Jo groaned. “You didn’t tell her.”
“I think actually it’s fourteen,” Amy said.
“How could you do that to us?” Meg asked me.
“Do what? It’s the truth, after all. I should be Amy. Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I assured them, and I remember thinking that my sisters often lacked proper perspective.
Disparate and divided as we were, we still thought of ourselves as the four Howland girls, although my sisters subdivided us into three of a kind, with bright brown hair and regular fine features, and me, the unfortunate final fourth. We were unquestionably a band of four under the same relentless guiding hand, or, as Mumma might have said, we were the four tires of the family car of which Pops was the driver while she was the chassis. (We would have said she was the driver.) Pops sometimes called us the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and at other times the four leaves of his lucky clover, but Mumma’s metaphors emphasized our differences, making us the four seasons, the four points of her compass. “You were all pulling in different directions, all the time,” she said. “No wonder I didn’t have a life of my own until I was almost forty, what with a husband, and you girls, and the house, plus my business.”
“What about Polly?” I asked. “Polly kept your house for you all those years and you’ve forgotten her? Most of your life when you had young children, Polly was there.”
“After Polly left,” Mumma specified, “it wasn’t easy. One child is a full-time job. Especially if it’s a girl,” she said, with her baleful eye fixed on me.
“It’s not like you were trapped at home. What about all those meetings you hauled me to?” I asked, but, “You were too young to remember them,” Mumma said.
Whereas my own childhood was spent sitting in one corner or another of Mumma’s purposeful life, my sisters had Mumma sharing every corner of theirs. Before I learned to be grateful for that, I was jealous. When I was fourteen, just starting high school, I tried to let my sisters know I hadn’t had the same amount and quality of attention as the three of them and to complain about how Mumma treated me differently, no matter what she said (“I treated all of you exactly the same, always,” she maintained)—and I had my evidence at the ready: “She was always worrying about your problems, your grades, your boyfriends. She always talked about you three and how she could help you out.”
“Don’t you get it? You didn’t have any problems. She didn’t need to go barging around into your life, straightening it out. You’re the one she left alone. No wonder we hated you.”
“That I did notice,” I told them.
“Not really,” Jo said. “We didn’t really hate you. Just as a sister.”
“And I did have problems. In case you remember, it was Meg who was the perfect daughter.”
“I had to be, didn’t I? I’m the oldest, the firstborn, she was all over me. She never let up, she never left me alone. No wonder I married so young.”
“Actually,” I said to my oldest sister, “the wonder is that you stayed married for more than six months. Mumma was pretty relentless about getting you away from Jack Cartenbury.”
But Meg was on a rant and didn’t pay any attention. “I didn’t have the choice to do badly in school. Don’t you remember the first B I ever got? It was the end of the world.”
“I remember that it wasn’t until you were a junior in high school,” Jo said. “And I remember that for me, a B was over-the-top excellent.”
“Mumma went ballistic over that B I got,” Meg remembered.
“No,” Jo said. “Ballistic was Mr. Smithers.”
Amy covered her face, and we were all silenced by the memory of that spring of 1959, and Mumma. “It was all so…” Amy spoke from behind her hands. Then she lowered them, and her cheeks shone pink. “I’ve never been so embarrassed. And furious too, for all the good that ever did me with Mumma. I’ll never forgive her,” she promised.
MUMMA AND AMY
Mr. Smithers taught Amy’s sixth-grade class, and he was one of those unusually charismatic practitioners of the teaching trade who sometimes come along. I’ve seen a few of them in action and I never know whether to think of them as saints just back from the desert, with their visionary eyes and compelling certainties, or as pied pipers, who lure the young away into mountain fastnesses. They are always the popular teachers. They are usually young men, young women with these qualities tending to find other arenas more satisfying and more rewarding, just as most such young men are found in politics or on a stage. They are rare in education, such young men, and even rarer at the elementary school level. Mr. Smithers was one of them.
