5

I HAVE reason to remember the library. Now of all the buildings on campus it is the clearest in my mind. I remember the shallow feeling under my feet of the steps leading up to it, and the weight of the front door, and the worn marble stairs inside. I know each room with its subdued shuffle of papers and feet, the smell of books that is different from the smell of periodicals and papers, and the sound of the light switching off in the stacks and the tinny tread of feet on the steel stairs of the stacks. I remember the sun across the study tables, the sun of that spring shining through green and the paler sun of that winter whitened by snow. I remember the feeling of excitement at ten o’clock when half the lights in the reading room were turned off as a warning of closing time, and I would go down and meet Gil.

I always studied in the library, never in my room at 1112. There was a table in the corner between two long windows where I usually worked, but if I sat with my face toward the window I kept looking out, studying the weather the way we do at home. If I turned toward the door, I watched people coming in and out. But I learned to look at the window and think about what I had been reading, too.

It was in October that I met Gil. I saw him sitting at a table halfway across the room. I watched him when he went over to the encyclopedias against the wall. I met his eyes and looked away. Finally, I turned my chair toward the window. It was better to be distracted by the weather than to keep glancing up at some boy. But after that I always looked to see if he was there when I went in.

One day I went over to the lib. after Mr. Echols’ class to work on the next assignment. Mr. Echols wanted us to write autobiographies. “Begin with your family. Make me see them with your eyes, then make me see you growing up, your town, your house, your religion, your school.” It must be interesting, I thought, for him to know all about each one of us sitting there in his classroom.

I thought it would be easy. Things I wanted to say sprang into my mind all the way over to the lib.: I would tell how the warm, melting breath of a chinook felt after days of dry cold; how it felt to pull the harrow or drive the combine; how it felt when a cloudburst struck after weeks of hard bright heat and I stood out in the open and let it drench me; how hail felt, too, when I ran out in it to get the chickens all in. I wanted to bring my whole world and set it down on paper.

But now, sitting in front of a pad of empty paper, it wasn’t easy. “Begin with your family,” Mr. Echols had said.

I started in: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I knew that town almost as well as Gotham. I could describe some of the people and the house where Dad was born, he had told me so much about it. The house was three stories tall and had a long two-tiered porch. I knew just how the parlor looked with its horsehair and walnut furniture and I knew Dad’s room when he was a boy. His windows looked out into green maple leaves that sometimes woke him in the night with the noise they made, louder and more scary than the sound of the aspen leaves by the creek, Dad said. There was a big picture of the Day of Judgment that scared Dad, too. He told me that when I said I wished we had more pictures in our house and he said it was better to have none than the kind that scared you.

Dad’s father was the principal of the high school and I think Dad stood in awe of him as a boy. He died while Dad was in the Army. When Dad went back with Mom only his mother and sister were there. I felt I knew a lot about Vermont, too. Dad so often talked about it—how different it was from Montana. Trees grew easily there, the way they do here in Minnesota, and there were picket fences and neat garden plots and all the houses were painted and every village had a church with a white spire on it.

Dad used to tell me about skating parties and corn roasts and the fun they had in the high school where his father was principal. Once he was telling about home and Mom looked up from the knitting she was doing and said:

“And the womans in that town would see a murder done better than have dust in their parlor. They are afraid of what their neighbors don’t do, too.”

Dad stopped talking about Vermont and went outside.

“Go get to bed,” Mom said sharply to me. That came back now more clearly than the stories Dad had told me.

I didn’t know much of anything about Mom’s town. I hardly knew what she looked like as a girl, except that Dad had a candy box of old snapshots: of the boat he went to England on, and the one he sailed to Archangel in, and pictures of other soldiers and the snow in Russia, of towns that looked half-buried in snow and groups of Russians with funny hats. One of them showed Mom in a dark dress with a bandanna over her head. There was a big black coffeepot in front of her as though she had just put it down, and she had a snowball in her hand and she was laughing. Mom was seventeen then, she told me. “The soldiers always laugh and joke and make fun,” Mom said. “Your father always had something fun to say. The day they bring him to Seletskoe all shot up and bleeding he can make jokes.”

