books
The White Girl
Ladies and Gents
Music in the Street
Thicker Than Water
Laura
Bedelia
Stranger Than Truth
The Weeping and the Laughter
Thelma
The Husband
Evvie
Bachelor in Paradise
A Chosen Sparrow
The Man Who Loved His Wife
The Rosecrest Cell
Final Portrait
The Dreamers
The Secret of Elizabeth
films
The Night of June 13th
Such Women Are Dangerous
Easy Living
Laura
Bedelia
Letter to Three Wives
Three Husbands
Out of the Blue
Les Girls
Bachelor in Paradise
plays
Blind Mice
(with Winfred Lenihan)
Geraniums in My Window
(with Samuel Ornitz)
Laura
(with George Sklar)
Wedding in Paris
(musical comedy)
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
First Edition published 1979 by McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Copyright © 1979, 2013 by Vera Caspary estate
Cover photograph of Vera Caspary by Alfredo Valente, used courtesy of the Estate of Alfredo Valente.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2902-5
Distributed in 2016 by Open Road Distribution
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
For
Judy and
Michael and
Daniel and
Zachary
Book One
1. The Secrets of Grown-Ups
2. The Poor Working Girl
3. “I Can Teach You to Dance Like This”
4. Liberation?
5. True Story
6. Greenwich Village
7. Dream into Nightmare
8. The Years of the Ravens
9. The Red Badge of Guilt
Book Two
10. Love Begins at Forty
11. Two Worried People
12. Domestic Situation
13. Return of the Specter
Images
A specter haunts my ego. For most of my life I have tried to escape this ghoul, bury her in a respectable family plot, lock her in a closet smelling of old women’s dresses. Tenacious and spiteful, she rises out of memory, laughing, mocking me with memories of failed dreams. Like everyone else in this contradictory world, I have two definite and well-developed sides, one that I show off and one I am afraid to see plain. So much of my life has been given to the exploitation of the exhibited side that the hidden self, the specter, has to be hunted down, smoked out of secret cells, stripped of disguise.
I see her now, a caricature of my showcase image, a skinny girl shivering as the Chicago wind sweeps across the Wells Street station of the South Side El. She is eighteen or nineteen and convinced that her life is a failure. She is cousin to my ugly old-maid cousins, who have devoted all their days (and, of necessity, their nights) to their dear mother and have never had husbands, lovers or fun; she is sister to my sister, a snob who talked loftily of culture, disdaining those who cared more for clothes and jewelry than for art and poetry, but who wanted more than anything else to be seen in the glittering garments of the rich; she is neighbor to my dull neighbors who played bridge and talked about clothes and the high cost of living; she is a stenographer among stenographers eternally trapped among the filing cases with men dedicated to percentages of profit. Saddest of all, she is a writer among those secretly writing in locked bedrooms the poem, the short story, the novel that will never be published.
As she rides on the South Side express, shoved, pushed, swaying, member of an ill-smelling crowd, she forces herself to look at scenes that, on brighter days, her eyes avoid. Open to the gaze of El passengers are the windows and lives of the poor of Chicago’s Black Belt. She sees squalor as evidence of futility. “Nothing really matters,” she whispers again and again as in prayer. The nihilism brings perverse consolation. The South Side El will not travel through eternity, the loathed office job cannot last forever, and in the end she, along with the other passengers and the blacks in the squalid rooms, will die as unimportantly as flies squashed against a screen.
She was wrong, of course. To the passionate mind everything matters. In a full life no incident is without meaning, no element so important as change. Our century has seen so much of revolution and on so many levels that for women, especially, the historic role has been turned upside down. To have known the changes of this dynamic century is to have lived in drama such as no genius has conceived.
I was born by accident in the nineteenth century. No one expected me on that November day, certainly not my mother, who had kept her shameful secret concealed under loose house robes. When she had learned that she was pregnant at an age then considered next door to senility (she was well over forty), she was facing a major operation and believed herself entitled to an abortion. Our Dr. Frankenstein, young and scrupulous, refused to hear her pleas. Lacking courage to consult a more cooperative doctor, Mama played the role of invalid and took to tea gowns which concealed her scandalous condition. When I made my untimely escape from the womb, Mama’s friends, sisters-in-law and grown children were honestly shocked. When she first laid eyes on the unfinished product my mother hoped the little monster would not last until the twentieth century. In November it was impossible to move a fragile infant to a hospital, so they rigged up a do-it-yourself incubator out of a wash basket which nurses kept filled with hot-water bottles in a room kept at an even temperature. After I had shown that I could survive the clothes basket, hot-water bottles, wet nurse and special formulas, Mama not only adjusted to what had seemed the horror of having a baby at her age but regarded me as something of a miracle. The rest of the family—my father, two grown brothers and a sister—loved, spoiled and bossed me outrageously. Aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends never dared enter our house without bringing tribute to the baby.
