Meaning a Life Read online

  Emma said to me one day, “Mary, would you take Pete to have his hair cut?” He was small and frightened, but we stood by each other; Pete didn’t cry, and I was proud of him—he looked manly with his shorn head and his slender little neck. He was the first young child I had known, and we loved each other.

  On my block in Kalispell I had been in and out of every house on the block and knew, at least intuitively, the ways of parents and children. By the time I was ten years old we had moved to Seattle and then to Grants Pass, a small town which differed greatly from Kalispell, Montana. On my block in Grants Pass was one household that was a remnant of a farm, with a cow and chickens, kept by an old couple so helpless and filthy that they were in disrepute. I visited them occasionally to buy eggs, which my mother thought was a kindness, and she was not afraid the eggs would be contaminated by the dirty farm. The farm-woman was old, hunched, and hobbling; old machinery lay neglected, the doors of the barn and sheds hung at angles, and utensils were scattered about the porch, kitchen, and yard. Chickens wandered in and out of the house, and the cow was led each day to a field at some distance. Probably the farmer had sold bits and pieces of his land as the town grew until his farm was untenable, unviable, and unproductive. All the rest of the houses on our block had been recently built by newcomers. Our friends the Whorleys from Los Angeles lived at the end of the street, while next to them two families of Osage Indians from Oklahoma had bought large pieces of land and lived a strange half-Indian, half-town existence. They were oil-rich, and each person in the family old enough to drive had a late-model car. Mr. Whorley saw one of the little boys one day, sawing through the legs of the new grand piano. The two older children of the families were a handsome, dark, reserved and intelligent eighteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl so beautiful it was breathtaking. They each drove a new sports car, dressed elegantly and formed an elite of themselves, the only dark-skinned people in the area; their beauty almost burned the town. They lived in a home in which old ways were more dominant than new ways. The older women looked like women on a reservation, with loose dresses and braids. The father, head of both families, was a somewhat heavy, dark-skinned man who was very dignified. The family made no friends in the town. The boy and the girl, with all their elegance, carried alone the weight of being different in the little town so full of prejudice that my family, too, was ostracized for being from Montana and Seattle—we were called “foreigners.” These Indians were only tolerated because they were rich. Why the father picked Grants Pass for their home was mysterious to me; perhaps he had seen so much discrimination that he saw no difference between one town and another, or perhaps even more discrimination had existed in Oklahoma. At any rate, they stayed, and the children lived fairly normal lives with the other young people of the town.

  There was little chance to know neighbors well; almost all the old families knew each other, but we were the newcomers. I was the only one in our family to find haven in houses not my own. I made friends with Prudence, the daughter of a grocery store owner. Prudence was a polio victim, hopelessly crippled and confined to a wheelchair, but she was intelligent and eager to be friends with me. I took her out in her wheelchair and we talked; as she was several years older than I, she was full of quirky information and thought. Other friends, the Voorhees, were of Dutch extraction and had come from New York. Mr. Voorhees ran the town’s only newspaper while his household was run by his cousin, Miss Benedict. This family was well educated and interesting, their attitudes were open, they welcomed me and I dropped in at their home often. They took me with them on picnics and excursions. After my father died I went often to these two homes; they accepted me so simply that I found security and stability with them. My family did not talk about a wide range of topics or show me a way out into the world, and these friends helped me decide to go to college. But it was the County Agent, Jessie Griswold, who in precise and practical terms convinced me that I could go to college and that I could support myself there. The Voorhees advised me to go to the University instead of the Agricultural College, not realizing how little I was able to deal with the more sophisticated city people who attended the University.