Some of the fun had gone out of him in Montana, it seemed to me, the way so many dry years have taken the moisture out of the soil.

I knew Mom’s family were very poor and she was the only girl in a family of five brothers. “I have five uncles, Mom. Will I ever see them?” I asked one time.

“Four was killed in last war,” Mom said, “and one go to be a priest.”

“Are my grandparents living, Mom?” It seemed as though a little part of me must be in them. I wanted to know about them in order to know more about myself, the way you do when you look at your baby pictures and listen to things you did before you can remember.

“They was both killed,” Mom said. I couldn’t have been more than eight when Mom told me about them. We were thinning beets in the garden; Mom was always more talkative outdoors.

“Killed, Mom?” I couldn’t believe it. Children in Gotham had their grandparents living with them. How could mine have been killed?

“My father try to keep his pigs from robber soldier. The man shoot him and burn our house. My mother burn to death.”

I stared at Mom. Even to a child my mother didn’t hide things or make them seem better than they were. I saw in her face that she could see it all just as it was.

“Did you see it happen?” The question almost stuck in my throat and yet I had to ask it.

“I see my father shot, then I run for help. When I come back the house is burned, and my mother dead. It was in winter.”

I remember how still it was out there in the garden, and since that day I have always known how red are the veins of the beet leaves and how like soft green leather the leaves themselves.

“What did you do, Mom?”

“My brother and I live in old shack for while. Then he go to be priest. I help nurse wounded soldiers. Move your hands faster. See, like this!” Mom was through talking, but all afternoon as we worked down the hot rows I thought about my grandmother and grandfather, part of me, killed. I remember wishing they could know that I was here.

I wished even now that they could know I was here in college, sitting in this big room at a polished table writing about them. But the paper in front of me was still empty except for two sentences: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I began now purposefully. I would start with their meeting.

“My father was sent to Archangel in the last war. In a way, I think it must have been the most important happening in his life. Before the war he had had one year of college and expected to go right on and finish. That spring he enlisted and that summer he sailed for England. While his transport was in the harbor in England, the order came that sent him to Russia.”

Dad has a picture taken in the harbor and one of himself leaning over the railing and waving. He says he’d never had an ache or pain then. He’d even won his letter for track freshman year. I had studied that snapshot a long time. It seemed so good to see Dad well. I’ve never known him when rain or cold didn’t set his shrapnel wounds to hurting and make him cough.

“The American troops were sent to Archangel to keep the Germans from gaining control of the railroad and the new Russian government from seizing the Allied ammunitions.”

I knew all about that; I had heard Dad talking to Bailey over at the elevator. “Damn-fool expedition!” Dad had called it. “The Armistice was signed less than three months after we got there, but the port of Archangel was frozen up tight as a prison. You ought to see it! We don’t know what cold is here. Cold fog everywhere. They told us what to do to keep from frostbite. One of the boys, a little fellow from St. Louis, insurance salesman he was, was so afraid he’d freeze his face he kept making faces every few minutes and it nearly drove us crazy. We’d bellow at him, ‘Stop doing that!’” Then Dad and Bailey had laughed and Dad had lost his tired look. I’ve heard Dad tell how the very morning the Armistice was signed, while some of the men were still at breakfast, the Bolshies came out of the woods in a regular attack formation. “Armistice or no armistice, that’s when I got filled with shrapnel!” Dad had said.

Bailey shook his head. “Don’t they know what’s going on in the rest of the world?”

“Russia’s a world by itself. They were mad at each other and they didn’t want us up there, so they kept on fighting.”

I loved hearing about their escape over a trail through the woods. Some of Dad’s stories Mom didn’t like, but she liked the part about the soldiers being brought into the little village where she lived. That was where she took care of Dad.

I tried to put it down in the biography, but I couldn’t get in so many things. When we had Mom’s hot red borsch Dad would say sometimes, “This is the stuff your mother filled me with to make me well.”

