Sunday evenings, which usually drew the biggest crowds of all, ended earlier than Saturday but not as early as they should have considering that Monday was a workday; and on Monday night we usually went to the movies because Monday was family night at our neighbourhood theatre, and an unlimited group arriving together and appearing reasonably compatible could all get in for twenty-five cents.
Tuesday nights we went to bed early unless someone was giving a party. Parties were indistinguishable one from another. They were always given in someone’s apartment; the food was always spaghetti, garlic bread and green salad; the drinks were either bathtub gin and lemon soda or Dago red; the entertainment sitting on the floor and listening to Bach or sitting on a studio couch and listening to Bach. I didn’t care much for Bach, even when partially anaesthetized by bathtub gin, but red-hot nails in my eyeballs wouldn’t have made me admit it, because Mary had made it very clear to me that everybody who was not down on all fours liked Bach, Baudelaire, Dostoevski, Aldous Huxley, Spengler, almond paste on fillet of sole, Melachrino cigarettes and the foreign movies.
I liked Baudelaire, Huxley and Dostoevski, I loathed Spengler, felt that almond paste on fillet of sole had a lot in common with chocolate-dipped oysters, Melachrino cigarettes tasted like camel dung and the foreign movies would have been dandy if only they hadn’t been foreign.
There is a certain state of ennui in which I become engulfed almost immediately when confronted by a flickering, speckled film and a lot of unfamiliar actors batting their eyes and saying, ‘A bisogni si conoseen gli amici’, or ‘Adel sitzt im Gemüte nicht im Geblüte’, or ‘A pobreza no hay verguenza’, or ‘Battre le fer pendant qu’ il est cbaud’, or ‘da svidanya’.
The foreign movies were on Wednesday nights at eleven-thirty at a University district theatre. The reason I kept going, aside from a false pride that made me say I thought they were ‘magnificent’, ‘a new approach’, ‘delicately directed’, etc., when I really thought most of them were boring and dull, was the fact that after each one the theatre management served little cups of black coffee and free cigarettes.
“An amazing picture, grrrrreat photography”, I announced loudly in the foyer of the theatre, as I stuffed my pockets with cigarettes, after having slept through Rocket to the Moon, a ridiculous picture in which the poorly made-up actors and actresses had themselves shot to the moon and were shown lurching around in its barren craters, speaking German and being otherwise hysterical about a questionable achievement.
We saw a French film of Joan of Arc which showed only the heads and shoulders of the actors. “Terribly new approach”, I said, grabbing at the cigarettes and trying to shake off the stiff-necked feeling of having spent the evening peering over a high board fence.
The Constant Nymph, however, an English picture starring Elizabeth Bergner and Robert Donat, I still consider the best adaptation of a book, and the most delightful moving picture I have ever seen. Mary also liked it but our friends were not enthusiastic—‘Pleasant little thing’, they called it, ashamed because they had enjoyed it and it had been in English.
One winter Saturday afternoon, quite by accident, as we were walking through the University district, my sister Dede and I discovered what was to become one of our chief and most enjoyable forms of free entertainment.
“I wonder why all those people are going into the basement of that church?” I asked Dede, as we strolled along the street. “Let’s go in and find out”, Dede, always one to face things, said. So we did and found that Miss Irma Grondahl was presenting her pupils and herself in a piano recital. Having nothing else to do we decided to stay and seated ourselves on folding chairs in the front row. Immediately Miss Grondahl, in a long gold velvet cape, appeared and assuming that we were relatives of some performer, solicited our help in moving the upright piano over to the left side of the stage and arranging large bouquets of dusty laurel leaves along the footlights.
The recital began and was more or less routine, except that all the performers made mistakes, swayed back and forth like pendulums as they played and even a baby only about four years old, who played ‘Baby Bye See the Fly, Let Us Watch Him You and I’, standing up, used the loud pedal.
Then Miss Grondahl announced that she would play ‘Rustle of Spring’ and ‘Hark, Hark the Lark’. She had shed her gold cape and was simply clad in a sleeveless black satin dress and some crystal beads. She settled herself on the piano bench, folded her hands in her lap and began to sway. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and then suddenly, like running in backdoor in jumping rope, she lit into the first runs of ‘Rustle’. Miss Grondahl was a vigorous, very loud player, but what made her performance irresistible to Dede and me were the large tufts of black hair which sprang quivering out of the armholes of her dress each time she lifted her hands at the end of a run, or raised her arm for a crashing chord.
After that we rarely missed a recital. We watched the neighbourhood papers and clipped out the notices and attended every single singing, dancing, elocution or piano recital that didn’t conflict with working hours and was within walking distance. We grew very partial to modern dance recitals whose uninhibited antics, often resembling the pangs of childbirth or someone who had just been stung by a bee, so delighted us that we were sometimes asked to leave, but singing was our favourite.
We learned almost immediately that, as we invariably became hysterical with mirth at the first frenzied shriek of the first performer, and singing teachers were wont to salt their audience with friends and relatives, the very back row was the safest place to sit. If we were fortunate enough to locate and attend a voice recital where one of the performers was tone deaf, or there were some thick mashed-potato contraltos, our joy was complete.
