My Own Two Feet (15 page)

After my narrow escape from Cal, the physical work of a chambermaid was a relief. I moved to a first-floor room next to Mrs. Cochran and, when she was out, answered the door and showed rooms, thus keeping Mother partially honest. I made beds, cleaned bathrooms, ran the vacuum cleaner, counted laundry. Fortunately, not all the forty-one rooms were rented.

To earn my meals I worked an hour before dinner in a men's boardinghouse across the street, where I had various duties: setting the table, making salad, cutting two colors of Jell-O into cubes and heaping them into sherbet dishes so they would look like more dessert than they actually were, ironing shirts for the landlady's sons.
She ran a tight boardinghouse and once reprimanded a summer student from Stanford for asking for butter when he already had jam for his toast, a scene that reminded me of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. Jamless or butterless, I was happy to be self-supporting, standing on my own two feet for the summer.

Soon after I started my humble chores, Clarence was offered a position by the new Department of Employment in Sacramento. Saturdays he came to Berkeley by train, staying at Skipper's boardinghouse, and we went to a movie in the evening. On Sunday mornings, when he helped me by running the vacuum cleaner in Stebbins's living room, Mrs. Cochran watched him and said, “He will be so good to you.” Afternoons we walked in the hills.

My work was physically strenuous. Sheets were heavy when carried up- and downstairs. Kleenex and bobby pins were a chambermaid's nightmare because the vacuum cleaner inhaled them, clogging the works. Once, when there were few occupants, I ripped up the stair carpet and retacked it so the worn part was no longer on the edge of the steps but at the back, thereby keeping one of Stebbins's assets from depreciating for another year.

Teachers were pleasant occupants, most of
them tidy in their habits, except for a few bobby pins on the floor. Some of them took an interest in me, and when I said I was going to the University of Washington for graduate work but didn't know where I would live, one teacher said she had been a student there and had taken a room in the home of Miss Ruth Entz, a kindergarten teacher. She gave me the address. I wrote to Miss Entz, who replied that they had not rented the room for some time but would rent it to me for eight dollars a month.

My future was taking shape as I grew thinner and thinner from hard physical work. Jane invited me to come to Mill Valley for a couple of days when summer session ended. I accepted, which inspired Mother to write: “It is plain to see you are not anxious to see your parents.” This made me angry. I had worked hard, and I was tired. I stood up to Mother and went to Mill Valley for two blissful days of good company and delicious food, including jam
and
butter on toast. Those two days gave me strength to return to Berkeley and board the train for Portland.

The train was unusually late, Sherwin-Williams covered the earth many times before we crossed the river, and when my parents met me, I remarked that the trip had been tiring. Mother said kindly, “You'll never have to go back again.”

I was speechless. Did Mother think I was going to forget Clarence? Obviously, that was what she was counting on.

Mercifully, I had less than a month before school started at the University of Washington, where I was determined to live on the thirty-five dollars a month Mother said she and my father could spare, adding, “That little bit of money you earned isn't much help,” a remark that cut deep when I thought of how hard the work had been.

Mother, a firm believer in my wearing red to attract men, had bought some bright red woolen fabric for a dress that I suspected she hoped would attract so many men I would forget Clarence. The way red flannel is used for frog bait, I thought with amusement.

I made the red dress before I took the train to Seattle. In a taxi on the way to the address on Miss Entz's letter, I saw that Seattle was a beautiful city of autumn leaves, lakes, and, in the distance, snowcapped Mount Baker. Elderly Mrs. Entz met me at the door and showed me to my room, which was small, with lavender walls and green woodwork. There were no windows but instead a glass door onto a balcony that looked into a cherry tree with yellowing leaves. The room was furnished with a narrow iron bedstead and, for a dresser, a piece of furniture so old-fashioned
it had a cupboard for a chamber pot. My desk was a card table. The room seemed bleak, but it was also only eight dollars a month. It would do.

