by Carson, Tom
My guardian felt helpless not to, but Communism had no appeal for him: “They aren’t wrong, Pam. But they are misguided,” he was to primly tell my avid Barnard incarnation. The first issue of The Catholic Worker might as well have been printed in Eureka, NY, when he bought it for the fabled penny in the spring of ’33.
As I’ve already reported myself telling Andy Pond, more conventional Catholics were appalled at the madwoman’s heresy. Her campaign to turn the Gospels into a how-to manual struck them as not only bizarre in theory—“That was then, and honestly! Should we go back to riding camels, too?” one especially snooty Purcey’s senior sniffed one day, no doubt quoting straight from the parental fount, as she snuffed an illicit cigarette in the fourth-form loo—but dangerously socialistic in practice, no matter how strenuously Miss Day tried to pass off the resemblance as some sort of mixup at the paternity ward. A certain thoughtful Chicago ad executive, however, was sold.
“She made me understand that the purpose of thought was to provoke behavior,” he writes in Letter 123 of The Mountain and the Stream. As someone who’s never been sure what, exactly, Madame Bovary is bidding us to do, I have to dissent from that, but this is his pilgrimage and not mine.
Soon in contact with the Worker’s only begetter, by late fall he was scouting property for Chicago’s first House of Hospitality, as the Worker’s free food-and-lodging edifices were officially known. “I don’t remember needing to be taught to take showers,” that same Purcey’s senior said. That led un-Christian Pam to un-Christianly picture her gasping under a cold one, shielding her deeply uninteresting frigleaf and lively little badminton birdies from our thigh-whacking, bobble-bopping truncheons.
Yet I don’t want my schoolgirl snits to distract from Nick’s quest. For the rest of his life, even after they differed—after Pearl Harbor and before Hiroshima, like so many people, he had serious problems with her pacifism—there was only one Dorothy in my guardian’s hesaurus.
You know what? The hell with it, Panama. Writers are born to seize on coincidences the rest of you find meaningless. Hello, old Scarecrow.
Posted by: Pämchen in Unidorm
It was to be over a year before I actually met her. (September 1935: Dorothy voyages to the Midwest to rally her troops. I suppose you could look it up.) Up to then, even as I defended the Worker’s only begetter from the dormant Tories in Purcey’s dorms and lavatories, I can’t say I’d thought about her much on my own hook. A half sawn product of Chignonne’s, I reacted to my guardian’s awakened faith with a sort of charmed bafflement that religion could be an internal matter, perplexing and harassing intelligent people—of their own volition, too—as if it were an emotion or a relationship.
As for Purcey’s Girls’ Academy of St. Paul, Minnesota, it was nondenominational in the brochure and Episcopalian in practice, my guardian having done his best to guess dead Daisy’s wishes on that front. Talk about through a glass darkly, too. Too bad for Jesus that the all-girl student body was also all adolescent, caught as if by motion-study photographs in various stages of pimples, surprise fuzz, colleen collines made of pale flesh, and hormonal moans—for Clark Gable, mostly, but with Tyrone Power ready to assist the cowards—along with sneaked cigs, the eternal hairstyle steeplechase (Pam a nonstarter there), rhetorical lewdness, and one honest-to-gosh alkie: Sigourney Keota of Skunk River, Iowa, nearly expelled after she threw up all over Longfellow and they found the white lightning. No wonder the sermons in chapel had an unswervingly cautionary tilt.
We heard an awful lot about how our bodies were temples, prompting Harmony Preston, who came from La Crosse and played it too, to hoot “Who does your temple pray to?” as she sashayed back across the Quad one Sunday. If wishes were visible, ten or twelve Gables, three or four Tyrones, two Robert Youngs, and one puckish Mickey Rooney—my God, was Sigourney that sozzled?—would’ve materialized in the dorms at lights out. As for Pink Thing’s own solo jimmyings of the temple door—oh, don’t go all blushy on me, bikini girl! I’m sure you do the same, not that I imagine your dad wants to think about that too much—they were usually provoked by mildly mournful alloys of moments left unseen in the Thin Man series. I always did aim for sophisticated.
