PREJUDICE, HATE, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
In the sixties, my fine old house in St. Helena seemed hollow, with the children gone. I said, Mary Frances, now is the time to go to new places and find different views of things.
Friends kept the hearth warm and the animals happy, and other friends let me stay in their own places when they were away. It was a vivid period of slow wandering, very rich, like a carpet I had often trod before I realized that it was there.
One winter I went to Long Island to a house I knew well from several summer visits. It was on the dunes near Bridgehampton. There was a car, so that I could drive into the village for mail and food. I cashed checks at the liquor store next to the grocery. I liked the tough fellow there, and when I went back after several months in Sag Harbor, I liked him even more, because he laughed with real pleasure when he saw me, and said, “God, were we glad to get you off the dunes and outta here!”
I knew why, because he was one of the volunteer firemen who would have risked their lives to reach the house if they knew I was without heat or help. They did not want to die, any more than I did, but …
The story I wrote about that incident is called “The Wind-Chill Factor,” and the house I lived alone in, except for rare weekends with its owner who came down from her job in New York, was a deliberate contradiction of the local wisdom: “natives” of that part of the Island build and farm and work inland. Only ignorant summer people stay along the blandly beautiful beaches, flirting in bland ignorance with hurricanes and such.
My house had been partly demolished in the last Big Blow, but was solid again and partly “winterized,” as was then said, and my hostess and I agreed that I was indeed a lucky person to face a cozy winter there. I holed in.
After what I reported in “The Wind-Chill Factor,” I knew that many more lives than mine depended on whether my lights had gone off, those three or four wild nights, and I moved to a one-room flat in Sag Harbor. I had the parlor and bathroom of what had once been a whaler captain’s house, with a cursory kitchenette at one end. I was warm and quiet, and worked steadily because there was nothing else to do. Outside, everything was mostly silence, because the snow stayed high for weeks at a time, and it was arduous to shuffle down the narrow high tunnels of sludge that led to the post office and the grocery store.
Fortunately, right across from my lodging was a small boozerie owned by a handsome Greek who was paraplegic from a railroad accident. We talked nostalgically about good wines, and I came to enjoy and even appreciate popular jug-stuff.
I never capitulated to the currently popular fizz wines, carbonated mixtures of fruit juices and dregs, but through the thin back wall into the apartment that had once been the captain’s dining room I often listened to a young fisherman, laid off during the bad weather, drink himself worse than silly on something like Thunderhead or Tango-Tango and then commit conjugal rape on his very devout wife every Saturday night, so that she could not receive Communion the next morning, after her Saturday Confession. Ho-hum. Their baby, about six months old, wailed a lot. They lived in a somewhat smaller “parlor” than mine, and there was always that half-gallon jug handy, under the bed.
My Greek friend and I talked in a detached casual way about this.
“The Wind-Chill Factor” taught me that there is a difference between what is true and what one believes is the truth. I depicted the storm in as bare a way as I could, since it had happened only to me. During the strange ordeal, there was nobody else, to observe or even survive. It was a true catharsis.
For a few days, after it, I felt floaty and emptied. And I had to face the fact that all my vague plans to write about an earlier life were crude fabrications of a fertile and fairly articulate mind. I wanted suddenly to write about my first years, for some unknown pushing reason, and I saw, after the wind on the dunes, that nobody but a child can write what has just happened to him. It is almost impossible for an older person to report such things without coloring them, twisting, invading the story, to make a more vivid or more self-flattering report.
In Sag Harbor I was almost always alone, for the months I was there. I never felt lonely, though, because that is not my bent. Some might say my life was austere. With an occasional glass of California jug-rosé from the little icebox that hummed along in a corner of my room, I tried to go as far back as I could into the life I honestly believed I had lived when I was four, or even ten. It was a sweaty job, at times painful.
People in Whittier have been hurt by some of the story’s candor (not many, nor much, I hope). But since the time on the dunes, and then in Sag Harbor, I know that I can never write polite tomfoolery again, if I ever did.
So … this report about some first days is not much more than a proof that ghetto children can survive as happy people if they are part of a close loving family.
