A Room of My Own Read online

  "Now, Lil, if I stop by the camp once or twice a week, I hardly think that will send us to the poorhouse. I have a good stable practice, and what's more, Harold is here to help. I understand your concern for the children, but really, there isn't anything at all for you to worry about." Papa patted Mother's hand and smiled, as though the matter had been amicably settled.

  But Mother pursed her lips. There was something else on her mind that she didn't dare speak aloud. Papa would have his way whether Mother liked it or not, and Mother was resigned. But I knew my mother well. I knew what she was thinking. While she was truly sorry for those poor people in the shantytown, her first concern was for the welfare of her own family--both how we fared financially and how we appeared to our neighbors. Mother didn't like Papa's lackadaisical attitude toward money. She didn't like his willingness to give medical care for free. But worse yet, to have him, a respectable doctor, mingling with the likes of those people down by the river--why, it just wasn't proper!

  Chapter Three

  Charlotte's house was just a few streets over from ours. It was a small brick structure, about half the size of my family's rambling Victorian affair, but large enough for the Besac family, as Charlotte was an only child. Mr. Besac, a traveling salesman, was seldom at home, so Charlotte and her mother were usually the sole residents of the place anyway.

  The sidewalks between Charlotte's house and mine were a well-traveled path for me, because she and I had declared ourselves best friends ever since our first-grade teacher assigned us to eraser duty together. I felt almost as much at home in Charlotte's house as in my own.

  Although school was out for the summer, it was generally after noon before I was able to escape to Charlotte's to play. Mother didn't believe in allowing children to become lazy during the summer vacation--an idea I wholeheartedly disagreed with at the time--and so she devised regimented programs for her offspring to follow. Instead of the three R's, summers revolved around what I thought of as the two L's: learning and labor. My mornings and sometimes a good portion of my afternoons were spent at the piano learning to play, at the sewing machine learning to sew, in the kitchen learning to cook. And I wasn't to get away from book learning. The primary textbook for those hot summer days was the Bible. I was expected to read a certain number of chapters daily, and every Sunday Mother chose a verse or two that she expected me to memorize and recite aloud by the end of the week.

  Mother also compiled a list of what she called "fine literature" that I had to work my way through before school started again. Everything from Louisa May Alcott to Charles Dickens to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Generally I checked a book out of the library three or four times before I finally finished it, and Mother could never understand why it took me so long to read a single novel. What she didn't know was that during much of the time I was supposed to be devoting to fine literature, I was actually devouring issues of "True Story," which Charlotte passed on to me when she finished reading them. I figured everyone had to have a vice or two, and surely one could do worse than reading romance magazines.

  That was the learning side. The labor side consisted of an endless cycle of household chores that still makes my head spin to think about. We had just finished our annual spring cleaning, a ritual that left every muscle and bone in my body aching from overwork. Mother, Emma May, Simon, and I stripped the walls bare in each room and scrubbed them with strong soap and household ammonia in water. We carried all the rugs, large and small, out to the clothesline, where Simon and I sighed and sneezed and scowled as we beat the dust and dirt out of them with carpet beaters that looked like oversized whisks. Then, on hands and knees, the four of us scrubbed the floors with huge wooden brushes and Fels-Naptha soap. Mother and Emma May then washed all the curtains in the house by hand while Simon and I cleaned the windows with a potent mixture of warm water, ammonia, and vinegar. After the curtains were washed, they were stretched out to dry on the curtain stretcher. Simon and I gave an exaggerated yelp every time we pricked one of our fingers on the pins, hoping Mother would have pity and excuse us from this chore. She never did. Thankfully, spring cleaning lasted only about a week.

  But even afterward, the usual chores remained. On Mondays when Mother did the laundry, I hung up the damp clothes and linens on the lines in the backyard. Sometimes on Tuesdays I helped with the ironing. On Wednesdays I dusted and polished the furniture, and on Thursdays I swept the porch and the sidewalk. Fridays were bed-changing days, when I was responsible for putting fresh linens on all the beds. Every day I was expected to wash dishes, clean my own room, and help tend the garden, where I did everything from planting the seeds to pulling the weeds to canning the vegetables after they'd been picked.

