Part 4 (1/2)

Students' worries over grades still puzzled me. Except for that D in Botany, which had been changed to a B+, I had never really worried about grades. If a subject interested me, I earned an A; if it did not, I plodded through to fulfill requirements and earned a B. After all, like Mother, I had my pride. It had not occurred to me that all the students at Cal were equally good, even better, or they wouldn't be there.

Now I heard worried conversations about professors who ”graded on the curve,” which seemed to have different meanings for different professors but appeared to mean that for every A a D should be given, the number of B's should equal the number of C's. This seemed unjust to me. Did professors never find themselves with a cla.s.s of brilliant students, all of whom deserved A's? Apparently not. Some students were labeled by others as ”D.A.R.s,” which stood for ”d.a.m.ned Average Raisers.”

I still was not worried about grades, and so one afternoon when I had free time I climbed the stairs to the School of Librarians.h.i.+p to inquire about courses that might be useful to a children's librarian. The secretary eyed me with such a haughty look that I lost my confidence and felt exactly what I was, an immature student in bobby socks.

”The school offers little in children's work,” she said and added, ”Are you an A student?” in a tone that implied she was sure I wasn't.

”Well-no,” I admitted. ”So far A's and B's.”

She said, ”I'm sorry,” which she obviously wasn't. ”The students in the School of Librarians.h.i.+p are almost entirely A students.” She turned her attention to the work on her desk.

Abashed in my bobby socks, I left. As I descended the stairs I felt defeated and then angry. How dare this woman treat a student, any student, with such arrogance? My wavering confidence stiffened. I was sure I had something to offer, and I was not at all sure straight A's would have anything to do with it. I returned to my room, wrote to the University of Was.h.i.+ngton for a catalog of their courses in librarians.h.i.+p, and got on with my studies.

The course that I looked forward to three times a week was The Novel, taught by Professor Benjamin Lehman, who had once been married to the actress Judith Anderson, which impressed his students. At first I was dubious about Professor Lehman because he began by speaking out against students who worked their way through college. In Europe, he said, students devoted all their time to their studies. I thought of the men who had started the student cooperatives at Cal. They had been so determined to go to the university that they had worked in the fields all summer and were paid in produce, which kept them going through the first year while they organized the cooperatives and attended cla.s.ses. Although Professor Lehman's remarks seemed cruel to me, his course came to mean more to me than any other course I have ever taken.

Professor Lehman was a short, slightly stooped man who entered the cla.s.sroom at the last minute, faced the cla.s.s from behind the lectern, and delivered fascinating lectures on novels, beginning with Pamela, the first of fourteen or fifteen novels we read that year. At the end of the lecture he turned and walked straight out the door. One sentence that he repeated has stayed with me all my life, and I often think of it as I write: ”The proper subject of the novel is universal human experience.” A phrase that has also stayed with me is ”the minutiae of life,” those details that give reality to fiction. It is a long leap from Peregrine Pickle, Tristram Shandy, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and all the other novels we studied that year to the books I was to write about Henry, Ramona, and Leigh Botts, but I know, if others may not, that the influence of Professor Lehman is there. I was so pressured, however, that I studied Tom Jones without realizing it was a funny story, and I was not the only one.

For English 117I, Shakespeare, I have checked in my text eight plays that we read that semester. English 117J, ”designed primarily for juniors whose major subject is English,” dealt with nine more plays, as well as Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and the relations.h.i.+p of his work to the Elizabethan theater and to contemporary thought and literature. Both courses were taught by Professor Guy Montgomery, a little man who wore a beard like that on the well-known bust of Shakespeare. He gave more life to the works of Shakespeare than my former teachers. I could compare because I had already studied Macbeth in high school and junior college. I am probably the only student in the United States to major in English without studying Hamlet. With the dread Comprehensive looming, I read but never actually studied it.

Philosophy 5A and 5B were taught by Professor Pepper, who p.r.o.nounced idea as if it had an r on the end and said he would automatically fail anyone who wrote examinations in green ink. We read Lucretius and Plato the first semester and Berkeley, Tawney, Hume, and Dewey the second semester. The large cla.s.s was divided into discussion groups that met once a week. In one of these groups I wrote down a discussion in my section. I wish I had kept it because it revealed that no one, student or section leader, had any idea what he was talking about.