By ghetto I do not mean slum, which now seems to spell the word to many people. I mean a small community within a larger one, where people of a certain ethnic or religious kind are segregated, either by choice or by unwritten laws. Whittier itself was a ghetto of Quakers who founded the little town so that they could live apart from other white Christians. Within its quiet bounds were a few intruders like us: a handful of Catholics and Protestants, now and then a Jewish family to run the five-and-ten, never a black person. I wanted to call the book: Child of an Inner Ghetto, but by the late sixties the term had apparently lost its real meaning to everybody but me. We lived happily in an enclave within a bigger enclave.
My father, Rex Kennedy, bought the Whittier News in late 1911. As I understand it, the little daily was in a dubious and even shady state, financially as well as socially. What is more, Father was an Episcopalian (roped and tied by his bride, after a rebellious Methodist upbringing). The town of less than 5,000 was a closed communal settlement of Quakers who had created it with pride and stress in the remote hills southeast of small sleepy Los Angeles. Only other Quakers were welcomed. Word on the local Rialto (the corner of Greenleaf and Philadelphia, where the bank was) said gently that the new young editor might possibly last a year … (Forty-two years later Rex died there, respected and loved.)
We lived until I was about eleven in a roomy solid ugly good house on Painter Avenue, just a few feet on the “right” (North) side of the Philadelphia intersection. South Painter was as green and quiet, but the houses were smaller, and the people lived simpler work-lives. North Painter, in 1912, was where the banker and some lawyers and a retired colonel were.
My parents were innocent of such rules of prestige and protocol, but the house was for sale because the Myers family wanted a smaller place nearer Mr. Myers’ department store on North Greenleaf.
There were four or five bedrooms upstairs, which my parents planned to fill with more children, and Father added a nice apartment downstairs for Grandmother Holbrook, who was his champion, financially and many other ways, against the world, his wife, and Outrageous-Fortune-in-General. It all worked well, as far as I can know, and gradually the debts got paid, and there were indeed new siblings. I was a very happy little girl.
And that is what I wanted to write about in Sag Harbor: the way it was, not the way I might have come to see it. I wish there were time to try again.
Of course Anne and I knew nothing of all this. Painter Avenue was a wonderful street, gummed over with tar which melted deliciously during the first heat waves in May and then settled into a cozy warm ooze which felt good on our feet. And tar meant the steamroller, the most exciting mobile object in my lifetime, until I heard my first and last real calliope in about 1917. Probably the ground was smoothed or scraped a little first. Then, awesomely, the steamroller would rumble into view. We stood almost prayerfully on the front porch and then, as we grew older and bolder, on the sidewalk, and watched it move up and down our block. It was like a gigantic snail, but of course noisier, with a man up in its shell to wave now and then to us. It was faultless in the way it rolled the tar, our tar, into the flattened street bed. It always went forward, and perhaps did not even have a reverse gear: I am ignorant of anything but its irrevocable progress past our house, a jolly Juggernaut.
We stood as long as we were allowed, probably almost dozing on our feet, hypnotized by its enormous and ruthless behavior, but I am sure that our jaws were not dropped, for we had our backs to the house and were chewing on the tar that had been spread earlier that day, and strictly forbidden by both Grandmother and Mother, a double hazard.
Tar with some dust in it was perhaps even more delicious than dirty chips from the iceman’s wagon, largely because if we worked up enough body heat and had the right amount of spit we could keep it melted so that it acted almost like chewing gum, which was forbidden to us as vulgar and bad for the teeth and in general to be shunned. Tar was better than anything ever put out by Wrigley and Beechnut, anyway. It had a high bright taste. It tasted the way it smelled, but better. And it was challenging, for unless we could keep up the heat and the juice and the general muscular involvement, it would flake off and turn our teeth a spotted betraying black … black as tar. Dangerous game!
One time after we had flagrantly and plainly cheated, Mother said coolly to me at the dinner table, after we had eaten the first course with propriety and were waiting to see what came next (for Anne and I had been too busy on the sidewalk that afternoon to quiz the kitchen), “Mary Frances, I would like you to show your father your teeth.” I steeled myself, and bared my little fangs at him. Things were still as church. Then Rex gave a great good laugh, and said, “TAR! Delicious! Best thing I ever chewed! But it looks awful on teeth!”
