CHAPTER 3
JUE LET’S TRUE ESSENCE OF CHICKEN
1911–1919
JAMES’S EIGHTH BIRTHDAY PARTY was planned for Oaks Park in Sellwood, on the eastern bank of the Willamette. Portlanders called the six-year-old amusement park the Coney Island of the Northwest. In summer, the interurban trolley unloaded throngs of children, long-suffering mothers, and amorous couples. They might take in the diorama of Chilkoot Pass, the fearsome Golden Stairs leading straight up and over to the Klondike goldfields, ride the Whirlwind, or splash around in the natatorium.
On a Saturday morning in early May, the trolley carried James, Elizabeth, and about twenty of his classmates from Hawthorne School. They lugged a picnic in Elizabeth’s enormous wicker basket. Actually, it was a two-part picnic—lunch and afternoon snack—which Elizabeth supervised and Let cooked and assembled. It included James’s monumental birthday cake, set in its own hamper. Elizabeth entrusted it to a couple of strong-limbed boys to ease it into the trolley car and protect it with their lives.
James told Let he wanted a White Mountain cake (also known as a Colorado), with beaten egg whites for softness and lightness and the palest, fluffiest crumb. It was spectacular: four stacked layers diminishing in diameter at the crown, heaped with white frosting like the snow cloaking Mount Hood and dredged in coconut, James’s obsession. And because the boy adored flowers of all kinds, Let raided Elizabeth’s hawthorn tree, just then exploding gloriously into blossom. He clustered the sprays around James’s cake, masses of white flowers with greenish-yellow centers and an exuberance of black-tipped pistils.
Other children wanted birthday cakes bristling with candles. Mrs. Pamelia Benson, mother of James’s friend Chester, made famously gaudy cakes with multicolored layers: one year green, yellow, and blue, the next year pink and white, smelling of strawberry juice and rose extract. The finished cakes were thick with swirls and swags of icing, shimmery and sweet from dustings of crushed rainbow candies.
By contrast, James’s cake was one any bride would have cherished, the envy of the Hawthorne School girls. Though boys like Lester, Morris, and Virgil Coomer, James’s next-door neighbors on Salmon Street, might laugh at his extravagantly pristine and floral cake (free of candles, since James thought they spoiled the effect), James was not embarrassed.
Where the Coomers roughhoused and went trolling in streams for sucker fish, hideous monsters with loose, fleshy mouths, James preferred to read or knit, a skill he was learning. Elizabeth cultivated in her boy an exquisite sense of preference, fearlessness in expressing himself, sensitivity to taste, and an unabashed regard for his own opinions.
Elizabeth had wanted a child; she was raising a physically immature adult. Elizabeth and John both separately read Dickens to James, starting when he was a toddler. The stories described human folly and the vicissitudes of fate, randomly elevating or indiscriminately cruel. Elizabeth taught James not to bother with childish things but to be more like a friend, someone to sit with her in the dressing room during corset fittings and say which style best showed off her figure. Above all, Elizabeth raised him to be her ally in ongoing fights with John and Lucille (still living in the Salmon Street house), with Let, and against strictures of all kinds.
Elizabeth didn’t banish the boy from rooms where adult conversations occurred, talk that might have proved racy even for most grownups in Hawthorne Park. James heard sexual transgressions alluded to: insatiability, infidelity, inversion. Elizabeth had several friends and acquaintances who led unconventional lives.
She sometimes took James along to meet friends in “fast” places such as Theodore Kruse’s Louvre and James Falt’s Quelle Café on Sixth at Stark. Elizabeth knew Mrs. Falt quite well. She had a house of her own up the Columbia. Elizabeth visited there frequently, sometimes taking James. The Quelle was famous for crawfish, crab, and oysters, both Eastern and Olympia. Its private dining rooms were notorious for alleged debauchery. And though James Falt was said to pay off the police, vice men occasionally hauled him in front of a judge on charges of immorality, or of thwarting the Sunday liquor ban by serving gin in teapots—Falt’s “special blend”—an off-menu house special.