  What was the character of Grants Pass? The greatest number of the residents of this town 400 miles from a city mined or worked in the lumber industry or farmed; most of them were not interested in enriching their lives in other ways. The library had its pitiful few books, and the school had no library at all. The town’s inhospitable attitude toward all newcomers closed it to new ideas as well, and the itinerant agricultural work-force drifted through. It was a one-street town settled by forty-niners who had come over the Rogue River trail from Gold Beach on the coast, hunting for gold. The attitudes reflected in the schools were southern attitudes—a Ku Klux Klan organization existed, and Catholics were not welcome; Negroes were not permitted to stay overnight. Prospectors searched, and when one gold strike was made every shovel, every pan, and all equipment for panning gold was sold out in the town and we would see men bending over streams washing the gravel. Always a little gold was in the pan, but usually so little that a day’s work barely paid a day’s wages. Today the search for gold continues in southern Oregon, but volcanic activity and earthquakes have broken the veins of gold, preventing large quantities from being found in one place. Settlers from the hill country of Missouri and Kentucky had come to this valley; they loved the hills, guns, hunting, fishing, and searching for gold. One-room schoolhouses with a local teacher like Emma taught the three R’s. The children at the school ran from age six to sixteen; the usual progression was to go on to high school in town, but this meant that the student had to be supported while in town or had to get to town each day, and so those not intent on an education had only to continue at the local school until they passed the age of sixteen, when attendance was no longer legally required. Children in the country were needed on the farms, and if they reached the age for dating and marriage before they had been introduced to town life they usually preferred to stay at home; they married a neighbor and continued the old way of life, fishing, hunting, and farming the meager hill-country soil. For the woman, childbearing and housework became her whole future life. Country people were suspicious of townspeople, and townspeople were suspicious of outsiders. The fears and angers resulting from these unresolved and misunderstood differences were not surmounted, and the results were petty destructive ways. “Foreigners” tended to choose “foreigners” for friends, townspeople usually chose townspeople, and few country people had a view of a world larger than their farm and the surrounding forests. My family aroused great suspicion; I think we were somehow shocking to the sober business people after Papa died.

  Mama and Paul invested in one get-rich-quick scheme after another. They were gleeful, imaginative and unsuccessful so far as getting rich was concerned, but with each new scheme they hoped anew that they would emerge suddenly rich. Grants Pass was already, in 1921, a highway town based on automobiles, and the buildings were strung out on both sides of Main Street. In Southern Oregon there is a wet season with months of rain, and overnight the country turns as green as a rainforest; in late spring the dry season comes and everything turns brown—the land that is not irrigated turns dry, and summer is hot. An irrigation dam was being built when my father chose this valley, but even with irrigation agriculture did not develop very much, although almost anything will grow in the rich soil of the valley bottom.

  Papa’s preoccupation with his impending death and his responsibility to provide for us after his death did not allow me to find the world outside with him and through his ideas. I never saw his family again after his death; that tie was broken. I studied and worked during the following summer, passed the examinations, and applied for acceptance to the University. I made some clothes to take with me to Eugene in the fall. My brothers had to explain to my mother that, although my father’s will left her all the assets of his estate, she still had a responsibility to me and should help to pay my expenses at
college.

  At Eugene I was given a place to live in a small apartment with three other girls. No jobs were offered, and I did not know how to look for one. I was invited to a sorority dinner as a possible member, but I was uncomfortable with the sorority girls, with their bourgeois tastes and needs. Early marriage to the boy most likely to enter bourgeois life seemed their first concern. I settled into dormitory life with a senior student named Onslow, a cool intelligent girl, a sophomore named Sally from Portland who became my friend, and Katherine, a rancher’s daughter from eastern Oregon who was an aggressive bully of a girl—she wore my clothes without asking and trod rough-shod as though she were too large for apartment living. Girls in the dormitory or in class did not speak to other girls if they were walking with a boy.

  I do not know how I met the boy who became my friend. He was a mathematician, a senior honor student, a tall shy boy from Marshfield who told me of the beauty of the marshes. I wondered at a life in the marshes, with plank-walks laid over outcroppings to marshy islands. I began writing dreamy romantic prose of green watery country. There was a fairy-tale quality to knowing him—perhaps he lived in a fantasy. We went for walks at night in the hills around Eugene, and we peered into houses where people were sitting, reading by their fires. One night he brought a revolver, which we shot once to see if the people in their snug houses took note, but no one even looked up. He had a younger sister whom he loved, and we bought her a book about marsh birds.

