Immigrant

by Sally Bennett

  This girl we’ll call Ellie was tough-looking but pretty, with a waspwaist and heavy thighs. She was one of the cheerleaders, and she continued to lead the cheers at the football games even after she was heavily strapped in beneath the thick cheerleader’s sweater. No one said anything to anyone. It was so shocking that the only response was to pretend it didn’t exist. Even our English teacher, Mrs. Garrabrandt, looked at Ellie angrily when they passed in the halls.

  Two months or so before graduation, Ellie was absent for a time. She returned in time to graduate. Her picture appeared in the yearbook with everyone else’s, and I remember seeing her at one of the class reunions many years later. She toughed it out and beat the system, or so it seemed.

  I learned the truth after I graduated and was working full-time for the county health department as a clerk-typist. One of my jobs was to file the birth and death certificates, which were kept in our office. I looked her up and there it was: a stillbirth certificate for a baby boy. No father was named.

  For young women of the time, sex and pregnancy were locked together in a way hard to imagine since the pill. For “nice” girls, sex before marriage was a moral issue, not only a physical one. It was possible, of course, to buy condoms, but they were believed to be not only unreliable but immoral. It was not just avoiding pregnancy that mattered but remaining chaste. This (and your reputation) became compromised once you “went all the way,” even if your boyfriend swore secrecy.

  I knew how girls got pregnant and how they didn’t, but, even armed with information, I was terrified of the possibility. Knowing what not to do did not entirely banish what were partly irrational fears. I was afraid (like all “good” girls) of compromising my reputation even though I genuinely liked and trusted my boyfriends. Sex was a minefield where one false step could destroy you.

  After acquiring secretarial skills, I worked during the summer in a law office. As I got older and more self-assured, my relationship with my mother improved. I no longer resented her and in fact felt obliged to care for her. I felt her poverty deeply and did not think I should do anything to further annoy or upset her. This turned me into a nicer person but came at great cost, as it included the belief I should not leave her to go to school.

  During the last two years of high school, some of my older friends graduated from their prep schools and were attending college: Sweet Briar, Hollins, Mary Washington, Wellesley. The boys went mainly to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Hardly anyone was educated outside the South.

  I heard about the book lists for summer reading, the clothes, the rules of living in a dormitory, and later the mixers with neighboring men’s colleges and the in loco parentis rules that strictly enforced the hours students had to keep.

  By then, I did not even want to go to college. I had convinced myself that it would be a waste of time. I wanted to work and learn what I wanted to learn in my own way. What either no one told me or I did not hear was the value of an education beyond its practical aspect. I could get an office job without a college degree. I do not remember there ever being any talk of careers. I think I would have heard it in college but in high school it was not a popular topic. The assumption, of course, was that we would all marry.

  I’m sure most of the mothers of my friends had not attended college but in the 1950s, after the war, middle-class professional families were sending their daughters to be educated. Since they did not really expect to have careers, the purpose of the education was to make them better wives and mothers, very much like the purpose of my mother’s education in the early 20th century. Like all my friends, I accepted the values of the time and place. I was committed to being an autodidact, although I did not know the term. I felt in no way inferior to my friends; I just had no money.

  Occasionally a crack would open into the realities behind our careful social manners. One Christmas I made soft felt slippers for all my friends. I must have read how to do this in a magazine. I bought the felt and cut out the slippers and stitched them together and wrapped them in wrapping paper.

  I had not imagined how they would be received. But it was clear immediately that my friends were embarrassed—perhaps because they had nothing for me but (I thought) by the poverty of the present. I had blundered across the line into the family lives of my friends who socialized with each other. They shared holidays, and the families gave each other presents and entertained.

  We engaged in none of this. I was invited to all the parties and always had a date with someone’s brother or friend from school or a local boy. My mother never entertained, nor was she invited by any of these families. She had friends—mostly older women, a few with husbands. They played bridge together, but otherwise my mother did not go out. Occasionally, before we lost our income, she would give a small party and make a European meal: a cheese fondue, perhaps.

  I remember a group invited for a Fondue Genevoise with Gruyere cheese and white wine that my mother had learned to make in Switzerland. We could not get imported cheese, so she must have used a domestic Swiss. The guests included the president of our bank and his wife and perhaps four others. They had no idea how to eat out of a common pot, spearing a piece of bread and dunking it in the molten cheese. They took their plates back to their chairs and ate there rather than standing around the pot. There was a lot of laughter—the hot local wine, the rubbery cheese. They were kind people, and I am sure made my mother feel appreciated. But as usual, I wished we could have been like everyone else and served a proper American meal.

  In 1951, I graduated, and suddenly high school was over. For our prom, held in the gymnasium and decorated with our class colors, we hired a second-rate Dixieland band, customary at the time. One of my friends’ parents invited some of us for a steak dinner before the prom to fill our stomachs with protein before the evening of dancing and drinking, culminating in a sunrise breakfast at a popular restaurant I had often been to after our country club dances in the summer. They served wonderful eggs and bacon and grits and biscuits to exhausted and often drunk teenagers.

