Beverly after gaining weight eating avocados, Verna, Virginia, Mother Clapp, and Fred Claudine reads her mail at "Jessica Todd h.e.l.l."
Posing prettily in pink with my junior college yearbook Peeking out the door of the Ontario apartment. Buildings often went without fresh paint during the Depression.
Norma on the balcony outside our apartment on Euclid Avenue, Ontario.
Connie at U.S.C., where she was enticed by a larger scholarship than that offered by Cal.
Cooperation.
On the drive up the coast Norma"s parents offered to stop in Berkeley for an hour so I could visit Stebbins Hall. Inside Sather Gate, I consulted a map, raced across the campus up Euclid Avenue and Ridge Road to arrive, flushed, panting, and with a st.i.tch in my side, at the granite steps of Stebbins Hall, a three-story L-shaped building with a one-story dining room in the angle of the L. The house-mother, an elderly woman who walked with a cane, came to the door and asked me to sit down before she explained that there was no possibility of my being admitted for the fall semester. My look of despair and disappointment must have touched her because she kindly said that she would add my name to the waiting list even though there were rarely any cancellations. Perhaps another semester...
I thanked the housemother, then, feeling that I should say something more, added that if I should be accepted, I hoped I would be a.s.signed a roommate who was a good student and who did not smoke. In the 1930s many girls took up smoking as soon as they went away to college. Then I raced back across the campus to meet Norma and her parents and continue the drive home.
Summer vacation was mercifully short because Cal"s fall semester began the middle of August. I read and reread the dean"s list of approved housing, which listed nothing I could afford and which I did not show my parents, who seemed not to give a thought as to how I would live. I had to manage somehow, even if I had to work for my room and board. I saw my friends, made over some clothes, and at Mother"s suggestion made a dark red taffeta formal and a rose moire dress with three black velvet bands around the hem for parties Mother was sure I would be invited to. Mother also saw to it that I had a beautiful tailor-made coat. I wish I still had it.
The best part of summer was a couple of weekends spent at Puddin" with Claudine and her mother. Claudine had been hired to teach first and second grades in Dee, a sawmill town near Mount Hood. She was to earn seventy-five dollars a month for nine months plus an extra five dollars a month because she could play the piano. Eighty dollars a month and she would no longer live at home! Lucky Claudine. My own financial independence required two more years of college and a year of graduate work, which seemed forever when compared with the riches Claudine was soon to earn with her brand-new credential.
Then one sunny afternoon late in July the mailman shoved a letter through the mail slot, and Mother, always an eager mailbox watcher, opened the little door in the living room wall, pulled out an envelope, glanced at it, and handed it to me. The leaping heart of Wordsworth beholding a rainbow in the sky could not compare with the leaping of my heart when I beheld a letter from Stebbins Hall. I had been accepted for the fall semester. Joy flooded through me. Now I had nothing to worry about, not a single thing. I danced around, waving the letter.
Mother, who could always find something to worry her, said, "You must not let Stebbins make you wait on table. Once a waitress, always a waitress."
Dad, when he came home from work and heard the news, said I had had enough of travel by Greyhound. I must travel by train and sleep in a berth. Mother gave me precise instructions on how to b.u.t.ton the green curtains that would enclose the berth, how to go to the dining car, how to tip the porter. Train travel was more comfortable but less interesting than bus travel. The Pullman car was half-empty, and I had no one to talk to. Eating the cheapest meal in the dining car with its starched napkins and rosebuds in silver vases gave me an agreeable feeling of sophistication in spite of an awkward encounter with a catsup bottle that refused to yield its contents until the waiter gave it a whack.
And so, one August morning as the fog was retreating from San Francis...o...b..y, I disembarked Southern Pacific into a world that smelled like tomato catsup. That"s peculiar, I thought as I looked up University Avenue toward the Campanile, why should a university smell like catsup? As I collected my steamer trunk and typewriter crate, I felt academically confident. In spite of the expunged D in Botany, I had always been an honor student. In many other ways, however, I felt insecure. Did I have enough money, were my clothes right, would I make friends, would I choose the right courses? The great University loomed large and exciting, a new field to conquer.
