Immigrant

by Sally Bennett

  Someone picked me up, or perhaps June drove me in her red convertible. I remember the song “Red Silk Stockings and Green Perfume” playing on the jukebox, a favorite of the hostess. My dress was different from anything the other girls were wearing. Some of them were black strapless, and none of them were pink with puffed sleeves. I resolved never to make that mistake again. From then on, I chose my own clothes.

  Afterwards, I went back to being miserable. My sister’s presence did not seem to matter. She was four years younger and pleased to be back with her mother and sister. We had acquired a large black-and-white dog named Peggy, who became her friend and companion. I was not interested in Peggy or my sister, for that matter. I wanted only to be at school and with my friends. Most of all, I wanted to live in town where I could go to the movies and meet my friends at the drugstore. I was trying to grow up. Adolescence was not a recognized period of life in those days. You were a child or an adult. The passage between was a minefield no adult wanted to contemplate.

  While we were living on the Berryville Road, I had my first boyfriend, Bob—probably an eleventh grader, two years older than I was. It was common practice for boys to date younger girls. He would come for me in his car or with another couple, and we would go to a school function or to one of the many roadhouses to drink and dance to music from the jukebox. I do not remember alcohol being part of the evening, but he might have drunk 3.2 beer, the only alcohol for sale. The alternative was to bring your own bottle, available at the staterun liquor stores. At the end of the evening, we would certainly have spent some time in the car kissing. When I conjure up Bob’s face, I see him in kissing mode. No other memories have survived.

  One day, I was waiting by the road for the bus to town. A car pulled onto the shoulder not far from where I was standing. I thought someone was going to offer me a ride so I started walking toward it. The driver’s door opened to reveal a man, his fly open, his penis sticking out. I turned and quickly walked away from the car back toward my house. When I turned and looked back, the car had gone.

  The bus was late that day, and all the classroom doors were closed when I got to school. I walked on the polished floors through the empty halls. I felt strange, as if some part of me had been replaced or removed.

  I don’t remember if I ever told my mother—probably not. I did not tell her things until much later, after I had gained control of my life, and then very selectively. I knew she would have been shocked. It didn’t occur to me that it might have hastened our move into town. I thought she was from another world, disconnected from the one I was trying to become part of. I knew I had to be nice to her, but I would never have asked her for advice. I did not think she knew anything useful and felt I no longer needed her.

  As a child during the war, I had been very dependent, afraid to stay away from home overnight. Within a couple of years this changed. My mother implicitly and explicitly compared America to the Europe she knew before the war.

  “But, of course, I’m an outsider.” This was her mantra, exempting her from all responsibility for opinions. She professed to like young people who, I think, saw her as sophisticated and sympathetic, like the characters in the movies. But I knew I did not want to be like her. I wanted to be an American.

  CHAPTER 23

  1947: Winchester

  It must have been during the summer at the end of our first year that we sold the house on the road to Berryville and bought another house in the old part of Winchester, on Cork Street, near the hospital. This house was built early in the history of Winchester and was reputed to have served as a hideout for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. The front door opened onto the brick sidewalk, with no front yard or porch. The floor boards were wide and sloping in the way of old houses, and some of the ceilings were not quite straight. The dining room was filled with the same heavy, dark furniture that had been in Mont’Alegre. The effect was Old World. We did not use this room much, but I liked it, as I liked the living room with the comfortable sofa and French side chairs and library table. I had lived with these things most of my life; they were familiar and comforting. They came with us wherever we went and settled wherever we put them. I liked that.

  There was a staircase leading up from the front of the house; another, from the back, was designed for the maid. For perhaps a year or more, we had the whole house to ourselves with a bedroom upstairs each and, out back, a tiny postage-stamp garden around which my mother built a brick wall. As we had no car, the location was perfect. We could walk to school and into town. Sometimes (rarely) I would meet my mother out doing an errand or visiting a friend and always found it surprising, even mildly distressing, that she should be outside the house. It was as if I had come upon the sofa or dining room table inexplicably in the street.

  These were my mother’s best days. Five feet four with an hourglass figure, her dark hair streaked with gray in a neat roll, she was still healthy and vibrant. Every morning, she dressed and made herself up and remained that way for the rest of the day. I never saw her in her nightgown or dressing gown after breakfast unless she was ill. A fast and vigorous walker, she stepped with agility over the uneven sidewalks; many of the bricks were heaved by the roots of trees, making the surface treacherous. I turned my ankles so often, they became weak and swollen. Doctors were not in our budget, so I consulted a library book on ankle exercises and after some time, my ankles were again strong.

  My mother remained optimistic and cheerful in spite of her financial problems, interested in the affairs of the world. In the ’50s, she listened to all the McCarthy hearings on the radio, expressing aloud her disapproval of Joe and his lies. She liked to read and had at one time been a fan of Khalil Gibran and his book The Prophet. She read some novels and liked adventure and exploration. She regretted her lack of education, often telling me that they were taught nothing in the school she attended as a girl. She would like to have read Milton and Keats (she owned copies of their poems) but felt inadequate to understand them.

