No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  “Are you a student here?” asked the girl standing beside her, preparing to alight. She was dressed in a long skirt and slim linen jacket.

  Agnes nodded.

  “Do you want to share a hired car?” Over a burst of escaping steam the girl pointed to a sign across the street: “Fikes Auto Livery.”

  Agnes stepped down onto the ground. “Which way’s the school?”

  The girl pointed east and Agnes set out for Tempe Normal.

  “Classes don’t start for two weeks!” the girl called after her, but Agnes paid no attention. When she reached the corner of Sixth and Mill she stopped to wipe the perspiration from her neck. She was hungry. She’d eaten a single roll for breakfast, another for lunch, rolls she’d brought with her from Clifton. She and the bread had sat up most of the night and both were stale.

  The sun hung low in the sky behind her now. The girl in the linen suit had long since passed in her hired car. Agnes changed her valise from one hand to the other and turned where she’d seen the automobile turn.

  Passing between rows of palms, leaves moving slightly in the hot breeze, she saw a brick building three stories high. “Old Main,” said the engraved lettering over its front entrance two flights above ground. Agnes walked around all four sides.

  “Not so grand,” she said to herself, and tried a sniff of contempt. After all, she’d lived in Denver. She’d traveled throughout the Southwest. She’d worked for a newspaper editor. If she stretched the truth she could say she was a journalist who was unimpressed by a little school plunked down in the middle of the desert.

  She set the valise on the sidewalk, wiped her neck again with the damp handkerchief, and began to embellish her life in Denver the way Father embellished his stories. Mother would have called it lying, but Agnes had no intention of living in Mother’s drab world. Instead of a magazine agent, hadn’t she been assistant to the editor? She picked up the valise, threw back her shoulders, and continued walking until she came to a street of comfortable, two-story frame homes. By the time she found the corner house with a sign on its wide porch, “Rooms to Let,” she had become the editor’s assistant; the editor’s book reviewer; the newspaper’s star reporter.

  She peeled off a bill from the roll of money Big Buck had given her and paid for a room.

  “Can I wash my dress?” she asked. “I’ll use cold water.” Before the landlady could hesitate, she added, “I’ll do up your breakfast dishes for you tomorrow morning.”

  “All right, but you can’t iron,” said the woman. “I iron on Tuesdays, and I won’t build a fire for one dress.”

  Next morning, wearing the dress she had tried to smooth and stretch as it dried the night before, Agnes washed dishes for the family of eight and three boarders before setting off to the college. Inside Old Main, cool, high-ceilinged corridors stretched into the distance. She passed empty classrooms, an office marked “The President,” and a mailroom with small brass mailboxes lining the walls. In front of an oak door she stopped to wipe her forehead and neck. She could not prevent herself from looking down at her unironed dress. Ashamed and defensive, she lifted her chin, pushed open the heavy door, and entered the admissions office. She approached a long wooden counter and glared with the effort to make up a life.

  “How much does it cost to go to school here?”

  “You have to be accepted first,” the woman behind the counter said, and pointed to a stack of catalogues and application forms. Agnes passed over the school’s accreditations and turned to the “Costs” section. Big Buck’s money would last just one semester, not counting board and room. She completed the application form. In the blank beside “Parents” she wrote “Dead.

  “Father’s Profession: Doctor.

  “Guardian: Tilly Ralls.

  “Method of Payment: Cash.”

  “The admissions officer will see you,” said the clerk. Agnes followed her through a low, swinging gate built into the counter and entered the office of a man who was as smooth and white as a blanched almond. After lengthy questions about her past, he paused and drummed his clean fingernails on the top of his desk. He looked dubious.

  “We have a test we administer to students like yourself,” he said.

  “I passed the test for my teacher’s certificate,” Agnes said. “I’ll take any test you give me.”

  He showed her into an empty classroom across the hall and left her at a desk with test, pencil, and eraser.

  “How much time do I have?” She took a pocket knife out of her purse and began to sharpen the pencil. She shaved the wood into a neat pile at one corner of the desktop.

