Later, when they were coming back, George carrying the football, Luther sighed. “Women,” he said, shaking his head.
George laughed.
Luther looked up at the gray clouds gathering overhead. “A storm is coming.”
George laughed even louder.
“I don’t know,” said Luther. “Now she’s talking about going someplace in the South Pacific.”
“That little girl?” said George, looking at his brother with amusement. “And you’re going to let her go?”
“Me?” said Luther. “I’ve got nothing to say about it.”
He wanted to tell George about “the tensions, indefinite as to cause perhaps a feeling of not communicating, with not getting through to the other, that left a sense of uncertainty, ill-defined and meaning unclear.” Of late, this sense of uneasiness had increased. He often joked that Margaret was so often absent he had to make appointments to see her.
“Worrying about it is a waste of time,” George said. “People do what they want to do.”
“That’s not true,” Luther said.
“Well, worry about it then,” George said. “See if that will change anything.”
“I knew you’d say something like that,” Luther said.
It wasn’t until later, when he was driving in the motor car accompanying his father while the doctor made house calls, that Luther found himself thinking about Margaret again.
Not looking in his father’s direction he said, “Papa. Do you remember when Margaret was writing her paper on Polynesian tattoos? Well, she’s stuck with it. She even has the idea she can do her fieldwork in the South Seas.”
“My word,” said Dr. Cressman, “she certainly does dream.”
“The place she wants to go is called Tuamotu, a little dot somewhere in the South Pacific. Dr. Boas says it’s too dangerous. He suggested American Samoa.”
“American Samoa?”
“It’s as safe place a place as any, if she can get some assistance. It’s administered by the U.S. Navy.”
His father grunted, then pointed to a small brick house set back from the road. “There,” he said. “Pull over.”
An hour later, when they were leaving the patient’s house, walking up the lane to the car, Dr. Cressman said, “I’ve been thinking.”
Luther turned to him.
His father had fished out his tobacco pouch and began to fill his pipe. He seemed to be dredging up some memory from the distant past. “I wonder if this would help Margaret.”
Luther waited.
“Don’t know if I ever told you the story, about how I stood in for Edward Stitt at his graduation from medical school?”
“Edward Stitt?” said Luther, racking his brain to remember why the name sounded familiar.
“I was a year behind Edward in medical school. Well, Edward was in the navy at the time. He was commissioned an assistant surgeon and ordered to his ship, just a week before graduation.”
Luther was still baffled.
“That’s when I stood in for him.”
Luther opened the car door for his father, waited for him to climb in, and then went around and got in on the driver’s side. Turning the key, the engine jumped to life.
“Could be time for me to write him now and collect on that promissory note,” said Dr. Cressman. “Edward’s now ‘Rear Admiral Stitt,’ surgeon general of the U.S. Navy. He might be able to provide the support Margaret needs.”
Luther pulled away from the curb.
“If you think it would help,” said George Cressman, “I’ll write to him.”
“If you do that, Papa,” said Luther, “I think we have it made.”
15
THE OLD KING MUST DIE
I am very eager not to take a false step. If it is possible for me to get started in New York, I feel that it’s the proper place for me to be.
—EDWARD SAPIR
January 1925
Edward pressed on with the letter that he was writing to his colleague Robert Lowie at U.C. Berkeley: “It is high time I got on to a university job if I am not to die without feeling that I spent my whole life as a square peg in a round hole,” he said. “This place is getting confoundedly on my nerves.”
Escape from Ottawa still continued to elude him. Months of searching for a university position had demonstrated that teaching jobs for linguists working with unwritten languages were practically nonexistent.
Berkeley, he already knew, was impossible. Alfred Kroeber, who professed to be his friend, had always been threatened by Edward’s aptitude with languages. Harvard also seemed to be off the table. Roland Dixon—who was “sympathetic” to Edward’s wish to devote himself to linguistics alone—had not been able to “cobble together” the funds to hire him there. And while a job offer seemed to be forthcoming from Fay-Cooper Cole, the head of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, there seemed to be little enthusiasm within that institution to combine the study of ethnology and linguistics.
For Edward, Columbia was still the most desirable location. After all, Boas was his mentor and New York City the hub of his intellectual universe.
Lately, Bill Ogburn, an ally who taught sociology and was privy to the inner workings of Columbia and its administration, had indicated there were rumblings of a sea change. The departments of Sociology and Anthropology might be combined, but only after Franz Boas retired.
Boas was sixty-six years old and looking frail.
In life, as in folktales, the old adage “the old king must die” still held. The question was when?
Although naive when it came to academic politics, Edward was wise enough to know that dancing on the grave of this hallowed patriarch would not only be unseemly, it would be profoundly counterproductive. In particular, caution was to be exercised among that clutch of female grad students who circled around Boas like mares in season. This especially meant treading carefully around Ruth. Although Edward considered her his closest confidant, her personal loyalty to Boas superseded even their friendship.
But Edward was in need of information.
