancestors.”
One day I enjoyed a treat. Donald, the boy who boarded next door, came down with chicken pox. Since I had already had chicken pox, I was sent to play with him. He was generous with his Tinkertoys, and even though he was older, he did not mind playing the Uncle Wiggily board game with me. I had a good time.
However, it soon developed that Donald had, not chicken pox, but smallpox. I, too, came down with smallpox. Even a fever and itching scabs were better than a day in Miss Falb’s classroom.
Drama surrounded smallpox. The health department nailed a red quarantine sign to the front of the house. The milkman left milk on the bottom step and fled. My father was not allowed to live at home. He packed a suitcase and moved overtown to stay with his sister Minnie, who owned a small apartment house where any member of the family in need of help was welcome. For a treat, he had Meier & Frank’s department store deliver delicious cookies topped with pink marshmallow cushions strewn with coconut. Mother read aloud The Princess and the Goblin, I ate those delicious cookies, and I did not have to go to school.
Mother thought my scabs would never drop off. In time, of course, the last scab fell away, the red sign was removed, and Mother lit the required fumigation candles throughout the house before she closed it up and took me overtown to the health inspector at the City Hall, who pronounced me fit for school. I did not realize how fortunate I was to be unpitted by scars.
Once more I was shoved out the door to go to school. By then I was hopelessly lost in reading. The class had been divided into three groups: Bluebirds, who found happiness in seats by the window; Redbirds, who sat in the middle seats; and Blackbirds, who sat by the blackboard, far from sunlight. I was not surprised to be a Blackbird.
The worst part of the day was the reading circle, where the Blackbirds in turn had to read words from the despised and meaningless word lists: “shad, shed, shod, shin, shun, shut, shot, ship, shop, shift, shell.”. We all feared and hated our turns at that circle of chairs in the front of the room as much as we dreaded trying to say the words on flash cards Miss Falb held up in front of the class. With luck, party or mamma, words I could read, were flashed at me. Oh, the relief!
From a country child who had never known fear, I became a city child consumed by fear. A three-year-old boy named Bobby, whose divorced mother lived across the street, came to stay with us for a few months while his mother was away looking for work. A disturbed little boy who wet his bed, Bobby needed the love and attention that Mother gave. I felt left out, as if Mother did not have enough love to go around.
An uppity Bluebird in the neighborhood made fun of me for naming my doll Fordson-Lafayette after a Yamhill neighbor’s tractor and the town where Great-grandfather Hawn had settled. Dolls were supposed to have nice names like Alice or Betty. Nobody named a doll after a tractor. When children discovered I still believed in Santa Claus, everyone laughed at me. I had never endured ridicule in Yamhill. When I asked Mother about Santa Claus, she smiled and admitted there was no such being. How was I to know, alone on a farm where I believed so much that Mother told me? I did not mind disillusion in Santa Claus, but I felt that Mother had made me the butt of other children’s derision.
Fear was intensified by adult talk of a terrible earthquake in Japan, where the earth shook, buildings crumbled, and thousands of people were killed. What if an earthquake happened in Portland? Suddenly I did not want my father to work nights. I wanted him home, safe, after dark.
And like the good little girl I struggled to be, I said my prayers at bedtime. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake…” If I should die before I wake. The words suddenly were not just something I recited. They had meaning. I did not want to die like those poor people in Japan. If an earthquake came, I wanted Father there to save me. He could. I knew he could.
I lay in bed, determined to stay awake until he came home. I could not die if my father were home. I lay as flat and as still as I could so Death would overlook me, or a Thing hiding under the bed would not know I was there. I fought sleep, praying for dawn, for the first twitter of a bird.
I could not confess my terror. Mother had impressed upon me that I must never be afraid. If I told, she might love me even less than I felt she loved me since Bobby had come to live with us. When I did sleep, I frightened Mother by walking in my sleep down the stairs and out the front door. She said the sound of a sleep-walking child was the most ghostly she could imagine, and she began to sleep lightly, listening as she slept.