James grew up as an accessory to Elizabeth: her plump Little Lord Fauntleroy with a petulant face who’d say what he thought of the oysters and make everyone howl. Once he met a woman Elizabeth often gossiped about, passing along rumors of how she’d cheated on her husband. “I suppose you’ve been keeping busy,” James said to the lady, as gasps and barely suppressed chuckles rippled through the room. Elizabeth made a show of scolding him for his cheek, though James suspected she was secretly delighted. He was that most charming of small guests for afternoon tea: an innocent corrupted.
Most children avoided James. He had a temper and a nasty tongue; he criticized their rooms, clothes, and toys. When Elizabeth took James along to call on a friend, the woman’s children might be absent, with vague or flimsy excuses given in explanation. James would be left to sit at the edge of a roomful of grownups, handed plates of sandwiches and sweets to keep him occupied. He’d have nothing to do but think about what he was eating, as when a regal friend of Elizabeth’s who once lived in Vienna gave him tea with a float of schlag. She’d folded crushed praline into the whipped cream. It stuck in his imagination.
: : :
JAMES DID HAVE FRIENDS, mostly girls. Esther Kelly, who was older than James, lived in the house opposite and called him Baby Beard. The Kan girls, Grace and Miriam, lived in the nearby Mount Tabor neighborhood. As a young man, their father, Andrew Kan, had emigrated from Fujian Province in China, before the Exclusion Act. He weathered racism and the obstacles it enshrined in the law to become well known as an importer of goods from China and Japan: embroidered silks, Peking furs, fireworks, dishes, curios. He had shops and a warehouse downtown, also a large hopyard and truck garden south of the city. Kan’s friendship with the customs appraiser John Beard was a strategic one. He urged his wife, Minnie, to send Grace and Miriam to Salmon Street often to play with James. The children spent hours together in the backyard playhouse.
Elizabeth liked having the Kan girls around. She instructed James’s Chinese nanny—his amah, Thema—to dress him like a Qing Dynasty princeling. The boy’s fine, sandy hair was done up in Buster Brown style—a pudding-basin cut, heavy bangs sitting low and straight across his forehead. Thema dressed him in Chinese suits of silk pongee, little embroidered coats that buttoned on the side and had frog closures at the shoulder. In summer, his suits were of Japanese loose-weave cotton, cool though scratchy; in other seasons, he wore Chinese linen with short pants in blue or white.
For breakfast, Let served him fruit and tea in the Cantonese manner, congee (rice porridge) if it was chilly, and sometimes Guangdong steamed salt fish or one of Elizabeth’s English kippers. James had his own collection of ivory chopsticks that fit his small hands, gifts from his merchant Chinese godfather (another strategic affiliation), a counterpart to General Summers, the boy’s white godfather.
Elizabeth had begun collecting pretty things from Andrew Kan’s cluttered so-called Japanese Bazaar on Morrison Street. Hatred of the Chinese exploded in Portland after 1900, so labeling the shop Japanese was certainly an act of self-preservation for Kan. It had a mezzanine and a large American flag tacked high on the back wall, as if to assure Portlanders that Kan was a loyal, patriotic neighbor. Elizabeth displayed the treasures she bought at the Japanese Bazaar in her Salmon Street parlor: courtesans painted on silk, fans revealing floating landscapes when opened, mirror frames with imperial scrollwork in carton-pierre, screens of delicate rosewood tracery, and Canton jugs emblazoned with blue pagodas. All of it provided proof of a distant world where beauty and strangeness mingled, far from Portland’s glooms, its drab minds and dripping streets.
Stella always wrote to Elizabeth from far-flung places where she ventured: Honolulu and the South Sea Islands in 1908, and seasons in Europe almost too numerous to count. Elizabeth, in turn, would have shared with Stella descriptions of her latest acquisitions from Kan’s.
