There were two ministers during my time there. The first one had visited my mother when we lived on the Berryville road. They sat together in the living room and drank tea. I think they were mildly romantic but I did not eavesdrop on them; I was too embarrassed. Our second minister was younger and very intense. The older ladies loved him. For reasons I have forgotten, he turned me against the church, or perhaps something else did and I associate it with his tenure. I remember thinking him a fraud. After high school, I never went regularly to church again and for years called myself an agnostic.
Earning money became top priority when, sometime during 11th grade, my mother’s monthly alimony and child support check stopped coming. She tried to trace Jack Pratt through the bank and his former place of employment, Ingersoll-Rand, but nothing came of it. No one seemed to know where he was. His mother, June Mullaney, was not in touch with him (she said). He had, in fact, always disliked his mother, and when we were still a family, he used to put her letters in a drawer without opening them.
Much later, after our mother died, Janine wrote to the Veterans Administration for information on her father, and they sent her boxes of files. He had filed one medical claim after another. She learned so much from these files she was able to write a book (Janine Pratt Moden, Black Pearls and Hollyhocks, 2001). She also learned from her half-sister, Betty, Jack’s first child with his first wife, the whereabouts of Jack’s last child, the daughter of the Spanish spy, and arranged a meeting
What stood out for me in this welter of unexpected and not particularly welcome information was that June had always known Jack’s whereabouts. What we also learned was that he had come to settle after the war in the Eastern part of the United States, not far from where we lived, where for a time he made a good living as a stock broker.
Looking at this from the long perspective of over 50 years, it does not seem strange that he would have had enough of supporting a second family for more than six years. He had another child by then, and we knew he had lost his job with Ingersoll-Rand. I suppose, like all divorced men, he had hoped Sylvia would remarry. She was by then 58 years old with two teenage girls.
So what to do? The wolf was snarling around the door. The chimney needed repair. Our friendly bank manager agreed to let her pay the interest on the mortgage without paying anything against the principal. Still, we needed more income. The house became our cash cow.
My mother’s first attempt to bring in money was to inform the Winchester public school system that she had two rooms to rent to teachers. She would give them meals. My sister and I moved into what had been the maid’s room at the top of the back stairs, leaving our two rooms available.
When I started 11th grade, two young teachers moved in with us. One became my typing teacher, the other taught primary school. They were to eat breakfast and dinner with us as part of their board.
My mother, being English and well brought up, made a good impression on the paternalistic school system. Young female teachers were treated very much like college students of the day. The school assumed an in loco parentis attitude toward them. My mother was expected to behave as a kind of house mother. Nothing could have been more alien to her temperament. She didn’t care what the young women did with their free time. She needed their money and tried to feed them well. This was the end of it, as far as she was concerned.
The first problem was the food. Sylvia’s English cooking (straight out of Mrs. Beaton’s Book of Household Management), with a heavy emphasis on carbohydrates and heavy puddings or tarts for dessert, was not what these young women were used to. They wanted meat and fresh vegetables and some nice light dessert. They were in the market for husbands and did not want to compromise their slender waists.
Being close to their age and perceived as mature for my age (most dignified, cast as mother in senior play), I became friends with them. I tried to explain about my mother and her English cooking, all the while agreeing and sympathizing. I was definitely on their side.
One night, the issue of cooking flew out the window when my mother had to summon the ambulance. The young primary school teacher had tried to abort a pregnancy herself. Blood was everywhere. The school authorities arrived, followed by her parents. She was sent home as soon as possible and the other teacher moved to new lodging. My mother was black-listed by the school system.
After this, the three of us moved into the back part of the house, where a small kitchen was constructed. A wall separated the two parts, leaving the large front part of the house intact and available to rent. Janine and I kept the bedroom at the top of the back stairs next to the bathroom, and Sylvia slept downstairs next to the new kitchen. Our living room now had a door onto the street.
The main part of our house was rented to a pleasant young couple with no children. Our finances did not allow us to repay the mortgage or make any home repairs, but with June’s small contribution to Janine’s support, my father’s tiny contribution, a portion of my salary, and the rent, we squeaked by.
Sylvia, 1950
CHAPTER 24
1950: High School
For all my interest in books and English class and drama and musical comedy, I spent every weekend in a social whirl. I dated boys who were in college, but I also had a high school boyfriend, Ronnie, who was on the football team and the president of our class. His father was the Presbyterian minister in town, and his church had a youth center that held dances on the weekends. We dated regularly during the school year. When my older friends came home on weekends and during the summer, I went out with them to parties and dances at the country club.
I think this all worked as well as it did because girls like me were not expected to have real sex with our boyfriends. The boys did not expect it, although they probably took their cues from the girl. What was quite clear was that your value was considerably reduced if you “gave in.” There were other girls for that, ones they would never marry.
My memories of the last two years of high school are happy, in spite of anxiety over money. We lived in the present, and very much from hand to mouth. Occasional financial challenges would occur, like my invitation to be one of the two maids of honor to the queen of the Apple Blossom Festival.