At Stebbins I was given a key and shown to room 228 at the rear of the building, a room I was to occupy for two of the most interesting years of my life. It overlooked a row of garages with clotheslines on the roofs. Beyond, a weedy hill slanted up to the backs of small apartment houses. The room had cream-colored walls and curtains, basic furniture, and, I noted with interest, a wall telephone, which I was to learn could receive incoming calls. Outgoing calls were made on a pay phone on the stair landing. The room was part of a suite, connected by a bathroom to another room.
When I had finished unpacking, the work-shift manager knocked on the door and told me I had been a.s.signed to wash gla.s.sware after lunch. Would Mother approve, I wondered as I made up my bed with its terra-cotta-colored spread. Then I sat down to write a note to my parents telling them I had arrived safely and would not be waiting tables. To be on the safe side, I did not mention what I would be doing.
When I returned from mailing my note, I found my roommate had arrived and was unpacking. Her name was Miriam. She was a tall, slender girl with curly hair who was wearing blue shorts and a pink blouse. We exchanged fundamental roommate information. She was a soph.o.m.ore from Utah and was putting herself through Cal on a scholarship awarded each year to the Utah student with the highest grade point average. She had won it twice and had every intention of winning it two more years. At Stebbins she chose to wait on tables at dinner because waitresses ate before the other girls. This allowed her to go to the library early.
"I"m so glad you"re here," Miriam told me. "My last roommate tried to keep a puppy in the bathroom."
Miriam"s wardrobe, as limited as mine, was quickly unpacked. She tacked her shoe bag above mine on the closet door. Stebbins had a rule that nothing was allowed on closet floors or under beds. Then she set about making up her bed as if the foot were the head, placed her pillow at the opposite end, and covered her bed with the spread so our beds looked alike.
How odd. "Why do you make your bed that way?" I asked.
"The dean says we have to sleep with our heads eight feet apart, and the only way we can do it is for one of us to sleep with her head at the foot of the bed."
Diagonally our heads were eight feet apart. Maybe that"s Cal"s way of preventing the spread of germs, I thought.
Then Miriam made an astonishing remark. "Someday I"m going to marry a physicist."
To me physics was a course in a catalog. I had never given the subject a thought, other than to avoid it. "Any special physicist?" I asked.
"No."
"Then why a physicist?"
"Because they are so nice," she answered. "I am sure one will come along someday."
I could see that I had an unusual roommate.
While Miriam and I were getting to know each other, the house was filled with thumps of trunks and boxes, and the laughter and greeting of girls, all sorts of girls, I was to learn in the next few days. Tall, short, shy, "fast," brilliant, struggling, colorless, beautiful, neat, sloppy, confident, brokenhearted. Most were wearing homemade clothes. One girl had tailored a coat from a blanket. They came from small towns, ranches, mediumsized cities outside commuting distance of Oakland and San Francisco, and other states. Girls from small high schools were confused and bewildered in a university of more than fourteen thousand students. Many girls had no idea of the sort of education they wanted or needed. Sheltered girls were overwhelmed by the freedom of a university that expected them to be adults. Some girls knew exactly where they were going in life and how they would get there. Some, and I was one, were sure where they wanted to go but did not know if they could find the money to get there.
A few girls were ashamed of living in a cooperative house, but most were glad to be there. Some had had unsatisfactory experiences working for room and board even though the university set the pay and the number of hours worked. Fitting into a strange household was awkward, and they were usually expected to baby-sit weekends when they longed for fun. One girl had been treated as a maid and required to wear a little white ap.r.o.n and a cap. For them Stebbins was a relief.
During the two years I lived at Stebbins, four girls occupied the other half of the suite at different times. One was a statuesque girl from Carmel who had worked as an artists" model. "Naked?" I asked, shocked.
"Oh yes," she answered, and made a face. She had not enjoyed the work.
Another girl, short and plump, suffered because she felt she was too fat. Sometimes when I came in from cla.s.ses, I would find her, florid and sweating, wrapped in a woolen blanket, lying on her bed after soaking herself in bathwater as hot as she could stand. Her weight loss, if any, was only temporary, and to me did not seem worth the misery, but then I was, as people often said, "just skin and bones."
