by Jane Rule
We didn’t have to organize parties because there was one going on at the house perpetually. While Dad was there (he stayed only ten days, and Patsy went back with him while I stayed on for another month), great numbers of friends and relatives turned up. Granny did most of the cooking of dinner. Breakfast and often lunch were prepared for ourselves, and we took turns cleaning up and taking Granny’s long shopping lists to the store. Addie Waddie, the coloured maid, and her daughter Beatrice (with the accent on the “a”) cleaned. The laundry was sent out.
Granny was well organized and tolerated very little of the long sitting on the back of one’s neck that teenagers do. We went upstairs to our rooms to relax. Once we entered the public rooms, we were targets for conscription. There was always someone to be met at the airport, train or bus station. There were chairs and tables to be put or taken down. There were children to be entertained, old people to be helped out of chairs, up and down stairs.
My grandfather still went into New York nearly every day to his office to look after his various real estate investments. He had recovered most of what had been lost during the Depression. A quiet man in the midst of that large, very vocal family, he didn’t really try to listen and was apt, therefore, to introduce suggestions in conflict with plans already made. I was surprised at the energy of my father’s impatience with him.
“We can’t go to the theatre tomorrow night. Mother’s invited guests for dinner.”
Granny, firmly in control with everyone else, was apt to give in and change everything around to suit her husband, not with the best grace in the world, but he didn’t take any notice of her bad temper. Like my father, I sided with Granny, but I didn’t feel the irritation he did.
In order to have time alone with my grandfather, I got up and had breakfast with him. He had ladyfingers instead of toast every morning, a habit I happily imitated. Though he occasionally asked a question, he liked better to tell me how gifted a poet his brother Lucian was or to show me the books of his that Grandfather had had privately printed. He told me about his friend Tony Sarg, a painter he’d commissioned to do a mural in the lobby of an apartment house on Jane Street in the Village. He confided that he’d like to found Rule University, devoted to teaching people to think.
Granny had no use for most of his schemes though she obviously let him indulge in those that were not too extravagant, and, when he came up with proposals which had a potential for profit, she encouraged and supported him. My father saw the conflicts between them more than their important co-operation. Though Dad admired his father’s business accomplishments, he resented his father’s neglect of his mother, and was embarrassed by how often his father sounded like a naïve crackpot, saved from folly after folly only by his wife’s strong character. I loved my grandfather, but I felt closer to Granny, more able to talk with her. She didn’t encourage me. She resented what she thought of as my grandfather’s favouritism.
“I have to remind your grandfather that he has more than one grandchild. He can’t do for one what he can’t do for the fourteen of you.”
She had favourites herself, of course, but that was different. Our fortunes rose and fell on our merits, not on a romanticized and idealized image. I did know my grandfather didn’t love me. He didn’t know me, but I was glad to be under his protection.
It was not for idle pleasure that Granny took Patsy and me for Sunday lunch at West Point. She was more disappointed than we were of the friends Patsy’s brother brought along with him. Platoons were organized by height, and so the other two young men were as unusually tall, looking as my cousin Artie did in those unflattering uniforms like pencils with heads on them. Neither of them had military backgrounds or any backgrounds at all that Granny could discern. Neither their table manners nor their conversation impressed her. Of these my cousin was the only one who interested me. He seemed genuinely glad to see his sister, his grandmother and me. The affectionate friendliness of both Artie and Frank hurt me for my own isolated and hostile brother.
George, priggish and disapproving, was easily fathomable and therefore no threat. We formed an I-Hate-George-Coale Club dedicated to minor tormenting. When the rest of us went swimming, we played in the water. George swam laps. He, like his father and mine, was interested in competitive swimming. If he’d been at all amiable about it, we would have been an eager cheering section, but instead he bragged about competing at an exclusive country club in Atlantic City where we wouldn’t be allowed in.
Frank and I drove over in his Jeep the day of the meet and passed ourselves off as competitors. We changed into our suits and joined some of the swimmers warming up in the pool. Frank suggested that I do ten lengths as fast as I could. When I climbed out of the pool, exhausted, Frank responded with great satisfaction that at least three coaches had begun to time me with worried expressions on their faces. George had, of course, spotted us, and would have turned us in as impostors if it hadn’t meant embarrassment to himself. So we sat through the meet in the competitors’ bleachers. George lost.
By the time we got home, he had already reported us to Granny, who suggested we might have better entertainment than plaguing George. We doubted it.
One evening we all did go into New York to one theatre, ten or twelve of us. The Coale boys were there, and Artie had a pass from West Point. Aunt Lib, Dad’s youngest, tallest and handsomest sister, was with us. I don’t remember what we saw. I do remember our standing together at intermission, people looking to see what kind of a platform we were standing on. I was the shortest one. My father’s eyes were amused and proud in that forest of family.
I was less comfortable with Aunt Lib as we walked along Fifth Avenue together. A man coming toward us, candidly but quietly admiring her, was greeted with, “I don’t stare at you because you’re short!” Aunt Lib, Patsy and later my own sister, Libby, were more defensive about their size than I was.
