Coming of Age

by Deborah Beatriz Blum

  As she walked toward the table, Ruth rehearsed a greeting. As she drew closer she hesitated. Suddenly it felt like the wrong time to interrupt.

  That night Ruth wrote in her journal, “Said nothing to Mrs. Parsons at lunch—nor she to me. Dr. Boas said I was to approach her.”

  The next day Ruth felt more courageous: “Wrote Mrs. Parsons I was interested.”

  Ruth spent the rest of the week in the reading room at the museum, revising a paper she was writing on the Serrano Indians of California. As she was leaving the library, she spotted, halfway down the hall, a man dressed in eccentric garb.

  He noticed her, too. “Ruth,” he hollered. “Lunch?”

  The man was Pliny Earle Goddard, the museum’s curator of Indian artifacts. From his spume of pomaded hair down to his bolo tie, it was clear this was a man who paid too much attention to his appearance.

  Goddard was the boyfriend of Gladys Reichard, the same Miss Reichard who had managed to snag the department’s one open teaching position.

  He must be gloating.

  Ruth turned toward him, a gentle smile on her lips. “Hello, Dr. Goddard.”

  “Library research again, Ruth? We’re going to have to set up a cot for you in there,” he said with a laugh as he led her toward the dining room.

  That night she made the following notation in her journal:

  Lunch with Dr. Goddard. He settled scores for my lack of attention to him this winter. Began with my felicitations on Gladys’ job. He took up Dr. Boas’ worry about me for me. “He said he supposed there’d always be these driblets of research but that was all he could see ahead for me.”—I feel some capacity for making a place for myself, thank you! But on the elevated [train] I was weary, and plain wept with vexation.

  On the following Monday Ruth received a letter from Mrs. Parsons offering to pay her $1,000 to undertake research on Southwest mythology. She accepted. The headaches, however, did not subside. At first she couldn’t understand why accepting this fellowship would cause so much stress, and then one night the anxiety came into focus.

  Of course, she was silly not to have known it earlier.

  The fellowship meant that she would have to do fieldwork. She knew Dr. Boas would expect as much from her. His methodology was built on an “insistence on inclusive and systematic field investigation.”

  The truth was that Ruth was terrified of leaving the cool safety of the library and going into the field—choosing a community, mixing with strangers, all the intimacy that kind of human contact would necessitate. Not to mention that a summer away doing fieldwork would threaten her already fragile relationship with Stanley.

  * * *

  Lunch had been eaten, her papers packed into her satchel, and Ruth was heading for the train. At home, Stanley’s present—“a beautiful new Zeiss lens Kodak”—was waiting to be wrapped before she made the preparations for his birthday dinner.

  The sidewalk was crowded. Ahead of her she saw a man’s head poking out above the others. The hair was long around his neck, his hat tilted at an angle. The shape of his shoulders, the way he swung his arms were unmistakable. Her heart quickened.

  It was not unexpected that she should see Edward Sapir here, heading for the streetcar. Ruth had marked on her calendar that Florence was leaving the hospital today. No doubt he was going to pick her up.

  The last time she had seen Dr. Sapir he’d told her his wife was better, saying, “At least there’s something else to think of besides life and death.”

  She followed him down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians, staying far enough back so he wouldn’t notice her.

  Her mind raced. She could tell him that she’d finished the dissertation. Maybe he would ask to read it. After all, it elaborated on the ideas she’d explored in her “Vision” paper, the paper he’d so admired.

  As she drew closer she became aware that her blouse, under her arms, was cold and clammy.

  She was almost alongside him. All she had to do was reach out to touch his arm.

  She slowed, and then stopped, letting him walk ahead. She watched him disappear into the crowd.

  That night she recorded her near encounter in her journal:

  Worked on texts AM. Out to Bedford Hills. Saw Dr. Sapir ahead of me at noon, but suddenly I didn’t care whether he looked up or not. He didn’t, and I went on to the train.