“That was poor stuff, not like this,” Mom would answer. “You’d had so many of those cold apple pies and salt-pork meals you don’t know good soup from bad.” Sometimes I felt Mom wasn’t joking when she said things like that. She didn’t like anything about Dad’s home.

“Did you fall in love with each other right away?” I asked just last summer when Mary Bardich got married.

Mom went on knitting without looking up. Her face went blank the way it can do when it shuts down over something. I looked at Dad. Dad was busy getting his pipe to draw.

“I mean,” I said in the funny little silence that had spread until it was big, “wasn’t it hard with Mom speaking Russian and you English?”

“We didn’t find it difficult,” Dad said kind of formally.

“He can say ‘bol,’ pain, and ‘hurt,’ and ‘water’ in Russian,” Mom said, “and ‘What is your name?’” She looked at him and laughed a little.

“Kak vashe emya,” Dad said like a child saying his lesson.

“You could say ‘rest now’ and ‘eat it up’ and ‘you will feel better,’” Dad said, as though he had forgotten me and was talking to Mom. And I could see suddenly how it must have been through those few words. I think I began wanting to know different languages then.

“And ‘mne holodno,’ remember?” Mom asked, hugging herself as though she was shivering cold.

“I remember the day you said ‘cold’ in English,” Dad said.

“And how you try to teach me English,” Mom said.

“You learned very fast,” Dad admitted.

“That was easy!” Mom said, as she says about planting a whole field or cooking for harvest hands or even digging stones out of the field.

I sat there in the library, chewing the end of my fountain pen while I tried to sort out what was important in the story of Dad and Mom. I remembered one time I had heard her admit that a thing was hard. Judy Bailey was getting married and going to Illinois to live. I was helping Mom with the washing and I said I bet it would be hard meeting her husband’s family the first time.

Mom lifted the dripping clothes out of the hot suds with a stick. “It is hard,” she said. “Everything is different when I go to your father’s town, everything!” She made a gesture with the stick and dripping clothes that showed how wide the difference was. “They don’t eat same as I do—house, clothes, church, everything different. They don’t even think same. That was hard.”

“You weren’t there long, though, were you?” I asked.

“Long enough!” Mom said, and her face was dark and heavy. “They was glad to see me go. We come out here.”

I asked Dad once, when he was talking about Vermont, how they happened to come off out here, and Dad’s face looked almost as though he didn’t know either, but he said:

“I wanted to go to the other end of the earth just then and your mother wanted to live on a farm. So we homesteaded. Sort of last-call pioneers.”

I heard Dad talking to Bailey one afternoon in winter when it started to grow dark at three o’clock and it was so cold in the elevator Bailey kept the door into the office closed. They both sat there with their feet on the airtight stove. I think they’d forgotten me.

“If anyone was to tell me when I was seventeen that at forty I’d be ranching it out here in Montana I’d have told him he was crazy,” Dad said. “At seventeen I was hesitating between being a lawyer and teaching. My father wanted me to be a college professor. He taught in Andover for a year before he became principal of the high school at home. And I was leaning that way. I’d have liked to teach history.”

“And then the war threw the monkey wrench into all your plans, eh?” Bailey said. “You could have gone on and taught anyway, couldn’t you? It would be a long sight easier than raisin’ wheat in this infernal country.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Dad said shortly. “I was married and had a child on the way. My father was dead by that time. Not a chance!” He got into his heavy sheepskin and the cap Mom had knit him that came way down over his ears, and the mittens. “Good night, Bailey. Come on, Ellen.”

There was one day when Dad was sick and had to lie on the couch all day. Mom and I were cleaning the barn, and some of my thinking and wondering came out in a question.

“Mom, couldn’t Dad have gone back to school? Wouldn’t his mother and sister help him and you could have found some position?”

“What you talking about?” Mom was scattering fresh straw in the stall and a wisp of straw was caught in her hair. I looked up at her and thought how pretty she was.

