by Kris Neville
The summer was unusually dry and she played outside a great deal, went to one wiener roast, attended a blanket party at Doris Heisten’s house seven miles out in the country, and spent one week with Aunt Bessie at Lakeside. When the rains finally came they came in torrents that made the yard a welter of mud and the outside an extremely unattractive place: the rains flattened the dying hollyhocks, and later the first day, savage hail sheared leaves and twigs from the cherry trees and broke the glass front out of Al’s Grocery across the street. She located David Copperfield in Dave’s haphazard collection of books. There were perhaps twenty volumes in all, some left over from college, some purchased during a half year of enlightenment, when he was a member of The Book-of-the-Month Club. She was attracted by the name, a copperfield, in her imagination, being an endless stretch of copper stalks, glistening in the sunlight, row on row, like tall corn. It took her several days of conscientious reading to finish the book, and all the while, for sleepy background, the rain drummed deliciously on the roof and dripped from the eaves and moved upon the windowpanes. She did not understand all of it, but she laughed with Mr. Micawber and cried when Dora died. And when the book was done, she felt glad and proud, although she could not understand quite why she should. It was a strange book, and unreal. But unreal in a different way than Alice In Wonderland, which she had read twice, each time feeling that she was missing something of the utmost importance.
Time hung poised with the rain, but finally sunny skies came and school and winter and then always-exciting spring again. But this spring, before her eighth year of school, was not the same as the ones that had gone before. The adults were quiet and Waiting; and they seemed about to bubble over with some expected excitement. In early May the excitement broke, and the war in Europe was over. Everyone cheered and cried and was happy. But beneath that, Bettyann felt, sad and still, a little guilty perhaps because the war had eaten deep into men’s hearts and burned there like a horrible conscience. Just before school began again, the other war, too, ended, and the people were deeply frightened at the way it had happened. But peace was a vast relief, and without fully knowing of war, Bettyann cried when she heard the news.
Bettyann’s grade school teachers all agreed that she was not quite like the rest of the children. (“All I know,” Mrs. Fox said, “is that she had an absolutely phenomenal grasp of historical time.”) And her difference, whatever it was, was not altogether reflected in her superior grades. It was deeper than that, deeper, even, than her conduct: for she played as the others played, recited much as they recited but with occasional flashes of adult perspective, teased other girls about boyfriends but was never teased in return, passed notes surreptitiously in class, and blushed whenever she was caught chewing gum. The deep difference, in the final analysis, it must have seemed to the teachers, was that she should be quiet and pensive and reserved, and that she completely refused to be.
As everyone expected, she graduated from the eighth grade at the top of her class. And then, during the prehigh school vacation, the frightening biological change came, and she became hurt and puzzled, and for the second time she withdrew into herself. (It was that summer that Jane and Dave told her of the adoption: and they attributed her new reserve as much to that as to anything else.)
The sense of having been unfairly imprisoned by nature, of having been tied in some vague way against her will to a new and not altogether likable body, persisted into her freshman year. There were flashes of acute embarrassment, not for any act, but, in surprising moments, perhaps while reciting at her desk, for existence itself. And always it seemed that just beneath the borderline of consciousness there lay a way for her to escape from everything that oppressed her.
Her art, so hopefully displayed and marveled at in grade school, no longer interested her; ambition lay dormant. Waiting, she instinctively realized, to be released by more knowledge and to be given direction by increased insight; and some day, in full maturation, many things would be possible for her; but not now. She was listless at her books; school bofed her. She half wanted, more in daydream fantasy than anything else, to become a . . . an airplane pilot—or explorer—or gambler—or race car driver—or something else in revolt against this weak, feminine body. (Dave jokingly said, “A girl ought to know what she wants to be by the time she’s in high school and she answered, genuinely concerned, “I wish I did; I wish I did.”)
