You will be paid, Ray, a weekly overwrite of $10.00 per order on all orders from your crew. You will also be paid a monthly production bonus of $5.00 per order for 25 net orders per month; an additional $8.00 bonus for 35 net orders per month and a $10.00 bonus for 40 net orders per month. You will be responsible for all charge-backs of your men, to be charged at the going rate. As far as expenses are concerned, they will all be paid for by my office with the exception of your automobile.
Ray, you are in a position, starting today, whereby you can easily earn $15,000 in the next 12 months. All that you need do is put to work your abilities. Welcome aboard. Let’s show them what can be done.
Another mimeographed pep talk:
Meet Ray Blais, a resident of Granby, Mass., who started in the selling field immediately after graduating from Granby High School. [At some point Raymond did get a G.E.D.] His sales career started with Colliers. He soon realized after his association with other book men that Americana offered the most. Colliers’ loss was our gain. Ray has been a consistent producer in the Springfield area right from the beginning. His willingness to cooperate with his manager and his eagerness to work with new men perhaps is best exemplified by the training job he performed with Fred Joslin. Ray’s big goal at this point is a Corvette and I’m certain we’ll all have the pleasure of riding in this Corvette very soon. One of Ray’s greatest assets is that he is willing to set a goal and then willing, at all costs, to work towards it. Earlier this year, he was instrumental in having a set of Americana donated to the Governor of Massachusetts’ favorite charity. The publicity from this gesture was immeasurable. I’m confident, as Ray progresses in our business, that he will be a man to contend with in the future.
Raymond was out of the house more than he was in it, eventually spending time in Boston and New York City and Puerto Rico, selling. We had less and less in common. I knew little of the details of his life, and he knew little of mine.
For Raymond, and our family, the superiority of encyclopedias to some other product sold door-to-door was their inherent respectability. When displayed on a shelf in a living room, especially in an otherwise modest or even impoverished setting, it didn’t matter whether the books were ever opened or not. They stood for ambition, enterprise, ardor. A better future. Somehow, in our collective desire to lunge after the rosy version, we did not dwell on what it must have been like for Raymond to go from door to door: the bad hours, the food on the run, the twinge of discomfort upon entering strange neighborhoods, hoping to lasso a star. We believed in those letters to the letter, failing to detect their overblown tone, the gassy oaths of big money and armies of underlings.
When I left in the fall of 1965 for the College of New Rochelle in New York, known at the time as the you-can-drink-when-you’re-eighteen state, my sisters gave me a gift of personalized stationery with my name misspelled, and our mother, cashing in scads of books of S&H green stamps, presented me with a fleet of hard-cased red luggage that I lined up in order of diminishing size. In what strikes me today as an epic blunder of nomenclature, this brand of suitcases was named after Amelia Earhart. One of my first friends at college looked at me, looked at the luggage, and said, with a slow, knowing nod, “If I were leaving home for the first time in my life and my mother gave me luggage named after the most famous missing woman in history, I’d think twice.”
In addition to the usual classes, we had special presentations. We could hear an address entitled “The Catholic College Graduate: Opportunities and Challenges of the Business World” by Miss Patricia Carbine, then assistant managing editor of Look magazine, or we could attend a panel discussion with married women called “Christian Marriage: Is the Ideal Possible in the Real World?” or we could hear a talk about the “Physiological Aspects of Marriage” with a Catholic woman doctor.
All it took was a few months at college for me to transform into a beatnik stereotype, favoring a wardrobe that consisted of a black leotard, a Danskin wraparound skirt, and Capezio flats. I wanted to be a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, with a pilgrim soul, who lamented the death of the universal soldier, but who might someday cheer up and send in the clowns. I yearned to develop a style that I hoped would be seen as original and worldly. My novel strategy was to declare everything to be either pathetic or bourgeois. For that first Christmas, I made a list of what I didn’t want: not a beaded Orlon cardigan, not a Cos Cob dress made out of Dacron (“The fabric that never sleeps”), not anything from Peck & Peck. I left reminder notes to myself: Be one upon whom nothing is lost, and Live by language so that Time itself, which W. H. Auden said is “indifferent in a week / to a beautiful physique,” would be on my side. We still had religious retreats, and the priests still warned us about the devil quoting scripture for his own purpose, neglecting to give us what would have been a useful update about boys from Fordham and Fairfield quoting Ferlinghetti. The Fordham boys in particular had a foolproof argument for their advances: “JFK used to do it all the time.”
Of course, I came home for all the major holidays, a college girl in a camel’s hair coat deigning to drop by.
“You don’t have to,” our mother would say. “I only want you here if you think you’ll enjoy yourself. The last thing I would like is for any of you girls to dance attendance on me.”
“She doesn’t mean it,” Jacqueline whispered. “What she means is: ‘Dance, girls, dance.’”
At night there’d be the usual rustling of the newspaper.
“Now, listen to this, girls,” our mother might say. “A mother in California dumped her three kids on the median strip and just kept driving toward Mexico. The oldest of the children, who is seven, informed police that the mother got fed up when they wouldn’t stop horsing around in the back seat.” A short pause to string on a side remark like a bead. “I wonder why she didn’t think of leaving them at a gas station. It would have been a lot safer.