“About Dad. I think it would have been so much better for him if he’d been a teacher. That’s what he always meant to do, he told Bailey one time,” I said brashly.

“Did he say that? How long time?” I was too young and stupid to get the change in Mom’s face right away. I saw it afterward, though.

“Oh, last month sometime. I don’t see why he didn’t go back to school.”

“His mother and sister was afraid to death they don’t have enough to go on live just as easy as always. They love that house like first son. No, they don’t want to help.”

“But why didn’t they want to, Mom? They must have been hateful.”

“No,” Mom said slowly. “They don’t like him to bring back poor Russian girl who don’t talk much and don’t dress right. I see now; I don’t then. I hate them. I don’t know then what Ben want to do. I can’t stand it there. He want to go far away. I want to have just a little land. He hear you can take homestead, so we come out here.” Mom shrugged. “He like it here.”

“Oh, I know he does,” I said quickly, wanting now to comfort Mom. I had seen the change. “It’s only sometimes in the winter when he doesn’t feel good that he talks that way. In the spring he loves it.”

Mom nodded. That was one of the times when I felt like a parent to her. And I have not asked questions so brashly since.

But you couldn’t write all this into a biographical sketch. My knowledge of Mom and Dad was made up of such little things, things felt more than known. I came back to the few sentences I had actually written and went on boldly:

“My mother and father fell in love, although my mother could speak only a few words of English. They were married by the Captain of my father’s company and when the ice loosened its grip on the harbor at Archangel my mother sailed with my father to America.” I set a period with a flourish. “Loosened its grip” had a proper, bookish sound. I skipped over the return to his home in Vermont in a sentence and wrote of their taking a homestead in Montana, “where I was born three years later.”

I had told their story in eight sentences, but it had taken me all afternoon. I had to run to be at the cafeteria on time.

By seven-thirty I was back at the same table. I had thought it would be easy to write now, but it wasn’t. I kept remembering certain happenings in my childhood, down to the silliest detail; but they weren’t the kind of incidents you tell. I could only seem to compose terrible trite sentences like “My early childhood on the ranch was the usual happy life lived by children in the country, although it may seem bare in the telling.”

But how could I tell about those days when I’d run up to the top of the rimrock because I had to be closer to the sky? Ever since I was seven or eight I have done that, or run out across the flats. I couldn’t stand still or walk soberly, because I felt something exciting was going to happen. Sometimes the wind gave me that feeling, sometimes the first bleak day of fall, always spring and the first green pricks of wheat, and always threshing time.

I have looked at Mom often and felt that she didn’t expect anything exciting to happen. I think Dad used to, we are so much alike, but he has given up expecting it now, so I try not to show how I feel.

All I wrote was: “I did not really know the difference between work and play. Work on a ranch is interesting to a child: driving the horses and later the truck or tractor, making butter or filling sausage cases. It doesn’t matter much what you are doing, except the things you really hate, like washing dishes and cleaning house.

“I had toys. Dad bought most of them. He hardly ever came back from town, when I hadn’t gone along, without a stuffed animal or a monkey I could wind up or a new book of paper dolls. But I was fondest of a painted wooden picture, less than a foot high, that Mom put in my room on a high corner shelf. Set back from the frame was a solemn face with round cheeks and deep-set eyes. I liked best its hands that met finger tip for finger tip with each one distinct and perfect, even to the fingernail. The paint had mostly worn off; only a faint tinge of blue still remained. The wood was so smooth it felt almost soft when I stood up on a chair to touch it. It wasn’t a toy at all, but an icon that had hung in Mom’s house in Russia. She found it near the ashes after her home was burned. I had it near my bed and used to talk to it without making the words, just looking over at it now and then.”

I did not write of the uncomfortable feeling I had about the icon. When I had diphtheria at six, Mom hung the shelf in my room and put the icon on it and a saucer beneath with a lighted wick floating in oil. I lay in bed watching the little flame. When it grew dark outside, the flame on the wick made a secret glow in the room. As soon as Dad came home from town I called him to come and see it, but instead of liking it he was angry.

