Part 3 (2/2)

At the beginning of the semester, on late sunny afternoons, some of us ran up the hill to the Pacific School of Religion to play a children's game, statue, on the lawn. Other times, after dinner, when we had written ”Libe” in the sign-out book, we went off to the library singing, ”Ta-root.i.ty-too, ta-root.i.ty-toot!

We are the girls from the inst.i.tute.

We do not smoke, we do not chew, We do not do what the other girls do!”

When the library closed at ten o'clock, we returned to Stebbins, most of us to continue studying.

Sat.u.r.day afternoons the atmosphere of Stebbins changed. We washed our hair, and sometimes I cut Miriam's, which was so curly mistakes didn't show. We exchanged shoe polish and pressed our dresses in the bas.e.m.e.nt laundry. Many of us chose the time before dinner to answer letters.

Next to Mother, my most loyal correspondent was Claudine, who wrote cheerful letters from the cold mill town fourteen miles from Mount Hood. Sometimes she enclosed a dollar bill in her letter. A whole dollar to spend any way I pleased! I bought silk stockings for special occasions, stockings without runs stopped by dabs of nail polish. Once I used Claudine's dollar to take a ferry trip to San Francisco, where I enjoyed a quiet, solitary lunch in a tearoom. Quiet and solitude were as precious as money when I lived at Stebbins.

With letters written, hair washed, and dresses pressed, we were ready for fun. Miriam had a number of male friends. Occasionally I went out with one, and once we double-dated, a memorable evening because one of the men had a car. We drove across the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, something every student longed to do, for this bridge that we had seen being built was now open for traffic. The sodium-vapor lights shone down upon us, turning our complexions green and our dresses hideous colors, the sort of colors children mix from their paint boxes. Looking like specters did not dim our excitement at riding eight miles over water. In San Francisco we danced, without much enthusiasm as I recall, in the Colonial Room at the St. Francis Hotel, or ”Frantic,” as students usually called it. After waffles at Tiny's we drove back to Berkeley. I cannot recall a thing about the two men who were our escorts. They could not compare with the excitement of riding across the new bridge, even though the lights made us look like ghouls.

Campus social life centered on dances: club dances, house dances, fraternity and sorority dances. I was taken to one dance in a fraternity house that I found so boring-all that beer drinking-that I simply walked out and went back to Stebbins alone. Largest of all were the biweekly a.s.sembly Dances held in Harmon Gym, admission fifteen cents with a student-body card, dates not necessary. Sometimes Miriam and I went, promising each other we would return to Stebbins together. The orchestras were good, and because Cal had two and a half male students to every female, there was always a stag line of men looking women over as if we were auditioning for the honor of dancing with them, which I suppose we were. I seemed to attract engineering students, all of them looking tired and overworked, some with slide rules (referred to by Stebbins girls as ”sly drools”) in their s.h.i.+rt pockets, which indicated they had dropped in for a breather before going back to their books, belying the campus myth that engineering students entered the Engineering Building and were not seen for four years. All of the engineers were serious, and we had little to talk about as we tried not to tread upon each other's toes. I never once met an engineering student at an a.s.sembly Dance who was cheerful or a good dancer. As they concentrated on their feet, they seemed to have the weight of future bridges and skysc.r.a.pers on their shoulders. Apparently they recover from the oppression of the School of Engineering after graduation. Since college I have met a number of interesting engineers who, although they were serious men, could talk, laugh, and even dance like anyone else.

At one a.s.sembly Dance a tall, thin young man with black hair and blue eyes stepped out of the stag line and asked me to dance. He said his name was Clarence Cleary. ”Cleary?” I asked, never having heard the name. ”How do you spell it?” He spelled it. He was from Sacramento. So were several Stebbins girls whom he knew, which gave us something in common. I hoped he would telephone me, and I was glad I was wearing a becoming pink dress Mother had made with great care and sent to me a few days before, a dress I found touching because Mother disliked sewing and was usually careless in her work.

In the meantime Miriam received a letter from a friend, a physics professor at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, telling her a British physicist in this country on a Commonwealth Fellows.h.i.+p would be at Cal working with Dr. Ernest Lawrence and would call on her. Miriam hoped he would, and sure enough, Wilfrid called in person. He was handsome, very British, and was immediately entranced by Miriam.

