Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Portrait of Jane Rule taken on the occasion of her retirement from writing, 1991

  Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

  Contents

  Taking My Life by Jane Rule

  Early Childhood

  Summers with the Family

  School Days

  Anna Head’s School for Girls

  Castilleja School

  War Years

  After the War

  Meeting Ann Smith

  Mills College

  A Trip East

  Libby Pope, a Rare Teacher

  Emerging Sensibility

  To England

  Home to America

  Back to College

  Taking a Stand

  Choosing to Become a Writer

  Afterword by Linda M. Morra

  Commentary

  Omitted Text

  Acknowledgments

  About The Authors

  Taking My Life

  WRITING AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY may be a positive way of taking my own life. Beginning in the dead of winter, mortal with abused lungs and liver, my arthritic bones as incentive for old age, I may be able to learn to value my life as something other than the hard and threateningly pointless journey it has often seemed. I have never been suicidal but often stalled, as I have been now for some months, not just directionless but unconvinced that there is one. No plan for a story or novel can rouse my imagination, which resolutely sleeps, feeding on the fat of summer. And so, I take my life, with moral and aesthetic misgivings, simply because there is nothing else to do.

  I remember remembering when I was born. My practical young mother said nobody could. But I did remember dreaming and dreaming and that first waking to the hard light. By the time she read me Mary Poppins, I realized that I, like most people, had forgotten not just my birth but apparently the language of birds, the ability to fly, to walk into the landscape of pictures and to be at home among the stars. Just that one sensation remained—the painful brightness. It was not enough to make me into Mary Poppins, but memory became for me the earliest self-discipline I had. I couldn’t, after I learned to write, keep a diary, just as I couldn’t later take notes in lectures. Writing anything down seemed a way of forgetting it. I wanted to memorize my life so that whatever experience taught I would not forget. The difficulty, of course, is that what may seem to be static interference could be instead the very melody of life, the dismissed clutter, the real furniture of the soul. The fear of such loss, even our starkest nightmares, are consolation, for they store and restore to us things we have not chosen to recall.

  I remember Josephine, our black servant, the more vividly for the nightmares she inspired. Perhaps because she was real, she spared me a random racial bigotry harder to sort out. I did not, at three, confuse her with “that black trash” on the playground with whom my brother and I were not allowed to play. They were simply children like us, victims of adult whim and anger, as were the kittens Josephine kicked out of the kitchen back down the basement stairs. Nor did I confuse her with Rose, black nurse for the children we were sent to play with on Josephine’s day off, who was wonderfully, shockingly permissive. We could turn over all the furniture on the porch and play doctor on the youngest and most natural victim among us, a little boy we also regularly lost in the woods. On one Rose afternoon, a gang of us, ranging in age from three to six, broke into a vacant house on the rumour that there was candy in the garage. Our young fathers had to make up a party to restore bashed screen doors, broken windows.

  Afternoon outings with Josephine were rigidly supervised, arm-wrenching walking, full of negative lessons in deportment. The only consolation is that sometimes our destination would be a building site our father was supervising. In those days, he was working for his father, helping to develop Wychwood into a residential section of Westfield, New Jersey, the acres of the old family farm.

  We lived in the large gatehouse of the development, built to advertise it and given to my parents when my older brother, Arthur, was born. Mother came home from the hospital to the enormous relief of her own house. They had been living with my father’s parents, among others of his worried sisters and twin brother, for the first year of their marriage, a hard requirement for my mother, a materially spoiled and emotionally deprived only child. Her mother-in-law’s attempts to teach her housekeeping had not been markedly successful. The butler, swearing her to secrecy, did her kitchen duties since she was queasily pregnant. When she moved to her own house, she knew how to make mayonnaise and cheese soufflé. Her experience in ordering food for that large clan prompted her to spend a month’s food budget in the first week. She didn’t know how you could buy less than five pounds of butter at a time.

  Perhaps because there had been servants before Josephine, dishonest or syphilitic, Mother loved Josephine. They were the same age. Josephine could wear Mother’s cast-offs when she wasn’t in uniform for a party. She knew how to cook and clean. She welcomed and took good care of guests. Since Mother assumed the care of us when she was home, she did not know Josephine’s violent temper or the terrifying tales she told. I developed a phobia about food because Josephine spun stories about cooks who put poisonous snakes in the soup, whose leprous fingers fell off and were ground up in the hash.

  I became such a problem to feed that my mother turned to the nursery school my brother and I attended for help. They suggested I stay at school for lunch for a time. We were not allowed milk or anything else to drink until we had finished the main course. Each day for a week, I resolutely cleared my plate, then stood up and vomited, and was sent to lie down. The school finally gave up. I knew, in a perverse way, my mother was proud of me. I would have shamed her as well as myself if I’d let the school do what she hadn’t been able to. She simply didn’t understand that Josephine and the school cook were trying to poison me. I loved my mother, but I couldn’t trust her in such matters. She didn’t even know how to cook.

