And then it occurred to her that maybe Ruth had already slept with Sapir. It was strange to think of Ruth in that light. She’d always considered Ruth attractive, but not in an erotic sense. Ruth possessed a nature that was classical, orderly, and controlled, what Nietzsche had called the Apollonian form. The thought of a different Ruth, one who gave expression to her physical needs, was not anything Margaret had ever considered.
She stared into the darkness, wondering if she would be able to fall asleep.
Somehow she had to get to know Edward Sapir. He was, she thought, “the most brilliant person … the most satisfactory mind” she’d ever met.
How would she go about it? Would it even be possible? She tried again to re-create the touch of his hand on her arm. Had he even touched her arm?
* * *
In mid-September, while still on the mesa, Ruth received a letter from Edward. It was dated a few weeks earlier, on August 23, 1924:
The meeting at Toronto was quite a success and there were a really large number of worthwhile papers. I think you would have enjoyed it but you did wiser, after all, to go to the Southwest, where you can see and feel it first hand.…
Edward told Ruth that what he “enjoyed particularly” was visiting with Goldie, and “getting to know Margaret Mead.” He said of Margaret, “She is an astonishingly acute thinker and seems to be able to assimilate and invent ideas at breakneck speed.”
“Getting to know Margaret,” thought Ruth, “that was strange.” She had received several letters from Margaret, all written since the conference, and there had been no mention of Edward.
In fact, it wasn’t to be until two weeks later, in a letter dated September 8, that Edward Sapir’s name appeared in one of Margaret’s letters:
This morning’s mail brought your letter along, my paper and a letter from Sapir so I’ve had much food for thought all day. I suppose it’s a very bad sign that Sapir has time to write letters but I do enjoy them. It’s such a satisfactory friendship, defaced by no tiresome preliminaries (that’s thanks to you) and founded on sure ground of like-mindedness.
“Like-mindedness?” wondered Ruth. Margaret had always gushed that it was she and Margaret who were like-minded, and now suddenly Edward had been made a member of their circle.
What Ruth couldn’t possibly know was that for weeks Margaret had been careful not to discuss Edward, even though the desire to do so had been overwhelming. The fact that she indulged herself now was because, earlier in the day, Edward’s letter had arrived, and she could no longer contain herself. Margaret felt compelled to tell someone about it and, when it came down to it, Ruth was her closest confidant.
14
GUARDIAN ANGEL
Dear George: I shall instruct all Navy personnel under my command in Samoa to do everything possible to facilitate the success of your daughter-in-law’s project.
—REAR ADMIRAL EDWARD STITT
December 1924
A camel hair coat was slung over the back of the divan. It was the first thing Luther noticed when he entered his living room.
He moved to touch it. Perhaps it was the burnished ocher color, so rich and exotic, or the fur collar, a semicircle of genuine sable, haughty enough to frame a queen’s face. Whatever it was, this insolent wrap dominated the room.
The coat was not Margaret’s. It would be profoundly out of place in her closet.
It could only belong to one of two people—Pelham Kortheuer or Bunny McCall. They were the only girls swanky enough to wear it.
He stood stock-still, listening for a sound. The door to their bedroom was closed, and out of courtesy he did not go toward it. Obviously, Margaret had loaned out their bedroom for an afternoon tryst. She believed in supporting her friends in their attempts to find love, and Luther did, too.
He entered the kitchenette and contemplated the pile of last night’s dishes waiting in the sink. Standing there, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, he turned on the water and reached for a dirty dish. It made a clinking noise against the other plates. He winced. The impulse to tidy up was strong, but not as strong as his desire to be considerate of the lovers in the bedroom. He threw down the sponge and shut off the faucet. Putting his coat back on, he walked out the door and locked it behind him.
Once outside Luther walked along Broadway, peering in the shop windows. Shopkeepers were pulling down shades, turning off lights, locking up for the day. Only at the barbershop was there any activity.
When Luther reached the toy store he stopped. He always took pleasure in the miniature German soldiers. These perfect replicas of a 1914 infantry brigade made out of lead and painted with enamel were accurate in every detail.
Then his eye moved to a model of a schooner. It made him think again about Margaret. Now she was talking about doing fieldwork someplace in the South Seas. Ever since Margaret had done that paper comparing tattooing patterns from one island culture to the next, she’d been fixated on Polynesia.
A journey to the South Seas was the kind of adventure that Luther and every other boy of his generation had been raised on, thanks to writers like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson. It was Stevenson, sailing by schooner to Hawaii, the Marquesas, and far-off Samoa, who had best captured the allure of that unknown world:
I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman Empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letter are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.… I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar.…
And now it was Margaret who might venture there, too.
She’d told Luther that Polynesia, meaning “many islands,” was—according to the great British anthropologist A. C. Haddon—“probably the part of the world which most urgently needs ethnological investigation.” It was one of “the primitive cultures that would soon become changed beyond recovery.” Even so, Luther could hardly imagine her traveling alone to such a wild, far-off, and unexplored land.
