Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Mother did say to me, when I spoke about wanting a year in England to write, that it would soon be time for me to stop being selfish and start thinking about leading a life that involved people other than myself. The idea startled me, for I didn’t think of the future in those terms at all. For the first time, it occurred to me that I would be expected either to marry or earn my own living before much more time had passed. But I couldn’t imagine either course very clearly.

  Roussel’s visit was a natural disaster. It rained the entire ten days she was with us. When we crossed the Bay Bridge, we couldn’t even see the bridge, and it was snowing on the higher hills in San Francisco. It was some years before she’d let me forget my false picture of sunny California.

  Mother and Dad were very welcoming and hospitable, but I could sense a reserve in my mother which she didn’t have with my other friends. It couldn’t be Roussel’s age because Mother was perfectly aware of how much time I’d spent with Dr. Pope. Was it her English manner? Or did my mother feel the intensity of my involvement with Roussel and mistrust it?

  Once Roussel had gone back to Iowa, I was restless. I wasn’t really looking forward to going back to college. I had more independence at home. I did want to have done with it.

  There wasn’t a room for me in Orchard Meadow. Ann McKirsty, an English major who lived in Olney, had at Christmas lost her porch mate to marriage or breakdown, I can’t remember, and offered the space to me. Since I’d known my own classmates at Orchard Meadow, my close friends all having graduated, the shift was not difficult. There was a strong group of English majors on senior corridor. Because we all faced comprehensive exams even on courses we hadn’t taken, we co-operated more in our studying than we had before.

  Soon after I got back, Ann and I organized a series of seminars for all senior majors, at which a student gave a paper designed to help others review the subject. We invited the faculty to attend as observers. Dr. Pope was nearly always there, as impressed with us as we were with ourselves, for each of us chose the field we felt most competent to deal with, and we were, on the whole, an intelligent and hard-working bunch.

  I was also taking Dr. Pope’s course in nineteenth-century poetry and an independent study with her, asking that I write no papers, have no meetings with her but simply turn in a reading list at the end of term.

  “How will I grade you?”

  “I’ll grade myself.”

  The nineteenth century was not her field, and her organization of the course was gimmicky and rigid. I, who had loved combative discussion in class, sat saying not a word. My papers were dutiful but uninspired. Both of us were unhappy, but we couldn’t do more than be polite to each other over the gulf of our disappointment in each other.

  The writing instructor that term called me into his office and carefully shut the door before saying in a nervous half whisper, “You know, you could be onto something here, writing about inversion.” He went on to say that he couldn’t officially encourage me, of course, but off the record there just might be quite a market for it. I stopped writing.

  Roussel wrote to say she’d involved herself with Willy, a young woman whose readiness Roussel could not resist. Now she worried that Willy would be hard to leave. We wrote to each other about dependence, about how finally negative it was, destructive of love. We would never be possessive of each other or jealous.

  I wrote to Roussel about Marilyn, a music major, with whom I listened to music and read Gertrude Stein, who had transferred from Reed, whose distractions from required work I’d never allowed myself before. When we first made love in her room, I knew it was dangerous, but I was already so tempted to quit that I needed the defiance of it.

  I wasn’t, in my view, learning anything. I was working for a degree, and I felt scornful of that motive. One night, when I came back from being with Marilyn, there was a note left in my typewriter from Ann, who was already asleep. Dr. Pope had called to notify us both that we’d been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Ann had been asked to persuade me not to refuse. It was exactly the kind of gesture I was looking for; yet faced with the opportunity, I couldn’t do it. It would have been insulting not only to Dr. Pope but to Ann and other friends accepting the honour.

  I looked through my large collection of snapshots and found pictures of all eight of us who had been elected. I cut them into the shape of keys and strung them by their necks to swing over Ann’s desk.

  The president in his luncheon speech confirmed my gallows humour by saying most Phi Beta Kappas were not really creative people but masters of convention, which the secret ceremony afterward confirmed. I did it, handshake and all, to be “welcomed into the company of scholars.” Whose company had I been in until now?