The year wore on exasperatingly. Until, one day in late November (but almost a month beforehand!). the boy who sat across from her in general science class. Bill Northway, asked her to the holiday freshman prom, and she came home enthusiastic to announce: “I’ve got to learn to dance!”
Dave received the news with the false surprise of elevated eyebrows, and for a moment she was afraid he would refuse her request. But he nodded his head and said gravely, too gravely. “We’ll have to see about it,” which, she knew, meant, “Yes.” The next Saturday afternoon, with a three o’clock appointment, she went to Zobel’s Studio For The Dance. The studio was no more than one room above a bar, just off the Square, and the music was from a portable phonograph and scratchy, fox trot records. Often the fox trots were only dimly heard above the stentorian bellow of the jukebox below. Mr. Zobel, a slender, effeminate man, had one assistant, a willowy blonde, Mrs. Hawkins, who danced with the older boys, those who objected to dancing with Mr. Zobel. It was the only studio in town, and Mr. Zobel taught tap and ballet as well as ballroom, and rumor said that he once danced in night clubs in the West and had a movie contract until something happened that led immediately to his return to his parents’ home and the subsequent establishment of the studio. Bettyann had pliant movements, and she molded easily to Mr. Zobel’s discreet lead. and. after two private lessons, dancing, with an uncanny ability to anticipate his steps, became as natural for her as walking. And after the holiday prom, she was happy again, and reconciled to the no longer quite so new body.
Social science, as the elementary course in government was called, was first to prick her awakening interest, early in the second semester, and she began to read, avidly, the front page of the newspaper and ask puzzled questions, all of which, to the best of his ability, Dave tried to answer, and, when she appeared unduly depressed at some of the information, he quieted her with, “After all, honey, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds; it’s just the best we have.”
She checked out the two books on government from the school library, and, in further search in the public library, came across, quite accidentally, while browsing through the three hundreds (the assistant librarian had forgotten it was not to be filed in the stacks open to the public) Das Kapital. Miss Stemy the librarian said when Bettyann brought the book to the desk, “Aren’t you a little young for such heavy reading, Bettyann? Wouldn’t you like better an adventure novel or something like that?” But Bettyann said, “I’d like this, Miss Stemy, if you don’t mind,” and Miss Stemy, who was an old friend of the family and very fond of Bettyann, said, “Of course, my dear, if you wish it.” And later she phoned Dave to say, “I thought you might like to know your daughter is taking up Das Kapital.”
“She is, is she? She’s a curious little devil, all right,” Dave said. “Then you don’t mind my letting her have it?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’ll completely corrupt her mind,” Dave said, “but please, Lee, if she comes in after Krafft-Ebing, don’t let her have that. Not until her next birthday, at any rate.”
Bettyann understood very little of Das Kapital; but the Communist Manifesto at the end of the book made her blood sing with enthusiasm. She felt she should do something for the workers immediately, and she went to Dave, who, after listening tolerantly to her excited speech, agreed that a sense of indignation at social injustice is invaluable, but, unfortunately, due to the absence of a revolutionary movement at the moment which had the people’s welfare at heart, he was afraid there was very little one small girl could do; and that she’d have to content herself with such unexciting but neces
sary jobs as helping with the next Red Cross and Community Chest campaigns.
During the summer her enthusiasm for social science waned. By the beginning of the second year, she had taken up with almost crusading zeal the pursuit of a new occupation. She was determined to become a doctor, or failing that, a nurse. She talked it over with Dave. Dave agreed that it was a worthwhile career and that it had many rewards. “But you’ve got lots of time to decide,” he said, reversing, it seemed to Bettyann, his previous stand. And Jane, seeing her idealism, encouraged it soberly, but with equal restraint. Neither of them wanted to see the idealism expand unnaturally to the point where the world would crush it, and disillusioned by asking too much, make Bettyann cynical and hard in automatic response.
