She joined the American Association of University Women and attended several meetings, discussions of New Deal economy or isolationism on campuses. The others seemed to know all about it, the older members and all those compact, doll-chinned young marrieds with husbands in business and children in kindergarten. They were hellishly efficient. She sat, for the most part, tongue-tied among them, with the sense now and then of dizzying alienation. What had all this to do with Tennyson and Eliot and Blake, and the death of kings and the rite of spring and Dancing in the Chequer’d shade? Later she would begin to see a connection between the two. But for the moment she neither saw nor too much cared. And she crept away quietly, guilty but relieved.
She was too recently emerged from the dim light of libraries, where Agincourt was louder than Dunkirk and fallen Lucifer more real than Haile Selassie. In colleges one lived considerably in the past—that being the means of education—to study as much as possible of what went before. Though she had picked up a thing or two from the past, she failed in the next step—to relate it to the present. Except as it concerned her immediately, she gave little thought to the issues of the moment. They seemed to come at her out of left field, and had little relevance to her daily life for all she could see.
Moreover, she was weary of serious pursuits, having worked steadily and yearlong, winter and summer, and having finished her thesis only weeks before her job began. And it seemed there would be no respite now. She had to work hard—she was teaching four classes—and she was willing. Nonetheless, secretly, she wanted to dance and flirt and drink beer, as she had done so little in her student days. In spite of her tomboisterous childhood, she had been a shy, studious adolescent, awkward around boys, and had never quite outgrown it. But she’d had a few tastes of pure frivolity and looked with longing at the country club, where they had an orchestra and danced and played golf and gave dinner parties.
The closest she came to that crowd was a ballet class to which they sent their daughters. She was small, and among the thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds did not stand out too glaringly. And even that class, taught by a white-haired mistress of impeccable character, she’d had to give up. It was made known to her by discreet suggestion that such a pursuit was inappropriate for a teacher; ballet was for children. After twelve weeks in the intermediate class, she regretfully bowed out. Early on, she had given up the idea of joining the Little Theatre. A remark by a colleague let her know that the Little Theatre was considered a “fast crowd” and was frowned upon.
For diversion she turned to the poets. And she scribbled lines of her own. Haltingly, feeling her way along, she began to set her lines down in a notebook. Sometimes they became paragraphs, whole passages, which might be, she thought, the germ of a novel. She worked away at it, sometimes for nights in a row, and at intervals, the words came in a rush—images, ideas, flowing from the tip of her pencil, always to her astonishment.
Then she would walk out in the dark, announcing soundlessly to each house, Tonight I have written this line—this page—I have written this! Afterward, sobered, she’d go upstairs, wash her dishes, eat an apple, press a dress, brush her teeth, turn out the light, stand at the window awhile. Go to bed.
Four
She lived in a great brick house on the western side of the town, well away from the stockyards and the railroad yards and the factories producing shoes, sewer pipe, and smokeless powder. Those stood to the east and north. Farther to the north was the section known as Jackroad, which took its name from the old road that used to lead to the mines. There, ore was roasted, reduced, and turned into zinc. Zinc and lead, drawn out of sphalerite and galena, out of the chert and limestone that underlay the region. For half a century, mine tailings, heaped gangue, had risen into massive cones.
But all this was on the far north end of Center Street, which ran south from there into the business district and beyond into open country, headed for Arkansas. The older residential section lay to the west. Here, before the turn of the century, the very rich had built their mansions. Over time, lots had been divided and lesser homes sprouted among them, but a few of the mansions stood as they always had, commanding whole blocks. They were massive structures of brick and native stone, set on deep lawns. Retaining walls of gray limestone supported black iron fences that ran the length of the front yards. Mermaids thirsted in fountains long gone dry.
Far back on the lawns stood the carriage houses crowned by cupolas, in turn sporting weathervanes that had lost all sense of the weather, or martin houses that might or might not be tenanted come summer. Gabled, slate-roofed, mullion-windowed; housing a Buick, a Pierce-Arrow up on blocks; their attics full of bound journals; wicker rockers; half rolls of flocked wallpaper; croquet balls and rusted wickets; blue glass jars, half-gallon size; dead dolls, spiders, and the smell of camphorate. Below, the wide doors opened onto broad graveled alleys, grass-grown down the middle. By day, no refuse disgraced the premises. Trash bins, tightly covered, and such articles as a broken chair or cast-off picture frames appeared discreetly only at dusk on the eve of trash collection. These genteel corridors ran west to east for seven blocks, lined on either side by a tangle of vegetation: snowball bushes and honeysuckle, small mulberry trees, japonica, rose of Sharon, and thickets of forsythia gone wild. Bridal wreath, unpruned, drooped across the fences. In their season the scent of viburnam and old lilacs lay on the air.
