My Own Two Feet (23 page)

Life as a housewife in a three-room apartment was a letdown after the stimulating work in the hospital. War had scattered friends, most of them now married and parents of infants, with little time for writing letters. Librarians I had met as a member of the Special Libraries Association asked if I would be interested in their libraries, but when I learned the work would consist of research handled by mail, I felt it would be too much like writing college papers. The postwar cost of construction prevented us from building a house on a lot we had bought during the war. Clarence was transferred to the university, where he was in charge of government research and development contracts. His travel time made our days longer.

For the first time since the war began, I went to Portland to see Mother and Dad and to admire Claudine's beautiful baby boy. Dad, who had aged, said little but was obviously more than happy to see me after such a long time, and Mother enjoyed serving ice cream and cake to my friends when they came to call. Then one evening when Mother and I were doing dishes, I remarked that now that the war was over, Clarence and I were thinking of starting a family.

Mother said, “Oh, this having babies is just a fad.”

I managed not to laugh but pointed out that if people didn't have babies, the race would die out. But I wondered. Why had Mother made such a remark? Later, I asked her. Her tart answer—“Well, I said it, didn't I?”—left me wondering if she did not want me to have children.

When I returned from Portland, I told myself that if I was ever going to write a children's book, now was the time to do it. But when I sat down at my typewriter and stared at the paper I had rolled into it, the typewriter seemed hostile, and the paper remained blank. The longer I stared, the blanker it seemed. After years of aspiring, I found I had nothing to say. Maybe it had all been a foolish dream.

I kept busy making a braided rug to go in front
of our living room couch and, inspired by work I had seen in the Red Cross craft shop at the hospital, traveled to San Francisco to study wood carving with a retired puppeteer who lived in his studio over a former Chinese laundry. “That's nice,” said one of the neighbors. “Gives you something to do.” I carved trays, a sewing box, panels for a chest, and a mask intended to be a Greek god that turned out to look like Clarence with horns and a beard.

Then a brief pregnancy ended disastrously, leaving me pale, depressed, and lonely for the child we did not have. I had to pull myself together. To stop moping around feeling sorry for myself, I once more became Christmas help at the Sather Gate Book Shop. By then wholesale business had increased, and four of us, reaching over and around one another, manned the crowded department, serving customers and pulling library orders. There was no room to stand back from the punch of the cash register drawer. Credit cards were new, but machines for stamping names and addresses had not come into use.

I felt better being with people, and gregarious Quail, who collected people, invited Clarence and me to a party. I was fascinated by her rustic house furnished with antiques of no particular period. The living room windows were eighteen
feet high and looked across a deck to a view of one end of the bay and to the bottom of a cliff, an abandoned quarry that Hannah, Quail's mother, had turned into a rock garden. I was even more fascinated by the mixture of guests of all ages: architects, writers, artists, publishers' reps, and bookstore customers whom Quail found interesting. That evening revived my spirits.

When we returned to our apartment, I told Clarence I wanted to move to Berkeley.
Now
. He agreed. The next weekend we drove aimlessly around the Berkeley Hills on streets where we had walked when we were students. Three blocks up a steep winding road from Quail's house, we came upon a
FOR SALE
sign in front of a privet hedge that hid a brown redwood house shaded by eucalyptus trees growing in vacant lots on either side.

We stopped, walked down the brick steps through a terraced garden, and knocked on the door. Within a couple of hours we had bought a five-room house clinging to the side of the hill and only ten minutes from Clarence's work. As it turned out, we had bought a house and a cat.

The naval officer who owned the house was being transferred, and the cat, a large, sleek tabby with a white vest, was destined for the Humane Society. Didn't we want a cat? No, we did
not want a cat. Parting with their cat was so painful to its owners that we agreed to feed it for the ten days they would be staying with relatives. They agreed to let us paint the laundry while the house was in escrow, which horrified the real estate woman handling the sale.

