by Jane Rule
An old Indian ran the pony ring out on El Camino Real. He had five or six ponies, one small horse and a goat and cart. On a Sunday morning, he’d lead me across the highway on the horse and turn me loose for a long hour’s ride in the Stanford grant-land eucalyptus forests. She was a hard-mouthed, ill-used creature I loved nearly as well as my bicycle, which I called Silver. I often went to the ring early and helped curry the animals. The day I was offered free rides for helping to clean out the goat pen, I was liberated. Though Mother Packer protested that it was no job for a small girl, I was beyond bargaining with. The smell of a goat could hardly be compared to the punishment of dancing class.
I considered my relationship with the old Indian purely professional, but he must have been fond of me. Once he took me with him to call on a friend who raised and trained polo ponies. Mounted on one of those elegant, high-strung animals, I reined for a light turn and was taken round two full circles, while the two men stumbled with laughter. There was no humiliation in it for me. I was too amazed and then delighted at how light and quick a hand I needed. He said to me on the way home, “Yes, you could ride, little girl. You could ride.”
Because the Colonel had kept horses in the army, Mother and he had always ridden. I loved to look at pictures of them on horseback in Golden Gate Park, while they were stationed at the Presidio, to learn the names of the horses, Whaland and Tzar. But that, too, was a world irretrievably gone.
Mother was also musical. She had a beautiful singing voice and had studied at the conservatory in San Francisco, though she’d never had professional ambitions. She belonged to a singing group in Palo Alto and sang in performances only days before my sister was born. My father, though he had no training, had not only a true voice but a knack for picking up and playing nearly any musical instrument. I could carry a tune, even with concentration sing a part, but I was bored with the piano lessons Miss Bone came to the house each week to give Arthur and me. For a brief few weeks I tried the violin instead. My arm got tired and, when Arthur asked if I’d ever get the squeaks out of the instrument, I knew I wasn’t curious enough to find out. The birth of our sister relieved us both of the burden of our musical education. Mother simply didn’t have the time or patience to keep us on a practising schedule.
Another great bonus of that pregnancy was Dad’s decision to add a small room for the baby right off their bedroom. He did most of the work at night with floodlights which shone into my bedroom window. The light, the noise of the sawing and hammering, banished the terrors of the dark, and I slept, peacefully. Dad finished it before cutting the door through, a ceremony to which the long-suffering neighbours were invited. We all sat on my parents’ bed and cheered as Dad bashed through to the new nursery.
Mother went to the hospital in the middle of the night on February 23, 1939, but Libby was not born until around eight o’clock the next evening when Arthur and I were already in bed in the big guest room at Mother Packer’s. The maid, Bertha, came in to tell us the news. Arthur cursed. I cheered. Then he said, “Oh well, at least a girl won’t be allowed to tag around after me.” Had he been imagining a companion worthy of him? I hadn’t really thought beyond the fact at all. Just before Mother came home from the hospital, Arthur and I came down with the measles and had to stay two weeks longer at 1111 Hamilton, an increasing trial to our grandparents and Bertha.
Libby was nearly a month old by the time we saw her. My interest in dolls had never been great and disappeared as soon as Arthur wasn’t willing to play with me. My chief interest in the baby was showing her off, rather as I might a new bike or Brownie camera. Until the novelty wore off, I was cheerful about taking her round the block in her carriage. Her real value in my life was to end my role as the baby of the family, which had never seemed to me anything but a disadvantage.
WHEN DAD ANNOUNCED that he was taking us on a holiday to Yosemite, it was Libby who was left behind in a nurse’s care. I was eight years old. I didn’t like the cabin we stayed in because it was surrounded by other cabins, and everywhere we went in the park, there were other people. Used to the solitude of South Fork, I knew wonder as a private emotion in the silence of the great trees or enclosed in the wind on the river bar. I was embarrassed to be so moved by huge waterfalls surrounded by strangers.
