My Own Two Feet (11 page)

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 repu
tation, 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 naïve 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 assured 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.

Living at Stebbins Hall and dating were educational, but there was more to life at Cal. Much, much more. That first week of classes I started off with a light heart, eager anticipation, 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 class size. Except for a small class 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 lim
ited to forty students, classes seemed enormous after the small classes 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 class, “When you go to college you will have to take notes,” and for half an hour had read while her class tried to distill the essence of her words. Essence-distilling was more difficult at Cal. I thought of the knitting we had done in class 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 glass 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.

Students' worries over grades still puzzled me. Except for that D in Botany, which had been changed to a B+, I had never really worried about grades. If a subject interested me, I earned an A; if it did not, I plodded through to fulfill require
ments and earned a B. After all, like Mother, I had my pride. It had not occurred to me that all the students at Cal were equally good, even better, or they wouldn't be there.

Now I heard worried conversations about professors who “graded on the curve,” which seemed to have different meanings for different professors but appeared to mean that for every A a D should be given, the number of B's should equal the number of C's. This seemed unjust to me. Did professors never find themselves with a class of brilliant students, all of whom deserved A's? Apparently not. Some students were labeled by others as “D.A.R.s,” which stood for “Damned Average Raisers.”

I still was not worried about grades, and so one afternoon when I had free time I climbed the stairs to the School of Librarianship to inquire about courses that might be useful to a children's librarian. The secretary eyed me with such a haughty look that I lost my confidence and felt exactly what I was, an immature student in bobby socks.

“The school offers little in children's work,” she said and added, “Are you an A student?” in a tone that implied she was sure I wasn't.

“Well—no,” I admitted. “So far A's and B's.”

She said, “I'm sorry,” which she obviously
wasn't. “The students in the School of Librarianship are almost entirely A students.” She turned her attention to the work on her desk.

Abashed in my bobby socks, I left. As I descended the stairs I felt defeated and then angry. How dare this woman treat a student, any student, with such arrogance? My wavering confidence stiffened. I was sure I had something to offer, and I was not at all sure straight A's would have anything to do with it. I returned to my room, wrote to the University of Washington for a catalog of their courses in librarianship, and got on with my studies.

The course that I looked forward to three times a week was The Novel, taught by Professor Benjamin Lehman, who had once been married to the actress Judith Anderson, which impressed his students. At first I was dubious about Professor Lehman because he began by speaking out against students who worked their way through college. In Europe, he said, students devoted all their time to their studies. I thought of the men who had started the student cooperatives at Cal. They had been so determined to go to the university that they had worked in the fields all summer and were paid in produce, which kept them going through the first year while they organized the cooperatives and attended classes. Although
Professor Lehman's remarks seemed cruel to me, his course came to mean more to me than any other course I have ever taken.

Professor Lehman was a short, slightly stooped man who entered the classroom at the last minute, faced the class from behind the lectern, and delivered fascinating lectures on novels, beginning with
Pamela
, the first of fourteen or fifteen novels we read that year. At the end of the lecture he turned and walked straight out the door. One sentence that he repeated has stayed with me all my life, and I often think of it as I write: “The proper subject of the novel is universal human experience.” A phrase that has also stayed with me is “the minutiae of life,” those details that give reality to fiction. It is a long leap from
Peregrine Pickle, Tristram Shandy, The Mysteries of Udolpho
, and all the other novels we studied that year to the books I was to write about Henry, Ramona, and Leigh Botts, but I know, if others may not, that the influence of Professor Lehman is there. I was so pressured, however, that I studied
Tom Jones
without realizing it was a funny story, and I was not the only one.

For English 117I, Shakespeare, I have checked in my text eight plays that we read that semester. English 117J, “designed primarily for juniors
whose major subject is English,” dealt with nine more plays, as well as Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and the relationship of his work to the Elizabethan theater and to contemporary thought and literature. Both courses were taught by Professor Guy Montgomery, a little man who wore a beard like that on the well-known bust of Shakespeare. He gave more life to the works of Shakespeare than my former teachers. I could compare because I had already studied
Macbeth
in high school and junior college. I am probably the only student in the United States to major in English without studying
Hamlet
. With the dread Comprehensive looming, I read but never actually studied it.

Philosophy 5A and 5B were taught by Professor Pepper, who pronounced
idea
as if it had an
r
on the end and said he would automatically fail anyone who wrote examinations in green ink. We read Lucretius and Plato the first semester and Berkeley, Tawney, Hume, and Dewey the second semester. The large class was divided into discussion groups that met once a week. In one of these groups I wrote down a discussion in my section. I wish I had kept it because it revealed that no one, student or section leader, had any idea what he was talking about.

In choosing my German course I took the ad
vice of Stebbins girls: Never study a foreign language from someone with a name in the same language because the course will be much more difficult. I chose to take the course from a Mr. Corrigan, who in spite of his Irish name turned out to be a blue-eyed blond. I plodded along with a class of mostly men who were planning to be engineers or medical students.

