Taking My Life
Page 7
By unhappy accident, the eighth-grade teacher fell down the stairs and broke her arm soon after school began, and the principal, whose husband had gone off to war, had a nervous breakdown. The assistant principal, Mrs. Knapp, an old school friend of the principal, who had been brought in to fill gaps, took over our class for several weeks until the first of a series of unsuccessful substitute teachers could be found. In those few weeks I was taught with an attention and perception I had not known existed. Each of us had private appointments with Mrs. Knapp in her own bed-sitting room in the boarding house. There we discussed our problems and set up individual programs for solving them.
“When you don’t understand, say so,” she said finally. “That is the first mark of intelligence.”
Why was a word I had not used outside my home for years. Slyly at first and then with something like abandoned greed, I asked and asked. Mrs. Knapp set up a tutorial hour for me once a week which continued even after she had left the class.
I worked so hard at home, for such long hours, that my father finally said I must set limits.
“But I have to,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”
“Teach yourself to concentrate,” he said. “When you’re overtired, you daydream.”
It was true; so I set myself time limits for my assignments and found I could get through the work much more quickly, but I was edgy with excitement every night, often unable to sleep and, in that state, old fears of the dark returned to me.
My room opened onto a stone terrace, past which a small creek flowed down into the lake. On stormy nights, tree branches would scratch at the window, and the creek was a wild throat. Too old now to call out to my parents with fake requests for drinks of water and more blankets, ashamed of the childish fantasies that terrified me, one night I got up, put on my shoes and a coat over my pyjamas, and went out the French doors onto the patio. I followed the path by the creek down to the road and began to walk along it, sure every shadow was a madman and murderer or a vicious wild animal or an evil spirit. Light-headed with terror, I nevertheless forced myself to go on. Gradually, my stride grew less timid. I began to be able to turn my head and look around me. It was a wild night, wind pushing broken clouds across the face of a bright moon, setting the trees to dancing. I was not victim to it now but part of the spirit of the storm. I began to run, intoxicated with the energy in me and all around me. I ran the full circle of the lake, came home and slept. I was never afraid of the dark again. I had taken it into my nature.
That kind of energy can be a disruptive force. I was often that autumn too happy to know what to do with myself, energy spilling over into nearly hysterical high spirits. When we didn’t have a teacher with as sure a hand as Mrs. Knapp who could use our energies, we became torturers.
“You’re acting like silly children,” one of them snapped, her patience nearing an end at our noisy joy.
I suggested we all bring our younger sisters’ and brothers’ musical animals, wind them up and put them in our desks. The room was full of the faint twinkling of a dozen different music boxes, and our teacher quit.
We grew proud of our ability to discourage substitutes. Rumour now had it that our original teacher hadn’t fallen but had been pushed down the stairs, and it was the behaviour of the eighth grade that had inspired the principal’s nervous breakdown. One of our motivations was to force Mrs. Knapp to return to us, but our pranks were mainly inspirations of high spirits.
Expecting yet another substitute to turn up one morning after chapel, we got into boxes of yarn to be distributed to us to knit squares for afghans for soldiers. We strung the whole room with it, I climbing up to hook it to the ceiling lights, another girl binding the teacher’s chair to her desk. Hearing footsteps on the stairs, we raced to our seats and sat waiting for a reaction to our decorative achievement.
It was Mrs. Knapp who opened the door. There was the faintest flicker at the edge of her mouth.
“Well, get us undone,” she said. “It’s clear who will have to get it off the ceiling.”
In ten minutes we were sheepishly, happily at work, arguing fine points of grammar, a skill we had developed so well only Mrs. Knapp could beat us at it.
At home I was rebellious about the amount of time I was expected to spend with Libby. I started reading her my English text, not to waste the hour, and the poor child even put up with that if it was all the attention I would give her.
When Arthur looked at us and sighed, “And I wanted to be the football player in the family,” instead of responding with some rudeness about his protruding Adam’s apple, I burst into tears and left the table, a reaction as surprising to me as it was to him.
The next morning I had my first period, about which I felt as physically awkward as I did about wearing stockings, but, though it was still commonly called “the curse,” I was glad to have it and to cross the line that divided those who didn’t from those who did.
My father had a long talk with my brother which must have had to do with the mysterious emotions of women and how they must be treated. From then on, though there could be irony in his tone, his attitude toward me was faintly flavoured by the protective concern he had been so generous with when we were little children.
When elections were held about a month after school started, I became judge of the lower school court, a position of even greater prestige than president of the class. More often than not, I was one of the offenders and had to turn over my position to the president of the class while my own trial was going on. Mrs. Knapp pointed out that my example wasn’t very good for the younger children, but I sensed underneath her rebuke a tolerance for my run of high spirits, stealing from an abundance of neighbourhood flowers to bring her a bouquet, climbing the tallest tree on the grounds and chucking hard candy down to my schoolmates. About matters of real moral importance, I was dependable. Cheating was despicable, lying about anything important unthinkable. I loved the solemn ritual of chapel that began each school day. In the alto section, my voice was perfectly acceptable, and Mrs. Knapp’s morning comments about truth, beauty, self-discipline and kindness gave me a few moments of saintly aspiration each day, which had nothing to do with giving up pranks, rowdiness and laughter but rather to do with some unimaginably noble and self-sacrificing act that would save Mrs. Knapp’s life in a more dramatic way than she was daily saving mine.