I visited Ann twice that summer in an apartment they’d moved to near the George Washington Bridge. The second time, Henry was away. Ann made love to me gently, reluctantly, the last night I was there. I was afraid to make love to her in shyness and ignorance. I felt guilty, too, because she was afraid of what she had done.
A DAY OR TWO BEFORE I LEFT THE EAST, my grandfather announced that he’d arranged a little party at his Jane Street apartment house. The liquor had been provided, but he thought perhaps we should take some food along.
“We have to leave in an hour,” Granny Rule said.
“Nothing fancy,” he suggested.
It was a hot, humid August day. Granny pulled herself out of her chair, hobbled into the dining room and then lifted her dress off and slung it over a chair. I was ordered to bring bottles of chicken, celery and mayonnaise from the pantry, to fill a box with salted nuts, olives, cheese spreads and crackers. An hour later, I sat in the back seat of the car, a large bowl of chicken salad on my lap. Granny waited behind the wheel while her elegant husband still dawdled in the bathroom waxing his moustache, tooth brushing a bit of red into his fringe of hair, arranging the peaks of his pocket handkerchief.
Simply the mention of the Jane Street apartment block could put Granny in a bad temper because Grandfather had rented most of the apartments to people in the arts who often couldn’t or didn’t pay their rent. Grandfather, instead of giving them notice, indulged them rather as he did his brothers. If he could not be an artist, at least he could be a friend to artists.
Though I was curious, I was also apprehensive. I trusted Granny’s judgment too much not to feel in many of my grandfather’s plans the potential for disaster.
Until Great-Grandfather Rule had died of breakdown in the Depression, Grandfather had never taken a drink. On doctor’s orders now, he had a glass of sherry before dinner, but he was not even what could be called a social drinker. Granny didn’t drink at all.
The thirty or so people assembled in one of the larger apartments had not waited for their host and hostess (we were, of course, late). The enthusiasm of their greetings wa
s more drunken than genuine. As Grandfather introduced me to one tenant after another, it was embarrassingly obvious to me that they saw him as something of a fool to be humoured for their advantage. Granny settled herself into a couch with a Coke and became rather as if she were waiting for a bus, rather than giving a party.
I detached myself from my grandfather as quickly as I could. The party was noisy and crowded enough so that no real conversation needed to be sustained.
A very good-looking, very drunk young woman sat on the floor, her back against the wall, saying to no one in particular, “If men were really more superior to women, there would be no problem.”
“Look at my poodle,” a man called out, “he’s smart enough to eat the chicken and spit out the celery.”
A man touched my elbow and said, “Your grandfather wants you to sing for us.”
“I don’t sing,” I said. “He’s mixed me up with my mother.”
“She’s just being modest,” Grandfather insisted.
I looked toward Granny for help. She would not on my behalf. I was the inspiration for this farce. Whatever embarrassment I had to suffer for it was no concern of hers.
I protested again. By now half a dozen people urged. The music critic for the New York Times offered to play the piano.
“I really don’t sing,” I said frantically.
I sang, a song that eludes my memory.
I couldn’t be angry with my grandfather, nor could I really despise that gang of cheerful freeloaders. That party was simply an early confirmation for me of my mistrust of groups of people with artistic pretensions or not. All parties were essentially frat parties. I gradually learned to be better at avoiding them.
I had confided to my grandfather that I was really uncertain about the value of going back to college. He urged me to stay in the East. I could be a Powers model like Mary Lily. Or he could get me a job as a book reviewer if that was my bent. Since he hadn’t gone to college himself, he thought the world one’s best teacher. Though I was touched by those daydreams, I wasn’t deluded by them. I did have the sense to know I had to learn how to read books before I could review them.
I went back to college in the fall simply because I didn’t know what else to do.
Because of my odd status, I had not been assigned a room on freshman corridor, and I couldn’t be offered a room on sophomore corridor because the class was already too large for the space. One suite was vacant on junior corridor, consisting of two studies and a sleeping porch which doubled for a living room during the day. A sophomore who had not found a comfortable social place in her class volunteered to share it with me. Since it offered both privacy and space, I was delighted. Marty and I never became real friends. She was a bridge-playing, party-going non-student, as the majority were. I sometimes had to go on working with a bridge game at my feet, but weekends I had the place to myself, which suited me very well, for I had determined to make as much effort as I could to become a real student.
Since most of the courses I enrolled in were designed for incoming freshman, I had the advantage of already knowing my way around the campus and the library, and I had at least learned some of the things not expected of me as a young scholar. The first essays I turned in were thoroughly researched and conservatively presented, if still misspelled.
My English professor, Elizabeth Pope, had been on leave the year before. It took very little time for me to know that I was in the presence of a rare teacher for whom I wanted to be a rare student.
