Nor from the grave was risen.
Now I am all alone, Jesus,
You are my only friend
I want to come home to you, Jesus,
So an angel down for me send.
I want to be with Papa
He’s up there with you too
So are Johnny and little Mildred and Bertha
They all died of the flu.’
The woman’s name was Mrs Halvorsen and according to her she had buried everyone she could get her hands on. In addition to Johnny, little Mildred, Bertha and Papa, who had all gone out just like lights, and within minutes of each other during the flu epidemic after World War I, there had been innumerable little Charlies, Dannys, Carls, Helwigs and Irmas who smothered in their beds, swelled up and died, choked to death on baby teeth, or just came in and announced they were going to Jesus and did.
Talking to Mrs Halvorsen was the equivalent of attending hundreds of funerals, but she was very kind and brought me little bags of Sirup Spisser, Fattigman and Sand Kakers, which I ate during Shorthand so that that winter my notes were not only wrong but always crummy. Mrs Halvorsen was one of the very few of us students who had been published. Her poems had been published in religious papers both in Norway and the United States, and though she hadn’t been paid anything we were all very proud of her.
Another friend of mine at Writing class wrote personal experience stories, all very depressing, about how she was fired and not paid, about one place she worked where the woman was so stingy they only bought a half a pound of hamburger for dinner for themselves and their two servants, and about the time she slipped on the sidewalk and broke her hip and the city wouldn’t pay her. She had a stack of rejection slips about nine feet high and couldn’t understand why.
“I tell de trut”, she said. “Dere is not vun vord I write dat is not de trut.” I told her that I thought she should write about happier things, not be so sad, and cited Mark Twain as an example. She said, “You mean I should make yokes?” I said “Yes”, and so she went home and laboriously inserted Pat and Mike ‘yokes’ here and there in her sad little manuscripts.
A little fat Greek man thought the idea behind successful creative writing was quantity not quality, and he came staggering into each session with about a hundred pounds of badly written, greasy manuscript in pencil on scratch paper, about a moronic detective and an even stupider police captain, who could never catch a big gang of killers and robbers who continually robbed a little Greek grocery store run by the cleverest little fellow ever to appear on a grubby piece of scratch paper.
The class criticizers were so relentlessly cruel to him they almost made him cry, so Mrs Halvorsen and I invited him to have coffee with us and we told him we thought he was a genius. He said, “I got lotsa ideas. I write all night lotsa times.” We told him that some day he would be famous and he was so grateful he brought us each a bottle of Metaxa brandy.
One time during the depression I tired of the regular Public Evening School and registered in one run by the WPA. This night school had one shorthand teacher, who for some strange reason held the class in a different room every night and lived in mortal fear of Government spies.
When I had dates pick me up at the school, as I often did, and they came early and signalled at me through the door, she would jump up from her desk, shout, “Who’s out there? Who is he—what does he want?” in her excitement dropping her books and her pencils, even her glasses, which she stamped on one night. Once, when she seemed more upset than usual, a friend of mine, a shy young lawyer, appeared and she threw open the door to the hall and shouted at him, “Let me see your credentials. If you’re going to snoop around here you’ve got to show your credentials.”
Mary was right, I never met any executives at night school, and it didn’t improve my shorthand much, but there were many times when I found it most comforting to look around a big class and feel that we were all failures together.
11
Bills! Bills! Bills!
A BILL IS A THING THAT comes in a windowed envelope and causes men to pull in their lips and turn the oilburner down to sixty degrees, and women to look shifty-eyed and say, ‘Someone must have been charging on my account.’
A bill collector is a man with a loud voice who hates everybody. A collection agency is a collection of bill collectors with loud voices who hate everybody and always know where she works.