One of the mansions was a museum now, seldom open. In others, the lingering remnants of old families hung on, their presence known by the raising or lowering of a window blind, or a light in an upper room. Some said an old crazy woman lived in one of the houses. A corner house, its original symmetry distorted now by odd rooms and porches added on, had become an apartment house. In this one Miss Liles rented an apartment, tacked onto the existing roof rather like a martin house. She preferred to think of it as a penthouse. To reach it, one turned in from the side street, proceeded a few steps into the alley, and climbed an outside stairway three flights. From the rooftop landing, one entered the apartment through the kitchen and thence into a sitting room with a couch for a bed. A bathroom adjoined the kitchen. A somewhat shabby little place, but it came cheap, and the kitchen had an electric refrigerator.
This was her first apartment. At school she had always lived in a dormitory or a certified rooming house for young women. Mother, who had driven down with Dalton to bring Allen and her belongings, had been dubious when she saw it. “It’s too secluded,” she said, “way up here away from anybody. You’d be a lot better off in a nice rooming house with a landlady.”
“For Pete’s sake, Mother, I don’t need any fussy old landlady poking around. Anyway, we’ve looked at four places today with rooms for rent, and I couldn’t stand any of them. Neither could you.”
“Well, we can just look some more.”
“I like it here. It’s sunny and quiet and roomy. I can spread out all my stuff and work without interruptions.”
“Well, yes,” Mother said. But there were more arguments before she would give in. “Well, all right,” she finally said grudgingly, “if you’re determined. But you behave yourself, up here so private.” She shook her head. “That long, rickety stairway is a mighty peculiar way to get into a place. How’s your brother going to make it up all these steps with your things?”
“I’ll make it.” Dalton appeared on the landing, suitcases in hand.
To Allen the three flights of steps were one of the attractions. Like climbing to the top of a tree or up the ladder to the barn loft. Much better than being earthbound. From the landing at the top of the stairs you could look over roofs and treetops and see the Presbyterian steeple, two blocks over, pointing the way to heaven. The steeple chimes rang sweetly on the quarter hour. She sat there often during the fall, under yellow moons in foggy Prufrock nights, far away in her thoughts.
When we are young, particularly when young and lonely, we imagine a future and dwell in it, as later we dwell in a past we also have imagined. So, on those fall nights,
she dreamed herself forward into Italy as she knew it from the English poets, and the Paris of Hemingway, and the New York City of Katherine Anne Porter. It was a rich improbable future, made up of other people’s pasts. Such fantasies were her entertainment, the pageants of a thoroughgoing romantic, and she invented within them, projected and plotted course, until the steeple clock, striking the late hour, brought her back to reality and the grudging acknowledgment that, far as she was from Paris or New York, she had a job and she could damn well be contented. As Mother said, she was lucky.
And after a time, as she got into the work, she had to admit that she almost liked it. Though her colleagues were a colorless lot, they were pleasant. Faculty meetings were tiresome and, as far as she could see, useless. But college classes were no harder to teach than high school and a lot more fun. It was very gratifying to teach Shakespeare in some depth and be able to dwell at length on the English poets, Romantic and Victorian, with a little modern thrown in now and then if she took a notion. She even enjoyed grammar and composition classes. And she liked the students. They were bright kids, most of them, happy and alert and funny. All of them were polite. There were a few who were older, working men in their twenties, enrolled late in college. Like the others, they came regularly to class and sat, attentive, faces tilted respectfully. Fertile, orderly rows, and hers to hoe. Here and there was a blank face and inevitably a squirmer, and two or three who were bored within an inch of their lives. Still, they made a pretense of learning and that made it easier for her.
And there was something else: she recognized it slowly as a sense of power. She saw that this had infected all the teachers, some more than others. Older than their students, with more learning, and with vested authority, they assumed more superiority than perhaps they possessed. A treacherous condition. It could lead to complacency, as indeed it had in some of them. Still, the sense of power, dangerous though it might be, was a heady thing, and she had to admit that she found it extremely pleasant.
It gave her an assurance she had not felt before, a sense of herself, and the courage to exert that self (within the bounds of propriety) and depart a little from the norm. No one seemed to mind that she wore to school what she had worn as a student—sweaters and saddle oxfords, like the rest of the girls; nor that now and then between classes she ran up the street to the hamburger shop where the kids hung out and had a Coke. Dr. Ansel went there for Cokes and candy bars, so it had to be all right for her to go too.
Dr. Ansel, being a Ph.D., was chairman of the English department (which consisted of him, her, and an unobtrusive little man named Hudgin). His dissertation had been titled “The Teaching of English in the Missouri Public Schools: 1895–1925.”
“I only took this job because of Mother,” he explained to her one day. “I could have got in over at Springfield if I’d tried. But Mother doesn’t want to live in a big city. She doesn’t even like it here very much. But I can’t teach and stay on the farm. We’ve got a place down south of Pierce City, you know? Quarter section? I go down there to see about it every few months, take Mother. She gets awful homesick.”
“Why doesn’t she stay down there?”
“I tried to get her to, but she won’t. She thinks she has to be here to look after me.” He said drolly, “She thinks I’m going to be the dean someday.”
“Here?”
“After Dean Frawley goes.”