Back at their apartment, before inserting his key into the lock, he caught the odor of onions cooking, then heard Margaret’s voice coming loud and fast from within. He still thrilled at the sound of it.
He walked in. Margaret was standing over the stove, Pelham seated at their kitchen table. Pelham’s eyes were swollen.
“You’re much needed,” said Margaret, shooting Luther a meaningful look.
Luther pulled up a chair.
Margaret had always taken pride in the way her friends opened up to him. She joked that Luther “liked women better than men, as people,” and the truth was, he was completely comfortable listening to women. Louise Rosenblatt, who some time ago had nicknamed Luther “Margaret’s guardian angel,” had recently begun calling him “their guardian angel.”
“He told me he needed breathing room,” said Pelham, repositioning her chair.
“Here it is,” thought Luther, “another one of these affairs, that start out like firecrackers on the Fourth of July and end with the hulls all burnt out and soggy on the wet ground.” He reached across the table and pressed his hand over hers.
“He’s got another think coming if he thinks I’m going to wait around for him to make up his mind,” said Pelham.
Luther considered his own wife. She was purposeful, bossy at times, but always straightforward and generous. He was thankful that their life together was not fraught with false drama. Together they had pooled their energy so they could move forward in a productive and meaningful way. They were making life simpler for each other. It was the way marriage was supposed to be.
* * *
Margaret waited for Dr. Boas to answer.
They were the only two people there in the empty classroom, with its smell of chalk dust and radiator exhaust—the twenty-two-year-old student, and her sixty-six-year-old mentor.
From Margaret’s perspective, Boas seemed ancient, almost decrepit. She rued the fact that, considering the very real possibility that his retirement was i
mminent, he was unable to give her opportunities for the kind of person-to-person contact she craved. It didn’t make sense that, “as long as a student was doing well, he paid almost no attention to her,” while the mediocre ones sucked up all of his time.
She watched him walk toward the front of the classroom. He moved gingerly, almost unsteadily. He seemed beaten, and with good reason. Just three months earlier, in October, his twenty-seven-year-old daughter Gertrud had been stricken with polio. She’d died at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx where Dr. Ernst Boas, the professor’s oldest son, was the medical director. Boas never mentioned his daughter’s death, but his grief was palpable.
At the blackboard Boas pulled on a cord and unfurled an enormous map of the world. Moving closer to the map, squinting at it, he stood there for such a long time that Margaret found herself fidgeting.
She hated to waste the precious moments she had with him in silence. As one who was most comfortable in the midst of a high-spirited conversation, it never occurred to her that Dr. Boas enjoyed the silence, that he was satisfied just to gaze upon his map, taking in the names of far-off untraveled lands. She did not know that for Boas maps were as entrancing as great works of art, that he loved studying the topography of distant regions, the relationship of a people to their landscape, to the rivers and mountains that bounded them.
Nor did Margaret have any idea that her teacher was reliving that time in his own life when he had traveled to mysterious corners of the world, lands untouched by Western hands.
She could not possibly know that when Franz Boas was her age, with a graduate degree in physics from Heidelberg University, he had approached his own uncertain future with the same relentless determination with which she now confronted hers. He had felt then, as she did now, that by sheer willpower he could force the opportunities to materialize.
Always fascinated by the North Pole, Boas had devised a hair-raising scheme to bolster his credentials by becoming an Arctic explorer. Modeling himself after the heroes of his day, adventurers who had perished in their attempts to reach the North Pole, he had dreamed up his own expedition to the Arctic, and sold the story rights to a Berlin newspaper. With the advance he received on future articles, he financed his trip, sailing on a schooner to Baffin Island and spending the next twelve months among the Eskimo, traveling by dog sled to map their migration routes, sleeping in igloos, and surviving on raw seal liver.
And now Margaret was proposing her own far-fetched scheme—an expedition to a far-flung Polynesian island where ships docked only once or twice a year.
She watched him locate a cluster of tiny islands in a vast sea.
She held her breath.
Finally he turned back to her.
“No,” he said, “Tuamotu is not possible.”
“Oh, no,” she thought, “he’s going to insist I go to New Mexico.”
“Tuamotu is too remote,” he said, and he launched into a litany of the dangers she might encounter. Foremost on his list were the young men who had died while doing fieldwork outside the United States. His final example was William Jones, his own student, who’d earned his PhD from Columbia in 1904 and had gone to do research in the Philippines. Jones had been living in Dumobato, on the east side of Luzon, when he was assaulted and murdered by three members of the tribe he’d been studying.
Nodding her head, seemingly attentive, Margaret’s mind was racing. If Boas were to refuse now he might never relent.
“There’s enough to study here, with our own American Indians,” he said.
“But I want to work on change,” she insisted, “and the only way to do that is to work in an old and stable culture, one that has not been exposed to Western ways.” Rushing headlong into a discussion of tattooing patterns in Polynesia, she began to spew out random facts about how the manufacture of pigments was changing.
Dr. Boas scowled. “Why don’t you take on a study that you’ve lived through, that you can follow here, on our own continent?”
