Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Certainly, if I had to be anywhere separated from Roussel, it was the right place to be. Dewey had resigned himself to friendliness. Frank, a brash young scholar from Brooklyn, was proposing to each woman in turn, saying, if he couldn’t live with all of us for the rest of his life, at least he should be allowed one. Everyone was exchanging addresses, making plans to meet again somehow.

  SEVERAL OTHER OF THE BISHOPTON BEAGLES, which we had been christened, were also going to Edinburgh, fortunately among them a strong and amiable young man, for I had added to my five suitcases and typewriter a small oak table made from the beam of an old mill which looked very like tables already in my parents’ living room.

  Roussel and Sheena came to Stratford for a last day to say goodbye to everyone. I tried not to resent the presence of eighteen other people I’d come to like well. Roussel and I had no more than five minutes alone in the clutter of my half-packed belongings and presents for my family. I had spent the crowded day memorizing the expressions on her face, the gestures of her hands with their long, elegant fingers, the tones of her voice, its breakings. For five minutes, I simply held her in my arms, unable to believe I could cross an ocean and a continent without her.

  By the time I left for Edinburgh, I had another heavy cold, and the trip made it worse. When the train finally drew into the station late at night, I looked out the window with feverish eyes and saw what I thought was a giant billboard. It was Edinburgh Castle, illuminated.

  I signed in at a small guest house, where a number of other Rules had registered in the past few months. In a city that felt much more foreign to me than London, I was near the lowland source of my family name. As I unpacked what clothes I intended for use, I discovered that I’d left all my tickets in my bureau drawer at Bishopton Lodge. I was advised to phone in the morning to get Mrs. Lucas to find them and read me the row and seat numbers from the tickets for the first few performances before she sent them on to me. I was allowed, with that information, to attend concerts and plays without a ticket.

  Nearly every day a letter arrived from Roussel, and I scribbled notes to her late at night against a rising fever. I could have been seriously ill if I hadn’t met Ginny Gilbert, a class and hall mate from college, wandering along a city street. She had been given penicillin and other useful drugs by her doctor against the chance of illness. She had planned to be in Edinburgh another week, but she had just had news that her mother was seriously ill with polio and was going back home at once. She gave me enough pills to take care of the secondary infections.

  Her early return made me think not simply of my grandfather’s death but of my grandmother who would meet the ship in New York. She’d probably find me a chore rather than a help; yet I’d always felt closer to her, more really known, though not so flatteringly, than by my fantasy-inventing grandfather. I was really too ill to take in much of what I was seeing. I was heartsick for Roussel and homesick for my family.

  I left Edinburgh in the rain that had fallen for the ten days I’d been there on a night train to Liverpool, lay on a narrow bunk and coughed all night.

  There was a letter from Roussel waiting for me on board the ship. I was in a cabin for ten days on the Georgia, a one-class ship which was grossly overcrowded because her sister ship had run aground, and we had to take a share of her passengers. Among our ten was one nun. In the cabin next door were nine nuns and one college student. We effected a swap for everyone’s greater comfort.

  The next day, off Ireland, more passengers were boarded from launches, and flowers came aboard, roses for me from Roussel. I no longer needed a grandfather to make romantic gestures, but, when a cabin mate asked who they were from, I hesitated before I said simply, “Someone I met in England.”

  It was an uncomfortable crossing without seats enough in the dining room, lounges or on deck. I was in no mood to meet new people, but it was hard to find a quiet corner for reading or writing. We were wakened every morning with the PA system blaring “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” and similarly were ordered from meal to activity to meal like will-less robots. Then there was a storm, and I discovered I was among the few good sailors aboard. We were not allowed on deck, but I had a fine view from the forward lounge. The rhythmic power of enormous grey waves breaking over the bow of the ship, the pressure of the wind released me from my stupor of grieving into a sense of wonder at the power of my own feelings, to be young and alive and in love on that wild sea.

