A Girl from Yamhill (6 page)

Winston and I are dressed for a party. By now my hair is thick enough to support a bow, even though the bow keeps slipping
.

Too young to be trusted to wind the Maypole, Elma and I are bewildered flower girls in Yamhill's May Day festival
.

Yamhill celebrates the Fourth of July by having a board nailed across the stomachs of little girls so they won't fall off the float. I represent Ohio, second from the left in the front row with dirty knees that show I have fallen down. The parade route is short because Yamhill's main street is only four blocks long
.

Mother organized her library in the Commercial Clubrooms on the top floor of this bank building. Forty years later the china cabinet, empty of books, and the worn leather chair remained in the dusty room where a dead bird lay on the floor. (Yamhill County Historical Society
.)

Portland, city of regular paychecks, concrete sidewalks instead of boardwalks, parks with lawns and flower beds, streetcars instead of a hack from the livery stable, a library with a children's room that seemed as big as a Masonic hall, buildings so high a six-year-old almost fell over backward looking at the tops. I loved elevators that lifted me, leaving my stomach behind, and escalator stairs that moved, so I did not even have to raise my feet. Mother patiently rode up and down, up and down, with me.

On Halsey Street, we rented a six-room two-story house with a furnace instead of wood stoves; it seemed warm and cozy after the big farmhouse. The city lot had been part of a farm at one time, for old cherry and plum trees and a
bramble of loganberries grew in the backyard. An acre or so of hazelnut brush flourished across the street, and beyond, in Sullivan's Gulch, railroad trains huffed and chuffed, dividing the city.

A plumber, who lived behind his corner shop, sang “O Sole Mio” into a washtub. A French widow, who took in boarders, lived next door. She had a fascinating accent and called me “Bevairly.” Best of all, children lived in almost every house.

And toys! I had never seen such toys. A boy who, with his father, boarded next door, had an Uncle Wiggily board game, Parcheesi, and Tinkertoys. Girls had whole families of dolls. One girl, Elizabeth Ann, had a rocking horse, a tricycle, and, in the corner of her dining room, a large and completely furnished dollhouse. Her parents owned a radio, the first I had ever heard. Everyone had roller skates. I sat on the front steps, longing for skates of my own and for a skate key on a string around my neck, hoping someone would offer to lend me theirs.

And then one day my father brought home a pair of roller skates of my very own, and I, too, became part of the neighborhood, skating up and down the gentle slope. My knees were constantly skinned, but I picked myself up, screwed my skates in place, and skated on with blood trickling into my half socks. Sometimes I squatted on
my skates and, with my arms wrapped around my legs, coasted down the slope.

We made stilts out of two-pound coffee cans and twine and clanked around the block yelling “Pieface!” at children on the next street and bloodying our knees when the twine broke. When we tired of clanking, or someone said, “For heaven's sake, children!” we pounded rose petals with rocks and soaked them in water, hoping to make perfume. We hunted for old bricks among the hazelnut bushes and pounded them into dust in a game we called Brick Factory. With scabs on my knees and brick dust in my hair, I was happy. I had children to play with who could be summoned by standing in front of their houses and yelling their names. Telephones were for grown-ups.

There was one problem, however, in the midst of all this joy. Because the children of pioneers considered education unnecessary for sons, who were expected to farm the land and hand it on to succeeding generations, my father's education consisted of two years of high school—all that Yamhill offered at that time—and a few courses in farming at Oregon Agricultural College, which left him ill equipped for city life. He became a night guard, from 7:00
P.M
. to 7:00
A.M
., for the Federal Reserve Bank, his one Portland connection. At some time in his youth, he had worked
guarding Federal Reserve gold shipped by train to San Francisco. Trying to sleep daytimes with all the neighborhood children skating, yelling, clanking, and crying over skinned knees was difficult. He moved a cot to the attic and sometimes yelled out the window, “Quiet down there, you kids!” We tried to be quiet, until we forgot.