Meanwhile, at the bank, Father spent his nights quietly working with an unabridged dictionary on a contest to make the most words out of letters in a phrase I have now forgotten. He turned page after page of the big dictionary, writing thousands of words on tablets of paper, hours of labor that won him a Bee-Vac vacuum cleaner. He had expected a bigger prize—who else had such a big dictionary or such long nights for uninterrupted work? Mother said the Bee-Vac kept the rugs much cleaner than the carpet sweeper.
Between my fear of falling asleep, and not eating lunch, I must have looked peaked. Convinced that something must be wrong, Mother visited our class at school.
That day Miss Falb told Mother what a nice little girl I was and went out of her way to be kind. This confused me. When some of us were sent to the blackboard, I accidentally erased part of Miss Falb’s example of writing that the boy next to me was supposed to copy. Fearing punishment in front of Mother, I began to cry.
“Why, Beverly, there’s nothing to cry about,” said Miss Falb, so gently I felt even more confused. This was not the Miss Falb I knew.
“Of course you didn’t mean to erase the writing,” she said, and rewrote the erased example while Mother, smiling, sat on a straight chair at the back of the room.
After Mother’s school visit, life was worse than ever. “Please, Mamma, don’t make me go to school,” I begged. “Please, please!”
“Of course you have to go to school,” she said. “Miss Falb is a very nice teacher. It’s all in your imagination.”
“It is not!” I screamed. “She’s mean, and I hate her!”
“Now, show your gumption and remember your pioneer ancestors,” ordered Mother as she shoved me out the door. I was fed up with all those pioneer ancestors, who only faced danger and starvation and did not have Miss Falb for a teacher.
Somehow the first grade came to an end. Free at last, I raced home with my report card.
Mother examined it and pointed out something I had overlooked in my escape, three words written in perfect script so pale it was almost invisible: “Passed on trial.”
Mother looked sad. “Beverly,” she said, “you must never, never tell anyone.”
“Why?” I asked, unprepared for shame. The Bluebird who lived across the street had demanded to see my report card. She knew. I was filled with guilt.
“Because we don’t want anyone to know,” Mother told me; “and you must work harder in the second grade. If you don’t, you might have to go back to Miss Falb.”
I need not have worried about facing Miss Falb again. When school started in September, she no longer taught at Fernwood. She had been transferred to the open-air school for tubercular children.
Miss Marius
That summer, the children of the neighborhood skated once more. We skinned our knees tumbling off tin can stilts and played Lotto and Old Maid. Bobby’s mother reclaimed her sad little boy, and Mother was mine again. Father began to work days instead of nights at the Federal Reserve Bank. I was now confident that I would live through the night, that no earthquake would turn our house into rubble, and no Thing lurked under my bed, ready to pounce if I moved. I forgot the ominous words “on trial,” and entered the second grade refreshed.
Miss Tessie Marius, our second-grade teacher, was plump and blond, with a pink and white complexion.
She was pretty, calm, gentle, kind and, in my memory, never wore navy blue. Miss Marius, aware of my shameful record, asked me to come to her desk with my book, The Beacon Second Reader. She had me stand beside her, and there she quickly taught me to read—or perhaps I had already learned but had been frozen by fear.
The second reader was an improvement over my primer. There were no silly accounts of Ruth and John, Rover and Kitty, or stories of Tom and May going to the seashore. Seashore! No one in Oregon went to the “seashore.” Oregonians went to the beach or “over to the coast.” Everything in that primer had been pretty—brooks, books, dolls, doves, robins, ponies—and everyone happy—kissing papa, spinning tops, swinging high, and riding their stupid pretty ponies. The Beacon Second Reader had stories already familiar from Mother’s library in Yamhill: “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” “The Wolf and the Seven kids,” “Rumpelstiltskin”—all stories worth reading again.