“Oh, look here. One of the churches in Holyoke is discontinuing bingo for the duration of the winter, worried that a senior citizen might take a fall. How I hate that expression, ‘senior citizen.’ I don’t care how old I live to: I forbid anyone using that expression around me. Here it says the oldest resident of South Hadley is getting the Gold-headed Cane. If they tried to give that damn thing to me, I’d refuse it. They try to make it sound like such an honor. What kind of honor is it to be next in line?
“Dottie Wilson is moving to Florida. She was quite the dame, quite the gal. First woman I knew to wear overalls. I haven’t thought of her for years. For her wedding, someone gave her a big pot for making homemade baked beans. She got famous for them, hauling vats to all the Girl Scout functions and the annual Congregational Church fair. It always seemed like such an odd gift.”
Pause. She knew how to get a laugh.
“For a bride, I mean.”
Meanwhile, time continued its inevitable process of self-erosion. As quickly as the house had once filled with babies, it was spitting out gawky teenagers. One by one, we launched into our parallel existence.
“The hard part,” said our mother, “is that there is always one last time for all kinds of tasks that involved you children, but you never actually know when it is: the last time you’re begged for a coin for the gum machine, or asked to tow someone’s sled, to retrieve a tooth from under a pillow, to buy a pail and shovel, to tie a shoe. It comes and it goes in total anonymity, like the final flake of snow at the end of a storm. One last time.”
Still, she labored over the scrapbooks, now including those moody college photos popular at the time of barefoot girls hugging trees, taken by our Art Major friends who tried for a cunning shadow-ridden effect or something oddly angled. There is one of me, from a profile, featuring a prize possession, long dangling earrings that someone had sewn out of watermelon seeds. The world of fur hats and matching muffs had faded from empire. Sometimes a letter we wrote to those still at home merited inclusion. One letter that I sent to Jacqueline would surely have broken the clapometer for insufferability:
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“I had to write a letter because Giles Fletcher (seventeenth century poet) loses all appeal on cold dark Friday nights,” it began.
“The best thing about staying in on a week-end is that you generally delude yourself that you owe yourself some pleasure and relaxation since you so effectively denied it to the outside world,” it continued. Did I really believe that? The letter nattered on in its breezy, bratty way, ending with a vocabulary list, the better for my sister to get high SATs:
Learn, J.!!!
(1) Pindaric: characteristic of a Greek lyricist
(2) rhetorical: studied, labored, overdone
(3) amanuensis: one employed to write from dictation
(4) Laputan: devoted to visionary projects
(5) putsch: secret plot to overthrow the government
I asked her, “Do you have any opinion on the not so peaceful peace march in Washington?” I further wondered, “Isn’t this a great letter? Is it, as Eliot says, ‘lovely and justified’?”
I want to say I don’t believe I ever wrote that, but if we are characters in our own life, it makes sense. The same deluded individual with buck teeth and eyeglasses who wrote to Grace Kelly about looking like her might also mislead herself into believing that haranguing someone with a vocabulary list is “lovely and justified.”
In 1967, Jacqueline left for Marymount in Virginia, then a two-year college.
During one of my visits home the following spring, my assignment was to help Christina with her college essay.
“My goal,” I said to her, “is to make you sound like an unusually articulate person as opposed to a merely normally communicative one.”
Christina was the sister who had all the fun, who really did almost go to Woodstock except she didn’t want to share her toothbrush with strangers. She interrupted our session to take at least three calls from friends, to buff her nails, and to lay out the next day’s outfit.
“When you talk,” she said, “you sound just like a book.”
This was not a compliment.
“What a miscreant remark,” I shot back.
I decided it would be easier to simply write the essay for her.
“While I find myself enamored of the moderns (i.e. Updike, Bellow, Greene), more often than not my most undivided attention is devoted to the writers who fulfill the classical exigencies and honor all the old Aristotelian values of plot and setting and at the same time have crafted their sentences with lapidary precision….”
“I can’t send this. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
The next fall, Christina went to the College of Our Lady of the Elms in nearby Chicopee. During her stay she renamed it Our Lady of the Tree Stumps because of a campus-wide case of Dutch elm disease. Like the rest of us, Christina helped finance her education with work study. Her job was janitorial, and she often joked about graduating magna cum broom. Yet even from headquarters as geographically marooned as the Elms, she managed to spend weekends skiing at Stowe or attending regattas on the Charles River.
With only Michael and Maureen still at home full-time and with Raymond dropping in and out according to his job prospects or the lack of them, by the next fall our mother’s days had taken on their own deflated routine. One letter read:
Over the week-end I have planned dry cleaners, the Ware factories outlets for a sweater for me, the South Hadley Common for the Columbus Day fair, correction of school papers, out to dinner with Peg and another friend, big catch-up on important correspondence, yes, you’re right, I’ll probably get to one third of the whole thing. Oh, yes, I forgot, GREEN STAMP trip. Funny the patterns one’s life assumes. The list I just made is a pretty accurate description of the way I spend my leisure non-school hours.