James wished he’d been born a Chinese American boy. He adored Thema and Let; likewise Billy, Let’s friend and the chef of House’s Restaurant downtown. Billy was famous for his coleslaw, lavished with cream and dotted with tiny salty shrimp or flakes of crab. It had the majesty of the ocean James knew stretched from Gearhart Beach all the way to the shores of China. It matched the cool serenity of the Kan residence in Mount Tabor, where James sometimes went to see Grace and Miriam, and for a time their cousin John Kan, staying with them in Portland while his parents, Christian missionaries, were off converting Chinese souls in country towns beyond Mount Hood.
James loved listening to the eldest of the Kan children, Andrew Junior, practice at the piano in the lace-curtained parlor. It gave James a feeling of beauty, in the same way Mr. Kan—elegant, ebony-haired, and slender—was beautiful. There was no other word to describe him.
The entire Kan family was cultured and kind. It was obvious they cared for one another with a warmth the Beards were unable, or unwilling, to beget. Nor did Elizabeth and John, with their separate interests, and friends who rarely mingled, spend much time with James as a family. But the Kans, and their house of music and children and delicious smells from the kitchen: how James yearned to belong.
There was one Salmon Street memory James would forever keep close. He was three and sick with malaria. Portland was in the midst of a summer heat wave, and the old swamp districts on the east side were incubators for the disease. James’s limbs ached, and he had shivering fits. He despised the taste of stomach bitters his amah dissolved in water to make him drink; his tongue felt so thick he didn’t have the will to swallow. One afternoon, the primrose-dotted curtains in his room were drawn to keep it cool, and a fly buzzed at the open window. He could hear the Coomer boys thwacking a can with sticks and whooping, and Mrs. Coomer stomping out to the yard to shush them.
And then Let appeared at the door, holding something and entering without words. In the darkened room, James caught the white flash of his long changshan, heard it rustle around his legs in motion. The bed slumped as Let sat beside him. James noticed his bare, work-scarred forearms and saw that he was bearing a saucer, with a spoon and a small crock of something the color of weak tea, though it didn’t move like liquid. Gently, Let cradled James’s head to raise it, dipped the spoon in the crock, and brought it to the edge of the boy’s lips. He allowed Let to place it in his mouth: its coolness against his inner lip gave instant comfort. It was jelly, salty instead of sweet, and with the flavor of roast chicken and giblet gravy. It clung to the roof of James’s mouth and tickled it. When he flexed his tongue—pressed the jelly to his bony palate—it became slippery, easy to swallow. It cooled his throat, and conjured the richness of the world beyond his primrose curtains.
Patiently, spoonful by spoonful, Let fed James until the crock was empty—the first act of tenderness James would remember, and the one that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He studied Let’s face, still close on the bed: the deep lines framing his mouth, pursed in a half-smile above the exuberant patch of whiskers sprouting from his bottom lip; his high forehead and soft, dark eyes. Of all the fine and elaborate things James would recall eating at his mother’s table—the oyster patties and roast beef, Parker House rolls and braised ducks—Let’s subliming of chicken to become rich golden jelly was somehow the purest and yet most complicated.
Let returned every afternoon for nearly two weeks with his crock, spooning cold elixir into James’s mouth like a father robin tending a nestling, until he was again able to feed himself, submit to being dressed, and return to the whirl of his mother’s dominion.
: : :
JOHN SPENT LONG DAYS away from Salmon Street, at work behind the heavy iron gate of the appraiser’s storeroom in the Custom House. It was a ponderous heap of masonry, with bars at the windows and a brooding courtyard. Within its fortresslike walls, he pored over the contents of sample crates from ships loaded with cargo from Chinese and Japanese ports, anchored at the Willamette docks.
As assistant appraiser for the District of Portland, John assessed the value of Asian imports for the US Treasury Department to assign a duty, payable before a cargo was released to its owner. He was diligent. He passed his days squinting through a magnifying glass at the bottoms of lotus bowls and teacups, decoding brushstrokes and factory marks. He trained an electric light onto brass figures of sages, goddesses, and beasts of the zodiac to gauge the percentage of copper in their alloys. He sifted through medicinal herbs in search of smuggled contraband, unraveled silk to assess the grade of its floss, and counted fibers in cotton embroidery and sakiori weavings—some of the very objects Elizabeth would later buy at Andrew Kan’s shop, or receive as gifts at banquets hosted by the merchants and brokers whose cargoes John appraised.