In choosing my German course I took the advice of Stebbins girls: Never study a foreign language from someone with a name in the same language because the course will be much more difficult. I chose to take the course from a Mr. Corrigan, who in spite of his Irish name turned out to be a blue-eyed blond. I plodded along with a cla.s.s of mostly men who were planning to be engineers or medical students.

The subject matter of Developmental Psychology was interesting, but the professor was not. He had tan hair, wore a tan suit and tan tie, and spoke in a monotone that I thought of as a tan voice. I suspect he did not enjoy teaching undergraduates and was eager to get back to his graduate students, a common failing of Cal professors.

Midterm examinations were enlightening. On the way to cla.s.s we stopped at the corner drugstore to buy blue pamphlets in which to write our examinations, which were to be graded by ”readers” who were graduate students. Professors, it seemed to me, did not stoop to read examinations, although, to be fair, they probably did read those their readers considered best-or worst.

Stebbins circulated a myth that it was possible to outwit a reader by writing ”Second Blue Book” on the front and writing one brilliant last sentence inside. This was supposed to make the reader believe he had lost the first blue book, which would fill him with such guilt that, rather than admit to carelessness, he would give the student an A.

Several days after midterms, the blue books were piled alphabetically on the floor outside cla.s.srooms. When I collected mine, I was shocked. Instead of A's and B's, I had sunk to B's and C's. What was wrong? Obviously, I must work harder, and others felt the same way. We no longer sang on our way to the library or played games on the lawn of the Pacific School of Religion.

One of my problems was the tremendous amount of reading in small print required in English courses. The print in the Oxford Standard Edition of Shakespeare was finer than that of the Bible. The print in many novels we read was also fine. German, in those days, was printed in Gothic rather than in Roman type, which was difficult to read with the best of eyes. Once more I broke my vow of never asking my parents for anything and wrote home saying I needed gla.s.ses. Once more Mother wrote that I was not to wear gla.s.ses. I should drop out of school and come home. Why? Probably because she wanted me home and did not want my appearance marred by gla.s.ses. So I struggled on, unable to afford gla.s.ses and unaware that Cowell Hospital, always sympathetic to student health problems, might have helped.

Second midterms were not much better than the first. And then finals. A saxophone player in the apartment house next door poured sorrow into ”Solitude.” I sat at my desk and looked out at the limp, dejected underwear dripping in the rain on the clotheslines. Evenings, from time to time and for no reason, male voices would call out, ”Pe-e-dro-o-o-o,” a sad and lonely sound, a Cal custom whose origins were lost, if not in the mists of time, in the fog of San Francisco.

Tension mounted at Stebbins. Some students stayed up all night to study, or tried to. One girl took a pill to keep awake all night, and at breakfast reported, ”It was horrible. I desperately wanted to sleep and couldn't.” Another girl, who had been issued one sleeping pill by Cowell Hospital, told us, ”I woke up feeling as if I hadn't slept at all.”

In those days, before ballpoint pens, we filled our fountain pens, emptied them, and refilled them just to make sure. We self-addressed postcards to enclose in our blue books so readers could send us our grades before official grades came out. Then, as was the Cal custom the first day of finals, the Campanile tolled ”An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the morn'.”

Pessimists brought bottles of ink in case their pens ran dry. Sometimes a student without a watch brought a noisy clock that ticked on the nerves of the rest of the cla.s.s. Mimeographed sheets of questions were pa.s.sed out. The professor ostentatiously left the room, for Cal operated on the honor system. We read, contemplated, estimated time for each answer, and began to write. I did not have a watch, so I had to rely on my time sense. As we wrote, someone's pen was sure to leak and a profane word was whispered. In every exam I have ever taken, someone, almost always a man, arose from his chair long before the Campanile struck the hour, dropped his blue book on a table at the front of the room, and walked out, leaving the rest of us to wonder if he was brilliant and found the exam so easy he finished quickly or if he found the exam so difficult it was hopeless.

The honor system seemed to work in all my cla.s.ses except German. As soon as the instructor left the room, answers were whispered back and forth and, once, announced to the whole cla.s.s. I gritted my teeth, tried to tune everyone out, and clung to my honor even though I knew I would never excel in German.

