The future loomed before him as an empty expanse. The university with its oodles of Rockefeller money and its community of engaged intellectuals meant nothing to him. All he could think about was that he would arrive in a place where there would be no Margaret. When she returned from Samoa it would be to New York City, not to Chicago. Somehow he had to convince her to join him. As soon as he was settled he would talk to Cole.
At the moment what he wanted was to see Ruth. He urged her to route her return trip through Chicago:
There’s no one on God’s earth (of those residing on this continent) I’d sooner see there or anywhere.… And do stay in Chicago as long as you possibly can, for I want you to at least glimpse the children, if that is possible. And I want to talk to you. Perhaps you can help me buy furniture!
* * *
On a Friday afternoon Edward stood under the massive portico of Union Station, outside the Western Union office. Looking in, he could see that a line of customers had formed in front of the counter. When he stepped inside he smelled the familiar odor of ink and heard the rapid click of a teletype machine.
The tone and content of Margaret’s last letter had alarmed him. She had complained about feeling lonely and, of course, about her arms. Granted, his letters to her had been harsh, impulsive, and self-centered. Perhaps he was responsible for making her feel worse.
To make amends he had decided to send a cable.
His hand closed around a scrap of paper covered with letter combinations. He’d written out a message in code, the code she’d devised for just these kinds of situations. It said that he loved her, only her, and was anxious to know that she was all right.
He looked at his watch and calculated the time difference. Right now it was dawn in Samoa. When Margaret woke, she would find his cable waiting for her. Filling out a form, sliding it through to the clerk, he waited for the clack of the teletype. Once he was sure of the cable’s transmission he felt better.
The next morning he woke up early and found that his mother was already awake, busy in the kitchen, making the children their breakfast.
“Has there been a cable?” he asked, his voice booming out too loudly.
“A cable?” she said, looking up, startled by his tone.
“I’m expecting one. Please let me know when it gets here.”
That day he stayed at home all morning and afternoon, trying to read, waiting for Margaret’s reply. By the day’s end he was becoming alarmed.
He thought how, in a number of Margaret’s letters, she’d referred to the pain in her arms. She refused to take the neuritis seriously. If one knew anything about her complexes, one would simply be forced to assume, on general principle, that she was exhibiting some sort of hysterical symptom. He hoped she was not at the beginning of a physical breakdown. All the signs indicated that it was due.
As the night wore on he became even more convinced that something must be seriously wrong. He had to find out if she was all right.
She was staying in that hotel alone; he had to locate someone who could go to her room and check on her. Suddenly a name came to mind. Margaret had mentioned a Dr. Owen Mink, the chief medical officer. He was the navy man who’d been instructed to look after her.
By the time Edward reached Western Union he’d composed his message. Entering the office he was relieved to see there was no line. He wrote out the cablegram and had it sent it to Dr. Owen Mink, Tutuila.
* * *
Margaret, always one to be industrious, was pleased with herself for identifying a place in the station where there was daily interaction between people speaking both Samoan and English so she could “practice hearing translation.” That setting was the High Court. When Margaret eased herself into a seat in the courtroom, a case was in progress. A fifteen-year-old girl had been accused of biting off the ear of a rival. The presiding judge was an American lawyer from Los Angeles. After two hours, he sentenced the defendant to three months in jail. Margaret left the courtroom with the feeling that the judge “believes with all Americans here that the Samoans are a suggestible lot of children.”
As Margaret was walking down the courthouse steps she heard someone call her name. She looked and saw Dr. Mink walking toward her, in his hand a piece of paper.
“Miss Mead,” said Dr. Mink. He waved the paper. “Miss Mead, your father cabled.”
Hearing this, she was worried.
Rushing toward him she grabbed the cable out of his hand. Seeing it had been sent from Ottawa she felt the heat starting to spread over her cheeks.
Dr. Mink said, “I thought you said your father was at the University of Pennsylvania?”
“He must be doing some work in Ottawa,” said Margaret.
