Anybody Can Do Anything

  “Oh, my God.” said the young artist, jerking one of the chopsticks out of her hair and gesturing with it. “It is the most obvious thing in the world. I simply cannot understand how you people can be so deliberately obtuse. This dark grey background represents the depravity of civilization. Here is Warr, here is Fameen, here is Deeseese, here is Death and here, in the centre, the only bright spot, is epitomized Social Service.”

  “We don’t like it and we don’t understand it”, was the verdict, however, so I gave the problem to another artist. The other artist produced a sketch showing a lot of cripples on beds, in wheelchairs and on crutches working their way toward a big ginger-coloured building labelled Social Service and from whose wide front door and down whose wide front steps bubbled nurses, doctors and kind-faced people with their arms outstretched to the approaching cripples.

  “Now, uh, er, uh, that uh, is what uh, we uh, had in mind”, said the delighted graduate school of social service.

  “Oh, my God in Heaven”, said the purple-stockinged artist. “It looks like an advertisement for the Blue Cross.”

  A smart, most efficient youth secretary, who, after an unexplained absence of several weeks, came swishing into my office dressed in black satin and monkey fur and resigned. “I wish to resign as I have obtained private employment”, she said smiling happily.

  “How nice for you, Muriel”, I said. “What kind of work are you doing?”

  “Helping a lady”, she said.

  “Housework?” I asked.

  “No, not exactly” she said. “But I take care of my own room.”

  On her card I wrote ‘reason for leaving - private employment - mother’s helper.’ Two days later I was informed by a police matron that my youth worker was on record as a regular prostitute and had reported for a medical check-up. I changed the notation on her card but I harboured no ill will toward her. I didn’t like shorthand either.

  A small, pearl-skinned girl fresh from a convent who shattered into a million little delighted giggles every time a boy looked at her. “Oh, Miss Bard,” she told me breathlessly at the end of the first week, “I love the NYA. I’m never going to try to get a job.”

  A spastic girl, so timid and convulsed by embarrassment that she couldn’t fill out her employment card or tell us her name for several weeks, but who finally valiantly learned to cut stencils and run mimeograph.

  An arrogant young director who inspected us as though he were poking through a dustpan with the toe of his shoe.

  A lone young coloured office worker whose loud footsteps and slamming doors always made me think of a little boy whistling to keep up his courage.

  The smell of baking bread from the nursery school kitchens in the basement.

  A small grey official who threatened to report my friend Katherine and me to President Roosevelt because we put a padlock on our rest room door and wouldn’t give him a key. “Wherever I have worked I’ve always used the women’s rest room,” he told us, adding almost tearfully, “I’ve never before been refused a key.”

  The old red brick school building, one of Seattle’s oldest, where the NYA had its first projects. The stair treads, rounded and scooped out by thousands of shuffling feet, creaked and groaned menacingly even under the slight weight of the nursery school children. The draughty halls always dark even on sunny days. The towers at each end of the top floor reminding me of the olden days, especially during storms when the wind screamed in the eaves, the rain lashed at the windows, the building shifted its weight from one foot to the other and the tower seemed suspended on its hill above the misty city like a castle in a fairy book.

  A woman with long greasy curls, sagging purple cheeks and a tarnished gold turban, who demanded that I give her a job teaching charm to youth. “I’ve been on the stage for yeahs and yeahs”, she said. “I’ve met all the big names—know all the famous people. I could give them kids some tips they’d never get anywheres else.”

  A young artist who rode a motorcycle, belonged to a motorcycle club whose insignia was in silver nailheads on the back of her wide black belt, and often reported to work with heavy casts on one or more of her limbs.

  A handsome boy, who talked like a dead-end kid, had three brothers in reform schools, wore a black satin shirt, and was gentle and good and worshipped his mother. “De old lady wants I should be an artist, see?” he told me the first day he reported for work. “I ain’t never done much but I can copy anything.” He wasn’t much of an artist but he was a fine craftsman and became an expert silk screen operator. “I seen one of them artists snitching a sable brush”, he told me one day, rolling down his black satin sleeves. “I had to bloody his nose a little but I got the brush back.”

