Father tired of the long streetcar ride to work. Mother dreaded another winter of icy winds sweeping down the Columbia River Gorge. I did not say so, but I was fearful of having for my teacher the woman who thought I was a nuisance.
Mother resigned her upcoming PTA presidency, and early in the summer, we moved to tree-lined Hancock Street, half a block from Fernwood, my former school, which had sprouted two gymnasiums and an auditorium in the past year. Mother said I was just skin and bones, and now I could come home for a good lunch. She felt so cheerful about the advantages of the move for all of us that she went to a beauty shop and had her hair bobbed and permanent-waved. She came home smiling, with her long hair in a paper bag.
I now had a long walk to Sunday School while dreading having to read aloud a Bible verse with the word womb, a mysterious word, both in meaning and in pronunciation. However, the new Rose City Branch Library and the new Hollywood Theater were only a few blocks away.
Houses were close to one another, so close we could hear “The Prisoner’s Song” or “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” played on Victrolas. All our neighbors had front and back lawns, and most had children the right age to play with. We played hard that summer: jump rope, hopscotch, and O’Leary with hard red rubber balls. Sometimes we did not play, but instead danced the Charleston, heels flying, hands crisscrossing between our knocking knees. If one of us fell down, the rest shouted “I faw down, go boom,” a reference to a silly song about England’s Prince of Wales falling off polo ponies.
“Good gracious,” said Mother, “those children have all turned into flappers, and they’re going right through the soles of their shoes.”
Evenings when a comedy program was broadcast, neighbors with radios left their front doors open so children could settle like flocks of birds on their porches and listen. Some parent was always willing to take a few children to any civic event that might interest us. We saw Charles Lindbergh, blond and exhausted, paraded through Portland. We saw Queen Marie of Romania, holding a bouquet of purple flowers, ride down Sandy Boulevard. We saw the statue of Joan of Arc unveiled and were bored by speeches. And, of course, each year we sat on curbs to watch the Rose Festival parade.
We also went to the Hollywood Theater, an art-deco palace with Moorish towers above the box office. Inside, everything seemed red and gold. A Wurlitzer organ rose out of the floor by magic, with the organist already seated, ready to accompany the silent films.
Father took me to every movie with Lon Chaney or Douglas Fairbanks. My favorite was Douglas Fairbanks, who leaped from urn to urn in The Thief of Baghdad and slid down the sail of a ship by stabbing it with his dagger in The Black Pirate.
Mother preferred Mary Pickford or comedies. In Sparrows, Mary Pickford led a group of orphans across quicksand to save them from an evil man who was pursuing them, a scene so scary Mother found a piece of paper in her handbag for me to tear into little pieces so I wouldn’t bite my nails until my fingers bled. When Harold Lloyd dangled from the hands of a clock far above a city street, children screamed with fright and excitement, and some of us were left with a permanent fear of heights.
Most of all, children hoped for an “Our Gang” comedy. To me, these comedies were about neighborhood children playing together, something I wanted to read about in books. I longed for books about the children of Hancock Street.
Worried about something I did not understand, Mother began to change. She decided it was time to mold my character. I was too old to call her Mamma. I was to call her Mother. Her rules followed me around the house like mosquitoes. “Use your head.” “Stand on your own two feet.” “Use your ingenuity.” “Never borrow.” “Use your imagination.” And, of course, “Remember your pioneer ancestors,” who used their heads, stood on their own two feet, always stuck to it, never borrowed.
If I lost something, Mother said, “You’ll have to learn to look after your things.” I did. If I was involved in a neighborhood squabble, I got no sympathy. “What did you do?” Mother always asked, leaving me with the feeling that, no matter what happened, I was to blame. “Try,” Mother often said.
And try I did. When Abendroth’s store across from Fernwood announced a contest sponsored by Keds shoes for the best essay about an animal, many of my class planned to enter. I chose the beaver, because Oregon was known as the Beaver State. On green scratch paper left over from printing checks, which Father brought home from the bank, I wrote my essay and took it to Mr. Abendroth. On the final day of the contest, I ran to the store to learn the results. I had won! Mr. Abendroth handed me two dollars. Then he told me no one else had entered the contest.
This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying. I also wrote a letter to the Shopping News, which published the letter and paid me a dollar.
Fernwood was a relief after Gregory Heights. I had not been forgotten, nobody knew I was a nuisance, and my height did not matter. Johnny, my “love” from Gregory Heights, was there; his family had also moved.
