For the next month I read the notes and Mary memorized them and by recital time we both knew the Third Ballade but Mary played it, giving a brilliant performance if you discounted her omission of several runs and that entire, most difficult, interval near the end where the left hand is supposed to race up and down the keyboard while the right hand pounds out the original melody. Miss Welcome, to whom omission didn’t mean that much, shouted “Bravo, Bravo” from the back of her stuffy little parlour where the recitals were held and then rushed forward, kissed Mary on both cheeks and said, “Oh, Mary, Mary, I didn’t think you could do it.” To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure she had.
We both took singing from our Sunday School teacher’s sister, or rather Mary took singing and I played her accompaniment, but we always referred to it as our singing because it took both of us for a performance.
Mrs Potter, our teacher, had an enormous contralto voice and was a thick singer and always sounded as though her throat was full of phlegm. She was supposed to be a very good teacher and to know Madame Schumann-Heink, which fact she just happened to mention at least ten times during every lesson. “Watch my diaphragm”, Mrs Potter would demand as she sang, “Caddy me bok to old Vugiddy. Deeahs wheah de cottod ad de sweed bodadoes grrrrow. Deahs wheah de buds waughble sweed in de sprrrring tahb . . .”
At first Mrs Potter wanted me to study singing too but Mother thought that, as I had once had very bad tonsils, it would be better for me to be Mary’s accompanist, which was fine for a while.
“Pale hahnds I loved beside the Shalimah . . . ah, wheah ahhh you now, oh wheah ahhh you now?” Mary wailed at Cousin Reginald Coxe, who was painting Mother’s portrait and had to endure this form of reprisal. “When the dawn flames in the sky, I love yewwwww . . . When the birdlings wake and cry, I love yewwwww.” Mary’s rendition of At Dawning was to me the most beautiful thing in the world and always brought tears to my eyes. Mary’s soprano voice was clear and true but not that good, so probably adolescence had something to do with it.
We were about twelve and fourteen then and loved romantic things but Mary’s love of romance took a different turn from mine. While I wanted her to sing At Dawning every time we performed so I could get tears in my eyes, she wanted to swathe herself in Mother’s Spanish shawl, clench her teeth and sing, “Less than the dust, beneeeeth thy chaddiott wheeeeel, Less than the rust, that never stained thy saw-word.”
Not only that, but having by this time ceased all pretence of practising, she often made up her own tunes and words and I—her unimaginative accompanist—often a page behind, after frantically changing keys and turning pages, would finally stop dead and point out to Mary where she was and where I was and what she had sung and what she should have sung. This infuriated the great artiste and she would assume a tortured expression and sigh heavily as we got ready to start over again.
It was during this cultural interlude that my brother Cleve, who had begun ominously to refer to Mary and me as ‘those darn gurls’ and to fill the baseboard of his room with shotgun shells, put an enormous automatic bolt on his bedroom door, spent all his free time with the Laurelhurst bus driver and ate Smith Brothers cough drops by the box. One day Gammy interrupted one of our best recitals to show Mother a large armful of empty cough drop boxes, and to tell her that it might interest her to know that while her daughter was traipsing around in her naked strip (her interpretation of the Spanish shawl) singing those lusty songs, her son had become a dope fiend.
Then Mary entered and won an elocution contest.
‘Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table . . .!’
she shouted as she sagged and reeled around the kitchen, pounding on the table so hard her fist stuck to the oilcloth.
‘Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, Boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomday, Boom.’
she roared. Then suddenly half-crouching, with eyes like slits, she reached behind her and got her right arm and thrust it directly at us, the stiff index finger appearing suddenly at the end like a knife blade on a cane. Still crouching, her squinty eyes on the pointing finger, she slowly moved the arm in a half-circle and hissed through clenched teeth:
‘Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black,
Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.’
That’s the one she won the contest with and it was usually her encore and my favourite. Cleve and Gammy liked Lasca best.