We left a bedroom window open so the cat, who had simply been called Kitty, could go in and out. When we arrived with paint and brushes, Kitty ran to meet us with the saddest miaows I had ever heard, and when he followed us into the house, his desolate cries seemed to echo through the empty rooms.

“We're going to keep that cat,” said Clarence, beating me to it. We did our best to console Kitty, who endured a lonely escrow, felt reassured when furniture arrived, and was quite at home when we moved in. Because he felt the house was his, he ruled us with a fur-covered paw of iron and proved to be a remarkably intelligent animal with a large vocabulary of expressive miaows, demanding praise when he presented us with a gopher, coaxing a young cat who was badly treated into the house to share his food. He recognized the sound of our car when it was two blocks away, and ran to the door to meet Clarence. He did not care to sleep in the laundry on cold nights, so he figured out how to open the door so
he could make himself comfortable, after a thorough bed-jiggling wash, in the middle of our bed. We loved the neighborhood, we loved the house, we loved the cat.

We had discovered in the linen closet a ream of typing paper left by the former owner. I remarked to Clarence, “I guess I'll have to write a book.” My ambition, refusing to die, was beginning to bloom again.

“Why don't you?” asked Clarence.

“We never have any sharp pencils” was my flippant answer.

The next day he brought home a pencil sharpener.

The trouble was, I couldn't think of anything to write about. Besides, I was busy turning our house into a home. We bought dining room furniture to go over the braided rug. I braided another for the living room from my army uniforms, Clarence's wedding suit, and other memories. Quail, always generous with hospitality, helped us make friends with neighbors whose houses were scattered among the eucalyptus trees.

But it was Quail's mother, Hannah, who became my special friend. She had been a newspaperwoman for the
Spokesman Review
in Spokane, Washington, as well as the mother of Quail and six sons. She was the first liberated woman I had
ever known, although I sometimes felt her liberation had come at the expense of others. When Clarence and I walked down the hill to Quail's house for dinner, we often heard mother-daughter shrieks floating up the canyon, but by the time we reached their doorstep, they were laughing at how ridiculous their argument had been. Their relationship, although not an easy one, seemed much healthier than my relationship with my mother.

Afternoons I often walked down the hill to see Hannah. Sometimes she invited me for lunch to eat “dead party,” her term for leftovers from entertaining. Hannah loved parties and, when telling about one, often said, “Life is a soap opera.” She liked young people, particularly if they were creative, and often said, “Deliver me from my contemporaries.” I once found her in the garage running sheets through the mangle and singing at the top of her voice, “Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease.” Hannah insisted on gracious living, and that included ironed sheets even if she had to iron them herself. We drank instant coffee out of thin china cups that rarely matched because Hannah, who had an eye for antiques, felt that matching dishes were uninteresting and middle-class. What mattered was the quality of the china.

As we drank the dreadful coffee out of elegant cups, we engaged in what Hannah called “airy persiflage,” but sometimes we were serious. Hannah once said, “You know, Beverly, you are afraid of your mother.” I was startled, but I knew she was right. I sat, silent and thoughtful, looking out at her beautiful garden spilling down the cliff, and wished Mother had such a creative interest in her life. Hannah treasured every plant and even managed to persuade lilies of the valley to bloom in California by putting ice cubes on the plants in hot weather. For work on the steep slope she wore a big hat trimmed with corsage ribbons and pumps with three-inch heels, which she speared into the ground to keep from falling. “I dread the day when someone calls me spry,” she said.

Mother and Dad drove down from Oregon to see our new house. “Why, this is luxury!” cried Mother as she walked down the brick steps. “We worked all our lives for a house like this”—an exaggeration because the Portland house was larger, with an attic and basement, was more solidly constructed than our little house, and they hadn't worked all their lives for it. They bought it when Dad sold the farm.

Dad's attitude was different. He took an interest in cineraria and other unfamiliar plants in
our garden. He laughed heartily when we told how Clarence had spent half a day digging a huge thistle away from the corner of the garage, only to have a puzzled neighbor inquire, “Don't you
like
artichokes?”