Miss Entz, I soon learned, was one of the kindest, most generous women I have ever known. The larger front bedroom was rented to a very old couple, the Coffins, who eked out a living on the husband's tiny pension from a Canadian university where he had taught history. He spent his days at the public library, where he was writing a history of the world. Mrs. Coffin cooked on a hot plate in a closet, but more often Miss Entz carried upstairs casseroles of stew or other hot dishes. If she hadn't, I doubt they would have had enough to eat. Whenever Miss Entz and her mother listened to classical music on the radio, I would find Mrs. Coffin, huddled on the stairs in the dark, listening. As I picked up my mail, an almost daily airmail letter from Clarence, from the newel post, she would say, “That young man had better save his money and buy an annuity.” I didn't tell her that he was so extravagant he enclosed airmail stamps for my letters to him.

The School of Librarianship was in Suzzallo Library, a cathedral-like building that seemed elaborate after Cal's neoclassical Doe Library. In the main room of the library school we were assigned desks in predictably alphabetical order
with our names neatly typed on white paper and pasted to green desk blotters.

There were forty-eight women and two men in the class, fewer than half direct from undergraduate work. Most had worked in libraries, saved money, and aimed for professional credentials and higher pay. The women referred to the school as the Cloister, and “the Missionary Spirit” was a phrase we often heard from instructors. I soon discovered to my chagrin that I had suffered needlessly through Advanced French Grammar. This university counted quarter, not semester, units.

The first quarter we all took the same classes. Fortunately, memories of the Ontario Public Library reassured me that being a librarian was more interesting than learning to be one. Cataloging exasperated me because I do not have an orderly, logical mind and could not see why it was important to snoop behind pseudonyms to find an author's true name. Why should Mark Twain always be cataloged under Samuel Langhorne Clemens with a cross-reference card from Mark Twain? Reference work was enjoyable. Each week we were given ten questions and the resources of the university library to find the answers in a sort of intellectual treasure hunt. Once, when I was wearing the red dress, a man
who worked at the reference desk actually whispered, “You look like bait in that dress.” He did not, however, turn into a prince.

Children's Work, the reason I was there, was under the guidance of a nationally known faculty member, Miss Siri Andrews, who had a round face and round glasses and wore a round silver medallion on a chain around her neck. Her courses took me back to my childhood. The slogan of children's librarians was “The right book for the right child.” Adult Book Selection was taught by Miss Ruth Worden, a gray-haired woman who always wore navy blue suits and white blouses with touches of handwork on the collars, like baby dresses. She frequently used the expression “A rattling good tale” when referring to popular fiction. I looked forward to both Book Selection courses, but it was Miss Worden who gave me a feeling of inspiration for librarianship.

My days fell into a pattern as fallen leaves grew soggy, the weather damp and cold, and the morning air smelled of coal smoke as furnaces were fired up. After a breakfast of tomato juice, a sweet roll, and a carton of milk in my room, I walked a mile to Suzzallo Library. At noon I went with other students to the Commons, an inexpensive cafeteria run by the Domestic Science Department, where I drank another carton of milk
and ate a sandwich cut into three parts, each with a different filling. I came to like the peanut butter and banana on raisin bread section and saved it for dessert. As we ate our meager lunches and watched drama students, scripts in hand, emote over cups of coffee with soggy napkins folded in their saucers sopping up spills, we discussed the finer points of cataloging and invented an imaginary series of books for our instructor to catalog: six volumes, each with a different editor or sometimes two, one of whom wrote under a pseudonym and the other under her maiden name, some volumes translated from foreign languages and requiring translator cards, each volume with a preface by a different author, etc., etc. This sent us into gales of laughter as each of us thought of an addition to make the assignment more difficult. Such is the sense of humor of librarians. We also had earnest discussions on the finer points of grammar.

Afternoons most of us studied at our desks until three o'clock, when we were granted the privileges of the faculty room, where we could have tea and two Ritz crackers for two cents. I looked forward to that tea and those crackers. About five I left school. Because other students lived in boardinghouses or at home, I sometimes ate dinner alone in the Commons, but more often
I chose a coffee shop or cheap restaurant on University Way, where I was fueled by creamed chicken on toast or hamburger steak. Then I returned to my lavender and green room to study and to write letters.

