Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Jessamyn was furious with me when I dropped her course second term. The swimming lessons had ended, but my interest in the students had drawn me to their school. I had volunteered to work in the classroom two afternoons a week, one of which conflicted with my writing class.

  “You can’t be a writer and a do-gooder, you know,” she said. “You have to dedicate yourself to it; without that, no matter how great your talent, you’re finished.”

  “I just don’t seem to have much to say,” I said and meant it.

  I had plenty to say about Milton, the Old Testament, nineteenth-century novels, but about myself, outside of love letters, I had nothing to say, and I increasingly mistrusted my sense of what experience meant to other people.

  I spent less time in the dorm. I sat with English majors or philosophy majors at the shop, talked ideas, systems of values, or I spent evenings with Dr. Pope and sometimes other members of the faculty. Ellen and I often worked together on papers, and I talked with her, too, about how much the summer had meant to me.

  “I’d love to go,” she said.

  “Well, why don’t you?”

  “I don’t suppose Mother would let me.”

  But Ellen’s mother, hearing that I was going, too, was unexpectedly enthusiastic.

  I tried to be unreservedly pleased. When I wrote to Roussel, I presented Ellen’s being there, too, as an added delight. We’d by then agreed on the University of London, partly out of an appetite for more exposure to contemporary literature, partly for the availability of London, but also it meant I could see Roussel more often. She responded cheerfully enough but added that she intended to be demanding.

  Roussel sent me more and more information about the Festival of Britain. We must plan weekends not only at Stratford but at Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury. Everywhere there were to be remarkable plays, exhibits, lectures.

  “They’re going to perform Samson Agonistes at Oxford,” I said to Dr. Pope. “It can’t have been performed more than half a dozen times.”

  “It wasn’t really written to be performed,” she said, rather flatly, but her interest lifted again when I told her Lord David Cecil was going to lecture at Oxford, Dorothy Sayers at Canterbury.

  I walked down the hill that late evening, hearing again the brief flatness in her voice. Surely being a Milton scholar, she should be interested, even if it was something of an oddity. Then it occurred to me, breaking through the egotism of my nineteen years, that she had simply had to stifle a moment of envy. So often the summer before I had thought and written to her that she and not I should be having the opportunity to see what I was seeing, would bring so much more to it, share it so well in her teaching.

  Why shouldn’t she go? If I went with her to deal with the physical difficulties of travel there was no reason why she shouldn’t. I knew her well enough to understand her physical limitations, and I knew England well enough to manage it. I couldn’t take a course, but that didn’t matter. I’d get much more simply travelling around with her.

  I turned and went back up the hill. She was sitting with a book in her lap, smoking a cigarette.

  “Look,” I said. “Come, too.”

  “I couldn’t, Jinx,” she began.

  “Why not?”

  The plan that had begun to form in my head grew as I talked.

  “It’s a much more expensive trip for you, travelling around, staying in hotels.”

  “I can find cheap ones.”

  “We’d have to take cabs sometimes instead of buses or the tube.”

  “No big problem. Cabs aren’t that expensive,” I suggested.

  “Let me sleep on it.”

  I ran down the hill, nearly late for curfew, elated with the sense that finally I could do something for Dr. Pope, give her a world as rich as the world she’d given me.

  Only when I finally got back to the dorm did I suddenly remember Roussel, and, for a stricken moment, I prayed that Dr. Pope would wake to know it was an impossible pipe dream. Why had I been so impulsive? Then I remembered the delight in Dr. Pope’s face, the real hope in it. Well, damn it, I thought, we can all work it out somehow.

  In the morning, Dr. Pope told me she had phoned her father, a retired banker in Washington, D.C., and he was delighted with the plan. He had set up a trust fund for her which gave her extra money. He suggested that she should pay the difference between what the trip would otherwise cost me, including a first-class flight across the ocean since ship travel would be very difficult for her.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Well, wonderful!” I said.

  Ellen had to be resigned to going on the course by herself, joining us some weekends, but I promised her we’d have time together later in the summer, perhaps on into the fall to go to the Continent. Ellen had racked up extra credits and could afford to take a semester off. I had only one semester left, which I could complete in the spring. She was generous enough to see how important the trip would be for Dr. Pope.

  Writing to Roussel was more difficult. Her reply was downhearted. “Must I share you with all the world, my young Pied Piper?”

  Yes, I answered, but it will finally be richer that way for both of us. Love mustn’t cut us off but open us. I did believe it, or at least I thought I could will it.

  I WROTE TO VARIOUS SMALL HOTELS, explaining that we needed a room up no more than one flight of stairs and near the bathroom. At Stratford, we could stay at Bishopton Lodge because Mrs. Lucas had decided not to take students again.

  Evaline Wright, in the drama department, was on a year’s leave of absence in Greece. She wrote to Dr. Pope to ask if she could join us for at least some part of our trip. After a year abroad, she’d particularly like some friendly company. I sent her our itinerary, delighted with her suggestion, for it might mean I was somewhat freer to take a day or evening away. Roussel wasn’t as optimistic. For her, the summer was turning into a circus.

