Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Early on, Jane fell into poetry. In the 1950s, her mother gathered some of her youthful efforts and bound thirty or so of them into a little packet. Playfully or modestly, it’s not clear which, they were “published” as the work of one Sabilla Bodine, a forebear, five generations back, on Bessie’s side. Jane’s poems bore names like “A Mouse” and “Washing” and “Winter,” and look their age; they seem very much the juvenilia they are. Mostly, they rhyme: “I wonder if by any chance / Zebra babies like to dance.” Mostly, too, they are sweet, sometimes cloyingly so. On the other hand, they are striking for their varied subject matter and style. They include Aesop-like fables involving flies, fleas, and mice; micro-histories of Abraham Lincoln, the pirate Blackbeard, and the French poet François Villon. And warm recollections of Girl Scout camp: “In the dusky moonlight / by the flickering fire / Listening to the whispering leaves / That never seem to tire…” And delight in silly wordplay: “The baby is crying ’cause puss caught a mouse / Dingsy, dangsy, dito…” Or: “One day the willowing Willow / Willowing like a willow / Saw a waddling / Wallowing / Dolphin / A-wallowing in the sea.” A few, just a bit more sophisticated, draw young Jane closer to us: “Small puddles, token of a rainy day / Have always lured me from my schoolward way / I want the crash of thunder, and the rain / I want it beating on my head again! / How can I stay at home, a warm dry place / When I have felt wet hemlock cross my face?”

  Whatever we might think of these youthful efforts, she kept at it. Several of her poems were published—later, as an adult, and then, as an adolescent: “Greetings to you from the office of The American Girl,” the editor, Helen Ferris, wrote ten-year-old Jane in January 1927. “Miss Yost”—perhaps an assistant, perhaps Jane’s teacher—“has just sent me some of the poetry you have written and I want to tell you how much I like it.” She couldn’t use it all, of course, “but you may be sure that I will use at least part of your poetry just as soon as we possibly can.” Jane didn’t write much poetry as an adult, but she would always read it, and recite it, from what one of her children calls her “endless store” of Shakespeare and Mother Goose, Longfellow, Lindsay, and Frost.

  Between her parents, Jane was closer to her father. She’d remember him as “intellectually very curious, bright and independent. He was locally very famous as a diagnostician,” a kind of Sherlock Holmes of bodily clues. He used his eyes and ears. “I loved to hear his stories about how he found out this and that.” Dr. Butzner, bald and mustached, was forever reading the encyclopedia, not to idly amass informational factoids but to sink into its sometimes long, meaty essays, often discuss them with his family. Jane was about seven, she’d recall, when Poppa would ask her to retrieve for him one or another volume, like the one with Gr or Ro. “Then, while I looked at the drawings and plates, while he turned the pages, he would regale me with interesting bits” about the Greeks and the Romans. “The bit I liked best was how the barbarians demanded three hundred pounds of pepper from Rome, as part of a ransom payment. He said that as ransoms go, that was a pretty civilized demand.”

  Jane’s relationship with her mother was more problematic. The old lady, hair up in a tidy bun, always neatly dressed and groomed, whom her grandchildren would remember warmly as storyteller and gardener, author of vast waffle breakfasts, likable, intelligent, principled, sometimes funny or wry, always a close and attentive listener, didn’t entirely square with the much younger woman, not so long out of Espy, Pennsylvania, whom Jane, as an adolescent, knew as her mother. Bess would grow more tolerant over her 101 years; a staunch Republican, she’d resign from Daughters of the American Revolution when it condemned Jackie Kennedy for sending UNICEF Christmas cards from the White House. Jane, as an adult, recognized her virtues and was perfectly capable of painting a balanced portrait of her. Of how she would walk Jane around the garden each morning, pointing out this new growth or that. Or how, during a coal strike once, she tightly rolled up wet newspapers, one by one, to make artificial logs. “I can still see you in my mind’s eye,” Jane wrote her affectionately, “dipping them into a bucket of water and drying them in the back yard.” Jane would tell how her mother “became the night supervising nurse at an important hospital in Philadelphia”; there’s real pride there. She’d tell of her mother’s compassion. As a nurse, most of her patients were poor. “She would tell me how limited their lives were,” their poverty eating at her. In 1975, as her mother approached one hundred and grew more feeble, Jane would write that she still hadn’t “come to grips with the idea of this wonderful old lady wearing out…I’m used to her being in existence [and] besides, in fact I love her.”

