By the end of my second grade, Father changed to a new job: lobby officer in the new West Coast National Bank. He wore tailored business suits that hid his Smith & Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster. That he might ever have to use the Smith & Wesson never crossed my mind. In those days, Oregonians were much too well behaved to hold up a bank, at least, not often. At night the revolver, which I was told I must never touch, hung on the post of my parents’ bed. I never touched it, not once, even though Father always removed the bullets and left them on the dresser.
After two years, the seven-room house we rented on Halsey Street no longer seemed small and cozy. The wood and coal furnace did not heat as efficiently as the wood stoves on the farm, and the open staircase at the end of the living room created a cold draft. Pipes froze. Mother was cold. She was also nervous about the trains, with hoboes in empty boxcars, that ran in Sullivan’s Gulch. Children were no longer allowed to play in the hazelnut bushes between Halsey Street and the Gulch.
One night Mother heard, or thought she heard, someone pounding on the side door. The next morning dents were discovered, examined, discussed with the neighbors. Had they been there all the time, and we had never noticed? They looked fresh to some. Mother was sure she had heard someone whistle to an accomplice in the night. The story grew. There had been an answering whistle. Hoboes must have tried to break in. Mother decided it was time to move.
We rented a five-room house, with a glassed-in porch that served as a dining room, out on Seventy-seventh Street, a block and a half north of Klickitat Street—a neighborhood then five blocks from the city limit. Houses were far apart, and there were no children nearby. Hazelnut bushes, wild currants, and white marguerites grew in the rocky soil where garter snakes sunned themselves on warm days.
Mother was excited and a little frightened when we bought a gas stove with a thermostat on the oven. No more splitting kindling and struggling with dampers on the wood stove, or lighting a gas plate with a match. No more guessing at the temperature of the oven by the feel of heat on her hand. No more cakes that failed because of a wrong guess. Mother only hoped the whole thing would not explode.
The third-grade teacher at Gregory Heights Grammar School soon became ill and was replaced by a substitute who stayed the rest of the semester. Schoolwork was easy, but the substitute, I felt, could not be very bright. One day she asked a boy to make a sentence using the word “hot.” He answered, “My pillow is hot.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Stoves are hot. Fires are hot. Pillows can’t be hot.”
Yes they can, I thought. I felt sorry for the little boy, who looked ashamed. Pillows could be very hot. Dumb teacher.
Mother discovered, in the basement of the Sunday School I attended, a glass case of children’s books. The room was sometimes open evenings, so Mother and I walked to the church for books. She chose The Princess and Curdie to read to me, and two others, The Dutch Twins and The Swiss Twins, by Lucy Fitch Perkins, for me to read to myself. I had no intention of reading them. All I wanted to read were the titles of the silent movies at the nearby Roseway Theater. Movies were new to me, and exciting. I learned to read fast, before the titles disappeared from the screen.
The next Sunday afternoon was dreary. The outside world drizzled, the inside world was heavy with the smell of pot roast and my father’s Sunday after-dinner cigar, and I was so bored I picked up The Dutch Twins to look at the pictures. Suddenly I was reading and enjoying what I read! It was a miracle. I was happy in a way I had not been happy since starting school. I read all afternoon until I had finished the book. Then I began The Swiss Twins. For once Mother postponed bedtime, until I finished the book.
Shortly after my discovery that grown-ups spoke the truth when they said reading was a pleasure, a newspaper club, the Journal Juniors, offered a free book to any child who would write a review. Mother suggested I do this, and I agreed. Mother took me, carsick all the way, over-town on a streetcar to the Oregon Journal building, where I was given a copy of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, a book I enjoyed even more than The Dutch Twins. When we returned with my review, a photographer took my picture, which was published along with the review. Suddenly I was a school celebrity. “There’s that girl who got her picture in the paper,” everyone said. No one mentioned reading the review.
Those two long trips to the Journal made me dread streetcar rides, but I learned to endure them for the pleasure that lay ahead. To supplement our income, my father began to work Saturday nights as a bouncer at the Winter Garden Ballroom overtown. After supper, Mother and I sometimes took the long ride overtown, miserable for me because I had to fight carsickness, often with my face buried in my mother’s lap, for seventy-seven blocks, over the bridge across the Willamette River, and into town. Not throwing up took willpower, all I could summon, as I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, shut my eyes tight, and tried not to breathe the cold, stale streetcar smell until—just when I felt I must either die or disgrace myself—we arrived overtown. Mother bought the Sunday paper as we walked to the Winter Garden Ballroom.