He was young, he rode a motorcycle, he wore a jacket and tie to school, he was funny, he worked hard, long hours at full attention, and every Thursday his wife baked cookies for him to give his class at Friday lunch. Mr. Smithers was loved by his students and thus their parents, and naturally also the school principal. He was envied by other teachers. His sixth-graders presented no discipline problems. They did not cheat on tests or assignments. They did their homework carefully and went to school gladly. Amy was in his class and I, a second-grader, could bask in some of the glory of that accomplishment. “My sister’s got Mr. Smithers, and he says…” I could report to my classmates. He had been at Wampanoag Elementary only since September, but already by Halloween Mr. Smithers was a legend.
So that when Amy for the second February morning in a row complained of an undefined sickness, maybe in her stomach, she thought she might throw up, Mumma was suspicious. Her early-warning system was always up and running, her vigilance perpetual, her red alert formidable.
Also, Mumma had read Freud, who in her opinion didn’t know as much as he and everybody else gave him credit for, as well as Jung and Winnicott, plus Melanie Klein for a woman’s point of view. She took pride in her knowledge and understanding of human psychology, and in her ability to ferret out the hidden pistons that drive and define character. She was ready for Amy that second morning.
“You’re trying to get out of going to school.”
“No I’m not. I’m sick.”
“You don’t have a temperature.”
“I feel nauseous.”
“You don’t look nauseous. You ate all of your breakfast.”
“You made me.”
“If you were really sick I wouldn’t be able to make you eat. So what’s the matter at school?”
“Nothing,” spoken in the sullen, secretive way that really means I’m not going to tell you.
“The rest of you go brush your teeth, I want to talk to Amy in private,” Mumma told us. Pops had already left on his commute to Providence. It was midwinter, raw and cold on the Cape. Once she had Amy alone, Mumma asked, “Tell me. It won’t go any farther, you know you can trust me.”
About that she was right. We did know it. Even so, Amy insisted, “I’m just sick.”
“Is there a test you haven’t studied for?” A shake of the head. “Are you in trouble?” Another shake. “Have you had a fight with Jeannine and Helen?” Not that, either. “I don’t have all day, Amy. You’d better just tell me.”
A shake of the head.
This began to seriously puzzle Mumma, since Amy was not the stubborn, pigheaded one, that being my role. Amy had the part of the reasonable daughter. Meg could be asked for cooperation, as a favor, and Jo tricked into it through her empathetic nature, but Amy could be persuaded.
“If something’s wrong—”
“Nothing’s wrong!” Amy cried, so impulsively that Mumma was immediately confident that she had her finger on it.
“How can I fix it if you won’t tell me what it is?”
“Why can’t I just not go to school? Why won’t you leave me alone when I’m sick?”
“Because you’re not sick, as you very well know. Are the boys saying or doing things?”
Mumma asked this because in sixth grade many of the girls were “developing,” as the euphemism of the time went. The suggestion that there was anything any boy in her class co
uld get up to that she couldn’t handle pricked Amy’s pride. “They wouldn’t dare.”
“But you’re ashamed.”
“I’m not.”
“All right, embarrassed.”
“Never mind. I’m going to school, and if you have to come get me in an hour don’t blame me.”
“I never blame any of you for being sick. You know that perfectly well, Amy Howland, just as perfectly well as I know that something is going on. You can go ahead to school, but don’t think I’m not going to look into it, when something is going on with one of my daughters.”
“Mumma?” Amy was all anxiety now, pleading. “Don’t, please? I’m really sorry. I won’t do it again.”
As she plowed through the busynesses of her day, Mumma decided that the difficulty was that Amy had a crush on her teacher and wanted to stay home so that she could arouse his interest by getting him to worry about her health. Moreover, in Mumma’s opinion, Amy was not the kind of girl to be shallow about this. Overly emotional Jo was that kind of girl, but Amy was serious and realistic, the sort of girl to feel her first crush deeply. Satisfied with her insight and this analysis, Mumma decided to ignore it. The path of wisdom, for a mature woman and a good mother, was silence.
