A Room of My Own Read online

  We had crossed one street and were only halfway down the next block when Charlotte stopped suddenly. She pressed her forehead up against the window of an empty shop and peered inside. "Look, Virginia," she said, "this is where Mama used to love to come and shop for clothes. It's gone out of business, and they didn't leave so much as a garter belt behind. Take a look."

  I pressed my own forehead against the surprisingly cool glass and cupped my hands like horse blinders beside my eyes. Charlotte was right. The place was completely empty. Mother and I had never shopped there, but I did remember passing by the display window now and again and catching a glimpse of the sleek clothes on the mannequins. "I wonder what happened," I whispered.

  "I don't know," Charlotte said. "Wilma--that was the owner--she always had a pretty good business going. Least it seemed so."

  "Maybe she moved the store somewhere else," I suggested.

  "Maybe," Charlotte agreed.

  We looked at the sign in the corner of the window. It said "For Lease" and gave a phone number. Usually when businesses moved, they taped their new address to the front door of the old place. But Wilma had packed up and vanished without a forwarding address.

  "Oh well," Charlotte said resignedly. "Won't Mama have a fit when I tell her!"

  We continued walking. Up ahead we saw a shabbily dressed man accept a coin from a better dressed one. The scruffy man lifted his cap in appreciation and stuck the coin in his shirt pocket.

  "He's a beggar," Charlotte whispered from the corner of her mouth. "Just walk right by as if you don't see him."

  "But all I have is a nickel anyway," I said.

  "That's a gold mine to him. Stare straight ahead," Charlotte ordered.

  I couldn't imagine that the pathetic-looking figure now walking toward us would ask for a handout from two young girls. But suddenly I remembered what Charlotte said about hobos killing for money, and I wondered whether this beggar would accost us and slit our throats for the sake of a nickel. I wished I had gone home rather than agreeing to go to Pete and Jerry's.

  But the man passed by without giving us so much as a glance, and while I breathed a sigh of relief, Charlotte waved her hand under her nose.

  "Whew! Beggars stink, don't they?"

  I hadn't noticed. I was too happy to be alive with my nickel safe in my pocket.

  "There's another one over there," she continued, nodding toward a man on the other side of the street. "They're all over the place."

  There had always been panhandlers in this part of town, but once again Charlotte was right. Two on the same block was a rare sight. As we continued to walk, we not only passed two more panhandlers, but three shoe shiners, a couple of kids hawking pencils, and a man on a street corner selling apples.

  "Bothersome, aren't they--all these sidewalk salesmen," Charlotte remarked with a slight tilt of her chin. "That's what Mama says. She says back in the old days people ran respectable businesses in their shops. They didn't go out into the streets and try to shove their goods into people's faces."

  "Did she say what changed it?" I asked.

  "The Depression, of course."

  "I thought you didn't believe in the Depression."

  "I don't, but Mama does."

  "I don't know, Charlotte. I mean, they're always talking on the radio about the Depression."

  Charlotte shrugged.

  "And what about all those people down at the shantytown--"

  "But look at us, will you?" she interrupted. "Are we starving? Are we poor?"

  No. As I'd already realized myself, we weren't starving, and if we were poor we didn't know it.

  We moved along past empty shops with "For Rent" signs in the windows, past stores that were holding closing-out sales, past employment offices with "No Help Wanted" signs nailed to the doors. Charlotte began to speculate aloud as to the whereabouts of Mitchell Quakenbush (he hadn't in fact shown up at the theater), but I scarcely heard a word she said. I was still a little nervous about going to Pete and Jerry's, but more than that, the farther we walked the more convinced I became that something terrible was happening right here in the streets of our hometown. The city was quieter, more subdued, than I had ever known it to be. There were fewer cars in the streets, fewer pedestrians on the sidewalks (not counting the panhandlers and two-bit salesmen), and fewer businesses that were actually open for business. I suddenly felt as though I were walking through the belly of a dying man.

  "How much farther to Pete and Jerry's?" I asked.