There must be someone else within Columbia’s inner circle, someone who did not perceive him as a rival, who could provide him with a glimpse of the future. Aside from his friend Bill Ogburn only one other individual came to mind—the archaeologist Nels Nelson.
For the last two decades Nelson had been associated with any number of thrilling expeditions launched by New York’s Museum of Natural History. He’d surveyed the Upper Rio Grande Valley, excavated in Chaco Canyon, and had been part of the team that had discovered a Neolithic culture in the Qutang Gorge in China. Now he was preparing to go off with Roy Chapman Andrews on Andrews’s third expedition to hunt for fossilized dinosaur eggs in Mongolia.
Nels Nelson was only too happy to keep Edward apprised of Boas and all his plans. And in early February, at the end of a chatty letter, in which Nelson detailed the full extent of his preparations for Mongolia, he dropped some news that caused Edward to stagger up from his chair.
The letter referenced a sudden tragedy that had befallen the Boas family.
Heinrich, Boas’s youngest son, known to those in the department as Henry, had been killed in a freak accident
Nelson’s tone had been sympathetic, but at the same time matter-of-fact. Only a man who had not yet taken on the responsibilities of fatherhood could so casually drop such a bombshell.
Edward paced the room for some time before he sat down to write to Ruth:
I have just received word from Nelson in which he states in a postscript: “we were all greatly shocked this morning to read of Boas’ loss of his young son.” Does this mean that Heine has died? That would be terrible. Please drop me a line at once.
The agony of waiting for word by return post was nearly intolerable. It took another ten days for Ruth’s response to reach him. In it she described the freak accident that had killed Heinrich, age twenty-five, enclosing the obituary that had appeared in The New York Times on January 25, 1925:
/> TRAIN KILLS THREE IN MICHIGAN: Boas was taking the girls to Miss Bleasby’s father’s home at Pokagon … when the car was struck at a point where the view was obscured by trees. The bodies were found between the rails of the westbound track. The young man was a graduate of Storrs Agricultural College in Connecticut and had been at the Berrien County Farm about four months.
Edward visualized the bodies, lying on the rails, between the tracks. He was speechless. Within the space of three months, Franz Boas had lost two of his children, both in the prime of their lives.
* * *
Edward Sapir and Franz Boas sat in the study of the professor’s home in Grantwood, New Jersey.
The old man had visibly aged. His right cheek appeared to be paralyzed, his eye hooded under a drooping lid.
Condolences had been expressed, and the room hung in quietude for a good long while. Edward knew that Boas understood that he, Edward, was no stranger to the waves of grief that come in the wake of a sudden and premature death. There were no words that could ease that kind of pain.
Nevertheless, it was time for Edward to elicit the old man’s support in helping him escape from Ottawa.
Edward broke the silence, telling Boas that Fay-Cooper Cole at the University of Chicago had made him a serious offer. Perhaps Boas could use this information as a bargaining chip to leverage more interest out of Columbia’s administration.
“If it is possible for me to get started in New York, I feel that it’s the proper place for me to be,” said Edward. “I would be willing to accept a more modest position just to be in New York.”
“So you see teaching as the solution to your problems?” asked Boas.
As Boas was studying him, Marie Boas tiptoed in, carrying a tray with tea and an apple torte. She, too, looked worn and broken.
“What the hell do I care about exhibits?” said Edward, knowing that Boas was loath to see him give up control of Canada, which included a vast museum collection. “I should give so much to be in contact with people who are genuinely interested in linguistic research. It would give me the stimulus I so badly need.”
“I can appreciate your feeling that you lack congenial people with whom you can talk over scientific interests,” Boas answered, “but we all have to put up with that condition.
“However,” he added, “I am able to offer you a summer school appointment, but that’s all. You can teach two ethnology courses. There is some interest, which leads me to hope that in a few years a department of linguistics may be established. For that, we will have to wait.” And then, standing up, he indicated that the conversation was at an end.
“This is much looked for news,” Edward said. “Thank you.”
* * *
A few days later Edward walked into the Stockton Tearoom where he’d arranged to meet Margaret Mead. He spotted her, seated in a corner booth. As he walked toward her he felt a twinge of remorse at how he’d handled their last exchange. She’d sent him one of her poems, which he thought was decidedly mediocre. Considering their developing friendship, he’d found himself in a predicament, and had said as much to Ruth:
I wrote Margaret yesterday and decided to tell her gently but frankly how her verse affected me. She won’t take offence, I am sure, especially as I make the positive point she should go in for simple narrative verse, and I don’t think it would have been really frank or friendly of me to have passed over her verse in utter silence. That kind of charity would have seemed an insult to me if I had been she.
From the look of her now, she didn’t seem upset. Reaching the booth, he slid in across from her and said, “I am glad to see you looking as buoyant and as industrious as ever.”
Margaret smiled and pushed a package wrapped in brown newsprint across the table.
“What have we here?” he said, lifting the package.
“Don’t worry,” she said with a laugh, “it isn’t any more of my poetry.”
He undid the string and ripped open the paper. Inside was a book entitled The Growth of the Mind by Kurt Koffka.