Badly crippled by polio as a child, Dr. Pope was not over five feet, standing on her good leg. To get the height she needed, she often sat on top of her desk, her lecture notes and the text forgotten on the lectern. It was a joke among us that she didn’t know how to read because she needed neither notes nor text to deliver entirely organized and handsomely phrased lectures, enriched by long passages of quotations. Without the necessity to consult the printed page, she could watch her audience and play to it, not so much for dramatic effect as for requiring of riveted attention. She anticipated questions, bewilderments simply by reading the faces of her students and calling on them to ask at the moment they needed to. She was always glad to clarify, argue a point, encourage a new interpretation.
I had not before been in the presence of someone who had lived entirely for her work. Her long years in the hospital, where books were her only friends, made her dedication to her work intense and personal, an attitude more to be expected of eager undergraduates than of seasoned scholars. She was, therefore, able to reach students more easily than most other teachers, share their first wonder at learning because it was still her own.
In 1948, Dr. Pope was in her early thirties. Her PhD thesis on Paradise Regained had been published, and she had been at Mills long enough to have established herself as a central power in the department, cherished and admired by Donald Weeks, the sensitive, cynical head of the department.
The first year I studied with her, she lived first at graduate house and then in my own dormitory. When she finally moved to her own apartment off campus, it was open to her students at any hour of the day or night. She never made a real distinction between working and sociability. Conversations could be as intensely academic over dinner as they were in the office, and, in the office, she was as welcoming and warm as she was in her own living room.
From the beginning, we fought fiercely. I had grown so to mistrust authority that I needed to test all the way.
“All right!” she shouted at me one day, her large green eyes flecked with a spatting of yellow. “Don’t see the point of understanding the great chain of being! Be a barbarian!”
“Quitter!” I shouted back.
She looked surprised.
“You have to fight long enough to let me lose,” I said and knew I trusted her enough to give her that information.
I challenged the texts chosen for study, the methods of teaching, the questions on quizzes and exams.
“How can I possibly compare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prose styles in one paragraph?” I scribbled instead of answering the question. “I give up!”
“Which one of us is to have the child?” was written in her neat hand across the bottom of the quiz, along with an F.
Critical as I was of all the details of my instruction, I didn’t spare myself. I never refused to answer a question unless I knew I could have been adequate to it. Every argument I lost out of ignorance was an invitation to longer hours of reading. By the time I had finished my first full year at the college, the head librarian had given me faculty privileges.
Because Dr. Pope went to chapel, I began to attend. Any member of the congregation could propose topics for sermons. George Hedley lectured rather than preached, often on hard points of doctrine, and a group of us usually stayed after the service for coffee provided by Helen Hedley in their book- and record-lined living room. The debates were often literary and historical with some of the brightest and best-informed members of the faculty participating. Discussions of morality tended toward various kinds of responsibility rather than definitions of sin.
Only when I went back to the dorm for lunch did I feel in odd company among other students well dressed from their attendance at other churches in the neighbourhood, mostly Catholics and Mormons. My own friends were only recently awake, dressed for tennis or hiking or horseback riding, and I shared their pagan spirits.
Yet chapel hadn’t required faith. Interdenominational, the service was more Episcopalian than anything, but it borrowed texts and ceremonies liberally from not only other denominations but other religions. When George Hedley dealt with faith, he did not assume he was preaching to the converted.
Still, often when I bowed my head in prayer, it troubled my conscience that I recognized no audience for that gesture by my fellow petitioners. And I envied what seemed to me the innocence of Dr. Pope’s belief. It was among the few important things we didn’t discuss.
I didn’t ever speak about the nature of my relationship with Ann
. I knew Dr. Pope would not have understood or accepted it. The relationship that was growing between us had to be defined by our work without any erotic overtones.
A graduate student, recently out of the service, was obviously in love with Dr. Pope, loitered in places where they might meet, offered to run errands, brought small presents, and I saw Dr. Pope’s physical disgust and growing irritation.
“I can’t stand people who fawn!”
I was used enough to the physical needs of my grandmothers to be able to know when Dr. Pope needed help and how to offer it without offending her fierce independence.
When the lovesick graduate student asked me outright how I managed to win such favour, I was frightened as well as embarrassed, for I knew she recognized the nature of my own devotion as clearly as I recognized hers. I felt sorry for her, but I wanted nothing to do with her or her self-despising, painful devotion.
I was suspicious of other more attractive offers of friendship. The natural reserve there was between Dr. Pope and me couldn’t be assumed with people more or less my own age who expected exchanges of confidence. I joked in the dorm corridors, joined the group-singing at dinner, went out to a movie or to a bar if there was an empty seat in one of the cars, but I didn’t join many late-night bull sessions after I discovered that what could begin as an interesting discussion about religion soon deteriorated into personal gossip about who was and who was not sleeping with her boyfriend, who did and who did not have crushes on the more attractive of our male teachers. Marty told me that sometimes there were sessions of “constructive criticism” of one or another of the group’s members.