She had the virtues of cheerful respect and fairness, and, though she devoted herself to us, she stayed aloof. I never felt the five inches taller than she that I was. And I bitterly resented her sudden demotion when Mrs. Hyde, the principal, returned and took Mrs. Knapp’s place on the podium.
With Mrs. Hyde was her husband, on mercy leave to help her in the first month of taking the school back under control. One of her first acts was to hire a teacher for us who would stay, a dull but stubborn woman who outlasted our rebellious stunts with the help of Mrs. Hyde’s harsh disciplinary measures. We were punished as well for our devotion to Mrs. Knapp. Our tutorials were abruptly stopped.
Outraged and heartbroken, I protested my banishment.
“Don’t cross her, Jinx,” Mrs. Knapp said, tiredly. “She’s not a person to be crossed. You have to grow up in these matters and accept what you have to.”
The whole tone of the school changed. We attended formal teas at the principal’s house at which academic subjects for conversation were frowned on. When I had an opportunity to speak with Mrs. Knapp, I discovered neither of us was very good at small talk. Mrs. Hyde made surprise inspections in the classrooms and was sarcastic about what displeased her, which more often had to do with housekeeping and personal appearance than with lessons.
Then she announced a series of surprise tests unrelated to our ordinary work. My academic confidence was so new and frail that I felt unfairly challenged and at the same time required to live up to the hours of individual instruction Mrs. Knapp had given me. In the middle of the math exam, I discovered the girl across the aisle copying answers from my paper. No
thing like it had happened since I’d been at Anna Head’s, and my pride in the standards of the school was offended. I told her to report to the next student court.
The faculty adviser who should have attended that meeting was called away to another emergency, and I carried on the meeting without her. The cheater was charged, found guilty and given a week’s suspension from school. I went home, maniacally self-righteous about having seen that justice was done, only to discover that I myself had been suspended from school indefinitely.
The next day, my father went to school for an appointment with the principal to be told not only of my unprecedented behaviour in suspending one of my classmates behind the adviser’s back but also of my arrival at chapel every morning reeking of smoke. I was in matters of general deportment a very bad example to younger students.
“I don’t smoke!” I said indignantly.
What I did do was ride every morning in a closed car with a man who smoked a cigar.
A meeting was arranged with Mrs. Hyde for me and my parents. When we arrived, Mrs. Knapp was also there.
“Because Mrs. Knapp has been in charge while I was away, she has asked to sit in on this meeting,” Mrs. Hyde explained.
I could not look at her or at anyone, feeling at once betrayed and ashamed and in terror of being shut out of the only school I had ever liked.
Even when Mrs. Knapp spoke at length in my defence, I could not look up. I was sure that I would recognize the pattern of that carpet for the rest of my life. She said that, while I had certain immaturities and was too headstrong in judgment, I had a natural reverence of spirit, was an eager student and a good athlete and I was well liked by all of my classmates if not always a good example to them. I had made a serious error which, once I understood it, she was sure I would apologize for.
“As for the smoking …” my mother began, never patient with even the mildest criticism of her children, however couched in praise.
“Do you understand why what you did was wrong?” Mrs. Knapp asked.
“She did cheat,” I said defensively.
“You had no business sending a student home from school on your own authority,” Mrs. Hyde snapped.
“I’m the judge of the court,” I said. “I didn’t do it behind anyone’s back. The adviser had to leave.”
Mrs. Hyde gave an exasperated sigh.
“Do you understand why it was wrong?” Mrs. Knapp asked again.
“Because it was unkind,” I said.
“Are you ready to apologize?”
It was my turn to sigh, but I nodded my head.
I could return to school, but I was no longer judge of court. Someone with a clearer understanding of the limits of justice and authority was put in my place.
“You know that saying, ‘I’d rather be right than president’?” my father asked. “Well, sometimes it’s probably better to be president.”
“Or anyway not pick out the richest girl in class who’s only there because her father makes large donations to the school,” Mother said indignantly.
Neither of their views had the clarity of the judgment Mrs. Knapp had drawn from me. I had been unkind to someone more frightened of that test than I was, someone needy and unsure and unhappy.
Dad, meanwhile, had obviously decided for himself that he’d rather be right. He had volunteered for overseas duty and had orders to join his ship in Seattle. We would last out the school year where we were and then move back to Palo Alto to a house of our own until the war was over.