“There’s so much to do!” Bettyann cried. “So much that needs being done!” Dave said, “But it takes a long time and a hot oven even to hatch an ostrich egg.” And Bettyann laughed, wanting to say, Of course, I know that. Dave said, “Society, I’m afraid, is pretty complex. Things that look simple frequently aren’t.”
“Being a doctor’s simple,” Bettyann said. And Jane said, “It all depends on the kind of person you are.”
She began to draw again, mostly pen and ink sketches, carefully, painstakingly wrought, but this time the drawings were abstract and personal, devoid of meaning for any save herself, and she burned them after they were completed. She could feel the growth of power, the technical mastery of line and perspective, a growth that would some day, when she was ready, permit her to do pictures that would say something to others as well, and something important, too, which, as yet, she had only the merest inkling of. She made the beginning tries at reading poetry (she liked best Emily Dickinson), and she discovered the adult short story in the O. Henry award volumes. She located them neatly arranged in dusty rows by the south window of the public library. The stories seemed to say a great deal about life, but it did not seem possible to put what was said in words other than the authors’. And society, she began to realize, was complex, and again she was lost and uncertain.
“Silly, romantic little fool!” she told herself, when she let her emotions be caught up and involved in something beyond her immediate life. She saw a picture of the Great Pyramid, and she was overcome by the grandeur of human effort and the sad, defiant presumption of a forgotten man, and she wanted to write poetry about the great ebb and swell of human life, something like Sandburg’s The People, Yes. (She had read an excerpt from it, and the title haunted her, and later, when she learned that Hamilton called the people “the beast” she could not help thinking, Yes, but the people, yes!)
Toward spring of her second year, at the fourth all-school assembly in the auditorium after the holidays, the principal announced, to her complete surprise (she had been carrying on a whispered conversation with Bill Northway seated beside her), that she had been selected by the faculty as the Outstanding Sophomore and would be sent, all expenses paid, by the Federated Women’s Clubs on a one-day trip to Jefferson City, the state capital, next Friday.
Friday came quickly. And she found herself in Jefferson City admiring Thomas Hart Benton’s murals and Carthage Marble. She had tea in the Governor’s Mansion and actually talked for a few moments, alone, with the governor’s wife, an embarrassed sparrow of a woman who seemed flattered that Bettyann should notice her to say: “It must be tiresome to have so many strangers in your house like this,” to which the governor’s wife replied with an almost defeated sigh, “It is, sometimes, my dear,” and then brightly, as if it were amusing and yet important, “Did you know the high school groups are the worst about the silverware? We lose thirty or forty spoons every time.” Bettyann laughed and said, “I must take a spoon, then, mustn’t I, to avoid being different?” So, conspiratorially, the governor’s wife went to the table where the lemon ice was being served, and took a silver spoon, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and carried it back to Bettyann. “Don’t let them see you,” she whispered. “Of course they wouldn’t say anything. Votes, you know. But it’s always best not to let them see you.”
After that, the school year closed explosively, and Bettyann, over Jane’s halfhearted opposition, got a job in Scot’s Five & Ten, where, for nearly three months, she waited on and came to know the townspeople. And as she came to know them, all of them, the petty and haggling, the self-consciously magnanimous over a dropped penny, the aggressive, the shy, the bold, the frightened, she knew that there was an infinite variety, and that very little was constant except, perhaps, the expression deep in their eyes, and nothing was certain but the multiplicity of ambitions, hopes, fears, desires.
There was much not to be forgotten: “Whistling” Red, a wizened man (a retired fanner, an ex-bootlegger, a renegade Catholic priest: there were many stories about his unknown past occupation) who whistled tunelessly to himself wherever he went and who attended every funeral and always cried into a big linen handkerchief. “I go for the music,” he confided to Bettyann. And Ed Barnett, who fell four stories from the Drake Hotel to the sidewalk and walked away without even a bruise. And William Seiner, who shaved his head every Monday because he was afraid of dandruff. And Miss Leonard, who, it was said, got mad when her sister married and stayed in bed for twenty years out of pique. She was a prim old maid with bright brown eyes, and she chuckled when she told Bettyann, “Get a man, child,” winking, “Get a man.”