While she treasured her pictures and knickknacks for the distant places they opened in her imagination, John regarded them as subjects for material analysis, free of prejudice, emotion, or fancy. James found himself fixed between both.
At home, John hid his own desires, his delights and passions. To James, he was a man of invisible currents. Besides Elizabeth’s bitter complaints about her husband—his crudeness, his coveting of what she thought of as her money—what James knew of his father was the self-portrait John displayed to the world. He painted himself as a man of essential American character and pioneer roots; a person of ruggedness and self-reliance, conversant with things of the wild. At the Custom House, he was a bureaucrat whose position depended on political alliances within the local Republican Party—a civil servant, not a federal appointee like his patron, boss, and protector, Owen Summers.
His protection couldn’t last forever. After Summers died in 1911, John was vulnerable, his position tenuous. Oregon’s congressional delegation in Washington didn’t put forth John’s name for the job of chief appraiser. In the year and a half it took President William Taft to appoint a new man, as he mulled whether to kill the federal position altogether (Portland’s ship traffic had dwindled, compared to newly booming ports like Tampa and Detroit), John worked harder than ever to prove his value. He kept an even greater distance from Elizabeth.
James knew his father mostly as a noisy shadow: the sound of drawers opening and closing in the small back bedroom as John dressed for work, the pop of an errant cuff link hitting the floor, the clank of the iron skillet against the range early in the morning, and the rich, slightly scorched, flour-and-bacon aroma of his Sunday-breakfast fried chicken.
On chicken mornings, John rose early. He added wood to the live embers in the range’s firebox, carried a muslin-wrapped side of smoked bacon from the pantry and skived off several pieces. These he sliced in thin strips, which he then tried out in a deep skillet set on the range’s relatively cool zone. As pieces of bacon crisped, he removed them to a plate; into the hot grease he slipped (gingerly, to keep the grease from splashing) the chicken (sometimes two), hacked into ten pieces and floured. He covered the pan and moved it to a cool edge of the range to simmer, then lifted the lid and moved the pan to the hot zone so the skin would crisp.
Once he removed the chicken and poured off most of the grease, he made cream gravy in the skillet: a heaping spoon of flour stirred up with the recalcitrant leavings and diluted with butterfat-rich milk, then simmered, salted, and peppered. Meanwhile, Let would have made biscuits for sopping up the gravy.
It was all too rustic for Elizabeth’s tastes. It annoyed her that John never closed the kitchen door when he cooked, and thus allowed insinuating odors of bacon and frying to seep into the parlor and taint her pretty things. What stood out for James was his father’s precision in what was essentially an intuitive process, grounded in weekly practice. John cooked in Elizabeth’s kitchen with a vengeance and seasoned ferociously with black pepper—acts of subversion the boy would not forget.
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JOHN WAS BORN IN 1861 in Iowa, a midway point along the family’s arc of migration. His father, Andrew Francis Beard, was a stable keeper from Kentucky (originally the Carolinas), pappy to sixteen children, all told, conceived with two wives. John was five when Andrew once again uprooted his clan to seek material uplift on the Pacific Coast. They traveled west in wagons along the Oregon Trail, which had begun to peter out ever since the route across Panama opened a decade earlier. When the first locomotives rolled along the Transcontinental Railroad, in 1869, the wagon route to the Northwest was little more than a deeply rutted ghost track. In time, John’s journey westward took on the shape of legend—the covered wagon that jolted him across Kansas, the shoot-outs with natives on the Plains—pioneer credentials that gave him status in Portland, a place steeped in a founding myth of Lewis and Clark and the intrepid white settler.
By 1880, the Beard clan had settled sixty-five miles south of Portland, in a farm and ranching village in Linn County named Scio, a flat place cut through with roads, all leading somewhere else. The town had a white clapboard church and a pharmacy where nineteen-year-old John became a druggist’s apprentice. He washed bottles and learned to compound simple medicines, a grounding in rudimentary laboratory methods that trained him for work as an assessor.