Then there was a girl from Montana who padded around in beaded moccasins. Her roommate was tall, beautiful Nellie, who once came to me in desperation. She had been elected to the history honor society and was told that for her initiation she was required to read an original poem about the War of Jenkins" Ear. Since I was an English major, would I please write it for her? I did not fancy myself a poet but was willing to try if she would tell me what the battle was about. She told me about the eighteenth-century battle between England and Spain that began with Captain Jenkins displaying in the House of Commons his ear, which had been amputated by Spaniards before they pillaged his ship. This colorful event seemed to lend itself to the ballad form, and so, tapping out rhythm with my pencil, I wrote "The Ballad of Jenkins" Ear." Nellie reported that it was well received at the dinner. I wish I had kept a copy.
These four suite-mates, all so different, shared one thing in common: Each took her turn at cleaning the bathroom without complaint. In addition to our bathroom-cleaning schedule, roommates took turns dusting furniture, vacuuming rugs, and making sure there were no dust mice under beds or on closet floors. All rooms were inspected once a week. Slovenliness was not acceptable at Stebbins Hall.
I spent the first day or two of that first semester hurrying up and down hills, campus map in hand, inhaling the smell of tomato catsup, which someone had explained came from a cannery "down in the flats." Downhill to Harmon Gym, where I waited in a long, long line to register for cla.s.ses, uphill to the women"s gym for a physical examination. There all the girls were handed ancient gray bathing suits to wear for modesty. Why I cannot guess. They were ill-fitting and all had large holes in the crotches. Off to Cowell Hospital for a hearing test, but I do not recall an eye test. Downhill again to register at the Employment Office, which had nothing to offer someone who had earned money only by knitting or by working in a library. New students did not rate even the most menial job of shelving books. With ravenous appet.i.te I hurried back up the hill to Stebbins while music rang out from the Campanile, making my feet lighter as they carried me toward food.
Meals at Stebbins! Eighty-two girls plus fifteen boarders who lived in rooming houses across the street. The low ceiling of our crowded dining room compressed conversation, laughter, and the rattle of dishes into a din that forced us to raise our voices to high pitches as if we were talking to people who had hearing problems. Waitresses hurried, balancing as many as five plates at a time. Busgirls leaned to one side under the weight of heavy trays of dirty dishes they were carrying to the kitchen. Nevertheless, from the babble I learned that at Cal grades were important, and something to worry about. Required courses were often dreaded and certain professors should be avoided if possible. When I shouted my name and "I"m majoring in English," I was surprised at the sort of answers shouted back: "Poor you" or "I"m glad I"m not in your shoes. You get to take English Comprehensive!" What"s so terrible about an English exam, I wondered. Their remarks stayed with me as I joined another girl in the kitchen to attack gla.s.sware.
We filled two sinks with hot water, poured into one strong granulated soap that made us sneeze. We came to dread days when sherbet gla.s.ses doubled our work, but we felt our job was better than that of girls who sc.r.a.ped plates and loaded them into the antique dishwasher. We worked as fast as we could, entertaining ourselves with knock-knock jokes, and left the kitchen damp with perspiration and with hands that looked like wet pink corduroy. The luxury of rubber gloves did not enter our frugal minds.
After my first day of gla.s.s washing, I ran upstairs to consult my copy of the General Catalogue and read in the English section, "The Comprehensive Final Examination must be taken at the end of the senior year. It will consist of two three-hour papers, the second of which will take the form of an essay. The examination will cover English literature from 1350 to 1900." There goes Beowulf, I thought. He would be no help at all. Neither would the modern American poetry, biography, or essays I had enjoyed at Chaffey. Mrs. Kegley"s course in drama, although called English, had been mostly about playwrights of other countries. I consulted the lower-division courses taught at Cal, which included Survey of English Literature, which I had not had, at least not as described in the catalog. Somehow I would have to manage.
I soon put the Comprehensive out of my mind because of the struggle going on at Stebbins Hall. Almost as soon as the semester began, girls began to mutter with dissatisfaction over the food. Menus were planned by the housemother, who sat erect at the head table with her mouth set in a straight line. Plainly, she expected us to eat without complaint the meals set before us. Since food had never particularly interested me, I was not much concerned until the day stewed rabbit was served. The rabbit had been shot. We knew this because we found shot in the meat. And then there was a lunch of inedible, lightly scorched oyster soup with cantaloupe for dessert. Hungry girls who burned energy climbing hills and stairs pushed their dishes away while the housemother sat erect, eating her scorched soup as if she savored it. Madeline, the student manager, a young woman of intelligence and character, rose from the table and headed for the office of the Dean of Women while the rest of us faced a hungry afternoon.
