Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Hallie Flanagan was a four-foot-eight-inch dynamo with dark wavy hair, intense eyes, and a soft, pretty face. President McCracken, who hired her away from Grinnell College where she had been developing an experimental theater program, called her a “pocket Venus.” She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell, received a master’s degree in drama from Radcliffe, and, at the time she was hired in 1925, was considered a bright and rising star. A dynamic speaker with a charismatic personality, a woman who always had something interesting to say and was never afraid to say it, she broke creative and curricular barriers at Vassar and quickly became a campus cult figure. In the spring of her first year at Vassar, while busy revamping the drama department, she learned she was the first female recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation grant that would fund a yearlong study of European theater. She left that fall, Bentley’s freshman year, and, after a tour of western Europe, spent time studying the productions of the Moscow Art Theater and Riga Experimental Theater. When she returned to campus, it was with revolutionary ideas in both theater and politics, and with enormous and contagious enthusiasm about the Soviet Union.

  Hallie Flanagan became a one-woman political movement at Vassar, writing and producing plays about labor, poverty, free speech, and fascism, and gathering around her a group of similarly committed students who called themselves “Hallie’s Girls.” Inspired by their teacher, Hallie’s Girls were involved in most of the left-wing causes that found expression on campus. Elizabeth Bentley, the perennial wallflower, watched from the wings. She wasn’t one of Hallie’s Girls, but she took Dramatic Production from Professor Flanagan and was so taken with Hallie’s stories of Russia that she wanted to go abroad and see for herself. In the meantime, she enrolled in two more drama classes.

  In the spring of her junior year, Bentley received word that her mother had suddenly taken ill. Mary was rushed to Genesee Hospital in Rochester, New York, in great pain, unable to keep down food and running a high fever. The doctors diagnosed her with peritonitis, a severe and life-threatening bacterial infection generally caused by a tear somewhere in the gut. On March 25, when she underwent exploratory abdominal surgery, the reason for the peritonitis became clear. Mary Bentley had late-stage intestinal cancer. The tumor had perforated her intestines. She died a week later, four months shy of her fifty-second birthday.

  The Bentleys were not an emotionally demonstrative family. Still, Elizabeth must have been devastated by her mother’s sudden and untimely death. If she was close to anyone, she was close to her mother, the woman after whom she modeled herself, the woman who had imbued her with a social conscience, the woman to whom she owed her love of learning and her desire to teach. The dutiful daughter returned to Vassar after the funeral, throwing herself into her schoolwork as never before. Except for a C in chemistry, her grades were all Bs that term, the best she had ever done, the best she would ever do. All around her, Vassar bustled with activity, but Bentley ignored it all, distancing herself both from the excitement of college life and the intimacy of female friendship. Now her class, nearing graduation, was abuzz with talk of love affairs, of who was engaged to whom. There was, in fact, an epidemic of engagements, for a good marriage was what naturally, seamlessly followed a good education for these young women of Vassar. But Elizabeth had no fiancé, no boyfriend, no marriage prospects.

  After graduation, she went on a musical tour of Europe conducted by one of her Vassar professors. The group visited England, France, Germany, and Italy, going to concerts, plays, and museums, experiencing the language and culture and history the young women had learned in the classroom. It was the perfect, fashionable way to polish off a quality education. But to Elizabeth Bentley, it was something more. It was a revelation. On the voyage to Europe, she had her first romance, a shipboard fling with a British engineer. It was almost as if she couldn’t wait a moment longer to lose her innocence, to begin experiencing the emotionally charged world from which she had kept herself so distant. A thousand miles at sea, a thousand miles from her New England upbringing, she could dare to be something different from the woman she had been brought up to be.

  Touring Europe, and especially Italy, the country whose language she loved and had studied for four years, she was awakened to the possibilities of her own life. Rome was thrilling. Florence was magnificent. The music was big and lush, the sights and smells intense and intensely felt. For a New England girl who had spent the last four years in a Vassar dormitory, it was a wild, wonderfully unsettling experience. Her depression lifted. When the time came to leave, she did so regretfully. She did so knowing that she would find a way to come back. But for now, she had a job waiting back in the States, exactly the kind of position for which she was trained. She would teach English, French, and Italian at Foxcroft, an aristocratic girls’ boarding school in Virginia.

  Chapter 3

  Awakenings

  FOXCROFT, WHERE ELIZABETH Bentley began teaching in the fall of 1930, was one of those small, exclusive boarding schools to which the well-heeled sent their well-bred daughters. Nestled in the hills of Virginia among the old-money horse farms and ample country estates of the gentry, the school was a world of its own, more than four thousand manicured acres of orchards, fields, and farmlands through which flowed a tributary of the Potomac. Foxcroft enrolled eighty very privileged young ladies of high school age, a significant number of whom brought with them their own horses. The riding program was reputed to be one of the best in the country. But Foxcroft considered itself more than an elite finishing school. It was a serious college preparatory academy that offered a number of courses in Elizabeth Bentley’s specialties. It was just the place for a blue-blood from Vassar. In fact, schools like Foxcroft were where those Vassar girls who had to work ended up working.

