“Coming to the cast party?” Eleanor asked after the Saturday night performance. I was wiping off my stage makeup with cold cream, and Eleanor was skillfully applying rouge and lipstick, neither of which I was permitted to wear. “It’s at Charley’s house,” she said, moving on to eyebrow pencil. “All the Bluffer boys will be there, and the stage crew, too. There’ll be lots to eat, and dancing, too, of course.” Eye shadow was next.
“Sorry, but I can’t,” I said. “I already have other plans.”
“Oh, too bad,” said Eleanor, but I felt sure she wasn’t at all disappointed. My “other plans” were a fabrication, but I’d decided that the best way to avoid being humiliated at a dance was not to attend one.
At the start of my senior year I signed up to work on the staff of The Oracle, the school’s monthly magazine. Charley Drayton was the editor-in-chief. He had an ingratiating manner and an easy grin, but he was also lazy, and the rest of us had to take up the slack for him, which we performed gladly at the time and then resented later when he got most of the credit. My title was School Editor, and my job was to edit articles about student activities. Mary Nancy Paluso, a linsey-woolsey nicknamed Mimsy, was the literary editor overseeing short stories and poetry, an assignment I would have preferred.
The final issue of the year was published as the class yearbook, with individual photographs of the graduating seniors along with each person’s nickname, ambition, list of activities during their four years of high school, and a classical quotation that was supposed to reflect the senior’s personality. Brainy Mimsy, of course, came up with the quotations.
Tubby’s was from a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “A Dream of Fair Women”: A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, / And most divinely fair. Mine was from a poem by James Russell Lowell, “My Love”: Her glorious fancies come from far, / Beneath the silver evening-star, / And yet her heart is ever near.
“‘Glorious fancies,’” said Tubby. “Just like Miss Fowler predicted.”
Jean Runyon was in charge of gathering the information on each graduating senior. We went over it together, checking spelling and punctuation.
Margaret B. White. (The B was for Bourke; my mother had given me her maiden name as my middle name.) Nickname: Peggy. Ambition: Herpetologist.
“Herpetologist?” Jean asked. “What’s that?”
“Someone who studies reptiles and amphibians,” I explained. “Snakes, mostly, but also frogs and toads, newts, salamanders. And also lizards and turtles. They’re all herps.”
Jean shuddered. “I remember the time you came to school with a snake wrapped around each arm. And back in eighth grade, when you brought a snake to school and all the girls screamed, and the boys put on a show of not being scared, but I knew they were.”
“I didn’t want to scare anybody. The snake wasn’t poisonous. I just thought it was interesting.”
“Maybe.” She shuffled through the forms she’d collected. “Other girls want to be teachers, and a couple say they want to be nurses, but I know that Dottie Hendricks, for instance, gets sick to her stomach when something doesn’t smell right. Eleanor Treacy says she’s planning to study art and become an illustrator. Most of them, though, just want to get married. The boys hope to go to sea or become doctors. But so far you’re the only one who wants to be anything like a herpetologist.” She arranged the papers in a neat stack. “What would you actually do with those creepy, scaly things?”
“I’ll visit dark and interesting jungles and collect specimens for natural history museums. I’ll learn so much about them that people will invite me to give lectures. Maybe I’ll become a famous scientist, and then I’ll marry a famous scientist, another herpetologist, and we’ll travel all over the world together.”
“You really want to do that? That’s kind of a strange thing for a girl to do.”
“I want to do all kinds of things that girls never do. That women never do. Didn’t you ever think of doing something like that?”
Jean looked at me skeptically. “I just want to go to normal school and earn my teaching certificate, because my dad wants me to, and teach for two years while Tom finishes his degree, and then we’ll get married.”
We went back to checking the seniors’ forms. My list of activities was among the longest in the class—decorating committees, ice cream receptions, pageants, swim team, class secretary. I added another one: class song.