Later we did discuss the dubious sides of turning our backs, and the knowledge that we were cheating, and all that, but the reaction of my father made it easier for Anne and me to accept our capitulation to Obedience, and within a comfortable time the steamroller stopped its majestic smashing and we had a paved street, which made even ice chips less tasty.
Down on the corner of Philadelphia and Painter, near enough for us to see at night from the sleeping porch which we gradually had to ourselves as our parents started a new batch of children in another part of the upstairs, there was a big light strung over the intersection, and when a man had climbed up to it to clean it, he would drop out a long greyish tube of some kind of clay which made fine chalk. The sidewalks were sketchy in the town then, but we had a lumpy one going along our block, over the bulging roots of pepper and camphor trees. Later I found it hellish to skate on, but for hopscotch and artwork it was very good.
Across the street lived Old Lady Ransome, and her house still stands in its genteel green-and-white remoteness. Now and then my mother would put on a hat and gloves and go across to pay a call, and the two women would come out on the wide cement porch behind the hanging baskets of smilax ferns and perhaps wave to us. Anne and I went there only a few times, to carry Easter eggs or some such trifle, for Mrs. Ransome was crippled, and in pain.
Next door to her lived a series of people we never knew, except that during the influenza epidemic in 1918 Mother made us stay in the back yard while two or three coffins were carried away from it, one of a young woman, perhaps not yet twenty, who had waved now and then to us as she walked downtown to work for a lawyer. We did not feel one way or another about the plague, probably, although it interested us that soon after that Father came home at noon and pulled off the gauze mask requested by the Red Cross and said something like, “Bushwah! I can’t smoke in it. And my nose is too big.”
Next to the sad unknowns across from us, for a magical few years lived the Smiths. He was a lawyer. She had enormous sunken dark eyes, and played the piano very well. I think she was the fairly rich daughter, with what in France would be called a dowry, of the owner of a department store in Kansas City or some such place. Gradually they had two little girls. All four of them were tubercular. The last I heard, at least three of them had died. Mr. Smith’s family was very bitter about his having caught the terrible disease from her, and her family felt the same way about him, and Mother worried a lot about their dilemma, but Anne and I simply enjoyed them. We went on wonderful picnics, for one thing. And I remember sitting under Mrs. Smith’s beautiful grand piano and holding on to one of its legs while through my body ran the force and delicacy of the music she knew and played well. I think now it was Schubert, Mozart.
On up the street lived the Maples. They were and probably still are important in Whittier, and I remember them as a handsome large family. They were intelligent and well bred, and went to local schools and then away to Western colleges. Mr. Maple was the banker. On the top floor of the large house, into which I never once stepped, lived Mrs. Maple’s mother, a small and apparently fearsome woman who looked down all day on the corner of Painter and Hadley from her high windows, but never waved or nodded.
I remember walking to the Bailey Street School when I was about five and a half years old, with the oldest Maple girl, Caroline, who was wearing her first long skirt. This was in about 1913, and it was plainly an important step for her to take. Two or three girls accompanied her enviously, still with skirts flapping above their shoe tops, perhaps nine inches from the ground. Much later in our lives I met Caroline a few times and liked her very much, but always felt some of my childhood awe of her having grown up that long before I did.
I was supposed to be a good friend of her little sister Josephine, but it never worked. Both of us tried for years to like each other, because our mothers thought it would be nice for one reason or another; we went to little parties, and had mutual friends, and remained consistently cold and disinterested.
Josephine had blond hair and was solidly built, as a child. She was rather malicious, I think, and I remember that once when I was tagging along shyly behind Red Sutherland, my first and only love in schools until I was well on toward marriage, Josephine in a small gang of my friends spread the word that I had blown a kiss to Red’s back or head as he marched on bravely in front of me. This hurt me. I would have liked to blow a kiss to him, but would never have done so. It also insulted me: such a childish gesture, turned into such a lascivious one! I was no dolt, but rather a sensitive proud princess riding behind her knight, whether or not he cared. (He did not.) I felt defiled, no matter how naïvely.