  "You know where it is," Charlotte replied with a hint of annoyance. "Around this corner and down another couple of blocks. Say, look at that line of men over there. Goes all the way around the corner and down the next block. I didn't know there was a movie theater down there."

  When we turned the corner, we discovered that the men were not in line for a late afternoon show. On the other side of the street from where we stood was a morbid red brick building. A crude sign over the door identified it as the Lower Street Mission. Charlotte and I stared dumbfounded at the line that snaked backward from the mission door. It was an ill-clad, unshaven, forlorn group of men that stood there one behind another like obedient schoolchildren waiting for milk. They were eerily quiet, the only evidence of life their constant agitated fidgeting beneath the hot sun. With eyes downcast and shoulders slumped, they wiped at their foreheads with soiled handkerchiefs, the rims of their caps, or sometimes with just the back of their hands. The line seemed barely to move at all. Every few moments the men shuffled forward half a step or so. One man, better dressed and more confident than the others, went down the line handing out what looked to me like Bible tracts. I figured he was a volunteer with the Mission. Food was never dished out at a mission without a side order of the Gospel. The men in line received the pamphlets dully. Some glanced at them and stuffed them into shirt pockets. Others tossed them aside.

  "What on earth are they doing?" Charlotte whispered.

  "It's a breadline," I replied just as quietly. The aura of anger, humiliation, and despair hung so heavily about these men that it dissolved any trace of joy that had clung to me from my film trip into make-believe with Buster Keaton.

  "Oh yeah, a breadline. I've heard about them."

  "Don't you remember? This is the mission where we sent our money."

  She nodded. "Well, I hope they appreciated it. Come on, let's go. I'm as hot as your mama's temper and dying for that cherry Coke."

  The occasional wind had carried one of the pamphlets to our side of the street, dropping it gently almost at our feet. I picked it up and caught Charlotte by the arm. "Just a minute. Listen to this. It says, `Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.' I don't remember that being in the Bible."

  Charlotte nodded knowingly. "I think it's in the Old Testament somewhere, probably in Exodus. Isn't that where all the slaves got together and left Egypt?"

  "Oh yeah." I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember if this was something Moses had announced to the Hebrews to get them riled up enough to walk out on Pharaoh. Though I'd read the story numerous times, I didn't recall this particular verse. But, I reasoned, it was hard to remember the details of all the Bible stories. There were so many.

  "At any rate," Charlotte continued, "the man handing out these tracts is knocking on the wrong door. These men aren't workers, they're beggars--the whole lot of them."

  "Well, maybe not, Charlotte," I said, rising to their defense.

  "What do you mean, maybe not? They're standing around waiting for a handout, aren't they?"

  "Yeah, I guess so, but--hey, who's that man there?"

  "What man where?"

  "The one with the tie."

  Charlotte pushed out her jaw and squinted. "If you mean the one with the wing-tip shoes, I've never seen him before in my life."

  He did have on wing-tip shoes. What was a man wearing a tie and wing-tip shoes doing in a breadline?

  "I know that man," I stated with certainty.

  "Yeah, well,
it's no secret that you favor tramps. He looks a little bit like Charlie Chaplin."

  "I don't mean--"

  "Come on, before I die of thirst."

  It was her turn to grab my arm and pull me along, but we'd gone only a couple of steps when from the corner of my eye I saw one of the men stagger and fall forward onto the hot asphalt of the street.

  "Charlotte, look!" I cried. I pulled my arm from her grasp and instinctively started across the street toward the man who had fainted. I have no idea how I might have revived him had I reached him, but I couldn't get that far, for the crowd of men that gathered around him. I stood in the middle of the street with my fingertips pressed to my lips.

  "Go on, little miss, get out of the road 'fore a car comes along and runs you over."

  I looked up into the face of a rough-looking fellow, a man who seemed hardened by the years, but when he spoke his voice was gentle.

  "It's just the hunger and the heat that got him. Happens all the time. Go on now, you run along 'fore you get hurt."