Thanks to Miss Marius, I could read, but I refused to read outside of school.
“Everyone in our family has always loved to read,” said my puzzled mother. “I can’t understand why you won’t.”
Neither could I, but I felt reading should be confined to school, and only when required.
Miss Marius taught us a rousing song about a peanut that sat on a railroad track with the train coming “a-chunk, a-chunk.” When, in that last line, the train ran over the peanut, we all sang with glee at the top of our voices, “Toot-toot! Peanut butter!” Miss Marius also let us sing the popular songs of the day, “Last Night on the Back Porch” and a song about “Barney Google with his goo-goo-googley eyes.” On Friday afternoons, before the last bell, we told jokes and riddles.
For exercise, we stood in the aisles, one hand on a desk, the other on the back of our seat, and recited, “Jack, be nimble. Jack, be quick.” On “Jack jumped over the candlestick,” we jumped over our seats.
In December, Miss Marius told us we could bring cake or cookies from home for a party the day before Christmas vacation.
Mother, however, was not to be persuaded. “My land, forty children, all with cakes and cookies!” she said. “Poor Miss Marius. You’ll all get sick.”
“But Miss Marius wants me to bring something,” I insisted, for I knew a teacher’s word was law to parents.
We reached a compromise. I took forty sticks of gum to pass out to the class, which turned out better than I had expected. The classroom was a mess, a glorious mess of crumbs, frosting, smeared faces, and sticky fingers. I walked up and down the aisles passing out welcome sticks of spearmint gum, which may have helped settle a few stomachs. No one threw up, at least not in the classroom.
Although the excesses of the party probably had nothing to do with it, I became ill with a sore throat and a high fever. Mother was frightened. She put me to bed on a couch in the dining room, where she could keep an eye on me. She piled on blankets, which I pushed back; she pulled them up again, saying, “You must stay covered up. You might get pneumonia.” Mother was always afraid of my catching pneumonia or tuberculosis.
She consulted the Frenchwoman next door, who was a practical nurse. Mrs. Williams brought over a fever thermometer, which registered one hundred and six. She pulled off some of the blankets and advised Mother to call a doctor. He came two days later to say I had tonsillitis.
All I remember is a strange sinking sensation, as if I were going through a white tunnel toward a light at the end, with the sound of the telegraph wires of Yamhill humming in my ears.
I recovered to find my reader, delivered by a neighbor child, probably that Bluebird, on the couch beside me. At Mother’s urging, but without enthusiasm, I picked up the book and read a story about American Indians. I felt a languid interest in the discovery that a reader could tell me something I did not already know. Then I laid the book aside.
The happy calm of the second grade was interrupted one day when Miss Marius asked us to stand and march into the third-grade classroom, where each of us had to share a seat with a third-grader. We discovered, propped up in the front of the room, a large black circle with numbers and letters painted on small white circles. Over this was another black circle, this one with round holes that revealed the letters and numbers underneath. We stopped whispering, giggling, and pushing to stare.
The third-grade teacher introduced a man from the telephone company, who explained that Portland was going to use the dial system. “All telephones must have dials,” he said, pointing to the mysterious object in front of the room. The man explained the system of numbers and letters, moving the big black circle to show us how it worked. The top circle always returned to its original position after he moved it. The whole demonstration seemed so mysterious I did not understand it at all. His final words were “If you do not learn to use the dial system, you cannot use the telephone.”
I had never used a telephone in my life. In Yamhill I could not reach the wall telephone that Mother cranked; in Portland there was a general understanding that telephones were for the use of adults. Children who wanted to communicate with their friends stood on the front porch and yelled their names until they came out. But now—where would we get one of those big black circles, where would we put it, and what if my mother and father did not know how to spin it to make it work? What if they didn’t understand it any more than I did? They could never telephone Aunt Minnie or Grandmother Bunn. Father could never telephone home from work.