The real thing I still have against Josephine, even now, although by now we well might like each other without cavil, is that once she whispered meanly to a school friend about my mother’s looks. This I found, and still find, hard to forgive, and it gave me my first ugly taste of real hate. It must have been in 1918, because Mother was bending over my new sister Norah in her pram at the bottom of the front steps, where the baby lay in the sunshine. Skirts came to the floor or more daringly the ankle then, for a woman of my mother’s age and social position, the first of which was about thirty-seven and the second, precarious. She was probably pregnant with my brother David, and her ankles were puffy, and as I watched her tuck the soft white covers about the baby I heard Josephine titter to my other school friend, “Look at her big fat ankles.” Ah, there was a flash of rage in me, still felt!
It was the custom for the little girls of one or another neighborhood to meet on the sidewalk in front of their houses and walk to Penn Street School together, in a morning troupe that sometimes held fifteen or so, and I suppose the boys did the same. We never rode bikes, except after school and on Saturdays, and skates were out of the question because of the chancy sidewalks. We walked.
That morning of the slur on my mother’s beauty, I knew we would stop for at least eight friends before we got to Penn. For perhaps the first time in my life I was so conscious of being angry that I knew I could not go with them, and especially with the sly secure tittering traitor who had mocked Edith Kennedy’s ankles. Mother had suddenly become real and beautiful to me. I wanted to embrace her wildly, which we never did in our family, especially in those early days, and then run out onto the sidewalk and hit Josephine in her blond smug face until all her teeth popped out and her skin turned black and her eyes died.
This would not do, plainly. Instead I gave a bang on the side of the baby’s pram, turned away roughly from my mother’s tender if preoccupied goodbye, and ran around to the back of our house and down the alleys, alone all the way to school. And I was swinging higher than anybody when my own crowd came onto the playground before the bell rang.
Across the street from the Maples, and down a block toward us, so that the house would be only a little north and across from the low brown cottage so full of love and music where the Smiths coughed and rotted, the Fays stayed for several years. Mrs. Fay was very grande dame, and always dressed formally for dinner, although they were poor as Job’s turkey, according to my mother. When my parents went there, Mrs. Fay simply slung her train over one arm as she carried in the vegetable dishes, I was told later with laughing admiration. They did not even have a Hired Girl, and Mrs. Fay washed her lone child Eleanor’s long hair and pressed her middy skirts’ countless pleats.
Eleanor was very nice to us, and today might have been called a baby-sitter, on the rare times when Rex and Edith and the Fays would drive into Los Angeles in our Model T for a dinner with wine at Foix’s or Marcel’s or the Victor Hugo. My sister Anne and I never liked her much, one way or t’other, but I cannot remember why, for she read to us and was not sly or a tattletaler. Later the Fays moved away and she was sent to a fashionable school, and occasionally we heard that she had done things like make a debut (to what, in Southern California?) and get married. Caroline Maple kept in touch with her for a long time, and passed news along to my mother, but it did not seem to move any of us. The Fay we remembered, with varying degrees and for different reasons, was her father, Charles, always thought of as Charlie.
All I can say now is that he was thin, not as tall as Father, and ineffably distinguished. He wore shabby hunting clothes the way most men dream of doing. He was from Boston, and I loved to hear him talk, although I don’t think he ever addressed more than a remote greeting to me. Often he came in for a nip of sherry or beer or a rarer whiskey, before he went on up the street to change into his dinner clothes for the evening ritual of the thin fare he could provide, and I would listen with delight from a nearby room as his elegant high voice hung in the air. My parents were under his spell too, and when he was with them they spoke with more wit, more attention to their own fineness.