  8

  HELL’S KITCHEN

  Three nights running before the funeral, I returned to wash dishes and offer companionship to my friends in the kitchen. I could not offer prayers; nor was I moved to.

  —LUTHER CRESSMAN

  January 1923

  Luther and his father, Dr. George Cressman, walked at a brisk pace up the dirt road. Dr. Cressman carried a walking stick and Luther a shotgun, breech open, across the crook of his arm. Before them ran the Cressmans’ favorite hound, Virgil. The dog had picked up a scent and was crying excitedly under his breath. He took off, Luther and Dr. Cressman watching him go.

  Luther was happy to be back home again. Father Sparks was already talking to him about possible assignments. After he and Margaret married it would be good to live in the country. “The city changes a man,” he thought, and not necessarily in a good way. He and Margaret had a lot to think about.

  Luther had found an opportunity to bring up the subject with her last week after they went to a matinee of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Margaret loved the play for its mixture of fantasy and realism. She said Grieg’s score was haunting. Afterward, sitting in a tea shop, she’d talked about her upcoming exams and the Barrymore performance of Hamlet she hoped they’d be able to see, adding happily, “Such a life! I scarcely have time to breathe!”

  Luther had cleared his throat. “I’ve been speaking to Father Sparks,” he said. “The place the bishop offers is at Mansfield, in Tioga County, on the state line. There’s a rectory, and a garden.”

  “The state line?” Margaret had said. “That’s a good distance from here.”

  “There are a couple of places but Father Sparks said they are not nearly as good as Mansfield. The rest are all small, soft-coal towns.”

  “Are you sure we want to be so far from the city?” she asked.

  “A Ford, a new one, is provided with the rectory. Elmira is twenty-two miles away. That’s about ten dollars’ worth of car fare from New York.”

  “Well,” said Margaret, “it might be all right. But I don’t know if I want to live out that far.”

  Walking beside his father now, with the feeling of contentment that hung between them, Luther wondered how Margaret could not like living out here. Ahead of them stretched a carpet of fallen leaves, dotted with patches of thinly crusted snow. From somewhere in the woods they could hear Virgil, his drawn-out cries coming faster and faster.

  “Maybe he’s got something,” said Luther.

  “Don’t think so,” said Dr. Cressman. “Just running off some steam.”

  They walked on, listening to the cries.

  “Virge,” called Luther. “Good boy! Go get ’em!”

  They watched as the hound appeared, then disappeared again between the maze of gray and brown trunks.

  “No matter,” said Dr. Cressman, when finally they heard only silence. “Let’s just enjoy the walk.”

  “It’s great to be here,” Luther said. “Sometimes when I’m in the city it seems like the wrong place to be.” He glanced over at his father. What he really wanted to tell him was the change in direction Margaret’s life was taking. Up until now he and Margaret had shared the same dreams: that he was to become a minister in a country parish and she a college executive. They would raise a large family of six children. Somehow that had all changed. He wasn’t even sure how it had come about, or when. Now Margaret had work in the city that she wanted to pursue. While Luther had always believed that what made a strong marriage was the support each partner gave the other, he didn’t know how to reconcile their diverging paths. Maybe his father could give him good council.

  Instead, hes
itant to bring it up, Luther said, “Papa, I went to my tenements again. It’s gotten easier. They know me now. I don’t dread it like I used to.”

  An image of the tenements, an “unbroken line of brick buildings, four or five stories high” loomed up before him. He could smell the reek of boiled cabbage and the pungent stench of the outhouses.

  “That’s good,” said Dr. Cressman, taking his pipe from his jacket pocket, reaching in and fishing out his tobacco pouch. “I’d like to come with you, next visit.”

  “Father Pomeroy warned me, if I were to meet someone on the stairs to stop with my back to the wall. But I can tell you, in all my work there, no one has ever bothered me.”

  His father nodded.

  “I have definite interests there, people I know,” said Luther. “Good people.”

  They walked in silence while his father filled his pipe and lit it.

