Anybody Can Do Anything (25 page)

I longed for the days when Mary was in charge of our house and would have had every single one of us plucking, blowing or beating on something while the Youth Orchestra was still foundering around as an embryonic idea.

Finally one day a friend of mine loaned me her violin and I threatened Alison into taking lessons. Mother stood it for one week and then said, “I have put up with a great deal from all of my children including mallard ducks and guinea pigs but I am now too old and too tired to listen to anybody practicing on the violin.” That was that.

Because he was famous, was on a very grueling trip and didn’t want to cope with crowds, Stokowski elected to get off his train in Tacoma and be driven to Seattle by Mr. Morrison and me. I was so excited I thought I’d die. Imagine driving Leopold Stokowski the thirty miles from Tacoma to Seattle, talking intimately and laughing over amusing things that had happened at the tryouts. I even went so far as to imagine him saying at the end of the delightful drive, “You know, Miss Bard, I could use a secretary on this trip. Do you think that the NYA could spare you for a while?”

When the night finally came and it was determined that Stokowski’s train was due to arrive in Tacoma about eight-thirty, Morrison had the NYA Garage Project boys prepare one of the best Government cars, a 1923 Reo or reasonable facsimile thereof, and we set off. It was cold and rainy, and the car had no heater but the NYA boys had thoughtfully provided two rather musty army blankets left over
from the C.C.C. camps to tuck around the august presence.

The station in Tacoma, which is below the street, was not only dark and wet, but apparently deserted. We were joined there by the State Director, a gentle, learned man, and for three-quarters of an hour we smoked cigarettes, stamped our cold feet, wandered around peering into boxcars and detached pullmans, and wondered what had happened to Leopold Stokowski and if we would be held responsible.

Finally, however, the train, which was late, came in. Mr. Stokowski, appearing very waxy and distant, debarked with the conductor of the Florida Symphony, there were introductions and we set off. Morrison, an exceedingly glib and very witty man, made several small overtures toward conversation. He was answered by the Florida Symphony man.

On the way back to Seattle, I tried and tried to think of something to say to Mr. Stokowski, something short so that he would listen, but outstanding enough to stamp me on his memory. I couldn’t think of a thing but it didn’t matter because all during that thirty-mile drive Mr. Stokowski either talked exclusively to the Florida Symphony man or kept his eyes closed.

When we got back to Seattle the news leaked out that Mr. Morrison, the State Director, Mr. Stokowski and the Floridan were going to a cocktail party and I was to stop off at the office and type a certain kind of list of contestants desired by Mr. Stokowski. It was then ten-thirty and as I climbed the stairs of the deserted school building and let myself in to its cold, dark interior, I had many bitter thoughts about woman’s place in the business world.

It took me until twelve-thirty to finish the lists and though I ran for three blocks, I missed the last streetcar home and had to take one that turned down through the park and left me to walk across a bridge and up two blocks to our house. The park by our house, well known as a nesting place for
exhibitionists, was not a location I would have chosen to be in at one forty-five on a dark windy night.

I stepped onto the bridge and shivered as branches whipped across the lights and made reaching menacing shadows. The noisy playful wind picked up papers and leaves and pushed them along in front of me, rubbed branches together until they squeaked in protest, tapped on the bridge with bare twigs and jumped out at me suddenly from behind trees. There wasn’t a soul in sight—not one lighted house.

Then suddenly above the racket of the wind I thought I heard footsteps. I looked over my shoulder and a tall man stepped from the trees and started across the bridge. I hurried my steps and it seemed to me he hurried his steps. I began to run and from the hollow echo of his footsteps on the bridge I knew he was running too. I was terror-stricken. I ran so fast my feet didn’t touch the sidewalk but I could hear his footsteps ringing out behind me in the lonely darkness, above the wind, getting closer and closer. He was only about twenty feet behind me when I got to our house. I took the steps in one leap and threw myself through the front door which Mother was holding open for me.