The high point of my day was picking up my mail from the newel post. Mother's letters were no longer amusing, but Jane, working for her teaching credential at Cal and reading blue books for an education professor, wrote long, entertaining letters about life at Stebbins, which I read and reread. Miriam, now married to Wilfrid, wrote from London. She was disappointed that British universities would not accept her Cal credits. Connie had moved to Berkeley to be near Park and was working at a San Francisco advertising agency while he earned his master's degree. Norma upset her family by insisting on marrying as soon as she earned her teaching credential rather than working a year first. Virginia wrote that she and Bob were getting married in the spring and wanted me to be a bridesmaid. Claudine felt teaching in a Portland suburb was an improvement over a mill town. Letters prevented loneliness.

Miss Entz must have guessed that my budget was stretched to its limit, for she said her mother would be glad to prepare me a breakfast for
twenty cents on school days. Dear Mrs. Entz. She served me juice, hot cereal with raisins, a coddled egg, buttered toast with jam, and milk. I ate at a card table by the living room window while Heidi, their dachshund, sat up on her hind legs and wavered around on her long spine until she fell over, only to rise and try again. Those breakfasts sustained me through the year.

My eyesight became an increasing problem. The print in Mudge's
Guide to Reference Books
was even finer than my Shakespeare text at Cal. I began to have headaches. Once more I wrote home, more forcefully this time, and said I
had
to have glasses. This time Mother gave in. Perhaps my father interceded. I received the money and went to an ophthalmologist recommended by Miss Worden. There I learned that not only was I nearsighted, I had an astigmatism in one eye. When I put on glasses and walked out onto the street, I walked into a new world. I could see individual bricks on buildings, street signs were suddenly legible, lines on the sidewalks were sharper. My headaches left me, and I no longer squinted to read Mudge.

Then, at the end of the quarter, Miss Worden called me into her office. “Miss Bunn, you have done excellent work in Book Selection,” she said,
“but I am giving you a C because you looked bored.”

I was speechless. Graded on my facial expression—I couldn't believe it. I may have been tired or hungry, but I was
not
bored. If her course had been Cataloging, I might have understood, for teachers of Cataloging are probably used to students looking bored. I don't know what I said, not much, and left her office as quickly as possible.

In the 1930s students did not rebel, probably because we were afraid to. We had too much at stake and, in our eagerness to prepare for security and a better future, were much too humble. When in the 1950s students began to rebel at Cal, I recalled a number of injustices to students and wished my generation had had the same courage. I doubt if any student today is graded on a facial expression, has graduation depend on composing an original tap dance, or is required to write twenty-four pages on “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” Cal's dreaded English Comprehensive has been abolished.

Except for my grade-C face, which did not expel me from graduate school, my grades returned to my pre-Cal A's and B's. The second quarter, we chose our field of librarianship. Miss Siri Andrews, a precise and thorough teacher, limited her classes to six students, who met in her office.
She gave us a project we worked on the rest of the year, designing a children's room in an imaginary public library in a town of ten thousand and selecting the basic book collection. We began by searching for articles on the number of books desirable for the population, the average size of books, the length of shelves to hold them, the arrangement of furniture. Then we selected books by classification, reading all the reviews we could find, typing cards, with notes and sources for each book, working in a small room full of clattering typewriters and walls lined with donated books the university did not know what to do with. One title I recall was
Men, Marriage, and Me
, by Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

When Christmas vacation came, I went home to Portland. Clarence had worked overtime so he could come to see me for a few days. This meant his first meeting, or confrontation, with Mother, which I dreaded. Dad and I drove to the station to meet him, and when we walked through the front door, Mother, smiling, made an entrance from the kitchen. She was wearing the pink dress she had made for me and that I had mentioned I had worn the night I met Clarence. I had left it in my closet when I went to Seattle. I was shocked and then angry. When I was alone with
Mother, I demanded to know why she was wearing my dress.