While my father slept in the attic, Mother took advantage of city culture and enrolled me in a ballet class overtown so I would become graceful. In Portland we did not go “uptown,” as we had in Yamhill; streetcars took us “overtown” because we crossed the Willamette River. There, in a basement room (could it have been in the Civic Auditorium?), I laced my ballet slippers and shivered my way into a yellow camisole with attached bloomers, slipped my head through a hole in a square of yellow China silk, and tied a ribbon around my waist. With other shivering members of the class, including one resentful, tearful boy, we exercised at the bar under the direction of Alice May Brown and pranced around the room in steps with names that sounded to me like “gallop” and “sauté.”

At home I galloped and sautéed around the living room while Mother played “The Glowworm” on our old upright Ludwig piano from the parlor in Yamhill. The neighborhood children, denied or spared this cultural activity, pressed their noses
against the front window to watch. As her glowworm glimmered around the living room, Mother said, “I do wish those children wouldn't smear the glass with their noses.”

Mother also took me to the Portland Library Association, as the library was then called, where we walked across the marble floor, now hidden beneath composition flooring, to the room for children. Mother chose books to read aloud to me, and I ran my fingers along the spines of thousands of books I would soon be able to read to myself.

In the evening, Mother read aloud
The Blue Bird
, by Maurice Maeterlinck, the story of two children seeking the blue bird of happiness. “It's true,” she said when she finished the book. “We find happiness in our own backyard.” Mother did not have to tell me. Happiness was all around me. I couldn't wait for school to start. Then happiness would be complete.

Father brought home two books required for the first grade,
The Beacon Primer
and
The Beacon First Reader
, which cost fifty-two cents apiece. These businesslike books, with dark green covers lettered in black, were thin and easy to hold. I buried my face in the pages, inhaling the new-book smell, eager to join other children in reading from them.

The day after Labor Day, Mother walked me the six blocks to the two-story red brick Fernwood Grammar School, where I joined a confusion of children from the first through the eighth grades. Mother left me with other first-graders in the basement, where teachers lined us up, two by two. Clutching our books, tablets, and pencil boxes, we were all excited and bewildered.

Someone blew a whistle and called out, “Mark time!” Imitating other children, I pumped my knees up and down. “March!” Led by the first-grade teacher and still pumping our knees, we marched up the stairs to our classroom, where we were each assigned one of forty desks in five rows of eight, each row bolted to two boards so individual desks could not be moved. All the seats were occupied.

Except for one girl who lived across the street from me, the room seemed one big blur of children. Everything was strange: the American flag hanging indoors, the letters of the alphabet written across the top of the slate blackboard, the picture of a serene little girl in a white dress with a pink sash that hung above the blackboard.

The teacher was a tall, gray-haired woman who wore a navy blue dress and black oxfords. “Good morning, children,” she said. “My name is Miss Falb. It is spelled
F-a-l-b
. The
l
is silent. Say, ‘Good morning, Miss Falb.'”

“Good morning, Miss Fob,” we chorused.

She then wrote
Miss Falb
in perfect cursive writing on the blackboard and instructed us to get out our tablets and copy what she had written.

The whole thing seemed unreasonable to me. If the
l
was silent, why was it there? I picked up my pencil with the hand closer to the pencil. Miss
Falb descended on me, removed the pencil from my left hand, and placed it in my other hand. “You must always hold your pencil in your right hand,” she informed me.

No one had ever told me I had a right or wrong hand. I had always used the hand closer to the task. With her own pencil, Miss Falb wrote
Beverly Bunn
on my paper in the Wesco system of handwriting with its peculiar
e
's,
r
's, and
x
's that were to become a nuisance all my life.

The business of right and left hands worried me all day. At home, I asked Mother how to tell one from the other. She happened to be sitting in front of the sewing machine, so she said, “Face the sewing machine.” I did as she directed. “Your right hand is the hand closer to the wall.” Oh. I went through the first grade mentally facing the sewing machine every time I picked up a pencil.

School always began with a strange song about “the dawnzer lee light.” We sounded out words,
c-a-t
and
d-o-g
, and chanted rules: “
e
on the end makes
a
say
in cake” and “
i
before
e
, except after
c
.”