I felt important when we were admitted free. We climbed the stairs to seats in the empty balcony, where I opened the paper and read the Sunday funnies on Saturday night—to me, a magical glimpse into the future. I knew on Saturday night the mischief the Katzenjammer Kids got into, while the rest of Portland had to wait until Sunday.
When I had finished the funnies, I leaned against the balcony railing, listening to the beat of the drums and banjo, watching the lights glimmer on the saxophone, trumpet, and trombone, following couples circling the floor, around and around, in the fox-trot, two-step, and hesitation waltz. My father paced the sidelines, keeping his eye on the dancers. Sometimes he stepped into the crowd, tapped a man on the shoulder, and spoke to him. I knew he had caught a glimpse of an illegal flask. The man and his partner always left quietly. Prohibition had been voted in since I had tried to peek under the saloon door in Yamhill.
Gradually the circling of the dancers made me drowsy; Mother pulled me back from the railing. Once again I laid my head in her lap, where, with the Sunday paper crackling above me as she turned the pages, I fell asleep. When I awoke, I was being carried over Father’s shoulder from the streetcar to our house. How loved and safe I felt, the three of us alone, in the night, going toward home. I cherished those magic Saturday nights.
That year I fell in love, twice. At school I loved a boy named Johnny. During lunch period, after taking one bite out of my sandwich and sucking the juice out of my orange, I followed, or chased, Johnny around, much to his embarrassment, until the bell rang.
I also fell in love with the eighth-grade boy next door, who sometimes rode me to school on the handlebars of his bicycle, making me the envy of other third-grade girls. I loved him until the night our cat died. In the morning, Mother paid the boy to bury the cat in a vacant lot. Farm life had prepared me for the death of a cat, but the sight of a boy I loved carrying our cat by its tail outraged me, destroying my love. I wept in fury at this indignity to our pet.
That winter, freezing winds roared down the Columbia River Gorge, which was closer than we had realized when we rented the house. The glassed-in porch was too cold to use. Mother sparingly fed wood and coal into the furnace, trying to make it last the winter. Snow fell, melted, froze.
Mother bundled me up, pulling my knit cap down over my ears, wrapping a woolly scarf around my neck and over my nose, and pulling heavy stockings on over my shoes to prevent my slipping on ice. With her sweater held close around her, she opened the front door enough for me to slip through while she instructed me to walk in the middle of the street so I would not be struck by falling wires. In those days, bad weather was no excuse for closing schools or for keeping children home.
That solitary walk on icy streets was beautiful in a shining silver world under a cloudless sky of piercing blue. The only sound was the thud of ice-coated wires falling to the glazed crust of the snow. Sunlight transformed hazelnut bushes into fairy-tale crystal; icicles were flashing daggers that plunged, stabbing the snow, before they shattered. The air was so clear and cold that breathing was painful, even through the layers of my woolly scarf. My nose ran, mittens did not warm my hands, but I was sorry to reach school, to leave the dazzling outdoors and enter the gray concrete building stuffy with the smell of little bodies and noisy after my radiant, silent walk.
By the time the snow had melted, our class had become 3B and had moved to another room and another teacher, a tall, pretty woman whose name, as I recall, was Mrs. Coad. She was a smiling, kindly teacher.
My only problem in 3B was the multiplication tables. In class we chanted in unison, “Two times two is four, two times three is six…,” on and on.
“I don’t hear you, Beverly,” Mrs. Coad said, but she was nice about it.
The trouble was, we were expected to learn the tables all the way through the hard numbers, the sevens and nines. I absorbed the easy numbers by chanting, and tried to avoid being drilled by Mother on hard numbers.
One day Grandmother Bunn, who lived with her children in turn but spent most of her time with Aunt Minnie, came to stay with us. Mother had to go overtown in the afternoon, and that evening she planned a rare treat: taking me to the nearby Roseway Theater to see Milton Sills in The Sea Hawk, so Father could have a good visit with his mother. I was instructed to come straight home after school to keep my grandmother company.
Grandmother Bunn was tall, slender, and beautiful, with silver hair and flashing dark eyes. In her youth she had been famous, Mother said, and Father agreed, as the most beautiful woman in Oregon. She was kind and friendly toward me, but somehow I could never feel as close to her as I felt toward Grandma Atlee.
The prospect of an afternoon alone with Grandmother Bunn was daunting. What would we talk about? I disobeyed Mother. Instead of coming straight home from school, I went home with a girl in my class who lived about five blocks away; and when my conscience made me leave, Mother had returned home ahead of me.