  My sister and I had mothers as different as our fathers, even though they were one and the same woman. My mother was educated in the restricted way of her time and worse, possessed of a set of attitudes that doomed her to believe she was incompetent. Men ruled her world. They were superior beings, if not by nature, then by fact. But while my mother was warm and irrepressibly cheerful, my sister’s mother was artificial and bitter and, worse, disappointed in her younger daughter.

  Sylvia never contemplated remarriage, perhaps because no one turned up. She was different from other women. She certainly had lovers, mostly after she returned to Europe, though not while we lived in Virginia, as far as I know. Perhaps she did not remarry because she preferred her single state, with all its privations and insecurity. I do not think being alone was hard for her, although she used to say she missed having a man in her bed. She learned to live on very little.

  Janine Pratt, age 15

  Winchester in the late 1940s and ‘50s was a protected backwater; people were still licking their war wounds, the turbulent future only glimpsed. Rock ‘n’ roll had not yet come to our attention. The birth control pill had not been developed, and diaphragms were fitted by doctors only on engaged or married women. There was a kind of stasis to life that was both unreal and deeply comforting.

  In the house behind us, one of my friends from The Crowd, Kitty, lived with her sister, Pat, and their parents in the second-floor apartment of a large Victorian house owned by their step-grandmother, who lived on the first floor. Their mother was the daughter of her deceased husband’s first marriage. Relations between the floors were tolerant if imperfect. Their father, a veteran, old and ailing, was caretaker of his wife, who periodically had psychotic episodes. At these times, she would go into town and run up large bills at the local stores and sometimes take off her clothes on Main Street. Someone would bring her home and the ambulance would be called to take her to the state psychiatric institution, where shock therapy was administered. After a period of time, she
came home and lived quietly until the next episode.

  Later, I wondered if our fractured families were the bond that brought us together. I was drawn to Kitty in part because of her beautiful singing voice and dramatic temperament. She was slightly exotic in a way most of the girls were not. She took voice lessons and was often a soloist in the church choir. Both sisters were interested in the theater and music. I loved musical comedy and really learned about it for the first time from my two neighbors. Music was always playing in their apartment particularly light opera like Menotti’s The Medium and Lost in the Stars by Kurt Weill.

  This was a new world for me, and I took to it immediately. It was an extension of the movies I had loved, like Singing in the Rain, Gilda, and Cover Girl. Perhaps because there were no demanding adults (the parents almost never came out of their room), their apartment was a haven where we said and did what we liked. Kitty seemed to have few household duties: someone cleaned for them, and their laundry was sent out. I loved the clean, pressed clothes when they arrived, so different from our own attempts to keep ourselves clean and ironed. My mother did send out the sheets but we had to move the top sheet to the bottom every two weeks, with a fresh sheet on top, thus saving on our laundry bill. The rest of our clothes we washed by hand or occasionally had dry-cleaned.

  While my passion was books, Kitty’s was music, which I did not know much about. It is hard to overestimate the importance of books for someone like myself. Our many moves from one country to another, loss of family, especially a father, and the need to adapt to different schools and people made me dependent on their stability. They were my guides, teachers, and entertainment, and they did not change. I lived in books more profoundly than I lived in the world. I knew I was lucky to have this world and recognized that I knew a great deal more than my friends, making me older in certain ways. What I only realized years later was how poorly prepared I was to live in the real world, which I thought was like the world of books. It was years before I understood that books are written from the perspective of one person. They do not represent the unpredictable and chaotic world we live in. All this book experience made me seem worldlier than my peers and— because I was also pretty—mysterious and attractive. Years later when the boy I loved in high school told me I was looking for a knight on a white horse, he was onto something.

  I had found the public library, a copper-domed beauty, when we first came to Winchester, before our brief sojourn on the Berryville Road. I prowled the open stacks and discovered the writers I came to love: Somerset Maugham, J.B. Priestly, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many more. I did not read many women writers. This was not by design. There were not as many women writers. It was a time before television, cell phones, or disposable income. Books were my classroom, my friends, and my mentors. They probably saved my life, or at least preserved my sanity.

  Besides novels, I read how-to books on anything I needed to know (like how to fix a weak ankle). I learned, for example, the connection between what you ate and how you looked. I wanted to be thin and shapely, so I stopped eating my mother’s carbohydrate-laden foods like pancakes and bread dipped in bacon fat. I also stopped eating dessert. This, of course, led to endless conflict with my mother, who believed it was her duty to produce a sweet at the end of a meal and ours to eat it. She made the glorious Victorian desserts from Mrs. Beaton’s Book of Household Management that she had grown up on: treacle tart, steamed pudding with hot golden syrup, mince pie, and lemon curd tart. I loved them all, but began a lifelong habit of denial in order to achieve and maintain a svelte figure. Fortunately, I was becoming a swan as well as excelling at school, so she stifled her complaints as she watched me go about my business of self-improvement.