In 1881, twenty-year-old John married Emma Clifford Biggers. In 1884, they had a girl, Lucille Bird (James’s half-sister). Two years later, Emma gave birth to another girl, Genevieve, but at the age of four, only months after John and Emma moved their young family to Portland, the small, sickly child went up to heaven to live with the angels. In August 1896, Emma died of consumption. By Christmas, when Trinity Church choir gave its annual carol recital and General Summers, wearing the Santa Claus suit he donned every year, showered gifts and candy on the children of political allies, Clara Summers had already begun to scheme.
Before the new year was old, Clara convinced the still-mourning John that Mrs. Brennan, handsome mistress of the Gladstone boardinghouse and likewise bereaved, would not look askance at Mr. Beard’s request for her hand in marriage.
John had loved Emma. The grief of losing both a wife and a daughter within the same year had made him vulnerable. When it came to the movements of his heart, John’s skills of analysis, so keen in his work at the Custom House, deserted him.
After marrying Elizabeth and moving into the Gladstone with Lucy Bird, John’s brothers and sisters paid their wedding calls to congratulate him on crossing a new threshold, witness the start of his reinvigorated life, and help lay Emma and Genevieve to rest at last. The new Mrs. Beard was having none of it.
Elizabeth rudely implied they’d all only showed up at the Gladstone to take advantage of her: use up the hot water, devour all the rolls and butter, and pocket the silver. She seemed to take particular delight in turning them out in the most public way possible, in front of the Gladstone’s residents. Far from finding peace, the ghosts of John’s departed wife and daughter were doomed to go on haunting him.
He found comfort in work and its social demands. He went on men’s retreats with bureaucrat colleagues to St. Martin’s Springs on the Washington side of the Columbia, for mud baths and bonding over whiskey, firing buckshot at deer in the woods, and long, improbable tales about sex. He joined a fraternal lodge and mutual benefit society, Multnomah Camp No. 77, Woodmen of the World. He anchored himself to the bedrock of its mystical pioneer values and un-churchy Christian philosophy and cut loose at its hee-haw gatherings and secret initiations around the bonfire—excuses to drink and cuss with other men.
In time, he’d become an officer of the organization. And though it was a motto the Woodmen reserved for the rusticated gravestones of felled brothers, “Dum Tacet Clamet” (in jokey jackass Latin, “Though silent, he speaks”) seemed especially fitting for John. Even though he was a scant and mostly silent presence at Salmon Street, the awkward fact of his existence echoed through the house like a roar.
Elizabeth and James cleared out of Salmon Street when John threw his annual holiday whirl for local Treasury Department men and other useful Republicans. There were Tom and Jerrys for John’s braying, shoulder-slapping guests: a dollop of egg-butter-sugar batter, with cinnamon and allspice, diluted with hot water and whiskey. All was vigorously stirred in the glass with fingers, a spoon, or, for the critically drunk, a cigar, until the sticky liquid overflowed onto shirt cuffs and dripped onto Elizabeth’s Peking carpet: a mess, it’s true. Yet it was the only time in the year when the house ever thumped with crowds or was unself-consciously alive to joy.
: : :
ELIZABETH STAGED RETREATS of her own. Twice in 1915, during San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, she sailed south with James from the Astoria pier. Other years, they traveled by rail—Southern Pacific’s Shasta Limited—to spend a week or more in the city James came to think of as his dream place.
They stayed at the Palace Hotel or the St. Francis. They dined in the winter-garden opulence of the Palace’s Garden Court, James in a double-breasted suit and the overly meticulous grooming of a boy eager to look smart in the glamorous city he’d heard his mother describe with longing and nostalgia. They shopped and went to the opera, took in plays. Above all, they ate: Marquard’s for the luncheon and hors d’oeuvre buffets; Tait’s at the Beach for its dark-paneled rooms, high-walled Japanese garden, and theatrical clientele; Jack’s for abalone and calf’s-head vinaigrette; Solari’s and the Fly Trap for veal chops and sand dabs.