  The other blackly humorous ceremony I attended was my brother’s wedding. Because Edy’s mother was a reclusive widow, there was no reception. Art and Edy left after the ceremony at the college chapel. The rest of the wedding party, my father as best man, Sally Millett as maid of honour, along with members of the family, went to Dr. Pope’s for a glass of champagne.

  “Remember, kiddo,” my brother had said to me just before the service. “You can run your heart out, but I can beat you standing still.”

  Did he feel victory in marrying Edy? Did he resent my academic honours? I didn’t know. He never explained himself beyond very occasional cryptic slogans.

  My mother was distressed by the marriage as well as the service. She thought Arthur far too young and unstable to marry, but, if there had to be a wedding, it should have been a proper one to which all her old San Francisco friends could be invited bringing suitable gifts. I had long since given up believing that such a society really existed for us. Libby was the only one ever to put store in Mother’s nostalgia.

  I had weekly phone calls from Mother Packer who focussed her attention on my twenty-first birthday, which I’d asked to celebrate with the family at her house for squab dinner. Each time she called, she asked me what I wanted, and each time I replied, “Money for a year in England.”

  “I’ll give you a car.”

  “Fine, I’ll sell it.”

  “Would you like a house?”

  “I’d sell it.”

  “How about my opal ring?”

  “It’s bad luck. You said so yourself. I’ll sell it.”

  “You can’t go away for a whole year. It would break your father’s heart.”

  Such a sentiment amazed me. My father’s heart had nothing to do with my plans. Nobody told him that selling South Fork broke my heart, and no one should have. He needed his own business. I needed to go England.

  So, apparently, did Ellen. She had decided to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her enthusiasm infected two other senior English majors in Mills Hall to make plans of their own. I did not know either Judy or Waki well enough to be as concerned about them, though all of us were drawn closer by the pressure of exams. I know I couldn’t declare London my private property, but I did remind Ellen that I’d agreed to share a flat with Roussel.

  The day before my birthday, I went to the beauty shop and asked for a short cut. I came out looking as if a field of wheat had been planted on my head. It even rippled in the breeze.

  “What will I do? Mother Packer will kill me,” I wailed to Sally Millett who had dropped by with a birthday present.

  “Put on dangling earrings, and pretend it’s the latest style.”

  “I don’t own any.”

  “Open your present.”

  For once, Mother Packer was struck speechless, and the rest of the family was kind enough not to comment. Already nervous about my hair, I was uneasy, too, about the mood in the room. Everyone seemed overly casual. Then I realized that there were no presents.

  Dinner was announced. When I got to the table, I saw, instead of the usual bright bouquet of sweet peas, the ugliest piggy bank imaginable on a pedestal. The table itself glittered with small change. On the place cards were pasted silver dollars. At my place there was a fan made of paper dollars,
a camellia backed in dollar bills. At Mother Packer’s place was a toy cash register which replaced the bell for calling the maid, and, every time she rang it, everyone took handfuls of small change to put into the piggy bank. Dad presented me with a framed hundred dollar bill. The cake was not only filled with dimes, it was decorated with “Money happy returns of the day.”

  Late that night, I lay on my back, prying the last of the change out of the piggy bank with a nail file. I counted it to the last penny. My year in England was paid for.

  With such good fortune secured, it seemed graceless to be so negative about the weeks that remained. I joined other English majors each night at dinner. Ann, more intensely working than any of us, also was best at breaking the tension by starting sudden, impossible conversations, usually with me.

  “Did you let the elephant out?” or “Was that the duke who phoned?” They mostly developed into intense quarrels of faked jealousy, invented failures of responsibility for the benefit of a suitably amused audience. The game we played when we were alone was quarrelling over our shared servants, Gertrude and Bertrum, who finally became too expensive and jealous of each other to keep. It then fell to singular Bertrude to deal with our clothes and cleaning.