‘The air was heavy, the night was hot,
I sat by her side, and forgot - forgot;
Was that thunder? I grasped the cord
of my swift mustang without a word.’
For Lasca, Mary wore her high laced hiking boots, her fringed Campfire Girl dress tucked up to be a riding skirt, a green velvet embroidered bolero that belonged to a Bolivian costume a friend of Mother’s had left at our house, a cowboy hat of Cleve’s, and carried Mother’s quirt, which she flicked against the hiking boots when she sighed ‘for the canter after the cattle’ or ‘the mustang flew, and we urged him on’.
“That girl ought to be on the stage”, Mrs Watson, our cleaning woman, said, the first time she heard Mary do Lasca, and I thought so too. I thought all her recitations were absolutely marvellous and was delirious with happiness when she offered to coach me.
After studying me from every angle, Mary decided that I was the ‘cute’ type. Why she made such a decision I’ll never know because at the time I was painfully thin, pale green, wore a round comb and had a mouth filled with gold braces. Perhaps it was kindness, perhaps wishful thinking, but whichever it was, it was most gratifying to me and gave me a lot of self-confidence.
My first cute recitation was Little Orphan Annie. Mary taught me to stick out my lips like a Ubangi, wrinkle my high forehead, roll my eyes, waggle my forefinger and say in a kind of baby talk, ‘An’ the Gobble-uns ’ll git you, Ef you Don’t Watch Out!’ Then came ‘The carpenter man said a bad word, he said, “Dam”’, only Mary had me say ‘corpenter’ and ‘dom’ as being cuter.
The family were openly nauseated by my performances, but when I recited at school the girls thought I was cute and begged for more so I learned, ‘Elthie Minguth lithsps the doeth, the liveth wite croth the threet from me. . . .’ Mary, terribly proud of her handiwork, took me down and showed me to her elocution teacher, who said that I should study, which we took as a compliment.
As elocution was very popular and most of our little friends studied, some of them reciting from memory, and at the drop of a hat, whole chapters from Daddy-Long-Legs, Tom Sawyer and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I probably would have studied except that Daddy died that year and we stopped all of our lessons but piano and ballet. Mother could have stopped these too, as far as I was concerned.
“One, two, three, LEAP!” shouted our ballet teacher, as she pounded her stick on the floor. Mary leaped so high they had to pull her down off the ceiling but I, who had also seen Pavlova and the Duncan Dancers, rubbed my ballet slippers in the resin and dreaded my turn.
When anything was sewed with small, hard, unrippable stitches Gammy said it had been ‘baked’ together. I felt ‘baked’ together at dancing class. The other girls did arabesques that made them look like birds poised in flight. I wiggled noticeably and the leg that was supposed to point up toward the ceiling hung down like a broken wing. When we stood at the bar I pulled and strained and kicked but my bones were as stiff and unpliable as pipes and I seemed to have fewer joints than the rest of the class. In spite of it all I finally got up on my toes and appeared in many recitals.
In one recital our class, clad in short silk accordion-pleated skirts, with pieces of the same material tied low around our foreheads and cleverly arranged to go over only one shoulder yet cover our budding bosoms, were supposed t
o be Greek boys, leaping around, pretending to be gladiators and drive chariots. We were very advanced ballet students by then and the dance was such a success that we were asked to repeat it at some sort of Army-Navy celebration in Woodland Park.
We were glad to, of course; but just after we had come leaping in driving our chariots, the top of Mary’s costume came off and it immediately became apparent to the audience that at least some of these dancers were not Greek boys.
“Hey, Mary,” I hissed at her, “your costume’s broken.”
Mary ignored me. She leaped and whirled and stamped through the entire dance and not until we were taking our final bows did she deign to fix the shoulder strap. I was aghast.
“Mary Bard,” I said, “do you realize that you were dancing out there in front of all those people with part of your bust exposed?” Mary said, “My dear girl, did you think that Pavlova or Isadora Duncan would have stopped to fix a shoulder strap? After all, no matter what breaks, the show must go on.”