Edward turned the book over in his hand. “I’ve heard of him.”
“He’s a professor of experimental psychology,” said Margaret.
“I see that.”
Edward opened the book to a page at random and read several paragraphs. He was aware that she was watching him closely.
“He probes some of the questions that you’ve been working on,” she said. “What forces shape personality, what forces determine behavior.”
He continued to read.
“For example, what would have been the fate of people we know,” said Margaret, “like Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams, or Ruth, if they had been born into another culture, like the Zuñi?”
“Ruth as a Zuñi.” He laughed. “Can you imagine that?”
Edward then said that he was going to teach two classes at the Columbia summer session. He planned to structure his ethnology course around topics of interdisciplinary theory. “I want to overhaul some of the fundamental concepts in a way that might be of interest to students of psychology, sociology and history.”
Margaret was listening to him with rapt attention.
The waitress appeared at their table, and he ordered for the two of them.
Margaret began to unbutton her sweater.
As Edward was talking, telling her that the manners and morals of tribes, as well as those of their own culture, were not piecemeal examples of behavior, but part of an overall pattern, he noticed her blouse. The pale ivory chiffon was nearly translucent. He could actually see the outline of her nipples pushing against the cloth.
He looked away, embarrassed. A moment later, in mid-sentence, his eyes returned to her blouse and he stared again.
He raised his eyes to hers.
Her face was tilted upward, her eyes looking straight into his. He reasoned to himself that a young lady would consider it unseemly to go around without a brassiere. He knew, however, that Margaret had some unconventional ideas.
“When one works with a living culture,” he continued, “this wholeness is a part of everyday experience.”
“That’s why I think you’ll really enjoy the book,” Margaret said. “Like you, Koffka interprets human activity as a pattern that unfolds in a series of actions, each one triggering the next.”
He was surprised at the sophistication of her thinking.
“You might be able to use him in your classes,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, patting the book. “I look forward to reading this.”
* * *
Back in Ottawa, Edward Sapir was restive. As usual, he blamed the weather. It was supposedly spring, and yet the sky still persisted in dropping pellets of frozen rain. On April 15, 1925, he wrote the following to Ruth:
I’ve been reading Koffka’s “Growth of the Mind” (Margaret’s copy) and it’s like some echo telling me what my intuition never quite had the courage to say out loud. It’s the real book for background for a philosophy of culture, (your, my philosophy), and I see the most fascinating and alarming possibilities of application of its principles, expressed and implied, mostly implied, to all behavior, art, music and culture, personality and everything else.
He looked up from writing the letter. It didn’t occur to him that perhaps his enthusiasm for the book was, in part, an enthusiasm for the person who had introduced him to it.
Since his lunch with Margaret he’d found himself thinking about her more and more. He found it perplexing that she was a married woman. That boy Luther, her husband, was a strange sort of fellow. Obviously he had sanctioned her decision to be called by her maiden name.
When Edward had commented on what he found to be a bewildering marital arrangement, Margaret had retorted with the rejoinder that he, Edward, was of a different generation than she, and perhaps this was the reason he didn’t understand.
Edward continued his letter to Ruth:
If somebody with an icy grin doesn’t come around to temper my low fever, I’ll soon b
e studying geometry again in order to discover what really happens when a poem takes your breath away or you’re at loggerheads with somebody. Nay more—unless a humanist like yourself stops me, I’ll be drawing up plans for a generalized geometry of experience, in which each theorem will be casually illustrated from ordinary behavior, music, culture and language.
He thought again about the way Margaret carried herself, with a step so light it was as if she was walking on air. She’d told him that she was trying to persuade Dr. Boas to let her go to an island in Polynesia. She said if she was able to secure backing from the U.S. Navy, he might actually let her do it. That was a foolhardy idea. He and everyone else knew her to be a person who was high-strung. How could a girl like her even consider going to the tropics?
But that would never come to pass, he was sure of it. Boas wouldn’t let it happen.
He ended his letter to Ruth, “How is Margaret? It’s too bad she has such a frightful time with the neuritis. Can’t something be done?” Then he shifted gears. “And how are you? And what news about the place? Here spring holds back. Hail today. Is this a place to live?”
* * *
With summer school just a few weeks away, Edward was busy making arrangements. He planned to leave the children in Ottawa, under the care of his mother, and come down to New York on his own.
He gave little thought to Chicago. When Ruth queried him on the possibility of a job there, he replied, “Until I actually get a black and white offer, I shall not count the cup as having attained the lip, nor shall I have the family’s pictures taken for the use of the immigration authorities.”
In truth, his hopes were still pinned on Columbia. Once he was ensconced in the department, perhaps Boas would be loath to let him go.
Most of all he kept thinking about Margaret Mead. While in New York he intended to spend as much time with her as possible. He gave little thought to her threat to go to the South Seas, nor to the fact that she was married.
16
A SECOND HONEYMOON
All competing affairs had been laid aside; and without intrusion, we were ‘living together in marriage,’ a kind of second and true honeymoon.
Coming of Age Page 16