  “Three hours,” said the man, eyeing the growing pile of shavings. “Someone will come for you.” He turned to leave. “We have a pencil-sharpener on the wall,” he pointed out from the doorway. But Agnes continued scraping at the lead. Without a word she scooped the shavings into her hand and emptied them in the wastebasket.

  The test was easier than the teachers’ examination she’d taken in New Mexico. She didn’t finish all the problems in the mathematics section, but she answered most of the history questions, and she wrote a good long essay on Geronimo’s trail outside Clifton, Arizona.

  The admissions officer returned and said she’d used up her time. “Be back here tomorrow,” he added, “to meet the admissions committee. They’ll have questions for you.”

  Agnes wandered outside to stand for a moment under a pepper tree. Walking south, she came to a sign that marked the site of the original Territorial Normal. College, she thought, was like a little town devoted to learning. Remembering the cool stare of the admissions officer, she tried not to love the grounds and brick buildings; she was sure the pale man would reject her application. She fingered the small cloth purse pinned to the inside of her shirtwaist and missed Big Buck’s suntanned face and direct gaze.

  Three days after being interviewed by a committee of men who told her she was deficient in mathematics but that her knowledge of history and the essay on Geronimo’s trail helped make up for it, she returned to the admissions office. She’d been poked and prodded with questions about her family, her schooling, her employment, questions which she’d answered in a daze, lying when she saw no other way to pass through the committee’s minefield.

  “The admissions committee has made its decision,” the blanched almond said when she’d seated herself on the edge of a straight chair. “We think you have the capacity to enroll as an irregular student.”

  In an instinctive release of tension, Agnes gave him a wide grin.

  “But,” he said with a warning gesture, “we will supervise your work closely. If we are wrong in admitting you, you will be dismissed from Tempe Normal.”

  “You won’t have to do that,” Agnes said. “I’ll work hard. I’ll make good. You’ll see.” She jumped to her feet.

  “Where will you stay?” He motioned for her to sit back down, but she remained standing.

  “I’ve made arrangements,” she lied.

  “The college may be able to offer you some help,” said the almond. A hint of color had reached his head. He got to his feet. “Follow me.”

  They climbed two flights of stairs to the top floor of Old Main where they went up one corridor and down another until they reached a large, sunny room with rows of desks and long counters with sinks.

  “Frederick?” said the admissions officer. A dark-haired man with a fastidious mustache and clean, ironed shirt stepped out from a storeroom.

  “Professor Irish, may I introduce Miss Agnes Smedley.” The lean man came forward and rested one immaculate hand on the edge of a counter. In an aside the admissions officer said, “This is the one I was telling you about, the irregular student.”

  The professor, who was perhaps ten years older than Agnes, put both hands behind his back, bowed slightly, and gave her a moment’s study. “Sit down, Miss Smedley.” She took a seat in the front row. Professor Irish drew up the straight chair from behind his desk and placed it near Agnes. The almond, seate
d two desks away, took charge of the conversation.

  “Tell us about your interests,” he said, as if she hadn’t already exposed every detail of her life to him and his committee.

  “I already told you,” Agnes said. “Reading. Horseback riding.”

  “What is your favorite book?” Professor Irish asked. His eyes were intense in his thin face. Agnes debated whether to make up something that sounded high-class and educated, or to tell him the truth.

  “A book on Geronimo,” she said, and tossed her head.

  “Geronimo was a magnificent leader,” Professor Irish said.

  Agnes looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You know about Geronimo?”

  “Of course. Anyone with any interest in this continent cannot help but know of Geronimo.”

  “I found his trail,” Agnes confided. “Part of his trail is up in the canyon behind Clifton, Arizona. I’ve been back in the Indian dwellings,” she added, and began to talk about the hot afternoon rides up beyond the mine where she and the forest ranger had entered abandoned rooms that honeycombed the crumbling cliffs. She repeated facts about the copper mine she’d heard from Big Buck, about how hard the early miners worked to find a process for smelting copper that didn’t cost more than the ore itself.