Spare me, boys. I’m well aware which Thirties flick any male readers daisysdaughter.com may have are praying I’ll reprise. Mädchen in Uniform, preferably colorized, in Purceyish reenactment, yes? Even Cadwaller asked, so I know you’re all hopeless. Since l’équipe wants to be user-friendly, I’ll do my best to dredge something up, but I warn you it’s not much. I personally found and find it about as erotic as a month-old Spam sandwich.
Basketball practice, winter ’36 or ’37: Buchanan, gawky but determined forward, wrenches her shoulder. Miss Hormel, intramural coach and instructor in French—you bet she thought the world of me, folks—thinks a long soak in the tub with salts will do better at getting the kinks out than the nasty communal showers back in Radclyffe Hall. Fortunately, the teachers have private ones, waiting on their short white little Pekinese legs with their silver tongue-faucets panting.
My shoulder did hurt like the blazes; I accepted. What did I care? I can’t remember if Hormel moused up the nerve to wash my Pamback or just stood in the open door, swapping blather for lather with diffident questions about Bawdyleer. While I don’t mean to be cruel, I could’ve been raging to yield to the Charybdis temptation, just champing to get my strawberries soaped, and that accent would still have depressed me. Anyhow, she was furry, fifty, fat, squat, and fearful—you know, no great advertisement for Sappho’s delights, any more than I was the gal to put more than the tall in Tallulah. At least the Lotus Eater had been pretty. End of pornographic sex scene.
She did ask why I no longer wrote poetry, dumbfounding me with her frank if unwitting admission she was too stupid to breathe. It’d taken me two years of hard work—basketball, sneaked cigs, Thin Man movies, Eleanor Roosevelt jokes—to exorcise the Pam, still only a half vivisected frog, who’d spent a whole wretched semester wiping off pie or worse in Purcey’s halls after the appearance in Pink Rosebuds of “Chanson d’automne.” My lesson learned, I’d gotten a hell of a lot better at being a fake Midwestern private-school girl than poor Hormel would ever be at passing for heterosexual on any continent.
“Because I’m rotten at it?” I wonderingly asked her tile wall. “Jeez, everybody ought to be counting their blessings I catch on fast. Don’t you think, Miss Hormel?”
That wasn’t too charitable of me, since she was the kind of teacher who got rattled when asked her opinion of anything. Her class handed down Greatness with no Hormelized mediating, and I’d once struck horror into her squat soul by idly saying Corneille bored me. All things considered, she didn’t do badly, though.
“Well! Ahm, well. Ah, Pam. You weren’t all that good at basketball when you went out for the team, but I didn’t see you giving up on that.”
“Sure, but come on. Look at me, Miss Hormel,” I said, which was probably really unkind. “I’m the tallest girl in school except for Bellaire Petoskey from Wolverine, Michigan. There’s ‘good at,’ Miss Hormel—then there’s ‘right for.’ I started with a lot of ‘right for.’”
“I thought you did at poetry too,” she muttered, leaping like a lemming into the void of a judgment unconfirmed by the world’s approbation.
Well, I’d pretty much had it. Decided, as if I’d had any doubt, this wasn’t the tub for me. Fidgety little loon with her scalded-looking upper lip, her Bawdyleer.
I stood up. “Tell you what, Miss Hormel. I’ll try again next time my mother dies.”
Posted by: Pam
Fortunately, I do not own and have no wish to own a copy of the Fall 1934 edition of Pink Rosebuds. Though it took me a good decade, I’ve successfully expunged most of my poemess from Pink Thing’s archives. During the rest of my time at Purcey’s, I wrote for the yearbook, not our simpering lit mag. And in Engli
sh, since I wasn’t a fool.
To give you an idea of the flavor, the only line of “Chanson d’automne” I remember is “dans les grands blés sanglotants.” Its bathos was most likely inspired, to use the utterly wrong word, by the landscape chugging by on my trips from Chicago to school and back. Farewell to my guardian at Dearborn station, then a snip of Illinois and a lot of Wisconsin before we came into Minneapolis six or seven lion-pelted, intermittently bovine hours later. From there, I’d hop into a taxi—the now familiar Negro porter wrestling my trunk—for the backward zip across the river to St. Paul.