  That summer I worked in the law office as a fledgling secretary. They were kind to me and offered me permanent work after the summer was over. However, I had decided to attend a secretarial college in Richmond, Virginia, in the fall. For this, I had written to my father in England and asked for the tuition. He complied, as he probably would have done had I asked for money for college.

  I thought this extra training would get me a better job, and I think I also wanted to go somewhere like the rest of my friends who were off to college. Mine turned out to be a poor choice, leading to a deadend, not opportunities in a wider world that I had hoped for.

  CHAPTER 25

  1951: Richmond

  After high school, I moved to Richmond in an attempt to find a way forward that did not include college but, instead, secretarial work and a new and different adult world. Ronnie, my high school boyfriend, was going to Davidson College in North Carolina, a small college with high academic standing connected to the Presbyterian Church.

  I moved into a boarding house, one of Richmond’s many Victorian row houses dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. The ground floor, occupied by the landlady, included the dining room, kitchen, and living room. The smell of boiled cabbage greeted you inside the front door. The rooms on the first two floors were occupied by older people, mostly single.

  I shared one of two rooms on the third and top floor with my old friend and neighbor, Kitty. The other room was occupied by two other single women. The bathroom was one floor down. Kitty was attending Richmond Polytechnic Institute as a voice major.

  One of our suitemates was slightly older, a working woman coming off a messy divorce and bankruptcy. The other came from faraway Oakland, California, training to be an occupational therapist, an occupation I had never heard of. The four of us became friends.

  We ate breakfast and dinner together in the dining room, cooked by our landlady. After we had finished, we passed our plates to be scraped a
nd stacked before being carried to the kitchen. I found this heaping of scraps and bones repugnant. Except for my brief stay at Nellie Baker’s, it was my first experience living with people other than my own family. At the time, I had no idea of becoming a writer and missed a golden opportunity to write about this captive group.

  One evening, I left the front door unlocked when there had been rumors of a cat burglar in the neighborhood. I had gone out after work to meet Ronnie, who had come from Davidson to stay with his aunt Louise, a widow with one daughter. She could not have been more different from her sister, Ronnie’s mother. Whereas Peggy was self-consciously refined, Louise was natural and outgoing.

  When I returned to the boarding house, I was greeted by an angry landlady. The first- and second-floor tenants had cowered in their rooms as some unknown male, finding the front door unlocked, had clomped through the house, apparently looking for someone he believed lived there. Finding no one around (doors locked, no sounds), he clomped out again. My roommates on the top floor were unaware of the interloper. I apologized; I was abject and promised to be more careful. The landlady agreed to let me stay on probation.

  In fact, a few months later I moved out into a small apartment I arranged to share with Kitty’s sister, Pat, who was also trying Richmond out as an alternative to Winchester. Pat had given up drama school in New York City, believing she was not a good enough to earn her living as an actress and was not suited for such a precarious life. I liked the idea of sharing an apartment better than living in a boarding house, and I found Pat more congenial than her sister. The two were not on good terms, so I never really saw Kitty again after this; she moved away and eventually married. I felt I had betrayed her by choosing her sister, but this did not stop me.

  Meanwhile, I went to work part-time in a luggage store while attending the secretarial school. The store was run by a man and his wife, Eulalie, a lively redhead who used to excuse herself to “shake the dew off my lily.” I helped out in the office. Their other employee was a young man, a newlywed who had taken his bride to New York City for their honeymoon. There, they had something they called pizza pie. We stared at him, wide-eyed. No one had heard of pizza pie.

  Soon, I had enough of the secretarial school, realizing I already knew how to type and take shorthand well enough. Bookkeeping was shakier, but I did not plan to take a job as a bookkeeper. I left the school after the first semester and found a full-time job with a life insurance company as secretary to the director. I discovered I could quickly transform initial chaos into meaningful tasks. My boss was nice to me and even invited me home to dinner, where his young wife produced an elaborate meal that involved shrimp, an almost unknown food to me at the time.

  Perhaps the most interesting event of my year in Richmond was my brother’s visit. Kem and his wife, Gillian, were spending some months in Hollywood, where he was writing a movie script based on his novel. When Gilli became pregnant, she decided she wanted to return to England to have the baby. On their way back to New York, they stopped in Winchester to visit our mother, and I took the bus home from Richmond to see them.

  I had not seen Kem since we left England four years earlier, and I had never met Gilli. My feelings toward my brother were complicated: a mix of awe, admiration, and resentment. I did not know him well enough to know if I loved him, except that he was my brother and had always been nice to me. Like my mother, he was English; I was American.

  He had brought my mother some expensive scented oils by Mary Chess, a fashionable perfumer. My mother loved luxuries of this kind and, of course, could not afford to buy them. It was a perfect present. He brought me an umbrella, which he had bought locally at one of the women’s clothing stores. The umbrella had a bamboo handle and was, I thought, very elegant.