  The only person who did understand was my brother, but he had a reckless courage about eating and an ability to reason with authority. Sixteen months older than I was, he often tried to stand between me and the world. Our classrooms were separated only by a curtain. When, at nap time, I lifted my head off my rug to look around, a chair was put over me. Arthur must have heard my indignant protest because he came from the other side of the curtain to explain to the teacher that I was too young to understand such a punishment and must be treated kindly.

  Arthur had an odd combination of talents.He was instinctively tactful, never made the blundering comments that were to become my trademark; yet he couldn’t distinguish between what had happened and what he made up. His teachers thought of him as overly imaginative. I suspect it was I, a moral primitive, who first called him a liar. I had a passion for getting things straight. I have a more vivid memory of the closet where the hockey sticks were stored than I do of my classroom, the chapel or the dining room at school. I was sent to that closet after asking impertinent questions in the time set aside for that purpose at the end of chapel service. Once I asked why Santa Claus wasn’t superior to God since he brought presents. Arthur never was inadvertently naughty. But he was dismissed from a car pool for saying “Grunty” in front of proper little girls and their mother.

  I don’t think for the first five years of my life I had a very distinct sense of myself as a separate human being. I was half of what made up Arthur and Jane. We were named for our parents, who also seemed to me each half that made up Mother and Father. Oh, one fought, Arthur sensible enough to hit so that the wound didn’t show, I leaving punishable teeth marks. He, the more tender of the two, asked me not to pull earthworms in half. I sometimes told on him. But we were central to each other. Occasionally, when he was taken off with older cousins for an event in New York and I wa
s left behind with my cousin Frank to stand on the curb, shouting “It isn’t fair!,” I had warning that the world didn’t think of us as I did, naturally inseparable. But he would come home, content to perform operations on my dolls (I remember only two, called Jesus and Barbara, who slept in bunks of a toy Pullman car I had been given). I could protect Arthur from the dogs that terrified him. And we could discuss all manner of things, from why brown cows gave white milk to what God tasted like when the grown-ups ate him.

  When not under Josephine’s thumb or in school, we were more permissively raised than our cousins. Mother had resented her mother’s always siding with her teachers and was resolutely and often unreasonably loyal to us and our versions of the truth. Dad was eager to teach us to reason and to explain. All our grandparents had the conviction that we would be killed in the street while one of our parents stopped to explain the reason for getting across. Grandmother Rule, who had raised five children and didn’t stand for any nonsense, gave Mother more advice about raising us than she wanted, and we were glad to be left less often than our cousins in Grandmother’s care. Our grandparents at that time lived just across the street from us in the little Gatehouse. Grandfather had built a replica of Robbie Burns’s cottage in a field next door and stocked it with children’s books for all the grandchildren.

  One afternoon, four or five of us were playing hide-and-seek in Farmer Brown’s cornfield when someone decided we should pick some and cook it for ourselves. We gathered the corn and went to the cottage where there was a fireplace. Like our mothers, we didn’t have much idea about cooking, but one of the boys said Indians roasted corn over an open fire. We had just got a good blaze going, a triumphant exercise for a band of children under six years old, and were dropping our corn onto it when someone spotted Granny Rule, coming out of her house and not hesitating in her stride as she snapped a branch off the apple tree. Arthur and I went out the back window, somehow managing to take four ears of corn with us. When we presented the corn to Mother, she asked if we had stolen it.

  “Farmer Brown’s got lots. He should share,” I replied, not old enough yet to know the moral communism of childhood did not extend into adult territory.

  We could hear the cries of our cousins being beaten with the apple branch. We had our first whole ears of corn for dinner that night, right under the veiled but disapproving eyes of Josephine.

  Josephine moved with us when we left the Gatehouse just before my fourth birthday. My grandfather’s various business ventures, too much mortgaged, were near collapse and selling that impractical, lovely storybook house was one of the ways my parents could help. Josephine, who had lived in one of its turrets, now had a room in the simple attic of a house we rented on Harrison Avenue. For the first time, I had a room of my own, away from my brother, and there was no balcony off it over which, in the Gatehouse, we had peeked at the grown-up world down below, whose sounds drifted up to shelter our sleep. What I remember of that house on Harrison Avenue are nightmares and sickness. All of us were sick: Dad with appendicitis, Mother and Arthur with mumps, and I had the only real earache of my life. Josephine was finally sent home to her own people to die of what was then called galloping consumption. “If she’d lived, she would have come to California with us, even without pay,” my mother was fond of saying, but loyal Josephine, my nightmare bad mother, was gone for good.

  With her went the world my mother had expected to live in. Grandfather was near bankruptcy, Grandmother ill with arthritis. There was no work for my father. The yearly journey we had made to California to visit Mother’s mother and stepfather was, the year I was five, to be one way. With a legacy from her grandmother, Mother paid for the home in California. My father’s mother didn’t forgive him that decision for years.