Our attendance at recitals so stimulated our appetite for simple pleasures that we began clipping out and attending other little functions. The Annual Tea of the North-west Driftwood Society was remembered for its few guests, and enormous platters of openfaced sandwiches which we wolfed down as we exchanged opinions on patina, good beaches and time of year to look.
Most groups of Penwomen had very little food but lots of cigarettes; we were too young and regarded suspiciously by most garden clubs; but North American Indian Relic Collectors, the Society for the Protection of the Douglas Fir and the North-west Association of Agate Polishers, etc., were glad to see anybody.
Another simple pleasure we enjoyed in those poverty-ridden days was looking at real estate. My brother Cleve through a long involved series of trades, beginning, I believe, when he was ten years old with a saddle Mother had had made in Mexico, had acquired a long low cream-coloured Cord convertible with dark blue fenders and top. On spring Saturday afternoons we would all climb in the Cord and go house hunting.
I suppose in a way it was taking an unfair advantage of the real estate dealers, who invariably, when they saw our gorgeous car drive up, often primed with Mary’s and my cleaning fluid, came careening out of their offices brandishing keys and carrying fountain pens and a contract. But on the other hand they tried awfully hard to take advantage of us.
‘This magnificent structure,’ they would say, as they tried to force open the sagging door of some termite-infested old mansion, ‘was the home of one of Seattle’s finest old families and is being sold for taxes. Just given away, really.’ In we would all troop, the children racing up the stairs or down to the cellar, the rest of us walking slowly, examining everything and noting with amusement the empty whisky bottles, lipstick-smeared walls, and other irrefutable evidence that this fine old family must have been supplementing their income by making whisky or dabbling in white slavery.
Sometimes we found wonderful bargains. One was a huge brick inn, north of the city, about an $85,000 structure, on sale for $5,500. There were thirteen bedrooms, a living-room eighty feet long, a dining-room, breakfast-room, library, music-room and billiard-room, every room with a fireplace, magnificent barns, a stream and ten acres of land, and we had many violent fights over
who would have which room and how we would furnish it. The real estate dealer finally got so sick of taking us out there that he gave us the keys, and we used to take picnics and make plans while we ate our peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. The real estate dealer was more than anxious to make an even trade for our very saleable house in the University district and we were all ready to move in when Mary, distressingly practical, pointed out that the nearest bus line was five miles away, the nearest school about eighteen miles and the former owner had, upon questioning, admitted that it cost from $200 a month up to even take the chill off the lower floor.
We were all so disappointed that Cleve went right out and rustled up an enormous yacht which was on sale for almost nothing, and would really be a much more economical home for us because it would eliminate real estate taxes, light, gas and telephone bills, we could catch fish from it and we could pull up the gangplank when bores or bill collectors approached. The yacht unfortunately was in Alaska and Cleve never did get around to sailing it down.
Once we found a whole block of brand-new empty houses, each uniquely hideous, each on a forty-foot lot and each priced at $40,000, which at that time would have bought the Olympic Hotel with Puget Sound thrown in for good measure.
When we stopped by the first one, the owner who lived in the middle house popped out of his front door and came running up to the car before Cleve had turned off the motor. “Wonderful buy, wonderful buy” he said rather thickly, swallowing the last of a doughnut but not bothering to wipe the powdered sugar off his chin. “Come on in, all of you. Go through them. Lots of time.” We all trooped out and into the first house.
Hours and hours later we were only on the next to the last and it was dark, the children were hungry and we were all surfeited with bad planning, unrelieved ugliness, chromium, peach plaster and maroon tile. Mother, pointing to the miles and miles of woodland stretching away in all directions, asked the eager little builder why he had put such expensive houses on such small lots. He said, “Big development out here. Gotta make room for everybody.”
We drove away then and left him in front of his big development whose only signs of life were a single lighted window in his own house, and the hoot of a night owl from one of the trees across the road.
10
Night School
UNTIL I STARTED NIGHT SCHOOL, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity. While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being labelled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner, highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player, most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to learn to adjust to remarks such as, ‘My, Mary has the most beautiful red hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so coarse is what makes it look thick.’
Then I started to night school to learn shorthand and after ten years of faithful attendance, realized that now I was eligible for some kind of a medal for being the slowest-witted, most-unable-to-be-taught and longest-attender-at-school-studying-one subject.
I went to every night school in the city of Seattle, both paid and free, studied under expert teachers, but I couldn’t learn shorthand. It had something to do with my co-ordination I believe, because I was never able to learn arm-movement writing in school either.
