The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  CHAPTER 32

  1924

  Ellen Love walked out of Rockefeller Hall, the cold air jolting her out of the mental haze that had overtaken her during her demanding two-hour English class. Though she had finished just one semester at Vassar, there was something about coming back after a break that made her feel she was now a proper member of the college community. She wasn’t nervously arriving for the first time; she was proudly returning.

  “Ellen Love! There you are!” said a girl with a haircut identical to Ellen’s. As the 1920s had crept in, all the students had had their hair uniformly shorn so that it just grazed their cheeks, never long enough to pull back. “Can you believe there is more snow than when we left? It looks pretty, but it’s a terrible pain to get around in.”

  Mary Elise Watts also hailed from New York City, and in one short semester had established herself as a leader of the freshman class.

  “I know!” said Ellen, shaking the snow out of her hair. She had been standing outside the building daydreaming and hadn’t realized the amount that was accumulating on her head. “It could be knee-high by this evening, that’s what the newspaper said. I wore the wrong shoes, and now my feet will be soaked on the walk back to Joss. I didn’t have time to change them before Macurdy’s Greek class. You know what an axe she is about tardiness.”

  “Don’t I?” said Mary Elise. “Well, good luck to you and those darling, if inappropriate, shoes. I must run,” she declared, sending Ellen an air kiss. “I have to put some time in at the libe or I’ll fail everything and have no chance of a Phi Beta Kappa key.”

  “Are you thinking of that already?” asked Ellen, laughing. “It’s freshman year!”

  “I know, it’s ridiculous, but if I don’t snap up that key, my mother will—” She made a cutting motion at her neck with her index finger. “I’ll come by your room this afternoon!” she called back as she ran off.

  Ellen watched Mary Elise hurry into Thompson Memorial Library, the beautiful Gothic building made of Germantown stone and named for Frederick Ferris Thompson, a former college trustee. Students past had known him, from his many appearances on campus, as Uncle Fred until his death in 1899. Whenever Ellen was in the library, she tried to find a seat under the stained-glass Cornaro Window, which depicted a young Venetian woman being awarded her doctoral degree, the first woman to earn the honor. Ellen had written to her mother her first week at school from her favorite spot under the large window and said she couldn’t imagine college without such a building to study in.

  But books were not on Ellen’s mind after she had run across the quad to escape the cold in her building, Josselyn Hall, one of the campus’s newer dormitories. As soon as she was inside the foyer, she smoothed her bangs, which were damp from the snow. Her dark hair was fashionably bobbed but was so straight she didn’t bother to give it a wave, as many of her friends did. She had tried first semester, but it fell every time, like attempting to crimp cooked spaghetti.

  Once in her room, she kicked off her shoes and threw her coat on the floor, placing her beloved Irving Berlin record on the phonograph. She hummed the words to “What’ll I Do?” as she pulled on a heavy-knit cardigan, changed her wet tights, and reached for a cigarette. She let the ashes drop in a small glass tray next to her picture of her family, which stood in a silver frame on her desk. As she was about to move the phonograph needle to hear the song again, there was a knock on the door, and an older woman, with yet another identical haircut, stuck her head inside.

  “Ellen, there is a telephone call for you downstairs. It’s your mother. Would you like me to take a message or can you come take the call?”

  “I’ll come down, Mrs. Morris. Thank you,” said Ellen, putting out her cigarette. The woman shut the door, and Ellen pulled her brown saddle shoes on and ran downstairs to the dormitory telephone. There were plans to expand the phone lines, but in 1924, only a few were available to the students. The messengers, and sometimes the dormitory warden, as Mrs. Florence Morris was for Josselyn Hall, alerted the girls when they had a call. Ellen smiled at Mrs. Morris when she reached the phone; unlike many of the girls, she was fond of her building’s warden. Mrs. Morris was a member of the class of 1898 and had overlapped with her mother for three years. She loved reminiscing about the school before the turn of the century and had only admiring things to tell Ellen about Anita Love in her college days.