  Needless to say, I was not an idle child.

  The day after Papa's first visit to Soo City, I had dutifully completed my daily projects before heading out to see Charlotte. I was anxious to tell her about the community living down by the river that Papa discovered. Charlotte was constantly telling me about her own father's travels through his Midwest territory, but I was ready to bet he'd never come across anything quite like Soo City.

  I skipped along the sidewalk, wondering how I could embellish the story a bit to make it all the more sensational. Perhaps I could say Papa saw rats and snakes and spiders crawling all over the people's shacks, all over the people themselves, and the men and women of the camp were so used to it they didn't even care. Charlotte would turn absolutely white, maybe even faint, if I was convincing enough.

  Charlotte's mother was sitting on the porch swing when I arrived at their front steps. Mrs. Besac was just about as different from my own mother as she could be. In the twenties, when Mother was attending temperance rallies and campaigning against the evils of drink, Charlotte's mother was visiting speakeasies and going to parties where she rolled down her stockings and danced the Charleston far into the night. Charlotte said her mother didn't go to these parties with her father, but with a series of men Charlotte knew as Uncle Joe, Uncle Fred, Uncle Al. There was a whole string of uncles, she said, that showed up when her father was away on business. They'd hang around for a while, then disappear again.

  I was both puzzled by and in awe of Mrs. Besac. Imagine rolling down your stockings and dancing until all hours of the night! Actually, I couldn't imagine such a thing. No woman in my family would dream of such mad behavior. I thought Mrs. Besac must be terribly courageous and fun loving, but at the same time I wondered why she rarely smiled.

  For a onetime flapper, she now appeared oddly subdued, sitting there on the porch swing in her plain white cotton dress with her bare feet tucked up beside her. Her full lips were painted the color of cherries. Her fingernails--and even her toenails, from what I could see--were polished in a matching color. Her narrow face was powdered and rouged, and her marcelled hair hung in brisk waves over her ears. Pinched between the index and middle fingers of her right hand was the slender Lucky Strike she was rarely without. She lifted the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled deeply. She held the smoke in her lungs for a moment and gazed skyward, then let it out slowly, wistfully. In her left hand was a sweating glass of lemonade, which she used as a chaser for the nicotine.

  When she saw me, her face registered no emotion at all. She simply looked at me as one might stare at a harmless curiosity. Then, as though she finally recognized who I was, she pushed at her marcelled hair with the hand that held the cigarette and said, "Hello, Ginny. Hot enough for you?"

  I climbed the porch steps and saw that in spite of the powder her forehead glistened slightly with small beads of perspiration. Now that she mentioned it, I realized my own dress was beginning to cling to my back.

  "It's pretty hot for May, isn't it, Mrs. Besac?" I agreed.

  Mrs. Besac nodded slightly and took another sip of the lemonade, her lower lip meeting the smudge of lipstick on the rim of the glass. I waited for her to invite me in to see Charlotte, but she said nothing. Instead, she continued staring off beyond the porch railing as though she were wai
ting for someone. Finally, not wanting to invite myself into the house, I asked, "Is Charlotte home?"

  Mrs. Besac, taking a drag of the Lucky Strike, frowned at me. She blinked her eyes against the smoke. "Who?" she asked.

  "Charlotte," I repeated.

  She formed her shiny lips into an O and exhaled swiftly, but all the smoke had already escaped. "Oh, Lottie. Yeah, she's upstairs. Go on up."

  Ever since Charlotte and I had announced our intention to go by our full given names rather than by Ginny and Lottie, neither of our mothers could seem to remember who we were. We constantly had to remind them to call us Virginia and Charlotte--they, who had given us the names in the first place.

  "Thanks, Mrs. Besac," I said.

  The woman managed a bland and unconvincing smile. "Sure, Ginny," she said.

  I resisted the temptation to correct her, but just to be annoying, I let the screen door bang behind me as I stepped into the house. Maybe that would show my displeasure at her insistence on calling me by a childish nickname.