Through Wilfrid I met several Commonwealth Fellows whose stipends must have been generous, for they had cars and seemed to have plenty of spending money. Wilfrid's roommate was Campbell, a chemist from Scotland who had once worked in a coal mine. We went as a group to Faculty Club dances, a dinner at the home of a professor, to Harmon Gym to hear George Gershwin play Rhapsody in Blue with the San Francisco Symphony. ”Dreadful,” p.r.o.nounced Wilfrid.

Another time Miriam and I went with Fellows to see the cyclotron housed in a shack on the campus. I remember we had to take off our watches before we approached the invention where atoms were smashed to produce new radioactive species. The cyclotron was the reason Wilfrid was at Cal. All I knew about atoms I had learned in Philosophy 5A from studying Lucretius, an ancient Roman philosopher, who got it all wrong. I kept still and tried to look impressed by the strangely shaped device. If I had understood what the smas.h.i.+ng of atoms would lead to, I would have been genuinely impressed and probably frightened.

Only once did I think of myself as going out on a date with a Fellow, an Oxford graduate and, as I recall, also a physicist. His dancing was as bad as or even worse than that of any undergraduate engineering student, or perhaps the English danced differently. When we were not dancing, I eluded his clutching hands. For some reason the Fellows left the Faculty Club dance early to go to another dance, in the Hotel Oakland, a place that was to play an important part in my life half a dozen years later. The ride to Oakland was harrowing. My date, fresh from England, drove on the left-hand side of the street while I clutched the door in fright. We rode over round metal b.u.t.tons that protected streetcar riders from traffic as they boarded streetcars. Some people had to jump out of his way as we b.u.mpety-b.u.mped past. I was relieved when what I had come to think of as the mad Englishman returned me safely but unnerved to Stebbins. He telephoned the next evening, but I told him I was much too busy to see him. He did not telephone again and probably thought of me as too American to appreciate an Englishman.

Clarence called, and so did other men. One I had met at the Masonic Club, which my parents arranged for me to join so I would ”meet nice people.” His name was Jack, and he was a graduate student in entomology. I went out with him two or three times, but somehow my intuition told me not to trust him, probably because he never asked me more than a day ahead. His explanation was that he was on call for inspecting incoming s.h.i.+ps for foreign insects, an explanation that seemed logical after my bus experience at the California border. Nevertheless, I once said something about his being a bachelor and added, ”But are you a bachelor?”

Jack laughed and said, ”Where do you get such ideas in your pretty little head?” Having a pretty little head struck me as so ridiculous it was funny, but I managed not to laugh. To this day, when I do something stupid, I blame it on my pretty little head.

One night at an a.s.sembly Dance, where I had gone with Miriam, Jack stepped out of the stag line. As we were about to join the throng circulating the gym, a thin, tired-looking older woman interrupted and said to me, ”I think we should know one another. I'm Jack's wife.”

I was too numb with embarra.s.sment and humiliation to say anything. There followed a bit of dialogue etched in my memory forever. Jack's wife said to her husband, ”What do you see in her anyway?” Indignation erased my embarra.s.sment.

He said, ”She's young and fresh and there's a s.h.i.+ne about her.”

His wife snapped, ”Don't worry. Men will take it off!” and stalked away.

Jack turned to me and said, ”Believe me, Beverly, I wasn't making a play for you. Can't we talk this over?”

”No,” I said, and walked away with tears of anger in my eyes.

In this a.s.sortment of social life there was Clarence. He was six years older than I and was putting himself through Cal by working part-time in the Bedding and Linen Department at Breuner's Furniture Store in Oakland. We went to a couple of a.s.sembly Dances and ate bacon-and-tomato sandwiches and drank milk at the Jolly Roger. He was kind, gentle, quiet, and, best of all, single. I made sure of that. By now I was wise enough to go to the lobby of Cal Hall to consult a card file of students filled out when we registered. At the time I had wondered why we had to give our marital status. Now I knew.

Clarence, authentic bachelor, began to telephone me every afternoon at five before he left work, and I began to look forward to his calls. He was the middle of five children, and his mother, a widow, was a nurse in the emergency room of Sacramento Hospital. After junior college, and a series of low-paying jobs, whatever he could find in Depression times, he had returned to school at the California College of Agriculture in Davis, a sixteen-mile hitchhike from Sacramento. Drivers were kind to students. In two years, he was late for cla.s.s only once. His interest was veterinary science, but he felt he should no longer live at home when his mother had younger children to support, so he became a dairy technician because he could earn a certificate in two years. He had worked for a dairy in Palo Alto, an experience that left him critical of ice cream. ”Too much air incorporated into the mixture,” he often commented when we bought ice-cream cones. As the Depression deepened, he had been laid off and decided to return to school. He was studying economics and history.