There were these, “Whistling” Red, Ed Barnett, William Seiner, and Miss Leonard, and a hundred more besides; and the days were warm and happy. Bill took her several times to the movies and once skating and twice swimming. And there were dates with other boys, and one of them, one evening, quoted a great deal of the poetry of a man named Swinburne: the boy looked very soulful when he quoted it, and she wanted to laugh, but she was too polite.
In her junior year she had to write fiction for the English class. In her first composition, she used what she thought to be a new style for description. But as the teacher pointed out, in such passages as “Creeping moonlight genuflected at gaslight shadows, writhing,” the style rather got in the way of the thought, making the whole more meaningless than necessary; and she agreed. (Always, at every turn, in painting, with prose, in conversation, there was the difficulty of communicating.)
“Look at the yard,” she said to Bill, while the two of them sat on her quiet front porch swing, “and tell me what you see.”
“Well, let’s see,” he said, pretending seriousness, as he frequently did, without, she knew, ever taking her seriously. “There’s the grass. Yes, that. And there’s the moonlight, of course. And the shadows from the old oak tree, and then there’s the sidewalk with cracks in it, and the hedge . . .” Bettyann wanted to explain that one might, in addition to seeing the physical details, see also the relation between them, or one of the many relations between them, that caused everything to be ordered into a pattern. “There’s first of all aliveness and deadness,” she said. “Look how they’re balanced against each other. See how soft the aliveness is and how hard the deadness is. Look at the aliveness of the grass and the oak; and the deadness of the sidewalk and the shadows. See how the leaves seem to suck at the moonlight and how the tree bark lies inert before it.”
“Hummm,” Bill said, only half serious, now, and then, no longer pretending, turned to her with catching laughter to say, “You’ve got a pretty head full of stars.”
She knew that he did not understand. Or, more accurately, perhaps, he heard the words, understood the meaning, but did not feel as she felt the essential rightness and truth of them. But he did sympathize with her; he did not laugh coldly, but in friendship, and that made everything quite all right.
During the summer before her senior year, Bill went East to see his mother, who was divorced and lived in New York City, and, when Bettyann saw him again in early autumn, he was old and wise with travel, and deliciously she knew that she had been waiting for him.
The final year of high school opened, and together she and Bill went to the movies and
walked the quiet streets and drank Cokes in Gray-Reynold’s Drugstore and laughed between classes. And his lean face was handsome.
But that he was soon to be drafted cast a net of dizzying uncertainty around their every handclasp and knit them together even as it promised to shear them apart. She wished desperately that this fact of divorcement might suddenly vanish. She wished—what nonsense she knew, even in the dream of it—that she might some way serve in his stead: or that a quick illness would come and pass and leave him with her to nurse back to health. Her other daydreams were quiet and contented and vaguely maternal; and surely, she thought, in close living, day to day, he will come to understand me as I can’t be understood.
Then, as spring came again and his draft date drew nearer, their lives became more desperate and frantic until, one evening, she knew with sudden insight that her dream was splintering. His eyes were distant and angry and she was hurt and she reached out desperately after him, making, in memory, a perfect little idiot of herself and pushing him even further from her. Finally, to her shame, she cried bitterly and unfairly, “You’ve got to have a woman with two arms, haven’t you?” and the dream lay at her feet, ruined forever, and even in the instant, the hot instant of the words, she knew that, for the first time, she had used her handicap to try to win advantage and that she could never again make that same mistake. And after he had gone, she remained weeping on the porch swing in hurt repentance, and mortification.
Sadness came in; she could never be happy again; resigned, never happy. As she sat in the darkness, staring out at the stars, she felt wave after wave of longing.
The world around her, silent, was quietly sad, and the air was quietly sad, and the leaves dripped quiet sadness; and life, too, was sad.