My Own Two Feet (16 page)

“It's the only thing I have to wear,” she said.

This made me even angrier because, even though her wardrobe was limited, it was not true. What was she trying to accomplish? I have often wondered.

It was an uncomfortable time. Clarence was courteous, and Mother made some awkward attempts at conversation but quickly saw she could not manipulate him as she had Gerhart.

Dad was generous about letting Clarence drive the car, so we went everyplace I could think of to go. New Year's Eve we went out to dinner with Virginia and Bob. This time it was Virginia's turn to be shocked. Her mother had reserved the table next to ours for herself and Virginia's father. I suspected she wanted to look over the man I had imported from California. After dinner, when we were alone, Clarence slipped a cigar band on my finger and told me that someday he would replace it with a real ring. I still have the cigar band.

Christmas vacation was not an enjoyable time for any of us, and I was glad to escape into cold, blustery Seattle, where a gale sweeping across the campus was sometimes so strong I could lean into it and its force would support me, an experience I found exhilarating. All Seattle weather, no
matter how raw, was exhilarating after four years of California's blander climate.

Snow fell. “Mother Hulda is shaking out her feather bed,” I wrote to Jane. This was a reference to a German folktale from Miss Andrews's course in Storytelling, in which we had to stand in her small office and tell to the class different types of stories—myths, legends, folktales, and modern fairy tales. Facing the sardonic looks of our peers in a small room was disconcerting, but when we went off to a branch of the Seattle Public Library, we found telling stories to children much easier because we could see pleasure on young faces.

Winter calmed and faded, the sun shone, and walking to the campus under trees sending out leaves was vitalizing. When the cherry tree outside my glass door was in bud, it was time for the class to divide and go off for a month of practice work. Several of us went to Portland, where I lived at home and against my will was involved in being a bridesmaid, while the others lived in a small hotel near the library. I was eager to do well in practice work and pointed out to Mother that although Virginia and Bob were good friends, being a bridesmaid took time and was an avoidable expense. Mother dismissed my argument by saying that this was something she and
Dad wanted me to do. Mother loved weddings, and I disliked arguing with her, so I became a bridesmaid.

Virginia, a most considerate bride, chose shades of pink for our dresses because her matron of honor had been married in a pink dress that she could use again. Virginia chose a similar pattern, and her Depression bridesmaids set to work on yards of pink chiffon, which slipped and slithered as we sewed.

Practice work, I was sure, was going to be much more interesting than struggling with chiffon, and I approached with eager anticipation the library that had meant so much to me. Weather, however, presented a problem. After a gray and dismal winter, the sun melted the clouds, the sky was blue, trees and flowers bloomed, birds twittered, and children played outdoors. They did not come to the library.

Collectively, the librarians who supervised practice students were kind and even entertained us with a luncheon, but my first week in the children's room of the main library was uncomfortable because the children's librarian was hard put to keep me busy. I read shelves, which meant seeing that books were in correct order, the most boring of library tasks. I was handed stacks of catalog cards to alphabetize, work I tried to make
last as long as possible. Whenever a child entered, I offered to help find a book that he or she might enjoy and sometimes succeeded, unlike another student, to whom a little girl said, “Excuse me, but I think I can find a book faster myself.”

I spent my lunch hours finding sandals, having them dyed to match my dress, meeting other bridesmaids in a shop that made us hats, pancakes with roses made from material from all our dresses surrounded by ruffles that matched our own. Mother also gave me errands, “since you are overtown.” All I really wanted to do was sit down during my lunch hour.

During my next two weeks, in the branch libraries, rhododendrons bloomed, and the weather was still glorious, beckoning children from houses and schools but not enticing them to the library. I enjoyed the children's librarian in the first branch. She picked me up at home and drove me to the library and took me out for hamburgers for lunch. But what was she to do with me? She handed me a stack of catalog cards and said, “Sit here with these in your hands so that old bag will think you're doing something. Just keep away from her.” The “old bag” was the librarian in charge of the branch. The children's librarian
took me off to visit schools to escape the librarian's watchful eye.