I ran home from school. “Mamma, Mamma,” I cried, panting. “You can’t use our telephone anymore! You won’t know how. A man came to school and told us.”
Mother laughed. “Oh, you’re talking about the dial system,” she said, and showed me the small dial on a new telephone and how it worked, remarking, “I do miss Mrs. McKern. She was always up on all the news in Yamhill.” How easy! I wondered why the telephone man had made something simple seem so mysterious and difficult.
By the end of second grade I could read, although outside of school I flatly refused to open a book.
“Really, Beverly,” Mother protested. “I simply cannot understand what gets into you. You used to want to learn to read.”
Neither did I understand what got into me, and I did not care. If Miss Marius was not around, nobody was going to catch me reading. I would do anything for Miss Marius. In her classroom, even in Oregon, the sun seemed always to shine.
The best day of all, that year in the second grade, was the day Miss Marius let me wash her little teapot after lunch. Then I knew for sure she loved me.
Gregory Heights
By the end of my second grade, Father changed to a new job: lobby officer in the new West Coast National Bank. He wore tailored business suits that hid his Smith & Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster. That he might ever have to use the Smith & Wesson never crossed my mind. In those days, Oregonians were much too well behaved to hold up a bank, at least, not often. At night the revolver, which I was told I must never touch, hung on the post of my parents’ bed. I never touched it, not once, even though Father always removed the bullets and left them on the dresser.
After two years, the seven-room house we rented on Halsey Street no longer seemed small and cozy. The wood and coal furnace did not heat as efficiently as the wood stoves on the farm, and the open staircase at the end of the living room created a cold draft. Pipes froze. Mother was cold. She was also nervous about the trains, with hoboes in empty boxcars, that ran in Sullivan’s Gulch. Children were no longer allowed to play in the hazelnut bushes between Halsey Street and the Gulch.
One night Mother heard, or thought she heard, someone pounding on the side door. The next morning dents were discovered, examined, discussed with the neighbors. Had they been there all the time, and we had never noticed? They looked fresh to some. Mother was sure she had heard someone whistle to an accomplice in the night. The story grew. There had been an answering whistle. Hoboes must have tried to break in. Mother decided it was time to move.
We rented a five-room house, with a glassed-in porch that
served as a dining room, out on Seventy-seventh Street, a block and a half north of Klickitat Street—a neighborhood then five blocks from the city limit. Houses were far apart, and there were no children nearby. Hazelnut bushes, wild currants, and white marguerites grew in the rocky soil where garter snakes sunned themselves on warm days.
Mother was excited and a little frightened when we bought a gas stove with a thermostat on the oven. No more splitting kindling and struggling with dampers on the wood stove, or lighting a gas plate with a match. No more guessing at the temperature of the oven by the feel of heat on her hand. No more cakes that failed because of a wrong guess. Mother only hoped the whole thing would not explode.
The third-grade teacher at Gregory Heights Grammar School soon became ill and was replaced by a substitute who stayed the rest of the semester. Schoolwork was easy, but the substitute, I felt, could not be very bright. One day she asked a boy to make a sentence using the word “hot.” He answered, “My pillow is hot.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Stoves are hot. Fires are hot. Pillows can’t be hot.”
Yes they can, I thought. I felt sorry for the little boy, who looked ashamed. Pillows could be very hot. Dumb teacher.
Mother discovered, in the basement of the Sunday School I attended, a glass case of children’s books. The room was sometimes open evenings, so Mother and I walked to the church for books. She chose The Princess and Curdie to read to me, and two others, The Dutch Twins and The Swiss Twins, by Lucy Fitch Perkins, for me to read to myself. I had no intention of reading them. All I wanted to read were the titles of the silent movies at the nearby Roseway Theater. Movies were new to me, and exciting. I learned to read fast, before the titles disappeared from the screen.
A Girl from Yamhill Page 6