  The storm delayed us nearly two days, and, by the time that voyage was over, even I had joined the bridge players and camp-song singers and game players to pass the last dull and crowded hours. As a result of that incarcerating experience, I was better able to entertain my sisters’ friends and other children for years afterward.

  It was 100 degrees on the deck in New York, the humidity nearly visible. I was nearly four hours in customs, and I was among the lucky first few. Ann was there instead of my grandmother, who had elected to wait at a hotel with the car to drive me back to Westfield.

  I was shocked to see Granny Rule arrayed in black. Mother Packer had not observed such mourning for the Colonel.

  “It’s a great comfort to me to have you here,” she said as we drove out of the city. “You were your grandfather’s favourite. I sometimes had to remind him that he had thirteen other grandchildren.”

  The words were familiar enough, but the tone was completely different. What had created a tension between us while he was alive became a bond between us now that he was dead.

  Through the few days I intended to stay, she spoke at length about her husband. She was aware that everyone in the family was all too familiar with his shortcomings, with the difficulties of their relationship. She believed that I, because I had been close to him, would understand her own love for him. It wasn’t so much that she had restricted his dreams as that he had counted on her practicality to distinguish between the good and bad ones. If he was generous to a fault with his brothers, it was a good quality in a man to be loyal to his own.

  She had taken over the running of his real estate business and was in the middle of a dispute about sewers and town lines. After one long phone call, she looked at me and grinned.

  “I let them treat me like a poor widow as long as it serves my purposes, but I’ve always dealt with these problems. Your grandfather neither knew nor cared about sewers or town lines.”

  When I suggested I might come back for an extra week after a brief visit with Ann and Henry, she was delighted. My parents were disappointed that I’d have only a few days at home before going back to college, but under the circumstances they thought it was the right choice.

  Ann brought the children to pick me up. Granny reached out for baby Susan. It was very rare that a baby wasn’t at home on her ample lap, entertained by that strong string of beads she wore round her neck. The children, by now both my goddaughters, seemed so nearly my own flesh that Granny’s welcome of them and delight in them was a gift to me.

  I told Ann at length about Dewey, briefly about Roussel. Her eyebrows arched. Then she said, “I have no right to be jealous, I suppose.”

  “You haven’t any reason to be,” I said, and I meant it. My love for Ann was absolute. No one would ever be a challenge to it.

  “Does she know about me?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  It hadn’t been difficult for me to talk with Roussel about Ann. It had reassured her that she was not my first lover. It was not difficult for me to talk to Roussel about anything because, though she teased me about how young I was, she didn’t feel the same responsibility that Ann did, nor did she have ambitions for me, which Ann did.

  I was newly restless with Ann’s questioning. I knew she would think I should have chosen to spend time with Dewey, to get on with my heterosexual initiation. She had a Freudian rather than religious interpretation for my fall, for she was far more interested in my conditioning than in my morality. Yet she influenced my moral view without ever convincing me that heterosexuality was my only c
hoice. From Ann I had learned how to love without being possessive, how to accept and rejoice in her love for husband and children. From Ann I had also learned that sexual fidelity did not necessarily mean what it did to my parents. It was possible for her to love me without threatening Henry. It was possible for me, therefore, to love Ann and Roussel without threatening either of them.

  I had given up making any sexual demands of Ann, though my own desire was stronger, less inhibited by inexperience. It was, for the same reason, easier to live in its tension. The summer had given me a new sense of my own attractiveness, and I had discovered a world in which I felt at home.

  I went back for a final week with Granny, newly related to her. I was no longer a troublesome adolescent but a young adult with whom she could really talk.

  As I handed out lavish presents to my parents and sister (not including the oak table which I had shipped ahead from New York), I debated about whether or not to confess that, try as I could, with these purchases, with a weekend in Paris, ten days in Edinburgh, half a ton of books mailed directly to college, I had been able to spend no more than half the money Mother Packer had given me.