Men did not make up all of my social life. One of the Stebbins girls stood out. I noticed her the first week of the semester at lunchtime when she bused heavy trays of dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. She was small, attractive, and wearing a becoming red-and-white-checked dress obviously made from a tablecloth, which suggested she was a girl of originality, initiative, and independence. Her name was Jane Chourre, and we soon became friends, lifelong friends, as it turned out. Jane was calmer and better organized than I and aspired to become a teacher. ”Teaching is an honorable profession,” she often said. ”A teacher has a respected place in the community.”

English was her major, and we shared several of the same cla.s.ses. She often went home weekends and returned with begonias in vibrant colors, yellow, red, orange, and apricot, which her father grew as a hobby. If she was too busy to go home, her mother sometimes mailed her begonias, with each stem carefully secured in a balloon of water. Fresh flowers meant a lot at Stebbins. Mrs. Chourre understood this.

Jane invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with her in Mill Valley. Jane's parents were an unusual couple for those days, for Mrs. Chourre was both older and taller than her husband. Their children-Jane's sister, Marianne, and her brothers, Bud and d.i.c.k-were close in age because, as Mrs. Chourre put it matter-of-factly, ”We wanted four children, and because I was older, we had to have them close together.” She had been a home economics teacher and was always serene in her role as homemaker and mother. Mr. Chourre liked teaching in the print shop of Tamalpais High School. They were a happy couple. Their home was unpretentious and immaculate. Windows shone, curtains were crisp, chairs were comfortable, but there was no particular color scheme. Mrs. Chourre thought women who went in for ”interior decoration” superficial and their families probably uncomfortable. A house should be comfortable for the people who lived in it. Even d.i.c.k's dog, Chuck, had his own ottoman in the living room. At the Chourres' even the dog was comfortable. I thought sadly of Mother closing the blinds so our furniture would not fade and not allowing me to sit on the bed because I might wrinkle the spread and break down the edge of the mattress. Jane and Marianne shared an L-shaped bedroom furnished with two cots and a dressing table made of orange crates. They sat on their cots anytime they felt like it.

And the food! After the quant.i.ty cooking at Stebbins, every meal was a treat, for Mrs. Chourre was an exquisite cook whose kitchen habits fascinated me. As she cooked, she kept a pan of soapy water in the sink. As soon as she used a utensil, she washed it. When Thanksgiving dinner for twelve was on the table, there wasn't one dirty dish in the kitchen.

The Chourres were a family who found pleasure in small things: the begonias Mr. Chourre grew in a lath-house, the richness of their compost heap, a game of Scrabble, a ca.s.serole dish they called ”Smells to Heaven.” Jane was making an afghan out of squares of bright sc.r.a.ps of yarn woven on a small loom. Her whole family helped out. Mr. Chourre wove a yellow square on which Jane embroidered POP in turquoise yarn. It seemed to me that everything the Chourres did had a touch of originality about it. Mrs. Chourre kept on the mantelpiece a small box of misspellings of the family name that she clipped from envelopes that came to the house. One of the misspellings was ”Chowsie.” Jane and I often referred to her family as the Chowsies.

After Thanksgiving, Clarence began to meet me at the library in the evening and to walk me back to Stebbins. Women were warned against walking alone on the campus at night. Once we went by way of the Greek Theater, where we ran out on the stage and pretended to lead a yell at a football rally: ”Oski wow-wow!.

Iskey! Wee-wee!.

Holy-Mucky-Eye!.

Holy-Berkeley-Eye!.

California!

Wow!”

We were startled when applause came out of the dark.

Back at Stebbins, we lingered just long enough on the steps so no one could accuse us of lingering. Clarence walked a lot that year because he then walked back across the campus to his boardinghouse, a Victorian house run by a woman the men called Skipper, where he shared a room with a premed student, Ken. Many years later their room was immortalized in the film The Graduate, when it became Dustin Hoffman's college room.