Along with pimply Jack Daniels I was elected by the staff of The Oracle to write the words to the class song. It would be sung at commencement to the tune of the Plainfield High School alma mater.
I’d been writing poetry since I was a child. Mother kept most of my early scribblings in a box, along with my report cards, beginning in first grade. “Just look at this,” my mother had said the last time she’d added something to my box, and pulled out a crumpled bit of paper with my handwriting. “‘Flit on, lovely butterfly / Into a world more fair / With azure sky far more high / Than that blue sky up there.’ You wrote that when you were eleven—see, I put the date on it: August 1915.”
Now I sat in the library across from Jack Daniels, trying to come up with an idea for the song. I didn’t much care for Jack.
He’d already had his poetry published in some little magazine no one had heard of, and he seemed overly impressed with his own brilliance.
“We have to work the class colors into the poem,” Jack said. “That’s a good place to start.”
“I didn’t know we even had class colors. What are they?”
Jack looked at me with disdain. “For your information, they’re red and gray, and we voted on them last fall, before the Autumn Festival dance. You don’t recall that?”
“But aren’t there some other school colors? Scarlet and azure?”
“Red and blue, Peg,” Jack sighed. “Red and blue are the school colors. We’re talking now about our class colors.”
I once wrote an eight-hundred-word short story with less fuss, but after hours of discussion, we cobbled together a poem.
Our Red and Gray we’ll ne’er forget, / We’ll always to our Class be true. / What e’er we do throughout our lives / We’ll keep unstained the Red and Blue.
“Very colorful,” I allowed.
I graduated in June with high grades and plans to attend Barnard College in New York City. Mimsy was the valedictorian, no surprise, and gave a stirring address on “Beauty in Modern Life” with references to art, music, poetry, and dance. Prizes were awarded in Latin, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and Mimsy collected the Babcock Prize for her short story based on Hermione, the daughter of Helen of Troy. “I didn’t even know Helen had a daughter,” Tubby said. “But if anybody would know, it’s Mimsy.”
That summer I took the train to New Brunswick, where I enrolled in classes in swimming and aesthetic dancing at Rutgers University. I was already a good swimmer, but I wanted to become an excellent swimmer. As a herpetologist collecting specimens in the wild, I might frequently be around bodies of water. The Amazon, maybe, or the Nile!
I had learned the waltz and the foxtrot in dancing class, but aesthetic dancing was a form of self-expression that didn’t require a partner. The instructor was a gaunt woman in a flowing black skirt, her dark hair with a dramatic white streak worn in a chignon.
“Focus on the center of your body,” she told us. “Concentrate on your breathing and how you move. Breathe! Move! Feel that energy coursing through your entire body!”
Day after day I breathed and I moved. I had always been a bit chubby, but the swimming and dancing streamlined my body. One of the dancers loaned me a lipstick and showed me how to use it. I looked in the mirror and liked what I saw. No longer a plain, baby-faced girl but a pretty seventeen-year-old smiled back at me.
The other thing that happened that summer was my growing friendship with our well-to-do neighbors, Mr. Henry Munger and his sister, Miss Jessie Munger, who lived a few blocks away. Bound Brook was not a wealthy town. The Mungers could have lived in nearby Pl
ainfield, a town of large villas, sweeping green lawns, and elaborate flowerbeds, but for some reason they chose not to. Mr. Munger puttered around his flowers and looked after his own grass, although he had reached an age when that was becoming harder. Sometimes my mother sent Roger over to the Mungers’ to help out. They always tried to pay Roger, but Mother forbade him to accept any money.
“It’s what neighbors do,” she said. “They look out for each other.”
Roger objected, saying he wanted to have some extra spending money, and he promised to save half of whatever he made, but Mother was unbending. So Roger rode over on his bicycle to help with the weeding and mowing in summer and snow shoveling in winter and sometimes ran errands for Miss Munger. She probably slipped him a quarter every now and then and Roger didn’t say no, but he didn’t tell Mother.