  Kem was charming, kind, funny, and loving. He seemed an ideal man. My mother certainly thought he was and made no attempt to hide her love and admiration. They seemed to have a special connection with each other, even though they had not seen each other for years. They called each other “darling,” a word you never heard in America at the time except in the movies. I had grown up without a father and had not known any mature men. The only men I knew were boys and, casually, my friends’ fathers and occasionally a friend of my mother’s. Kem was kind and attentive. He seemed to have much more experience than most Americans at the time. He, after all, had been in the war and lived in many parts of Europe. He was a writer and lived with other writers of diverse and complicated backgrounds. My overwhelming feeling was that I wanted to be the kind of person he would love and find attractive. I did not think I was worthy. I felt too young and ignorant.

  He drove me back to Richmond after the weekend. He asked me where we should have lunch. I had never had a meal out anywhere, especially in Richmond, and was tongue-tied by the question. He spotted a Chinese restaurant, and we ate there. When he tried to kiss me goodbye I was too shy, and we ended by shaking hands.

  I believe Kem would have liked to stay in California. The life would have suited him, and he might have done well as a writer. But Gilli wanted to go home. I did not see him again for about 15 years, by which time he had a second child with Gilli before they divorced, and had turned from writing to being a cook and restaurateur.

  He could not make a living by writing. Money was always short, and he was still responsible for his children when their mother remarried. The restaurant business is very hard work as you age, and, as Kem became overweight and continued to smoke, making ends meet became difficult. As his children grew up, they helped him.

  I wanted to become a writer because of him. I would have liked to be his friend.

  At the end of my year in Richmond, I decided to move back to Winchester. I could live at home, thereby giving my rent money to my mother and helping her out in other ways. Richmond had proved a disappointment; it had not provided anything really new or interesting for me, either socially or professionally. I realized that secretarial school was redundant; I had those skills. A fancy secretarial school like Katie Gibbs in Manhattan where the girls lived at the Barbizon was preferred by college graduates. It would have provided placement in desirable locations that hired desirable young men, but I could not afford the fees.

  The year in Richmond had provided me with some new experiences, mostly those of living on my own and working in a new city. I had also been able to go to a couple of theater productions: Strauss’s opera Die Fledermaus and a production of His Eye Is on the Sparrow with Julie Harris and Ethel Waters. I sat in the nose-bleed section of the second balcony and loved every moment of it. I had loved the theater for many years, even though I never aspired to act: I think I knew I was too self-conscious. Later, I tried my hand at writing a play, which I called The Fourth Monkey.

  So it was home to Winchester. I felt I had abandoned my mother for a not very good reason. If it had led to a better job or some interesting new friends, the move would have felt justified. As it was, it seemed pointless. My decision to return felt responsible and grownup. I found a good job in the local Health Department as a clerk-typist, which required secretarial skills. The pay was poor, but it was interesting work that taught me quite a bit about the population we served with our public health nurses, sanitation officers, and clinics. I liked it better than working for the insurance company.

  My social life also improved, as I knew a lot of boys now in college and others who were working locally. Ronnie’s parents had moved to Florida, so he no longer had a home to come back to but he hitchhiked many hours and slept on our sofa. Pat had also moved back to Winchester and was now engaged to marry a young lawyer in town. My sister was a high school student by then, and she also worked part time in a shoe store.

  For a few years, life was stable, and not very different from my last year of high school. I was making more money and no longer had to work all day Saturday. I could sit in my open window, puffing on a cigarette, or lie on my bed and listen to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts until I fell asleep.
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  By 1954, my mother had reached the end of her resources, and we knew that some change would have to be made. The bank wanted more return on its loan than the monthly interest, and the chimney was falling down. We were notified that we had to maintain the property or put it up for sale. My sister had not yet finished high school.

  Ronnie and I decided to marry even though he had one more year of college. My mother could sell the house, and I would use the money my father gave me as a wedding present to buy her plane fare to England. There she could stay with Kem until some other arrangement could be made. Janine would live with Ronnie and me while she finished high school, after which her grandmother, June, would send her to college. All this came to pass over the next two years. Then our Virginia idyll came to an end, and we went out into the world.

  CHAPTER 26

  The World

  The three things that happened to us in this new location seemed at first to have been the result of sensible, even wise, choices. Ronnie and I were married in the summer before his senior year in college. His father performed the ceremony in a small white Presbyterian church with box pews, dating back to before the Civil War. His uncle Frank gave me away, as I had no male relative in America, and in those days no one would have thought it proper for a mother to give away her daughter.

  I engaged in the same wedding preparations as all my friends. Ronnie and I chose our silver and china patterns and listed them in the local store that specialized in fine china, crystal, and silver tableware. The presents that were delivered to our house seemed almost a miracle. My mother had never purchased china or silverware or linens in my lifetime. What we had was old and had had many years of use. I put these new beautiful objects out on the table as was the custom so that the guests who came to the reception could admire them.