  Ellen sat down in the comfortable armchair by the telephone and pressed the receiver to her ear. “Mother? Mother, is that you?” she said, addressing a symphony of static. “The connection is terrible,” she shouted.

  “Yes! It’s me. Can you hear me?” Anita Hemmings Love’s middle-aged voice came over the wire from her comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City.

  “Now I can hear you fine,” said Ellen, kicking her feet onto the nearby desk. Mrs. Morris gave her a look, and Ellen brought them down apologetically, crossing her calves in their gray wool tights. “I’m happy you called. Just checking in to see if I made it to school all right?”

  “Yes,” said Anita. “That, and it’s just nice to hear my eldest child’s voice.” Anita often called Ellen her eldest, though she was really the Loves’ second child. Ellen had a sister born a year before her in 1904, but baby Dorothy had died from diphtheria on Valentine’s Day in 1907. Ellen had one younger sister, Barbara, and a rebellious younger brother, Andrew Jackson Love Jr., named after their father.

  “Was the train ride bumpy?” asked Anita. “I worried with all the snow and wind. It’s still warbling through the buildings here.”

  “It was just fine. I quite liked the excitement, and the Hudson looks so pretty when it’s frozen,” Ellen replied, wishing she had brought her cigarettes down. “But I’m happy to be back on campus, and the semester is starting off well. Oh! And Evelyn Colgate, who I took the train up with, said that my new coat with the fur trim was just perfect for school. Snappy, even. What else?” said Ellen, fiddling with her tights, which had twisted. “Well, classes have started, and I’m taking Greek with Macurdy just like I promised. I am doing very well so far, though we are only two days into the semester. And I absolutely love my English class. So many complain about the expository writing requirement freshman year, but it’s by far my favorite class, Mother. As our text proclaims, we must learn to convince our audience that they have come to a certain conclusion themselves, even if we are the ones convincing them. Don’t you love that notion?”

  “I wish your generation would avoid words like snappy,” said Anita, after she had applauded Ellen for her interest in her required course. “But I suppose we had our fair share of strange vocabulary when I was up there.”

  “Oh, Mother, I almost forgot,” said Ellen excitedly. “Take a guess who was on my train up the Hudson?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine many excited Vassar women who use dreadful words like snappy,” said Anita drily.

  “Well, yes, but we were joined for a moment by Mr. Rhinelander! Marchmont Rhinelander. He was making the journey to Hyde Park to call on Mr. Frederick Vanderbilt. He’ll be staying in that magical house on the bank of the river. Can you imagine ever going inside such a grand house? Mr. Rhinelander told me and Evelyn that there is an Italian garden with two thousand rosebushes dotted all around. That must smell heavenly, especially with the breeze up the river. He promised he would call on us to tell me about it over Easter.”

  “What a wonderful coincidence,” said Anita. “He’s always been such an elegant man.”

  “I agree,” said Ellen, who had been acquainted with Marchmont all her life. “And how’s Dad? And everyone?”

  “Your father is well,” said Anita. “There’s an outbreak of measles in a building on One Hundred and Tenth Street, so that is keeping him plenty busy. And he’s doing a fine job harping at your brother to listen to music less and spend more time on his studies and devotion. Don’t write and tell Andy, please, but we are considering sending him to Mount Hermon, the brother school to Northfield, where I wen
t.”

  “Yes, I know it, Mother, you talk of it often enough,” said Ellen, who had attended high school in the city. “But why? Andrew loves New York. Don’t send him away.” She was protective of her younger brother, who had never known anywhere but New York City. “He’s not even thirteen.”

  “He’s not like you, Ellen,” said Anita. “And it wouldn’t be for this year. You’ve always been studious. You did wonderfully at Horace Mann, but he is not excelling in school. Music is taking over his life and greatly interrupting his academics. He listens to so much jazz I’m waiting for a trumpet to fall out of his ear.”

  “Music won’t rot his brain, Mother. Just give him time to grow up.”

  “I’m trying,” said Anita. “But you know your father, he expects perfect grades every year, and no growing pains allowed.”

