by Jane Rule
Asked to explain her comments, I was furious.
“How can I defend myself against a general lie? My moral character, as far as I’m concerned, is a good deal better than hers.”
“Why were you expelled?”
“I wasn’t expelled. I walked out because the restrictions she insisted were intolerable and unjust.”
Could one woman, I wanted to know, really have the power to prevent me from going to college? Didn’t my grades, didn’t the other letters mean anything?
“We’ve had some odd communications from this woman before,” the registrar said to the dean.
“Tell me what you want to study,” Dean Hawkes said.
The almost abrupt directness of her manner reminded me of my grandmother Rule, to whom I’d always felt required to stand up, to give an account of myself. Dean Hawkes was younger and handsomer, white haired, dark eyed, with a face I could read, probably because she wanted me to be able to. I told her essentially I wanted to learn to understand and then tell the truth. I wanted to be a writer.
“There’s a difficulty about your test scores,” she said, when I’d finished. “They can’t be accurate.”
“They are,” I said. “I don’t take tests like that well.”
“You’re particularly weak in language and reading skills. I find that hard to believe.”
“I’m weak at the test’s language and reading skills.”
She smiled at me.
“I don’t think I’m a moron,” I said.
“No,” Dean Hawkes agreed. “Yours is not only an irregular application but we don’t usually let students in for the February term. We aren’t really set up for it. You wouldn’t be able to take all the courses you should.”
“I don’t think I can wait much longer to get back to work,” I said.
In February, a month before my seventeenth birthday, I enrolled as a student at Mills. Mother came down from Reno to take me to Hink’s to buy the furnishings for my room. I had been at home with her for the week before, buying more clothes than I’d ever imagined owning. Never having gone to college herself, Mother enjoyed all the preparations even more than I did, and laughed when she later read the instructions to parents that she shouldn’t have come with me and influenced my choices. Mother has always been a follower of the dictum, “When all else fails, read the directions.”
I did not settle easily into my first term of college. I was not as grateful as I should have been for my “provisional” status, proud of my academic record and still righteously indignant at what had happened to me. But I was not as confident of myself as I tried to appear. I had read nothing but required texts, some poetry and books about the lives of doctors. I had to bluff a background assumed for those students professing an interest in literature until I could, with years of all-night reading, make up for my earlier indifference. At that time, I was a slow reader though I had a good memory for what I had read. I couldn’t spell.
I not only didn’t know what was expected of me in assignments, I didn’t know that anything in particular was expected. Asked to write a character sketch, I wrote three pages on Ann’s hands. The paper was returned with every line crossed out and a question mark at the end. In a humanities course which was supposed to challenge our cliché-ridden young minds to some originality, I was simply suspicious of questions like, “Does a drowning man really drown?” I didn’t want to be made a fool of by a bunch of condescending, smart-aleck male professors. In a course on religions of the Far East, the other students were all seniors in religion and philosophy with a vocabulary I didn’t understand at all. At the final exam, the kindly professor said, “Miss Rule, if you don’t understand the question, just write what you know about the main words in the sentences,” advice I followed for an hour of the three allotted. I had no more to say.
The remedial reading course I was required to take because of my low test scores was taught by a woman with a bad stammer which at times reactivated my own. Her advice, to read the first and last sentences of a paragraph and guess what was in between, was beyond my skill at reading poetry and religion texts, political argument and history.
I did not, of course, accept my failures humbly. I blamed the courses, the teachers, the texts, venting my anger and frustration on anyone who would listen, from impatient teachers, to my adviser, to the dean.
My complaints were not limited to my academic experience. I was amazed and appalled at the restrictions under which I was expected to live, signing in and out of the dorm, having to get signatures if I was to be away for the night. Because the only room available was a single on senior corridor, I was daily reminded of my lowly status and lack of privileges compared to the students I lived among. They were a friendly group, willing to sympathize with me and occasionally smuggle me out with them for a beer-drinking evening. They’d grown restless, too, with the hall meetings at which we had to vote on such things as whether we’d wear cotton dresses and sandals; skirts, sneakers and loafers; or formal dresses, stockings and high heels at our next open house.
Though I was an independent spirit, I was a domestic infant. I not only didn’t know how to do my laundry (I sent my clothes out all through my years at college), but Mother had always washed my hair. I came from so private a household that the casual nudity in the washrooms was actually embarrassing to me. I contrived to find times when everyone else was out to use the facilities.
The suspicion, apparently so often entertained by so many people, that I was a sexual adventurer, seemed the more ludicrous for someone as young and physically shy as I was.
I did make friends of sorts. Alette, a Dutch girl who had spent three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies, lived next door to me. When I was at my most impatient with the restrictions and requirements of my new life, she would counter my complaints by comparing the college to the camp. She would point out the abundance of quite good food, of hot water, the freedom to walk about the beautiful campus, to play tennis, ride, swim. The restrictions were, after all, only silly, not cruel. She wasn’t pious about it, simply detached and realistic. She was herself marking time until June when her fiancé would arrive from Australia and they would be married. She spent a lot of time writing letters to him.