The housemother was soon replaced. Although I was not sorry to see her go, I always suspected she had moved me ahead on the waiting list because I had requested a roommate who was a good student and who did not smoke. Such virtue would have appealed to her.
A new housemother arrived, Mrs. Ruth Cochran. She was young, sympathetic, and understanding of the times in which we lived. She also understood that we lived in a cooperative house run by students and not by the housemother. She did oversee menus, which the cook prepared with food purchased cooperatively with the two men"s houses and adapted to the appet.i.tes of active young women. Unlike students who lived in boardinghouses, we enjoyed the luxury of an egg for Sunday breakfast.
The second semester, I felt I had had my share of corduroy hands and managed to get transferred to the switchboard. This work shift required an hour a day because theoretically operators could study while on duty. In practice, study was almost impossible because of interruptions: plugging in the lines for incoming calls, pulling levers to ring bells, looking over young men as I rang their dates" rooms to announce them. If the man was a blind date, the girl would usually whisper, "How does he look?" If the man had gone into the living room to wait, I could whisper, "Nice," "So-so," "Tall," "Short," or whatever word I could find to help the girl meet her evening"s fate.
Calls for baby-sitters were pa.s.sed on to any girl I knew who was in real need of money. One call I kept for myself, for as much as I enjoyed my noisy life at Stebbins, a quiet evening in an unusual house in the hills was a treat. This house was built around a circular staircase, and every room was on a different level. The well-behaved little girl, Donna, went to bed early but sometimes called out, "Miss Bunn, I want a dwink of water." Running around the staircase with a gla.s.s of water was the only interruption in peaceful, comfortable evenings in a quiet living room with a view of the lights of San Francisco. As I absorbed the soothing silence, I felt the Berkeley Hills must be the loveliest spot in the world and longed to live there myself someday.
My senior year I became house secretary, a position that relieved me of a work shift but required that I take minutes of compulsory monthly house meetings and post them on the bulletin board. These meetings were usually short because everyone was anxious to get to the library. The house president made announcements: "Please do not linger over good-nights. Necking on the front steps gives Stebbins a bad name." To my surprise, for several years afterward, whenever I met someone who had lived at Stebbins, she often said, "Oh, you"re the one who wrote those hilarious minutes." Hilarious? I wasn"t trying to be funny. I simply recorded what took place. Years later, when I read a statement by James Thurber, "Humor is best that lies closest to the familiar," I began to understand.
Council meetings went on much longer-too long, we felt, if we had papers due or tests the next day. These meetings dealt with more serious matters, often individual behavior, and minutes were not posted for all to read. A major problem was the Dean of Women, who felt we should cut expenses by eliminating the switchboard, which cost what now seems like a ridiculously small amount, something like twenty-eight dollars a month for all of Stebbins. Never, we vowed, would we part with the switchboard. If we could not receive incoming calls, how could men get in touch with us? Then there was the problem of the girl who wore slacks to the library. It was agreed she be told that slacks were inappropriate for wear outside the house. And what about the girl who was conspicuously pregnant but behaved as if she hadn"t noticed? Should she be allowed to remain at Stebbins? Someone pointed out that people were saying, "You see what comes out of Stebbins Hall." Although we all felt we had our good reputation to maintain, we decided, after long and serious discussion, that the girl should stay. We would say nothing. She needed us no matter what others said about the virtue, or lack of virtue, of the residents of Stebbins Hall.
At the beginning of my second semester the house manager announced that the eighteen dollars a month we had been paying did not cover "depreciation of fixed a.s.sets." Our fee must therefore be raised to twenty-four dollars a month. We were aghast. Where could we find an additional six dollars a month when most of us could barely manage eighteen? Some girls felt they would have to drop out of school (as far as I know none did); others reluctantly wrote home for money, something I refused to do. One girl had a white fur "bunny" jacket that she rented for fifty cents an evening to girls going to formal dances. It shed on dark suits. Some found odd jobs typing or baby-sitting. I was a poor typist, and baby-sitting, except for my one customer, was too time-consuming. Where could I find another six dollars?
I found six dollars in the style of the times. Hems twelve inches from the floor were no longer fashionable, so I opened a skirt-shortening business: fifty cents a skirt if it was straight and didn"t have pleats. I could shorten a straight skirt in half to three-quarters of an hour, which beat the forty cents an hour Cal set for student labor, and I saved precious time because I could work in my room. My business, although hardly flourishing, did bring in enough to make up the six dollars without my having to write home for money, something I had vowed I would never do. I wanted independence more than anything.