I could no more have a complete feeling of kinship with someone who has never had bills than I could with someone who doesn’t like dogs. Owing money is not pleasant and undoubtedly stems from weakness, but those of us who have known the burden of debt; have spent our long wakeful night hours peering into that black sinkhole labelled ‘the future’; have grown wild with frustration trying to yank and pull one dollar into the shape and size of five; have flinched at the sight of any windowed envelope; have cringed with embarrassment at the stentorian voices of bill collectors; have been wilted by money-lenders’ searing questions; and have often resorted to desperate dreams (in my case usually involving scenes where a beautifully dressed, charming, red-haired lady says to a lot of different people, ‘Your pleading just bores me—close my account!’), to emerge finally, if we are able, kicked and beaten into a reasonable facsimile of a human being and/or dogliker.
Which is why, I guess, I’ve never felt very close to bankers. Bankers remind me of a little girl I used to play with in Butte, Montana—a little girl named Emily, who always had a large supply of jelly beans which she carried in a little striped paper bag, the top of which she kept closed and tightly twisted. When Emily wanted a jelly bean she untwisted her bag, reached in, took one, put it in her mouth, retwisted the bag and told us, her loyal playmates drooling on the sidelines, “Gee, kids, I’d like to give you some jelly beans, I really would, but my mother won’t let me.”
Experience has convinced me that all bankers are little Emilys. The only time they untwist their little striped bags and take out a jelly bean or two is after you have proved conclusively that you already have plenty of jelly beans of your own and aren’t hungry anyway. When you don’t have any jelly beans and are starving they say, “Gee, kids, I’d like to give you some jelly beans, I really would, but my Board won’t let me.”
The best pal I’d like to have least after a banker, is a credit manager. Credit managers are people who, by birth or training or both, live entirely in the past, have no faith in the future, are not interested in the present, hold grudges indefinitely or at least for six years, never forget old slights and are always ready and eager to rehash old quarrels. Credit managers collect, the way other people collect recipes, all the nasty things anybody has ever said about anybody else.
If you were two payments behind on your vacuum cleaner in 1943, the year Mama got that fishbone stuck in her throat, Bobby broke his arm and the sewer packed up, and apply for credit in 1949, the credit manager shuffles through his neat stack of white cards, swells his nostrils and says, “I’m sawry, but it says here that you didn’t live up to your contract on your vacuum cleaner and your attitude was sullen.” The rest of us are taught that every day is a clean slate but a credit manager is taught that every day is an old bill.
The only person ever able, to my knowledge, to completely confuse credit managers is my mother. Mother, a truly charming and most talented woman, has no more financial sense than a hummingbird, arguing with her about money is like trying to catch minnows in your fingers, and what is worse she adopts a reasonable attitude toward bill paying.
When a credit manager would call Mother and shout accusingly, “You promised to be down here on Monday and you didn’t show up”, Mother wouldn’t cringe or get tears in her eyes, but would say pleasantly, “I know but I was busy with something else.” When the credit manager said, “Why didn’t you come down on Tuesday, then?” Mother would say, “Would you mind holding the phone a minute, the cat seems to have a fur ball in her throat?”
Some time later, having disposed of the cat, Mother would pic
k up the phone and resume, “Hello, Mr Crandall, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. Let’s see, Tuesday, oh, yes, there was a programme at school.”
“What about Wednesday? Mr Crandall would ask.
“Wednesday is a very bad day to get someone to take care of the children”, Mother would say.
“What about Thursday?” Mr Crandall would ask irritably. “Couldn’t you have come down Thursday?”
“No”, said Mother, “I couldn’t. I was having the chimney cleaned and I had to get Mrs Murphy’s lunch.” Mrs Murphy was the cleaning woman but the credit manager, whose head was beginning to buzz, thought she cleaned the chimneys.
“Then will you be down to-day?” he would finally ask wearily. “Oh, not to-day”, Mother would say. “I’m making Alison’s dogwood costume.”
“Next Monday then?” he’d say, still with hope.
“All right, next Monday”, Mother would say, adding after he had hung up, “If my primrose woman doesn’t show up.”
Mother employed the same infuriatingly reasonable tactics with Mary and me.