No child ever received more presents or thoughtless of them. Nothing material had value for me except in the receiving. I broke or lost dolls, mittens, lockets, crayons, balls, bracelets, pennies and pencils; left toys wherever I dropped them and looked for more when the doorbell rang. In the same way I received the petting and adulation, but along with it was forced to accept their various ideas of discipline. Not unnaturally I became a self-centered little girl, loving but rebellious, since the things I learned in my early years were confusing and untidy.
I cannot remember the naughtiness for which Papa gave me the only spanking I recall, but I can still see the frightened little girl being carried up the stairs, laid across dark blue knees, unbuttoned and smacked. It probably did not hurt much because Papa could not have been cruel to Baby, but the humiliation left a permanent scar. Papa unbuttoning my pants! Papa seeing my behind! He was my first idol, a strong and ardent man, gifted at love and passionate in honesty. “Do you know what your name means?” he’d ask. “Truth. A girl named Vera can never tell a lie.”
This made me a clumsy and uncomfortable liar. Even the trifling falsehoods of social life, excuses for tardiness, broken dates, forgotten promises, have caused acute discomfort. Not that I can claim a life entirely free of deceit. During high school years my chum and I spent fifty-one cents at Walgreen’s penny sale for two boxes of Dorine cake rouge. Every school-day, after saying goodbye to my mother and sister, I’d hurry into the bathroom, rub pink circles into my cheeks, tuck the rouge into the toe of a shoe at the back of the closet and race out before Mama or Sister caught sight of a painted countenance that would have disgraced the Caspary name.
A formidable lie caused by an act of rashness in my late thirties laid upon me a burden of deceit that for a time made me bitter, hostile and at war with myself. I have tried again and again to exorcise the horror, have written a book that half-revealed the deception and shall try again in this confession to relieve myself by writing the whole truth.
My grown-up sister knew everything in the world. There were fifteen years between us so that when I began to pry into the secrets of grown-ups, Irma was a young lady who used rice powder on her face and kept her underclothes fragrant with sachet. Small of breast, she wore bust ruffles of graduated layers of Swiss embroidery, had an opera cloak of oyster-colored broadcloth in which she would descend the stairs carrying the long-stemmed roses sent by the young man who was to escort her to the ball.
To her small sister, Irma’s social life was dazzling. When she was not wearing a plaid wool skirt for golf or starched linen for tennis, or going to theatre with a beau, she saw The Girls, who entertained each other at bridge parties and “afternoons” where they embroidered, gossiped and ate chicken salad and icebox cake. Irma could play the piano, paint and draw pictures. In her theatre book, beside the stubs of tickets and names of her escorts, she pasted pictures cut from The Blue Book and The Green Book: photographs of Maude Adams, Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske, John Drew, the Barrymores, Leo Dietrichstein and many others.
One afternoon when I was playing in the yard two princesses came out of our front door. I see them now, Mama with a toque of violets tilted over her shining white hair while there was balanced on Irma’s ratted pompadour a large black hat from which willow plumes drooped. Mama wore a suit of gray wool with a fichu of white lace; Irma’s pale-blue broadcloth was trimmed with soutache. Mama wore white kid gloves, Irma black, both gathered in rich folds on their forearms. With regal scorn they looked upon my bare legs and gingham dress. “What a dirty little girl. Go inside and tell Annie to give you a bath.” That the clarity of the picture remains after all these years is significant; perhaps it was on this day the shivering, skinny girl of the Wells Street El station was born.
The fear that I would never grow up to become a beautiful princess was compounded by my mother’s frequent “The baby isn’t pretty but she’s awfully cute.” Even in this I could not compete with Sister. In addition to having naturally curly hair, playing the piano, keeping a theatre book and studying at the Art Institute, she was cute. In her early twenties a popular girl, she often remarked that one attracted fellows by being kittenish.
