I floated over to Principal Flack’s office on top of my cloud, refusing to climb down even if the principal was about to reprimand me for my speech. My thoughts soared even higher than the rest of me. I will not deign to tarnish my vision with an apology. The truth exists whether it is agreeable to you or not. I think as much as any student here at Claverack, male or female, and therefore I want as much as any student here. I will always think for myself, Principal Flack, always. And after each new righteous statement, I puffed up further and further, so by the time I knocked on Principal Flack’s office door, my noble character was near to bursting out of me, and I rapped so hard, I startled myself.
“Come in,” he called.
I took a deep breath, and prepared to defend myself.
“Margaret,” Principal Flack said, clearing his throat. Not Miss Higgins. I deflated immediately.
He was sweating. Nervous. I sat. He didn’t.
“Your speech at chapel was wonderful,” he said, in the same tone I used to tell Ethel how much I liked her cat drawings. I did like her cat drawings. They were nice. But she drew an awful lot of them, and I wasn’t that interested in cats.
He cleared his throat again. Although I didn’t care what it was he couldn’t seem to say. Because I’d been so sure I had just shaken up the entire world with my speech, and in reality, I hadn’t even succeeded in stirring up Principal Flack.
“Your tuition,” he said finally.
“My . . . what?”
By the time the second word had left my mouth, I fully understood. He spoke on. “The bursar . . .” Something about “a second term.” And, “nothing more anyone could do.”
My heart beat too loudly to hear anything he was saying. All I heard was . . . Mary, Mary, Mary. Because . . . the Frohman school. Mary’s enthusiasm. Her single mindedness. She was grasping at her dream even as she knew mine was about to end.
I slid back into Principal Flack’s chair and stared up into his kind and sweaty face. I was being kicked out of school. I would have to leave here. Leave Amelia, and botany, and the kitchen ladies. But my heart was breaking for Mary. She knew this was coming. And Nan. They both knew this was coming, and they didn’t tell me. I couldn’t imagine the pain Mary must have been in to not be able to take care of this when taking care of things was what she did best of all.
And now I would need to leave. This dream, this adventure, this beginning . . . was over. Mary and Nan’s tremendous effort, my own tremendous effort, had come to nothing.
“Please take your time in collecting your things. Don’t feel you need to leave us this afternoon. Say your good-byes in a proper way.” He hesitated. As if there was more he’d like to say. But the truth exists whether it is agreeable to you or not.
“You’re a good student, Margaret Higgins.”
I was so very thankful he did not say that I was a good girl, or that I was promising. A good student. This I was. As was Mary. And Nan. I shook his hand before I left his office, clenching my jaw tightly. A Higgins didn’t cry. And then I walked slowly back to my room. Very slowly. I knew down deep it was better for me to stay out in the world. To not be alone. Even if it meant I had to pass a hundred sneering students due to my speech, their glares feeling like further proof I didn’t belong here.
Where would I go? Not Corning. I would not go back.
I couldn’t keep the news from Amelia. And she didn’t keep it from anyone else.
“I’d been preparing for a good-bye, but not this one,” she cried.
“What about Frohman’s?” asked Minnie. “Maybe you can still audition?”
I shook my head. “You need money for Frohman’s.”
“What about a job?” asked Marianne. “That would keep you from returning home.”
“A job?”
“Teaching!” Minnie shouted. “Principal Flack would give you a reference. Even he said you are an excellent student. And my mother knows people in New Jersey.”
“Teaching?”
My friends were sprawled across the room, all their good brains whirring in unison to save me. I hid my disappointment at the prospect of teaching, knowing I had always been heading here, to becoming Miss Hayes. A job in New Jersey teaching elementary school was far from the New York stage, and even farther than Cornell Medical School. Although, it was also far from Corning.
“Please write to your mother, Minnie. I’d love that teaching job.” But there was no air in my words . . . no passion.
* * *
I had the idea I would be teaching students closer to my own age. Instead, the next Monday morning I was set adrift in a sea of six-year-olds. Unlike public school in Corning, where we were all merged into a single class, in New Jersey they were separated by age. And so I now spent my days with eighty-four first graders.
I was extremely thankful to Minerva’s mother for the job. I had room and board, and for the first time in my life, I was on my own . . . if being on one’s own also included a horde of tiny Hungarian children, for most of my students hailed from this European kingdom.
I saw right off the reel that teaching was a job for someone who knew what she was doing, and that someone was not me. Although I made a valiant effort, setting up my classroom, gathering materials, writing out extensive lesson plans that I pressed upon my young charges day after day. But because English was not their first language, so often they had no idea what I was talking about, and worse, I had no idea what I was talking about either. They were, however, astoundingly respectful for such small beings, and I was amazed by their patience in me as I floundered about trying to teach them something. I had a newfound respect for Miss Hayes.