Maureen wrote to Jacqueline about financing her education at Marymount in Virginia. “I have a $1000 work study thing, and a grant of $700 more. But I have to get at least $900 or a thousand more. Does it cost $3200 or $2800? I thought you said $2800. Did you?”
In 1969, Maureen worked out the finances and left for Mary-mount in Virginia, while Jacqueline transferred to the four-year Marymount in Tarrytown, New York.
I enrolled at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. That summer, in New York, was a time of nightmare and dream unleashed with equal force. My first apartment was unit 3J, Laureate Hall, on the north side of 119th Street, between Amsterdam and Morningside Drive, shared with a friend from college who wanted to be an actress. We both sought to redefine ourselves as women of stature. We hoped to learn about wine and to meet some interesting atheists. Our mothers were worried about having their daughters footloose in such a heathen place, warning us especially about The Village, which they knew for a fact was filled with what they called “drug addicts and other charming types.” To save money, we tried to learn how to cook, sometimes calling down to the doorman to see if he knew whether salad dressing took three parts oil and one part vinegar or it was the other way around. Inside our small, dark apartment, where the cockroaches were fruitful and multiplied with a vengeance night after night, we led the frugal lives of most young women new to the city, packing snacks in our purses and walking long distances to avoid subway fares.
But outside apartment 3J, the world was filled with screaming headlines, events in boldface, underlined and capitalized.
The dream came first: Man on the moon. Who could forget the watery image of men in swollen suits as they progressed like fat stick figures across the TV screen? We hooted, of course, at everything that Nixon did to attach himself to the event, especially when he called it “the greatest week since Creation.”
“Overblown,” we said, “self-congratulatory. Maybe even blasphemous.” We couldn’t believe that our government was taking all the credit, with not so much as a passing nod at Euclid, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus.
We also saw that objects didn’t have to travel a great distance to change history. One day before the moon landing, nightmare: Ted Kennedy drives off the bridge at Chappaquiddick.
And then another dream, Woodstock. Of all the songs at the festival, the “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” by Country Joe & the Fish caught the mood—nervous, mocking, iconoclastic— of the half-million young people who slept outside on farmland in upstate New York under Nixon’s moon.
And then, one August day, some hippies killed some movie stars. Charles Manson took his place in that strange American galaxy, the Richard Speck Hall of Fame.
The turmoil was so vast that any family turmoil took a distinct second place: jet engines drowning out the chirps of sparrows.
Two years later, Michael left for Cape Cod Community College and later for Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, and Maureen transferred to the University of Maryland.
Each one of our educations was financed by a jury-rigged combination of scholarships, government grants, work study, and student loans (our negative dowry, we called them). The rule of the day was you got a diploma if you didn’t burn down the school and graduated with honors if you actually went to class. Our reduced circumstances had a nifty camouflage in the era itself: the detachable poverty that most students affected in the late sixties and early seventies. “You are wealthy,” said some famous philosopher of living simply, “in proportion to what you can do without.” Materialism was the crass province of boozy grownups who had traded their dreams for lookalike lawns in the suburbs, the very people who had gotten us into racial discord and into Vietnam. It was considered noble to pretend to be poor and to be able to get by with one perfectly weathered pair of jeans, but faking destitution usually stopped short in the face of a faulty carburetor or a throbbing tooth or cheap shampoo.
Our mother fielded the dunning calls from the banks and sent out notes to us like this one: “It was disconcerting to have a telephone call from the bank this morning about your loan. Mr. B. said your payment is over three months overdue and he really should turn the loan over to a lawyer. If you can’t make a payment, let me know. I will have to lend you the money, as it
’s too much to get these calls, especially the first Monday of the New Year. I understand your financial pressures and I am willing to help.”
Even with my degree from Columbia, the first years out of school were a painful apprenticeship in which many long steps were taken backward in order to grovel forward however infinitesimally. Most of my early jobs were more effective at showing me what I didn’t want to do than what I did. In Boston in the early seventies I had a five-week tryout at a Hearst newspaper so cheap that there was no air conditioning, just a cooler with lukewarm water and a supply of salt pills. One day, I was sent out to a hospital to cover the vigil of some children still in their plaid school uniforms waiting to see their father, who had been shot during a robbery. I called into the city desk to say there was one boy and two girls.
“Did you get their names?”
“Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“They looked scared. The boy was crying. I didn’t want to go up to them.”
“What do you think you’re being paid for?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t even know what to say.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say. Just bullshit with them.”
I hung up.
I returned to the waiting room.
I stared at them and I circled them, but I could not think of a single way to break through the bulwark of grief that was building up in the room as each bulletin about their father’s prognosis presaged the worst. I returned to the paper with an empty notebook and with the hard-earned realization that although I probably didn’t mind interviewing people after a tragedy, I did not want to talk to them as one unfolded, a distinction that might seem trifling but which led the way for me to confine my efforts to feature stories rather than breaking news.
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