  Finally Luther said, “Papa, do you know anything about the law here in Pennsylvania? Can a physician or a nurse give information about contraceptives?”

  “Of course not,” said Dr. Cressman. “It’s forbidden.”

  By the tone of his voice it was apparent that his father agreed with the generally held opinion that the use of contraceptives was immoral.

  Just then they saw Virgil coming back with something in his mouth. As he came closer they saw it was a stick and Luther laughed. Virgil came up and dropped it at Dr. Cressman’s feet.

  “I don’t think he believes you’re going to use that shotgun today,” Dr. Cressman said, bending down to pick up the stick.

  “Well,” said Luther, returning to the topic of birth control, “some young people, just married, want to put off having children on account of financial reasons. They aren’t ready yet.”

  Dr. Cressman grunted, then tossed the stick in a spinning arc way out ahead of them, Virgil taking off after it.

  Luther had no intention of saying so, but he and Margaret had decided to put off starting their family for a couple of years.

  That night Luther wrote to Margaret:

  I went along with Papa up above the Falls of French Creek and down below Pughtown. The hills are our hills again, the cold, stark trees, a sprinkle of snow over all, and a leaden gray sky—I wish we could enjoy them together but we will soon again my dearest. And after winter spring will soon be here.

  With every turn of the seasons September of 1923 drew closer, the time when he and Margaret planned to be married. But, oh, how he yearned for the touch of her:

  Dearest little wife to be you are such a sumptuous sweetheart and such a treasure of a promised bride and comrade. When I am with you I do not want to say goodbye and when I am separated from you I long to be with you and to be in the glory of your presence. I am so much a part of you and you of me that it is an anomaly to be separated.

  Still, there was a lingering doubt. Luther knew Sherwood Mead was not in favor of the marriage and had even tried to convince Margaret that she could do better. Not that the old man’s opinion carried much weight with Margaret. Everyone knew that she made up her own mind.

  Luther, however, wanted both sets of parents to be happy with the union. One night when he met Margaret after her last class, he reported that he’d talked to her mother and found her to be their ally. “She said she would cooperate by urging the other member of the family to see things the same way,” he said. “I’d say things look pretty promising.”

  On January 21, 1923, Luther was ordained into the priesthood of the Anglo-Catholic Church. He told Margaret that he “looked like ‘the Faustus’ in his clericals.” He was now, in the eyes of his church, a priest in the service of all people, all the children of the Kingdom of God. It was the culmination of four years of study at the seminary.

  While Luther waited for his permanent assignment, he had decided to broaden his horizons by pursuing graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University. With the encouragement of Father Pomeroy, he chose for his thesis the life of John Wesley, an eighteenth-century Anglican cleric who had lived during the time of the Industrial Revolution. What so intrigued Luther was that Wesley, like himself, had been so disturbed by his era’s horrific social conditions that he had decided to go beyond what the church was willing to provide. Moving from town to town, ministering to the poor, Wesley had become, first and foremost, a social reformer.

  In the meantime, Father Sparks arranged for him to split his time between St. Clement’s and another low-income parish, the small Anglican Convent of English Sisters, on the Lower East Side.

  * * *

  On a Monday morning in March of 1923, Luther was approached by Father Sparks, who told him that over the weekend one of their parishioners—a young man—had come to St. Clement’s, desperate for help. The man’s wife had gone into labor, giving birth to twins, a boy and girl, but had suffered fatal convulsions during the delivery. Luther thought he remembered her, an apple-cheeked young woman, barely twenty years of age.

  He was stunned to hear that she had died.

  Wanting some air, Luther walked outside the seminary’s redbrick edifice, exiting through its iron gates. What bothered him most was that he actually felt a sense of relief that he had not been present when the grieving husband had come looking for help. He doubted whether he could have met the challenge of that moment. And if he really had nothing significant to say in such a situation, didn’t that call into question all of his vows?