Was she, I wonder, kittenish with the young businessmen (doing well in real estate, a millinery man, in insurance, his family owns those drugstores) who took her to theatre and restaurants? She was skinny in a day when buxom girls were admired; had Caspary bones, a big nose, sallow complexion. Her eyes were blue and lively, and there was then a dashing quality about her, an extraordinary sense of fun, a promising vitality. Later her humor dried to bitterness, her cheeks became thinner, her dates less frequent. After the family catastrophe she ceased being a popular girl and had few dates. She was thirty-one, an old maid, when in desperation she married a man she despised.
Arthur, eighteen years my senior, was a businessman with a steady job in a wholesale millinery firm. Danny, who came between me and Sister, took after my mother’s handsome family. He was fair, cheerful and thoroughly bad; ran away again and again, broke Mama’s heart and became roller-skating champion of America. Whenever he came home after a long, mysterious absence there were scenes behind closed doors. Mama cried, Papa lectured, Danny promised to get a steady job, was soon off again with dubious companions who rode in automobiles and were seen with painted women.
In spite of the petting, treats and gifts, I felt sorry for myself because I was not allowed the privileges enjoyed by my sister and brothers. While they went out at night, saw shows, danced, listened to music or entertained themselves at home with the piano, the mandolin and popular songs, I was sent to bed at eight o’clock. Alone on the second floor I consoled myself with imagined companions, twin sisters who wore accordion-pleated dresses of pink and blue silk with matching hair ribbons and slippers and accompanied me on adventures more wonderful than anything my grown-up siblings even dreamed about. I believed in them and other made-up companions as I believed in princesses, fairies, witches and the adventures of girls and boys in storybooks. One day a friend of my sister’s brought to me a book called Spark, A Dog. The story began: “Bow-wow-wow. My name is Spark. I am a dog.” Tame stuff after Hans Brinker and Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch, but distinguished because it said on the cover “By Rosalie G. Mendel,” the name of the lady who had brought it to me. The magic words taught me that stories did not just grow in books but were written by someone I knew. At once I began printing miniature books, pinning together tiny folded sheets and lettering unevenly on the cover A STORY BY VERA LOUISE CASPARY.
Sister gave only second-best candy to little girls whose grandparents had Russian or Polish accents. She preferred having me play with children with the surnames of German-Jewish families who had been in Chicago for at least two generations. Her snobbery was precise. Class lines in the Almanach de Gotha were drawn no finer.
Grown people used a nasty word: kike. Papa disapproved yet occasionally was heard to murmur “Hinterberliner.” He was no snob, but there remained in him certain notions acquired from his mother. She came of a caste as rigid as Prussian nobility, Prussian Jews. Her maiden name was Mendel and apparently some Mendel, distantly related, had married into German aristocracy, a Prince Salm-Salm. That the family could seriously claim blue blood seems incredible, but all through childhood I heard about the abnormal hue of Caspary blood, even from Papa—who believed himself a Socialist (although I’m sure he never read Marx or Engels) and misquoted ideas he had gotten from his own father, who had fled Germany during the 1848 Revolution. Daniel Caspary, my grandfather, claimed that he was descended from the real Jewish aristocrats, the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal. He had no proof and no idea of where his forefathers had got their name. Nor were they ever sure of themselves as Jews. Grandpa Caspary, the Socialist, called himself a freethinker and brought up his children without religion. Papa told me Bible stories incorrectly so that later, in Sunday School, I argued with teachers; it never occurred to me that my father could be wrong about Noah in the lion’s den or Moses in the stomach of a whale.
Papa, having had no religious education, believed in God. Mama sometimes challenged fate with the statement “I don’t believe in Gawd.” We never took this seriously because we disliked the way she pronounced His name. She was the real aristocrat, with family records that went back to the flight from Portugal in 1497. Her father had been a learned man, graduate of a rabbinical school in Amsterdam, a teacher in a theological seminary. Before coming to America he had worked in England as an interpreter in a court of law. The English had found his Portuguese name difficult and when he arrived in New York, he took the noblest of Jewish names, Cohen. Mama forgot the original name but told me I’d find it in the old Hebrew Bible that contained records of all births, marriages and deaths since her father’s family left Portugal. Her sister Hannah had the Bible in Paris.
