Part 5 (1/2)

Then one spring day I found in our mailbox a letter from the University of Was.h.i.+ngton. I had been accepted by the School of Librarians.h.i.+p. My Wordsworthian heart leaped again. I dashed off a note to my parents and waited for Clarence to call from Bedding and Linen.

By now all English majors were feeling tired and overwrought. Jane invited me to Mill Valley for spring vacation so we could study for the Comprehensive together. Perhaps we did, a little. Mrs. Chourre, aware of the monotony of dorm food, prepared us a lunch of waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. I recall going for a walk with Jane and climbing a hill covered with wildflowers. We lay in a field of California poppies and lupine that had the fragrance of grape bubble gum and let the sun drain away our tensions. Wildflowers, suns.h.i.+ne, quiet, and the company of a dear friend-it was a lovely afternoon far from the pressures of Cal and of my family.

The Chourres invited Clarence to come to Mill Valley for Easter dinner. They made him welcome, obviously approved of him, and smiled upon us. There was laughter at the dinner table, and the family enjoyed one another's company. If only my family could be like this, I thought.

The memory of the Chourres and of serene Mill Valley with its lupine and redwood trees helped sustain me on the trip back to Berkeley and the dread Comprehensive, the first half of which I feared most of all. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Everyone said these were the most important writers, and I had eluded Milton as if he were chasing me with a knife. A graduate student called Stebbins's English majors to a meeting in the living room and offered to coach us. None of us could afford his services.

We all bought A History of English Literature, by Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, translated from the French, which was considered the definitive text. Couldn't the English write their own history? I wondered as I opened it to the section on Milton. My thoughts tumbled, words seemed to make no sense, I could not concentrate. I could only sit at my desk and stare at Stebbins's underwear flapping in the breeze on the garage roofs. When the man next door poured sorrow into ”Solitude” on his saxophone, I put my head down on my desk. I dreaded the exam, I dreaded Sherwin-Williams covering the earth, I dreaded Mother bearing down on me with her disapproval of Clarence, whom she had never met.

Then Mrs. Cochran, understanding of all the girls' problems, told me that Stebbins was going to rent rooms to women attending summer school and would need a chambermaid. I s.n.a.t.c.hed the opportunity. Mother had little enthusiasm for my doing menial work, but since I would be doing it in California, where no one in Oregon would see me, she admitted the money would help toward my nonresident tuition in Seattle. She gave the neighbors the impression I was to be a receptionist.

At breakfast the morning of the Comprehensive, we English majors, hollow-eyed, silent, and unsmiling, gathered sympathetic looks from others, as if we were about to have major surgery from which we might not recover. We then collected our freshly filled fountain pens and our blue books. On the way out, I saw a letter from Mother in our mailbox. I left it there.

In the chemistry building, scene of our ordeal, mimeographed questions were pa.s.sed out. The major question was something like ”Discuss the influence of history on English literature.” Most English majors had studied history as a minor, but I had not taken history in college and had skimmed lightly over it when it was brought up in English cla.s.ses. Silly me. A number of students read the questions and left the room, but I tried to thaw my numb brain and plunged in, spreading my knowledge thin.

The second question was about sonnet sequences. I could think of many sonnets but not in sequence. There was Shakespeare, and there was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but who else? Could I manage to work in the influence of Petrarch? I couldn't keep my thoughts focused. They drifted to the dreaded letter waiting in the mailbox, to Clarence, to anything but sonnet sequences. I felt as if the Campanile, with each pa.s.sing hour, was knelling disaster. Nevertheless I wrote something, I can't imagine what.

The Stebbins English majors, relieved, exhausted, and surprised that the sun was still s.h.i.+ning, compared notes on our way back to the dormitory. Jane taped a sign on her door: ”An English major knits up the raveled sleave of care.” In room 228 I read Mother's anti-Clarence letter and fell asleep.

In addition to the second half of the Comprehensive, I still had one more exam to take, Advanced French Grammar. I felt exhausted, confused, and incapable of remembering a single idiom. The night before the French exam, Clarence came to Stebbins to try to rescue me. We sat in the living room while he drilled me on grammar and idioms, and I tried to cram into my head a semester's work, desperate to make it stick until I had taken the exam the next day. When Clarence left, I felt as if he were taking my crammed knowledge with him.

Somehow I got through the final and, when it was over, exhaled what little I had learned about Advanced French Grammar. On the postcard I had enclosed in my blue book, Madame wrote: ”Mademoiselle, vous n'avez pas etudie.” She kindly let me escape with a C, probably because I was a senior.