I had asked my parents to bring us an old pair of andirons stored in the basement. Instead Dad insisted on taking me to Breuner's to choose andirons, fireplace tools, and a screen. “We had to work so long for ours,” he said, and Mother agreed. My relationship with Mother was improving, but even so, the visit had its tense moments, and I was glad to return to furnishing the house.

To help pay for some of our new furniture I became Christmas help in the bookstore once more. One morning, during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, “‘Bow-wow. I like the green grass,' said the puppy.” How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that. Suddenly I knew I could write a better book, and what was more, I intended to do it as soon as the Christmas rush was over.

During that Christmas season, Quail was excited because Elisabeth Hamilton, children's editor of Morrow Junior Books and, according to Quail, the smartest editor in the business, was coming to speak at a library meeting in San Francisco. Quail, who had published a couple of
easy-reading books and collaborated on two books for older readers, was eager to hear Mrs. Hamilton and asked her salespeople to go along if they were interested. Of course I went.

Elisabeth Hamilton was a tall, handsome woman who wore a white hat and told amusing anecdotes about her authors, which I found a bit disappointing when I had expected her to hand down Wisdom, but she had a presence that was impressive. After her talk, on our way out, I asked if she wrote a letter when she rejected a manuscript. She courteously replied to a question she must have heard too many times, “Only if the author shows talent but the book is a near miss.”

On January 2, 1949, I gathered up my typewriter, freshly sharpened pencils, and the pile of paper and sat down at the kitchen table we had stored in the back bedroom.
Write
and no backing out, I told myself. In all my years of dreaming about writing, I had never thought about what it was I wanted to say. I stared out the window at the fine-leafed eucalyptus tree leaning into the canyon and filled with tiny twittering birds. I looked out the other window at a glimpse of the bay when the wind parted the trees. There
must
be something I could write about. The cat, always interested in what I was doing, jumped up on the table and sat on my typing paper. Could I write
about Kitty? He had a charming way of walking along the top of the picket fence to sniff the Shasta daisies, but children demanded stories. A daisy-sniffing cat would not interest them. I thought about the usual first book about a maturing of a young girl. This did not inspire me. I chewed a pencil, watched the birds, thought about how stupid I had been all those years when I aspired to write without giving a thought to what I wanted to say, petted the cat, who decided he wanted to go out. I let him out and sat down at the typewriter once more. The cat wanted in. I let him in, held him on my lap, petted him, and found myself thinking of the procession of nonreading boys who had come to the library once a week when I was a children's librarian, boys who wanted books about “kids like us.”

Why not write an easy-reading book for kids like them? Good idea! All I needed was a story. How was I going to pull a story about boys from my imagination when I had spent so much of my childhood reading or embroidering? I recalled the Hancock Street neighborhood in Portland where I had lived when I was the age of the Yakima boys, a neighborhood where boys teased girls even though they played with them, where boys built scooters out of roller skates and apple boxes, wooden in those days, and where dogs, before the
advent of leash laws, followed the children to school.

These musings were interrupted by a memory that sprang from my days at the hospital. A harried office worker whose husband was overseas asked if her two children, a well-behaved boy and girl, could come to the library after school. I agreed. Once they brought their dog with them, which pleased men who missed their own dogs. The next day their mother told me that a neighbor had driven the children and their dog to the hospital. When the family started home, they learned a dog was not allowed on a streetcar unless it was in a box. Rain was pouring down, the nearest grocery store that might have a box was several blocks away—by the time the woman finished her tale, she looked even more harried than usual.

Aha, I thought, the germ of a plot just right for little boys. The trouble was, I soon discovered, I did not know how to write a story. It had been thirteen years since I had written anything but letters, radio talks, and tiresome papers with footnotes. Although I had received excellent grades and complimentary comments on both high school and junior college writing, the only corrections were on spelling, punctuation, and syntax, the sort of thing dear to English teachers.
No teacher ever told me how I could improve my stories or suggested any changes at all.