  She seemed to have no intuition about the transformation of child into adult. Perhaps she shared this with most adults of the time. Girls were encouraged to make themselves as pretty and agreeable as possible. Boys, of course, were expected to accomplish a great deal more. If there had to be a motto of the 1950s, it would have been DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.

  Meanwhile, my last two years of high school were mostly wonderful. I was now part of my high school group in the academic program heading for college (even though I was not planning to go), as well as part of the larger group of The Crowd who came home from college on holidays and occasional weekends. Then we would go out dancing or to a party, usually to celebrate a wedding somewhere in Clarke County (richer and more prestigious than our own Frederick County). People identified themselves by their county, not by the town in which they lived, except for those of us who lived in Winchester, which was the largest town in our area. This identity by county, not town, still exists in the South, maybe because there are fewer large cities or because many people live outside city boundaries.

  I modeled my social behavior on the girls I thought the most attractive and popular. By this time, the chip had fallen off my shoulder, and I loved school, especially English, and had no difficulty getting aboveaverage grades in everything except math. The academic English course was taught by Edith Garrabrandt, who took her job very seriously and was seen as something of a terror. She felt a real responsibility to prepare her students for college, particularly in 12th-grade English. We read Shakespeare and the Romantic poets and George Eliot and Willa Cather, among others. There was a special section of 12th-grade English taught by our school superintendent, Garland Quarles, on Hamlet.

  In 11th grade, before the pressure was on to prepare for college, Mrs. Garrabrandt taught English to whoever enrolled, including popular members of the football team. We were studying plural nouns.

  “If you had to mail order for more than one mongoose, what would you ask for, Manuel?” asked Mrs. Garrabrandt.

  “I would write two letters,” replied Manuel.

  The class broke up and even our usually stern teacher, who draped herself over the lectern revealing underwear straps when her blouse slipped off a bony shoulder. As she righted herself, all the while making a point, she hitched up her blouse to cover the straps. We loved her. She made us feel privileged and confident. My only career goal was to teach English in high school, although at the time it seemed impossible. Many years later, when I did go to college, I trained to become a high school English teacher, but by the time I was credentialed, there were no jobs. But that is another story.

  I joined the drama club as a “prose reader,” part of Public Speaking, which included debate. These extra-curricular activities were designed to round us out beyond academics, much like deportment and elocution for previous generations. As a member of the drama club, I tried out for and got the part of the mother in the senior play. I was also voted “most dignified” for our yearbook. What kind of person gets voted “most dignified” and is the mother in the senior play? This is the same person who caroused on weekends dancing and drinking, and who got one boyfriend fired from his job, or so he said. It did not seem a very serious matter at the time, and I forgot about it until a few years ago when I visited him and his wife and he referred to the fact he was fired. Oops, I thought. No wonder he didn’t want to be my escort for the Apple Blossom Festival.

  I was also a member of the Booster Club, which was designed to support our football team and into which you had to be invited. Membership was a privilege, perhaps related to grade point averages, perhaps to something else: whom we want to be part of our group. It was also a way for girls to participate in sports, largely a male activity in those days—but as boosters, not players.

  I worked every Saturday at a dress shop in downtown Winchester from nine in the morning until nine at night, for five dollars. In the summer, I worked there half a day during the week and all day Saturday. I was the only girl I knew who worked. Many of the boys worked after school and during the summer, usually on local construction jobs, which paid very well.

  My work at the dress store paid for my clothes, which I bought at the store for a discount and usually on layaway. Clothes had become (after books) my great
est interest. I would select what I could afford when the new season’s stock arrived, and by the time school started in the fall, I had usually paid them off, and my new wardrobe was ready. I could not, of course, afford cashmere sweaters or other pricey garments, but I chose what I liked and felt comfortably similar to my friends. We wore pleated plaid skirts with socks and either saddle shoes or loafers. We all put pennies in our loafers. There were high heels for dress—too high and often uncomfortable. For these, I waited for the sales at the end of the season and put my feet in the X-ray machines that showed the bones of your feet. Like so much that was bad for us, it was fun.

  Downtown Winchester was an important place. We congregated at People’s Drugstore after school, where we drank cokes and ate toasted brownies with a scoop of ice cream. We also smoked, asking each other for a penny to make up the 16 cents for a pack of cigarettes. We sat at the counter and flirted with our boyfriends and talked about our teachers and each other. Most of the grownups were friendly and watchful. Everyone knew everyone and their parents.

  Harold Funk, a large flabby man in his 30s, wearing a shabby jacket and tie, used to walk in one door of the drugstore and out the other, holding his imaginary radio to his ear, talking, talking, talking in his own language. I knew he was harmless (everyone said so) but he frightened me.

  On Sunday, I sang in the Episcopal Church choir and for a brief time taught Sunday school. I loved the choir; I could sing at the top of my voice and no one told me to stop. The best time was Christmas Eve, when I went with my friends to the candlelight service at midnight. There was always a party beforehand, and we arrived at church in a cloud of alcohol fumes, threatening the safety of the congregation as we fumbled to light our candles. We sang all the old hymns, loud and off-key, until we recessed on “O Come All Ye Faithful.”