Then came the day when those of us who had taken the first half of the Comprehensive could telephone the English office to ask for our grades. When I gave my name, the secretary said, ”E.”

”What?” I asked, aghast. I had never heard of such a grade.

”A, B, C, D, E,” she said. For a moment I thought she might go on down the alphabet to an even stranger grade, possibly K.

”Oh” was all I could say, and I hung up and fled to Jane's room to confess and seek comfort. She was as appalled as I and, never having heard of an E, was sure I had misunderstood. She offered to call the English office and inquire.

”Didn't I give out that grade?” asked the secretary. Jane explained that I couldn't believe it. The secretary confirmed that my grade was indeed an E, but she did say the Comprehensive would be given again during summer session and I could try it again.

Jane tried to comfort me, pointing out that we still had the second half of the Comprehensive ahead of us, and the two grades would be averaged, so there was still hope. But how, I wondered, did Cal average an E? I felt like a failure, a guilty failure. My parents' hopes were on my shoulders. I broke the news to them and found Mother sympathetic. She said it was a good thing I was staying in Berkeley for the summer so I could repeat the exam. I knew I was too exhausted to take the exam again, so my only hope lay in The Novel, the subject I had chosen for the second half of the examination.

The day came; I climbed the steps of Wheeler Hall on heavy feet and waited for the questions. There was only one, a statement rather than a question: Discuss the Novel. For three hours I discussed the Novel and emerged exhausted as the Campanile began to play a merry tune. This time when I called the English office, I learned that my grade was a B, which wiped out the disgraceful E and gave me a D as a final grade. I would graduate. I hoped Cal wouldn't squeal to the University of Was.h.i.+ngton.

Dad drove to Berkeley alone to attend my graduation. Mother felt she could not entrust the care of her mother to anyone else. The notebook in which he kept a record of his expenses shows that he drove to California inland and returned by the coastal route, thus making the most of his trip. Although he had never spoken one word of complaint about my grandmother living with us, he did not send my mother so much as a postcard during his two weeks of freedom. He and Clarence were friendly when I introduced them, and we enjoyed dinner together. We were more comfortable without Mother.

Graduation in the Memorial Stadium. More than two thousand of the Cla.s.s of '38 in our caps and gowns lined up behind the professors in their colorful regalia, leaders made sure we were in the right order, and when the time came for us to receive our diplomas, Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the university, handed mine to me and said, ”Congratulations to you.” I was free. The whole thing was so well organized that we each received the right diploma. Clarence refused to take time off from Bedding and Linen, where he was paid by the hour, to attend commencement. I picked up his diploma for him at Cal Hall.

Graduation night. An orchid arrived from Clarence, followed by Clarence himself in Ken's tuxedo with the bow tie untied because Clarence did not know how to tie it. Dad let us take his car, and after stopping at a gas station for an attendant to tie the dangling tie, we were off across the Bay Bridge for a night on the town. Dinner at the Fairmont, dancing at the Palace, more dancing at the Mark Hopkins, where we went to meet friends and made the mistake of sitting down. A waiter handed Clarence a bill for four dollars. What for? ”Cover charge, sir,” said the waiter. Four dollars just to sit down-we had never heard of such a thing. Fortunately, Clarence had four dollars left as well as twenty-five cents for the bridge toll.

The next day, after a lunch of crab Louis, a meal Dad remembered for years, we took him on a tour of San Francisco. It was a day we all enjoyed. I was happy to see the two get along and sorry to say good-bye to my father the following morning.

Like Cinderella after the ball, I turned into a chambermaid. I often wonder why I remember Cal with such affection.

Photographic Insert II..

The Campanile.

Miriam, my roommate at Stebbins Hall Jane on the steps of Doe Library at Cal Clarence in 1938, wearing the same tie he was wearing when we met (He still has it.) Clarence keeps his eye on the ball after work in Bedding and Linen.

En garde at Cal.

My Cal yearbook picture, cla.s.s of '38.

I escape from Cal.

A happy afternoon in Golden Gate Park with Dad and with Clarence's orchid on my shoulder Grandma Atlee after she came to live with us.

Grandpa Atlee, Uncle Henry, Cousin Zed.

PART TWO.

Children, Customers, Soldiers.

Library School.

After my narrow escape from Cal, the physical work of a chambermaid was a relief. I moved to a first-floor room next to Mrs. Cochran and, when she was out, answered the door and showed rooms, thus keeping Mother partially honest. I made beds, cleaned bathrooms, ran the vacuum cleaner, counted laundry. Fortunately, not all the forty-one rooms were rented.

