The next Sunday afternoon was dreary. The outside world drizzled, the inside world was heavy with the smell of pot roast and my father’s Sunday after-dinner cigar, and I was so bored I picked up The Dutch Twins to look at the pictures. Suddenly I was reading and enjoying what I read! It was a miracle. I was happy in a way I had not been happy since starting school. I read all afternoon until I had finished the book. Then I began The Swiss Twins. For once Mother postponed bedtime, until I finished the book.
Shortly after my discovery that grown-ups spoke the truth when they said reading was a pleasure, a newspaper club, the Journal Juniors, offered a free book to any child who would write a review. Mother suggested I do this, and I agreed. Mother took me, carsick all the way, over-town on a streetcar to the Oregon Journal building, where I was given a copy of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, a book I enjoyed even more than The Dutch Twins. When we returned with my review, a photographer took my picture, which was published along with the review. Suddenly I was a school celebrity. “There’s that girl who got her picture in the paper,” everyone said. No one mentioned reading the review.
Those two long trips to the Journal made me dread streetcar rides, but I learned to endure them for the pleasure that lay ahead. To supplement our income, my father began to work Saturday nights as a bouncer at the Winter Garden Ballroom overtown. After supper, Mother and I sometimes took the long ride overtown, miserable for me because I had to fight carsickness, often with my face buried in my mother’s lap, for seventy-seven blocks, over the bridge across the Willamette River, and into town. Not throwing up took willpower, all I could summon, as I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, shut my eyes tight, and tried not to breathe the cold, stale streetcar smell until—just when I felt I must either die or disgrace myself—we arrived overtown. Mother bought the Sunday paper as we walked to the Winter Garden Ballroom.
I felt important when we were admitted free. We climbed the stairs to seats in the empty balcony, where I opened the paper and read the Sunday funnies on Saturday night—to me, a magical glimpse into the future. I knew on Saturday night the mischief the Katzenjammer Kids got into, while the rest of Portland had to wait until Sunday.
When I had finished the funnies, I leaned against the balcony railing, listening to the beat of the drums and banjo, watching the lights glimmer on the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, following couples circling the floor, around and around, in the fox-trot, two-step, and hesitation waltz. My father paced the sidelines, keeping his eye on the dancers. Sometimes he stepped into the crowd, tapped a man on the shoulder, and spoke to him. I knew he had caught a glimpse of an illegal flask. The man and his partner always left quietly. Prohibition had been voted in since I had tried to peek under the saloon door in Yamhill.
Gradually the circling of the dancers made me drowsy; Mother pulled me back from the railing. Once again I laid my head in her lap, where, with the Sunday paper crackling above me as she turned the pages, I fell asleep. When I awoke, I was being carried over Father’s shoulder from the streetcar to our house. How loved and safe I felt, the three of us alone, in the night, going toward home. I cherished those magic Saturday nights.
That year I fell in love, twice. At school I loved a boy named Johnny. During lunch period, after taking one bite out of my sandwich and sucking the juice out of my orange, I followed, or chased, Johnny around, much to his embarrassment, until the bell rang.
I also fell in love with the eighth-grade boy next door, who sometimes rode me to school on the handlebars of his bicycle, making me the envy of other third-grade girls. I loved him until the night our cat died. In the morning, Mother paid the boy to bury the cat in a vacant lot. Farm life had prepared me for the death of a cat, but the sight of a boy I loved carrying our cat by its tail outraged me, destroying my love. I wept in fury at this indignity to our pet.
That winter, freezing winds roared down the Columbia River Gorge, which was closer than we had realized when we rented the house. The glassed-in porch was too cold to use. Mother sparingly fed wood and coal into the furnace, trying to make it last the winter. Snow fell, melted, froze.
Mother bundled me up, pulling my knit cap down over my ears, wrapping a woolly scarf around my neck and over my nose, and pulling heavy stockings on over my shoes to prevent my slipping on ice. With her sweater held close around her, she opened the front door enough for me to slip through while she instructed me to walk in the middle of the street so I would not be struck by falling wires. In those days, bad weather was no excuse for closing schools or for keeping children home.