When I went to the next branch, the sky was still cloudless, and Mount Hood was a pristine white cone. The children's librarian was pleasant but downhearted. She told me that when she first started to work in Portland, an older librarian said to her, “My dear, you look so young and fresh, and before you know it you will be wearing bifocals and arch supports.” This children's librarian was looking for another position.

My first day I was to work from one to nine. The branch librarian immediately accosted me with “Did you bring a lunch?” Well, no, I hadn't. I assumed that I could get something to eat in a neighborhood coffee shop. She sighed and said, “Well, I guess I can take you out someplace.” I felt like a nuisance.

I was disappointed and disillusioned by my experiences in the Portland Library Association, as the library was called at that time, before it became the Multnomah County Library. There was, however, one glorious day at the end of my month that restored my faith, a day on a bookmobile on its trip up the Columbia River Highway with a brisk, friendly librarian. Farmers' wives who waited with armloads of books greeted us like old friends, and while I checked out the new supply
of reading material for their families, the librarian recorded requests to be brought on the next trip. We stopped at a sawmill town near Bridal Veil Falls where workers, wives, and children, all friendly and eager, came aboard. On the way back to Portland we stopped at Governor Meier's summer mansion, overlooking the Columbia River. The smiling servants came out to exchange their books. It was a beautiful, encouraging day that restored my faith in librarianship and left me with a lasting interest in bookmobile service.

In the midst of all this were wedding preparations, the selection of a wedding gift, the rehearsal dinner, and finally the wedding. When the bride's mother appeared, she, too, was wearing a long pink dress, but hers was expensive, with a pleated skirt that gave Virginia's bridesmaids, by contrast, a loving-hands-at-home look. On the way home afterward Mother “talked over” the wedding the way she had once talked over my high school social life: who attended, what they wore, who said what to whom. The next morning I posed on the front lawn in my pink chiffon with my still-fresh bouquet. The neighbors came out to watch, and one told Mother, who told me, that “Beverly looks terrible, her health all gone.”

Once more I was glad to escape to Seattle.

In a few days Miss Worden called me into her office. She had the report on my practice work on her desk. She took off her glasses, pinched the bridge of her nose, put them on again, and told me what had been written about me. The librarian in the central children's room recorded that I was slow in filing; the “old bag” said she did not believe I was interested in children's work; the librarian in the second branch thought I was in poor health because I leaned on things. Leaned on things? I did have a pair of new pumps that pinched and probably leaned on something while I wiggled my toes, although I could not recall having done so.

I was devastated. All my years of ambition and hard work seemed wasted. I thought of Dad borrowing on his life insurance, Mother's sacrifices while she cared for my grandmother, all the creamed chicken I had eaten in the last months, all the kind people who had helped me along the way. The Portland Library Association, which had meant so much to me for so many years, had rejected me. I was exhausted, a complete failure. Miss Worden was nice about it, though. She let me go into the faculty rest room to dry my tears in private.

Next Miss Andrews called me into her office. I
dreaded facing her and decided to speak first. “I didn't do very well in my practice work, did I?”

She smiled and said, “I would like to see you start in the Los Angeles Public Library system. They are looking for a children's librarian and are willing to waive the residence requirement for you, but you would have to go to Los Angeles to take a civil service examination. Could you do that?”

Well! Suddenly I felt much better. Miss Andrews had faith in me, and as far as I was concerned, her opinion was the most valuable. I said I would see what I could do. Since I was so close to my goal, I felt I could ask my parents for a loan because I could repay it as soon as I was working. I wrote home and received a reply from Mother by return mail. They could not afford to lend me the fare to Los Angeles. I did not believe her. My father had received several small pay raises from the bank, and Mother received a monthly amount from my grandfather's estate for my grandmother's care and almost nonexistent expenses. Mother's motive was to keep me as far as possible from Clarence.

As I look back on this episode, I feel I should have asked Clarence for the money, but at that time, in the world in which I had grown up, this would have been a shocking thing to do. It was
proper to accept airmail stamps, but money—never. Sadly I told Miss Andrews a trip to Los Angeles was impossible.

The semester was ending. We wrote model letters of application in case we could find a position to apply for. Miss Worden corrected them. She then spoke to the class and asked us not to accept positions that paid less than one hundred dollars a month “because we don't want to lower the standards of the profession.” She added that this did not apply to Canadian students, who could not expect to earn a hundred dollars a month.