To earn my meals I worked an hour before dinner in a men's boardinghouse across the street, where I had various duties: setting the table, making salad, cutting two colors of Jell-O into cubes and heaping them into sherbet dishes so they would look like more dessert than they actually were, ironing s.h.i.+rts for the landlady's sons. She ran a tight boardinghouse and once reprimanded a summer student from Stanford for asking for b.u.t.ter when he already had jam for his toast, a scene that reminded me of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. Jamless or b.u.t.terless, I was happy to be self-supporting, standing on my own two feet for the summer.

Soon after I started my humble ch.o.r.es, Clarence was offered a position by the new Department of Employment in Sacramento. Sat.u.r.days he came to Berkeley by train, staying at Skipper's boardinghouse, and we went to a movie in the evening. On Sunday mornings, when he helped me by running the vacuum cleaner in Stebbins's living room, Mrs. Cochran watched him and said, ”He will be so good to you.” Afternoons we walked in the hills.

My work was physically strenuous. Sheets were heavy when carried up- and downstairs. Kleenex and bobby pins were a chambermaid's nightmare because the vacuum cleaner inhaled them, clogging the works. Once, when there were few occupants, I ripped up the stair carpet and retacked it so the worn part was no longer on the edge of the steps but at the back, thereby keeping one of Stebbins's a.s.sets from depreciating for another year.

Teachers were pleasant occupants, most of them tidy in their habits, except for a few bobby pins on the floor. Some of them took an interest in me, and when I said I was going to the University of Was.h.i.+ngton for graduate work but didn't know where I would live, one teacher said she had been a student there and had taken a room in the home of Miss Ruth Entz, a kindergarten teacher. She gave me the address. I wrote to Miss Entz, who replied that they had not rented the room for some time but would rent it to me for eight dollars a month.

My future was taking shape as I grew thinner and thinner from hard physical work. Jane invited me to come to Mill Valley for a couple of days when summer session ended. I accepted, which inspired Mother to write: ”It is plain to see you are not anxious to see your parents.” This made me angry. I had worked hard, and I was tired. I stood up to Mother and went to Mill Valley for two blissful days of good company and delicious food, including jam and b.u.t.ter on toast. Those two days gave me strength to return to Berkeley and board the train for Portland.

The train was unusually late, Sherwin-Williams covered the earth many times before we crossed the river, and when my parents met me, I remarked that the trip had been tiring. Mother said kindly, ”You'll never have to go back again.”

I was speechless. Did Mother think I was going to forget Clarence? Obviously, that was what she was counting on.

Mercifully, I had less than a month before school started at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, where I was determined to live on the thirty-five dollars a month Mother said she and my father could spare, adding, ”That little bit of money you earned isn't much help,” a remark that cut deep when I thought of how hard the work had been.

Mother, a firm believer in my wearing red to attract men, had bought some bright red woolen fabric for a dress that I suspected she hoped would attract so many men I would forget Clarence. The way red flannel is used for frog bait, I thought with amus.e.m.e.nt.

I made the red dress before I took the train to Seattle. In a taxi on the way to the address on Miss Entz's letter, I saw that Seattle was a beautiful city of autumn leaves, lakes, and, in the distance, snowcapped Mount Baker. Elderly Mrs. Entz met me at the door and showed me to my room, which was small, with lavender walls and green woodwork. There were no windows but instead a gla.s.s door onto a balcony that looked into a cherry tree with yellowing leaves. The room was furnished with a narrow iron bedstead and, for a dresser, a piece of furniture so old-fas.h.i.+oned it had a cupboard for a chamber pot. My desk was a card table. The room seemed bleak, but it was also only eight dollars a month. It would do.

Miss Entz, I soon learned, was one of the kindest, most generous women I have ever known. The larger front bedroom was rented to a very old couple, the Coffins, who eked out a living on the husband's tiny pension from a Canadian university where he had taught history. He spent his days at the public library, where he was writing a history of the world. Mrs. Coffin cooked on a hot plate in a closet, but more often Miss Entz carried upstairs ca.s.seroles of stew or other hot dishes. If she hadn't, I doubt they would have had enough to eat. Whenever Miss Entz and her mother listened to cla.s.sical music on the radio, I would find Mrs. Coffin, huddled on the stairs in the dark, listening. As I picked up my mail, an almost daily airmail letter from Clarence, from the newel post, she would say, ”That young man had better save his money and buy an annuity.” I didn't tell her that he was so extravagant he enclosed airmail stamps for my letters to him.