  Mother finally sold the house in Reno and moved to Berkeley because Dad was now working in that area. I was glad to have my family nearby so that I could go home for an occasional meal, sometimes taking friends home with me. Edy was there often. Her own father had died before Edy was born. Her brother and sister were much older; so she grew up alone with her very reclusive mother. She loved the sense of family we had. My parents welcomed her in, and my sister adopted her as a much better older sister than I was. I know that part of Edy’s interest in Arthur was the place he gave her among us.

  Mother was interested in the work I was doing with the handicapped students, and one day I took her with me. I assisted the teacher who had the older students, fourteen of them from the ages of twelve to twenty-one. Only two were able to walk. They were our runners for baseball games. Most of the students had either cerebral palsy or polio. One was paralyzed from the waist down from a car accident. Because their IQs varied greatly, they couldn’t be taught in groups larger than three or four. I taught everything from spelling to typing. Though their progress was very slow, there were moments of achievement that could never have been witnessed in another kind of classroom.

  “Don’t you sometimes get discouraged for them?” Mother asked me later.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “But when John first came, because he couldn’t talk, we didn’t know whether he could read or write. When I strapped his wrists onto the table in front of the typewriter and he typed, ‘I can read,’ I cried. He cried. We’d found a way to break the sound barrier.”

  Yes, it was true that I didn’t want to be mistaken for a volunteer mother. On my way back to college, when I saw a boy running across the field, the tears that welled were for all those who could never do so simple and beautiful a thing.

  Usually I enjoyed spending Easter vacation at college. I could work uninterrupted for hours, but this year, I needed to get away. I suggested to my mother that she join me for a week in Carmel, where we could celebrate our birthdays together. Other Mills students were in the same hotel, and we had drinks with them one evening before di
nner, but mostly we kept to ourselves, walked on the beach, went shopping, rested, read and talked. Both of us were good letter writers, and we talked often on the phone; so we weren’t out of touch, but we hadn’t had such time together since the war.

  She talked more frankly about our father than she had before, saying he was too good a man for the business world, both too honest and too trusting, but maybe it would be better when he had his own business. She didn’t think Arthur should be working for Dad. Arthur should be learning what a real employer would not put up with. But without any qualifications or experience, he wasn’t likely to get a job that interested him. She hoped Libby could stay as healthy as she had become in the high, dry desert air of Nevada. She hoped she could stay detached from Mother Packer once they lived nearer to each other again. My mother was very glad to be back in the Bay Area. She had never liked Reno.

  I suppose she worried about me, too, though I’d never been in the habit of confiding in her, offering my good news when I had it and only the brighter colours of my experience. The only negative emotion she handled easily was anger; so I did occasionally report irritations and injustices. My fears and griefs I kept to myself. Yet I felt very close to my mother, sure of the loving bond between us. We were deeply companionable. It is not so necessary to be understood by one’s parents as not to be misunderstood.

  Occasionally my mother’s zeal for our good health did embarrass me. Just before one of my trips to Europe, she read an article about blood transfusions for people who were tired and run down. She suggested to the college doctor that maybe a pint of new blood would set me up for the summer. The doctor explained that we had different blood types and that, in any case, I didn’t need it.

  I told that among a series of outrageous stories about my mother to entertain people, but I don’t think any of my listeners were in doubt that I was as touched as I was embarrassed and amused.

  I returned to college rested and reassured. Sally came back from her own adventures very sick. She had pneumonia. While she was in the infirmary, Edy remembered that Sally had for months been making a set penance at the Catholic church and would miss the last one because she was too ill to go. Edy phoned the priest, and he went to the infirmary for that purpose. Sally, seeing him, thought she was about to die and was furious with Edy for frightening her so.

  Sally had only about a month to prepare for her exams. Her first week out of the infirmary, she spent with my parents. She was a little less thin and pale when she came back, but she had very little natural energy. She had decided for psychology simply because there was a smaller body of work to get through. She had the texts of all the psychology courses, and she read by the clock, hour after hour on a schedule which would see her done the evening before exams began. Since I was working hard toward my own exams, we were more companionable than we’d been all year.

  The night before her exams began, Sally went out with some of the graduate students in the psychology department. She came home late, drunker than I’d ever seen her and was sick the rest of the night. In the morning, I phoned the doctor to say that Sally was too hung over to get out of bed.

  “And you call yourself a friend of hers?”

  “Look, I didn’t do it. I was home studying.”

  I half-carried Sally to the infirmary, where the doctor gave her a shot. Then the doctor told me to go to the college shop and buy the full pitcher of fresh orange juice and take it into the exam room for Sally.

  Sally did get to her exam on time, but, when I looked at her colour, I thought writing it was an exercise in gallant futility. I wondered what it was that drove her so angrily against her own intelligence.