  I turned to go, but as I turned I saw again the familiar-faced man, and this time he noticed me, too. A look of recognition, then of fear, or perhaps embarrassment, flashed across his face. He quickly turned his head away and coughed, but the cough sounded contrived. It almost seemed he wanted to hide from me.

  "Come on, Virginia!" Charlotte called. "The sun's starting to burn the skin right off me."

  Without a word I joined her, and in spite of the heat, we ran the remaining two blocks to Pete and Jerry's. When we arrived, panting and holding our sides, we found the door locked.

  "Drat!" Charlotte cried. She actually stamped her foot on the sidewalk as she repeated her exclamation. "Drat and double drat! Just what in the world is going on around here? Pete and Jerry's has shut down, too."

  I didn't answer. My mind had just called up a memory of the familiar face waiting for a bowl of soup. I saw myself holding Papa's hand as we took our weekly pre-Depression walk to the bank to deposit money. I always felt a chill run through me as we entered the lobby of that plush establishment. The place reeked of wealth, and I knew that beyond the marble counter where the tellers stood, there was a huge vault that held all the money in the world. Sometimes Papa would take me into the office of the president, who was an acquaintance of his. The man sat there looking very splendid in his double-breasted suit and his wing-tip shoes.

  His wing-tip shoes. That down-and-out fellow outside the Mission had once been the president of Papa's bank!

  As Charlotte had so aptly put it, just what in the world was going on around here? How could it be that bank presidents ended up in breadlines, that our streets were crowded with beggars, and that Wilma, Pete, and Jerry had all disappeared overnight?

  Chapter Five

  The Depression began to seem real to me after I saw the breadline at the Lower Street Mission. Just a few days later it really hit home when Mother told me that Uncle Jim had lost his job down at the grain mill and that now he and Aunt Sally and two of my cousins, Rufus and Luke, would be moving in with us. About a year earlier the oldest boy, eighteen-year-old Jimmy Jr. had hopped the Soo Line with some friends and was traveling the country in search of work, along with about 200,000 other boys and young men. Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally received an occasional postcard, but they knew that by the time a card arrived from, say, Omaha or St. Louis, Jimmy Jr. had long since moved on to someplace else.

  At first the prospect of relatives living with us seemed rather exciting, but that thought lasted only until Mother told me to clear my things out of my room because it would soon belong to Aunt Sally and Uncle Jim.

  I was too stunned to speak for a moment. My room had always been my room, from the very beginning. I had grown up in that room, journeying all the way from infancy to adolescence. That room was where I dreamed my dreams and hoped all my hopes. It was where I opened my eyes on each new day and closed my eyes in sleep at night. It was the place to which I retreated when I wanted solitude. It was my refuge, the only little space in all the world that was wholly mine.

  When I found my voice, I discovered it to be several decibels higher in volume than usual. "They can't have my room, Mama! It's my room!"

  Mother looked at me without so much as the slightest expression passing over her face. "Your aunt and uncle need the room, and so they will have it. The decision's been made and it's final."

  "And just where do you expect me to sleep?" I cried. "In the bathtub? On the kitchen table? Outside on the porch swing?"

  "Certainly not," Mother said calmly. We were in Mama and Papa's bedroom at the sewing machine. Mother was inspecting the apron I had just finished--one of the punishment garments. She snipped a piece of thread that was dangling from the hem and said, "You'll move in with the girls. They're still small enough that the three of you will fit nicely in their double bed."

  "Mama! You can't expect me to share a bed with Claudia and Molly! I'll be kicked and drooled on all night. I'll never get any sleep. I'll grow sick from exhaustion. I'll--"

  "Nonsense," Mother interrupted. "You'll do just fine, all three of you."