  A young Japanese girl giggling with a girl friend while the mimeograph ran off five thousand extra copies of page three.

  The mother of a young artist who ‘just had to come down and tell you how artistic we all are. There’s one of us layin’ around on the floor colourin’ or cuttin’ out any time of the day or night you come around.’

  It was very fortunate for me that at the time of the Leopold Stokowski Youth Orchestra try outs, the executive in charge of me (also the originator of the Publicity Project) was a Mr Morrison, a man who knew a bassoon from an English horn as he had for several years, before coming to NYA, handled the publicity for Seattle’s largest school of music and art, and for most important local impresarios.

  Immediately after the first announcements of the Youth Orchestra try outs, we were besieged by music teachers in flowing capes and foreign accents, and by eager mothers who insisted on trying to force their little geniuses and their harps into our small office. The try outs were to be held at the Cornish School, we announced in the papers, over the telephone and on the radio, but still mothers came and unleashed Mervin and his cornet solo right in the midst of our project.

  I kept fervently thanking somebody for setting the age limits at fourteen to twenty-four—because at least I was spared all the seven-year-old Darleens with their white diamond-studded accordions and the nine-year-old Rudys in their dress suits and violin solos a quarter-tone off.

  The first thing that was accomplished at the preliminary Youth Orchestra try outs was the elimination of anyone who played the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on anything. Then we weeded out the ‘Caprice Viennois’ violinists, the gasping wind-instrument players and the mothers.

  After that came the semi-finals, which were held in the Cornish School auditorium and were judged by some of the faculty at the University, a local violin teacher, a symphony conductor, a composer and some members of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. I listened and kept the tally, even though the judges’ reasons were as far above my head as Mother’s hocks and withers talk when she got with horsey people.

  I loved the try outs because I enjoy any amateur contest and in addition I learned the names, shape and sound of many instruments such as the timpani, and I had the pleasure of hearing the oboe, my favourite instrument, played for hours at a time.

  I was very impressed with the importance of the work I was doing for Mr Stokowski and I grew weak with excitement at the prospect of meeting him. Everywhere I went I talked Stokowski and orchestra, trying to give the impression that I was Leopold’s personal representative here on the Coast. At home I turned the symphonies up to full volume on the radio and tried to force the family to evince more of an interest in great orchestral music. I even toyed with the idea of starting Anne and Joan on flute and oboe lessons.

  Nobody was at all co-operative. They all liked orchestral music all right but only certain orchestras. Dede liked Glenn Miller, Alison liked Artie Shaw and Anne and Joan wanted to be members of a horrible orchestra run by some music institute in which huge groups of untalented little children all played together on little tiny violins.

  One, Maudie, a little girl in our neighbourhood, who had been taking tap dancing lessons since she was nine months old, belonged to this institute and insisted on bringing her tiny little violin
over to the house and sawing out ‘Home on the Range’ on it. Anne and Joan thought she was wonderful. When I refused to let them join the institute they were furious, wouldn’t listen to any more of my orchestra talk and fought loudly when the symphony was on.

  I longed for the days when Mary was in charge of our house and would have had every single one of us plucking, blowing or beating on something, while the Youth Orchestra was still floundering around as an embryonic idea.

  Finally one day a friend of mine loaned me her violin and I threatened Alison into taking lessons. Mother stood it for one week and then said, “I have put up with a great deal from all of my children, including mallard ducks and guinea pigs, but I am now too old and too tired to listen to anybody practising on the violin.” That was that.

  Because he was famous, was on a very gruelling trip and didn’t want to cope with crowds, Stokowski elected to get off his train in Tacoma and be driven to Seattle by Mr Morrison and me. I was so excited I thought I’d die. Imagine driving Leopold Stokowski the thirty miles from Tacoma to Seattle, talking intimately and laughing over amusing things that had happened at the try outs. I even went so far as to imagine him saying at the end of the delightful drive, “You know, Miss Bard, I could use a secretary on this trip. Do you think that the NYA could spare you for a while?”