“Mother,” I’d shout in exasperation, “I gave you twenty-five dollars Thursday to pay the gas bill and they called me to-day and said it hadn’t been paid.”
Mother intent on frosting an apple-sauce cake, would say, “Which man did you talk to?”
“A Mr Ellsworth”, I’d say.
Mother would say, “Is Mr Ellsworth the one with that lump behind his ear?”
“I don’t know about the lump,” I’d say, “but he has a Southern accent.”
“Oh, then the one with the lump must be Mr Hastings”, Mother would say. “Mr Ellsworth is the one whose daughter failed her College Board examinations and he is awfully upset about it.”
“Which college was she going to?” Dede would ask.
“Wellesley,” Mother would say, “and I told him that I had a very dear friend who teaches at Wellesley and promised to write to her and see if anything can be done.”
“Who do you know at Wellesley?” Alison would ask.
“Charles Horton’s sister, Mabel”, Mother would say.
“Is she old ‘there is rhythm and grace in every pore of the human body’ who used to sit on the couch with her skirts clear up around her thighs?” Dede would ask.
Mother would say, “She wore tweeds she wove herself and she is very nice.”
“Oh, that old bore”, Mary would say. “She’s not coming out here is she?”
Dede would say, “She’s probably packing her loom right now.”
Mother would say, “I think Mabel is very charming.”
Mary would say, “You do not. You think she’s a great big bore but you won’t admit it because she’s from Boston.”
I would yell, “WHAT ABOUT THE TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS FOR THE GAS COMPANY?”
Mother would say, “Lower your voice. I gave it to the egg man.”
“But I promised it to the gas company and the egg man isn’t due until next week”, I’d wail. “Why did you give it to him?”
“Because,” Mother would say, gently and with great reasonableness, “his wife has arthritis. Now let’s eat this apple-sauce cake while it is hot.”
Mother’s approach to any direct unpleasant question is to pick out the least important word in the question and make an issue of it. I can best illustrate this by an incident depicting a similar type of mind. When Anne and Joan were nine and ten, we overheard the following conversation one day as they sat on the back steps discussing school.
Anne said most dramatically, “Do you know that Janice Price is only ten and she smokes!”
Joan said, “What brand?”
Mother, a strong believer in, and supporter of, the small business made keeping the household accounts more confusing than world government. Mother had an egg man, a bread woman, a rabbit man, a chicken man, a spice man, a vegetable man, a butter man, a milk man, a laundry man, a coal man, a slabwood man, an alder man, an old forest growth man, a good plumber, a punk plumber who would come on Sundays, a painter, a primrose woman, an electrician, a Fuller brush man, five magazine men, an ice man, a chimney cleaner, a sewing woman, a bulb man, an orange man, a dahlia woman, an apple man, a regular manure man, a well-rotted manure man, a pots-and-pan woman, a mothball-and-potholder woman, a wire toecover man, a little old needle woman, a Christmas wrapping woman and a downspout man.
All of these ‘at the doors’ as Gammy used to call them, had regular times to appear but, both because they all loved Mother and because her method of payment was so erratic, they dropped in whenever in the neighbourhood. On pay-day they swarmed around the house like yellowjackets around a rotten apple.
Occasionally when Mary and I would try to bring order into our lives and live on a budget, we would gather the family together for strength and try to take Mother to task for her ‘at the doors’.
“Can’t you get rid of some of them?” we’d wail.
“I’ll do my best”, Mother would say. “Now which ones do you want to eliminate?”
“The potholder-and-mothball woman”, we’d all shout together.
“Why?” Mother would say.
“Because,” we’d say, “her potholders are no good. She makes big mistakes in her crocheting and when you try to grab anything hot you burn your fingers in the holes and you know as well as we do her mothballs make the whole house smell like a Chinese whorehouse, and contain some sort of special breeding stimulant for moths.”
Mother would set her lips stubbornly. “Mrs Twickenham,” she’d say, “makes mistakes in her crocheting because she needs new glasses which she can’t afford. I know her mothballs are no good and smell horrible but I always try to throw them right away.”