  I ran past the parlor where Charlotte and I often danced ourselves into exhaustion doing the Lindy Hop and the Charleston, the Black Bottom and the Susy-Q. We were usually heavily made-up and decked out in her mother's cast-off clothes and long strings of pearls. Our imaginary audience was composed of all the males we were sweet on at the moment, and we believed ourselves to be both stunning and mischievous as we jumped around like a couple of baboons gone mad. Of course, we would generally end up on the floor in hysterics, and now I'm glad there were no actual onlookers to witness our illusions of grandeur.

  Charlotte was in her room, a spacious pink-and-white place with frilly curtains, a four-poster bed, and an otherwise assorted collection of furniture that she claimed to have inherited from various aunts and grandparents. On top of the chest of drawers an ancient electric fan worked noisily to create a current of air through the room. Every time it turned one way it ruffled the curtains, and when it swung the other way, it sent a shiver through the pages of the magazines scattered across the desk.

  Charlotte, looking cool in spite of the heat, sat at the vanity table picking through a shoe box filled with bottles, tubes, and compacts of cosmetics her mother no longer used or wanted. Since my own mother wore no makeup, I had no castoffs at home to experiment with. It didn't matter; Charlotte had plenty.

  "Finally!" she exclaimed when she saw me in the doorway. "I thought you'd never get here."

  My friend loved to speak in italics. You could just see certain words come out all slanted under the weight of emphasis she placed on them.

  "Sorry," I apologized. "I'm having trouble with the dress I'm working on, and Mama made me rip part of it out and start over."

  Charlotte wrinkled her slender nose. "I hate to sew," she announced.

  "So do I."

  "Then why do you do it?"

  "Have to."

  "How come?"

  "Mama says I have to learn."

  "I'm glad my mother can't sew."

  I shrugged. Charlotte was lucky, but I didn't want to say so. I didn't want to let her know I was envious of her freedom. She didn't have to cook or sew, and she could read "True Story" right in front of her mother, and Mrs. Besac didn't say a word.

  "Know what?" I asked, my voice loud with exaggerated excitement.

  "What?" Charlotte asked. She was looking for a particular shade of lipstick among the myriad of tubes in the box.

  "You know that hobo jungle down by the river?"

  "Yeah?" She twisted the end of a tube to make the lipstick pop out like a wagging tongue.

  "Papa says it's turned into a whole city. There's hundreds and hundreds of people living down there--women and kids, too. All of them living like bums in cardboard boxes and eating food they've dug out of garbage cans...." I went on to tell her all I could remember from Papa's description, embellishing the facts whenever possible. When Charlotte ran the lipstick over her upper lip and capped the tube without coloring the lower one, I knew I had her attention. I rambled on for at least ten minutes, arms flailing dramatically.

  When I finished, Charlotte narrowed her eyes and, hissing through one red and one pale lip, said, "Oh boy, if only my pop weren't off in St. Louis, he'd march right down there and shoot every last one of them. You think he wouldn't, but I'm telling you he would. They don't come around here looking for food anymore when they know Pop's home." She laughed shrilly, then continued. "You shoulda seen it when they came around and Pop was here. He chased them off the back porch with his rifle, calling them lazy bums and pampered poverty rats. Pampered poverty rats!" She laughed again, her dual-colored mouth wide with glee. "You should see how fast those bums can run! They may be lazy, but start to swing a rifle at them and they're slicker than greased lightning!"

  I thought Charlotte might want to go down and spy on the camp, but she didn't suggest it. Probably the idea of the rats and snakes put her off. Truthfully, I wasn't much eager to wander over there myself. The hobos that came to our back door looking for food had always frightened me, and I couldn't imagine coming across so many of them at once.

  At the same time, although I couldn't understand it, I felt myself wanting to defend these folks who had snuffed out Papa's whistle and sent him home all wrapped up in weariness and concern. I dragged a straight-backed chair across the room and sat down at the vanity table next to Charlotte. I looked at her reflection in the mirror. She had come to realize her omission and was pursing her lips together to even out the color.