For our small community, the annual Apple Blossom Festival was comparable to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It attracted a lot of attention, making it a commercial bonanza for the local merchants. There were beauty pageants sponsored by the local service clubs, who organized floats celebrating aspects of local culture: the apple business, the fire departments, the Lions Club and the Elks, Shenandoah Valley and Handley High School. Celebrities were invited to attend, and many showed up. The year I was a maid of honor, Secretary of State George Marshall was an honored guest. Gurie Lie, the daughter of Trygve Lie, the Secretary General of the United Nations, was queen. Van Johnson, the movie star, agreed to appear and let me cut off his tie as a souvenir for his nonexistent fan club. In later years, the singer Patsy Cline drove her pink Cadillac convertible in the parade.
Sally and Ronnie, 1951
Apple Blossom Festival, 1948
Apple Blossom Festival with Guri Lie (Queen) and George Marshall (Secretary of State),1951
Apple Blossom Festival with Van Johnson, 1950
The Maids of Honor and the Princesses were all required to wear long white dresses similar to bridal gowns. This was a considerable honor and it required buying a specified white dress for the occasion. This was beyond our means. In the end, a friend of my mother’s stepped in and paid for the dress. There was a moment in the dress shop, as I whirled in front of the mirror, when I saw tears in the eyes of that sweet woman that jolted me from participant to observer. I knew why she cried.
As a member of the cast of that year’s Festival, I was caught up in the social whirl of lunches and tea dances. My picture appeared in the paper. I got fan mail.
When I look at those photos, I do not see a happy girl. What was wrong? I remember being bored and vaguely disappointed. What had I expected that w
as not forthcoming? As Gertrude Stein famously said, “There was no ‘there’ there.” My only attempt to step out of the lockstep rhythm of the event was to invite someone other than my regular boyfriend to be my escort. He declined, having already made other arrangements. My boyfriend never knew I had asked someone else, but it should have set off an alarm in some region of my brain. It did not, and I drifted further on the path to marriage.
I have always been drawn to books about the pioneer experience, about “strangers in a strange land.” I took strength from these stories but also read them as survival manuals: how-to guides on what to do in unknown situations like sex. My mother talked a lot about her experiences with men, but they were romantic, not practical. She also got the connection between menstruation and pregnancy backward. She believed that a woman became pregnant if she had intercourse during menstruation.
I learned the essentials quickly (information was easily available at the library), but the tenor behind the information was something else. Yes, it was possible to prevent pregnancy (with luck), but the behavior was wrong. Only bad (undesirable) girls had sex before marriage, and if you became pregnant life as you knew it was over. I was terrified of becoming pregnant. Even the harmless necking and petting we did in the back seat of cars and in secluded places were warned against by the “authorities.” Those pesky sperm could wiggle right through your underpants and find their way to your eggs. I became so frightened that I stopped menstruating and eventually went to a gynecologist. He asked me if I had any reason to think I was pregnant. No, I said, knowing this to be the truth, although my fear was what the fear of God must have been when people believed He could see their thoughts.
The doctor gave me a shot, saying it would start my period unless I was pregnant. Fortunately, it did, and that seemed to take care of my hysteria.
By the time, we were seniors in high school, most girls had steady boyfriends, many of whom were classmates but some older and in college or working in a local business. I was perhaps unusual because I had a steady high school boyfriend but also continued to date other boys when they came home from college. These boys took me to dances at the clubhouse in the summer and to roadside taverns, where we danced to the jukebox and drank 3.2 beer or whiskey bought at the state run liquor store and carried in a brown paper bag. I went to parties of a largely older crowd with them, to weddings and celebrations of the old Confederacy.
Ronnie’s father was the Presbyterian minister in town, and his church allowed teenagers to dance and socialize in the church hall on weekends. Most of the local churches did not permit this.
We were in the same English Classes and both loved the books we read. Ronnie was not only an athlete but the best student in the class. We must have seemed a natural pair: both smart, good at school. He was clearly headed for a fine career of some kind. I was very pretty. There was no doubt we loved each other. We did all the things that high school students did together: took walks and talked and necked. We had almost-sex, enough to have caused the hysteria that led me to the doctor.
We knew each other’s families probably better than we knew any other families. His sister was about the same age as my sister. His father, the minister, was beloved by his parishioners and seen as not only a good man but a natural man: someone you could talk to. His mother was very different. She had an elevated sense of herself both socially and intellectually. She was from an old Southern family, originally English, composed of many high-church members. She was well educated and considered herself a writer, having published small volumes of poems and short essays. She looked down on her husband socially, which caused friction in the family and a lot of hurt. Ronnie always allied himself with his father. Although I thought Ronnie’s mother was pretentious, and he and I laughed at some of her ways, I liked his parents and they liked me. My mother said she would not have been ashamed to introduce them to her family.