Every morning I was greeted by a swell of heads bobbing around my waist, each of them struggling for my attention—aching to show me a craft, share a secret, or relay a discovery. I could barely take any of it in, there were so many of them. I was constrained to a single body, a single mind, a single pair of eyes, and I knew I was wildly disappointing them, though it was the very last thing I wanted to do. Strangely, it was at these moments that my mother often emerged in my thoughts. It was a position I believed she might be familiar with.
The lone spot in the day that both my young students and I looked forward to was our lunch together. It was the only time we spent in one another’s company where they were in charge, and consequently, the only successful part of the day. We had all sorts of fun. They taught me the sounds of farm animals in Hungarian and performed folk dances from their home country in which they slapped their boots and danced in tight circles. They were, the lot of them, amazing, delighting us all with their joyful feats. Lunch was a time where words didn’t matter and I allowed myself to be one of them.
But it was also the time of day when I was most aware of how wrong I was in this profession. These children needed an education, not a teenage girl’s attention, and I didn’t know how to give it to them.
On top of this, New Jersey was lonely. I wrote often to Mary and Nan but never letting them know how badly I was doing. I didn’t want to further burden them, or worse, cause them guilt for not being able to keep me at school. I never mentioned Claverack in my letters. But there was a fantasy I harbored deep down, that they were somehow pulling together enough money to send me back, and that in the near future, I would return to school.
I also wrote often to Amelia, Esther, and Minnie. But again, I didn’t inform them I was wasting the time of a very large group of earnest children. Instead, I wrote them stories of the new dances my students were teaching me, and some of the truly funny things they said. I added in snippets of life in New Jersey, although I needed to use my power of imagination to embellish these into actual snippets since I did not live much of a life here. I was in the classroom six days a week, and mostly slept through the seventh. There were times where I arrived back at my room after work and laid down, only to wake up in the morning still dressed, and therefore, with a pat or two at my hair, ready to return to the classroom.
Even if there had been time for snippet making, the rules for female teachers were a large deterrent. After ten hours in the classroom, I was allowed to spend my evenings reading the Bible, or other “good books” chosen by the women’s boarding house—and none of them were good. I was also barred from marriage, or keeping company with men. And truly, didn’t the second part of the rule keep the first part from being necessary? There were so many rules. I was not allowed to wear bright colors; my dull dresses were required to reach no higher than two inches above my ankle, and under them I was also required to wear two petticoats “at all times.” I always had a snicker when I removed them before bed, thrilled to be breaking a rule. The final rule was both the funniest and the harshest: I was not allowed to loiter in ice-cream stores. This rule would eventually prove to be the most difficult to keep come spring. Thankfully it was the middle of winter, so all I did was laugh when I read it. Although it was much harder to laugh at the weather.
February had seen nothing but freezing rain and snow, adding considerably to my feelings of loneliness and confinement. The climate of southern New Jersey could not compete with Corning in the heights of their snowdrifts or the dips in their thermometer, but it was cold and wet enough that traveling out to discover the world beyond reading primers and arithmetic figuring was nearly impossible.
There was only one saving grace to this place . . . it was not Corning, New York.
I stumbled through each day, waiting for what, I wasn’t sure. Maybe for myself to admit that this was the end of the line. Here I was and here I’d stay, until—and I shivered at the thought—I found someone to marry me. The only happiness in this idea was I’d get to break another rule.
I wrote to Corey, although I hated myself for it. I knew he still loved me, and I knew I didn’t love him back. But he was a decent boy, a kind boy, a smart boy. Wasn’t that what I’d been trained to look for? So I wrote to him, knowing perfectly well I was holding up his happiness by doing it.
One would think my desperation would be the result of years of enduring this new life I’d been handed. Instead, I had been here in New Jersey for just three weeks! Three weeks and I was feeling as though someone had stuffed me in a box I needed to claw my way out of. Thankfully I was sleeping well at night due to the fact that I spent my days with eighty-four six-year-olds, and therefore I didn’t have too much time to lament my situation before I was returned to it.
Returning to my situation was by far the most difficult part of my day. The sixteen-block walk along flat, well-tended sidewalks felt much longer than the five miles uphill in Corning ever did. It was on this walk that I found it hardest of all to ignore that my dreams were going nowhere. I was going nowhere. And this seemed to be a recurring theme in my life.
I can withstand anything, I told myself on the Friday of my third week walking home from work, against a cold wind struggling mightily to rip the hat straight from my head. Anything . . . but continuing on in this way.
But when I returned to my room to find my father’s letter calling me home, I realized just how wrong I was.