Stella Ainsworth was still on the stage in New York. She traveled every year to California to visit her sister, married to a judge in the farming town of Woodland, northwest of Sacramento. James knew she was a great friend of his mother from the constancy of their letters, but mostly from Elizabeth’s stories, things he’d heard dozens of times about their travel together in Los Angeles and Panama, New York City, and of course in San Francisco.
On one of James and his mother’s trips to the city, strolling in Golden Gate Park with no particular destination, Elizabeth spotted a woman and a man on horseback. James noted the woman’s beautifully tailored black satin suit, and especially her pretty shoes. “What a surprise!” Elizabeth said to James. “This is Stella, my actress friend that I am always telling you about.”
After Stella and the man rode off, something in the way Elizabeth acted made the boy think that perhaps this surprise meeting wasn’t entirely by accident.
: : :
THE BEARD HOUSE on Salmon Street looked cheerful enough from the sidewalk. It stood two stories tall, under a low-pitched roof with dormers, six steps up from a barren street garden. The porch had plain stick balusters and windows with unfussy trim. The front door, flanked by a fern in a basket and a rope-hung swing with a settee of white canvas, displayed a homey flash of curtain through its central pane. A stranger walking past might think a conventionally happy family lived here, maybe even a boring one. It wasn’t so.
Loneliness hovered in the high ceilings of the kitchen, where, on most nights, James ate by himself. He was free to study in solitude the cream wallpaper with red polka dots, the immense black wood-burning stove that also heated the room. Of course Elizabeth kept everything well ordered: cuts and joints set away in the meat safe or hung in the basement (along with the stove wood and baskets of onions and potatoes) to age and ripen; jars of pickled lambs’ tongues, white asparagus, and Seville orange marmalade on pantry shelves, above the tin baby’s bathtub used for poaching whole salmon too long to fit the regular boiler. There were stacks of dishes—Chinese Peach Blossom and Blue Willow—as if the house might be expecting a horde of guests to descend. But there was never company for dinner. Even James and his parents seldom ate together.
The Beards occupied the kitchen in shifts. John had early mornings when Elizabeth was out, dressed in a fedora and divided skirt on her bicycle for exercise. John cooked breakfasts of bacon or fried ham with eggs for James, Lucy Bird, and her husband, Clarence Ruff. He sent trays up to their rooms. The young woman who helped out—paid help to succeed Let, who had disappeared in 1913, at the peak of Portland’s anti-Chinese fervor—delivered them.
After John departed for the office, Elizabeth took possession. She had her baking day, her annual weeklong mincemeat and fruitcake offensives. She fussed, preserved what needed putting up, checked her stores, and marketed or dealt with the tradesmen who rang at the back door. She made lunch for a close friend or two and served it in the kitchen, something simple and often cold: Billy’s coleslaw or pickled salmon and toast, maybe chilled stewed tomatoes and a poached egg, followed by scones or macaroons and pots of tea. The Ruffs ate their dinner apart from the Beards. Some nights, John did not even get home until late, after everyone was asleep.
A spirit of paucity ruled the Salmon Street kitchen, yet an almost absurd abundance surrounded it. The backyard was a tangle of perfumed and edible things in a perpetual state of flower and fall. In February, wild sour grass, aka clover-leafed oxalis, clustered at the fence line. In spring, the lilac that leaned against the screened back porch made the kitchen ache with fragrance. For two weeks in June, the magnificent quince was a lacy mass of pinkish blossoms. When the pomes came in, fuzzy, whorled, and deeply perfumed, Elizabeth piled them—as many as eighty!—in bowls at the center of the big oak kitchen table.
Later in spring, branches on the Lambert tree bobbed with clusters of blackish cherries, the Royal Ann with yellow-pink ones. A May Duke tree and a Montmorency yielded sour cherries for pies. There was yet another cherry tree, whose name James always forgot, that produced fruit with pits that practically slid from the flesh. Who would eat them all?