“I do know something about this, Dr. Boas, my dissertation—”
“No,” he said, waving his hand to cut her off. “I mean adolescence. Why don’t you do something on the adolescent girl?”
She paused.
“Put your tattooing aside,” Boas said, “and take on a study that you’ve lived through.”
Margaret felt her resistance rising like the rough on a dog’s back.
“Adolescence is a phase most parents face with dread,” said Boas, “but for all we know adolescence is a twentieth-century Western invention.”
Margaret’s mind leaped.
Here it was, the nature-nurture debate, the topic that was engaging the scientists of their time. Was it heredity or environment that determined the course of an individual’s life? Margaret knew that Boas had recently published an article in American Mercury suggesting that the National Research Council—known as the NRC—underwrite a study to answer this fundamental question.
Maybe the NRC could be tapped to finance fieldwork in Polynesia.
“Some will claim,” Boas was saying, “that adolescence is a universal phenomenon of human growth, that the difficulties of adolescence spring more from biology than from culture.”
Margaret was well aware that Boas believed the other side of the argument, that early on he had come out heavily in favor of the environmentalists, who asserted that “in the great mass of a healthy population, the social stimulus is infinitely more potent than biological mechanism.”
She studied him. Now adamant about making his point, he’d taken off his eyeglasses and was rubbing his eyes.
What she said now would determine whether or not he would let her go. She decided to try what she’d learned to do when she worked things out with her father—appeal to his vanity. She knew that there was one thing that mattered more to Boas than the direction she took in her own research and that was that “he should behave like a liberal, democratic, modern man, not like a Prussian autocrat.” He would be unable to bear the implied accusation that he had bullied her into accepting a culture that didn’t interest her. She’d never given any particular thought to adolescence, but she suspected that if she went along with his plan to study teenage girls, he might let her to go to Polynesia.
“We know how the young person experiences adolescence here, in our world,” Boas was saying, “Sturm und Drang and Weltschmerz. But is this what we would find in other cultures that have no contact with our own?”
“It’s a good idea,” said Margaret. “It really is, but in order to do it justice I’ll have to leave the continent.”
Boas shook his head.
“North America has been overrun. If I stay here, we’ll never know if it’s biology or culture that determines behavior.” She paused. “Tuamotu,” she said …
“Tuamotu is far too remote,” he said again.
Once again he turned back to the map. A long moment of silence hung between them while he let his finger trail across the small dots that comprised the islands of Polynesia. “What about American Samoa?” he said, his back still toward her. “There’s a naval base there. You might be able to secure some support.”
He turned to face her. “A boat must touch them every month, wouldn’t you think?”
* * *
They all trooped up Broadway into the wind. They had been to a concert at Carnegie Hall and were on their way home. Luther was glad for the blustery weather. The general confusion made it less necessary for him to engage in conversation. Next to him Louise Bogan was talking in too loud a voice. “I’m reading Marcel Proust,” she was saying. “I’ve given up Henry James as an old senile creature.”
Margaret and her new friend Edward Sapir, an anthropology professor from Canada, were behind them. They were discussing the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose orchestral work, The Swan of Tuonela, they just had heard performed.
Luther looked sideways at Louise, and saw her pull her coat close around her throat and happily toss her hair. He had always liked her, but
now he was not so sure. Her conversation had suddenly become too highfalutin, no doubt because Sapir was with them.
Louise was moving to Boston to be with her fiancé, Raymond Holden, and about that, Luther was glad. At least that relationship seemed to be working out.
“My new address is rather a nice horse-hair-and-black-walnut kind of address, don’t you think?” Louise was saying. “It’s way down on the wrong side of the Hill, almost against the Charles Street jail.”
Unfamiliar with Boston, Luther said, “I didn’t know there was a wrong side of Beacon Hill.”
“It’s all I can afford,” said Louise. “My entire exchequer is being ruined by visits to the dentist.”
Louise had recently been elected acting editor of the poetry journal The Measure. Under her watch the journal had selected a group of Sapir’s poems for publication. She admired Sapir’s poetry and, Luther thought, tried too hard to impress him.
Just then Luther heard Sapir say, “Like a faint mist, the music seems to enter the body without passing through the central nervous system.” Then Margaret said something that Luther couldn’t quite catch.
Apparently, until just recently, Sapir had assumed that Margaret was an unmarried graduate student. There’d been some confusion over her last name. Sapir had only just found out that Luther and she were husband and wife.
Luther was suddenly aware that he was straining to hear what Sapir was going to say next, and he hated himself for it. He caught the words, “… like a vague dream that wanders irresponsibly, flowing, unbidden…” and thought, “What malarkey.”
All night the three of them had tried to be polite, but really, Luther felt they had just been condescending.
Luther, Louise still at his side, reached the front steps of their building. He turned to look at Margaret.
He saw that her eyes were shining and happy.
* * *
Luther threw a football to his older brother, George. George took off at a full run. Visible behind him were the cold stark hills of French Creek.
Coming of Age Page 15