  We went first to Palo Alto, to our grandparents’ house, which was so very unlike either the large, ramshackle family house of the Rules or the quaint little Gatehouse they’d moved to in leaner times. The new house at 1111 Hamilton was on a corner lined with magnolia trees. If one leaf fell, our step-grandfather, Colonel Packer, went out to pick it up. The inside of the house was immaculate, cared for by a string of maids and a faithful Mexican cleaning woman, whose husband was the gardener. It was a Spanish house with red tile floors, protected by handsome, dark, oriental rugs. The beehive fireplace in the corner of the living room had never been used, fire being both too messy and too dangerous to consider a pleasure. Both the living room and dining room opened onto an enclosed patio, at the far end of which was a covered area with a small waterfall and goldfish pond. Beyond that was the real garden, entered through a tall gate and under an arbour of grapevines and wisteria. Fruit trees were espaliered to the walls. Parts of the garden were separated from each other by hedges. In the rose garden, there was a lily pond full of mosquito fish. At the end of the picking garden, there was a raised platform with an elaborately tiled barbeque and picnic table. I remember eating there only once. The garden was not a social place, haven rather for the solitary pleasure both grandparents took in gardening, and for my brother and me when we had behaved too well for as long as we could. Arthur had learned to whistle, and his toneless accomplishment was hard on Mother Packer’s nerves.

  Mother Packer

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  We stayed there long enough to be enrolled in school. The first day, to Arthur’s acute embarrassment, I offered to stand on my hands in the cement schoolyard and promptly broke my nose. He was already suffering badly from being the only boy in short pants on the playground. Neither of us was sorry that our stay there was brief.

  When Dad found a job as a salesman with the U.S. Gypsum Company, we rented a bungalow in a more dubious neighbourhood of the same town, a Filipino boarding house on one side, the large family of a postman on the other. Across the street lived an eccentric old maid who drove a large, ancient car after which loped her great mongrel dog, Gyp. Her Victorian house is all that’s left of that neighbourhood now, a heritage house among new high-rise apartment blocks.

  At 727 Cowper Street, we began our real life as a family. Though the Colonel and Mother Packer were as prone to interfere as our other grandparents had been, Dad didn’t work for them, and they didn’t live across the street. In fact, they seemed reluctant to come into the neighbourhood, as were many of Mother’s girlhood friends in San Francisco, whose money was old and secure enough to withstand the Depression. At first we had no furniture because of a dock strike in New York. We lived for some months with cots, card tables and porch furniture borrowed from an aunt and uncle of Mother’s, and from our grandparents. But even when the furniture bought for the Gatehouse arrived, along with silver and china, Mother and Dad did not resume the social life they had in New Jersey, which had not been too far for even San Francisco friends to come in the days of plenty. My parents, in their prosperous old age, have forgiven or forgotten those slights, attend the weddings of grandchildren, the fiftieth anniversaries of old San Francisco friends.

  In 1936, when they were beginning again, they did so with a sense of new freedom and adventure. Dad was proud of what seemed to him his first real job, for he could not be called away from it to make cocktails for his mother’s luncheon guests, and he held it on his own merit. Mother finally learned to cook, and, if her timing was a bit uncertain, the charred hamburgers and baked potatoes were love offerings, not poison. Gradually, she became a very good cook and enjoyed it. Cleaning the house was never anything but a chore, for which she got help when she could afford it. But for a time, we were alone together. Dad spent weekends building himself a darkroom, building us swings and an exercise bar, a ladder up the almond tree, from which we could climb onto the garage roof.

  I learned only much later that Mother Packer, whose inherited income had been little affected by the Depression, had offered to send me to private school to spare me the rough companions I would find in public school, a sheltering it did not occur to her to offer my brother. My father, in mos
t ways simply grateful to his mother-in-law for her generosity, refused. He did not want me among children with much more than I had. Though he had been raised by Southern parents, he somehow escaped a sense of horror at exposing his own children to the multiracial population of our own neighbourhood school.

  It seemed to me just one more evidence of freedom from Josephine that I could go to school with and make friends with black, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican children.

  The shock for me was of a different order. The curtain Arthur had so easily parted in our first school became a wall. The big kids in the first grade had nothing to do with the little kids in kindergarten, and girls didn’t play with boys at recess.

  At first our newness to the place made us dependent on each other out of school hours. We fought almond and walnut wars against the mailman’s kids next door. We made lead soldiers and turned the backyard into an ankle-threatening trench war zone. On Saturday mornings, we walked together three blocks to the movies, sometimes staying on for the adult movie in the afternoon, watching our father’s head against the screen as he patrolled the dark aisles trying to find us, then reading the typed message that moved along the bottom of the screen, “Jane and Arthur Rule, your father is waiting for you in the lobby.” On Sunday mornings, we walked to the Episcopal church. We both liked the church service and detested the Sunday school classes held afterward in the church hall, where fights could break out meaner than on the school playground. There was nothing to do but colour religious pictures with too few crayons. You waited for the blue crayon or turned Mary into a scarlet woman or switched.

  Carlotta Jane Hink Rule (Jane Rule’s mother)

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  Arthur Rule Sr. (Jane Rule’s father)