Miss Andrews called me in again and asked if I had enough money to get home. I did, just barely, but as it happened, I had a narrow escape. Forgoing commencement exercises, I packed, secured my typewriter in its crate, I hoped for the last time, said good-bye to Miss Entz and her mother, and called a taxi. When it arrived the driver told me he was no longer allowed to carry trunks. I must have looked so dismayed that he said, “I'll take a chance.” He carried my trunk, which had very little in it, and my typewriter downstairs and stowed them in his cab. When we reached the depot, I held aside enough money for my train ticket and gave him all the rest, which wasn't much. The tip for his kindness probably amounted to about thirty-seven cents. He was
nice about it, and without a cent to my name, I boarded the train for Portland. A Bachelor of Arts in Librarianship diploma would soon arrive in the mail. I was free of school, ready to go on with my life. All I needed was a job.

“Not one more cent,” said Mother, and I agreed. Accepting money meant she could control me. Then she showed me a record of the cost of my college education. That hurt. I don't think she meant to be unkind, but I felt she begrudged the money even though I had managed on very little and had earned what I could. I resolved, when I had children, I would give with a loving heart.

Clarence braved my family once more, and during his few days in Portland, Miss Worden wrote of two vacancies, one in Tacoma, Washington, and one in Klamath Falls, Oregon. When I tried to type letters of application, I was so tense my fingers refused to hit the right keys. Clarence typed them for me, we mailed them, and went
off on a picnic. We picnicked every day he was in Portland. Mother tried to give the appearance of friendliness, but her planned subjects of conversation lacked both warmth and spontaneity.

When Clarence left, I found some comfort in the sweater I was knitting for him with yarn we had chosen and he had paid for. My applications were not answered. With no job and no money, summer and possibly my whole life loomed like an oppressive cloud. Friends were equally dejected. Jane wrote that she was discovering there were no openings for English teachers who had minored in history. Only Virginia, the bride, was happy in her new home.

Each day of that early summer of 1939 seemed longer than the day before. The care of my grandmother was growing more difficult and Mother more depressed. Then Mrs. Klum suggested that Claudine and I spend the rest of the summer at Puddin'. Perhaps she was tired of having an adult daughter living at home. Mother, who did not need the added stress of a discouraged daughter, was glad to have me go. Dad promised he would drive out to the cabin with any mail from a library or from the university. He gave me money for my share of the groceries, money I was sorry to have to accept.

Claudine and I reverted to our high school
summers, swimming, reading, knitting, carrying our water, cooking on the woodstove. During the week we waylaid the man who serviced the jukebox to make sure he left recordings of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. Weekends we danced with farm boys or city boys who were camping and earning a few dollars picking beans. As I listened to the clang of horseshoes, the shouts and splashes from the river, and smelled the wood smoke and coffee of campers and picnickers, the stress of five Depression years of college drained away, and I began to feel like myself again.

Then early one evening early in August, our car came bumping down the road. Mother and Dad were smiling, and Grandma, who would not leave the house without her hat and gloves, sat in the backseat looking frightened as the car jounced over potholes. Mother waved a letter. “There's a vacancy in Yakima,” Dad said as he climbed out of the car.

“Where's Yakima?” I asked, and learned that it was a town in central Washington, hot in summer, freezing in winter. The chance of a job! Who cared about the weather?

Back in Portland, I sent off a letter of application, adding, at Mother's wise suggestion, that I could come to Yakima for an interview. An an
swer came by return mail, Dad took a day off, and we drove over two hundred miles up the Washington side of the Columbia River and through brown hills to a town of about ten thousand people with fruit orchards to the west, dry rolling country to the east, and dominated by a monument to the Depression, the rusting skeleton of an unfinished fourteen-story hotel. The thermometer in a filling station where I changed into a white suit in the rest room registered 110 degrees. Dad dropped me off at the Carnegie library, where I was interviewed in the children's room in the humid basement by Miss Helen Remsberg, the librarian, and by the entire library board. Feeling presumptuous, I inquired about living accommodations even though I did not have the job. Miss Remsberg told me that one staff member lived at the YWCA, where she shared a kitchen.