Not that I saw much of that room. Women were strictly forbidden in men's rooms, and vice versa. I was there only once, when Clarence had a bad case of flu and did not go to Cowell Hospital because the staff might keep him too long, and he would lose his job. Ken telephoned me and said Clarence would like to see me. Risking my reputation, I went. Chaperoned by Ken, but feeling guilty, I stood in the doorway to avoid germs and talked to a very pale, bedridden Clarence, who looked even thinner than usual. After a few minutes, I hurried back across the campus, half expecting the dean to pop out from behind a bush.

Mother would have been horrified. She had cautioned me never, never to go to a man's room, and she was already suspicious of Clarence, whom I frequently mentioned in letters because I knew Mother was intensely interested in my social life, far more than in my studies. Once she asked if Clarence had an Irish grandfather. This seemed an odd question. I was too naive to see what Mother was getting at, so I asked Clarence about his ancestor. Yes, he had had an Irish grandfather but had never seen him. Well! This must mean Clarence was a Catholic, Mother wrote, and she told me I would be wise to drop him at once.

Mother's judgment seemed questionable to me. Yes, Clarence was a Catholic. What difference did it make? We enjoyed each other's company, that was all. Nothing serious, I a.s.sured Mother. I planned to finish college, go to library school, and work for at least a year before I married anyone. That was what she advised, and for once we agreed.

This did not satisfy Mother. Clarence and I might get serious, and that would never do. No one on either side of my family had ever married a Catholic. I mentioned Clarence less often in my letters but continued to see him. When spring came, we went for long Sunday afternoon walks in the Berkeley Hills, where acacia bloomed, eucalyptus trees gave off their pungent fragrance, and through the trees we caught glimpses of the bay sparkling in the sun and dotted with sailboats. Gradually I saw less of other men and more of Clarence.

My Intellectual Life.

Living at Stebbins Hall and dating were educational, but there was more to life at Cal. Much, much more. That first week of cla.s.ses I started off with a light heart, eager antic.i.p.ation, and a new binder filled with pale green paper, which was supposed to be easy on the eyes. The Campanile measured our days and lightened our steps. I was always amused when it played ”Mighty Lak' a Rose,” the bells bonging out, ”Sweetest little fellow...”

It was a week of surprises, beginning with cla.s.s size. Except for a small cla.s.s in German, which I was taking because it was required for library school, and English 117J, Shakespeare for English majors, which was given in sections limited to forty students, cla.s.ses seemed enormous after the small cla.s.ses at Chaffey. English 125C, The Novel, had several hundred students, and so did Psychology 170, Developmental Psychology. Philosophy 5A filled what was called Wheeler Aud, which must have held almost a thousand students.

Professors began to lecture, and, with fountain pen, I began to take notes, a new experience for me, although a high school English teacher had warned her cla.s.s, ”When you go to college you will have to take notes,” and for half an hour had read while her cla.s.s tried to distill the essence of her words. Essence-distilling was more difficult at Cal. I thought of the knitting we had done in cla.s.s at Chaffey. Why hadn't we been taking notes?

Students were as impersonal as any attending a lecture in a civic auditorium, with one exception. Because I looked like someone who could take good notes, attractive men would sometimes sit beside me and strike up a conversation, not because they were interested in me, I soon discovered, but because they wanted to borrow my notes, which I refused to lend, no matter how charming the borrower might be. I suspected good-looking note-borrowers were so unscrupulous they might not bother to return my notes.

Miriam, who was majoring in economics, and worked out an unusual study schedule, or rather, she worked it out and I went along with it because it suited us. At eight o'clock every evening, Miriam drank a large gla.s.s of water so she would have to get up at four in the morning. She then slept soundly. When I came in from the library, I was careful not to wake her while I studied for an hour or so at my desk before I went to bed. Sometimes I would wake up early, usually when the steam radiator began to clank, and see Miriam studying in the circle of light from her gooseneck lamp. She was wearing a warm bathrobe, but her feet in thin leather travel slippers were blue with cold. Although she may have felt cold feet helped her stay awake, I wished I could afford to buy her a pair of warm, woolly slippers. If she saw that I was awake, she often said, ”Why am I studying this stuff?” which meant she was working on statistics. If she was not at her desk, she was in the bathroom whispering her Latin vocabulary. She could be sure of an A in Latin, which made her scholars.h.i.+p more secure.

<script>