  “Daddy can’t have everything he wants all the time,” said Ellen, waving to two of her friends as they came into the dorm, snow slowly melting into the shoulders of their coats.

  “No, not all the time,” said Anita. “Though he is thinking of changing offices. There is a bigger suite available and he might move up a few floors. There is a beautiful view of the south end of the park from the higher levels.”

  “As long as he doesn’t change buildings,” said Ellen, half-listening. “East Fifty-Fourth Street is so lovely, and all the wealthiest people live on the Upper East Side.”

  “I didn’t say he was going anywhere but up,” Anita replied, sure her daughter was thinking about many other things besides her parents.

  “Come outside, Ellen!” said Helen Tweedy, who was hovering around her friend, pulling on the phone cord. She was one of the most attractive girls on campus, and always managed to keep a perfect wave in her blond hair. “There’s a snowball fight about to start, and we need your arms.”

  “I must go, Mother,” said Ellen, signaling to her friends to wait for her. “There is a snowball fight in the quad, and my muscles are in high demand.”

  “And you won’t even get in trouble for it,” said Anita, cheerfully. “In my day, we would have been in the lady principal’s office and given a lecture on female gentility.”

  “Lucky for me they’ve done away with that position,” said Ellen, as her friends waved at her to hang up the receiver.

  “I’m so glad you’re there,” said Anita before Ellen hung up. “I’m looking forward to visiting you on Class Day in June. I know that plenty of ’97s plan to attend. And I will talk your ear off about all the nice times I had, even if we did have a lady principal.”

  “I’ll be glad to hear it, Mother,” said Ellen. “Thank you for calling. I love you, and send kisses to Daddy, too. And Barbara and Andy!” She hung up and ran outside with her friends, not caring that she was about to run through a foot and a half of snow in saddle shoes.

  “Shoulder-to-shoulder, march we forth, twenty-sev’n!” yelled Helen, making a snowball and lobbing it at a group of fellow freshmen walking to Thompson Library.

  “Don’t you dare attack us from behind, you traitors!” shouted one of the girls. Ellen and her friends quickly cornered them against the back side of Rockefeller Hall and dove into the accumulating powder to make snowballs as fast as their cold hands would let them. The other group, knowing they were unprepared, screamed to a trio of sophomores coming out of the library who quickly ran to their aid.

  “Now we’re outnumbered!” yelled Ellen as she wiped the snow off her face. Her right cheek was numb from a fastball hurled by her hallmate, but she was still grinning.

  “Come,” said Helen, packing snowballs with machinelike precision and handing them to a girl from Wyoming who was an excellent shot. “That sophomore there is frightfully rich and can barely use her delicate hands,” she said, pointing at an elegantly dressed girl. “And the other one is constantly eating marshmallows. We can take them.”

  “Perhaps,” said Ellen, grabbing snowballs from Helen’s pile and lobbing them at the girls. After thirty minutes, half the students were lying in the snow on their backs, trying to catch their breath and calling for a truce as loudly as they could.

  “Here, Ellen, your own personal snowfall,” said Ellen’s friend Virginia Heard. She stood above Ellen and sprinkled snow onto her face like powdered sugar.

  “Stop it, you pest!” said Ellen, laughing until she started coughing from the cold air. She pulled her friend onto the ground by her ankles.

  “You two are going to be soaked,” said Helen, standing above them. “And we have the Granddaughters meeting in half an hour. Stop wrestling and come back to Joss with me. I have to change out of these wet rags and curl my hair again. Why have a bob if it ends up looking like a dead octopus attached to your head after a little fun?”

  Helen’s mother, Grace Landfield Tweedy, had graduated in 1897 like Ellen’s mother, and Virginia’s mother had been class of 1901. Ellen and Helen often talked about how they would walk for their diplomas exactly thirty years after their mothers did and already had grand plans to carry the ribbons from their mothers’ graduation dresses on their day.

  “Did you hear me?” said Helen, leaning down and wiping the snow off Ellen and Virginia’s faces. “Granddaughters! We have to go now or we will all be sitting on the floor in the parlor, and I refuse to do such a thing in winter. The floor is too cold.”