  I decided instead to wait until I saw her. I had found her a beautifully woven shawl in Stratford which I gave to her when Dad took me to see her on my way back to college. I didn’t have the opportunity then to speak to her alone. So, when I got back to college, I wrote her a long letter, telling her how much the summer had meant to me, how much I had learned, how many beloved friends I had made. I told her I wanted to go back the following summer, either to Oxford or the University of London. Then I confessed I’d spent only half the money and offered to return it. I didn’t put much hope in her reply.

  Did something of what I told her stir her own memories of Europe? Was she amused at my frugality? Did she like the fact that I had asked directly without first consulting my parents? For whatever reasons, she phoned and said, “Yes, you may.”

  The letters between Roussel and me, retelling each moment of our weeks together, changed from those elegiac tones at once to impatient planning. Though I really did this time want to go to Oxford or the University of London, love of not one but two women had turned me into a traveller.

  Meanwhile Dr. Pope wanted to relive every lecture, play, concert, side trip with me. She quizzed me on details of performances I didn’t know I had remembered until I needed to for her. As she had prepared me, she now taught me to fix that experience in my memory for future use.

  I was sharing a sleeping porch with Sally Millett, who had elected to stay behind on junior corridor with me. Marty and Edy and the others moved on to senior corridor.

  Though I had made up the credits I’d lost to illness the first semester the year before, I had decided, with the encouragement of the college doctor as well as Dr. Pope, not to try to graduate with the class of 1951 but to give myself the time I needed to work in more depth on fewer courses.

  The world of Mills seemed smaller than it had the year before. I suppose I was also feeling spoiled and lucky. I saw a request for volunteer swimming instructors at the Y for handicapped children. One afternoon a week, for a couple of hours, I helped students from the handicapped wing of a local public school. For most of them, it wasn’t a question of actually learning to swim. They were too badly spastic or too much paralyzed to be entirely independent in the water, but some of them gained a physical independence there that was greater than any they had sandbagged into their wheelchairs. It was physically tiring work, lifting sometimes quite heavy teenagers in and out of the warm pool water. I slept better on those nights than I had in a long time. I was as glad to find that I was not squeamish before their sometimes-grotesque deformities as I was to find I didn’t get seasick. I suppose the suffering I went through from nameless anxieties had made me fearful of my competence before any test, markedly grateful to pass any of them. Once, while we were dressing the students after their swim, two daring twelve-year-old normal girls braved the dressing rooms to be first into the pool. I had to take them out in hysterics. Though I hated what their screaming did to my handicapped students, my instinct was to comfort rather than scold them. Fear is so often the source of cruelty.

  I signed up for the speakers’ bureau as well and was sent out to high schools, church groups, garden clubs to talk about the college, give book reviews. I always came back refreshed from contact with people not my own age.

  I realized that it was not only our shared interested in Shakespeare that had made the group at Bishopton Lodge so congenial but our mixture of ages and nationalities. Only Dewey and I had temporarily snagged on conventional expectations. At college I was increasingly aware of them.

  The seniors became a more cohesive group with the pressure of comprehensive exams ahead of them and beyond those the matter of what to do with the rest of their lives. Again I was involved in engagement parties, wedding plans, but I was not as detached as I had been my first term on senior corridor.

  Sally who always refused group pressure nevertheless rebelled in angrier, less interesting, more predictable ways. She had enough units to declare herself either a history or psychology major and refused to make up her mind. Instead of focussing on one discipline, she neglected two and enjoyed gathering faculties’ predictions that she would flunk either exam she took. She kept several young men busy courting her, claiming no one of them could afford her thirst. She was drinking heavily, and drunk she was surly.

  Because of her taunts at my lack of social life, I did go to one or two of the hall’s open houses and met Neils, a medical student, who phoned again suggesting not the usual frat party but dinner and the theatre in San Francisco. I accepted.

  His intelligence and the wide range of his interests and talents attracted me. He played the violin, rode horseback, hunted. He was well read in several languages. His hard, disciplined body attracted me not at all, but, since he didn’t press his sexual interest, I agreed to go out again, this time to the symphony and then a late supper.