But silence was never a path Mumma traveled for any distance. Only one or two days later, going into Amy’s bedroom to say good night, she turned the conversation to school and thence to Mr. Smithers, to sing his praises and gauge Amy’s reaction, which was, “He’s not so great.” Amy turned her face into her pillow so that her words came out muffled, unclear. “Everybody thinks he’s so great.”
“You said the same. In September, I remember you saying that.”
“Did not. I never.” Amy turned around to face Mumma, her cheeks flushed. “That was you, you said it. I just didn’t argue back. I don’t like to argue with you because why bother because you never let anyone else win.”
“You’re tired and cross,” Mumma answered. “Get a good night’s sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
At Amy’s door, struck by a bolt of insight, Mumma wheeled around. That she spoke without thinking goes without saying. “What is it about Mr. Smithers, if it’s not a crush?”
“A crush?” Amy sat up in bed. “That’s just—That’s sick. You think I have a crush on him?”
“So it’s the antithesis.” This was Mumma’s reading in psychology coming in useful again. “And that means you’re afraid. What is it, Amy, does he…?”
Here, words failed her. The 1950s were not years when anyone spoke openly about being groped by boys in the cloakrooms, or other perils of adolescence for girls, and never the dubious responses of many older men to those ripening bodies. This was an era when menstruation was called The Curse and sexual education consisted of presenting ten- or eleven-year-old girls with copies of Growing Up and Being Born, two slender books in which certain words—erection, for example, orgasm, clitoris—never occurred, not to mention an absence of even such acceptably Latin terms as vulva or vagina. Down there and It constituted the sexual vocabulary of well-brought-up girls at that time. So Mumma didn’t know how to ask her daughter if the teacher was copping a feel, or worse.
“Does he try to kiss…?”
“You’re disgusting!” Amy cried, and covered her head with the bedclothes. “Can’t you leave me alone? Please!” From under the bedclothes came muffled sounds of unsuccessfully stifled weeping.
This convinced Mumma. “A mother knows,” was all she planned to tell us and, moreover, being Mumma, that mother knew just what she wanted to do about this…this teacher, if her suspicions were correct, not to mention that mother being as well the secretary of the PTA, over whose collective eyes he had so successfully been pulling so much wool. But if the ’50s was an era without a vocabulary, especially among nice people, it was also an era that idealized its professionals.
In the ’50s, professionals were an Olympian breed, above questions, beyond reproach and, perhaps not incidentally, almost uniformly male. Doctors were all skilled and sober, lawyers hungry only for justice, bankers wise conservators, priests saintly, and teachers, of course, reliable arbiters of intelligence and behavior. Children might lie and cheat, but teachers were morally upright. Parents did not doubt teachers, any more than citizens doubted their president or the nation its warriors. It was, in short, an innocent and unsuspicious era. The ’50s often failed to protect its children, its patients, its clients, and its citizens from a variety of evils, many of which more modern times have named and numbered and guard zealously against. Mumma was not, however, one to jump to conclusions. She prided herself on objectivity and thoroughness. If it happened that most of the conclusions she reached after objective and thorough inquiry were the same as those she would have jumped to, had she jumped, that did not surprise her.
In the case of Mr. Smithers, she inquired first among other PTA parents. Those with children in lower grades were figuring out ways to maneuver their sons and daughters into his sixth-grade class. Those with sons in the sixth grade spoke with relief about his easy management of their unruly offspring. Some parents of girls were not so enthusiastic, although neither were they concerned; any changes they put down to “developing.” All of the parents Mumma talked to were mothers, although they spoke for two: “We’re hoping she’ll get this moody phase over with quickly; she’s always been such a sunny child”; “I guess we were hoping she’d never grow up”; “He even cares about getting his homework done, we can’t believe it.”
