Suddenly the storm’s fury seemed to abate. The calm lasted less than a minute, and while it did the air seemed “choked full of coconut leaves so stiff they might have been wired.” Even the blowing sand seemed suspended in the embrace of that calm.
And then the other edge of the storm, charging straight over the sea from Ofu, hit us, tearing that little calm into a thousand pieces. After that, it was just a question of how long before the house went. The two-months-old baby was the main point. One would be safe enough out in the open spaces between the houses. But it was pouring rain and the air was full of flying sand, coconuts, parts of tin roofs and so on.
Mr. Holt made the decision that they were all to shelter inside the concrete water tank. Handing Sparks a hatchet, he gave the order to start hacking a hole to let the water out.
Margaret was told to go in first so she could receive the baby. She went up the side and over the edge, stepping down into the pitch-black tank filled with several inches of water. Mrs. Holt followed.
Mr. Holt called, “Here comes the baby and she’s upside down.” A large blanketed bundle was put into Margaret’s hands. Righting the baby, she heard Mr. Holt’s voice call again, “Here comes Arthur,” as he helped his two-year-old over the edge and into his wife’s arms.
It was hours before the lashing rain and roaring surf subsided. When they crept out to survey the damage, only one room of the house had been spared. They crawled in between wet blankets and slept until morning.
The next day Margaret and the Holts picked their way through piles of sodden palm fronds, woven mats, and hunks of twisted metal. The village had been completely decimated. By Margaret’s count, only five of the natives’ homes had been left standing.
* * *
One week later the United States Navy dispatched Chaplain William Edel with a tugboat full of emergency goods. Edel had been chosen because he was acknowledged to have as good a command of Samoan as any officer on the base. Quickly proving himself a stickler for naval etiquette, Edel ordered Lieutenant Holt and Sparks to don their dress whites for a formal salute. Once he’d established his authority, he went to work “putting the place back on its feet.”
For Margaret the days and weeks following the hurricane proved to be enormously frustrating. The interviews she’d intended to conduct had to be postponed because “the whole village was busy building itself new houses, or weaving itself new walls or floors.” Informants, she complained, “were not to be had for love or money.” She spent most of her time wandering about, “sometimes engaging in useful activity and sometimes merely sitting on the floor and looking on.”
On January 5 she wrote to Dr. Boas to let him know that she was sending a preliminary report to the NRC that covered a period of fieldwork “too short to justify even tentative conclusions.” Even this was a stretch. She had yet to begin sustained research on the adolescent girls she had selected for her study. With only four months remaining to her on Ta’u, this was a matter of serious concern. She also confessed that she was “very much at sea” about how to present her results, once she had them.
Should she organize the material in a “semi-statistical fashion,” which might be misleading, or would it be preferable to write up her conclusions in the form of “illustrative case histories”? While she herself favored the latter approach, she made it clear that she would accede to his judgment. She took the unusual step of sending her letter by airmail post with the request that Boas “dash off an airmail answer” as soon as possible.
In mid-January she wrote to Boas again:
It is very sad that anyone as willing to take advice as I am should be so far beyond the reach of it. Life here is one long battle with my conscience as to whether I am working correctly and whether I’m working hard enough. I remember your saying to me, “You will have to waste a great deal of time,” but I wonder if you guessed how much.
The good news, she told herself, was that her future no longer depended on the success of her project. She didn’t need any more grant money. In fact, she didn’t intend to stay in Samoa any longer than she had to.
* * *
But while Margaret railed against her enforced idleness, beating herself up for the wasted time and unmet obligations, she failed to recognize that a remarkable transformation was taking place.
As the days passed she was actually practicing and improving upon a new and invaluable skill. Even though she wasn’t doing any sustained work on her “problem,” she was writing her bulletins, and they were turning out to be enormously entertaining. She was making the South Seas come alive for a rapt, if tiny, audience of family and friends.
The impact of this style of correspondence had not been anticipated. When she had begun the first of the bulletins, Margaret had done so for ease and practicality. “There was no way of knowing what lay ahead in the many months that I would spend on those far Pacific islands, but I wanted to share what happened so that, when I came home, they would know me better, not as a stranger but as myself.” She had no idea that the accumulated bulletins would form a written record of “her evolving consciousness.”
Nor did she know that these observations and her way of expressing them would be pivotal to her own coming of age.
Margaret had always wanted to be a writer—had tried her hand at different forms of written expression, from the rhetoric of debate, to short fiction, to verse—but she’d never really succeeded at any of them. To her great consternation there had always been someone who was better than she—like her close friend Léonie Adams, now a recognized poet. But the desire to write had never left her. If anything, her ambition had become even more consuming.
The genre she was now working in had been mined by many famous male writers, including Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. Theirs was the adventure literature she’d grown up with.
Now she was venturing into that same genre, but as a woman.
By exploring an exotic setting and recording her reactions to the landscape and the people who inhabited it, she was breaking new ground. She was creating a persona that—for a woman—had rarely been seen.
* * *
Frustrated in her attempts to get her research done, Margaret turned her attention to making plans for the steamer journey back to Europe.