Occasionally, she’d talk about her experience in the camp, being in charge for a time of rationing rice, a grain at a time, to the other women and children. She said she’d never again be as close to people as she had been then; it was a closeness with a price too high to pay voluntarily.
Sometimes I made her laugh. Perhaps that was why we could be friends. She could temper my bewildered anger, and I could distract her from a deep, private mourning. Thirty-five percent of the women had not survived. Fifty-five percent of the men in the adjacent camp died. Alette’s father had been beheaded.
Just behind the Mills campus was Oak Knoll Naval Hospital where Libby had been. Now it was filled with men in the final stages of rehabilitation, learning to use artificial limbs. Mills students were asked there as volunteers. I went once or twice, but I had no idea how to deal with their bitterness, the pressure of their need to be reassured sexually. I was afraid of them and ashamed to be. I could not as easily dismiss them as the sexually confident, socially ambitious Mills students did, as “creeps” and “weirdos.”
Our own self-obsessed and sheltered life in that oasis of beauty and luxury seemed to me peculiar and unreal. I took as many weekends as I was allowed to visit my grandmother and, therefore, Ann. The baby was born shortly after I arrived at college and named Carol after Ann’s favourite sister. When I was with them, I shared Ann’s preoccupation with her. In a way I didn’t much think about, Carol seemed somehow mine as well. At her christening, however, I listened with some dismay at my duties as her godmother concerning her spiritual life.
Henry had found a job in New York. Ann was preparing to join him. I would have been more distressed by her leaving if my father hadn’t suggested I go east with him to visit his pare
nts that summer. I’d be separated from Ann for only a couple of months.
Among the seniors, there were others like Alette announcing engagements, planning weddings. Most of them were also working hard to prepare for comprehensive exams and, if they were music majors, proficiency concerts. My corner room faced the music building. Perhaps some of the confusion of my own preparations had to do with nightly listening to the sounds from practice rooms: harpsichord, flute, piano, harp, voice. The seniors had time, too, for parties: receptions after concerts, major dinners with each faculty, engagement parties, balls. Sometimes I was included, but often I felt like a wardrobe mistress backstage, preparing all those attractive young women for their parts in a public show which had nothing to do with me. I did not usually mind.
As I had in high school, I invented a male figure for myself, this time called Sandy rather than David, far away not in the war but in New York. I received enough letters from Ann, addressed in her bold, androgynous hand, to make my story credible and excuse me my weekends without dates. The few details I offered about him, that he lived in a basement apartment two blocks from the Empire State Building and was an artist, were facts about Ann. Perhaps I should have invented him near at hand for Ann who still pressed me toward a required initiation into heterosexual life. I resisted on moral grounds, but, in fact, I had no gift or taste for men, except as friends.
Never having technically made love with Ann, thinking of her always as Henry’s wife and now Carol’s mother, I had no concept of being faithful to her, but I was both too preoccupied with her and too uncertain that anyone else would understand those feelings to wish any sort of intimacy.
I missed children. One day I saw several playing at the edge of a pond by the music building. They were trying unsuccessfully to catch pollywogs. I kicked off my sandals and waded in with their jar. As I was coming out with the jar full, a middle-aged man, elegantly dressed, hailed me. I was embarrassed to be found at so childish an occupation, but his amusement was clearly tinged with approval. He joined me and the children to examine my catch, raising his accented voice over the jumble of sounds coming from the practice rooms, and then he walked with me when I left the children with their pollywogs.
Nodding at the sound of a particularly commanding harpsichord, he said, “I hate it, like two skeletons fucking on a tin roof.”
I discovered some days later that he was Egon Petri, the concert pianist, who instructed some of the best senior students. I envied them for their access to such distinguished teachers, their life slightly apart from the rest of the college, the distinction many of them had already achieved. Even their building, a gift to the college in the prosperous 1920s, called attention to them as the elite. Professional music critics came to most of the proficiency concerts. Darius Milhaud taught composition every other year at Mills, the alternate years in Paris at the Paris Conservatoire, and some students commuted with him.
I had no gift for music, no courage for any performing art. It was the high seriousness and cowardice that attracted me. My young, unpractised English teacher would never have walked along the path casually with a student, making any kind of conversation. The only authority she had was her podium, over which she peered on frightened guard duty against the barbarous freshmen.
Dean Hawkes was the only adult with whom I had any rapport, and I saw very little of her. By the time college was over in June, the few friends I had were graduating. What work I had done was so fragmented and uneven that I couldn’t see much point in it. My attempts at writing were so sporadic and disappointing that it seemed more a daydream than an ambition. Perhaps it was really a lie.
I think I was a great deal more frightened of myself in those days than I could admit. I increasingly had migraine headaches, occasional blackouts and insomnia. I had traded my interest in athletics for a pack of cigarettes a day and a reputation for holding my liquor, punishing a body I had always been modest about but proud of in the pool, on the basketball and badminton courts. I could not look at the possibility that I was a woman, a sex pervert, a moral fraud who had been seen more clearly by Miss Espinosa than I could see myself.
Dean Hawkes was not distressed by the charitable C that I received in my religion course.