“Don’t bring my child up with such idols, Anna!” he called out to Mom, and he blew the flame out.

“Don’t take it away; I love it.” I started to cry. Then I remember Mom coming in and lighting the wick again, her eyes thin and her mouth tight.

“What have you got in your church a child can see?” Mom asked in a voice that was so cold and scornful it was like ice cracking in the water bucket.

“Please don’t take the picture away,” I begged, and Dad didn’t say anything more. Mom took the saucer away next day and never lighted a flame again, but the icon has always been in my room ever since.

I began writing again. “All the animals on the ranch were mine, or I felt them so. The cows, the team of horses that I rode bareback whenever I wanted, all of the series of dogs; only the sow I never laid any claim to nor the tom turkeys that always looked too bloody to me with their bright-red wattles. I think I have never been lonesome.

“We went to town often, but seldom on Saturday, when most of the ranchers went. I had a feeling that Father didn’t like it when the streets were filled with ranchers in clean work shirts, the little tags of their tobacco bags dangling out of one pocket, the color of their faces and necks giving away their occupation. Yet people must have told easily that we were ranchers. Dad always wore his best suit and a city hat, never the broad-brimmed Western hat. He carried cigarettes in a case that I was never tired of watching spring open at the pressure of a thumb. He wore oxfords instead of high shoes. Perhaps they couldn’t tell Dad was a rancher unless they looked at his hands, but he had Mom and me along.

“Mom wore a plain cotton print in summer, a dark wool dress in winter. She bought it in “The Big Store.” She never liked a hat on her head and never looked quite right in one. She never wore gloves in summer, and her hands were the color of the red-maple furniture you see in furniture-store windows; only her hands had fine lines of black that no amount of washing with the vegetable brush at the sink could quite take away, and her nails were always worn down at the finger tips. She was big-boned and solid, with broader shoulders than Father’s. Her lips of themselves were—Why do I put it in the past tense?—her lips are now red and full, and there is color on her high cheekbones. Her face is so calm and still it stands out from the animated or worried or cross faces of the town women, hurrying by on their eternal shopping. I guess I was thinking, too, of the contrast with women I had seen on the streets downtown in Minneapolis.

“For years I was a slim child with pale-yellow pigtails to the waist of my clean starched dress. I never wore a hat unless it was winter, and I wore socks and oxfords that Dad took pride in buying.

“Every time we went to Clark City Dad and I stopped to have our shoes polished at the Greek shoeshine place. I think it was one of the high spots of the trip for Dad. He would sit there, reading the paper he had bought, and feel like a city man.”

I held my pen still, remembering all those trips: the trip to the grocery store and to the hardware store or to the McCormick-Deering store for a piece of machinery, the briefer trips to “The Big Store” for some needles or thread or cloth. Usually we separated and Dad dropped into the lobby of the hotel to talk to someone. Mom and I went together, Mom walking along the aisles of the store, scarcely looking at the things that didn’t interest her, I hanging back as we went past the perfume counter, the fine soaps, then the pocketbooks and gloves and stockings. And yet, I really only wanted to look at them; I didn’t covet them; they would only have been a clutter around home.

I remembered the time when we did go to town on Saturday, the Saturday before Easter. All the women in Gotham had gone to town and bought new clothes to wear to church Easter Sunday. In the beginning, Dad had not intended to go. But Saturday came off so warm the winter wheat showed bright apple-green. We had left the breakfast dishes and gone outdoors to work. Dad set off with the drill to do some seeding. I was feeding the chickens and Mom was somewhere below the barn when all of a sudden Dad came back.

“Anna!” he called at the top of his voice.

I heard Mom answer and then I saw her running.

“Anna, tomorrow’s Easter!”

“I know.”

“Let’s go to town today.”

And instead of saying no when there was so much to do and everything, Mom laughed. “You want a Easter hat?”

“Well, you can’t work all the time.” Dad often said that to Mom. He tired before Mom did.

We drove into town that morning and had lunch at a restaurant. When we came out we stood together on the sidewalk the way ranchers do in town. Dad took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to me.