Miss Munger had problems with her eyesight, and two or three times a week I read to her for an hour or so. Between chapters Miss Munger called for tea, and as though he were a servant, Mr. Munger carried in a large silver tray and a plate of slightly stale cookies. When I told Mother, she began sending over a tin of cookies fresh from our oven.
Miss Munger was fond of historical novels set in England and featuring the Tudors. She loved every one of Henry VIII’s wives. She was interested in many other things as well, and I once brought my hognose snake to visit. Miss Munger squinted at him when he reared up and hissed at her and applauded softly when he played dead.
“What is it you intend to study, Margaret?” she asked on my last visit before I was to leave for college.
“Herpetology.”
“The study of snakes! How thrilling!” she said. “But is that a proper calling for a young lady? Still, one does sometimes wish for the unusual, doesn’t one!” Then she added thoughtfully that the highlight of her life had been a trip to India with her grandmother when she was a girl. “I remember the snake charmer playing his pungi, and the cobra rising up out of his basket. How exciting for you!”
I was packing my clothes, folding another drab dress as well as several pairs of those awful cotton stockings. Ruth, home from college in Boston, sat on her bed, across from mine, and assured me that from now on everything would be different.
“College boys aren’t like those boys who didn’t pay attention to you in high school,” she said. “You probably scared them off. You’re too smart, too ambitious, too driven. Boys that age don’t know what to make of a girl like you. But that will change. You’ll see.”
“Has it changed for you?” I asked. It didn’t seem to me that much had. She was still wearing cotton stockings and the dresses she’d made herself in high school.
“I’m not like you, Peg,” Ruth replied. “I love the law classes I’m taking, I get good grades, and I’m contented with that. I don’t want to be different. And you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s true.”
When I’d finished packing, we all piled into the family car, and Father drove to the dormitory at Barnard. Columbia University didn’t admit women, but I could enroll in science courses there and take my other required courses at Barnard, the women’s college on the opposite side of Broadway.
Father set down the battered old suitcase Mother had loaned me. “Call if you need anything.” That was all he said, but I thought his eyes looked watery. I know mine were.
“Remember, Margaret, never take the easy way,” Mother said, predictably.
Roger promised to take care of my various animals.
They got back in the car, and I watched them drive away. I picked up the suitcase and walked toward Brooks Hall with its row of Greek columns.
From now on everything will be different, Ruth had promised. I hoped she was right.
5
A Mature and Intelligent Young Woman—1921
I’D SIGNED UP FOR BIOLOGY, BOTANY, MATHEMATICS, and chemistry at Columbia. Most of the students in my classes were boys. They ignored me. The girls in my residence hall laughed at things I didn’t find funny, and they never seemed to tire of discussing clothes and parties and the handsome philosophy professor. My roommate, Madge Jacobson, a pretty girl with a curly blond bob and a closetful of smart dresses, would have fit in perfectly with the crystal-chandeliers. While I was studying in the library, Madge and her friends spent their free time playing bridge and drinking coffee. Madge had an infectious laugh and always seemed ready to have fun, and she didn’t mind that I kept a couple of pet snakes in a terrarium next to my desk.
We had strict curfews—eight o’clock on weeknights, midnight on weekends. The curfews didn’t bother me. Why would I want to stay out any later? There was a telephone in a booth at the end of the hall, and we had to take turns answering with, “Good evening, Fourth Floor Brooks Hall,” from seven until quiet hours began at ten; no calls were allowed after ten. I hated that one hour a week when it was my turn to sit by the phone. It never rang for me, except when Mother called every other Sunday.
At the start of Christmas vacation I caught the train to Bound Brook. I had brought along a satchel of books, and I was deep in a chapter on cycloalkanes when a male voice asked if the seat next to me was available. I glanced up and nodded. He was tall and thin with fine features and bright blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses that slipped down his nose. He looked older. He observed me observing him and pointed to the book in my lap.