  "Oh, Mama," I groaned, picturing myself squeezed into that dark little closet of a room with my two sisters. Because my own room was on the east side of the house, it caught the morning light, and sometimes when I sat on the bed reading or memorizing poems, the sun shone in across me, and I could almost feel the airy footsteps of angels as they climbed down the sunbeams to earth. The room my little sisters shared was on the north side of the house, and because of an enormous red maple just beyond its single window, it got little light at all. "Oh, Mama!" I exclaimed again. Tears came to my eyes, and I couldn't keep them from slithering down my cheeks, though I was ashamed for Mother to see me cry. I was trying so hard to convince her I was grown up, and shedding tears would only work against me. But I couldn't help it. My room--the one little alcove of the house that was all mine, that had always been mine--was now lost to me, and I felt I was being exiled to a strange land.

  Mother surprised me by patting my hand and saying kindly, "I'm sorry, Virginia. Truly I am. I know I'm asking a lot of you, and if there were any other way--"she paused and shook her head--"but there isn't."

  I sniffed and dabbed at my wet cheeks with the back of my hand. "What about Simon's room? Can't they have his room?"

  "Your cousins will be moving in with Simon. Even then, one of them will have to sleep on a pallet on the floor. Probably Simon, since he's the youngest. So you see, you're not the only one making a sacrifice."

  I wondered what sacrifice Mother and Papa would be making. Sure, the relatives moving in might be an imposition for them, but at least they would still have their own room, their own bed. Quietly, I slid a spool over the spool pin and began threading the machine. I had intended to start work on a skirt that morning--the pattern was all cut out and ready to be stitched--but I suddenly felt completely drained of energy. Had Mother not been there beside me, I would have run to my room, flung myself across the bed, and howled like a newborn.

  After a moment I asked dully, "Why can't they stay in their own house, Mama?"

  "I told you. Your uncle Jim lost his job a few days back, and since he and Sally are already in debt, they won't be able to keep up with the rent. They can't stay there."

  "But can't Uncle Jim get another job?"

  Mother sighed heavily. "Not likely. Not in these times."

  "Well," I asked hesitantly, "how long will they be here?"

  "I can't answer that, Virginia. I just don't know. But it could be quite some time, so don't get your hopes up that you'll be getting your room back anytime soon."

  I pressed the bobbin into the bobbin case and sniffed again. My mind stumbled over itself in an attempt to come up with a solution to this problem, a solution that the grown-ups had somehow overlooked. "Surely, Mama," I said feebly, "surely there must be some way Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally don't have to lose their home--"

  Mother shook her head. Wisps of hair stuck out from h
er bun and floated about her head like gossamer. I noticed there were a few more gray strands than before. In fact, she looked older and more tired than I had ever seen her. "There's no other way, Virginia. You don't expect me to send my own sister to live down in that shantytown, do you? Down there with the others who have lost their jobs and their homes? No. As long as your father and I have our health and our senses, no family of ours will go hungry or without a roof over their heads."

  I rose from my chair and went to gather the pieces of my skirt from the floor where I had cut them out, thinking I would begin to stitch them together. But Mother changed my plans.

  "Leave that until later, Virginia," she said quietly, not lifting her eyes to look at me. "You'd best start cleaning out your room this morning. They'll be coming the end of the week."

  Today was Wednesday. That meant I had only two more days to call my room my own.

  Mother continued. "You might as well start by cleaning out your closet and carrying some of your clothes up to the attic to store them there. That closet in the girls' room won't hold all three of you girls' clothes."

  "But how am I supposed to wear my clothes if they're up in the attic?" I asked. I stood there with two pieces of my skirt in my hands. The cloth became wrinkled as my hands closed into fists of frustration.

  "Just keep aside what you need and store the rest. Heaven knows you have more clothes than any child ought to have anyway."

  Then why am I slaving over this sewing machine making more skirts and dresses for school? I wondered. I wanted to throw the question at Mother, but I knew better. My tears dried on my cheeks, and my sadness was swallowed up by anger.

  I loved my uncle Jim, but in that moment I sided with my maternal grandparents in their opinion of him. Though it had all taken place long before I was born, I knew from Aunt Sally's stories that Grandfather and Grandmother Foster were strongly opposed to their daughter marrying Jim Dubbin. "He's working class," they had protested. "He'll never make a decent living, never give you a decent home."