He and Rex often went hunting, during several years, and unloaded dead doves or quail from the back of the Ford, late at night. Rex always carried his own weapons, but said that Charlie did the shooting and he was bird dog. Then they stopped going away together, and it was most probably coincidence that about then the Fays left Whittier and never came back, but later I learned that Rex had refused ever to hunt again after a weekend with Charlie in Antelope Valley, where countless sportsmen stoned and clubbed the trusting little fawn-like beasts to death, and then sometimes stripped them of their skins, and mostly left them dead or dying, and went on clubbing and laughing and swigging from their flasks. Before that we had often eaten antelope when Charlie Fay brought us a piece, but from then on we never did, and as far as I can remember, this unwritten taboo covered all game like venison, bear, the occasional wild kid that still turned up in California hills. We did eat birds, but only when people gave them to us, and although my father never shot again, later he liked to go away on fishing trips, mostly for trout, so that he could be with men he enjoyed. (I know he and Charlie parted as friends.)
The only other thing I remember about the Fays, except that he was probably the first man I ever realized was attractive, is that between their small parlor and the dining room hung a curtain made of long strings of eucalyptus buds. I thought this was truly elegant. I think there were colored glass beads now and then on the strings of the scented little nobs, and I would have loved to wrap myself naked in the clicking tinkling spray that hung down with such mystery between the two small crowded ugly rooms.
We never had any such modish fripperies at home, if one overlooks an elaborate edition of Sesame and Lilies by Ruskin, and there were a couple of other local status symbols I pined for, but not too strongly, in those days. One was a brass vase, at least two feet tall, in which stalks of pampas grass would stand. This should be placed in a corner of the living room or perhaps in the entrance hall. If possible, the frothy weird seed pods or whatever they are should be tinted pale lavender and pink and yellow. I have no idea where I got this vision, for we went into almost no homes in Whittier. I can remember only Mrs. Fay’s, Miss Brotherton’s when I was learning anatomy through inadvertent mathematics, the Smiths’, and of course the Thayer Ranch.
There was an old lady who lived out near Jim Town and had an avenue of pampas grass which she sent to a great convention somewhere in America, and Rex interviewed her once, and there was a story about her in the Saturday Evening Post. The highway to Los Angeles was lined in those idyllic days with silvery olive trees on her big ranch, and when we drove past the avenue of thick tall grasses that curved away from it we slowed down to look at them, plumy and beautiful and even famous. But a brass vase filled with them? Where did I find this dream?
(And of course it seemed a shame to me, for several years, that we did not have hanging baskets of smilax ferns on our small front porch. Other people did. Nice people did, especially nice old ladies, which probably I thought my mother to be and took for granted that Grandmother was, at least socially. Mother was adamant. She hated, for one thing, to have to remember to water anything. For another, as she confessed to me many years later, she had always considered smilax middle-class and vulgar, especially in hanging baskets, because she had been told that the only way to keep them flourishing was to give them diluted human urine. This haunted her, perhaps with some titillation, for I remember her pointing out especially beautiful fountains of smilax on other people’s porches and then laughing scornfully.)
South of the Fay house, one or two doors, lived a tiny ancient Kentucky colonel and first two devoted daughters and then one. Once there was an automobile parade past our house, on Memorial Day, and he rode in an open Pierce-Arrow in his Civil War uniform, not seeing anything, but fixed in a regal salute. Sometimes he sat on his front porch in a wheelchair, like Old Lady Ransome, but we knew enough not to bother him either. I think Mother liked the daughters, but they were still very unhappy about the Civil War and what it had done to them, and Mother was very busy.
Next to the Colonel, in a modest cottage compared to his faded yellow barn of a house, lived two little girls for a time, and they were friends of ours. Their mother had migraine headaches, which one of them later developed, and their father worked on the News, I think as a reporter. Helen and Alice the girls were, and Helen was almost too old for Anne and me, and already prone to biliousness and withdrawal. Although they moved away, they continued in the same school as we did, and that was fine, because Alice was a girl one wanted to see again.
Between them and us was a big ugly house where for a few years lived the Cutlers. There were several children. The oldest girl, Ethel, occasionally stayed in our living room at night when Mother and Father went out, which was increasingly rare as our family grew bigger and Rex grew busier and Edith grew heavier and more asocial. There was a sister about my age whose name I have conveniently forgotten. She was the first person I saw in Whittier.