Miss Falb passed out thin paper, about two inches square, for exercises in paper folding to teach us to follow directions. “Fold the paper in half,” she directed. “Open it. Fold it in half the other way. Open it again. Fold each corner to the
center,” and on and on. Mother marveled at my skill when I took my folded paper home.

Miss Falb supplied each of us with a small yellow box filled with blue cardboard counters the size of nickels. “Place five counters in a row,” she directed. “Take away two. How many are left?” I liked the little counters, but, thanks to Grandpa, I could already add and subtract, and with real numbers, not counters—a skill Miss Falb did not notice.

Once a week we sang. Miss Falb taught us to stand, clutch our elbows, rock our arms as if we were holding imaginary babies, and after a
tweet
on her pitch pipe, sing something about “Baby's boat, the silver moon.” Mother said it was a lovely song, but I preferred rousing hymns like “Bringing in the Sheaves” or “Yield Not to Temptation” any day.

At first, reading was dull but easy. The stories, though they could scarcely be called that, were about Ruth, John (What was that
h
doing in John?), and Rover. I managed “See mamma,” “See kitty,” and “I have a kitty.” (Why were there two
m
's and two
t
's when one would do just as well?) Reading picked up after that, for gold stars were pasted on pages beginning “I have a doll,” “I have a ball,” and “Rover is my dog.”

Then chicken pox kept me home from school for a week, perhaps longer, and ended my ballet
lessons as well. When I returned to school, I had fallen behind. I got no more gold stars.

One day Miss Falb swooped down and whipped my hands with her frequently used weapon, a metal-tipped bamboo pointer. Probably this was for letting my mind wander, though I was not sure because I was so surprised. My hands burned, but I felt I must have been bad because at home I always knew any punishment was deserved. I tried to hide my tears of pain and humiliation and was too ashamed to tell my parents.

Miss Falb made children sit on a stool facing the corner. Once I was ordered, without being told why, to the cloakroom, where I huddled, sniffling, among rubbers and lunch bags. For weeks after that, the smell of peanut butter sandwiches made my stomach curl. Once a plump and cheerful girl named Claudine was punished by being sentenced to crouch in the dark cave under Miss Falb's desk with Miss Falb's feet in their ugly black oxfords. When her sentence was reprieved, she emerged chastened but not much worried. Claudine, a city girl all her life, was braver in class than I.

Soon every school day became a day of fear. When I needed to go to the toilet, I was afraid to ask to be excused because Miss Falb had scolded the class for asking to leave the room so often. I
was also afraid to go alone down the steps to the girls' lavatory in the dim basement. One day, inevitably, I wet my pants. Miss Falb sent for the janitor to mop up my puddle and ordered me home to change my clothes. I walked six blocks with my wet bloomers
slish-slishing
with every step. Mother put me in fresh clothes and sent me back to school, where I was sure the whole class would remember my disgrace all the rest of their lives.

I began to beg to stay home from school.

“I'm surprised at you, Beverly,” said Mother. “Show your spunk and remember your pioneer ancestors.”

One day I enjoyed a treat. Donald, the boy who boarded next door, came down with chicken pox. Since I had already had chicken pox, I was sent to play with him. He was generous with his Tinkertoys, and even though he was older, he did not mind playing the Uncle Wiggily board game with me. I had a good time.

However, it soon developed that Donald had, not chicken pox, but smallpox. I, too, came down with smallpox. Even a fever and itching scabs were better than a day in Miss Falb's classroom.

Drama surrounded smallpox. The health department nailed a red quarantine sign to the front of the house. The milkman left milk on the bottom step and fled. My father was not allowed
to live at home. He packed a suitcase and moved overtown to stay with his sister Minnie, who owned a small apartment house where any member of the family in need of help was welcome. For a treat, he had Meier & Frank's department store deliver delicious cookies topped with pink marshmallow cushions strewn with coconut. Mother read aloud
The Princess and the Goblin
, I ate those delicious cookies, and I did not have to go to school.

Mother thought my scabs would never drop off. In time, of course, the last scab fell away, the red sign was removed, and Mother lit the required fumigation candles throughout the house before she closed it up and took me overtown to the health inspector at the City Hall, who pronounced me fit for school. I did not realize how fortunate I was to be unpitted by scars.