When she showed no inclination to discuss the matter further, Dr. Mink said, “Well, all right then, I hope everything is as it should be,” and walked away.
Later in the day, Margaret encountered Mrs. Mink and three other ladies as they were heading to the Officers’ Club for a game of bridge. She didn’t know if she was imagining it, but they all seemed to look at her with disapproval. If she wasn’t so much at the mercy of Dr. Mink, she’d find it amusing.
She wrote to Ruth:
… and then to cap the climax Edward cabled me Saturday and I couldn’t answer until Monday, and so he cables Dr. Mink. Heard now on every side, “Who do I know in Ottawa?” They thought my father was at the U of P, etc. I’ve written him very wrathfully, but please reiterate when you write to him. It just needs about a feather’s weight to have these people shut their doors and not only not cooperate but actually hinder my work.”
* * *
“It’s more than generous of you to take up my letters with such beautiful interest,” said Edward, pulling out a chair from behind the desk, turning it around, and straddling it. “You are no doubt shocked by my last letters.”
“Why?” Ruth asked.
“I am thoroughly ashamed of them.”
Edward and Ruth were together in Ruth’s hotel room. Ruth was perched on the edge of the bed, holding a cup of tea in her hands, Edward facing her. Neither was paying any attention to their surroundings.
“What exactly did you say to her?” asked Ruth.
“At the moment I don’t know,” he said, running a hand over his eyes. “When I get into certain moods, I go completely off the handle.”
They had eaten dinner in a restaurant close to the hotel, on Chicago’s South Side. Edward had brought the children there so Ruth could see how much they’d grown. After dinner, he’d taken the children in a taxi back to his temporary lodgings and left them with his mother, before hurrying back to Ruth’s hotel.
Now finally, he and Ruth were free to talk.
“Margaret is a girl of extraordinary power and insight,” said Edward. “She’s whittled down Luther’s personality to the point where, apparently, the only claim he has on her is to accept what gifts she wife-mothers him.”
“I don’t know that I’d characterize it like that,” said Ruth.
“Leaving him no choice but to declare that he’s happy with that.”
“I think you have to take him at his word.”
“And Margaret?”
“She loves you both.”
“Loves? Loves us both you say?” Edward struggled to his feet and started to pace. “Forgive me. But I still belong to the ninety-nine percent statistics who believe that a woman’s love cannot be shared by two men.”
“I’m just expressing for Margaret what she can’t at the moment say for herself.”
“Am I to accept Margret’s philosophy of love without a wink, though the mere contemplation of it causes me untold misery?”
Ruth said nothing.
“I can see by your silence that you think I should,” said Edward.
“Even with Luther in the picture, there must be some way for you to hold on to the beauty of the experience,” said Ruth.
He held up his hand. “Please, Ruth, try to see things a little my way as well as Margare
t’s. I can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t get my heart into work or planning. I feel absolutely lost. The image of little Margaret actually loving, with what all the word means, two men at once just sets me crazy.”
Ruth gave no indication of what she was thinking.
“Now I realize the hopelessness of moving such cultivated girls as you and Margaret to recognize the claims of the misguided majority which, by the way, is likely to be more nearly ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent.”
“Really, Edward, when you say such things, it sounds like your possessive panic is taking over.”
“Does it not occur to you that possibly there is something Margaret might reasonably sacrifice?”
Ruth seemed to shake her head.
Edward laughed. “You know, Ruth, there is a real element of comedy in the whole situation. Someday I may discover that a woman can love, truly love, two men at the same time, giving her body to each, but I haven’t discovered it yet.”
He walked to the window, undid the latch, and lifted it up. Leaning on the sill, his back to Ruth, he looked down on the street. The street lamps were glittering and car headlights illuminated the road.
“She is so much younger,” said Edward, almost to himself. “I mustn’t tie her down. So I sacrifice the home, if need be. I don’t demand wedlock. Nor do I, for a single moment, expect her to trim her scientific career for my sake.”