  She talked about the mines in Colorado and New Mexico, mines with names like Give-a-Damn, Great Relief, Neversweat, and Kreutzer Sonata. About the gallows frame, as the miners called the beam at the top of the shaft, and how miners got sick from fumes; how they died in explosions.

  She told Professor Irish about a deserted mine she’d passed once when she was riding her horse in New Mexico, its dark, mysterious mouth entered by a set of iron tracks, the rusted ore car lying on its side overgrown by weeds. She told him how, in the Colorado coal camps, strikes flared, died, and flared again, the miners’ discontent smoldering as surely as coal burns in an abandoned mine, smoke escaping through cracks in the earth.

  When she finished talking there was silence in the room. Through the window Agnes watched the leaves of the orange and lemon trees move. The admissions officer looked suspicious.

  “For a girl whose father was a doctor,” he said, “you seem to know a great deal about mines.”

  Agnes looked him in the eye. “My father doctored the miners,” she improvised. “He saved many lives.” The admissions officer actually chuckled. Agnes started to elaborate, but Professor Irish spoke up.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you explored the mining country of Colorado just as you explored the canyons outside of Clifton, Arizona.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did,” said Agnes. “And I covered the strikes for the Denver Post, too,” she added for good measure. She was just about to embark upon a long lie when the professor spoke up again.

  “Have you ever worked in a biology laboratory?”

  “No,” Agnes answered, “but I’m sure I could.” She cast a look around at the sinks and shelves of glassware, then raised her head. “When can I start?”

  “Will yesterday be too soon?”

  Elated, Agnes laughed a loud, free laugh that embarrassed the admissions officer. He made for the door, leaving her to Professor Irish, who took her to the storeroom and pointed out rows of petri dishes, pithing trays, flasks, and dissecting tools. He showed her a lined book that she would fill in once the students began their fall class. Each piece of equipment that left the storeroom had to be accounted for, he said. Agnes walked over to a large jar and looked at the snake coiled inside.

  “Are you interested in reptiles?” the professor asked. Agnes tapped the glass. She had not been aware of such an interest, but as she studied the thick, stirring snake she thought there was nothing in the world quite so interesting.

  “I’ve killed lots of snakes up in the canyons,” she said. “They spook the horses.”

  Professor Irish looked down on Agnes’ short haircut and high forehead as she inclined her head this way and that to get a better look. She turned the jar. “Where did you get him?”

  “In the desert,” said Professor Irish. “On a field trip.”

  “What’s a field trip?”

  “We camp in the desert,” he said. “We take specimens. We record temperatures and relative humidity, watch for vertebrate and invertebrate life, and catalogue plants.”

  “I’d like a field trip,” she said. She moved along the shelf from jar to jar.

  “Let’s walk over to the dormitory,” the professor said. He took a straw hat from a hook on the wall and put on his suit jacket in spite of the heat. “You may be able to wait tables in the dining room. That would help pay for your room and board.” He looked down at her; she was nearly as thin as he was. “You do eat, don’t you?”

  As they walked, Agnes let her gaze wander about the campus. She no longer felt an obligation to memorize everything. She would be able to look at it again and again.

  In her eagerness to learn what she felt everyone else already knew, Agnes didn’t pay much attention to other students. If girls greeted her on the stairs as she descended from her single room on the top floor of the dormitory, she said hello. But she never visited in anyone’s room or invited anyone to hers. What was there to say to rich and pretty girls who talked mostly about hair styles, clothes, and men? Besides, she was always working to supplement the tuition Big Buck had given her. She waited tables, cleaned house for faculty wives, and assisted in the biology lab.

  Still, as the semester wore on, she found herself watching the girls in the dormitory each night dampen their combs at sinks in the community bathroom and set their hair in wet, conscientious coils all over their scalps. Agnes let her hair grow and practiced winding clumps of it around her index finger.