Fun at Cal.
At the beginning of the semester, on late sunny afternoons, some of us ran up the hill to the Pacific School of Religion to play a children"s game, statue, on the lawn. Other times, after dinner, when we had written "Libe" in the sign-out book, we went off to the library singing, "Ta-root.i.ty-too, ta-root.i.ty-toot!
We are the girls from the inst.i.tute.
We do not smoke, we do not chew, We do not do what the other girls do!"
When the library closed at ten o"clock, we returned to Stebbins, most of us to continue studying.
Sat.u.r.day afternoons the atmosphere of Stebbins changed. We washed our hair, and sometimes I cut Miriam"s, which was so curly mistakes didn"t show. We exchanged shoe polish and pressed our dresses in the bas.e.m.e.nt laundry. Many of us chose the time before dinner to answer letters.
Next to Mother, my most loyal correspondent was Claudine, who wrote cheerful letters from the cold mill town fourteen miles from Mount Hood. Sometimes she enclosed a dollar bill in her letter. A whole dollar to spend any way I pleased! I bought silk stockings for special occasions, stockings without runs stopped by dabs of nail polish. Once I used Claudine"s dollar to take a ferry trip to San Francisco, where I enjoyed a quiet, solitary lunch in a tearoom. Quiet and solitude were as precious as money when I lived at Stebbins.
With letters written, hair washed, and dresses pressed, we were ready for fun. Miriam had a number of male friends. Occasionally I went out with one, and once we double-dated, a memorable evening because one of the men had a car. We drove across the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, something every student longed to do, for this bridge that we had seen being built was now open for traffic. The sodium-vapor lights shone down upon us, turning our complexions green and our dresses hideous colors, the sort of colors children mix from their paint boxes. Looking like specters did not dim our excitement at riding eight miles over water. In San Francisco we danced, without much enthusiasm as I recall, in the Colonial Room at the St. Francis Hotel, or "Frantic," as students usually called it. After waffles at Tiny"s we drove back to Berkeley. I cannot recall a thing about the two men who were our escorts. They could not compare with the excitement of riding across the new bridge, even though the lights made us look like ghouls.
Campus social life centered on dances: club dances, house dances, fraternity and sorority dances. I was taken to one dance in a fraternity house that I found so boring-all that beer drinking-that I simply walked out and went back to Stebbins alone. Largest of all were the biweekly a.s.sembly Dances held in Harmon Gym, admission fifteen cents with a student-body card, dates not necessary. Sometimes Miriam and I went, promising each other we would return to Stebbins together. The orchestras were good, and because Cal had two and a half male students to every female, there was always a stag line of men looking women over as if we were auditioning for the honor of dancing with them, which I suppose we were. I seemed to attract engineering students, all of them looking tired and overworked, some with slide rules (referred to by Stebbins girls as "sly drools") in their shirt pockets, which indicated they had dropped in for a breather before going back to their books, belying the campus myth that engineering students entered the Engineering Building and were not seen for four years. All of the engineers were serious, and we had little to talk about as we tried not to tread upon each other"s toes. I never once met an engineering student at an a.s.sembly Dance who was cheerful or a good dancer. As they concentrated on their feet, they seemed to have the weight of future bridges and skysc.r.a.pers on their shoulders. Apparently they recover from the oppression of the School of Engineering after graduation. Since college I have met a number of interesting engineers who, although they were serious men, could talk, laugh, and even dance like anyone else.
At one a.s.sembly Dance a tall, thin young man with black hair and blue eyes stepped out of the stag line and asked me to dance. He said his name was Clarence Cleary. "Cleary?" I asked, never having heard the name. "How do you spell it?" He spelled it. He was from Sacramento. So were several Stebbins girls whom he knew, which gave us something in common. I hoped he would telephone me, and I was glad I was wearing a becoming pink dress Mother had made with great care and sent to me a few days before, a dress I found touching because Mother disliked sewing and was usually careless in her work.
In the meantime Miriam received a letter from a friend, a physics professor at the University of Washington, telling her a British physicist in this country on a Commonwealth Fellowship would be at Cal working with Dr. Ernest Lawrence and would call on her. Miriam hoped he would, and sure enough, Wilfrid called in person. He was handsome, very British, and was immediately entranced by Miriam.