Indifferent though we were to religion, we were contemptuous of Jews who denied being Jewish or changed their names and contradicted ourselves with scorn for those whose names ended in -witz or -ski. Papa’s sister, my beloved Aunt Olga, the most merciful of women, would often tell me in a hushed voice, “They’re not the finest kind of Jewish people, dear.”
Brought up as a freethinker, craving religion, Aunt Olga turned passionately to Christian Science, became a practitioner, a member of the board of her local church and finally of the Mother Church in Boston. Her success in soothing the sick and anxious came from her profound humanity, although it was believed by the family as well as her co-religionists that her remarkable personality stemmed from her love of Christ and the example of Mary Baker Eddy. In times of distress, sickness and death, when burglars broke into the house and when Papa lost his money we were comforted by Aunt Olga’s lovely voice and shining optimism. No one thought of her vocation as an escape from Judaism, but as I came to know her in her franker years, I suspected from careless remarks that part of her conversion—certainly not all—was the anti-Semitism inherited from her Prussian mother.
Mama, a refugee from orthodoxy, a challenger of God, would often declare “I’m Jewish and proud of it,” in defiance no doubt of the imbalance of decision in her husband’s family. So long as we did not deny our Jewish heritage she had no objection to our observance of Christian customs. Christmas was celebrated with gusto in our house; at Easter there were colored eggs. They let me go to the Sunday School of St. James Episcopal Church because it was just around the corner with no dangerous streets to cross so that the grown-ups need not lose sleep on Sunday mornings. As a child in New York, Mama had been taught to close her eyes when she passed a crucifix, but she never said a word against my treasuring pretty Sunday-School cards with pictures of Jesus and Mary.
But my Christian education was brief; we moved out of the neighborhood of St. James when I was six, soon after I started collecting holy pictures. Our furniture was packed in crates, taken away in a moving van. The house was empty. We spent the night in a hotel. The next morning we drove in a hansom cab to the Illinois Central station. We were going to live in Memphis, Tennessee. There was a church directly across the street from our new home, but it was Methodist or Presbyterian and gave away no pretty pictures. My playmates in Memphis were the daughters of my father’s business associates, Jewish and not Sunday-School-goers. On Yom Kippur Mama went with their mothers to the synagogue but considered the service too orthodox.
Few congregations were actually so reformed as the temple whose Sunday School I attended after we moved back to Chicago when I was nine. Reform congregations in Chicago never used such an alien and outmoded word as synagogue: temple sounded more refined. Like the Christians, they held their services on Sunday. Sinai was not the only reformed congregation in Chicago but was certainly the farthest from ritual. Instead of a cantor there was a choir. The great organ played Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn. Dr. Emil G. Hirsch (always Doctor, never Rabbi) devoted his sermons to social questions, politics, philosophy and book reviews. He loathed cant, deplored complacency, railed against hypocrisy and never hesitated to use a culprit’s name. In a congregation supported by the rich he castigated landlords, industrialists and merchants who exploited the poor.
In the first years of Sunday School I regarded Dr. Hirsch as remote and awesome, a partner of God in laying down the law and judging humanity. One day in assembly his august gaze was fixed upon me. He had asked a question about the meaning of a Sunday-School song. No one volunteered an answer. “You tell me, little girl.” He was so cross-eyed that you never knew whether he was looking at you or the opposite wall. “You, the little girl with the blue ribbon.” All the little girls whose hair was not tied with pink ribbons were wearing blue. He came along the aisle, pointed a finger at me and said “You. What’s your name?”
“Vera Caspary.”
“Oscar’s daughter or Paul’s?”
“Paul’s.”
“The last time I saw your father was in Berlin. We had a glass of beer together.”
It shocked me to hear a rabbi confess before the whole assembly that he drank beer. I disapproved of all alcoholic beverages because our physiology textbooks were filled with prohibitionist propaganda. Dr. Hirsch asked again what I made of the words of the song. I answered lamely. “Totally wrong,” he said and—while I forced back tears—added, “but you think. Learn to use your brain, Vera Caspary.”