Two days later I received a letter saying I was hired to work six hours a day in the children's room and two hours in the adult department beginning September 1 at a salary of one hundred ten dollars a month “because living was higher east of the Cascades.” I was rich! Or soon would be.

Dad arranged for me to take out a seventy-five-dollar bank loan to get me through the first
month until payday. I packed the remains of my shabby college wardrobe and, leaving behind my cumbersome typewriter, boarded a bus bound for Yakima and independence. When I arrived, however, I was told there were no vacancies at the Y for more than a few days. What to do? I bought a newspaper, consulted advertisements, and saw that my soon-to-be riches would not stretch to cover apartment rent. I finally found a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Johnson, a single woman, thin and intense, who showed me a large pleasant room with an outside entrance and an old-fashioned library table, just the place for writing children's books on the portable typewriter I planned to buy as soon as I paid off my bank loan. I would share a bath with Mrs. Johnson, who slept on a couch in the dining room. On the evenings I worked at the library she suggested I eat dinner at Wardell's Percolator, a restaurant close to the library and noted for pies. I rented the room, expecting to stay only until there was a vacancy at the Y.

My first dinner in the boardinghouse was a shock. All the boarders were men: two from the Washington State Employment and Security Office, two younger men who were clerks for the Cascade Gas and Light Company, a sturdy old man who dug graves, and one or two others. They
were as surprised as I. Conversation was friendly but strained, and after a dessert of ice cream made with canned milk, I fled to my room to write letters. This went on for several evenings until Charlie Walker, an older man who worked at the employment office, knocked on my door and asked if I wouldn't please come out and share the living room. Then the gravedigger brought me a bouquet of dahlias, the colors of jewels, from his daughter's garden. After that I felt more at home. The men called me Bunzy, except when I made what I thought was a sophisticated black dress. Then they called me the Widow.

Perhaps because I thought my stay was temporary, my parents did not object to my living in a house full of men. Clarence, familiar with boardinghouses, now says he felt I would be protected. I was. Charlie referred to the two men from the gas company as the “young Upshots” because one of them confused “upstart” with “upshot,” beginning sentences with, “The upstart of the matter was…” On hot September evenings after work, the Upshots invited me to swim in an irrigation ditch. The swift current gave me a delightful sensation of being an excellent swimmer as it carried me downstream. I walked back.

During the time I lived in what Charlie called “Mrs. Johnson's caravansary,” some men moved
out and others moved in. One man who rented the downstairs front bedroom was so disliked by the other men that whenever he started upstairs to the bathroom, one of them would pop out of his room and beat him to it. Amused, I asked Charlie why. He merely said, “He has a dirty mind.” He did not stay long. Dinnertime, which Charlie referred to as the Take Your Hand Off My Knee Literary Club, was full of laughter, but no one put his hand on anyone's knee. Several of the boarders supplemented our diet with trout, venison, and pheasant. Times were hard, and Mrs. Johnson appreciated the contributions to her table but asked us not to mention them outside the house. As I ate the game, I felt like a Pilgrim.

The first morning, as I climbed the library steps to report for work, I need not have been so nervous. The staff was welcoming. Miss Remsberg, I soon learned, was firm, kindly, and fair. When she reprimanded me she always began with the word
fetish
. “I don't want to make a fetish of printing, but you must improve yours on registration cards.” She once reprimanded me for referring to “my department” by saying, “Miss Bunn, no part of the library is any staff member's private property.”

Miss James, the cataloger and reference librar
ian, had a look of antique elegance as she came to work with artificial violets pinned to her fur collar and wearing matching purple gloves. She had a serious, orderly mind, and I am sure she considered me frivolous. We three professional librarians and Mr. Royer, the janitor, were always called by our surnames, all others by their given names: such was the hierarchy of librarianship. Charlotte, in charge of circulation, grew beautiful flowers for the library and always included a bouquet for the children's room. She kept me alert, for it was she who caught any errors I made. There were others: Hazel, a widow who worked part-time, a WPA woman who mended our tattered books, NYA girls who shelved books.

And then there was Berneita, an assistant and the only staff member to call me by my first name. From practical experience she knew more about books and children than I, but she was always tactful, willing, and enthusiastic. Whenever I was swamped with children checking out books, I had only to push a button that set off a buzzer upstairs, and Berneita, smiling and eager, came flying down the steps.