Through Wilfrid I met several Commonwealth Fellows whose stipends must have been generous, for they had cars and seemed to have plenty of spending money. Wilfrid"s roommate was Campbell, a chemist from Scotland who had once worked in a coal mine. We went as a group to Faculty Club dances, a dinner at the home of a professor, to Harmon Gym to hear George Gershwin play Rhapsody in Blue with the San Francisco Symphony. "Dreadful," p.r.o.nounced Wilfrid.
Another time Miriam and I went with Fellows to see the cyclotron housed in a shack on the campus. I remember we had to take off our watches before we approached the invention where atoms were smashed to produce new radioactive species. The cyclotron was the reason Wilfrid was at Cal. All I knew about atoms I had learned in Philosophy 5A from studying Lucretius, an ancient Roman philosopher, who got it all wrong. I kept still and tried to look impressed by the strangely shaped device. If I had understood what the smashing of atoms would lead to, I would have been genuinely impressed and probably frightened.
Only once did I think of myself as going out on a date with a Fellow, an Oxford graduate and, as I recall, also a physicist. His dancing was as bad as or even worse than that of any undergraduate engineering student, or perhaps the English danced differently. When we were not dancing, I eluded his clutching hands. For some reason the Fellows left the Faculty Club dance early to go to another dance, in the Hotel Oakland, a place that was to play an important part in my life half a dozen years later. The ride to Oakland was harrowing. My date, fresh from England, drove on the left-hand side of the street while I clutched the door in fright. We rode over round metal b.u.t.tons that protected streetcar riders from traffic as they boarded streetcars. Some people had to jump out of his way as we b.u.mpety-b.u.mped past. I was relieved when what I had come to think of as the mad Englishman returned me safely but unnerved to Stebbins. He telephoned the next evening, but I told him I was much too busy to see him. He did not telephone again and probably thought of me as too American to appreciate an Englishman.
Clarence called, and so did other men. One I had met at the Masonic Club, which my parents arranged for me to join so I would "meet nice people." His name was Jack, and he was a graduate student in entomology. I went out with him two or three times, but somehow my intuition told me not to trust him, probably because he never asked me more than a day ahead. His explanation was that he was on call for inspecting incoming ships for foreign insects, an explanation that seemed logical after my bus experience at the California border. Nevertheless, I once said something about his being a bachelor and added, "But are you a bachelor?"
Jack laughed and said, "Where do you get such ideas in your pretty little head?" Having a pretty little head struck me as so ridiculous it was funny, but I managed not to laugh. To this day, when I do something stupid, I blame it on my pretty little head.
One night at an a.s.sembly Dance, where I had gone with Miriam, Jack stepped out of the stag line. As we were about to join the throng circulating the gym, a thin, tired-looking older woman interrupted and said to me, "I think we should know one another. I"m Jack"s wife."
I was too numb with embarra.s.sment and humiliation to say anything. There followed a bit of dialogue etched in my memory forever. Jack"s wife said to her husband, "What do you see in her anyway?" Indignation erased my embarra.s.sment.
He said, "She"s young and fresh and there"s a shine about her."
His wife snapped, "Don"t worry. Men will take it off!" and stalked away.
Jack turned to me and said, "Believe me, Beverly, I wasn"t making a play for you. Can"t we talk this over?"
"No," I said, and walked away with tears of anger in my eyes.
In this a.s.sortment of social life there was Clarence. He was six years older than I and was putting himself through Cal by working part-time in the Bedding and Linen Department at Breuner"s Furniture Store in Oakland. We went to a couple of a.s.sembly Dances and ate bacon-and-tomato sandwiches and drank milk at the Jolly Roger. He was kind, gentle, quiet, and, best of all, single. I made sure of that. By now I was wise enough to go to the lobby of Cal Hall to consult a card file of students filled out when we registered. At the time I had wondered why we had to give our marital status. Now I knew.