  When the exams were graded, Sally’s marks were the highest ever achieved by an undergraduate. We were triumphant for her, and she was delighted to have dumbfounded her professors. She matched my doubt at the real purpose of it all with her cynicism. She saw no more purpose in the way I worked, and it took more time.

  “But I care about it,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  Sometimes, I complained to Dr. Pope, I’d like to refuse to take exams, which seemed to make so much competitive nonsense out of our learning.

  “That’s no way to get into graduate school.”

  My own exams by then were safely over, and the summer was too much upon us for me to worry the bone of principle for long. Soon we would be back among people who cared about learning the way we did.

  Dr. Pope went to Washington, D.C., to stay with her father. I went home for a few days. Then, to save money, I took an unscheduled airline across the country. I was stranded in Chicago for twelve hours before I got a plane to Washington, D.C., where Granny was visiting Aunt Pat and Uncle Keg. I was wearing a new navy-blue and red linen dress. The seams of the panelled skirt did not last the trip, and I arrived with it in streamers. While I slept off my exhaustion, Aunt Pat sewed my outfit back together again so that it could withstand the strain of travel.

  I had arrived the day the parks were desegregated in Washington, D.C. Granny, busy with handwork, looked over her glasses at me and said, “I suppose you think you’ve won.”

  “It’s not my side, Granny,” I said. “It’s the right side.”

  She turned her attention back to the work in her lap, old matriarch who took responsibility for her black servants, cared for them when they were sick, sent their brightest children on to college, but knew that, in general, they were children, somewhat below par.

  Granny and I met Dr. Pope and her father for dinner, and the two old ones got on very well. I was scheduled then to fly to New York to have lunch with Ellen’s mother before Ellen and I went to Maine to visit Dr. Diller and his family. Ellen had taken a course in philosophy with him that year, and he had suggested we both stop at their summer place on our way to Europe. Lunch with Ellen’s mother didn’t bridge the generation gap. She was worried about our lack of definite plans after summer school and Dr. Pope’s departure. She wanted us to promise we wouldn’t go to Egypt. Ellen and I had enjoyed telling people we thought of bicycling down the Nile.

  “Jinx’s parents trust her judgment,” Ellen said accusingly.

  They didn’t so much trust it as know I was old enough to have to depend on it. I often didn’t trust it myself.

  Both of us were relieved to board the plane for Portland, Maine. Just as we were landing, Ellen said, “I guess I should tell you about Dr. Diller … Van and me.”

  I waited.

  “Well, he seems to be, sort of, in love with me.”

  “Oh my God, E.K.,” I said. “And we’re going to spend a week on an island of only an acre with his wife and children?”

  “I guess I should have told you earlier, but there never seemed to be time.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  The passengers were getting up to leave the plane. And there on the tarmac were Dr. and Mrs. Diller and the children.

  Years later, I wrote a story about that week, called “In the Bosom of the Family.” It is a tribute to our friendship that Ellen and I were still speaking at the end of it.

  WE HAD DECIDED, as a forerunner to our experiments in cheap travel in Europe, to hitchhike to New Canaan, where I was planning to visit Ann and Henry. A farm couple gave us our first ride and were not amused when we said we were going to England. They wouldn’t go there themselves.

  “One of our girls wasn’t good enough for one of their boys.”

  It took me a moment to realize they were referring not to a member of their family but to the Duchess of Windsor.

  Out on the big road, we were picked up by a couple who wanted us to stop the night with them in Boston at their daughter’s and drive with them to New York the next day. But their parental concern for our safety couldn’t overcome our sense of adventure.

  Our third ride was a lone man who asked us to get into the back seat. He was a pilot unable to drive less than ninety miles an hour,
and he took us to the turnoff to New Canaan. A local resident delivered us to Ann and Henry’s door.

  Henry was alone. Ann and the children had not come back from visiting her mother in Chicago.

  Once Ellen had been put on a train into New York, I asked Henry what was wrong. He said he didn’t know. Maybe I should phone her. I did, and she said she didn’t think her coming home right then was a good idea. Because of me, I wanted to know. No, she just didn’t feel ready. I wouldn’t ask whether she’d had a fight with Henry. Certainly he seemed as eager as I did to have her back. Between us, we did persuade her to come, but it was two precious days before she got there.

  On the night before she was due home, Henry said, nearly peevishly, “Aren’t you interested in me at all?”

  The idea hadn’t crossed my mind. Henry had been for so long a protective and considerate friend that staying with him while we waited for Ann had seemed uncomplicatedly natural. Only at that moment did Ann’s saying Henry would like to make love with me seem anything more than Ann’s perverse sexual pressure.

  I had no way to refuse him. It seemed to me odd that he would be the first man, but my emotional life had left convention so long ago that I had no measure for anything outside my own perception of things. Since Ann had encouraged just this, I assumed for her it would mean no more than my making a meal for Henry. She would even be pleased at my willingness.