When I finally caught my breath, I asked her how she happened to be up. She said that she was in bed but was awakened by the sound of my running clear down by the bridge. We called the police and they spent the rest of the night cruising up and down the streets flashing their strongest spotlights in our bedroom windows and knocking on the door periodically to report that they weren’t finding the man.

My enthusiasm for Leopold Stokowski and his Youth Orchestra was at a very low ebb the next morning when I reported to the music school for the final tryouts. These try-outs, held in a parlor on the main floor, were witnessed by the conductor of the Florida Symphony, the NYA Director’s secretary, Mr. Morrison and me.

Mr. Stokowski wore a lavender shirt and a pink tie but
was very gentle and kind to the contestants as he asked them to sight-read very difficult manuscript. Invariably, as each contestant adjusted his neck or pursed his lips for his first note, the Florida Symphony conductor would signal violently at me to go out and stifle some little noise that was filtering in from some other part of the building. Out I would dash to tell a surprised piano student in a third-floor practice room, “My God, don’t do that now—don’t you know who is downstairs?”

About eleven o’clock Morrison took me outside and told me to go down to the waterfront and get some seafood and whatever else I would need to fix a nice lunch for Mr. Stokowski. I spent $27.18 and came staggering back with jumbo Dungeness crabs, Olympia oysters, little neck clams, lettuce, celery, French bread, butter, coffee, cream and French pastries. I fixed the lunch and some of the contestants served it to Mr. Stokowski, the Florida man and the judges.

After lunch while I washed the dishes, Mr. Stokowski decided that the only young musician in Seattle really worthy of his orchestra was a viola player from the Seattle Symphony, a girl who was undoubtedly a fine musician but was not between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four.

After Leopold had left town I asked our head office for the $27.18 I had spent. They turned the matter over to the Treasury Department who said, “We can’t authorize payment for a thing like Leopold Stokowski’s lunch. There is no regular requisition, no purchase order, not even a proper appropriation symbol to cover such an unorthodox situation.”

I’ll always feel that Leopold Stokowski owes me at least an oboe solo.

17: “Anybody Can Write Books”

At the time Mary decided that anybody can write books, I was married, living on Vashon Island and working for a contractor with cost-plus Government contracts, making a very good salary.

Then an old friend of Mary’s arrived in town and announced that he was a talent scout for a publishing firm and did she know any Northwest authors. Mary didn’t so she said, “Of course I do, my sister Betty. Betty writes brilliantly but I’m not sure how much she has done on her book.” (I had so little done on it I hadn’t even thought of writing one.) The publisher’s representative said that the amount I had done was not the important thing. The important thing was, had I talent? “Had I talent?” Why, Mary said, I had so much talent I could hardly walk. She’d call and make an appointment for him to just talk to me and see. She did too. That very afternoon at five and she called me at a quarter to five.

“Betsy,” she said. “Forrest’s in town and he is a publisher’s representative and needs some Northwest authors so I’ve told him you were one. You’re to meet him at the Olympic Hotel at five o’clock to discuss your new book.”

“My what?” I yelled.

“Your new book,” said Mary, perfectly calmly. “You
know that you have always wanted to be a writer and Betsy, dear, you’ve got great talent.”

“I have not,” I said. “You know perfectly well that the only things I’ve ever written in my life were a couple of punk short stories, some children’s stories, ‘Sandra Surrenders’ and that diary I kept when I had t.b.”

Mary said, “Betty, this is your big opportunity. Don’t waste time arguing with me.”

I said, “Mary, you told me the same thing when you got me to run a Brownie Scout troop, work as an expert accountant, illustrate a book for Standard Oil, pick peaches and millions of other things.”

Mary said, “The trouble with you, Betty, is that you have absolutely [she said “ab . . . so . . . lute . . . ly”] no sense of proportion. Instead of using your great brain to write a book and make fifty thousand dollars, you in . . . sist on getting a mediocre job with a mediocre firm and working yourself to the bone for a mediocre salary. When are you going to wake up? When?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering if the switchboard operator had heard all that mediocre stuff and if it would do any good to point out to Mary that if my present salary was mediocre, then most of the jobs she had gotten me were so far down the scale as to be subterranean.