That solitary walk on icy streets was beautiful in a shining silver world under a cloudless sky of piercing blue. The only sound was the thud of ice-coated wires falling to the glazed crust of the snow. Sunlight transformed hazelnut bushes into fairy-tale crystal; icicles were flashing daggers that plunged, stabbing the snow, before they shattered. The air was so clear and cold that breathing was painful, even through the layers of my woolly scarf. My nose ran, mittens did not warm my hands, but I was sorry to reach school, to leave the dazzling outdoors and enter the gray concrete building stuffy with the smell of little bodies and noisy after my radiant, silent walk.
By the time the snow had melted, our class had become 3B and had moved to another room and another teacher, a tall, pretty woman whose name, as I recall, was Mrs. Coad. She was a smiling, kindly teacher.
My only problem in 3B was the multiplication tables. In class we chanted in unison, “Two times two is four, two times three is six…,” on and on.
“I don’t hear you, Beverly,” Mrs. Coad said, but she was nice about it.
The trouble was, we were expected to learn the tables all the way through the hard numbers, the sevens and nines. I absorbed the easy numbers by chanting, and tried to avoid being drilled by Mother on hard numbers.
One day Grandmother Bunn, who lived with her children in turn but spent most of her time with Aunt Minnie, came to stay with us. Mother had to go overtown in the afternoon, and that evening she planned a rare treat: taking me to the nearby Roseway Theater to see Milton Sills in The Sea Hawk, so Father could have a good visit with his mother. I was instructed to come straight home after school to keep my grandmother company.
Grandmother Bunn was tall, slender, and beautiful, with silver hair and flashing dark eyes. In her youth she had been famous, Mother said, and Father agreed, as the most beautiful woman in Oregon. She was kind and friendly toward me, but somehow I could never feel as close to her as I felt toward Grandma Atlee.
The prospect of an afternoon alone with Grandmother Bunn was daunting. What would we talk about? I disobeyed Mother. Instead of coming straight home from school, I went home with a girl in my class who lived about five blocks away; and when my conscience made me leave, Mother had returned home ahead of me.
“No Sea Hawk for you, young lady!” was her verdict.
I wept, I begged, I had to see The Sea Hawk. The whole school was going to see The Sea Hawk.
“Then why didn’t you do as you were told?” Mother wanted to know.
I was sorry, I would be a better girl, I would never, never disobey again. My grandmother looked amused; Mother remained calm. I said I would die if I didn’t get to see The Sea Hawk.
Finally Mother relented, but she exacted a price for my sin. Before I could go to the theater, I had to be able to recite, without mistakes, the multiplication tables, including the twelves.
“But that’s not fair,” I protested. “We aren’t even up to the twelves in school.”
“Suit yourself,” said Mother, and went into the kitchen to prepare supper.
Cornered, I began the struggle. Grandmother Bunn, entertained by my dilemma, helped by listening to me recite. I learned fast. Mother and I left the house barely in time to catch the beginning of The Sea Hawk.
What a movie! That scene of a man swallowing a ring to keep it from the pirate, the pirate following him into the ship’s cabin and emerging with a bloody knife in one hand and the bloody ring in t
he other. Gosh!—to use a word Mother forbade. That scene was the talk of the third grade on Monday, and I was secure in the knowledge that I knew my tables through the twelves when the rest of the class did not.
Mother did not care for The Sea Hawk. As an antidote, she took me overtown to see Peter Pan, with Mary Brian as Wendy and Betty Bronson as Peter Pan. I liked Captain Hook and the pirates, even though they were not bloody like the pirates in The Sea Hawk. I saved my ten-cents-a-week allowance for ten weeks so I could buy a copy of the book.
Gradually spring came to Seventy-seventh Street. Wild iris bloomed. One day a teacher came into the 3B room to announce that third-grade girls would take the part of lilac blossoms in the spring PTA program. She asked all the girls to stand. She then walked up and down the aisles, tapping girls on the shoulder. “The girls I have tapped will be lilac blossoms,” she informed us, and left the room.