“Here, Ellen, go buy yourself a new Easter dress.”

When Dad had gone on down the street I handed the money to Mom to put in her big pocketbook for me. She pushed it off. “Keep it yourself, your father want you to buy with it.”

Without a sound my day broke into pieces, pieces with sharp cutting edges. I didn’t want any new dress. I only wanted to be in my jeans and old shirt at home. Mom was hurt because Dad hadn’t given her the money.

“I’ve got to go in hardware store and buy new ax handle,” Mom said. “Your Dad’ll never think. Go on, get your dress.”

Wretchedly I walked into the store where dresses were sold. Nothing drew me as it usually did, not even the long sheer silk stocking on a shapely glass leg. I watched some women coming in and hated them for the way they wore their clothes, and their trim ankles and shoes and the faint sweet smell as they passed me. I had been standing aimlessly against a counter by the front door. Suddenly I knew what I wanted. I went over to the stocking counter and said in a firm voice:

“I want a pair of silk stockings like those on that glass leg.” When the clerk asked what size I said, “A big size, about as large as you sell,” thinking of Mom’s legs as I often saw them in the row ahead of me when we worked in the garden.

“Those are three dollars,” the clerk told me, and I could see she doubted whether I could pay for them.

“I’ll take them,” I told her. Then I gave her the five-dollar bill and had two silver dollars back.

“Are they for a gift? I could wrap them with tissue paper for you.”

I didn’t want them to seem anything special. I said, “No, just everyday.”

I walked straight from the stocking counter to the perfume counter, where I had never had time to linger before. It was hard to know what to ask for. The salesgirl was unlike anyone I had ever seen outside a magazine.

“What scent do you have that smells Russian?” I asked.

“Russian? Let’s see—we have Cuir de Russe. That’s Russian leather.”

“I’d like to smell it.” The whiff seemed to penetrate back of my eyeballs. My eyes watered. “I’ll take two dollars’ worth,” I said.

The lady at the counter gave me a bottle so tiny it didn’t look as though it could cost more than a quarter, but I paid her. Mom still has the bottle on her dresser, along with a picture of Dad in his uniform and a hand-painted pin tray with “New York City” written on it. The perfume bottle is still half-full.

“You get your dress?” Mom asked when I found her. She had the ax handle in her hand.

“No, I bought these for you.” I thrust the paper sack and the little package at her and took the ax handle. I busied myself with an assortment of screws. Mom was so quiet I had to look at her. Her face was different. It wasn’t as firm as usual.

“Yeléna, your Dad won’t like it.”

“He gave it to me. It’s mine.” But I wasn’t anxious to see him and have him ask me about the dress. He did ask me, and I said I couldn’t find one I liked so I bought something else I wanted. He whistled and smiled. Dad never was stern or angry with me—only at life and the weather and his own illness.

“What did you buy?”

“Some perfume and stockings,” I mumbled. Mom was in the back seat arranging parcels.

“So you had a hankering for perfume and silk stockings. You’re growing up. Nobody would think it to see you in your jeans. What do you think of that, Anna?”

Mom didn’t answer and Dad let the matter drop. He had another idea. Easter had gone to his head.

“Why don’t we stay overnight and go to church on Easter like civilized people?”

I held my breath.

“We’ve got the stock to take care of,” Mom said doggedly.

“They can wait. We’d be back by two o’clock. It would do us good. We haven’t been to church since . . .”

“Since we went with your mother,” Mom said. That was before I was born, I was busy figuring to myself. Church wasn’t part of our living. But I wished Mom hadn’t said that. It was suddenly too close to breathe easily, even though we sat in the truck on the main street. Dad started to drop the idea and close up and then he didn’t.

“As I remember, you were a good Greek Catholic once. We don’t want Ellen not to know what the inside of a church looks like.”