  But after her experiences abroad, after the freedom of travel and the awakening of her independence, and especially after her shipboard fling, it was difficult for Bentley to fit back into the cloistered, girls-school life. Like all unmarried teachers at Foxcroft, she was required to live in the student dormitory, in a small faculty apartment. She was expected not only to teach but also, by her presence on campus, to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day example for the girls, comporting herself in the genteel manner that would be expected in the upper-class circles from which her students came. Miss Bentley did her job well and even put her Vassar drama class experience to work acting in a faculty production of Robin Hood. She played the venal Guy of Gisbourne, the corrupt nobleman who crossed swords with Robin Hood and was, later in the play and much to the delight of the Foxcroft audience, stuffed into a chest by Friar Tuck. “Miss Charlotte,” founder of Foxcroft and headmistress, played the part of Friar Tuck, with the aid of a number of pillows and a clown’s red nose.

  Charlotte Haxall Noland had founded the school on the values of determination, courage, and character. The possibilities before you, Miss Charlotte used to say, are measured by the determination within you. Miss Bentley, the English, Italian, and French teacher, had seen those possibilities and was determined to go after them. After her first year teaching, she returned to Europe in the summer of 1931. Her desire to go back was cloaked in academic terms—she would study Italian at the University of Perugia—but it was still desire. In Europe, she was free to be, she would give herself permission to be, another kind of woman entirely. In Europe, on her own, she could take up where she left off the summer before. She did study in Perugia. She was serious about furthering her education. But she was hungry for something more. That summer she lived with a Hungarian army officer who was stationed in Italy. He was an older man, a man with a rich and unknowable past, which she undoubtedly found thrilling in that way a young woman of twenty-three would. And he was, on top of that, a European, with European manners and an accent she must have found charming. He was an experience she had to have. When fall came, the Elizabeth Bentley who left to teach once again at Foxcroft was a woman of the world.

  Her second year in Virginia passed uneventfully. She was grateful to h
ave a job in increasingly tough economic times. She needed the work. Unlike for many of her former classmates at Vassar, for her employment was not a hobby; it was a necessity. But the lovely little upper-crust school was a little too lovely, a little too insular for the person she was becoming. She would have to break away, take her career in hand, perhaps aim for something with more freedom and more possibilities, like a position on a university faculty. In the summer of 1932, she began studying for her master’s degree in Italian at Middlebury College in Vermont. That fall, instead of returning to Foxcroft, she moved to Manhattan and enrolled at Columbia University, where she continued her studies full-time. Her father died the following spring, leaving her a small sum of money that helped to pay tuition bills. But she had hardly settled into the graduate program when she started applying for several scholarships to study abroad. Of course, it made sense to go back to Italy. She would be surrounded by the culture and the language, which was the best environment in which to pursue her graduate studies. But she knew a trip to Europe would offer considerably more than academic opportunities. In the spring, Bentley was delighted to learn that she had been offered funding to either return to the University of Perugia or study for a year at the University of Florence. She chose Florence, where she was one of four exchange students sponsored by the Institute of International Education.

  Once again, as she hoped it would, as she knew it would, Italy transformed her. Miss Bentley, the erstwhile prim and proper New Englander, lunged at the opportunity to live a life unfettered by either past or pedigree. She drank heavily. She enjoyed numerous liaisons. She was rumored to have seduced one of her professors. Among the other Americans studying in Florence, she was known as wild and promiscuous, a naughty young woman with a sometimes foul mouth. She was having fun at a breakneck pace.

  But she was also experiencing firsthand what it was like to live under fascist rule. Mussolini’s control not only of politics, but also of education, the press, health care, even family life, was extraordinary. A little more than a decade before, Il Duce’s black-shirted squads had come to power by raiding the political headquarters of his opponents, destroying trade union offices, torching cooperatives, smashing left-wing presses, assaulting socialists with brass knuckles, and force-feeding communists castor oil. Now fascismo ruled, and Mussolini maintained control by encouraging violence, suppressing civil liberties, and imprisoning people without trial. No newspaper dared criticize his increasingly harsh policies. Free elections disappeared. Voters were given color-coded ballots so that poll-watchers could monitor how each person voted. Schoolchildren were required to use state-issued notebooks decorated with fascist cartoons and slogans.

  Men who had not fathered children were taxed for their “celibacy” because Mussolini wanted big families to build national strength. On the first official Mother’s Day in 1933, Il Duce himself presided over a national rally in Rome during which the most reproductively prolific mothers from each of Italy’s provinces were paraded before the crowd as the number of their live births was announced to all. As an American university student, Bentley was undoubtedly insulated from many of the direct excesses of fascist rule. She even joined a university students’ fascist group, not out of any ideological affinity with the repressive regime, but because it was a way to secure various discounts and privileges—another of Mussolini’s successful attempts to control young people. Bentley was no fascist. On the contrary, she was deeply affected by the mood of the country and by what she saw around her in the streets every day.