  When I could take an hour off, I went to find Marilyn. We’d walk out to the lake, climb trees, play games with the local children. Or I’d go to the music building to listen to her practise. It was Marilyn my parents most liked me to bring home because, when she was there, we all sang after she sang for us. Her father was a minister, and she knew a wonderful range of hymns. She also told stories about stealing her allowance from the collection plate.

  With Ann and with Roussel, it was I who lightened the day with nonsense. In Marilyn, I had a real playmate who didn’t worry at any future between us, who took the pleasure we had in each other simply.

  I had, when I first arrived at Olney, made a speech in hall council about not attending hall meetings. I was willing to pay a reasonable fine, but I simply didn’t have time to spend arguing about whether we’d wear heels or flats to a dance I didn’t have time to attend. When it came time for the English majors to give a dinner party for their faculty, none of us asked each other that friendly question, “What are you going to wear?” We went to our closets, creatures capable of making independent choices. Five out of six of us met in the living room wearing navy-blue linen dresses with white piping. The sixth wore navy with red piping.

  “They’ll think we’re the waitresses in the restaurant,” Ann wailed. “Bertrude told me you were wearing green.”

  “Bertrude always lies to you,” I answered.

  Brainwashed we were, and we tramped out chanting, “Remember who you are and what you represent,” one of the more tasteless of the college mottos to fulfill another of what seemed endless rituals.

  I didn’t make top marks in my examinations. I felt dogged rather than intent, restless with so much generality. Even the paper I was interested in because I could set my own question was overworked in my head before I wrote it. Dr. Pope was more disappointed than I was. She saw my performance as one more act of rebellion.

  “I do understand, Jinx. Because I was a mother figure, you had to rebel, and it was time for you to have friends your own age.”

  That would be how the dean and Miss Wright had tried to comfort her. I didn’t like how much I’d withdrawn from her, how little I’d minded punishing her with my silence in class. She had given me everything she could, loved me in all the ways she knew how, and I could only spend time trying to figure out how to forgive her for it. Finally, she taught me that, too.

  She and Miss Wright, whom I would now begin to call Libby and Evaline, gave me a special “faculty purse” for graduation, filled with money for martinis aboard the Queen Elizabeth, on which Roussel and I were booked to sail.

  Mother went with me to Hink’s to buy things I’d need for my year in England, and she also helped me pick out a full tea service for the Sargeants since it was still impossible to buy anything but white china in England. It didn’t occur to me then how odd it was to be so easily extravagant at the beginning of a year in which I would be poor enough to think of an extra apple as a treat. Europe for so many generations’ materially spoiled young was a basic financial education. We stayed in cheap hotels which would have terrified us in New York or San Francisco. We lived in cold rooms on inadequate diets which would have offended our sense of what we expected at home. None of us supposed, as many of our counterparts in those countries did, that we would go on living like that forever. Our poverty in those exotic settings was part of the romance. And our parents didn’t have to visit us to be concerned.

  Over the years, Ann stopped writing except to confirm times when I might be with her. When I arrived to spend a week, I did not know that she’d spent much of the spring in a mental hospital, suffering, Henry said, from melancholia. She had threatened to kill herself and all three children. Even now, she could not be left alone with them. During the day, she tended them well enough, but she hadn’t the mind to get the washing done, the house cleaned, and the food she offered was out of cans. She talked very little until she began to drink after the children were in bed, and then she talked endlessly, wildly about suicide and murder. She said being a woman was simply too degrading. Henry did not love her. He didn’t want to introduce her to any of his New York friends. He only made love to her after looking at his dirty pictures. Why should the girls grow up to be treated like that? In India girl children were killed. She’d seen it for herself when she was a child. Sometimes I argued with her, asked her why she’d made me godmother to them all if she thought she had absolute power over their lives, told her I was a woman and loved my life. To that she replied that I didn’t yet live in the real world. I told her I never intended to. Henry left very early in the morning and came home late at night, taking advantage of my presence for some time to himself, for, once I’d gone, he’d have to be back to relieve a sitter, there to guard the children from their mother.