Mary said, “I told Forrest you’d meet him at the Olympic Hotel at five to discuss your book.”

I said, “But I can’t write a book.”

Mary said, “Of course you can, particularly when you stop to think that every publisher in the United States is simply dying for material about the Northwest.”

“I never noticed it,” I said sullenly.

Mary said, “Betty, listen to me. We are living in the last frontier in the United States. The land of the great salmon runs, giant firs, uncharted waters and unsealed mountains and almost nothing has been written about it. If you told
the people in New York that salmon leaped in our front doors and snapped at our ankles they’d believe it. Most of the people in the United States either think we’re frozen over all the time like the Antarctic or that we’re still wearing buckskin and fighting Indians. Now personally I think it’s about time somebody out here wrote the truth.”

“If I wrote the truth about my experience in the mountains,” I said, “I would only be proving that salmon snap at our heels and that there are still Indians.”

Mary said, “What difference does it make. At least you’d be writing and using your great talent.”

All that talk about my great talent was beginning to hit home. Up to that moment I had never shown any particular talent in anything except making Christmas cards and picking and cleaning chickens, and it was a nice feeling to sit there at my golden oak desk littered with unchecked purchase orders and think that every publisher in the United States was foaming at the mouth with impatience waiting for me to write about the Northwest.

“What time is the appointment?” I asked.

“Five o’clock,” Mary said. “You’ve only got five minutes so hurry.”

As I put on lipstick and combed my hair, I told one of the girls in the office that I had to hurry as I was going to meet a publisher’s representative at the Olympic Hotel to discuss my book. She said, “Gosh! Betty, are you writing a book?”

“Sure,” I said with the casualness of great talent, “and this publisher’s representative has come all the way from New York to talk to me about it.”

“What’s your book about?” she asked.

“About my experiences on a chicken ranch,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, with obvious disappointment and changed the subject.

Walking up to the hotel in the February rain, I decided
that I would tell Forrest that I was going to write a sort of rebuttal to all the recent successful Move-life books by female good sports whose husbands had forced them to live in the country without lights and running water. I would give the other side of it. I would give a bad sport’s account of life in the wilderness without lights, water or friends and with chickens, Indians and moonshine.

The publisher’s representative, who was very friendly anyway, liked my idea and told me to go home and write a five-thousand-word outline and bring it to Mary’s dinner party the next night.

Having never written either an outline or a book, I was a little slow and found it necessary to stay home from work the next day to finish it. I called the construction office and told my best friend there that I had to stay home and write an outline for a book but would she please tell the boss I was sick. She said sure she would, wished me luck, hung up the phone and skidded in and told the boss that I was staying home to write a book and so I was fired and in one day transferred my great talent from construction to writing.

When I told my husband and daughters that I was going to write a book they were peculiarly unenthusiastic. “Why?” they asked. And I couldn’t think of any reason except that Mary thought I had great talent, so I said, “Because every single publisher in New York wants me to, that’s all.” A likely story they told each other, as they tapped their foreheads and suggested that I take a nice long rest.

During that long, long year between the conception and birth of
The Egg and I,
I sometimes got so depressed I put the book away in disgust and went into town and applied for and got dreary little part-time jobs that seemed much more in keeping with my ability than writing. Then after a month or so, Mary would hear about it and call me up and demand that I quit and again unleash my great talent.

One Monday morning during the summer, I was hanging
out the last of a huge washing when Mary called and demanded over the long distance phone, “Betty Bard MacDonald are you going to spend the rest of your life washing your sheets by hand or are you going to make fifty thousand dollars a year writing?” It didn’t leave much of a choice so I got out the manuscript and got started writing again.

Toward the end of the summer, when the book was almost finished, Mary called and told me to write to Brandt and Brandt, literary agents whose name she had gotten from the former editor of the Seattle
Times.
All successful writers have agents, she told me, and Brandt and Brandt are the very best. I thought, “Well, if they are the very best at least I’ll be starting at the top and after they turn me down I’ll go to the Public Library and learn the names of some others.”