“You shouldn’t have been in that course in the first place. It’s for senior majors.”
My other marks were not quite as humiliating, but I knew I hadn’t taken firm hold anywhere, not out of lack of effort but out of lack of understanding.
“You’ll begin well next year,” the dean predicted.
Mother, too, was unconcerned, perhaps even relieved. She took my lacklustre performance as a sign that I’d learned to be less tensely serious about my work and was having some fun. I had dutifully reported the few frat parties I’d gone to, exaggerating my social success as I did to Ann, whose investment in my heterosexuality was no less than my mother’s, if differently personal.
Though Dad was confident and happy with his new job, had picked out a lot at the edge of town to build a house, his relationship with Arthur was as bad as ever. I hated being back in that tension again. Unable to do anything about my brother’s obvious unhappiness, I didn’t want to be around it. After too brief a visit to San Francisco and a nightmare drive with my brother back across the mountain, knowing no one in Reno, I hid with the stacks of books I’d brought home and read with a will until it was time to go east with Dad.
Ann preoccupied my imagination, but I was also looking forward to seeing my grandfather Rule, with whom I’d started an independent correspondence once I left home. A dreamer himself, who honoured artists above all others, he had encouraged me and I’d confided in him all my young ambitions. He was the one adult who advised me against marrying early or perhaps marrying at all since I had so much to accomplish in myself and few men had either the vision or generosity to allow that. He assumed, with the sweet transposing vanity of a doting relative, that I was pursued by all men and must guard myself against shallow temptation. However inaccurate I knew that flattery to be, it was some comfort to me. And even as an old maid, I wouldn’t disappoint him.
My father, too, had begun to find me more presentable now that I was well dressed and knew how to comb my hair. He was a courtly travelling companion, and he looked so much younger than his years, I enough older, that we were often mistaken for a couple. Even at college, I was teased about the glamorous older man I tried to pass off as my father.
We stopped first in Chicago to visit my father’s oldest sister and her family. My cousin Patsy had, like me, improved with age. A year older than I was, three inches taller, she was still in high school and had no plans for college. Her twin brother had just gone off to West Point, following in his father’s and older brother’s footsteps. Granny Rule had promised to take me to West Point to see him, a duty she had taken on for her own daughters with the result that two married army officers, one a teammate of Dad’s at Annapolis. Dad, listening to me talk about the things I was planning to do, suddenly suggested that Patsy come with us.
“Certainly not,” her father said at once. “We can’t afford it.”
Later, when Dad was alone with his sister and brother-in-law, he offered to pay Patsy’s fare. They agreed only on condition that she not know anything about it until the last minute, a tease so mindlessly cruel I felt entirely alienated from my aunt and uncle when the surprise was sprung only twenty minutes before we were to leave, Patsy’s suitcase already secretly packed by her mother. Her father jeered the news at her so that she left feeling more the butt of a joke than the recipient of a holiday.
As soon as we had left, my father did what he could to make up for it, asking Patsy what kinds of things she’d like to do, giving her a sense that she had some choice in the matter.
MY GRANDPARENTS WERE LIVING in the little Gatehouse the last time I’d visited them. Now they’d moved back to what was affectionately called “the shingle chateau,” the original family house that Wychwood had developed around, and where Mother and Dad
had started their married life with the whole Rule family. It was far too large and impractical a place for an old couple to be living in, but it had ample room for welcoming various members of the family for a visit or in transit, as so many in the family always were.
I couldn’t now draw a floor plan from memory or recount the number of rooms. The large old kitchen on the ground floor and a suite of rooms on the second floor which could be reached by the back stairs were rented to a sister-in-law of Dad’s twin brother, her husband and her daughter, Debbie, who was Patsy’s age. What had been the butler’s pantry had been turned into a small kitchen for my grandparents, but the arrangement was flexible enough to allow the Rule family to spill over into the large kitchen where crowds had to be cooked for.
My grandparents had a bedroom and bath on the ground floor since Granny couldn’t manage the stairs. The only authority she had over the two floors above her was her voice, commanding up the stairwell for our presence at dinner, for our late-night guests to leave, for the younger cousins to be put to bed.
Dad’s sister Mary and her family lived in Westfield. She came over rarely and always seemed to be just getting over or just coming down with a migraine. Her youngest son was away at camp for the whole summer, but both Frank and young George were at home. Frank, six weeks older than I was, was just finishing high school, but George had been away to college. I had expected to make common cause with him, partly because our grandfather had linked us as the brains of the family. George was, however, very superior and dull, and he told Granny he didn’t think I was old enough to go out on dates.
Frank, on the other hand, all but moved in. Granny made no complaint about feeding him, but she treated him more like a lazy servant than a guest. He made great sport of outwitting her and rather relished his role as the bad brother. Affectionate and funny, always willing to be included in any outing, offering his war-surplus Jeep for transportation, Frank obviously was making up for the sisters he didn’t have. He didn’t have my brother’s polished manners, height or good looks. In fact, I thought all my eastern cousins socially retarded. They didn’t go to the theatre or concerts in New York, only an hour away. They didn’t give or go to parties. But Frank was, at least, willing to learn.