Mother had made contact with her father, whose department store, J.F. Hink and Son, was in Berkeley and who lived not far from us. His first gesture was to give Mother a forty-percent discount at the store. Then he bought us a membership in the Orinda Country Club where he liked to play golf. His wife Gretchen invited us to dinner where we met her son and daughter. Zane was in uniform, a handsome, silent boy about to leave for the Pacific. When we younger ones were left alone after dinner, he said suddenly and viciously, “I hate his guts!” His older sister tried to calm and distract him.
“Anyway,” he said finally, “I’m leaving and I won’t come back.”
He was killed in action three months later.
“He’s tired of her already,” Mother said on the way home. “He says three years is really his limit.”
By then we had been to the store and met his three sons by his second wife who still lived in Berkeley.
I wrote on my basketball shoes, “Jinx thinks Hinks stinks,” wanting no part of the reflected glory when my grandfather was made first citizen of Berkeley that year.
A mother of one of my classmates said, “Are you Lester Hink’s granddaughter? I always thought he was a bachelor.”
When I repeated the remark to Mother, she said, “I’m afraid that’s what he thinks, too.”
But into the hands of that self-centred, self-serving man, my father commended our lives, as he commended us to Arthur: “You’re the man of the family now.” He was not yet fourteen years old, six feet and three inches of awkward bone.
The epidemics had begun before Dad left, inevitable with the numbers of young men living in close quarters. Spinal meningitis and polio were the killers. Our next-door neighbours couldn’t go to the funeral of one child, dead of meningitis, because they were quarantined with another with polio. Swimming pools were closed. We no longer went to USO shows or the movies.
Libby, always prone to ear infections, ran a temperature of 106 degrees and had to be taken by military ambulance to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, rows of quickly set up Quonset huts on a hill of golden grass behind the city, receiving mainly men who had lost limbs. Stanford Hospital was taking the blinded and those in need of plastic surgery. There were also isolation huts for the contagious diseases, and one hut for the children of navy personnel.
Libby was given sulpha and broke out in a rash. That allergy kept her longer in the hospital than the ear infection.
It was a forty-mile round trip for Mother each day, and she had to apply for emergency gas rations. I lost the coupons, and she had to go yet again and stand in line.
On weekends I went with Mother to visit Libby. We walked past eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, the basket cases without arms or legs, wheeled out into the sun. Then we sat with Libby, who seemed to grow thinner and longer each day, black circles under her still-feverish eyes, her arms blotched red, without even the energy to complain. We read to her, brought her colouring books, sat quietly while she dozed, and I didn’t dare ask my mother how sick Libby really was.
Mother herself was running a fever. She’d come home from the hospital, put on supper and then go to bed. After a few days, Arthur was sick as well, and he went straight to bed and stayed there. I’d had the fever several days before I admitted it, not seeing how Mother could go on without what little help I could offer.
She called her father, desperate to find someone who might come briefly to look after us all. He came himself, bringing a box of candy and a stack of health magazines, and kept Mother up until midnight telling her his marital troubles.
Arthur recovered in about ten days. Lib came home from the hospital so that Mother didn’t have to make the daily trip and could rest, but it was several weeks before she was well. I was in bed for a month, unable to shake the fever. When I finally went back to school again, I had lost so much weight people didn’t recognize me. And Libby was back in the hospital with another ear infection and dangerously high fever.
She was in and out of the hospital all that spring. When she was home, we worked at making her eat to gain back what weight and strength she could. We dyed milk different colours and made custards, not knowing until several years later that one of her chief allergies was to milk.
Each time the ambulance came, I wondered how much more that child could take. Mother, too, was strained and often silent. Arthur avoided the house as much as he could, but it was he who finally went to the hospital with Mother to wait through Libby’s mastoid operation.
Arthur came home murderous, Mother in tears of mixed anger and relief. The timing of the operation, crucial and so much a matter of guesswork, had been right. The infection was full blown enough to get it all, and it hadn’t yet affected the bone protecting the brain. Libby was going to live.
Granddad, who had not appeared again in all those months, phoned to suggest that he take me out to dinner. I didn’t want to go, having no idea what to say to such a man, alone with him. But Mother wanted to accept any gesture he might make.
Taller than he in my one pair of modest heels, bone thin under my button-down-the-front dress with a “Chubbettes” label, thirteen awkward years old, I went. I needn’t have worried about what to say. He talked about himself without a moment’s failure of interest. He told me what I was to hear over and over again each time I couldn’t avoid seeing him over the years. He was an excellent golfer, had been a professional boxer, was a genius at business, Berkeley’s first citizen and a poet.
We went to the St. Francis Hotel to the main dining room. There, waiting for our meal, he explained why he never sold his poetry, published it himself in a book called Musings of a Merchant, which he gave away to his friends.
“I could make a fortune with it if I wanted to,” he said. “I could syndicate.”
He took an elegant repeater pencil from his pocket and wrote the figures of his imagined fortune on the white tablecloth. I wondered if the waiter would throw us out. The orchestra had begun to play, and my grandfather asked me to dance. I said I didn’t know how.