Toward the end of my junior year, on a trip to the orthodontist, I detoured into Meier & Frank’s personnel office for an application for a summer job as a cashier or elevator operator. Proud of my attempt at helping out and eager for a bit of independence, I told my parents what I had done.
“You are not filling out any application for Meier & Frank,” said Dad.
“But I want to help,” I protested, near tears.
“No daughter of ours is going to be seen working in Meier & Frank,” said Mother.
Everyone was short of money. Mrs. Miles planned to take her girls out to harvest strawberries and raspberries when school was out and invited Claudine and me to go along. Even though I knew the work would be back-breaking, I was eager to go, to earn money, to be with my friends.
“Certainly not,” said Mother.
“Mrs. Klum is letting Claudine go,” I persisted.
“I don’t care what Mrs. Klum is letting Claudine do,” said Mother. “You’re not going.” Then she added, “I don’t see how Mrs. Miles manages with five girls.”
Just before school was out, Mother telephoned the dean of girls at Grant to ask if someone in the neighborhood wanted a baby-sitter. I was humiliated. If she wanted me to baby-sit for strangers, why couldn’t I ask the dean myself? I received a call from a woman wanting me to stay with her two-year-old son for an afternoon. I did not even know there was a two-year-old in the neighborhood. During the Depression, babies were luxuries few people in our neighborhood could afford. The baby next door, with whom I sat when he was asleep, was the only one I knew. Apprehensively, I went to the woman’s house. She pointed to the kitchen stacked with dirty dishes I was to wash, peas to shell, the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the living room, dusting to be done. About her little boy her parting words were “I hope you can do something with him. I can’t.”
I spent a terrible afternoon. The child was more than I could handle and still cope with housework. As soon as I put my hands in dishwater, he was out the back door and down the street. I ran after him and carried him, kicking and screaming, home. He refused to take his nap. He threw things. He hit me. Somehow I managed to get through the stack of dishes while trying to keep the child from harm. Late in the afternoon I sat down on the kitchen floor with him and entertained him by getting him to shell peas along with me while I thought longingly of an elevator at Meier & Frank and a real paycheck, even a small one. At six o’clock the mother came home, frowned at the vacuum cleaner still in the middle of the living room, handed me fifty cents, and told me to vacuum the living room before I left.
I felt incompetent and exploited, and I flatly refused ever again to baby-sit for strangers. This angered Mother. Helping out would not hurt me, she said. I wanted to help, but not by being paid a pittance trying to do two jobs at once in someone’s dirty kitchen.
My junior year ended. Franklin Roosevelt was running for President. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he were elected and could turn this country around?” Mother said, not really believing he could.
Mother’s old friends from her school-teaching days wrote that they were coming to Portland. She replied, “What a disappointment! We have to be out of town just when you are going to be here.” We did not answer the telephone while they were in town. “Friends,” Mother said, “cost money.”
My father spent his vacation painting the outside of the house. I heard worried whispers between my parents. How were they ever going to set anything aside for their old age? What were they going to do with Beverly? I wondered, too. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself.
Once Gerhart, in spite of Mother’s disapproval, took me to see a marathon dance contest. Those pathetic, exhausted couples dragging one another around the dance floor under the supervision of a smarmy master of ceremonies in hopes of winning a few dollars—and what about the losers? They were desperate, too. This was the Depression at its most degrading. I demanded to be taken home, away from those hurting, shuffling feet.
When Gerhart said he wanted to buy one of the new Ford V-8s, Mother said, “Now, Gerhart, don’t you do it. You save your money. You’ll need it someday.” As he drove up the driveway in a new V-8, I had an irrational feeling of surprise that he had defied Mother, and a taste of bitterness because he could afford a new car when Dad had been forced to sell ours.
Then Claudine and her mother left for Puddin’, and Gerhart drove off to California to spend his two weeks’ vacation visiting his family. I was glad to see him go, so very glad I went limp with relief and faced at last how much I had come to dislike him.
When the Fourth of July came, Mother said, “You should have an invitation to a picnic. When I was your age, boys always invited me to Fourth of July picnics, and we always had a glorious time.”
Even though I felt guilty, a social failure and disappointment to my mother, I did not want to go to a Fourth of July picnic. I wanted a real job, or I wanted to be left alone to lie on my bed in my room and read Willa Cather.
My reading, secluded in my room with the door shut, annoyed Mother. She constantly talked to me through the door and accused me of being snooty. I was not snooty. I was confused and unhappy, and wanted time to think without Mother telling me what to think.
One afternoon, when Gerhart had been gone about a week, I was lying on my bed watching butterflies sip from purple panicles of sun-warmed blossoms on the bush outside my window, and wondering what was to become of me, when Mother called from the dining room, “Beverly, come here a minute.”
As I stepped from the hall door into the living room, a hand reached out and stroked my hair. It was Gerhart, who had flattened himself against the wall so I would not see him until I was in the room. I was startled and angry, cheated out of another week without him.
“Come on. Let’s go for a ride,” he said, or ordered, for Mother was sure to say, “Go on, Beverly. You’ve been cooped up all day.”
We drove around awhile, ending in the usual place, the Swan Island airport, where Gerhart turned to me and said, “Will you marry me?”
Marry him? Marriage to anyone, especially Gerhart, was of no interest to me when my life had not really begun. Embarrassed and bewildered, I made my refusal as tactful as I could manage. A proposal of marriage was, after all, supposed to be the greatest compliment a man could pay. Gerhart’s jaw clenched. He shoved his V-8 into gear and, without a word, drove me home and left. Mother gave me a sharp look, but I said nothing.
Gerhart did not stay away. I resented his touching me and shrugged away from him. Once, when his grasp was insistent, I startled him by ordering, “Unhand me, greybeard loon!” He obeyed, but must have been mystified by the words from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He had not been required to memorize hundreds of lines of poetry.
One evening, when my father and I were alone in the living room, Dad said quietly, “You know, you don’t have to go out with Gerhart if you don’t want to.” I don’t remember my answer, but I do remember how his gentle words soothed my troubled heart. I knew I had an ally in what had become an intolerable situation, one that was abetted by Mother. Why, when she was so quick to point out Gerhart’s flaws to me? I can only guess that my life made her life more interesting, she was trying to relive her youth through me, and she enjoyed her duties as self-appointed chaperone on picnics and trips to the beach.
It was Claudine who unknowingly rescued me. She wrote from Puddin’ inviting me to come out for a while.
I was packed and was waiting when Mr. Klum picked me up in his gray Model T sedan, to which he was fiercely loyal because “it gets me where I want to go.” With Spud, a dog he had rescued from the pound for company when he worked nights, we drove out of Portland through Oregon City, turned off the highway at a water tank, wound past meadows of grazing cows, drove through a covered bridge, and on until we came to the Colvins’ Pudding River Camp Ground and Picnic Resort and the Klums’ cabin, which Mr. Klum called “the shack” in the same affectionate way he called Spud his “pooch.”