Mumma then took her suspicions to the principal and the principal resisted, probably put off by both Mumma’s directness and the idea itself. Mumma cited her proofs, pointing out the physical maturity of those girls whose attitudes to school had changed and the physical immaturity or the gender of those children who were apparently untroubled, even glad to be in the class. “I think he’s taking advantage of some of the girls,” Mumma said, employing another euphemism of the time.
The principal leaned back in her chair for judicious thought before she announced, “Girls. Well. You know what they’re like, Mrs. Howland, you have…four of them, isn’t it? And two in the upper grades, so you know what adolescent girls can be like.”
“I’m not talking about the girls. I’m talking about the teacher,” Mumma said.
“Dealing with adolescent girls can be tricky,” the principal said.
“So you’re not going to do anything about it,” Mumma said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I’ll look into it, of course. But I have to ask you to remember, Mrs. Howland, that he is a young man with a family to support. I’m sure you don’t want to destroy his reputation. I will tell you that there was no hint of anything amiss in his recommendations from his last school, which was in Troy, New York. Everyone knows how excellent the New York school system is. Possibly the best in the country. Everyone knows how irrationally adolescent girls can behave. Think of the Salem witch trials.”
“I’m not saying he’s a witch,” Mumma answered. “Or a warlock,” she specified.
The principal ended the meeting. “The matter is in my hands now. You can leave it to me, Mrs. Howland.”
Of course, Mumma didn’t do that. Giving Polly charge of her family, Mumma drove off to Troy, New York, to be thorough, which for Mumma meant: Not giving up until you proved that you were right.
She met with the principal of Mr. Smithers’s former school, and then talked to two or three parents, and the evasions with which she was presented convinced her. (“When people start trying on half-truths, and dodging subjects, they might as well just go ahead and tell the truth and I don’t know why they don’t because who do they think they’re fooling?”) By the time she returned to the Cape, where spring was just beginning to soften the blues of the sky and the crocuses had only that week come up, hesitant and untrusting, she had devised a plan of action. That plan was typical Mumma, unnervingly direct and disquietingly sub
tle. Mumma announced to the principal that she was thinking of going into teaching, so she needed to observe a successful teacher in the classroom, and who better for that purpose than Mr. Smithers? How could the principal refuse?
All spring, Mumma went to school with Amy, every day, and remained there from homeroom to dismissal, stuffed into a desk at the rear of the classroom. At first, Amy was furious and embarrassed. Then she was miserable and ashamed. Every morning there was a scene at the breakfast table, Mumma implacably maintaining her career goals and Amy reduced more and more quickly to hysterical tears. There were classroom repercussions for Amy, as well, and recess repercussions. Even I suffered the shock waves, former friends now shunning me as the daughter of the mother who was going to sixth grade.
Every morning of that unending spring, Mumma entered Mr. Smithers’s sixth-grade classroom. She wore a bright flowered dress and high heels, stockings, lipstick; she carried a purse and a briefcase; she sat at her desk, sometimes writing, sometimes reading, never changing her story. “I’m learning how to teach. I’m observing.” She even went outside to enjoy the fresh air at recesses. I could pretend not to see her and run away when she called me, but Amy was not so fortunate.
“I’m really getting to know your sister, and that’s an added benefit,” Mumma said, giving the rest of us cold chills as she assured us, “Don’t ever think I wouldn’t do the same for any one of you.”
All that spring, Amy’s refrain was “I hate you! I hate you!”
“No you don’t,” Mumma assured her.
“You’ve ruined my life,” Amy insisted. “You’re ruining my life!”
“I’m not,” Mumma promised.
Mumma never directly accused Mr. Smithers. She just sat in his classroom, curtailing his activity. As she told the story in later years, after a couple of weeks he did ask, “Mrs. Howland, just what are you doing here?” and she answered, “You know.” Apparently he did, because although he was offered a contract for the next school year, Mr. Smithers decided to decline it, and—on Mumma’s good advice, she claimed, and Mumma never lied—left teaching. “You work well with people,” she told him, more of her unsolicited opinions. “You don’t drink, and you’ve got a good sense of humor.”
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