At the observation point where a fire was built and nightly pushed off to drop a mile to the valley below, Arthur and Dad climbed over the barrier to stand on the fire site.
“Do you suppose you could dive from here and hit the motel swimming pool?” Arthur asked.
I had stayed behind the barrier. When they climbed back to safety and started back down the trail, I couldn’t move. Dad had to pry my fingers loose from the fence rail and carry me away from the mesmerizing terror of that height. That night, while everyone else watched the fire fall, I closed my eyes and simply listened to the soprano sing “The Indian Love Call.” I had never been afraid of heights before, had walked logs over creek beds, crossed the Eel River on a swinging footbridge high above the water, dived into deep pools from fifteen or twenty feet up a cliff. But those were all imaginable distances, not a mad death wish like my brother’s, to leap off the edge of the world toward the postage stamp of a swimming pool a mile below.
Dad came home often in those days with news that he was to be transferred. We would go off to school with the important announcement that we were going to Chicago or St. Louis or Cleveland. Weeks would pass before we’d be told that, no, in fact, we weren’t moving this time. We were labelled the kids who always told lies about moving away. When we finally did go to Chicago, I had told nearly no one. Libby was eighteen months old, I nine, Arthur ten.
For years, Mother has said to us, “Never say ‘never,’ or you’ll end up in Chicago.” It was a place she had said she’d never live, and the year we spent in Hinsdale, a suburb of that city, did not change her mind. Dad travelled a great deal. Sometimes he had to take the car, leaving us without transportation for two weeks at a time. Sometimes he went by plane, which worried Mother. On the weekends, when he was at home, he was often too tired to be anything but physically present in the house, sleeping away most of the day. Mother hired Minnie to help around the house and give Mother some freedom from the baby but she really had nowhere to go. Newcomers were suspect in that conservative town. Mother was offended to be treated like a nobody, for the first time independent of family. Some of Dad’s business connections were friendly, but it was a very lonely year for her.
School for me was a new rather than familiar terror. In California there were half terms, and I had begun first grade in February. In Illinois, I couldn’t begin fourth grade in February. I had either to go back to third or join fourth grade halfway through the year. I sat in an empty third-grade classroom in a cramped, little desk, the third-grade teacher and the principal standing over me while I stumbled through the hated Dick and Jane reader.
“Well, just the same,” the second-grade teacher said, “she’s too big for the furniture.”
So, though my reading was a failure, I was put into fourth grade anyway. The school was so large that I lost track of Arthur the moment he got off the school bus and didn’t see him again until the end of the day. One morning, after we had been entertaining other passengers on the school bus by teaching them bawdy songs we had learned from our father, we were told we could no longer ride on the bus. It was in the middle of winter, twenty degrees below zero, and Mother had no car. We were a good three miles from the school. Furious with the school rather than with us, Mother hired a horse-drawn sleigh to take us to school and deliver us home, complete with blankets and Thermoses of rich hot cocoa, and we could sing any song we wanted to at the top of our lungs. We would have been glad never to have to ride that bus again, on which fights were always breaking out, but we were duly reinstated.
Mother did what she could for our social life.
Arthur and I were both enrolled in ballroom-dancing class. The girls all wore white gloves, black patent leather shoes, regular
school dresses except for special parties given at Christmas and Valentine’s Day. The boys wore jackets and ties. They sat on one side of the room, the girls on the other until the order was given. Then the boys had to cross the room. Each chose a dancing partner, by bowing and saying, “May I have this dance?” At the end of the hour we lined up to be paired off. There was always hurried counting and switching places to avoid being ludicrously coupled with the too tall or too short, too clumsy or disliked. For a reason I’ve never been able to discern, both the tall boys in my class liked me; therefore, what should have been another of an endless series of social ordeals, preparing me for a world nearly vanished in which I would never live, I actually enjoyed myself.
In the spring, Mother drove me out into the country to find a riding school. We got lost several times on the way.
“This damned place is so flat, everything looks the same,” she complained.