  "Papa said some of those people used to be just like us," I said, "but they lost their jobs and their homes, and they don't have anywhere else to go."

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. "They're bums," she stated flatly. "Take my word for it. They could find work if they wanted to. My pop's still working, isn't he? And we still have a house and a car and clothes and stuff. Pop says it'll take more than a little depression to keep him from supporting his family. Listen, let's do the globe, huh?"

  Soo City forgotten, Charlotte pushed aside the box of makeup and set in its stead her spinning globe, our forecaster of future romantic adventures. The standard ritual was to take turns placing an index finger lightly on the globe and then, with eyes shut, give the globe a furious spin. The spinner's finger was obliged to travel up and down the surface of the globe as it was turning, passing over the equator numerous times before the globe finally came to rest. When the spinner opened her eyes, the magic orb revealed where she would spend her honeymoon. More often than not, Charlotte or I would find ourselves stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean thousands of miles from anywhere. But we were not disheartened. We simply spun again until the globe set our feet on dry land.

  Charlotte wanted to honeymoon in Africa. Her plans for her future husband and herself included sailing the Nile, wandering off into the wilds of Kenya on safari, and visiting the pyramids of Egypt. Of course, she intended to be rather old when she married, maybe as old as twenty-six or twenty-seven. She wanted to remain single for a long time so she could have adventures before settling down.

  "But going to Africa with your husband sounds like an adventure to me," I'd argue.

  "Sure," she'd say, "but I want to spend a good long time shopping around, so when I go to Africa I don't end up with a dud."

  My own dreams centered around Europe. I pictured my husband and me snuggling together in a gondola in Venice and taking midnight walks along the River Seine in Paris.

  Charlotte may have had an inkling, but I myself was clueless as to what actually took place on a honeymoon. I invariably envisioned a couple all decked out in their finest, sitting on a hotel balcony and gazing up at the moon. The husband would interrupt the blissful silence at calculated intervals to call his wife "Honey" and other terms of endearment--hence, the term honeymoon. That such an event might be hampered by bad weather or an invisible new moon never occurred to me. In my imagination, the night was always clear and star studded, the moon as round and luminous and exotic as the blue moon I'd onc
e seen rising up over the city of Minneapolis.

  And so we spun, hoping the globe would take us to the place of our dreams. But even if it didn't, even if the globe predicted that we'd be gazing at the moon in some desolate place like Mongolia or Siberia, we decided that even there we'd find romance, as long as our husbands were handsome and rich.

  On that particular afternoon, Charlotte landed somewhere in the East Indies--Borneo, I think--while I found myself headed for Honduras. "I'll never go there," I murmured, lifting my finger defiantly from the globe.

  "Yes, you will," Charlotte said firmly, "if that's where your husband wants to go. It's either that or stay an old maid."

  "I suppose," I sighed, though I really did have my heart set on Europe.

  "Come on, let's see who we're going to go with." Charlotte pulled out of the vanity drawer a little jewelry box that played "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" when you opened the lid. My friend instructed me to go first.

  Again I shut my eyes. I fumbled with the lid, and while the notes sang "... call you sweetheart, I'm in love with you ..." I pulled out one of the folded pieces of paper from inside.

  "What's it say?" Charlotte asked.

  "Two," I replied.

  "Charlie Chaplin."

  "Yup."

  "Some honeymoon."

  But I was glad. If I had to spend my first days of marriage in a place like Central America, Charlie Chaplin was the man I wanted to be with.

  "Okay, my turn," Charlotte said. She screwed up her face into a tight knot while she slid her hand into the box. She unfolded the paper and smiled satisfactorily. "One!" she cried. "That means Al Capone."

  Charlotte was in her gangster phase. Later in the summer when the Olympic games were being held in Los Angeles, she'd turn her allegiance from gangsters to athletes. But for the past couple of weeks, ever since we saw Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, she found something enormously appealing about the men of the underworld. Had she selected paper number two from the jewelry box, she would have been traveling to Borneo with the whole Klondike O'Donnell gang.