Clarence, authentic bachelor, began to telephone me every afternoon at five before he left work, and I began to look forward to his calls. He was the middle of five children, and his mother, a widow, was a nurse in the emergency room of Sacramento Hospital. After junior college, and a series of low-paying jobs, whatever he could find in Depression times, he had returned to school at the California College of Agriculture in Davis, a sixteen-mile hitchhike from Sacramento. Drivers were kind to students. In two years, he was late for cla.s.s only once. His interest was veterinary science, but he felt he should no longer live at home when his mother had younger children to support, so he became a dairy technician because he could earn a certificate in two years. He had worked for a dairy in Palo Alto, an experience that left him critical of ice cream. "Too much air incorporated into the mixture," he often commented when we bought ice-cream cones. As the Depression deepened, he had been laid off and decided to return to school. He was studying economics and history.
Men did not make up all of my social life. One of the Stebbins girls stood out. I noticed her the first week of the semester at lunchtime when she bused heavy trays of dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. She was small, attractive, and wearing a becoming red-and-white-checked dress obviously made from a tablecloth, which suggested she was a girl of originality, initiative, and independence. Her name was Jane Chourre, and we soon became friends, lifelong friends, as it turned out. Jane was calmer and better organized than I and aspired to become a teacher. "Teaching is an honorable profession," she often said. "A teacher has a respected place in the community."
English was her major, and we shared several of the same cla.s.ses. She often went home weekends and returned with begonias in vibrant colors, yellow, red, orange, and apricot, which her father grew as a hobby. If she was too busy to go home, her mother sometimes mailed her begonias, with each stem carefully secured in a balloon of water. Fresh flowers meant a lot at Stebbins. Mrs. Chourre understood this.
Jane invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with her in Mill Valley. Jane"s parents were an unusual couple for those days, for Mrs. Chourre was both older and taller than her husband. Their children-Jane"s sister, Marianne, and her brothers, Bud and d.i.c.k-were close in age because, as Mrs. Chourre put it matter-of-factly, "We wanted four children, and because I was older, we had to have them close together." She had been a home economics teacher and was always serene in her role as homemaker and mother. Mr. Chourre liked teaching in the print shop of Tamalpais High School. They were a happy couple. Their home was unpretentious and immaculate. Windows shone, curtains were crisp, chairs were comfortable, but there was no particular color scheme. Mrs. Chourre thought women who went in for "interior decoration" superficial and their families probably uncomfortable. A house should be comfortable for the people who lived in it. Even d.i.c.k"s dog, Chuck, had his own ottoman in the living room. At the Chourres" even the dog was comfortable. I thought sadly of Mother closing the blinds so our furniture would not fade and not allowing me to sit on the bed because I might wrinkle the spread and break down the edge of the mattress. Jane and Marianne shared an L-shaped bedroom furnished with two cots and a dressing table made of orange crates. They sat on their cots anytime they felt like it.
And the food! After the quant.i.ty cooking at Stebbins, every meal was a treat, for Mrs. Chourre was an exquisite cook whose kitchen habits fascinated me. As she cooked, she kept a pan of soapy water in the sink. As soon as she used a utensil, she washed it. When Thanksgiving dinner for twelve was on the table, there wasn"t one dirty dish in the kitchen.
The Chourres were a family who found pleasure in small things: the begonias Mr. Chourre grew in a lath-house, the richness of their compost heap, a game of Scrabble, a ca.s.serole dish they called "Smells to Heaven." Jane was making an afghan out of squares of bright sc.r.a.ps of yarn woven on a small loom. Her whole family helped out. Mr. Chourre wove a yellow square on which Jane embroidered POP in turquoise yarn. It seemed to me that everything the Chourres did had a touch of originality about it. Mrs. Chourre kept on the mantelpiece a small box of misspellings of the family name that she clipped from envelopes that came to the house. One of the misspellings was "Chowsie." Jane and I often referred to her family as the Chowsies.
After Thanksgiving, Clarence began to meet me at the library in the evening and to walk me back to Stebbins. Women were warned against walking alone on the campus at night. Once we went by way of the Greek Theater, where we ran out on the stage and pretended to lead a yell at a football rally: "Oski wow-wow!.
Iskey! Wee-wee!.
Holy-Mucky-Eye!.
Holy-Berkeley-Eye!.
California!
Wow!"
We were startled when applause came out of the dark.
Back at Stebbins, we lingered just long enough on the steps so no one could accuse us of lingering. Clarence walked a lot that year because he then walked back across the campus to his boardinghouse, a Victorian house run by a woman the men called Skipper, where he shared a room with a premed student, Ken. Many years later their room was immortalized in the film The Graduate, when it became Dustin Hoffman"s college room.