Mary, as I have pointed out, was never in favour of my attendance at night school. She thought it was a waste of time and she was right, but learning shorthand got to be an obsession with me, like swimming the English Channel. I bought a book of stories in shorthand and for years mouthed them out on the streetcar riding to and from work—worked at memorizing the Gregg dictionary, symbol by symbol—I spent from seven to nine or six to eight of most of my Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for ten years in some shorthand class. But at my jobs the minute anyone ever said to me, ‘Take a letter’, or ‘Get your note-book, Miss Bard’, I would get such a case of buck fever I’d make wiggly little scriggles instead of smooth curves and little lines, and would get far behind trying to remember whether ‘a’ went on the inside or outside of the angles.
Night school differed from day school, I learned, not only in time of day but in atmosphere and type of students. Day school students, who were usually young, career-conscious people, eager to get jobs and get started (the fools), exuded an air of cheerful self-confidence.
Night school students, predominately young foreigners and old Americans suddenly faced with the necessity for earning their own livings, were even in times of great prosperity badly handicapped by language difficulties, the wrong colour of skin or old stiff fingers. Nevertheless they zealously, gallantly and in spite of the inadequacy of their tools, tried to carve niches for themselves in the stone face of the business world.
Often when I attended the Public Evening School, which was almost free, my shorthand class would be comprised entirely of old ladies and young Japanese girls. The old ladies worked feverishly at their speed studies and, over and above the teacher’s precise nasal dictation of dull business letters, I could hear their laboured breathing and creaking joints, like old hulls straining at their moorings during the stress of a storm.
The frustration I experienced over my inability to master shorthand was overshadowed by the tragic realization that even if those little old secretaries and young Japanese ones learned to take shorthand five hundred words a minute and could type faster than the speed of light, nobody would hire them. Not just because of the depression, but because of a horrible practice in American business of seldom hiring any female office worker who does not have white skin and is not under thirty.
The little Japanese girls were wonderful at shorthand. Naturally quick, studious and imitative, the rapid accurate transcription of someone else’s thoughts was just their dish. When the teacher gave us final impossible tests of long articles, read at two hundred words a minute and then asked for the hands of those who had got it all, only the little tan hands shot up and waved eagerly. ‘Read your notes, Miss Fukiyama’ the teacher would say and Miss Fukiyama would read in her soft, sweet little voice, with only a little hesitation and giggling, exactly what had been dictated. But when Miss Fukiyama went to apply for a job, all she was offered was housework.
The Public Evening School was housed in a large grey stone building that smelled of old bodies, stale sandwiches and chalk. My shorthand classes were usually from six to eight, which meant that I could go right from work and eat dinner when I got home. Sometimes however I would have to take the seven-to-nine class and then to kill time and to avoid the long trip home and back down town again, I took another subject from six to seven. Once I took French, another time Speech, and another time Creative Writing.
The Speech woman, who wore a big brown felt tarn and rough tweed suit, said, “Korrrrect speeeeeech is more eemportant than korrect post-eur. A person is eemeejutly judged by hees speeech.” As she talked she rolled back her lips, swung them to the sides or pulled them down so she looked like a red snapper. I used to imitate her at home at night for the pleasure of the family but I left after the sixth time.
Each session of the Creative Writing class was jam-packed with frustrated people who wanted to be writers and live Bohemian lives. Almost every student carried a large briefcase bulging with manuscripts which either the publishers were too timid to publish, were too crooked to publish, or else had kept just long enough to steal the idea and give it to some big writer. After about the fourth session I began to wonder if frustration produced bad breath, because halitosis accompanied so many of these unpublished writers.
In addition to their frustration and bad breath, most of the students were violently jealous of each other. The teacher, who confided to me one night that trying to teach people, with nothing to say, how to write it down was a sad business, had us write stories and little articles and then read them aloud and invite criticism. Before the unfortunate
victim had read his last word, the stiff upraised arms of the criticizers were as numerous as wheat stalks on a stubble field. The criticism ran to: ‘I don’t like your style and nothing you said was true to life’, ‘I don’t like to say this, honey, but your grammar is terrible’ or ‘I think that the author of this piece of material should put in deeper meanings and make the material a thing of lasting importance and more general import so that when the material is read by intellects other than those of this community they would have something to recall in the material’, or ‘I don’t think that fella would have married the girl after she treated him like that. I know I sure wouldn’t have’, or ‘I think the story wonderful and I don’t think we should be so hard on our fellow authors because think how you’re going to feel when you get up there’, or ‘I noticed that in one place she said that the cabin was twenty feet long and in another place she said it was eighteen feet long.’ There were a few poets whose works were of the:
‘Oh beautiful waters of Puget Sound
You are bluer and softer than the hard dry ground,
Oh, Mount Rainier so majestic and pink
Every night in your beauty I drink’
school and got much less criticism and more praise than the works of the fiction writers.
I noticed that the people with the worst breath were the ones most anxious to corner you and outline their trilogy on the life of a Butter Clam. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that all successful authors owed their success to illicit relations with their publisher and/or dirty books.
A large florid woman, who sat across from me at each session, and had a terrible time forcing her stomach behind the school desk, was interested only in religious poems, several of which she gave me as keepsakes. One of my favourites ran, as I remember,
‘Here I am, Jesus, take me to your bosom,
You didn’t bleed for nothing, Jesus,