  Walking up the avenue, oblivious to the rush of traffic on all sides, he felt resentment at the inequalities of life by which needed care for life’s basic functions should be available to a favored few with money enough to buy it.

  That night Luther put on his clerical collar and vest. It was his duty to visit the bereaved family.

  As he walked in the cold along Ninth Avenue, nearing the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, Luther could smell the grainy smoke of an incinerator. In the dark he saw other fires burning in metal trash barrels. People were huddled around the barrels, holding their hands above the flames for warmth. Coming closer he found his way obstructed by a man sitting against the building, his shoeless feet sticking out before him, cracked and bleeding. Luther stepped over him, and then over a woman wrapped in a blanket.

  The woman had a bottle in her mouth and was spitting something into it. She looked up at Luther. The light off the fire caught her clouded eyes. A smell that seemed to be a mixture of gin and vomit rose up off of her.

  These tenements housed some of Luther’s people, the families he’d gotten to know at St. Clement’s. This was the first time he’d paid a visit after dark.

  Indigent men and women were loitering in the doorways. On the sidewalks, around their feet, were their belongings, dark piles of filth that smelled of urine. He averted his eyes so as not to make eye contact with anyone. Then he felt something hard hit him in the back. It shocked him for a moment. He quickened his step, looking for an address on buildings that were not marked. Finally, standing on the pavement in front of what he thought to be the correct building, he looked down a half dozen steps into what was another level of hell.

  He walked to the bottom, knocked on the door. While he was waiting he could see a dark ooze of sewage puddled up around the corners of the foundation. After a moment, the door opened. A stout woman motioned him to come inside.

  The room fell quiet as soon as he entered.

  As Luther’s eyes adjusted to his surroundings, he saw the indistinct forms of several people gathered around a young man who held a bundle in his arms. Next to him an older woman held another bundle.

  Luther offered a greeting, feeling a wave of intense discomfort pass over him.

  Through an open door he could see a small kitchen. Scattered stacks of dirty dishes were sitting on a table and around the sink. Friends had brought food to be served with coffee or tea, but no one had bothered to wash the dishes.

  Seeing how he could help, Luther slipped out of his coat and moved toward the kitchen.

  Turning to the three women who were
closest to him, Luther said, “Please give me an apron.” When the women didn’t respond, Luther said, “Washing dishes is something I am very good at.”

  They saw he was serious.

  One of the women followed him in and handed him a long, soiled apron and, once he had it on, she tied it around his waist and then went back out to the others.

  The rancid smell of old food that hadn’t been cleaned in days assailed his senses. Luther stayed in the kitchen, scraping the congealed food off the plates, trying to think what else he could do. The family’s muted conversation didn’t give him any clues.

  He couldn’t stop the thoughts from coming:

  What did the church have to say about this? Our social ethics classes, showed that the church was not unaware of it, yet as far as my seminary training went it might not have even existed. How could I, feeling as I did, have repeated with any honesty the prayers of consolation the prayer book provided? How could I, when perhaps this death and all it portended need not have happened?

  From time to time, one of the mourners would wander into the kitchen and talk to him. He learned that the apartment belonged to the parents of the dead woman. They planned to care for her babies.

  For the next three nights, Luther returned to the apartment to wash dishes. He was there to “offer companionship to my friends in the kitchen.” He felt he could not offer prayers; nor was he moved to.

  * * *

  On the morning of the funeral, after the Requiem Mass, Luther walked out of St. Clement’s to find a row of horse-drawn carriages standing by the curb. Who was paying for these? Certainly not the widowed husband and his impoverished family. Coachmen were helping mourners step up into the carriages. Luther peered into the first one and saw that it was overflowing with members of the family. As he passed the second carriage, its door swung open. Father Sparks was seated alone inside and he beckoned Luther to climb in. For some minutes they waited. Then from outside Luther heard a commotion, and a shout to start up. The carriage pitched forward and they began their long journey from lower Manhattan to a cemetery in the Bronx.