The subject matter of Developmental Psychology was interesting, but the professor was not. He had tan hair, wore a tan suit and tan tie, and spoke in a monotone that I thought of as a tan voice. I suspect he did not enjoy teaching undergraduates and was eager to get back to his graduate students, a common failing of Cal professors.

Midterm examinations were enlightening. On the way to class we stopped at the corner drugstore to buy blue pamphlets in which to write our examinations, which were to be graded by “readers” who were graduate students. Professors, it seemed to me, did not stoop to read examinations, although, to be fair, they probably did read those their readers considered best—or worst.

Stebbins circulated a myth that it was possible to outwit a reader by writing “Second Blue Book” on the front and writing one brilliant last sentence inside. This was supposed to make the
reader believe he had lost the first blue book, which would fill him with such guilt that, rather than admit to carelessness, he would give the student an A.

Several days after midterms, the blue books were piled alphabetically on the floor outside classrooms. When I collected mine, I was shocked. Instead of A's and B's, I had sunk to B's and C's. What was wrong? Obviously, I must work harder, and others felt the same way. We no longer sang on our way to the library or played games on the lawn of the Pacific School of Religion.

One of my problems was the tremendous amount of reading in small print required in English courses. The print in the Oxford Standard Edition of Shakespeare was finer than that of the Bible. The print in many novels we read was also fine. German, in those days, was printed in Gothic rather than in Roman type, which was difficult to read with the best of eyes. Once more I broke my vow of never asking my parents for anything and wrote home saying I needed glasses. Once more Mother wrote that I was
not
to wear glasses. I should drop out of school and come home. Why? Probably because she wanted me home and did not want my appearance marred by glasses. So I struggled on, unable to
afford glasses and unaware that Cowell Hospital, always sympathetic to student health problems, might have helped.

Second midterms were not much better than the first. And then finals. A saxophone player in the apartment house next door poured sorrow into “Solitude.” I sat at my desk and looked out at the limp, dejected underwear dripping in the rain on the clotheslines. Evenings, from time to time and for no reason, male voices would call out, “Pe-e-dro-o-o-o,” a sad and lonely sound, a Cal custom whose origins were lost, if not in the mists of time, in the fog of San Francisco.

Tension mounted at Stebbins. Some students stayed up all night to study, or tried to. One girl took a pill to keep awake all night, and at breakfast reported, “It was horrible. I desperately wanted to sleep and couldn't.” Another girl, who had been issued one sleeping pill by Cowell Hospital, told us, “I woke up feeling as if I hadn't slept at all.”

In those days, before ballpoint pens, we filled our fountain pens, emptied them, and refilled them just to make sure. We self-addressed postcards to enclose in our blue books so readers could send us our grades before official grades came out. Then, as was the Cal custom the first
day of finals, the Campanile tolled “An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the morn'.”

Pessimists brought bottles of ink in case their pens ran dry. Sometimes a student without a watch brought a noisy clock that ticked on the nerves of the rest of the class. Mimeographed sheets of questions were passed out. The professor ostentatiously left the room, for Cal operated on the honor system. We read, contemplated, estimated time for each answer, and began to write. I did not have a watch, so I had to rely on my time sense. As we wrote, someone's pen was sure to leak and a profane word was whispered. In every exam I have ever taken, someone, almost always a man, arose from his chair long before the Campanile struck the hour, dropped his blue book on a table at the front of the room, and walked out, leaving the rest of us to wonder if he was brilliant and found the exam so easy he finished quickly or if he found the exam so difficult it was hopeless.

The honor system seemed to work in all my classes except German. As soon as the instructor left the room, answers were whispered back and forth and, once, announced to the whole class. I gritted my teeth, tried to tune everyone out, and clung to my honor even though I knew I would never excel in German.

At Stebbins we watched the mail for postcards. Most of us were disappointed, although the reader for Psychology 170 added a kind note to my postcard telling me I had written an excellent final but he could not give me an A because I had not done well in the first midterm. He gave me a B. I had a respectable B average, but where were all the A's I was used to?

Cal gave us a month's vacation between semesters, so we did not feel we should be writing papers or studying for finals like Oregon students. Miriam and I washed our windows; I packed my bag, said good-bye to Clarence, and, discouraged, took the train to Portland for my first Christmas at home since I was in high school. I was ashamed. My father had borrowed on his life insurance to pay my nonresident tuition, my mother frequently reminded me of the sacrifices she made for me, and now I was not living up to their expectations. Sleeping in a Pullman car was difficult. I dozed, and at Dunsmuir, in the middle of the night, the train backed and bumped as another engine, facing backward, was added to the rear to help push the train over the mountains. It reminded me of the pushmi-pullyu, an animal with a head at either end in the Dr. Dolittle books I had read and reread as a child.