  But most of that came later and, as a young adult, and earlier in her adolescence, and maybe going back further still, her mother rankled her. She was “quite prissy,” Jane wrote, “and particularly about anything to do with sex.” Even later, in the 1950s, Jane could write an editor how her mother “to this day astonishes me by her capacity for disapproval of the earthy.” A ditty making the rounds after World War I had somehow inspired Jane to recite it around the house:

  Kaiser Bill went up the hill

  To take a peek at France

  Kaiser Bill came down the hill

  With bullets in his pants.

  Don’t sing that, said her mother; “pants,” of course, were underpants, and Jane was not to mention them. But of course Jane kept at it:…with bullets in his…, whereupon Bess slung Jane over her knee and spanked her. “But I was going to say trousers,” Jane wailed.

  Jane would picture her mother’s mind as a veritable minefield of small-town narrow-mindedness. She remembered being ordered not to play with a Chinese girl in the neighborhood. She was advised that people from Sicily were slum dwellers—for the sole, if unassailable, reason that they were Sicilian. Politically, her mother was much more conservative than her father. When young, she’d been a strong Temperance advocate (as was enough of the country to get us Prohibition). Red wine was “Dago red,” one strike against it, of course, being that it was Italian; when Dr. Butzner occasionally got a bottle of wine from a Sicilian coal miner he’d treated, Mrs. Butzner was known to turn it into vinegar if she got her hands on it, or else just pour it down the drain.

  So, as many an adolescent before and since, Jane wrangled with her mother. Maybe worse, she felt “I had to shut up about things that I really would have liked to talk to her about.” The detailed, pages-long, idea- and fact-filled missives Jane wrote to her mother much later—on farming practices in the Canary Islands, acupuncture, or the “micro-balance-of-nature” represented by ladybugs eating aphids—testified to her own need to say, to speak, to explain, and also to her mother’s receptivity. But again, that came later. As a teenager, especially on more intimate subjects, she didn’t feel she had her mother’s ear.

  This seems to have been about as troubled as Jane ever felt at home. Not that any hurts she did experience were trifling to her; how could they be? But set against the whole fabled, fraught landscape of children and parents, little in her life on Monroe Avenue hints at subterranean terrors or cries out for probing scrutiny.

  Jane and her family inhabited the fat, happy middle of American economic and social life. They mostly had enough money, but not too much. Jane grew up in a nice house, on a pretty street of nice houses, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood; the house even had an early dishwasher. But she wasn’t entirely cut off from the less lucky. She’d remember a down-at-the-heels area near their house, “the Patch,” that had no sidewalks; “you just knew when you went into the Patch that this was a miserable place.” She knew about the men who worked the mines; some of them were her father’s patients. She heard from her mother about her nursing days and her poorer patients.

  Her childhood was sprinkled with a full share of the familiar and the comfortably unremarkable. She went to church—Green Ridge Presbyterian, a few blocks away. (Jane was “never at war with the church,” one of her children would say, “just bored.”) She traded cards with her friends—of political
figures, it seems, not baseball players. She played pirates, the loser walking the plank atop an old stump. She played cowboys and Indians. She sometimes roller-skated to school. She had a hiding place, in a cleft in a nearby cliffside, where she could secrete treasures. Like her sister, she joined the Girl Scouts, went to camp, enjoyed crafts. She’d remember the summer weeks when the Chautauqua came to Scranton, with its great children’s programs. She loved listening to her parents and grandmothers talk about their childhoods—like her grandmother, on wash days, making soap from fat and wood ash, or her mother, when she was eight, flipping the switch on the town’s first electric lights. She played pranks on her siblings, one time tricking brother John into giving up his favorite shirt. Come Christmas, the tree in the parlor was so cropped and positioned that it poked right up through the stairwell to the second floor, from where Jane and John, hidden, could pull on gossamer-thin threads tied to its branches, the neighbor children invited in to marvel at the tree wriggling and waving in the unseen breeze.