“Why do you buy them, then?” we’d groan.
“Because I had Cleve drive her home one rainy day and she lives in a little one room shack and she looks like Gammy.”
So Mrs Twickenham stayed.
“All right”, we said. “What about that awful wire toecover man? You know we’ve never been able to figure out a use for one of his inventions.”
Mother said, “I have. I’m using his egg basket to keep the dogs off my camellia cuttings.”
“What about his butter slicer, his bread cutter, his fruit basket, his soap dishes, his lettuce bag?” we said. “They none of them work and whenever you open any cupboard in our kitchen, one of them lunges out and snags your stockings.”
Mother said, “Yellow Belly had her kittens in the fruit basket and anyway Mr Muster’s wife has t.b.”
Mother, a completely selfless person herself, has her own means to combat selfishness. When my sister Mary married a doctor all the rest of the family, via Mother, immediately became well supplied with expensive vitamins. It was simple. When Mother stayed with Mary she loaded her suitcase with different bottles from Mary’s medicine cabinet and distributed them to the other members of the family.
Occasionally, of course, there would be slip-ups, like the time we all took, with excellent results, quantities of a Kelly-green bile-priming pill in the belief that it was a newer, stronger vitamin A. Or the time we all took, for several months, a great many bright red cinnamon drops in the belief that they were some wonderful new all-in-one vitamin, enormous quantities of which Mary always seemed to have on hand. “No wonder Mary gets so much done,” Mother told us, as she came staggering in with a new supply. “I’ve never felt better in my life.”
“What energy, what vitality—hooray for vitamins!” we told each other over long distance and when Mary’s husband heard about it he said, “Chalk up another for Christian Science.”
When I moved to the country, Mother arranged summer outings for all the family at my house and saw to it that Don and I dug lots of clams for distribution among the drylanders. When one of us married an Italian the others got plenty of olive oil, when one acquired an orchard the others all got fruit, when one got chickens we all got eggs. If one of us has a rare rock garden plant, Mother snips it up, roots the pieces and
distributes them to the others.
As I write this I am convinced that the Government could use Mother but I’m not exactly sure where, unless it would be to confuse the Russians.
My first experiences with debt were mild and vicarious, but they fostered in me a strong and lasting belief that bills were shameful things and should always be kept secret.
When my brother Cleve was about twelve he decided one desperate day that his only hope, in a world which seemed to be peopled entirely with females (Mother, Grandmother, sisters, cats, dog, horses, cows, even the turtle and canary were she’s), was to answer an advertisement in a magazine and become, with nothing down and plenty of time to pay, a ‘high-paid executive’ and show a few people!
To his chagrin, immediately upon receipt of his evasively filled-out coupon, he received from the advertiser, not a magic formula, not explicit instructions for brain control, not one darn thing that overnight would enable him to emerge suddenly from his messy, cough-drop-boxy, gun-littered room, a suave, smooth, high-paid executive in a blue, pin-striped suit, but a great big, thick arithmetic book labelled First Steps in Accounting and filled, he discovered to his disgust, after he had thumbed through a few pages, with nothing but ‘thought problems’—that most detested of all types of arithmetic problems. Cleve immediately abandoned all idea of becoming an executive, tossed the accounting book under his bed and returned to his job as unofficial assistant to the Laurelhurst bus driver.
Unfortunately, the Executive Builders didn’t give up so easily. They had started to mould a high-paid executive and by God, man, they were going to finish. Every week or two for months they deluged Cleve with courses, ledgers, note-books, examinations, books of receipts and mimeographed letters on character-building, co-operation, don’t be a quitter, and forging ahead. Surreptitiously Cleve garnered them from the mailman and shoved them under the bed.
Then one day the courses stopped and the letters began.
‘Mr Bard,’ said the President of the Executive Moulders, his long admonishing finger appearing across the entire face of the letter, ‘have you no honour? Don’t you know that buying things and not paying for them is STEALING?’