  There were eighty-eight members of the Granddaughters club, fifteen in the class of ’27 alone, so many that they had to meet by class rather than as a group. Ellen loved the way she felt when she walked in to the parlor to discuss Vassar history and alumnae with her branch of the elite club. She felt part of a family tradition, rather than just another freshman.

  On the agenda for the meeting was a luncheon for the granddaughters and their mothers scheduled for the Friday before Class Day the following spring. It was a ways off, but as the main event of the year for the Granddaughters club, preparations lasted for months.

  “I’ll have to tell my mother the date now,” Helen whispered to Ellen, “or she won’t be able to make the luncheon. You would think Vassar was always her first priority, but she’s been the head math teacher at our school in Binghamton since 1898 and her allegiance, I’m afraid, lies there. And you know how long those high schools stay in session.”

  “Mathematics? Isn’t that your sore subject?” asked Ellen.

  “Don’t remind me. I have to get my grade up or my mother will force a tutor on me. Some whiskered woman who hits me with a ruler,” she said, laughing.

  “Well, I think it’s wonderful that your mother worked through your childhood,” said Ellen, making sure to whisper. “My own worked at the Boston Public Library as a foreign language cataloguer until marriage, but then it was goodbye employment, hello babies and housekeeping. You know how most of that generation was. Even the intelligent ones. All that schooling just to tend house. A real pity.”

  “Not like us,” said Helen, closing her mouth quickly when the club president caught her eye.

  No, not like us, thought Ellen, who had been considering a career on the stage since she was in high school. Her parents constantly urged her to pursue medicine like her father, to do something academic with her life, and she worked hard in school to appease them, but even at eighteen, she knew where she would be after graduation, and it wasn’t an operating room, or tending house and raising children.

  “At least your mother made her way down to New York City after graduation,” Helen whispered when she was sure the club president was no longer watching them. “We have to move there after school. I am not going back upstate.”

  “Don’t we, though,” said Ellen. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I was born in Tennessee, but we moved up when I was little. And then we darted around New York a bit, from Broadway to One Hundred and Forty-Second Street and now on Riverside Drive. That’s where I like it best. With a view of the water and a city all around.”

  “You lived in Tennessee?” said Helen, surprised.

  “Briefly. For my father’s m
edical practice. But they weren’t happy there. My mother does not like the South but she adores New York. She loves the opera and the museums and lately, with me, the Broadway revues, though she pretends not to. She spends a great deal of time being supportive of my father’s office since he works independently, but she was always very good at making the city come alive for me, for all of us.”

  “After graduation,” said Helen, “it will be your turn. You can make it come alive for me.”

  “I promise,” said Ellen, thinking that while she knew she wanted to go back to New York eventually, she hoped her four years at Vassar would go by very slowly.

  When the meeting had ended, the girls left the parlor together, ready to part ways for their late afternoon classes.

  “I have zoology,” said Helen, the leather soles on her new boots tapping their way through Main Building.

  “Come to my room after class. I have the greatest record to listen to, ‘Riverboat Shuffle.’ My brother gave it to me over winter break. You’ll go crazy over it,” said Ellen.

  “I don’t think I can like anything better than ‘King Porter Stomp,’ ” said Helen, whistling the song.

  “If you keep whistling that tune, I swear I will tape you to your desk chair and never set you free,” said Ellen, putting her hands over her ears and holding her breath.

  “Good, then I won’t have to go to zoology,” said Helen, twirling into a wall.

  Giddy from the start of the new semester, the two girls made their way to the second floor, where many of the classrooms and administrative offices were located, and passed President MacCracken’s office on their way to the back stairs. Both looked inside as they walked by and paused when they saw the dean of the college, C. Mildred Thompson, sitting at the desk in the president’s reception room.

  “I live in fear of being called in by Prexy or Thompson,” said Helen, after they had smiled and walked by the dean. She was a much-admired woman who had marched in the second suffrage parade in 1911 and was now actively involved in Democratic politics, helped by her close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Despite that, the students hoped never to have to meet her alone.