Miss Pollock, our fourth-grade teacher, was a serious gray-haired woman who often reminded us that we should believe in “Gawd,” apparently the same God I had learned about in Sunday School. She was kind and easily pleased. The fourth grade seemed to be one long quest for the lowest common denominator in long division. Sometimes I wished Miss Pollock’s Gawd would help. For a treat, on Friday afternoons, we were allowed to recite poetry. I once recited “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” after being coached by Mother.
Once a week, we marched off to the music room. Miss Johnson, the music teacher, always wore a green smock with a pocket that bulged with what we children suspected was a package of cigarettes but was probably a box of chalk. Miss Johnson was not a popular teacher, and I could never please her.
By the time I reached the music room, my stomach was a tight knot. We opened our song-books and sang. Claudine, from the first grade, sat behind me, and when we began “If I were a student in Cadiz,” Claudine sang “If I were a student in Hades.” I admired and was cheered by her courage.
“Ring-ching-ching, ring-ching-ching, ring out ye bells,” Miss Johnson enunciated distinctly. “Not ring owchee bells.”
“Ring-ching-ching, ring-ching-ching, ring OWCHEE bells,” sang musical, carefree Claudine, spraying spit on the back of my neck.
We then had to take turns standing and singing alone. Please, God, let the period end, let the fire drill bell ring, let somebody throw up, before my turn. I sat, rigid, hoping the boy who had the courage to defy Miss Johnson would be called on first. His refusal to sing took up a lot of class time. He simply shook his head and sat mute. First his cheeks turned red, then his ears, while we sat fascinated by his defiance and by Miss Johnson’s anger. The boy always won.
The music class made me so miserable, so sick with dread, that Mother gave up on my gumption and interceded. She went to school and explained my unhappiness over singing alone. On the next music day, Miss Johnson made another singing-dreader and me come to the front of the room and sing “America.” We mumbled through, each trying to sing more softly than the other.
“Sing louder,” ordered Miss Johnson. “Let me hear each word.”
The girl and I exchanged glances of pure misery and mumbled more loudly on our second rendition of “America.”
Fear of singing, however, did not stop me from wanting to be in the Christmas operetta, The Cruise of the Trundle Bed, about a little boy who fell asleep and dreamed he went to Toyland. I enlisted as a tin soldier because a short tin soldier was useful for leading marches, something I had to do almost every rainy gym period when we lined up according to height and marched in columns of two, four, eight; divided into fours, twos; marched single file in circles, on and on. Because I was the shortest girl in the class and always led the girls’ column, I was good at marching, if not at singing.
On the night of the performance, dressed in blue and tan cambric soldier suits made by our mothers, we suffered one casualty, a girl who danced the Charleston on a chair and fell off, wounded, with a broken arm. Our troop regrouped and marched through our formations. When time came to face the audience and sing “The toyshop door is locked up tight. All the toys are quiet for the night,” my courage left me. I mimed the words, a dodge noticed by my parents and every other parent in our neighborhood. “Why weren’t you singing, Beverly?” they asked. “I didn’t notice you singing.” “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” I thought they were rude, but I did not care. After my failure to be a lilac blossom, to be a fourth-grade tin soldier was a triumph, especially when a basketball, playing the part of a cannonball, was rolled across the stage and we all fell over with one leg in the air.
While school was often a happy place, sorrow was creeping into our home. Evenings, when my father came home from work, Mother’s gentle greeting was always “Well, how did it go today?”
“All right.” My father said little about his days at work, but then, he always was a quiet man. He could not have enjoyed standing eight hours on a marble floor, but he did not complain in front of me.
After supper, Mother still read aloud to my father and me. At first she read travel books and Greek or Norse myths, but more and more she searched for humorous stories, usually in The Saturday Evening Post, which we bought for a nickel once a week from a neighborhood boy.
When I went to bed, I overheard worried, serious conversations. No matter how hard I tried, I could not hear what my parents were talking about. Finally Mother, desperate for a confidant, said to me in a voice filled with anguish, “Oh, I do pray your father won’t decide to go back to the farm. For me, those years were years of slavery.”
This was a complete surprise. Going back to the farm had never entered my mind. I had forgotten we still owned it. My father never mentioned in front of me his wish to return, for in those days parents did not discuss adult problems in front of children.
Tensions tightened. My father began to fly into rages over trivialities. A gentle man, he now terrified me by swearing, going into the bedroom, and slamming the door. I suffered over these outbreaks because I was afraid of what he might do when he came out. However, he always emerged quiet and in control of himself. Each time, I hoped such an outburst would be his last. I did not connect them with his dislike of the bank’s marble floor or his longing to work outdoors once again.