He turned, looking straight into Ruth’s face. “Margaret is a far more typical woman than either she or you know. And there is no shadow of doubt that Margaret loves me—why God only knows. And there is as little doubt that I love her.”
“I know you do,” said Ruth.
“Conflict or no conflict,” said Edward, thinking back on his last night with Margaret. “There’s dynamite latent in it all. Time and love will have to work out our solution, and there’s no forcing we can do.”
* * *
Ruth sat in the B&O’s dining car, looking out the window into the darkness. The train was rumbling through the farmland of western Pennsylvania. Sometime in the night they’d be passing through Philadelphia, Margaret’s hometown.
The night before, after Edward had left, Ruth had had a fitful night, her sleep broken by one bad dream after another. In one of them she and Margaret had adjoining rooms. She’d gone into Margaret’s room. Margaret was in bed, but she made no sign for Ruth to come to her, so Ruth went out.
Ruth woke up feeling miserable.
She could not deny that she was sick with worry. Edward wanted to bring Margaret to Chicago. If Margaret’s love for him was strong enough, he might succeed. If he succeeded, Margaret would disappear from her life. Truthfully, she told herself, the odds that this might happen were impossible to gauge.
She looked down at the stationery before her.
Darling, everything is a nice dark conspiracy to make me lonely for you—going back to New York; riding on the B & O; talking all last night with Edward. It was rather a joke on both of us—how we both talked of you and wished the other could be metamorphosed one precious moment into you.
She sat for a long time, ruminating. She knew that she had to tread carefully. Margaret’s love for Edward seemed to wax and wane; from what Margaret had been telling her in her most recent letters, that love was making a resurgence. It was best not to overreact.
Much might depend on Goddard’s job offer.
Ruth understood that Margaret’s ambition was unremitting. If the museum appointment came through, Margaret would be hard-pressed to turn it down. If she were working at the Museum of Natural History, she’d be anchored to New York City.
Ruth decided she must have a talk with Goddard. She’d make sure that Boas spoke to him, too.
She continued her letter to Margaret, mustering as much dignity as she could. About Edward she said,
But don’t think we didn’t enjoy each other too. He is looking a little thin, but alert and well. He’s very curious to know how he’ll like Chicago. All together I’ve never seen him when I’d more trust him to meet his problems as they could best be met.
Having shown self-restraint throughout, only at the end of her letter did she let some of her anxiety leak out, writing, “Dear love, write me that you love me. I treasure it so much it is hard for me to believe in it.”
22
A CEREMONIAL VIRGIN
In my three months down here I don’t think I’ve made a single friend except the Samoans in Vaitogi. Probably it’s because I’m so wrapped up in my own silly little woes.
—MARGARET MEAD
November 1925
Margaret had ten days to wait before she could leave with Ruth Holt and her newborn baby girl on the gunboat that was to sail for Manu’a. In the meantime, she was determined to get away from the naval station and out into the bush where she would be forced to talk Samoan. She’d heard about an out-of-the-way spot called Vaitogi that was twelve miles from the station and three miles from the last bus line. From time to time navy personnel visited there, and some had reported it was so pleasant they cried when they had to leave. With a letter of introduction from the Secretary of Native Affairs to Ufuti, the chief who was to be her host, she set off, ignoring the warning that she would return “covered with lice, fleas and boils.”
Vaitogi, known in American Samoa as the Village of the Turtle and the Shark, was on what was called “the iron bound coast” because it overlooked a shoreline edged with recently cooled lava, where the wild surf crashed to heights of fifteen-feet plus.
The villagers welcomed Margaret as if she were a goddess. Some of them had never seen a woman with golden hair and blue eyes. Many simply wanted to touch her white skin. Ufuti showed himself to be “keenly intelligent and surpassingly kind and gentle.” His wife Savai’i and his daughter Fa’amotu, immediately set to work making Margaret comfortable, spreading out a bed with “some twenty fine mats, mats which it takes a woman a year or more to make.” Moreover, when Margaret made the effort to converse with her hosts in Samoan, Ufuti and the other chiefs were so “tickled” they ordered “two young chickens a day” to be killed and prepared, and heaped her plate with mangoes, limes, and papayas.