Oh, Pam, you unspeakably privileged twat! Hop in by all means. Stroll past the railroad guards checking the Los Angeles–bound freights for jumpers. Feel curious at a purely war-whoop and firewater level about the alcoholic Chippewas for whom, alone among the puzzled hundreds trying to sweep streets with their shoes, the Depression hasn’t changed things much. Earn your imaginary movie audience’s contempt with your ignorance of the meaning of all the impressive historical scenery.
A fairly serious amateur of the American past in his spare time, Gerson couldn’t abide that cheap vein of “We know better now” irony, and while I’m prejudiced, he was right. I was in my teens, fresh from seven years abroad. I had a very hard time believing any of this looked different from exactly how it was supposed to look in its role as a quondam backdrop to my life.
Panama, at that age, in my shoes, it’s all Oz. My guardian’s attempt to help put things right on Dorothy Day’s yellow brick road, which I defended simply because anything he did was unimpeachable, struck me as one more fixture of this universe, not an effort to amend its rules. He was the one who gave me cab fare, presumably for dead Daisy’s sake, to cross the river in style to my second-rate (cf. Hormel) private school.
Anyhow, I guarantee my image of “les grands blés sanglotants” had no socioeconomic dimension, even if it does sound like the title in French translation of some lesser Steinbeck novel. The real epiphany of one train trip had nothing to do with either the “sobbing” wheat and rye or the Depression, and I claim it transcended both.
On a Pullman going south, Pam reads a discarded schedule. Goggling, she learns Muscatine’s a place. Thinking of it as a product, like Crisco or Rice Krispies, I’d pictured Iowans frothing in it up to their sudsy necks after my guardian’s sales job, happy to be keeping clean in Muscatine. That’s what I should’ve written a poem about. I might have if “Chanson d’automne” hadn’t cured me forever of trying.
My guardian often took a train north to visit me, since there was a Worker house in St. Paul whose bedding and cookware he’d had a hand in supplying. After celibately squiring me around on the Saturday, he’d stay over to volunteer on the Sunday, sharing the dispossesseds’ lives as Dorothy wished. Then back to Chicago on Monday, determined to find urgency in the rhetorical pretense that Ypsilanti could use more Rice Krispies or only no Crisco stood between Toledo and joy. If you find that absurd, may I recommend Belgium? I promise you’ll be happier there.
Naturally, once it got around he wasn’t a relative, his twinkling, patient waits for Pam in the lobby of Nordhoff Hall—a man then in his forties, his gray hair closely cropped, hat to slackly draped thigh and jacket parted to announce his no longer trim waistline’s second act, all finished off by his one Twenties souvenir, white shoes—were bound to excite comment. Girls will say anything about anyone but themselves.
“Get wise. What does he want with you, Buchanan?” said Cass Lake of Deer River, Minnesota. (Or was it Marion Swayzee of Kokomo, Illinois, Alma Franklin from the vicinity of Red Cloud, Nebraska? Où sont mes vierges d’antan?) “I bet he’s just an old lech. One snowy night, he’s going to—”
“He is not. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hormel was going to like this composition, or rather cum-paw-Z-shun. I could’ve done it in my sleep, probably had more than once. I slammed my book shut.
“A lech? Oh, but I say he is. They all are. Maybe he was the same lech you saw on Cape—”
“God! I can’t stand that word. Can’t you be stupid with more variety?” (If he ever reads this, Andy Pond may well call that quote “Dawn.”)
“What, ‘lech’? Ooh, Buchanan doesn’t like to hear ‘lech.’ Lech, lech, lech, lech!”
Five foot ten of basketball player belted her tormentor’s shoulder, which shouldn’t have even made Cass blink—or was it big Sandy Hingham from near Chester, Montana? At Purcey’s, we used to smack each other around like sumo wrestlers, only trimmer. But she rubbed her arm: “Ouch, Buchanan. I was teasing.”
It’s true, though. I did hate to hear women say “lech,” common enough slang though it had been since my childhood. My guess is the aversion’s source was my lonely bilingualism, since lèche, lécher, lécheuse, and so on meant something altogether different if no more, in some contexts, palatable. Since I was trying to be an uncomplicated American girl in my ersatz way, the distraction must’ve annoyed me.