The air cleared. That was the most exciting trip we had ever made to town. Mom and I bought nightgowns in Montgomery Ward’s and we packed them in a little straw suitcase Mom carried her parcels in. We stayed at the hotel where Dad often sat and talked in the lobby, a big glittering place that awed Mom and me. We had a room I can see now. The carpet went from wall to wall. The furniture was big and shining, with a full-length mirror in the door. There was a bathroom between the rooms, with the first big white bathtub I had ever used.

I couldn’t remember a time when Dad had been so gay. He called up and ordered ice water sent up to the room and tipped the boy who brought it, as though he were a king.

“Remember the hotel we stayed in the night after we got into New York?” he said to Mom. “I told you we were having our honeymoon and you thought ‘honey’ was the word for ‘hotel,’ Anna!” I walked into the bathroom and drew water out of the shiny faucet, feeling good because they were laughing.

It was a wonderful night. We didn’t eat dinner in the beautiful dining room; that cost too much. We went out to a cafeteria, and I thought of that cafeteria some days when I was serving in the one here.

I lay awake that night looking at my room until I knew every object in it. Light from the alley came in the window and shone in the mirror like the moon does at home. It was better at night, because you couldn’t see the dust along the edge of the carpet or that the rose-silk lampshade was punched through. I liked listening to footsteps in the hall and cars out in the street, and my body felt delicious after its hot all-over bath.

When I woke in the morning I had a funny feeling. I was afraid something would go wrong. Dad came into my room all dressed in a new white shirt he had bought himself. He’d had a shave downstairs in the hotel barbershop and he looked as though he didn’t know wheat from barley.

“Well, Ellen, how do you like it?”

“All right,” I told him. Something in me wouldn’t let me sound any more pleased for fear . . . fear. Maybe it’s because I was born on a dry-land wheat farm and I know you’ve got to be afraid every spring even though the wheat stands brave and green, afraid until the wheat’s cut and stored, afraid of drought and hail and grasshoppers. Dad is, always. Mom used to say to him, “If you’re going to be afraid of drought all the time, you might as well be afraid of planting in the first place.” Yet Mom is the one that feels it worst when the drought comes.

When Mom came into my room to braid my hair she had on her new silk stockings I’d given her and the scent of the perfume was on her. The stockings fitted her ankles and legs better than skin. They were too fine for the black laced low shoes she wore, but they were beautiful. Such a pride came up in me it almost drove out the little fear. I think that’s why folks dress up in their best clothes when they do something special—to keep them from being afraid anything will spoil it. I had another bath that morning and I felt as light as tumbleweed, but a lot cleaner.

We had breakfast at the cafeteria down the street. Dad had a paper to read while he ate and he gave Mom the woman’s part and me the funnies.

“It’s been nearly twelve years, Anna, since I’ve had a morning paper to read at breakfast. By heaven, this is living like a white man!”

And suddenly, I was proud that Dad knew how to live, that he was used to places like hotels. Mom loved it, too. Her eyes were bright and dark. I leaned toward her a little and there was the delicious smell of “Russian leather” again, nicer than fresh hay or sweet clover or buffalo willows in the spring and as penetrating as the smell of sage. I looked at the three of us in the mirror. We might have been travelers just passing through town for the day.

“I don’t like letting the cows and pigs and chickens an’ all wait for their food,” Mom said, but Dad didn’t hear her.

“Well”—he folded the paper on the table—”it’s close to ten. Where do you want to go?”

Mom looked surprised. “To church, Ben.”

I remember driving along the streets, quiet on that Easter Sunday morning. Bells on one church began ringing. I had never heard church bells before.

“Let’s go where the bells are, Dad,” I begged.

We could pick out the churches easily from the steeples that reached up above the roofs of the bungalows. I leaned way out of the car to try to see the bells swinging in the tower, the way they do on Christmas cards. I noticed how the sun glinted hard on the cross that topped the spire, like the sun on the lightning rod on the Hendersons’ barn.

“Sit back, Ellen,” Dad said. He stopped the car and Mom got out.

“I think I’ll take Ellen over to the Congregational Church, Anna.”