Three large Gravenstein apple trees spread their branches at the foot of the garden. By midsummer, they were heavy with fruit in vivid stripes of orange and parakeet yellow, fragile and crisp by late summer’s peak. In fall, when the apples turned mealy, Elizabeth cooked them to a jelly in a pinkish shade of amber. Sometimes she spooned it into a mold to set and then turned it out onto a cut-glass dish and placed it on the kitchen table, where it shimmered in the light of the overhead lamp. Alone, James helped himself to great spoonfuls of it, and doused the mound with cream. Eating without the distractions of company had its consolations.
After October’s rains, Elizabeth would wade through tall weeds in Hawthorne Park’s empty lots—ghostly white with field mushrooms at dawn—toting an empty ten-pound lard pail and bring it back full.
For weeks in autumn, the basement was a gallery of dead birds—gifts from friends and John’s colleagues who hunted, which was all of them—hung to dry and ripen the meat. Pheasant, geese, quail, and ducks (teal, mallards, canvasbacks); also venison—Elizabeth had learned from her father how long to hang each one. As a young boy, James had learned from Let how to pluck and singe the birds; how to draw entrails and excise bitter gall sacks. He knew the peculiar tangy odors of game as it aged, the trill of richness and rot that time produced.
There were only five people living on Salmon Street, all working out daily routines for avoiding one another. It didn’t stop Elizabeth from provisioning as though she were the mistress of a great house—still presiding over the Gladstone—directing a fantasy in which food was the center of a shared life.
: : :
“LOOK AT THIS, WAITER,” James said furiously. “Look at this! What is it, what is it—in my glass?”
“It’s only a fly, sir,” replied the waiter, in the best Cockney accent a sixteen-year-old Portland boy with a penciled-on mustache could manage. “It’ll do you no ’arm: It’s quite dead. Shall I take it out for you?” The boy shoved his thumb and forefinger into the glass, displacing water. James sputtered with outrage.
“Take your fingers out of that glass, at once, at once, at once!” James bellowed. He rose from his chair. He lifted his foot to stamp in protest, but as his shoe came down against the stage, it crushed his bowler hat.
James was on the stage at Washington High, in a student vaudeville show to raise money for decorating school floats in the Rose Festival Parade, just weeks away. He was playing the role of Mr. Jabstick, a rich, fat old gentleman lunching with his daughter (played by the popular Billie Fenimore) at a Soho café, in a one-act Scotland Yard slapstick, The Crimson Cocoanut, by English writer Ian Hay Beith. Sixteen-year-old James (class of January 1920) wore smears of red greasepaint on his cheeks and chalk dust in his hair and eyebrows. He’d swiped a stiff shirt collar and silk tie from John’s dresser; another student had borrowed her father’s boxy double-breasted suit coat for James’s costume. As a corpulent old prig, James was a natural—he didn’t even need to pad his suit. The audience (students, teachers, and parents) adored him.
“Confound and dash it!” James roared. Laughter surged through the auditorium—James could feel it as much as hear it. It sent an arc flickering up his spine, as though something in him had been switched on—electrified. He didn’t want to go dark again.
“James Beard nearly rivaled Miss Fenimore in his general popularity and extent of the undertakings,” read an item in the paper next day. “He was easily the star of the young men. He played the heavy part.” (Few could ever resist making jokes about James’s size; even then, he was remarkably large.)
The students raised $250 for floats: a triumph, and for James an overdue premiere. Washington High was a four-story Romanesque fantasy at Southeast Fourteenth and Stark, faced in ponderous gray stone, with dark halls and four flights of pitched stairs. Its classroom wings flanked a central steep-roofed campanile that glowered and seemed to hint at future doom. James’s first two years of high school had been trying.
When President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the Great War in April 1917, a rush of enlistments followed. Junior and senior boys disappeared from school—Washington’s class of January 1919, the one above James, was nicknamed “the war class.” Then, in the summer of 1918, news seeped into Portland’s dailies of a deadly influenza outbreak in Boston. In September, the so-called Spanish flu broke out at Camp Lewis, Washington, thirty miles north of Portland, following a troop transport from New England. And in October, Portland’s City Health Officer asked theater owners to eject anyone who coughed or sneezed. Panic gripped the Rose City. The Civic Auditorium became a hospice ward for terminal cases. People avoided streetcars, pool halls, bowling alleys, lodge meetings, and parades. When Mayor George L. Baker ordered the schools closed, all extracurricular activities ceased too. There were no football or basketball games (the fit boys had all enlisted anyway), no dances or assemblies. Student plays were canceled. James was no stranger to loneliness at home. War and a global pandemic made him feel it everywhere.