  “Your hair looks nice,” said one of the Mormon girls who met her on the stairs when Agnes had finished washing dinner dishes in the dormitory kitchen. Agnes stepped aside, wary, half-embarrassed by her curls. She hid her red hands, raisined by hot dishwater, behind her back.

  The girl turned to lean against the banister. “Are you going to the dance?”

  “What dance?”

  “The Fall Harvest dance.”

  “I guess I will. I like to dance.”

  “Who are you going with?”

  “Nobody.”

  The girl looked puzzled. Agnes climbed several steps and stopped.

  “Do you have to go with somebody?”

  “You go as a couple,” the girl said from the lower landing.

  “I haven’t asked anyone yet,” Agnes explained. The girl smiled politely and disappeared around the newel post.

  Ashamed of her manners and clothes, Agnes failed to invite a dance partner. Nor did anyone invite her. She spent the Fall Harvest in her room reading a book Professor Irish had suggested, a book about a monk, a great botanist named Gregor Mendel who lived in a little town in Austria. Professor Irish said Mendel made important discoveries while he worked in his garden, discoveries that had been overlooked for thirty years and only noticed in 1900, when Agnes herself was old enough to be working in gardens.

  She read the book as if it might be taken away from her at any moment. She was intimately acquainted with gardens and with the subject of Mendel’s experiments: the common garden pea. When the book talked about stamens and pistils, she knew what they looked like. She pictured exactly how Mendel conducted his experiments in the monastery garden, transferring pollen with a fine paintbrush from a red blossom to the stigma of a white blossom. Cross-breeding, the book called it.

  She understood how a man could be so busy earning his keep that he spent only nine years of an entire lifetime doing what was really his life’s work. When she came to the part where he had to drop out of school and join a monastery because he was too poor and ill to do anything else, she read without expression, dry-eyed and tense. All of this she understood.

  She was surprised, even heartened, by his failure to pass the teachers examination. Teachers examinations she understood.

  But she grew uneasy when she pictured Fathe
r Mendel separating the two petals of the pea blossom, parting the calyx that protected the female reproductive organs, the book said. Scientific pollination was one thing, but reproductive organs was something else again. She could accept Father Mendel’s experiments in pollination, but she rejected the idea that he conspired in the sexual process. She did not like to think of flowers as mating, nor of Father Mendel helping them along.

  True, it was interesting that some people in the same family are short while others are tall; some have blue eyes while others have brown. Curious that some pea vines are normal-sized and others are dwarf. She’d noticed that herself. As she read she tried to confine her thoughts to scientific inquiry; to size and color and other benign characteristics. But it was difficult to evade the fact of sexuality.

  She could not fail to notice, for instance, that if the lowly garden pea was sexual, how much more so was she. She had always made a point of ignoring physical stirrings in herself; the heartbeat between the legs. Gregor Mendel had been a monk and therefore he must have ignored the heartbeat, too, she reasoned. Ignored it in himself and found it, maybe, in his garden.

  After the first rain of the season, Professor Irish had taken his biology class to the desert. They returned with their arms full of primroses, sunflowers, pale gold desert dandelions, yucca blossoms. The desert air after the rain rang like a bell you could not quite hear, and the rock buttes and outcroppings stood as flat as cut-outs against the blue sky.

  Agnes had been enchanted by the vivid patches of desert bloom, so unexpected and short-lived. But back in the classroom and laboratory she recoiled at the words “breeding,” “mating,” “reproduction,” and worst of all, “sexual” in connection with the flowers they had gathered. She wished plants and humans could reproduce asexually, like the single-celled paramecium Professor Irish had shown her once under the microscope. She considered her sexuality a loathsome burden. Motherhood was weakening, frightening, unthinkable. She would kill herself rather than endure pregnancy. Childbirth was outside the realm of her imagination, a strange, dark territory so alien and fearsome that when she saw a pregnant woman she turned away with a tinny taste of revulsion in her mouth.