  In between her political and sexual awakenings, Bentley managed to finish writing her master’s thesis, an analysis of a fourteenth-century poem, early in the summer of 1934. Her faculty adviser at Columbia thought it was a sophisticated piece of work—maybe a little too sophisticated, a little too intellectually mature for a graduate student. He wondered if she had had special help writing it, perhaps from one of her Italian professors.

  In July of 1934, with her year of funded study over and her meager personal finances depleted, Bentley boarded the SS Vulcania and headed home to New York. She had a semester of work left to complete her master’s degree, and she would have to find some kind of employment, and quickly, in order to support herself and pay tuition. But there could not have been a worse time to come home. America was reeling from the full force of the Great Depression, with more people out of work—20 million in 1933—than at any other time in U.S. history. In New York City alone, 650,000 people were unemployed. In the Help Wanted section of the Sunday New York Times that summer, the summer Bentley was hunting for work, the prospects were dim. She could read through the section faster than she could gulp down a cup of lukewarm coffee. Most of the jobs advertised were for maids. There were a few postings for department store models, and a few more for office stenographers.

  Elizabeth Bentley was a teacher with a diploma from a prestigious college, an almost completed master’s degree, a year of study abroad, and two years of classroom experience at an elite academy. But in New York, in the mid-1930s, those credentials didn’t get you anywhere. The only teaching job listed in one Sunday Times that summer called for an instructor of shorthand and typing. Otherwise, employment possibilities for teachers were nil. More than a hundred candidates for public-school teaching jobs—some of whom had been on a waiting list for four years—had marched on City Hall that winter in an attempt to plead their case to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He sent out an underling to deal with them. Now it looked as if three hundred or more teachers would be laid off by the city in a money-saving consolidation move.

  The city was spending more than six million dollars a month on relief efforts, but hundreds of thousands were still jobless, homeless, and hungry. Three-quarters of a million New Yorkers were living on relief payments that averaged $8.20 a month, about a fifth of what it took to feed and house a person in those days. And things were getting worse. The city was running out of money—the crooked Tammany machine was siphoning off federal funds faster than Washington could send them—and was unable to make a tenth of the contribution to relief work that was required. During the summer of 1934, the city cut its contribution by almost half a million dollars and threw more than six thousand relief workers out of work. All along Riverside Drive, crowded on a narrow strip of park by the Hudson, was the city’s Hooverville: hundreds of shacks made of oil barrels, scrap lumber, corrugated tin, and cardboard. Beggars lined the streets. People were desperate. Two young men applying for work with the city collapsed from hunger in the mayor’s reception room at City Hall. Earlier that day, a woman, disheveled and tearful, had lapsed into hysteria in the stairwell. She had come to see the mayor about getting food and coal for her family. Her children had been cold and hungry for three weeks. Armies of the homeless and the jobless took to the streets carrying placards that read FIGHT OR STARVE. It was a grim and miserable time.

  Jobless and broke, Elizabeth Bentley, like so many others, was desperate. But she kept her head. She had to. No one was going to step in and rescue her. She had to come up with a plan, and she did. That fall she enrolled in business classes at Columbia to learn how to type and take shorthand, hoping that she might be able to land part-time secretarial work. She was angry that all her education had come to this and saddened that the dreams she had for herself now looked so unattainable. And she was scared. She had no idea how she could manage to pay next month’s rent, let alone that night’s dinner. With the fear and anger came something even more difficult to handle: loneliness. Both her parents were dead. She had no close friends and little social life. That may not have bothered her a few years before at Vassar, but now that she had experienced excitement and romance, now that she knew how it felt to be fully involved in life, she was, by contrast, lonelier than she’d ever been.

  She was also stunned by the conditions around her, aghast at how people were being forced to live. Every day there were more tragedies reported in the newspapers, more hungry children, more desperate mothers, more out-of-work men, mor
e misery, less help, less hope. It reminded her of the poor families her mother had tried to help in Pennsylvania when she was just a girl. Why were so many people starving and homeless? Her mother had told her it was because the wealthy were so greedy. Maybe she was right. Certainly it seemed to liberals of that generation that the great American experiment had failed, that capitalism itself had failed.

  Scott Nearing, who had lectured at Vassar when Bentley was a student there, wrote a powerful, argumentative book in 1932 called Must We Starve? In it, he presented a point of view becoming increasingly popular—that the current economic system could not and should not be saved. The future of capitalism, Nearing wrote and so many others believed, was just more frequent and more severe periods of hardship. The Depression was the death agony of an entire social system. But there was a way out of this disaster —one way out, as Nearing titled the final chapter of his book—and that way was a revolution by the working class followed by a planned socialist economy. It was the way being forged by the Soviet Union. It was a radical idea, a revolutionary idea, but somehow, in the mid-1930s, in the throes of the Depression, it didn’t seem all that radical. The American dream was vaporizing. Critics of the system had never sounded more persuasive. Good-hearted liberals, just a tick left of center, found it possible to read Marx and Lenin and believe they were right.