The children of Yakima. I shall never forget them. In a one-library town, the children's librarian meets all sorts of children: bright, healthy children of doctors and lawyers, children of unem
ployed millworkers, sad waifs whose poverty-stricken parents were past caring, garden-variety middle-class children such as those I had grown up with. At first many children puzzled me by calling me what I understood as “Stir.” Then Berneita explained that they came from Catholic schools and were in the habit of addressing their teachers as “'Ster,” short for “Sister.” French Canadian children laughed at my pronunciation of their names. To them “Lemieux” was pronounced “Lamear.”

Individuals stand out in memory. One was a junior high school girl with red-rimmed eyes who had read every book of fiction in the children's room. The labels “teenager” and “young adult” had not yet placed young people in a separate social class. I took her upstairs and introduced her to the staff members, who helped her find adult books. A shy, shabby little girl presented me with a bouquet of lilacs. “Did these grow in your yard?” I tactlessly asked. “No, I just picked them,” she answered. Wilma, Hazel's daughter, always brought her little brother to story hour, where they sat in the front row, their bright, interested faces an inspiration to a storyteller. A desperate father, furious because his son owed four cents on an overdue library book, shouted at me that his son's teacher had brought the class
to the library and encouraged the children to take out books, so she should be responsible for the fine. I could have argued the point but instead quietly told him to forget the whole thing. The look of shame on the boy's face was too much to bear. I never saw him again.

Most vividly of all I remember the group of grubby little boys, nonreaders, who came once a week during school hours, marching in a column of two from nearby St. Joseph's School. Their teacher, 'Ster Bernard Jean, said their textbooks did not interest them and perhaps library books would tempt them to read. I soon learned there was very little in the library the boys wanted to read. “Where are the books about kids like us?” they wanted to know.

Where indeed. There was only one book I could find about kids like them, kids who parked their earmuffs on the circulation desk in winter and their baseball mitts in summer. That book was
Honk, the Moose
, by Phil Stong, a story about some farm boys who found a moose in a livery stable. All the boys liked that book because it fulfilled another of their requirements. It was funny. As I listened to the boys talk about books, I recalled my own childhood reading, when I longed for funny stories about the sort of children who lived in my neighborhood. What was the
matter with authors? I had often wondered and now wondered again.

Children applying for their first library cards gave original answers to the question “What does your father do?” One little girl answered promptly, “He mows the lawn.” Another girl gave the question serious thought before she said in triumph, “He types.” Her mother, who was waiting to see how her daughter answered, explained with amusement, “He's an attorney.”

Then there was a six-year-old girl, who, when I asked her father's occupation, answered, “He's a cat skinner.”

“Does he stuff them, too?” I asked.

“No,” said the child, impatient with the stupid librarian. “He skins
cats!
” she insisted.

I gave up, wrote “Cat skinner” on her application, and handed her a library card.

An NYA girl who was shelving books approached me timidly and said, “Pardon me, Miss Bunn, if you don't mind my saying so, a cat skinner is a man who runs a Caterpillar tractor.”

Payday! One hundred and ten whole dollars that I had earned myself. When I received my first paycheck, I went downtown on Saturday night, a busy, colorful time in Yakima when Indians, many of the women with papooses on their backs, came into town from the reservation. I
window-shopped, thinking of all that I could buy but settling on underwear and pajamas, which I never had enough of because they didn't show. I had money left over to start a savings account. After a few more paydays I paid off my bank loan and bought,
finally
, a portable typewriter for writing children's books. The trouble was, I didn't have time to write them. I made one attempt at writing a chapter about Puddin', but soon found I had too many other things to think about—letters to Clarence, stories to learn for story hour, books and library periodicals to read. Most of my evenings I read, read, read. There was so much I needed to learn, so many books to become acquainted with.

I could not forget my desire to write. When a publisher's representative from Macmillan came to the children's room and told me I looked like someone who could write a book, and if I ever did, he would like to send it to Macmillan for me, I was so flattered I let him take me to lunch, an incident I did not mention to Miss Remsberg, who was cool toward book salesmen. “I am not going to let salesmen select books for the library,” she often said.