At Stebbins we watched the mail for postcards. Most of us were disappointed, although the reader for Psychology 170 added a kind note to my postcard telling me I had written an excellent final but he could not give me an A because I had not done well in the first midterm. He gave me a B. I had a respectable B average, but where were all the A's I was used to?

Cal gave us a month's vacation between semesters, so we did not feel we should be writing papers or studying for finals like Oregon students. Miriam and I washed our windows; I packed my bag, said good-bye to Clarence, and, discouraged, took the train to Portland for my first Christmas at home since I was in high school. I was ashamed. My father had borrowed on his life insurance to pay my nonresident tuition, my mother frequently reminded me of the sacrifices she made for me, and now I was not living up to their expectations. Sleeping in a Pullman car was difficult. I dozed, and at Dunsmuir, in the middle of the night, the train backed and b.u.mped as another engine, facing backward, was added to the rear to help push the train over the mountains. It reminded me of the pushmi-pullyu, an animal with a head at either end in the Dr. Dolittle books I had read and reread as a child.

The next evening the train, late arriving in Portland, waited on the east side of the Willamette River while a bridge was raised for a s.h.i.+p to pa.s.s through. There was nothing to do but watch the Sherwin-Williams sign, a paint can outlined in electric lights pouring paint made of hundreds of electric bulbs over a huge globe of the world. The words COVER THE EARTH lit up, the lights were extinguished, and the pouring of electric paint began again. Hypnotized by the sign, I wanted to sit on the p.r.i.c.kly train seat for hours rather than move on into Union Station.

When the s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed by, the bridge closed and the train crossed the river. My eager parents had arrived early because, as Mother explained, ”We like to watch the people.” Mother's mother, Grandma Atlee, proper in her old-fas.h.i.+oned hat and gloves, was sitting quietly, waiting.

”Where's Grandpa?” I asked, puzzled. Mother explained that she had not wanted to tell me during finals, but he was in the hospital with what had turned out to be inoperable cancer and Grandma was now living with us. I appreciated her consideration, but the news was a shock. Somehow I had expected my grandparents to live forever.

There was another surprise. Dad had bought a car. He explained that when he lost his job and had to sell his car in 1929, he held back some money that he invested in General Motors stock, which had increased in value until he could afford another Chevrolet, now a necessity because of my grandmother.

On the drive home I inhaled the fragrance of a new car and confessed that I was not doing as well at Cal as I had expected. I knew I could count on understanding from Dad, but I was not so sure about Mother. Here was another surprise. She said gently, ”Too bad. You'll do better next time.” I hoped I would.

Whenever Dad turned a corner, Grandma whispered, ”Oh, Lordy!” Except for a brief time when, over Mother's protests, Grandpa had bought and wildly driven a Model T Ford, Grandma had never ridden in an automobile until she came to live with us. Grandma called me Mable, Mother's name, and referred to Dad as ”that gentleman.” Our amus.e.m.e.nt covered sorrow. I had known my grandmother's memory was failing, but I had not expected it to drift so far away.

The next evening, because neither Mother nor I could drive, a friend drove us to St. Vincent's Hospital to see my grandfather while my father stayed with my grandmother. My dear, kindhearted, funny Grandpa, drugged into half-sleep, lay in a narrow bed in a cheerless room. He opened his eyes, said, ”Mable,” and sank into deep sleep. Could he possibly know how much he meant to me? Memories overwhelmed me: Grandpa holding me on his knee and teaching me arithmetic before I started school; Grandpa's vegetable garden, where I had loved to pick up new potatoes when he turned over the soil; Grandpa's strawberry bed; Grandpa behind the counter of his general merchandise store measuring coffee into the red coffee grinder, cutting slabs of Tillamook cheese with a small guillotine, and weighing out bulk tea and oatmeal; Grandpa letting me help myself to gumdrops and cutting off ”remnants” from bolts of fabric so I could make doll clothes; Grandpa jos.h.i.+ng with drummers who came by train with heavy trunks to sell bolts of fabric, thread, stockings, corsets, and all the things my grandmother sold on her side of the store. That evening was the last time I saw my grandfather. After that I stayed with my grandmother while Dad drove Mother to the hospital.