Not that I saw much of that room. Women were strictly forbidden in men"s rooms, and vice versa. I was there only once, when Clarence had a bad case of flu and did not go to Cowell Hospital because the staff might keep him too long, and he would lose his job. Ken telephoned me and said Clarence would like to see me. Risking my reputation, I went. Chaperoned by Ken, but feeling guilty, I stood in the doorway to avoid germs and talked to a very pale, bedridden Clarence, who looked even thinner than usual. After a few minutes, I hurried back across the campus, half expecting the dean to pop out from behind a bush.
Mother would have been horrified. She had cautioned me never, never to go to a man"s room, and she was already suspicious of Clarence, whom I frequently mentioned in letters because I knew Mother was intensely interested in my social life, far more than in my studies. Once she asked if Clarence had an Irish grandfather. This seemed an odd question. I was too naive to see what Mother was getting at, so I asked Clarence about his ancestor. Yes, he had had an Irish grandfather but had never seen him. Well! This must mean Clarence was a Catholic, Mother wrote, and she told me I would be wise to drop him at once.
Mother"s judgment seemed questionable to me. Yes, Clarence was a Catholic. What difference did it make? We enjoyed each other"s company, that was all. Nothing serious, I a.s.sured Mother. I planned to finish college, go to library school, and work for at least a year before I married anyone. That was what she advised, and for once we agreed.
This did not satisfy Mother. Clarence and I might get serious, and that would never do. No one on either side of my family had ever married a Catholic. I mentioned Clarence less often in my letters but continued to see him. When spring came, we went for long Sunday afternoon walks in the Berkeley Hills, where acacia bloomed, eucalyptus trees gave off their pungent fragrance, and through the trees we caught glimpses of the bay sparkling in the sun and dotted with sailboats. Gradually I saw less of other men and more of Clarence.
My Intellectual Life.
Living at Stebbins Hall and dating were educational, but there was more to life at Cal. Much, much more. That first week of cla.s.ses I started off with a light heart, eager antic.i.p.ation, and a new binder filled with pale green paper, which was supposed to be easy on the eyes. The Campanile measured our days and lightened our steps. I was always amused when it played "Mighty Lak" a Rose," the bells bonging out, "Sweetest little fellow..."
It was a week of surprises, beginning with cla.s.s size. Except for a small cla.s.s in German, which I was taking because it was required for library school, and English 117J, Shakespeare for English majors, which was given in sections limited to forty students, cla.s.ses seemed enormous after the small cla.s.ses at Chaffey. English 125C, The Novel, had several hundred students, and so did Psychology 170, Developmental Psychology. Philosophy 5A filled what was called Wheeler Aud, which must have held almost a thousand students.
Professors began to lecture, and, with fountain pen, I began to take notes, a new experience for me, although a high school English teacher had warned her cla.s.s, "When you go to college you will have to take notes," and for half an hour had read while her cla.s.s tried to distill the essence of her words. Essence-distilling was more difficult at Cal. I thought of the knitting we had done in cla.s.s at Chaffey. Why hadn"t we been taking notes?
Students were as impersonal as any attending a lecture in a civic auditorium, with one exception. Because I looked like someone who could take good notes, attractive men would sometimes sit beside me and strike up a conversation, not because they were interested in me, I soon discovered, but because they wanted to borrow my notes, which I refused to lend, no matter how charming the borrower might be. I suspected good-looking note-borrowers were so unscrupulous they might not bother to return my notes.
Miriam, who was majoring in economics, and worked out an unusual study schedule, or rather, she worked it out and I went along with it because it suited us. At eight o"clock every evening, Miriam drank a large gla.s.s of water so she would have to get up at four in the morning. She then slept soundly. When I came in from the library, I was careful not to wake her while I studied for an hour or so at my desk before I went to bed. Sometimes I would wake up early, usually when the steam radiator began to clank, and see Miriam studying in the circle of light from her gooseneck lamp. She was wearing a warm bathrobe, but her feet in thin leather travel slippers were blue with cold. Although she may have felt cold feet helped her stay awake, I wished I could afford to buy her a pair of warm, woolly slippers. If she saw that I was awake, she often said, "Why am I studying this stuff?" which meant she was working on statistics. If she was not at her desk, she was in the bathroom whispering her Latin vocabulary. She could be sure of an A in Latin, which made her scholarship more secure.