  One afternoon I took the children to a neighbour’s to play and stayed with them chatting with the mother of their friends.

  “Ann’s such a wonderful person,” she said, “so much calmer and wiser than the rest of us. If ever there’s a crisis in the neighbourhood, she’s the one who knows what to do.”

  So the serene mask she had always worn hadn’t cracked for anyone else. Her neighbours didn’t even know she’d been in the hospital. She lived inside her house, inside that madness, and nobody knew, except Henry and me and the woman who watched over her while Henry was not there. It seemed to me so appallingly lonely. Yet to contradict her neighbour would be a betrayal of Ann. In the adult world people simply didn’t know each other at all. How could they really help each other?

  I knew, for the sake of the children, I should have stayed on, but I had made other promises I had to keep. Neither Ann nor Henry asked it of me, both so locked in their anger and grief that I was hardly more than a temporary relief. I had never been really very real to either of them. But what about the children?

  “I’ll commit her if I have to,” Henry said. “The doctors think she’s going to come out of it. It just takes time.”

  My meeting with Roussel, which should have been so joyful, was blurred with my fear and guilt for the children. I took her to Granny Rule’s house which was full of aunts and uncles, cousins. One of my young cousins, Roddy, was so fascinated by Roussel’s accent that he practised, “I’m going down the path in an hour and a half to take a bath.” My father’s twin brother, whom I’d told Roussel was a cold, stiff man compared to my father, arrived and kissed all his female relatives down the line until he got to Roussel, smiled at this unknown woman and kissed her, too. The whole family delighted her, and I was distracted enough by them not to think too much about those threatened and vulnerable children I’d left behind.

  We’d been invited by Libby Pope to spend the last few days before we sailed with her at her family’s summer place in upstat
e New York. Once there, I had a severe migraine. Roussel went with Libby to see the sights while I was left in the care of the old family servant who made me her special iced tea.

  We nearly missed the boat. Only the first-class gangplank was still down, and we ran for it. We did have the luxury of a cabin for two, but it was airless, claustrophobic. One night, in desperation, we slept all night on deck under blankets, as a result of which we arrived in England with heavy colds. But I did get my trunk full of gifts through customs without duty. Roussel was made to pay on two pairs of nylons. Fortunately, most of her new things were with my luggage, and she didn’t know about them until we arrived in Horsham. The tea set for her parents was a great success. So were the things I’d brought for her.

  There were several long letters from Willy waiting for Roussel. I heard nothing from Ann. I suppose all relationships begin with burdens of separate sorrows, regrets, guilts that can be known but not adequately shared.

  In the cold winter flat in West Hampstead a cousin of Roussel’s had found for us, I made my first real home, learned after a fashion to cook, to entertain friends, to live with a lover and to write my first, unpublishable novel. In that process, I also began to learn how to live with the baggage of my life, its rhythms of failure and rebirth.

  Afterword

  Linda M. Morra

  Books are neither conceived nor written in isolation. So it is with Jane Rule’s autobiography, Taking My Life, in which she illuminates those social interactions that gave shape to who she was to become, as a person and a writer. These kinds of interactions might be seen to characterize the process of ushering Rule’s autobiography into print, of getting Taking My Life into the form it currently assumes. That I stumbled upon it in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, where the University of British Columbia Archives are housed and where I was perusing Rule’s papers, was the very result of one such exchange: I had had a stimulating conversation with David Anderson, a profoundly generous and intelligent friend. I regard that conversation as the catalyst for getting this work into print. We had been discussing the nature of my academic research, which focuses on Canadian women authors and the publishing industry in Canada, when he mentioned the Little Sisters trial in which Rule had played a significant part. He alerted me to the fact that the Rule papers were being stored in the archives at the University of British Columbia and that little critical and archival work on her had been done up to that point.