“Mother Dear,” she typed, “This letter is about clothes.” Her typing had always been fast and accurate, and now that she had instructions to impart, her fingers flew over the keys. She consulted her calendar, comparing it to the steamer schedule she had copied out. Her letter wouldn’t leave for the United States until February 16. She needed to make Mother understand that the instructions she was sending were time-sensitive.
I’ve no mind to land in Sydney in the middle of winter in dotted Swiss. The reason I want dark clothes is because I have so many light ones. Didn’t that occur to you? For long trips light clothes are a terrific bother.
She wondered about the latest styles and what her friends were wearing these days. Not Ruth, who dressed with a studied indifference, but the ladies who had a sense of style, like Pelham Kortheuer or Louise Bogan.
Margaret was explicit about the various ensembles she needed for the ship. “I would like Mrs. Stengel to get me a smart silk traveling suit or dress,” she began, “but if a suit, one piece, not requiring a blouse.”
She described in detail how she envisioned it:
I would like it to be either black or dark blue or dark green (not brown). Something on the order of that little white and gold suit she got me, with at least three quarter sleeves. Something smart enough to wear right up till dinnertime, on ship board.
Whatever the color, she needed gloves to match, size 6.
She then went on to ask for another informal dinner dress. “Crêpe de chine would be nice and it’s not too expensive.” She also needed a dress to go with her big lace collar, a new slip for her peacock evening dress, and “a pongee blouse … or a tricolette one, something that doesn’t have to be washed all the time
.”
Now that she knew she’d be returning to New York and starting the museum job, there was lots to do. In one letter to Luther she told him to find them an apartment. In another to her mother she instructed her to “scrounge around” the local antique stores and buy them some good used furniture.
But her thoughts were constantly drifting back to the date of her departure from Samoa, which would fall somewhere around the end of May or beginning of June. When she sailed, she intended to travel in style. In her next letter to Luther she asked him to research sailing schedules and the cost of a first-class cabin from Sydney to Marseilles.
Life was different now, and it all had to do with Edward Sapir.
* * *
Edward’s letter was in her hands, one sheet of paper containing four short paragraphs. It had been written four weeks earlier, sometime around New Year’s. In it Edward said that he didn’t want to hurt her, but he’d fallen in love with another woman.
The letter wounded like a knife in the heart.
She was, she admitted, “hysterical enough to conjure up any demon.” Was this a defensive move on his part? Or a sadistic urge to give her a taste of her own medicine?
Her eyes searched the page, trying to read between the lines.
He explained that his values had not changed by “a millimeter,” that they were “emphatically more real to him than ever.”
“No doubt I’m being unjust,” he wrote, “but I seem to feel little necessity to do otherwise.”
He went on to explain that as his love for this new woman had grown, and “it had grown fast and strong,” his passion for Margaret had waned.
She looked again at the letter’s date. It was written a few days after Christmas. That was before he and Ruth spent time together in the city. She wondered when, exactly, had Ruth found out about his new love interest? Feeling her cheeks grow hot, she began to look through the letters she’d received from Ruth, searching for clues. Unable to find any she dashed off an angry letter accusing Ruth of keeping the news from her.
* * *
The minerals in the driftwood sizzled and popped, sending sparkles of blues and reds and yellows up in the flames. Margaret watched as the colors of the bonfire danced. There was no moon. Fog blanketed the sky. The multitude of stars that she knew to be above were not visible. The velvety darkness merged with an endless sea, a pounding surf that softly echoed all around her.
As she sat cross-legged on the damp sand, staring into the fire, there was no possibility of peace. Pulling the burlap sack toward her, reaching inside, she grabbed the first letter she touched, crumpled it in her hand, and threw it into the flames.
She watched its corners curl, then fully ignite.
She wanted the letters gone. She wanted Edward gone. Pulling others from the sack, hurling them, one after the other, into the fire, she sat riveted by the conflagration.
They were all burning fast now, and the tears were running down her cheeks.
Not so very long ago Edward had told her that she had reawakened his “capacity to love,” which he thought had died for all time. Now, it seemed, that capacity to love could be easily shifted from one person to another:
When circumstances and the clash of our temperaments and ideas made the continuance of my love for you a sheer impossibility, I found, paradoxically enough, that I had to love another.… I did not find, as you claim that you have found, that a simultaneous love of two is possible.
Who was this girl he had fallen in love with? What was her name? What did Ruth know about her?
As Margaret stared into the fire, and its fury began to abate, a different feeling came over her. She found herself wanting to save the letters, or what was left of them. If ever a group of words and thoughts should be saved, these were the ones.
But it was too late.
Edward’s words, his magical words, were gone.
Leaving the empty sack where it lay, she started back.
As she tramped across the sand, her tears continued to fall freely. Her eyes, still sore from an attack of conjunctivitis, burned.
When she finally was calm enough she wrote one more time to Edward. She thought she was being magnanimous by telling him that she hoped he would be happy and asked him to write her, “to assure her that he was.”
Above all, she wanted to know who this girl was he was falling in love with now.