  I had been out with him half a dozen times before I realized I really didn’t like him. He was entirely without humour. Everything he did was for his improvement. He never simply had fun. And he didn’t know how to converse. He lectured on subjects that interested him, at least one of which was my improvement. A woman should be intelligent, healthy, tall in order to breed sons who would be princes. Neils lived at International House in Berkeley and made friends with exiled royalty from around the world.

  I refused the next date. He waited two weeks and then called again, making so open an offer that I had no excuse to refuse but to say I didn’t want to see him. He had, after all, been generous and thoughtful, and it seemed somehow too unkind to be that blunt: so I reluctantly accepted. This time, for the first time at the end of the evening, we parked. Instead of simply proceeding, Neils first laid out his plans for me: to be his mistress until he could afford to marry me. His intentions were honourable, his needs immediate, and I would be healthier, less neurotic with a good sex life. When I declined, he opened the glove compartment of his car and took out a pistol. I was overcome by an anger that left no room for fear. When I spoke to him, my voice was rich with stinging scorn. He put the gun away and drove me home.

  Though later I was surprised by my lack of fear, it probably saved me from rape at gunpoint. Unfortunately, my anger excited his admiration. He wrote me long letters in green ink (I’ve never been able to stand the sight of green ink since), explaining that it had been a test which I had passed admirably. I had courage in the face of danger, etc., etc. Nothing induced me to see him again. Then came the postcards with theatre stubs stapled to them and messages like, “These are for your scrapbook, foul friend.” He started dating another English major and pumped her for information about me. He went out drinking with my brother and developed a theory that we were incestuously involved. Neils could save me from an unnatural closeness with my family.

  I felt unduly punished for my brief involvement with him; yet I felt guilty, too
, thinking that, if I had been a normal woman, perhaps I would have found his forcefulness, his obsessiveness attractive. But surely the choice between being neurotic and spending the rest of my life with such a maniac was no choice at all.

  I retreated into work, which has never been a safe haven for me in times of stress. The overcharge of excitement gave me insomnia, and the symptoms of anxiety began to return.

  This time the doctor had a new solution. There was now a pill for the “fight or flight” syndrome. Then it was called Benzedrine, mixed with one or another of the sedatives. It was years before it was popularly named “speed.” It worked. Oh, it left a nasty taste in my mouth, took away my appetite and my hands shook, but I could keep going during the day and sleep at night. I didn’t take it routinely, but it was there when I needed it.

  I was aware intermittently of my father’s difficulties. The family who owned his business now that it was really thriving managed to oust him and return the profits to themselves. While Mother, with Libby, stayed on in Reno trying to sell the house they had built, he found work in Sacramento and gave Arthur a job there, too, all attempts at his schooling having failed. What Dad really wanted was to own a business. Mother Packer, too ill to go anywhere, was persuaded to sell South Fork to raise the necessary capital without interfering with her own income.

  I, who had been away in England all summer and planned to be there the next, could make no counterclaim, and anyway my father’s need was more important than my childhood love of the place. I didn’t go to shut it up. I wanted it whole in my memory, as if it were still there, but the falling of thousand-year-old trees invaded my dreams and my prose for some years.

  Now that Donald Weeks was gone, writers were invited to teach. Jessamyn West came that year, a woman of great energy and warmth, who gave us some insight into the practical business of being a writer, showing us editor’s comments on her New Yorker galleys, talking about contracts and agents. Though each of us did dream of publishing work some day, we were more concerned with writing great works than in the rather soiling aspects of the marketplace. Surrounded with the attitudes academics had for writers who published in popular magazines, we were suspicious of Jessamyn’s ability to instruct us in our rather higher calling. But we were polite, even friendly. I enjoyed celebrating with her when she sold her first poems to the Ladies’ Home Journal. She went to the college shop and bought a magnificently silly sun hat and a new bathing suit.