  When the night finally came and it was determined that Stokowski’s train was due to arrive in Tacoma about eight-thirty, Morrison had the NYA Garage Project boys prepare one of the best Government cars, a 1923 Reo or reasonable facsimile thereof, and we set off. It was cold and rainy, and the car had no heater but the NYA boys had thoughtfully provided two rather musty army blankets left over from the C.C.C. camps to tuck around the august presence.

  The station in Tacoma, which is below the street, was not only dark and wet, but apparently deserted. We were joined there by the State Director, a gentle, learned man, and for three-quarters of an hour we smoked cigarettes, stamped our cold feet, wandered around peering into boxcars and detached pullmans, and wondered what had happened to Leopold Stokowski and if we would be held responsible.

  Finally, however, the train, which was late, came in. Mr Stokowski, appearing very waxy and distant, disembarked with the conductor of the Florida Symphony, there were introductions and we set off. Morrison, an exceedingly glib and very witty man, made several small overtures toward conversation. He was answered by the Florida Symphony man.

  On the way back to Seattle, I tried and tried to think of something to say to Mr Stokowski, something short so that he would listen, but outstanding enough to stamp me on his memory. I couldn’t think of a thing but it didn’t matter because all during that thirty-mile drive Mr Stokowski either talked exclusively to the Florida Symphony man or kept his eyes closed.

  When we got back to Seattle the news leaked out that Mr Morrison, the State Director, Mr Stokowski and the Floridan were going to a cocktail party, and I was to get off at the office and type a certain kind of list of contestants desired by Mr Stokowski. It was then ten-thirty and as I climbed the stairs of the deserted school building and let myself in to its cold, dark interior, I had many bitter thoughts about woman’s place in the business world.

  It took me until twelve-thirty to finish the lists and, though I ran for three blocks, I missed the last streetcar home and had to take one that turned down through the park and left me to walk across a bridge and up two blocks to our house. The park by our house, well known as a nesting place for exhibitionists, was not a location I would have chosen to be in at one-forty-five on a dark windy night. I stepped on to the bridge and shivered as branches whipped across the lights and made reaching menacing shadows. The noisy playful wind picked up papers and leaves and pushed them along in front of me, rubbed branches together until they squeaked in protest, tapped on the bridge with bare twigs and jumped out at me suddenly from behind trees. There wasn’t a soul in sight—not one lighted house.

  Then suddenly above the racket of the wind I thought I heard footsteps. I looked over my shoulder and a tall man stepped from the trees and started across the bridge. I hurried my steps and it seemed to me he hurried his steps. I began to run, and from the hollow echo of his footsteps on the bridge I knew he was running too. I was terror-stricken. I ran so fast my feet didn’t touch the sidewalk, but I could hear his footsteps ringing out behind me in the lonely darkness, above the wind, getting closer and closer. He was only about twenty feet behind me when I got to our house. I took the steps in one leap and threw myself through the front door which Mother was holding open for me.

  When I finally caught my breath, I asked her how she happened to be up. She said that she was in bed but was awakened by the sound of my running clear down by the bridge. We called the police and they spent the rest of the night cruising up and down the streets flashing their strongest spotlights in our bedroom windows, and knocking on the door periodically to report that they weren’t finding the man.

  My enthusiasm for Leopold Stokowski and his Youth Orchestra was at very low ebb the next morning when I reported to the music school for the final try outs. These try outs, held in a parlour on the main floor, were witnessed by the conductor of the Florida Symphony, the NYA Director’s secretary, Mr Morrison and me.

  Mr Stokowski wore a lavender shirt and a pink tie but was very gentle and kind to the contestants as he asked them to sight-read very difficult manuscript. Invariably, as each contestant adjusted his neck or pursed his lips for his first note, the Florida Symphony conductor would signal violently at me to go out and stifle some little noise that was filtering in from some other part of the building. Out I would dash to tell a surprised piano student in a third-floor practice room, ‘My God, don’t do that now—don’t you know who is downstairs?’