Once more I was shoved out the door to go to school. By then I was hopelessly lost in reading. The class had been divided into three groups: Bluebirds, who found happiness in seats by the window; Redbirds, who sat in the middle seats; and Blackbirds, who sat by the blackboard, far from sunlight. I was not surprised to be a Blackbird.

The worst part of the day was the reading circle, where the Blackbirds in turn had to read words from the despised and meaningless word
lists: “shad, shed, shod, shin, shun, shut, shot, ship, shop, shift, shell.”. We all feared and hated our turns at that circle of chairs in the front of the room as much as we dreaded trying to say the words on flash cards Miss Falb held up in front of the class. With luck,
party
or
mamma
, words I could read, were flashed at me. Oh, the relief!

From a country child who had never known fear, I became a city child consumed by fear. A three-year-old boy named Bobby, whose divorced mother lived across the street, came to stay with us for a few months while his mother was away looking for work. A disturbed little boy who wet his bed, Bobby needed the love and attention that Mother gave. I felt left out, as if Mother did not have enough love to go around.

An uppity Bluebird in the neighborhood made fun of me for naming my doll Fordson-Lafayette after a Yamhill neighbor's tractor and the town where Great-grandfather Hawn had settled. Dolls were supposed to have nice names like Alice or Betty. Nobody named a doll after a tractor. When children discovered I still believed in Santa Claus, everyone laughed at me. I had never endured ridicule in Yamhill. When I asked Mother about Santa Claus, she smiled and admitted there was no such being. How was I to know, alone on a farm where I believed so much
that Mother told me? I did not mind disillusion in Santa Claus, but I felt that Mother had made me the butt of other children's derision.

Fear was intensified by adult talk of a terrible earthquake in Japan, where the earth shook, buildings crumbled, and thousands of people were killed. What if an earthquake happened in Portland? Suddenly I did not want my father to work nights. I wanted him home, safe, after dark.

And like the good little girl I struggled to be, I said my prayers at bedtime. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake…”
If I should die before I wake
. The words suddenly were not just something I recited. They had meaning. I did not want to die like those poor people in Japan. If an earthquake came, I wanted Father there to save me. He could. I knew he could.

I lay in bed, determined to stay awake until he came home. I could not die if my father were home. I lay as flat and as still as I could so Death would overlook me, or a Thing hiding under the bed would not know I was there. I fought sleep, praying for dawn, for the first twitter of a bird.

I could not confess my terror. Mother had impressed upon me that I must never be afraid. If I told, she might love me even less than I felt she loved me since Bobby had come to live with us. When I did sleep, I frightened Mother by
walking in my sleep down the stairs and out the front door. She said the sound of a sleep-walking child was the most ghostly she could imagine, and she began to sleep lightly, listening as she slept.

Meanwhile, at the bank, Father spent his nights quietly working with an unabridged dictionary on a contest to make the most words out of letters in a phrase I have now forgotten. He turned page after page of the big dictionary, writing thousands of words on tablets of paper, hours of labor that won him a Bee-Vac vacuum cleaner. He had expected a bigger prize—who else had such a big dictionary or such long nights for uninterrupted work? Mother said the Bee-Vac kept the rugs much cleaner than the carpet sweeper.

Between my fear of falling asleep, and not eating lunch, I must have looked peaked. Convinced that something must be wrong, Mother visited our class at school.

That day Miss Falb told Mother what a nice little girl I was and went out of her way to be kind. This confused me. When some of us were sent to the blackboard, I accidentally erased part of Miss Falb's example of writing that the boy next to me was supposed to copy. Fearing punishment in front of Mother, I began to cry.

“Why, Beverly, there's nothing to cry about,”
said Miss Falb, so gently I felt even more confused. This was not the Miss Falb I knew.

“Of course you didn't mean to erase the writing,” she said, and rewrote the erased example while Mother, smiling, sat on a straight chair at the back of the room.

After Mother's school visit, life was worse than ever. “Please, Mamma, don't make me go to school,” I begged. “Please, please!”

“Of course you have to go to school,” she said. “Miss Falb is a very nice teacher. It's all in your imagination.”