Schools reopened in December 1918. Days later, Washington High’s five English classes performed its long-delayed musical, a fundraiser for new library books. It was a comedy, a classical burlesque titled The Olympiadical Operatic Myth, with students portraying ancient Roman deities in singing tableaus. James wasn’t in the cast, but he reviewed the show for The Lens, the school journal. “How everybody laughed at Jupiter with his deep and sonorous voice,” he wrote, “perched on his mountain top (we were afraid it would fall down). . . . The flying Mercury was beautiful in symmetry, his black, gold, and apple green blending harmoniously with the surrounding.” The boy had an eye for beauty, a feel for aesthetics. And Elizabeth had taught him long ago to voice his opinions boldly, with a performer’s flair.
As the school year began, James was elected to student government—sergeant-at-arms, tasked with keeping order at meetings—or, as The Lens put it, poking fun at his size, “the ‘most’ sergeant-at-arms.” He joined the Hi-Y Club, a student service group for boys. At the new-member meeting, they initiated him as Jimmie Beard, played the palm-stinging slap game “hot hands,” and snacked on cheese and cider. The new fellows gave short speeches about themselves and Jimmie, of course, knew how to make everybody laugh.
Performance allowed James to become Jimmie, the boy who was funny, likable, social, and fully alive—strong enough to push off from the sadness yawning at home. Normally his body was an object of casual ridicule, but Jimmie the performer embraced his size, his height, his chins, and his softness around the middle. He made them into the things everyone loved about him; his body was the source of his power to command attention, and if there was anything James craved, it was attention.
Acting would be James’s life. It was the only thing that created a reason for his differentness, his dispensation for being something other than typical Washington High boys, who hutted footballs in some muddy, rain-washed field or stood around stiffly and stupidly with girls who were James’s closest confidantes.
For his class’s salute in The Lens, each graduating student officer got to write a motto next to their portrait. “Actors,” James wrote for his, “are born in the best of regulated families.” It was a quote he misremembered from a small book of Elizabeth’s, something she’d picked up on one of her trips to San Francisco: The Entirely New Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1905. It was a rather daring book, full of adult bons mots in the style of the late Oscar Wilde.
“Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person.”
“You may lead an ass to knowledge—but you cannot make him think.”
And one James found dangerous: “Tell the truth and shame the—family.” (A twist on “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”)
James altered one of the sayings to describe himself. “Actresses will happen in the best regulated families,” went the original, a witty twist on a line of Wilkins Micawber’s from David Copperfield, which he knew well: “Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.” James merely changed the gender, from “actresses” to “actors.”
He knew he was different. He realized at the age of seven that he liked boys. He was drawn to beautiful things: flowers and art; pretty clothes and ravishing cakes. Being an actor might prove to be his salvation, a plausible reason for his difference. It set him apart. He could explain his delicate tendencies as being the innate sensitivity of an artist.
“Hard on the Eyes,” was the headline of a jokey item in The Lens. It listed the most hilarious and grimace-provoking things no one ever wanted to see, including “Fat” Hickman in BVDs and Jimmie Beard in a bathing suit. In the same issue, in a farewell to the class of January 1920, each student named someone famous they aspired to be. James chose the late Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes Booth), the best-known American Hamlet of his generation, a man with an axe-chipped profile and eyes that seemed to tunnel into some deep well of suffering and spirit. Together, the two Lens items expressed the paradox of James’s existence. Through performance, he gained the attention that lifted him from isolation and depression, but instead of becoming the handsome idol he wanted to be, James had a physique that doomed him to bluster through comedic parts. He’d always be Mr. Jabstick, sitting down to a farcical lunch that might never end.