  Because my father died of cancer, I said that I wanted to be a doctor, but the first term I had a “D” for chemistry. The instructor looked me up to tell me that he thought it was his fault, that I had not understood that the first semester’s work required memorizing the tables of symbols and quantities. I could have memorized them, but it seemed to me stupid to be memorizing at a university. Chemistry was without interest for me, and the “D” discouraged me further. I left the university at Christmas-time; my boyfriend wrote to invite me to the Senior Prom, and I went back to go to the dance with him. He had not yet kissed me, and my needs were for a lover, but I think he was a virgin. He asked me to marry him; this offer to marry surprised me, and I said “Yes” just as girls in novels say “Yes” if asked to marry; but I did not intend to marry, certainly not at age sixteen, nor with this boy. I had to write and tell him I could not marry him, and I never heard from him again. At home I worked, saved more money, and planned to go to the Agricultural College next fall in Corvallis. Meanwhile, a new boy had come to town at the moment I had come home, and although we were both of high school age we were both out of school. This boy had been a lightweight boxer, and intellectually he was of no interest to me, but I went out with him and kept the relationship for the sex. I was glad not to have to think about him very much, although I think he gossiped about me in the town.

  While I was dating this boy, Noel asked me to go for a drive, and as we drove along he asked, “Mary, you don’t intend to marry that boy, do you?

  I was shocked and said “No,” firmly.

  As he turned the car to go home, Noel said, “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  I didn’t know what freedom and independence meant for me, but I was at an adequate age for sex, which I accepted as I needed when it was offered. Sex provided only a momentary fulfillment, and I did not find any way through my first relationships out of the trap I was in. I found instead that sex itself was a need, and it formed part of a greater need for a larger world, but it did not give me an identity. As I reached the age of sixteen, I saw in Grants Pass that sexual relationships were for the most part made and lived with diffidence. And I too entered into relationships with no ties and no expectations that they would solve anything.

  On Monday morning, of course, we all met on Main street or at school in our roles of wife, teacher, husband, banker, student, businessman, preacher, etc., but underneath this veneer the couplings went on, perhaps in a freer manner than in communities that have more to occupy them. Only two of my girlfriends seemed not to be engaged in sexual encounters. I have heard this small-town sex life described as circular sex.

  Love & Escape

  1926–1927

  In the fall of 1926 I entered the Agricultural College at Corvallis. At the first assembly a speaker told of Mussolini and his Blackshirts’ march on Rome, the first political event of which I had been made aware. At the second assembly Carl Sandburg sang and read his famous poem, “The fog / came / on little cat feet.” He sang “My Little Old Sod Shanty,” a song my mother had sung, and for the first time I heard this song and others as songs of my country, of the West. Hearing Sandburg read and sing I gained respect for my derivations, my roots in the United States.

  Jack Lyons, a young English professor who had taken his degree at Berkeley the year before, loved poetry, and in his class he introduced us to contemporary verse. I don’t think any of us in his class had known that poetry was being written in our times. He read poems of Vachel Lindsay, Millay, Dickinson, Cummings, Jeffers, Stephens, Pound, Eliot and others. He was in love with poetry, and he talked to us and asked us to write; he was eager that we too find poetry. I wrote, my first attempts since trying to write the poetry of my friend’s marshes. I wrote poems of my father’s death and of the forests I loved.

  George Oppen sat in the front row, directly in front of me, and after a month or so Jack Lyons introduced us to each other. One day when I was sitting on the library steps George asked me to go out with him that evening, and I agreed. He came for me in his roommate’s Model T Ford, and we drove out into the country, sat and talked, made love, and talked until morning. The moon made such a white light—we could almost see colors, it was so bright—and in the low spots the fog came up toward morning, forming a lake. George has written:

  THE FORMS OF LOVE

  Parked in the fields

  All night

  So many years ago,

  We saw

  A lake beside us

  When the moon rose.