  When Jane was about four, the family drove down to Virginia to visit their Butzner uncles, stopped to visit the White House, saw sheep grazing on the lawn, keeping it neatly cropped.

  When she was eleven, she wrote in a cousin’s autograph book, “Bite off more than you can chew—then chew it,” apparently heedless of its unoriginality.

  At least once as a child, she flew in an airplane, perhaps a biplane like Snoopy’s.

  But Jane Butzner’s childhood was more and richer than any such litany of the everyday suggests. Daily life—especially, as we’ll see, her life in school—was no match for what she read in books. And no match, either, for what she saw and heard around the dinner table or in the parlor at home. Her father’s mother, Lucy, died when Jane was ten; her mother’s mother, Jennie, when she was thirteen; she never knew her grandfathers. But somehow, the great stories and legends of her family reached into her, her head left full of times long past and larger-than-life characters. Not the Jeffersons and Franklins of her private dialogues, but members of her own family who had ventured to distant places, done wonderful things, held stoutly to their ideals.

  She heard, of course, of her mother’s father, Captain Boyd, who’d died years before she was born, and his Civil War exploits, his imprisonment in the South, his populist ideals, his run for Congress on the Greenback-Labor ticket. “I am pleased to see how many of that party’s planks, ‘outlandish’ at the time, have since become respectable law and opinion,” she would write, “and I am proud that my grandfather stuck his neck out for them.”

  Her father’s younger brother, Uncle Billy, the famous one-eyed criminal defense lawyer, as wide as he was tall, all eloquence and cunning, would take up the cause of anybody—bootleggers, black people, scoundrels, and rogues, it didn’t matter. In one celebrated case, he defended the husband of a Virginia socialite found hacked to death, successfully pushing the blame onto his client’s spurned lover; the jury returned a not-guilty verdict in thirty-six minutes flat. Another time, during Prohibition, his client was prosecuted for two pints of bootleg booze. But when, in court, Uncle Billy opened the bottles and emptied them into a graduated flask borrowed from the town druggist, their contents came to a few drops short of a full quart—the threshold at which a stiff penalty kicked in. His client got off. How did he know they’d come up short? “Well,” he said, “I’ve dealt with a lot of bootleggers in my time and believe me, they always cheat.”

  Jane’s mother’s aunt Hannah was another figure of family renown. At age forty-five, this outwardly proper and conventional woman hauled off to Alaska to teach Aleuts and Eskimos. Over a fourteen-year span, she camped out with Indians, clambered up cliffs in voluminous skirts and petticoats, traveled by kayak in garb made from bear intestines. Aunt Hannah was devoutly religious, and what Jane would term “an implacable, relentless prohibitionist”—yet in her own way a champion of women’s rights, too. To Jane, growing up, “she had the glamour of a storybook heroine.”

  And then there was her mother’s older sister, Martha, who after her own time at Bloomsburg Normal School and her years active in the Presbyterian church, at age forty-eight virtually vanished from civilization. In 1922, making an exploratory trip on behalf of the church to the mountainous backcountry of North Carolina, she had fallen in with the local people at a tiny, hopelessly backwater community called Higgins. Instead of returning after a few months, Aunt Martha stayed, and stayed, over the years bringing to it something of the light and warmth of modern life—books and learning, new buildings, a handicrafts center, a strengthened church. She was there all the years Jane was growing up on Monroe Avenue.

  Jane’s family included, of course, the requisite ciphers and nonentities, and plenty of solid if unremarkable mortals, too. You wouldn’t hear much about her father’s brother Calvin, a gruff figure in overalls who stayed back on the farm, beside his wood stove, with his dogs. Jane’s mother was one of eight, and they didn’t all work miracles in Appalachia like Aunt Martha; around the time Jane started in school, Bessie’s brother Irvin sold cars and her sister Emily was a school librarian, both of them back where they came from in Bloomsburg. Still, there were enough examples of family heroics and theatrics that Jane might reasonably have concluded that she came from quite a family.