I could not, as I had in California, simply mount a horse and ride off into a forest. There were a dozen other children to ride with, all with proper riding habits. The horses were large, the saddles English. Instead of sitting in the saddle, I was told I must learn to post. The first afternoon out, trying to do as I was told, I put my weight on the stirrups and one broke. I fell off the horse, the only fall I’d ever taken. Nothing but my dignity was hurt, but I would have suffered less from a broken bone in front of those strange, snobbish children. I went back occasionally, but, since the riding was far more a trial than a pleasure, I gradually gave up any interest in horses.
Dad took a vacation and decided we should all go to the New York World’s Fair. We had been several times to the world’s fair in San Francisco, about which I remember nothing but refusing to go down the slide in the funhouse after Bertha and Arthur had both hurt themselves on the way down. I remember little about the New York World’s Fair except that Dad thought Playland a waste of time and took us to incomprehensible educational exhibits instead. The lineups to see the future dome were too long, so we didn’t see that. As we dragged wearily along after him, he said, encouragingly, “Now how many kids can say they’ve been to both world’s fairs?” just as he always tried to cut through our boredom on long trips with, “Now how many kids can say they’ve been in this many states?”
Libby was the only good traveller among us. She sat, perched on a boxed-in potty, on top of suitcases just behind the driver’s seat where she had a good view. Every time she had to use the potty, she’d shout, “I have to be a good girl.” Minnie, who travelled with us, would lift up the lid, and Dad would empty the potty without slowing down.
The trip east, I suspect, was really for a reconciliation with Dad’s parents whom we hadn’t seen since we’d moved west. We stayed at the little Gatehouse in a clutter of cousins, ones we’d known when we’d lived in Westfield and a new batch around Libby’s age. There were finally fourteen of us, ten boys and four girls.
An unplanned and, for Mother, alarming family reconciliation took place soon after we got back to Hinsdale. Mother’s father phoned her from Chicago, on a honeymoon with his third wife, who wanted to meet all his family and reunite him with them. Mother phoned Dad at the office, something she never did, and told him he had to come home at once. She had not only to prepare dinner for her mythically particular father, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a child, but also explain to us we had a grandfather we didn’t even know existed, evidence of Mother Packer’s bitterness Mother had felt required to serve all these years. She cried a good part of that afternoon.
For Arthur and me it was a marvellous piece of information, for it suddenly solved a puzzle we weren’t clearly aware of until we had the missing piece. We had great-grandparents in San Francisco, to whose apartment we had occasionally been summoned for a meal. We liked to go. Oma always telephoned ahead to ask what we would like to eat and catered happily to my suspicious whims. Once I had chicken livers when everyone else was eating rare roast beef. Oma had a box of toys for us. There was a beautifully painted miniature German village to set up. We took turns sitting on a child-sized musical chair. Opa always made special drinks for us when the adults had cocktails, and he personally scrubbed our hands before dinner and lay down with us for a brief nap after the meal. Opa spoke with such a strong German accent that we could only tell he’d made a joke when he laughed at it himself.
We also had a great-uncle O.K. (Oscar Karl) and his wife, Lucille, who lived in Palo Alto. Uncle O.K. owned a department store there, called J.F. Hink and Son. We went to their house for dinner, to the store to buy clothes. There was an uneasy friendship between them and the Colonel and Mother Packer. Lucille had also grown up in Eureka.
“So Uncle O.K.,” Arthur said, “is this guy’s brother.”
“And Opa and Oma are his parents, and he’s why we’re related to them,” I added.
We put on our dancing-school party clothes for dinner.
“What are we supposed to call this guy?” Arthur asked.
“Granddad, I suppose,” Mother said, the sound of tears still in her voice.
“What about her?” I asked.
“Gretchen? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know what I am supposed to call her.”