Our teacher, as well as the Army and Navy, was very pleased with Mary. In fact, the Army and Navy asked us to repeat the dance again, which we didn’t, and our teacher held Mary up before the entire dancing school as an example of a true artiste.
Then we started to public high school and Mary gave up ballet and went into girls’ club work, school plays, vaudeville shows and the opera. She had leads in everything and she dragged me along with her whenever she could. Once I stumbled out of a giant grandfather clock and did a scarf dance and another time I was in the dancing chorus in an opera.
As time went on I became more and more convinced that Mary was right and that anybody could do anything, but I had sense enough to realize that it was a hell of a lot harder for some people than for others.
2
What’s a White Russian Got?
WHEN WE WERE EIGHTEEN AND TWENTY I married and went to live in the mountains on a chicken ranch, and Mary plunged head first into a business career, which eventually resulted in her being fired from every firm of any size in the city of Seattle.
Mary’s being fired was never a reflection on her efficiency, which was overwhelming, but was always a matter of principle, usually involving the morale of the entire firm. “I don’t give a damn if you’re the biggest lawyer in the city of Seattle, you can’t control my bladder”, she shouted at the head of a large law firm, who had suddenly arbitrarily ruled that all his stenographers had to go to the rest room at 10.30am and 3.15pm.
“Labour Day is a National Holiday and I’m an American citizen and won’t work if you call in the Militia”, Mary announced to the front office of a legal firm whose senior partner was anti-labour and got even with the A.F. of L. by making all his employees work on Labour Day.
“Go pinch somebody who can’t type”, she told a surprised and amorous lumber exporter.
“Henry Ford has proven that a rest period and something to eat in the morning and afternoon raises efficiency two hundred per cent and as Henry Ford’s got a lot better job than you have, I’m going out for coffee”, she told the personnel manager of an insurance company.
“If you want to say ‘he don’t’ and ‘we was’, that’s your affair,” Mary told a pompous manufacturer, “but I won’t put it in your letters because it reflects on me.”
Even though Mary’s jobs didn’t last long, she never had any trouble getting new ones. All the employment agency people loved her and she enjoyed applying for new jobs.
“There are only two ways to apply for a job”, she said. “Either you are a Kick-Me-Charlie and go crawling in anxious for long hours and low pay, or you march into your prospective employer with a Look-Who’s-Hit-the-Jackpot attitude and for a while, at least, you have both the job and your self-respect.” Anyone could see that all Kick-Me-Charlies kept their jobs the longest but they didn’t have as much self-respect or meet as many people as Mary.
While Mary changed jobs and met people, I raised chickens, had two children and didn’t meet anybody. Finally in March 1931, after four years of this, I wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and I seemed to have married the wrong man.
It was the beginning of the Depression and I didn’t really expect anything but sympathy, but Mary, who was supporting the entire family, replied in typically dependable and dramatic fashion by special delivery registered letter that she had a wonderful job for me and that I was to come home at once. I wrote back that I didn’t know how to do office work and it was five miles to the bus line. Mary wired back, ‘Anybody can do office work and remember the White Russians walked across Siberia. Your job starts Monday.’
It was late on a rainy Friday afternoon when a neighbour brought the telegram but I checked the bus schedule, dressed the children and myself in our ‘town clothes’, stuffed my silver fish fork, my graduation ring and a few other things into a suitcase, wrote a note to my husband, and leading three-year-old Anne by the hand, and carrying year-and-a-half-old Joan and the suitcase, set off across the burn toward the six o’clock bus to Seattle.
It was not an easy walk. The road, following the course of an ancient riverbed, meandered around through the sopping brush, coiled itself around huge puddles and never ever took the shortest distance between two points. When we made sorties into the brush to avoid the puddles, the salal and Oregon grape drenched our feet and clawed vindictively at my one pair of silk stockings. Every couple of hundred feet I had to stop and unclamp my purple hands from the suitcase handle and shift the baby to the other hip. Every half mile or so we all sat down on a soaking stump or log to rest. The rain was persistent and penetrating, and after the third rest all of our clothes had the uniform dampness of a pile of ironing folded down the night before.