“Organic chemistry,” he said. “You’re a student, then?”
“Columbia University. I plan to major in herpetology.”
He was on his way to a chemical factory in Bound Brook where he was about to start work as a research chemist. “They manufacture dyes,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name is François Gilfillan, but please call me Gil.”
“Peggy White,” I said, shaking his hand. “My home is in Bound Brook.”
“I’m from Ninnekah, Oklahoma,” he said.
We got off the train at Bound Brook. My father had come to meet me, and I introduced him to Gil.
“It appears that your daughter and I have similar interests in science, Mr. White,” Gil said. “May I have your permission to call her?”
Father glanced at me, and a little smile twitched at his lips. “Of course, Mr. Gilfillan,” he said.
Gil did call two days later. At Mother’s suggestion, I invited him to come for Christmas dinner, and he accepted.
My parents didn’t practice any religion, so there was no decorated tree, no wreath on the front door. My parents saw no reason for shiny glass balls or holly. If Ruth hadn’t persuaded Mother to buy a big roasting chicken, she would have probably served our usual Sunday menu—chicken fricassee and dumplings. Besides the chicken, we would have mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and Parker House rolls. “For dessert we’ll have apple pie à la mode,” Ruth said. “I’ll make it.”
“‘Pie à la mode!’” Mother sniffed. “You’ve been spending too much time with the upper crust in Boston.” Ruth didn’t bother to reply.
Mother and Ruth and I spent Christmas morning in the kitchen. After everything was prepared, I went upstairs to change. I wished I had something festive to wear—everything I owned seemed just the opposite—but I did have the tube of dark red lipstick I’d purchased last summer. When I came downstairs, Mother saw me and frowned. “It makes you look cheap, Margaret,” she said, but she did not send me to the bathroom to wipe it off.
Gil arrived, cheeks reddened with cold, wishing everyone a merry Christmas and presenting Mother with a box of chocolates. Gil and Father hit it off immediately, as I expected they would. While I was mashing the potatoes, Father was asking Gil questions. “So, Gil, where do you hail from?”
“Well, sir, I was born in Oklahoma,” I heard Gil say, “and my family moved to Texas when I was a boy. Then I went to visit an uncle in Oregon and wound up getting a degree in pharmacy there before I joined the army.”
He talked about where he’d served during the great war against Germany, and how, after his discharge, he’d gone to Yale and earned a doctorate in ch
emistry. “Now I’m at Calco Chemical as a research chemist.”
Mother set a bowl of gravy on the table. “And how old did you say you are, Mr. Gilfillan?”
“Twenty-eight, Mrs. White. I’ll be twenty-nine next month.”
“Twenty-eight!” Mother sounded shocked. “Are you aware that Margaret is just seventeen?”
I was a bit shocked, too, but Gil answered smoothly, “Peg—Margaret—strikes me as a very mature and intelligent young woman.”
A bright little bubble of happiness expanded in my chest. Not a seventeen-year-old girl—a mature and intelligent young woman! I bit my lip to hide a grin.
Ruth announced that dinner was served. Father carved inexpertly, as though he’d never seen a whole roast chicken, and the side dishes were passed around. It was a quiet meal. Father didn’t like a lot of conversation when we were at the table.
We hardly ever had guests for dinner, and none of us knew how to act. Roger stared at Gil with undisguised curiosity. “You must be pretty important,” he said. “We never eat like this.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Gil said easily, and accepted more mashed potatoes.
I jumped up to carry dirty dishes to the kitchen and stayed to scrape them, glad for something to do.
“You should be in there entertaining your beau,” Mother whispered when she brought out the skeleton of the chicken. “Goodness knows your father won’t do it.”
“He’s not my beau! And he and Father are actually talking.” We could hear the murmur of conversation, and I relaxed a little.
Girl with a Camera Page 3