The teacher had not tapped me. One other girl had been skipped, but the rest of the girls had been cast as lilac blossoms. Never in my life had I been left out. In Yamhill, children were part of all that went on. At recess I waylaid Mrs. Coad to tell her I thought the teacher had made a mistake. Mrs. Coad kindly promised to speak to the teacher.
When the bell rang and Mrs. Coad returned, I was waiting with the other non-blossom. Our teacher told us gently that we had not been chosen because we were too short, but that we could be substitute lilac blossoms.
Too short! I did not feel short; I was tall enough for anything I wanted to do. Of course, in Yamhill I had been known as the Bunns’ little daughter, but I thought this meant that adults were big and children little.
The lilac blossoms were all in remarkably good health. I watched sadly as they bustled off, full of importance, for rehearsals. At last a morning came when one blossom was absent. I eyed my rival substitute, who seemed unaware that anything unusual had occurred. The minutes dragged by until the recess bell. My seat was near the door, so I was able to dart out and down the hall. The blossom director was standing in a doorway talking to another teacher. I waited for her attention. Then, anxious to be fair to the other short girl, I said, “Excuse me, but one lilac blossom is absent today. Which substitute do you want to rehearse?”
The teacher put her hand on my shoulder, turned, and smiled at the other teacher. “This one,” she said, “is a nuisance.”
I stared at her in pain, while she looked amused, before I turned and fled, no longer wanting to rehearse, no longer wanting to be a lilac blossom at all. A nuisance, a nuisance—the word tormented me.
“What’s the matter, Beverly?” Mother asked when I came home from school. “You look down in the mouth.”
I shook my head, too ashamed to tell, because Mother might agree with that teacher. My parents believed teachers were always right.
The night of the program, I balked. “Of course you’re going,” said Mother. “I have been elected president of next year’s PTA.”
“Can’t Daddy stay home with me?” I pleaded. My father, I knew, did not like to go out in the evening. This time he wanted to go. I scowled and stuck out my lower lip.
“Get that look off your face,” ordered my father.
“Beverly, I don’t know what gets into you sometimes,” said Mother with a sigh. “Now stop sulking and come along.”
So, on that dreaded evening, all three of us walked to school and sat on folding chairs in the auditorium, with me in the middle, where I hunched down, trying to be invisible, a wretched, too-short nuisance.
“Sit up,” ordered Mother, who was running out of patience. “Stop that slumping.”
Reluctantly I raised myself an inch or two, while up on the stage the happy lilac blossoms rustled and twirled in their lavender and purple crepe paper costumes. I could scarcely bear to watch, and I never wanted to go to school again.
My Character and Music
Father tired of the long streetcar ride to work. Mother dreaded another winter of icy winds sweeping down the Columbia River Gorge. I did not say so, but I was fearful of having for my teacher the woman who thought I was a nuisance.
Mother resigned her upcoming PTA presidency, and early in the summer, we moved to tree-lined Hancock Street, half a block from Fernwood, my former school, which had sprouted two gymnasiums and an auditorium in the past year. Mother said I was just skin and bones, and now I could come home for a good lunch. She felt so cheerful about the advantages of the move for all of us that she went to a beauty shop and had her hair bobbed and permanent-waved. She came home smiling, with her long hair in a paper bag.
I now had a long walk to Sunday School while dreading having to read aloud a Bible verse with the word womb, a mysterious word, both in meaning and in pronunciation. However, the new Rose City Branch Library and the new Hollywood Theater were only a few blocks away.
Houses were close to one another, so close we could hear “The Prisoner’s Song” or “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” played on Victrolas. All our neighbors had front and back lawns, and most had children the right age to play with. We played hard that summer: jump rope, hopscotch, and O’Leary with hard red rubber balls. Sometimes we did not play, but instead danced the Charleston, heels flying, hands crisscrossing between our knocking knees. If one of us fell down, the rest shouted “I faw down, go boom,” a reference to a silly song about England’s Prince of Wales falling off polo ponies.