The children were cheerful and didn’t seem to mind the discomforts—I was as one possessed. I was leaving the dreary monotony of the rain and the all-encompassing loneliness of the farm to go home to the warmth and laughter of my family, and now that I was started I would have carried both children and the suitcase, forded raging torrents and run that last never-ending mile with a White Russian on each shoulder.
Just before we got to the highway, the road had been taken over by some stray cows and a big Jersey bull. Under ordinary circumstances this would have meant climbing a fence and going half a mile or so out of our way, because I am scared to death of bulls, especially Jersey bulls. Not that day. “Get out of my way!” I shouted at the surprised bull and small Anne, brandishing a twig, echoed me. The bull, sulkily grumbling and shaking his head, moved to one side. If he hadn’t I think I would have punched him on the nose.
When we finally reached the highway, I sat the children on the suitcase and listened anxiously for the first rumble of the bus. I knew that I would have to depend on hearing it, because the highways had been braided through the thick green tresses of the Olympic Peninsula by some lethargic engineer who apparently thought that everyone enjoyed bounding in and out of forests, dipping down into farmyards and skirting small rocks and hillocks with blind hairpin turns, and at the intersection where I hoped to catch the bus, and catch was certainly the right word, the bus would be visible only for that brief moment when, having leaped out of Mr Hansen’s farmyard by means of a short steep rise, it skirted his oat field before disappearing around a big rock just beyond his south fence.
I knew that I had to be ready to signal the driver just as he appeared over the brow of the Hansen’s barnyard and in my eagerness, I flagged down two empty homeward-bound logging trucks and the feed man before I heard the bus. When its grey snubbed nose peered over the hill, I rushed out into the road and waved my purse but the driver saw me too late and for one terrible sickening instant I thought he was going on and leave us to walk back up the mountains in the rain. But he screeched to a stop and waited at the big rock and I grabbed the suitcase and the children and ran down the road, and then we were aboard, in a front seat where I could urge the bus along and be ready for the city when it burst upon me with its glory of people and lif
e.
The bus driver was not at all friendly, due no doubt to a large angry-looking boil on the back of his neck and the bus smelled of wet dogs and wet rubber. There were two drunken Indians in the seat across from us, and a disgusting old man at the back of us who cleared his throat and spat on the floor, but everything was bathed in the glow of my anticipation and I smiled happily at everyone.
Down the mountains, through valleys, up into the mountains again we sped. We were going very fast and the bus lurched and swayed and belched diesel fumes but we were heading toward home. I was going to live again.
Once when we went around a particularly vicious curve, the drunken Indian woman rolled off her seat into the aisle. The Indian man, presumably her husband, peered over at her lying on her back on the floor, her maroon coat bunched around her waist, her fat brown thighs exposed, and burst out laughing. The woman laughed too and so did the other passengers. The bus driver half-turned around and said, “For Krissake, you Bow and Arrows pipe down or I’ll throw you out.”
The woman turned over and got up on all fours so that her big maroon backside was high in the air and a tempting target. The other Indian reached out and kicked her hard and they both began laughing again. Anne and I laughed too but the bus driver stopped the bus, pushed his cap to the back of his head and said, “For Krissake, you two, do you want me to put you off?”
The Indian woman climbed back into her seat and they quieted down to only occasional silly giggles. We started up again and after a while drove on to the dock and the big bus lumbered aboard the ferry and all of us passengers got out and went upstairs for supper.
Anne and Joan and I shared our booth in the ferry’s small smoky restaurant with a Mrs Johnson, a large woman in navy blue and steel-rimmed spectacles, whose eyes very handily operated on different circuits so that while her left eye looked out the window, her right eye was fixed on the waitress, on her food, or on me.