All our furniture was being moved from a dray into the house. I stood far to the north of the small front lawn, against a spindly hedge which later fattened. On the other side, in the middle of her own scrap of Bermuda grass, stood a little girl sucking her thumb with one hand and fondling her private parts with the other. We looked at each other several times, for I was interested in what she was doing, but we never spoke, and the process of moving into the house was basically a better show. That night when I was lying in my bed in the new room, a wonderful big screened porch like a bird’s nest high at the back of the house, my mother came to kiss me and welcome me there, and she asked me if I had noticed what the little neighbor was doing. I think I had almost forgotten, but I recalled it, and she said that she did not want me ever to bother myself that way, because it would make me nervous. I wondered what that might mean, but did not question it for many years.
The Cutlers took a Sunday paper, and so had funnies, which Grandmother did not allow in our house, and Anne and I became tricky at an early age in evading the Blue Laws. Ethel would bring them over in the afternoon, and we would meet at the far end of the long pergola of Cecil Brunner roses which led to our garage, Anne and I and a few of Ethel’s siblings there, all of us loaded with heavy Bible picture books. We would lie down close together on our stomachs on the grass between the two car tracks of cement, with our five or six heads pointed away from Grandmother’s room, and Ethel would read every delicious caption of every page of the funnies as we kept our Sunday books open in front of us. We knew, as if in a secret language, the Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt and Jeff, and another saga about a very tall thin willowy character in a prison uniform whose name I now forget. There was also Krazy Kat, which I did not really enjoy for years, except for all those bricks that could close any gap in his conversation.
It seems strange that the Katzenjammers did not suffer from the War, when German Measles were called Liberty, as also were Hamburger Steaks, and when somebody threw half a brick through our side window near the piano.
This was because Mother was playing, and she and Rex and Uncle Evans were singing, some German student songs in variously bad accents, no doubt bolstered by either beer or white wine and a common tenderness for one another. I cannot remember that a curtain was ever pulled in our house anywhere, so there in broad electric light were the editor of the town daily, his wife who had once lived in Germany itself, and her uppity professor-brother from the East, laughing and singing in the enemy’s own tongue! Somebody lobbed the brick rather timidly into the subversive group: it went through the glass, all right, but most of the shattered stuff stayed in place, so that the next morning when Anne and I came downstairs after our innocent slumbers, everything was fairly tidy, and by that night a new pane had been installed. I feel certain that Edith cried, for she wept easily and well, although hardly as often as she wished. The German music was put away. Uncle Evans went back to his law classes and Rex to his desk, each mum for his own reasons.
For a while after we went to Whittier there was one bakery going, run by a German, and usually at Christmas our turkey would be stuffed and taken down to be roasted in his undying oven. I think this happened a few times with large pots of beans, too, which stayed there overnight. The baker left town in 1916, to fight at home, and his brother-in-law took over.
The day before his Grand Opening, he sent home with Rex a great platter of gleaming sweet cakes, called Butter Flies because they made the butter fly, his new ad would say in the paper. We had a special treat that afternoon, and sat around in the dining room and drank pitchers of milk and ate the delicious surprise.
Grandmother tasted one, pronounced it good, and then dismissed it scornfully as a bribe. Edith, who was a helpless gourmande as well as a mild cynic, could not resist eating several cakes, while she murmured coolly to her husband that they could not possibly keep to this standard and would soon be like all other bought stuff, not fit to have in the house. Anne and I devoted ourselves to keeping far enough within the bounds of courtesy not to be noticed, while we got away with more delicacies than we had ever eaten before. It was a fine occasion, on which I think my father drank a beer and sat watching us from behind a cloud of slowly exhaled Bull Durham smoke.
Not long after that, though, the second German baker left town, and this time it was because we had entered the War and it was being said that he had put ground glass in some of his excellent bread. It was a sad thing, and my mother held her hand over her brown eyes, and then withdrew to her darkened room.