In spite of her grief, Mother did not forget my social life. An Anglophile because she had loved her English grandparents so much, she was interested in the Commonwealth Fellows and asked many questions about them before she got down to what was really on her mind. Did I still see Clarence? Yes, I did, but not exclusively. She repeated that I would be wise to drop him. After all, he was Catholic. Why did I no longer mention Jack? I told her, with wry amus.e.m.e.nt, the story of Jack the Bounder. At first she was shocked that such a man would be a member of the Masonic Club, where she had counted on my meeting nice young men. Then she said with a sigh, ”Well, I suppose it was good experience for you.” I agreed. From Jack I had learned to trust my instincts.

Claudine's return from Dee for her Christmas vacation was a relief from the sorrow and tension at home. I usually spent afternoons at her house, where we had privacy because Mrs. Klum was often out playing bridge. Claudine, never one to complain, did drop bits of information that I pieced together. Teaching in an isolated sawmill town was an experience she endured rather than enjoyed, even though she liked her first- and second-grade children, a number of them j.a.panese. She and an uncongenial teacher shared a room in the house of a young married couple who lived outside town. The wife packed their lunches, which every single day consisted of sandwiches made of white bread and bottled sandwich spread of mayonnaise and chopped pickle with no meat, not even bologna. Dessert was always a piece of chocolate cake. Dinners were not much better. Once a week she served wieners and sauerkraut.

The mill town was cold and lonely. Claudine and her roommate corrected papers in the evening and went to bed early. There was nothing else to do. There was no library, not even a bookmobile. The only way out of Dee was to ask the highway patrol for a ride to Hood River, where Claudine could catch a bus to Portland. I could see that she dreaded returning. She was wistful about my life at Cal, and her eighty dollars a month seemed like a fortune to me.

When I had to admit that Stebbins's monthly fee had been raised, my parents were shocked. What I had considered a challenge, they considered a hards.h.i.+p. I insisted I was able to manage, but Dad said, ”I can sc.r.a.pe up another six dollars a month.” He also sc.r.a.ped up money for a wrist.w.a.tch for Christmas.

It was a sad vacation. My nervous mother was exhausted from trips to the hospital. My gentle grandmother, confused in her new home, sat in a chair by the dining room window. ”She has nothing to do,” said Mother, and snipped holes in our sugar-sack dish towels for Grandma to mend, work she enjoyed. Her st.i.tches were as tiny and neat as the st.i.tches in clothes she had made for me when I was in the first grade. The memory of her marriage of over sixty years was gone. She never once mentioned my grandfather, whom she had married at the age of seventeen to escape a stepmother. Now she had only one memory left, a memory of her childhood in Michigan. When friends came to visit, she would sit quietly, apparently interested in the conversation. Then, when there was a pause, she would smile and say with pride, ”Father gave the land for the school.”

I was not sorry to board the Southern Pacific for Berkeley even though I was confused and worried about my future, the one subject Mother had not cross-examined me on, and with all her troubles, I could not add to them by admitting that Cal's library school would not find my grades acceptable, that after feeling the atmosphere of the place, I did not even want to be admitted. Teaching? No, I did not want to teach. My grammar school days had left me with several bitter memories, but I knew others had memories far more bitter. I did not want to become an unhappy memory to children trapped in a cla.s.sroom. Children were free to come and go in a library.

I tried but could not imagine a future for myself as the train pulled out of the station and the Sherwin-Williams sign drenched the earth with electric paint, retrieved it, and drenched it again.

Two Vacations.

Returning to the cheerful confusion of Stebbins was a relief after the tense, sad days in Portland. Then, on January 17, my grandfather died. Mother wrote that he had tried to climb over the bed railing, fallen, and contracted pneumonia. ”It was a blessing,” Mother said. ”Pneumonia is an old man's friend.” Poor Grandpa, so nimble as he climbed up and down a ladder to reach merchandise on the top shelves of his store, which had become the town's center. I couldn't bear to think of this kindhearted eighty-five-year-old man suffering alone on a cold hospital floor.