Granddad was not as big a man as we were used to for a relative, shorter than either the Colonel or Grandfather Rule. He was as bald as Grandfather Rule. Gretchen was a slight, dark woman, too young to be a grandmother. She had children, she said, not much older than we were. Neither of them was as strange as Mother. I had never seen her shy, even meeting strangers, nor had I ever seen her trying not to like someone. Gretchen seemed to us really nice, not just because she brought presents but because she talked to us as if we were people. Mother cried again when they left, but she seemed more relieved than unhappy. After that, Granddad sent her a cheque every Christmas, most of which she gave to us for our savings accounts. We were curious about him, but we didn’t ask many questions until years later when he became a real fact in our lives.
Oma Vance
Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia
All the photographs of Arthur in Hinsdale are sullen. He was hanging around with boys who stole light bulbs from the hardware store and then smashed them in people’s driveways. When Dad was home, Arthur would become suddenly talkative, bragging about fights he’d been in, about how fast he could run, how many races he’d won at track.
“I bet I can still beat you,” Dad said.
“I bet you can’t.”
Right after dinner they raced each other round the block, and Dad won.
The next week Arthur started stealing the new nickels Dad was collecting. He wrapped them in bits of paper and threw them out my bedroom window. When Dad got home, Arthur showed him the nickels in the garden.
“Janie must have been stealing them from you.”
I was furious with Arthur and, at the same time, sorry for him. So many of his lies were too elaborate to be credible. Sometimes it seemed as if he told them to get caught.
Granny Rule, perhaps aware that Arthur’s behaviour and moods puzzled and worried my parents and, confident in her ability to handle children, offered to take Arthur and two other cousins on a trip to Washington, D.C. To forestall my protests, Dad promised to take me to Kentucky where I could visit for a week at the Rule family farm in Goshen.
I wanted so much to go on my first plane ride that I kept myself from thinking about staying alone for a week with people I didn’t know. Only Mary Lily, a much younger cousin of Dad’s, had visited us for a week. While she was with us, Dad’s men friends joked about wanting to help her babysit. I had to judge her attractiveness from their behaviour, which seemed to me distinctly stupid. She was tall with long, strawberry blonde hair, I was interested in her breasts at a time when I was apprehensive about someday having to have them myself.
“All this talk about what a vamp she is!” Mother said to Dad. “She’s just a nice, simple, country girl. Your sister’s just jealous. She’s used to being the y
oungest and best-looking woman in the family, that’s all.”
“What did she do?” I asked.
“When she was staying with Aunt Lib and Uncle D.B. at West Point, she was popular with cadets,” Mother said. “She’s an eighteen-year-old girl. What’s the matter with that?”
Her looks interested me most because she looked more like Grandfather Rule than any of his own children.
It was a strange household Mary Lily had grown up in, made up of Grandfather Rule’s three older brothers: Clarence, a widower; Wallace, a bachelor; and Lucian and his wife, Ida, who were Mary Lily’s parents. Lucian was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Clarence and Wallace were both lay preachers. Grandfather Rule had built them a small church, much in the same spirit that he’d build the Robbie Burns cottage for us, but they never had much of a congregation, travelling Baptists forever stealing away their neighbours. Clarence kept himself busy with farm chores. Wallace hired himself out as a water-witcher. Lucian studied and wrote religious poetry which Grandfather Rule had privately published. After Lucian died, Granny Rule found erotic poems which she promptly burned.
Ida looked after all of them, no easy chore since they didn’t keep the same hours or eat the same food. Lucian, who read most of the night, was going to bed, just as Clarence was getting up to do the milking. Wallace, who would not sleep in the house, had a tent platform out in the side yard and appeared for food any time he was hungry. The original farmhouse had burned down. A servant and her illegitimate baby had been killed in the fire, a hellishly Presbyterian fate, which might have frightened Wallace. His father, a Presbyterian minister, convinced of hell but not of heaven, was finally unfrocked. The grass was still dead in a patch by the front porch where he was said to have spent his last days, rocking and spitting tobacco, tended by his saintly wife.