“No Sea Hawk for you, young lady!” was her verdict.
I wept, I begged, I had to see The Sea Hawk. The whole school was going to see The Sea Hawk.
“Then why didn’t you do as you were told?” Mother wanted to know.
I was sorry, I would be a better girl, I would never, never disobey again. My grandmother looked amused; Mother remained calm. I said I would die if I didn’t get to see The Sea Hawk.
Finally Mother relented, but she exacted a price for my sin. Before I could go to the theater, I had to be able to recite, without mistakes, the multiplication tables, including the twelves.
“But that’s not fair,” I protested. “We aren’t even up to the twelves in school.”
“Suit yourself,” said Mother, and went into the kitchen to prepare supper.
Cornered, I began the struggle. Grandmother Bunn, entertained by my dilemma, helped by listening to me recite. I learned fast. Mother and I left the house barely in time to catch the beginning of The Sea Hawk.
What a movie! That scene of a man swallowing a ring to keep it from the pirate, the pirate following him into the ship’s cabin and emerging with a bloody knife in one hand and the bloody ring in the other. Gosh!—to use a word Mother forbade. That scene was the talk of the third grade on Monday, and I was secure in the knowledge that I knew my tables through the twelves when the rest of the class did not.
Mother did not care for The Sea Hawk. As an antidote, she took me overtown to see Peter Pan, with Mary Brian as Wendy and Betty Bronson as Peter Pan. I liked Captain Hook and the pirates, even though they were not bloody like the pirates in The Sea Hawk. I saved my ten-cents-a-week allowance for ten weeks so I could buy a copy of the book.
Gradually spring came to Seventy-seventh Street. Wild iris bloomed. One day a teacher came into the 3B room to announce that third-grade girls would take the part of lilac blossoms in the spring PTA program. She asked all the girls to stand. She then walked up and down the aisles, tapping girls on the shoulder. “The girls I have tapped will be lilac blossoms,” she informed us, and left the room.
The teacher had not tapped me. One other girl had been skipped, but the rest of the girls had been cast as lilac blossoms. Never in my life had I been left out. In Yamhill, children were part of all that went on. At recess I waylaid Mrs. Coad to tell her I thought the teacher had made a mistake. Mrs. Coad kindly promised to speak to the teacher.
When the bell rang and Mrs. Coad returned, I was waiting with the other non-blossom. Our teacher told us gently that we had not been chosen because we were too short, but that we could be substitute lilac blossoms.
Too short! I did not feel short; I was tall enough for anything I wanted to do. Of course, in Yamhill I had been known as the Bunns’ little daughter, but I thought this meant that adults were big and children little.
The lilac blossoms were all in remarkably good health. I watched sadly as they bustled off, full of importance, for rehearsals. At last a morning came when one blossom was absent. I eyed my rival substitute, who seemed unaware that anything unusual had occurred. The minutes dragged by until the recess bell. My seat was near the door, so I was able to dart out and down the hall. The blossom director was standing in a doorway talking to another teacher. I waited for her attention. Then, anxious to be fair to the other short girl, I said, “Excuse me, but one lilac blossom is absent today. Which substitute do you want to rehearse?”
The teacher put her hand on my shoulder, turned, and smiled at the other teacher. “This one,” she said, “is a nuisance.”
I stared at her in pain, while she looked amused, before I turned and fled, no longer wanting to rehearse, no longer wanting to be a lilac blossom at all. A nuisance, a nuisance—the word tormented me.
“What’s the matter, Beverly?” Mother asked when I came home from school. “You look down in the mouth.”
I shook my head, too ashamed to tell, because Mother might agree with that teacher. My parents believed teachers were always right.
The night of the program, I balked. “Of course you’re going,” said Mother. “I have been elected president of next year’s PTA.”
“Can’t Daddy stay home with me?” I pleaded. My father, I knew, did not like to go out in the evening. This time he wanted to go. I scowled and stuck out my lower lip.
“Get that look off your face,” ordered my father.
“Beverly, I don’t know what gets into you sometimes,” said Mother with a sigh. “Now stop sulking and come along.”
So, on that dreaded evening, all three of us walked to school and sat on folding chairs in the auditorium, with me in the middle, where I hunched down, trying to be invisible, a wretched, too-short nuisance.
“Sit up,” ordered Mother, who was running out of patience. “Stop that slumping.”
Reluctantly I raised myself an inch or two, while up on the stage the happy lilac blossoms rustled and twirled in their lavender and purple crepe paper costumes. I could scarcely bear to watch, and I never wanted to go to school again.