“Do you want to be the dean?”
“Umm,” he said with a nonchalant glance out the window, “I suppose I have to expect something like that. Frawley’s not getting any younger. They’ll have to find somebody. And as long as you’re right here and qualified… After all, if you’re a man you can’t stand still in the academic profession.”
“How about women?” she said.
“It’s not so important for them. Women get married.”
“So do men.”
“Yes, but men can go on teaching.”
“So can women.”
“They can now, but school boards aren’t too keen on it. Most women don’t want to anyway. Women want to get married and have kids.”
“Not all of them do.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Not necessarily. Not for a long time anyway.”
“How long do you plan to teach?”
“Three or four years, maybe five, till I’m out of debt.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“I’m going to go to New York and I’m going to be a writer.”
“You sound mighty sure of yourself.”
“I’m not a bit sure. But that’s what I want to do. I’ll probably have to start as a typist at some magazine or publisher and work my way up. But I’m going to be a writer.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to do some writing, myself. Matter of fact, I’m working on a paper right now—‘Solecism and Correct Usage: Utilization of Regional Speech as an Aid in the Teaching of Grammar.’ Sort of an unusual approach, I think. Ought to be just the ticket for one of the scholastic journals.”
Dr. Ansel was an indefatigable researcher. In his spare time he liked to dig through the files of the local historical society and the county courthouse. Not all his biographical research involved dead history. He was good, as well, at the living. He seemed to know all about every teacher on the staff. Mr. Pickering, for instance, had tried to get into the army air corps and failed. Miss Gladys Peabody had once been married to a gentleman who turned out to have two or three other wives. And so on. You couldn’t believe half what he said. On the other hand, he always seemed to have documentation. And he wasn’t mean about it; he was just interested.
Dr. Ansel had a small blotch, roughly the shape of Iowa, over his left eyebrow, which tended to turn red whenever he got into an argument. It was an exercise to keep her eyes off it.
He could be tiresome and he was a little smug, being the only one among them with a Ph.D. But he wasn’t entirely awful, and they had a few interests in common. Which was more than she could say for Mr. Pickering, who taught economics and looked indigestive, or Mr. Lord, the chemistry teacher, who had four or five kids and was always trying to flirt with her. Dr. Ansel was tolerable. He wasn’t handsome, but not altogether ugly either. He was middlin’. Medium-tall, almost good-looking, fairly bright. Middlin’. That’s the best she could give him. Well, he wasn’t fat. And he had good posture.
Sometimes after school they had long discussions about Orson Welles or the teaching of Shakespeare or what the novel was coming to. It amused him that she had read Ulysses and looked into Finnegans Wake (loaned by one of her professors), while Ansel had scarcely heard of them. It riled him so. He always came back at her with the American Frontier or the novels of Harold Bell Wright. According to Ansel, The Shepherd of the Hills embodied the key ideas of the entire Western movement.
“It’s okay,” she said, “for the kind of thing it is. Romance and sanctimony.” She added, just for the hell of it, “When he starts preaching and gets sentimental, that’s when I run for Faulkner!”
That always got him up on his hind legs. He hated Faulkner. And they had a fine invigorating argument. At least you could argue with Dr. Ansel and talk about something besides which restaurant served the best lunch for the money.
Now and then they branched out onto Rooseveltian policy (Ansel was against it) or Hitler and how things were going in Europe. But Allen preferred their literary conversations.
One day in October, classes were cancelled, long tables set up in the gym, and the faculty, charged by the Selective Service Board, registered students, those over twenty-one, for the draft. Allen had quite enjoyed it. It was like a holiday, overlaid with a not-unpleasant sense of the gravity of it all, which none of them was quite convinced of.
“Roosevelt has said that no American boy will be sent overseas to fight.”
“And I think he’ll stick with it, unless he wants to lose votes.”
Over a sandwich at noon, she and Ansel had had a solemn discussion of the
implications. He leaned toward the isolationists.
“Look at it this way: we made the Declaration of Independence. We are absolved of any allegiance to the British Empire.”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said and tried to defend the protection of British shipping.
But this was self-conscious talk and neither of them was on sure ground. In general, the Federal Theater and Henry V were as close as they came to politics and war.
On occasion they argued the merits of the Federal Writers Project and the effect of the Depression on the arts. At the time of the crash, she had not yet turned fifteen. Dr. Ansel, though he didn’t come right out and say so, must have been all of twenty-five. He remembered the early Depression better than she did. But both of them bore the stamp of those years—a seriousness of purpose, the drive to achieve, born of necessity. They lived scared, knowing by observation the perils of joblessness. With much in common, the two of them got along well enough.
It was nearing Christmas when Ansel came to her room one afternoon with his feathers all ruffled.
“So!” he said, “Miss Liles is going to conduct a seminar next semester!”
“Not a seminar,” she said, “just a discussion group, reading and discussing. But I suppose,” she added (the term had a fine ring to it), “you could call it a seminar.”
Clair De Lune Page 3