  Her life would prove rich in harmonies tuned to those of her family and her forebears. But if so, what—what, exactly?—should we make of this? That she came from “good stock,” something rare and precious being passed down through her DNA? Or that whatever came down to her did so through the “culture” of the family? Certainly Jane was blessed with extraordinary intelligence; all she thought and said testifies to it. But we can say with equal assurance that she was blessed with an unusually nurturing family; and that of those social and family forces that crush so many children’s spirits Jane was mercifully free. She couldn’t have known at the time just how rare that was. She knew later, though: “Being in a family where I wasn’t put down, that’s luck.”

  Good luck, too, was that she grew up at the right time to be a woman, or a better time, anyway. A time that, more than the Victorian era preceding it or the post–World War II era of her own children, didn’t discourage her as girl, woman, worker, thinker. Those years, she’d say, amounted to “an island of hope for women.” A constitutional amendment brought women the vote in 1920, when Jane was four. The idea was alive, she’d say much later, “that women were equal to men and could do anything.” In the Girl Scouts, she’d remember, “we had all sorts of merit badges, not just child care and being a hostess and those sorts of things, but for astronomy and tree finding and making things. All this was part of a liberating ideology for women. We were lucky.” The world was a big place, where you could do great things. You had agency. You could become something. A woman could become something.

  All in all, Jane Butzner didn’t have much going against her. She seems never to have been hampered, or held back, or squeezed into something she wasn’t. “I grew up with the idea that I could do anything,” she’d say. “Nothing was going to be barred from me if I wanted.”

  CHAPTER 2

  OUTLAW

  IF THERE WAS A PROBLEM with this pretty picture it was that it was too special, too rare, and thus certain to butt up against the less forgiving realities of the world outside Monroe Avenue. In Jane’s case, the conflict came early—in school, first at George Washington School in Dunmore, later at Scranton’s Central High.

  “In those days,” Jane would recall, classrooms were “more regimented than they are now. For hours we would sit there doing this or that and we wouldn’t be allowed to talk unless we were asked a question.” Some of her classmates may have found this congenial enough, or at least tolerable. For Jane it was torture, so at odds with her life at home, so deadening, that it exacted its own peculiar price. She developed what she’d call a “misapprehension,” a fear “that I couldn’t talk anymore, that I didn’t have a voice anymore.” And out of that, in turn, developed “what you mig
ht call a little tic. I would make a little noise in my throat, a little voiced noise, just to be sure I could still talk.” One day, finally, her parents asked her why she did that. She wouldn’t answer, or couldn’t, “because I had a feeling that if I did, it would open up the whole subject of how my teachers and I were at outs a good deal.”

  Her first two years at George Washington School, located a few blocks from home, at the corner of Green Ridge Street and Madison Avenue, were all right. But then things went downhill. As Jane told it, at numerous times and circumstances during her life, the ordeal of her school years could seem to apply to all of them without distinction—third grade, fifth grade, high school, it didn’t much matter. Later, she’d sound downright jealous of her father’s schooling in that one-room schoolhouse in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. She’d tell how as a schoolgirl she “didn’t listen much in class. I would try to, but I would get bored with it.” She always had some book hidden beneath her desk, maybe Bulfinch’s Mythology, that was more interesting than anything the droning teacher had to say. She’d remember being subjected to “the most awful endless repetition,” and years later could still recite all the countries of South America, in alphabetical order, pointing in the air at their locations on an invisible map. “To tell you the truth,” she’d tell an interviewer once, “I thought that most of my teachers were rather stupid. They believed a lot of nonsense. I was always trying to educate them, so we would get into conflicts sometimes.”

  In third grade she managed to get herself expelled. And at least in Jane’s adult telling, it was the great gulf between the vibrant, open air of home and the stiflement of school that led to it. A promise, her father told her one evening, was serious business; you never, ever make one unless you’re sure you can keep it. Well, Jane would recall, the very next day at school, a man came in to talk to them about tooth care. In a scene redolent with the wholesome spirit of public health and do-goodery of Sinclair Lewis’s 1920s, students were ushered into a common room to listen to the good gentleman. Of course, he exhorted them to brush their teeth. But he took things one step further, which is where he got into trouble with Jane: “He asked everybody to promise to brush their teeth every night and morning,” for the rest of their lives, and that they raise their hands to affirm their promise.