Then Ufiti conferred on Margaret the highest honor possible, naming her taupou of the village. Margaret was not a virgin, and she certainly wasn’t unmarried, but she did not try to disabuse her host of his mistake. After all, there were to be many special fiafias (entertainments with singing and dancing) with her at the center, and the experience of participating in those would be invaluable.
Justifying her deception as necessary for the advancement of her ethnological research, Margaret passed herself off as chaste. For the days she spent in Vaitogi she reigned as the community’s ceremonial virgin alongside the chief’s own daughter Fa’amotu.
At the end of a delightful ten-day stay Margaret presented Ufuti with a hanging lantern as a tofa (good-bye gift). She composed a farewell speech in English, and asked Ufuti’s nineteen-year-old son to translate it into Samoan so she could recite it from memory:
America excels in the making of machinery. France excels in the making of clothes. From Italy comes the greatest singers. But the Samoan people excel the whole world in hospitality.
When she was done the whole family cried, and so did Margaret. The people of Vaitogi really had made her feel like she was one of them. Writing home, Margaret said: “I never spent a more peacefully happy and comfortable ten days in my life.”
* * *
The islands of the Manu’a group were three tiny specks in the South Pacific, a day’s journey by boat from the naval base in Pago Pago. Ta’u, the largest of the three, was eight miles wide, eleven miles long, and thirty-two miles in circumference. Approximately nine hundred to a thousand people lived on Ta’u, spread between four villages on the west coast, all connected by a steep, often muddy trail. The U.S. Naval dispensary—Margaret’s new home—was situated in the village of Luma, facing west and overlooking a lagoon and coral reef. The dispensary was the only papalagi
(foreign house) on the island, built of weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof. It was at the center of a small medical compound that provided supplies and nursing care to the native population.
Margaret joined a household that consisted of the Chief Pharmacist Mate Edward R. Holt, his wife Ruth, their two-year-old son Arthur, and new baby girl, Moana. Mr. Holt was tall and fair. In appearance he reminded Margaret of her brother Dick. Also living at the dispensary was Sparks, “… a young sailor whose chief preoccupation was the fact that he had only a third grade education.” Sparks spent his days “fooling with new types of radio apparatus and reading radio magazines,” and only appeared when he sat down to the table for a meal.
Margaret’s room took up half of the back porch and was next to the area where provisions were stored. A loosely woven bamboo screen divided where she slept from the metal cabinets that held all the sundry medical supplies.
For much of the day the sticky tropical heat made work of any kind impossible. Margaret wrote home, “there is the most peculiar sensation one gets … a feeling as if one’s skin were going to fly off in thin gossamer layers and a curious buzzing inside one’s head.” It didn’t take her long to realize that the pleasantest time of day was at sunset and she soon made it her habit, at the end of each day, to stroll out to the shore.
On an afternoon in late November, accompanied by a dozen girls and a handful of children, she walked to the outskirts of the village of Siufaga. There they stood on an ironbound point, with the waves lapping around their feet, watching as the sun dropped behind the coconut tree-covered hills, throwing the village and part of the beach into shadow.
Most of the adults were already there, clad in lavalavas and carrying buckets for water borne along on shoulder poles.
On one side of the beach all of the heads of families were seated in the fatetele (roundhouse) grinding kava (drink made from the kava root). Not far off a group of women were filling a small canoe with a solution of the native starch—arrowroot.
Only when the sun had disappeared into the sea did Margaret start back for home. The soft footsteps of the half-dozen children who were following close behind was a comforting sound. They had all nearly reached the store when the curfew-angelus began to sound, a wooden bell that sent a mellow clang through the village. Suddenly the children scurried for cover, scuttling under the store’s wooden landing. There they waited, until another bell sounded, signaling that the Lord’s Prayer was over.
Coming of Age Page 23