  About eleven o’clock Morrison took me outside and told me to go down to the waterfront and get some sea food and whatever else I would need to fix a nice lunch for Mr Stokowski. I spent $27.18 and came staggering back with jumbo Dungeness crabs, Olympia oysters, little neck clams, lettuce, celery, French bread, butter, coffee, cream and French pastries. I fixed the lunch and some of the contestants served it to Mr Stokowski, the Florida man and the judges.

  After lunch while I washed the dishes, Mr Stokowski decided that the only young musician in Seattle really worthy of his orchestra was a viola player from the Seattle Symphony, a girl who was undoubtedly a fine musician but was not between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four.

  After Leopold had left town I asked our head office for the $27.18 I had spent. They turned the matter over to the Treasury Department, who said, ‘We can’t authorize payment for a thing like Leopold Stokowski’s lunch. There is no regulation requisition, no purchase order, not even a proper appropriation symbol to cover such an unorthodox situation.’

  I’ll always feel that Leopold Stokowski owes me at least an oboe solo.

  17

  ‘Anybody Can Write Books’

  AT THE TIME MARY DECIDED that anybody can write books, I was married, living on Vashon Island and working for a contractor with cost-plus Government contracts, making a very good salary.

  Then an old friend of Mary’s arrived in town and announced that he was a talent scout for a publishing firm and did she know any North-west authors. Mary didn’t so she said, “Of course I do, my sister Betty. Betty writes brilliantly but I’m not sure how much she has done on her book.” (I had so little done on it I hadn’t even thought of writing one.) The publisher’s representative said that the amount I had done was not the important thing. The important thing was, had I talent? ‘Had I talent?’ Why, Mary said, I had so much talent I could hardly walk. She’d call and make an appointment for him to just talk to me and see. She did too. That very afternoon at five and she called me at a quarter to five.

  “Betsy”, she said. “Forrest’s in town and he is a publisher’s representative and needs some North-west authors so I’ve told him you were one. You’re to meet him at the Olympic Hotel at five o’clock to discuss your new
book.”

  “My what?” I yelled.

  “Your new book”, said Mary, perfectly calmly. “You know that you have always wanted to be a writer and Betsy, dear, you’ve got great talent.”

  “I have not”, I said. “You know perfectly well that the only things I’ve ever written in my life were a couple of punk short stories, some children’s stories, ‘Sandra Surrenders’ and that diary I kept when I had t.b.”

  Mary said, “Betty, this is your big opportunity. Don’t waste time arguing with me.”

  I said, “Mary, you told me the same thing when you got me to run a Brownie Scout troop, work as an expert accountant, illustrate a book for Standard Oil, pick peaches and millions of other things.”

  Mary said, “The trouble with you, Betty, is that you have absolutely (she said ‘ab . . . so . . . lute . . . ly’) no sense of proportion. Instead of using your great brain to write a book and make fifty thousand dollars, you in . . . sist on getting a mediocre job with a mediocre firm and working yourself to the bone for a mediocre salary. When are you going to wake up? When?”

  “I don’t know”, I said, wondering if the switchboard operator had heard all that mediocre stuff and if it would do any good to point out to Mary that if my present salary was mediocre, then most of the jobs she had got me were so far down the scale as to be subterranean.

  Mary said, “I told Forrest you’d meet him at the Olympic Hotel at five to discuss your book.”

  I said, “But I can’t write a book.”

  Mary said, “Of course you can, particularly when you stop to think that every publisher in the United States is simply dying for material about the North-west.”

  “I never noticed it”, I said sullenly.

  Mary said, “Betty, listen to me. We are living in the last frontier in the United States. The land of the great salmon runs, giant firs, uncharted waters and unsealed mountains and almost nothing has been written about it. If you told the people in New York that salmon leaped in our front door and snapped at our ankles they’d believe it. Most of the people in the United States either think we’re frozen over all the time like the Antarctic or that we’re still wearing buckskin and fighting Indians. Now personally I think it’s about time somebody out here wrote the truth.”