There was one other commercial war casualty in our town: our butcher, who had lived there for many years but with a German name, disappeared after several weeks of harassment and gradual bankruptcy, because a little boy, locally famous for his disobedient and ornery ways, had stuck his finger in the sausage slicer. Rumor said that the butcher went right on making and selling sausages from that machine with the flesh of an AMERICAN CHILD!
There were, most of the time, two Jews who ran the town’s variety store. They seemed to change, perhaps all in one family but spending a winter in turn, for their health, from some place like Chicago. They were always small, quiet, and kind, and I loved to go into the store for something like shoelaces or a paper of pins. I think that once a little daughter came to Penn Street School for a few months, but I do not remember seeing her in the store. Jews were simply not there, in Whittier. They did not really exist, except within themselves I hope. Their temple must have been long miles away. Nobody spoke to them. I cannot imagine what they did for proper food if they were Orthodox. I prefer not to think of their isolation.
Catholics were a step above Jews, socially, and one or two below the Episcopalians. This was largely because we were all white, while the Catholics had a few Mexican communicants. Rex had one very good friend, a Catholic who ran a garage in Whittier, who finally was frozen out of town (as my father was supposed to have been by 1913 or so). He moved to Santa Ana or Anaheim, or some place like that. He was never recognized as a friend by my mother, who took a consistently dim view of her husband’s offbeat intimates.
After the Catholic left town, Rex bowed to pressure and became a Mason, which may or may not be important to this picture. By then he had learned what a small religious community can do to a human being, all in the name of the Lord, and it is probable that in Masonry as in Rotary and the Salvation Army he believed there was enough fairness left to counteract the bigotry all these institutions have been accused of. It is one of the many things we never discussed, later. I do not know if we would have been able to. We were a hot-tongued and articulate family, and by the time Time itself had cooled us, it was too late: we were dead, or physically deaf, or spiritually numb and wary.
There was a small Catholic community in and around Whittier, mostly Mexican and illiterate, and some of my friends in school, therefore, were Catholics, but we never bothered about rituals like going to Sunday school together, or comparing Friday menus. We learned to read and write, at school, and we played wildly and thoroughly, and then parted every twilight, content as calves going to their own barns from a common meadow.
My mother was not used to having people of different-colored skins near her, and was shy about it, but Rex had it heavily on his mind that the living conditions in Jim Town, out around Pio Pico’s rotting house on the banks of the Rio Hondo, were not right for man nor beast. He found that the Catholic priest in Whittier was the townsman most in touch with the people there, and they began to work together. I am sorry that I cannot know what they got done, in that Mexican ghetto of so long ago. Certainly it: was not the kind of action that would possibly result today from the friendship and concern of two good men, but at least it sufficed for a pair of renegades, and they continued a long life of golf, mild tippling, and zeal, both of them social mavericks but shrugged off, if not actively condoned, by the good Quakers.
Much later, and perhaps as a result of this suspicious activity of the priest and the editor, the Friends installed a small mission in Jim Town, and Rex asked its earnest heavy-breathing pastor to give all of us Spanish lessons. It was doomed to quick failure. Mother gave up at once, and retired to her genteel romance with everything John Galsworthy ever wrote but especially The Forsyte Saga. Anne and I were Wild Indians at that period, and could not long tolerate the endless afternoons with Señor Cobos and his fat little daughter Amparo, as we sat politely and drank lemonade and tried to understand the difference between Thee and You (if we had only been Quakers!). Finally Rex went alone to Jim Town and sweated over Spanish verbs, which were suddenly fun for him when he began escaping to Guadalajara, once a year or so. I have often felt sorry about being so stupid with Señor Cobos.
Later I studied Spanish hard and happily in school, and when I was much older I went to tedious night classes in Adult Education to recall some of it, and I can still read and hear it with pleasure. Of course I have never been hurt, except perhaps indirectly, because of another language I love besides my own. Nobody ever threw a piece of brick through a window because I was singing “La Cucaracha” or “Plaisirs d’Amour.” But my mother never sang a German song again, after that night in about 1917—nor spoke a word of the language she had learned in several years in Germany, except when one of us would sneeze and wait happily for her Gesundheit!
—Sag Harbor, 1973