So many things were taken for granted in that window of time lasting (for me) from about 1948 to 1955, when I married and left Winchester. I went from childhood to adulthood in those few years, and it felt good—so good that I was more confident than I should have been. Because I usually played by the rules—I did not see any reason not to—the surrounding adults thought I knew what I was doing.
The important issues were college and, eventually, marriage. I did not want to go to college when I finished high school. I certainly did not want to get married.
The reason for the first was simple but not exactly the one I gave out for public consumption. My mother had no money to pay for college. The thought of asking my father in England never occurred to me. Why not? He would have been the obvious person to turn to. Although I had not seen him since just after the war, we wrote to each other and exchanged Christmas and birthday presents.
The reason I did not want to go to college had to do not only with money but with what I knew about college from all my college-going friends. They had been preparing for this important event for a year or more. There were choices to be made, clothes to be chosen, name tags to be sewn on, luggage to be bought, room-mates to be met.
I knew I could have had a scholarship. I also knew that with a scholarship I’d have to work—probably wait on tables. And how would I have paid for the rest of it? And what about my mother?
So I said I did not want to go to college; I could read all the books and learn on my own. Also (I insisted) I did not want to take certain required courses, like math and science. I said all this and more with such sureness that my teachers and probably the guidance counselor left me alone after a while. The assumption in those days was that a girl like me would get married soon and college was really only a frill on the basic necessity of marriage and children. All this seemed to make sense and went on making sense until after I married and finally entered real adulthood to find myself ill equipped and totally confused about how to live.
Almost the only professional work available to women after World War II was nursing or teaching; that was the landscape of the ‘50s for girls of the middle and upper-middle professional class in the South. One of my friends, the valedictorian of our class, went to Cornell University and yet still trained to be a public school teacher.
I graduated from high school into secretarial work and, five years later, marriage. Like many other women of my generation, I entered the world of higher education and professional work after I married and had children. By then, the world had changed: women had gone off to war along with men and, when they came back, demanded more equality. Women became accepted in colleges as mature entries and trained as professionals in graduate or medical school.
My classmates on the academic track took their electives in subjects that would help them in college. When I chose to learn to type and take shorthand, I knew it would get me work in an office, rather than a clothing store.
With the benefit of hindsight and knowledge acquired over the 50 years that separate me from high school, I realize I was not as trapped as I believed. It wasn’t only that I could have asked my father to contribute to my education (and I think he would have done this). What I lacked was confidence that anyone owed me anything. We had struggled alone since I was old enough to understand what it meant to be a family consisting of a woman and two small children in an unknown place. We had been taken in socially, but financially we were very much on our own. There were certainly those poorer than we were, but they often lived near family. We not only had we no income to speak of, but no one to advise us. If there were social agencies, we did not know about them, any more than we knew we were supposed to register annually as aliens at the local post office. In any case, my mother would not have taken what she would have seen as charity. It was unthinkable.
I had not seen my father, Bill Bennett, since we spent that year in England after the end of the war. When he arranged to contribute something to my support in the 1930s, Sylvia and Jack were in love and paid no attention to something as unimportant as Bill’s child support. By the 1950s, the small pr
ewar contribution must have become negligible. Sylvia, of course, would never have asked him for an increase, any more than, years later, she would have applied for a pension under the National Health and Assistance in England. She would have qualified as a British subject and as a pensioner (i.e., an old person) with no income, but it was never thought of. I was too young and clueless in such matters, and my brother thought as she did. They both believed, but would not have said, that it was beneath them.
My mother was in her late 50s by this time but looked a good 10 years younger. She still had her pale complexion and hourglass figure, and she wound her dark hair around her head in the fashion of the day. Her naturally easy manner was expressed in an English accent she could hide behind if the going got rough. She fit into the world of Southern gentility that was fast becoming extinct or changed beyond recognition. Her friends were older than most of my friends’ mothers—their husbands had been in the war, and some had not come back. Some were wealthy, but old wealth was not so rich after the war. Soon the new rich would sweep the remains of the old society away and create something very different.
By the late 1940s, things looked superficially the same. It was a time of recuperation: families were coming to terms with their war losses and beginning to build their futures. There were veterans everywhere, particularly in high school, older than the other boys and very attractive to the girls. I remember couples standing around during recess and after school, smoking and necking in the bushes. These men, back from the war, were not interested in high school activities like sports; they just wanted to finish their degree and get on with their lives. Some of them were already married.
During our senior year, one of my classmates got pregnant. No one spoke of it as she got larger and larger, although she hid the fact for a long time. I was fascinated, terrified, and amazed at her composure. I knew this could happen to anyone and that it meant the end of school—and probably everything else. It is hard to understand now, in this much more tolerant time, how devastating the prospect of unmarried pregnancy was. Years later, I learned it was not so uncommon. Girls either survived an illegal abortion or died, married or gave the baby up: it was all shrouded in secrecy and fear.
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