Grandpa's death was a sad start for a new semester. Mother, worn-out from hospital visits, the care of my grandmother, and the disposal of my grandfather's store and the post office building he owned, did not remember that I no longer received money from him. I missed his monthly five dollars. But I held to my vow of never asking for money, so I shortened more skirts, and Mrs. Cochran paid me to make her a silk dressing gown she could slip into when she had to get up to unlock the front door for girls who had overstayed the two-thirty deadline. (Most, however, bypa.s.sed Mrs. Cochran by climbing in the ground-floor windows of accommodating friends.) With one exception, my second-semester courses were the same as the first. Because I was not giving up on becoming a children's librarian and writing children's books, I decided courses in education might be useful. Unfortunately, Education 101, History of Education, was a prerequisite for any course in elementary education.

History of Education was the sort of cla.s.s that began with students counting minutes, hoping the professor would be late, for Cal had an unwritten rule that if a professor was ten minutes late, students could leave. This one was always on time. All I remember about the uninteresting, to me, lectures was the professor's several references to Saint Simeon Stylites, who lived on top of a pillar for thirty-six years to call attention to the evils of his time. I do not recall why this uncomfortable saint was mentioned at all.

What I do recall is the paper the entire cla.s.s was required to write on one subject, ”Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” This paper had to be twenty-four pages long. Not twenty-three, not twenty-five. Twenty-four. Fortunately, I was fresh from Plato the previous semester, but I resented every word of that paper, every footnote, every ibid., every op. cit., and longed to add one footnote, ”I thought of this myself.” Footnotes in foreign languages, according to the wisdom of Stebbins, always impressed a reader, but I couldn't work one in on Plato. Someday, someday, I vowed, I would write entire books without footnotes.

For some m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic reason, I felt I should take a course in physical education even though this was not required of juniors. I have no idea why I felt this way because students got plenty of exercise climbing stairs and hurrying up and down hills. I chose Fencing, which surprised and amused athletic Clarence. Nevertheless, epee in hand and protected by a wire-mesh mask and quilted plastron, I lunged, parried, and thrust my way to a surprising B. Touche, Clarence Cleary! The educational residue of this course was a critical att.i.tude toward fencing in movies. Very sloppy, most of it seems to me, but then I did not have to duel my way up and down staircases.

At the end of my junior year, I took the train once more for Portland, where Sherwin-Williams still covered the earth. I was filled with ambition to study for the Comprehensive, that literary doomsday for English majors.

Because Cal's spring semester ended in May and the University of Oregon's in June, Virginia, a high school friend, invited me to come to Eugene to stay at her sorority house and attend a dance. She had rounded up the brother of a boy I had known in high school to escort me. I drove to Eugene with Bob, her fiance, a young man I had introduced her to several years before.

That weekend in a sorority house was quite different from life at Stebbins. A number of girls were engaged to be married, which seemed the fas.h.i.+onable thing to do in those days when many Oregon parents sent their daughters to college to ”catch a husband,” an expression I had never heard applied to Cal. The girls were not treated like adults. Immediately after the dance they were expected to return to the sorority house, where the housemother stood at the door. There were no kisses, no lingering goodnights. The girls slept on a sleeping porch in double-decker bunks like those in the Camp Fire Girls' summer camp, and most girls had their own busily ticking alarm clock. On school days the ringing must have been even more annoying than the thumping, whacking steam radiators of Stebbins Hall.

The dining room was attractive and homelike, but conversation was not as lively as that of Stebbins girls, probably because the housemother, unlike Mrs. Cochran, presided. After breakfast we attended a softball game and a beery fraternity picnic. I was glad I was attending Cal.

I had a glimpse of Claudine before her school was out. She had decided she could not face another bleak year in Dee with sandwich-spread sandwiches and chocolate cake, so one Sat.u.r.day she took a carsick bus trip down the Columbia River Highway to Portland, a ride that did not make most Oregonians carsick because they stopped and got out of their cars to admire every waterfall along the way. Once again Claudine's mother and a friend drove Claudine to a suburb to be interviewed by a school superintendent, who was also the owner of a roadhouse. It was late afternoon, but he and his wife were dressed for work, he in a tuxedo and she in a long evening dress. Claudine was ill at ease and so, apparently, was he. After a few hurried questions, he said, ”Take off your coat and walk around the room.” He was used to hiring dancers, not teachers. Embarra.s.sed, Claudine did as she was told, and she was hired. She returned to Dee to finish the remaining days of her bleak school year.