Mom leaned against the car door. All her face waited. I knew with dreadful certainty that the thing had come, the thing I had feared when I woke up this morning, the thing that would spoil our day. I couldn’t say anything. I looked at the people going into church, whole families together. Some of them wore flowers. The bell was still ringing. The double door opened and I caught a glimpse of brightness, of candles far down in front, and the stained-glass windows.

Dad was making the engine sound louder with his foot. “We’ll come back for you at twelve or as soon as our service is over, Anna. Wait right out in front.”

I wanted with all my heart to go with Mom. It was no good this way. I held my hands tight together. Why didn’t Mom say something? Her face was firm like it is when she goes to kill a turkey.

“Now I don’t want any church,” she said.

“Oh, Mom, come with us,” I said as she opened the door of the car. Mom shook her head. Her lips came out farther than usual. “I go to his church once. Everyone is too busy look at me to say prayers.” The hard cold feeling was there. Nothing could help now. It was no use.

Dad pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The engine roared so loud people on their way to church looked at us. Dad drove back down from the quiet shady streets where people lived, out the road toward home. I watched the road straight ahead without looking at Mom or Dad. They didn’t speak. After a while I looked down at Dad’s shoes with the city shine on them, at Mom’s silk stockings so thin and smooth they showed a blue vein through.

We were more than fifteen miles toward home when Dad said, not to Mom or me, just aloud, “I guess we’ve lost our religion out here along with some other things.” He didn’t sound mad, only discouraged. We never drove into town to go to church again.

“Tell about your religion,” Mr. Echols had said. “How much it has meant to your family, to you.” The sheet in front of me was blank. I hadn’t written a word for an hour.

It was just there that I looked up and saw Gilbert watching me. I always remembered that meeting him was mixed in with my writing my biography, as though I must have known how deeply he was to be part of my life. He met my eyes and smiled. I smiled a little in return. He picked up his book and came over to my table and I saw again how slender and tall he was. He took the chair next to me.

“I’ve seen you here for two months. It’s time we knew each other. How about calling it a day and going over to Pop’s Place for a coke?”

I hesitated, then I put my pencil down. “Okay,” I said. We went down the marble stairs together.

“My name’s Gilbert Borden—Gil. I’ve been trying to find out what yours is.”

“Ellen,” I told him. “Ellen Webb.”

“I like that. It fits you. Where do you come from, Ellen Webb? You must be a freshman, because I’d have seen you if you’d been around here.”

“I came this fall from Montana.”

“It would be some place far away and unusual.”

I remember laughing at that. I remember how we laughed at all kinds of things. Everything we told each other seemed exciting. He was a senior in the school of architecture.

“Any other year I’d have been working for the Paris fellowship. If I got it this year, I’d have to take it in Cincinnati or Cleveland or some place. Anyway, I’ll probably go into the Army in June.”

That, too, gave a deeper color to everything he said. We had a booth in Pop’s, the last one. Gil kept punching out “Tomorrow Is a Lovely Day” on the jukebox. He played it over again three times. I felt as though I’d known him for years.

We walked back across campus and sat on the steps of the auditorium. The lights along the mall seemed to lie at our feet. We sat against one of the pillars, so we weren’t cold.

“No kidding, I’ve watched you in the library ever since the first week in October. You came in and sat down there at the end of that same table and the sun on your hair made it shine like silver.”

“I’ve seen you, too,” I said.

“You didn’t take much time from your work to look my way!”

“I can’t. I have a job at the cafeteria and it takes quite a lot of time. Don’t you ever go there?”

“I will now. But that’s no job for you.”

“I hope to get a job in the library next year if I can.”

“Maybe Dad can help you. He teaches history.”

“You live here, then?”

“Oh, I live at the fraternity during school.”

He walked back with me to the rooming house. I ran up the stairs that night not feeling that they were narrow or that the upper floor was stifling. I looked at the biography, but all that had happened to me before seemed unimportant beside the future. I wrote that at the end and copied the whole thing neatly before I went to bed. Mom and Dad’s story seemed less important than my own.