  I remember

  Leaving that ancient car

  Together. I remember

  Standing in the white grass

  Beside it. We groped

  Our way together

  Downhill in the bright

  Incredible light

  Beginning to wonder

  Whether it could be lake

  Or fog

  We saw, our heads

  Ringing under the stars we walked

  To where it would have wet our feet

  Had it been water

  We talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring. When George said, “I am Jewish,” I thought, The Bible! Jews! “That’s good,” I said, and we went on to tell as much of ourselves as we could in that first night.

  When we returned in the morning, many heads were thrust from the windows of my dormitory, watching us. I went inside, and someone told me to go to see the Dean of Women. I was expelled from college for coming in past the dormitory curfew. I collected my belongings and spent my last night at college with Nellie, a remarkable girl and my friend from Jack Lyons’ poetry group. I took the bus home.

  I found George Oppen and poetry at one moment, but the college expelled me and suspended George as a result of our meeting. Choice may not have been apparent to someone outside our situation, but what happened to us, our joined lives, seems to us both choice and inevitability. Once we found that we shared the same vision, our response to each other was to stay together, but it certainly was not easy for me to get away from Grants Pass. My brothers heard my story without comment, and I went back to work in my family’s store, bewildered at how fast I had been removed from college and the life I had begun to see for myself there. Looking back now, I see that it was not necessary to have been expelled; I would only have needed an adequate pretext to stay out all night. But I did not make that choice.

  Mama passed through Corvallis a little while after I had
departed. She told the Dean that the Dean had interfered with my education, and that the Dean exceeded her responsibility in expelling me. I was surprised when Mama reported her conference; I had supposed, when she had made difficulties about giving me money, that she did not want me to go to college. I heard my family disapprove the strict rules, the curfew for girls and not for boys at the college, and I benefited from their strength. In what they took as a defeat for me, my family closed ranks around me; and for a few months I lived again in my mother’s house.

  George arrived in Grants Pass in a torrent of rain in his roommate’s Model T. When he stopped in a garage in the center of town and got out of the car, the man said to him, “What hotel are you going to?”

  George replied, “That one across the street.”

  But the man said, “It’s run by Catholics.”

  George went to it anyway, and then he made his way to our house to meet my mother and brothers of whom he’d heard on our first night together. Brave young man to come into our stronghold! George and I went out in the rain in the Model T. South of Grants Pass we passed the Rogue River dam; the rain was now nearly a cloudburst, and the water flooding over the dam was dramatic. The dam-gates were lowered to release the pressure of the water, and the force of trees and floating debris swept the banks clean of stumps, trees and small buildings. We stopped at a place marked “Tourist Cabins”; inside our cabin was a little stove, and while George built the fire I bought crackers and cheese and toasted them on the stove. Talking together, it became clear that all we needed was to stay together, and we could do the things we wanted to do: go out into the world together, discover the world, and become whatever was in store for us to be. The comfort of our first bed, our first fire, our first home were all in that little cabin, at the time of the Rogue’s first flood.

  We started back to Grants Pass on the road that followed the river. When we came to a high spot before the town we parked the car and walked to the bridge, where we stood and watched the water creep higher and higher, to the roadway of the bridge. Chicken coops, pots and pans, even trees were held against the bridge, adding to the weight of the water. We turned to look at our car, which we had left on high ground; the sheriff who was standing with us turned too to see his car, left on the roadway, disappear as the water closed over it. We waited until the water stopped rising and we could cross the bridge safely; as we entered my mother’s house I turned off the kerosene lamp Mama had left burning for us. George went into my room and I went upstairs to sleep. Mama must have awakened at our homecoming—she went to the mantel and burned her fingers on the still-hot lamp!