Posted by: Pam
Having put in time among the grandees of Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and what used to be called the Third World, I’m responsibly placed to tell you this. To the last man or woman, the egotists who burst upon us with the news they’ve transcended their egotism have unknowingly only sublimated it. During the Great Depression, the Dorothy who found her Scarecrow in my guardian was an example to beat the band.
What I won’t do is beam after that remark as if it’s a grand slam that puts the troublemaker in her place, letting the rest of us go airily back to discussing the futility of everything. Sublimation is as sublimation does, and she got a lot of people fed.
Thanks to my presence in September of 1935 at Dorothy Day’s lunch with my guardian, the future Brother Nicholas, I can also report a certain amount of comedy is involved in entertaining a saint. Don’t think I’m speaking figuratively, as the Vatican has started to kick canonization down the road. She’ll be only the third American woman with her own Catholic baseball card, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t been fifteen the only time I met her. More often, I’m glad I was.
It was understood they weren’t going to eat at the St. Paul Worker house itself. Dorothy had shared a thousand meals with her flock of capitalism’s displaced, but under the pressure of a tour including radio talks, personal appearances to browbeat the well-heeled into forking over, and the continuance of her column in the Worker while she traveled—it was still “Day by Day” then, not “On Pilgrimage”—she could honestly use a break. Her brusque request to my guardian to find some decent place for lunch before she shot on to St. Cloud and Milledgeville without him tested even his acute sense of appropriateness just the same. In Dorothy’s vocabulary, “decent” had enough potentially clashing meanings to make the Sphinx go crosseyed.
The future Brother Nicholas obviously couldn’t take her to one of the posher places where, as dedicated in his job as guardian as he was in serving Dorothy, he treated me to non-Purcey meals on his visits. She’d’ve been on her feet before the appetizers, prowling for rich folk who looked Catholic and demanding that they open their wallets. He did want her to have a good meal, however, and after some hunting settled on a plausible-looking Italian place, one checked tablecloth and jacketed waiter up the scale from a workingman’s café. It was all of a block from the former appliance store whose windows now proclaimed in hand-lettered white paint, The Catholic Worker Hospitality House. All are welcome. Whatever ye do unto the least of these my brethren, ye do unto Me.
Pam was surprised to be brought along. Though he was pleased anytime I asked about it, my guardian had never tried to get me involved in relief work. I’d never even gone to see him at either this Worker house or the one in Chicago where he spent most of his Sundays cooking for fifty. “Cooking for four, I can’t do,” he’d said once. “They know where to find you, after all. But fifty? I can just blend into the angry crowd.”
My
recollection is lunch was his only chance to see me this trip, since he was in St. Paul as Dorothy’s facilitator and not Pam’s guardian for a change. I only wish the old bachelor’s concerns had included the odd fashion tip. So help me, I think I was wearing white gloves.
If his worry had been the ambiance, he’d wasted his time. I suspect Miss Day came into everyplace as if it were a train station in disguise.
“Dorothy! We’re over here,” my guardian called just before her unbraked momentum would’ve taken her into the kitchen for a word with the conductor. “Dorothy, this is my ward, Pa—”
“I probably shouldn’t eat at all,” she said rapidly, sitting down in a chair that had needed its wits about it to be in the right place at the right time. “I’ve just found out I’m speaking tonight in St. Cloud. Virgil talked the Lions into giving me my say, but I hate what all this does to my nerves. Nothing but butterflies in my stomach! Oh, well. I suppose I can’t let them starve.”
“No—they didn’t know what they were getting into, either. But you speak in public all the time,” my guardian said affectionately.
“The Light Brigade charged, too. What’s your point? Oh God. Is this a menu or my schedule? Nick, am I due to speak to Neal Parmegian at eighty o’clock?”
She still had that Saracen nose you see in earlier photographs. In the later ones, the rest of her face seems to have crept gauntly forward to keep it company. She hadn’t yet started doing her hair in the tightly wound braid whose resemblance to a crown of thorns might’ve struck you as hubris if it hadn’t looked so practical. In the restaurant, she sat with her hands coiled around her elbows, turning her torso into a shell for her face to thrust forward from. I swear she kept kicking the table.
“Have we had any word about more beds for the Detroit Worker house? I’m sorry, but I didn’t have time to find out myself.”