“Good gracious,” said Mother, “those children have all turned into flappers, and they’re going right through the soles of their shoes.”
Evenings when a comedy program was broadcast, neighbors with radios left their front doors open so children could settle like flocks of birds on their porches and listen. Some parent was always willing to take a few children to any civic event that might interest us. We saw Charles Lindbergh, blond and exhausted, paraded through Portland. We saw Queen Marie of Romania, holding a bouquet of purple flowers, ride down Sandy Boulevard. We saw the statue of Joan of Arc unveiled and were bored by speeches. And, of course, each year we sat on curbs to watch the Rose Festival parade.
We also went to the Hollywood Theater, an art-deco palace with Moorish towers above the box office. Inside, everything seemed red and gold. A Wurlitzer organ rose out of the floor by magic, with the organist already seated, ready to accompany the silent films.
Father took me to every movie with Lon Chaney or Douglas Fairbanks. My favorite was Douglas Fairbanks, who leaped from urn to urn in The Thief of Baghdad and slid down the sail of a ship by stabbing it with his dagger in The Black Pirate.
Mother preferred Mary Pickford or comedies. In Sparrows, Mary Pickford led a group of orphans across quicksand to save them from an evil man who was pursuing them, a scene so scary Mother found a piece of paper in her handbag for me to tear into little pieces so I wouldn’t bite my nails until my fingers bled. When Harold Lloyd dangled from the hands of a clock far above a city street, children screamed with fright and excitement, and some of us were left with a permanent fear of heights.
Most of all, children hoped for an “Our Gang” comedy. To me, these comedies were about neighborhood children playing together, something I wanted to read about in books. I longed for books about the children of Hancock Street.
Worried about something I did not understand, Mother began to change. She decided it was time to mold my character. I was too old to call her Mamma. I was to call her Mother. Her rules followed me around the house like mosquitoes. “Use your head.” “Stand on your own two feet.” “Use your ingenuity.” “Never borrow.” “Use your imagination.” And, of course, “Remember your pioneer ancestors,” who used their heads, stood on their own two feet, always stuck to it, never borrowed.
If I lost something, Mother said, “You’ll have to learn to look after your things.” I did. If I was involved in a neighborhood squabble, I got no sympathy. “What did you do?” Mother always asked, leaving me with the feeling that, no matter what happened, I was to blame. “Try,” Mother often said.
And try I did. When
Abendroth’s store across from Fernwood announced a contest sponsored by Keds shoes for the best essay about an animal, many of my class planned to enter. I chose the beaver, because Oregon was known as the Beaver State. On green scratch paper left over from printing checks, which Father brought home from the bank, I wrote my essay and took it to Mr. Abendroth. On the final day of the contest, I ran to the store to learn the results. I had won! Mr. Abendroth handed me two dollars. Then he told me no one else had entered the contest.
This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying. I also wrote a letter to the Shopping News, which published the letter and paid me a dollar.
Fernwood was a relief after Gregory Heights. I had not been forgotten, nobody knew I was a nuisance, and my height did not matter. Johnny, my “love” from Gregory Heights, was there; his family had also moved.
Miss Pollock, our fourth-grade teacher, was a serious gray-haired woman who often reminded us that we should believe in “Gawd,” apparently the same God I had learned about in Sunday School. She was kind and easily pleased. The fourth grade seemed to be one long quest for the lowest common denominator in long division. Sometimes I wished Miss Pollock’s Gawd would help. For a treat, on Friday afternoons, we were allowed to recite poetry. I once recited “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” after being coached by Mother.
Once a week, we marched off to the music room. Miss Johnson, the music teacher, always wore a green smock with a pocket that bulged with what we children suspected was a package of cigarettes but was probably a box of chalk. Miss Johnson was not a popular teacher, and I could never please her.
By the time I reached the music room, my stomach was a tight knot. We opened our song-books and sang. Claudine, from the first grade, sat behind me, and when we began “If I were a student in Cadiz,” Claudine sang “If I were a student in Hades.” I admired and was cheered by her courage.
A Girl from Yamhill Page 7