24
A PRACTICAL JOKE
Doing straight ethnology is just fun and so easy once the people love you.
—MARGARET MEAD
February 1926
It was one of those sleeting rainy Sundays when no one was about and there was no question of going out. Stanley was in bed with a cold, and when Ruth brought him in some tea she found that he’d dozed off. Sitting back down on the couch, she tucked her legs under her, and looked out on the peaked roofs of Bedford Hills and the swirls of smoke curling up from the chimneys.
Gone was the specter of Edward Sapir. Soon he would be faded into memory, like the wisps of smoke outside her window. It was unsettling that even the most intense love could be so transitory.
By all rights Ruth should have been relieved that he had backed away from Margaret, and yet she experienced his change of heart as a defection. Worse, as a form of treason.
The girl was Jean McClenaghan, a graduate of the University of Toronto, and a recipient of a Smith College fellowship to study at the Juvenile Research Institute in Chicago. Ruth felt obligated to give Margaret a report but decided to tell her only the bare minimum. She had no intention of telling her how thoroughly smitten—and ridiculous—Edward had become.
Apparently the letter Ruth had sent to Edward in response to his “news” of Jean had communicated her disapproval. When he wrote back, he sounded offended:
You say you can describe Jean in considerable detail. Would you care to set down your preconceptions? I should be willing to corroborate or set you right where necessary.
Ruth really didn’t want to hear any more about Jean and she didn’t encourage him to tell her more. He did anyway:
Jean is very pretty, often beautiful when you gaze into her calm, radiant eyes that have so much purity of feeling, much tremulous certainty of love and such kindness. No, Ruth, Jean is not a simple dear thing. She is all woman. Quite all, and she has an alert and sympathetic mind. Too wise to make any mumbo jumbo of a rag-bag of intellectual goods. Her feelings are extraordinarily precise, unmarred, delicate … but hardly a taint of sentimentality.
He also seemed to be looking for opportunities to compare Jean to Margaret, in ways that would highlight the latter’s shortcomings:
Jean has great psychological insight; false gestures and wrong accents can’t pass her. She’d be shy and withdrawn with Margaret I suspect, but all the time her psyche would be crowding in on her and burning away all kinds of paper mache.
And, not surprisingly, Edward was already fantasizing about the future:
I have no true plans, Ruth—only dreams. Jean and I see each other rather frequently and have grown so closely together that the thought of a separation for longer than two or three days at a time seems difficult to bear. Neither Jean nor I are of the ambitious, planning type, and for that very reason are perhaps more likely to end up in wedlock than if we carefully scanned the future.
Certainly Ruth was not going to tell Margaret any of this now. Perhaps later, when her feelings weren’t so raw. Instead, she reported what she could, saying that Edward had commented on the Christmas present Margaret had sent, a posed self-portrait, taken by a professional photographer before she’d left for Samoa. It had finally just arrived at Edward’s office. He’d liked it, saying to Ruth “a strong wave of tenderness swept over me when I saw it.” And then, because they offered a measure of solace, Ruth quoted Edward’s final words:
Perhaps I have been terribly precipitate and brutal and yet something keeps telling me that under Margaret’s hurt pride there will be a cheerful little song of thanks, a glad relief at
being disburdened of a relation and an irritation that her nature desires to taste rather than to feed on. Am I not right?
During these months of separation from Margaret, Ruth had learned that some days of waiting were more difficult than others. Today was one such day. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that she’d spent the weekend researching hotel accommodations in Rome and Tuscany. Then, of course, there were the tickets she still needed to secure for their steamer journey home. She’d settled on the Saturnia, an Italian ship done in a Beaux Arts decor. Having heard that accommodations on the Italian liners were not to be trusted, she’d decided they couldn’t “risk anything but first class.” The cheapest first-class cabin would cost $234 and if Margaret had trouble covering the expense, Ruth had decided she’d make up the difference.
That night she found it almost impossible to sleep. She wrote to Margaret, “I almost weep at the thought. If this mood continues, it will be harder to wait the next months than all the time that’s gone by.”
* * *
By February, Margaret reported that she was thoroughly disenchanted with life at the dispensary. Her relationship with the Holts had broken down. She told her mother, “Mrs. Holt is the sort of old fashioned feminist who doesn’t approve of my keeping my name but thinks ‘women are so wonderful’ and is furious while I dispense all my dreadful radical notions.” Even worse, both Holts had “rebelled” at her having “mobs” of Samoans in her room. The final straw came while the USS Tanager was in the harbor. Members of the crew “jibed at Mr. Holt for having his porch covered with ‘Samoan kids.’” Since then Margaret had been longing to “escape from that tiny island and the society of the tiny white colony on it.”
Beyond this general atmosphere of unpleasantness, Margaret was finding it “practically impossible” to make any progress on her research. Now that hurricane recovery efforts had come to an end and services on Ta’u were restored, all the teenage girls had returned to school. Margaret complained there was little to keep her busy during the day. She wrote home to say that hearing the school gong and seeing the pupils with their “slate pencils” made her homesick “for New York or for the farm or for bathtubs or beefsteak.”
Coming of Age Page 25