From that day on I became his pet and the butt of his scorn. When I answered stupidly he told the whole assembly that he expected better of me. When I was twelve or thirteen I entered the confirmation class and studied with a small group in Saturday-morning sessions with Dr. Hirsch. The Old Testament and Jewish history were but a small part of our instruction. He went deeper into the development of religion. We learned about animism, tribal gods, nature worship, taboos, early cultures, about Baal and Ra, Jove and Allah; Zoroaster, Mohammed, Buddha, Christ and Confucius; Hillel, Maimonides, Spinoza, Luther and Calvin as well as about the medieval rabbis, scholars and Talmudists.
This adult, broad-minded education brought about a change in me. I was robbed of simple faith but relieved of superstition, taught that our rituals and myths were not exclusively Jewish, but a variation of practices and legends of various descendants of nature-worshipers. It cured me of much of the Caspary ambivalence so that I could honestly echo my mother’s “I’m Jewish and proud of it.” Dr. Hirsch had given me reason for pride in belonging to a people whose courage, whose practice of social justice, whose endurance is one of the miracles of the Christian world.
Dr. Hirsch’s lessons alone were not to blame for my heresy. The first world war began. Every day newspapers brought reports of death and maiming. Belgian babies’ hands cut off, nuns crucified, peasants starved, soldiers’ feet frozen. If, as we sang in assembly, God marked each sparrow’s fall, why did He allow men to suffer so cruelly? It had been bad enough for Him to torture the Israelites in the distant past, but how could He permit a modern war? Had He learned nothing in those thousands of years? No, I was in no position to announce that He was a God of mercy.
This was not my only declaration of disbelief. In seventh grade I had been called upon to analyze those lines of “Snow-Bound” in which Whittier lamented the loss of his little sister:
I cannot feel that thou art far
Since near at need the angels are,
And when the sunset gates unbar.
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And dark against the evening star
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
I stood up between the rows of desks and stated unequivocally that I found it impossible to believe that the poet’s dead sister would stand at the pearly gates waving a welcome. Miss Quinn (or it might have been Miss Kilburn) was enraged. Above her desk in a mission-oak frame hung the faces of the New England poets. John Greenleaf Whittier looked down at me reproachfully. Miss Quinn (or Miss Kilburn) made an acid speech on the audacity of an ignorant girl who dared challenge the positive knowledge of poets and the Church. Her arguments did not move me, but I was afraid of her vengeance. I saw myself confronting the principal, Miss Read, a cold woman who wore nose glasses and a turban with an aigrette. I saw myself suspended, even expelled from the Frances E. Willard School. But nothing would make me retract. Honor was at stake.
The argument went on for days. I stood alone while on the side of immortality was a great company of poets, preachers, the scriptures and my classmates. Although I would have had to be tortured to confess it, I was shaken. Inevitably I asked the opinion of my sister. She quoted Swinburne:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
I thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Flows somewhere safe to sea.
I never brought the verse to class. It was too important to me, private and magic, a source of strength, antidote against fear. It gave me faith in my opinions and encouraged me to think for myself. The lines have remained with me ever since, along with the prophet Micah’s words which Dr. Hirsch had suggested as the theme of my opening prayer at confirmation: To do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with thy God.
I have never been sure of the identity of my God. Certainly I have never found Him a shield against disaster or a comfort in distress. I have never been able to worship, pray or ask favors. Omnipotence became an ethical force demanding honesty and decency. I am sorry to say I have not always walked humbly.
Yet these were years of humility. Along with the poetry and games my sister instructed me in shame. Not intentionally, of course. Each day she acted out a drama of disappointment and pretense that could not fail to make a deep impression on an observant child.
Sister was in love with our father. Short, stocky, big-boned, he was no romantic figure. His virtue was love—which he gave and received with such generosity that his daughters were not his only admirers. In a day when millinery workers (earning from three to six dollars a week) were considered disreputable, Papa treated them like ladies. On hot summer days he carried in his pocket a roll of soda-fountain tickets which he would slip to the girls when they went off for brief rest periods. They tried to show gratitude by pooling together to buy expensive toys for his little girl and by sitting up at night to make elaborate wardrobes for her dolls.
So much of his great stock of love had been spent on his older daughter that her self-esteem grew out of all proportion to her importance. In her secret heart she was Princess Irma, daughter of the King. Her great sorrow was that Papa was not more successful, outstanding, an important figure in the community. What was he but a middle-class merchant, an employee, department-store buyer—and not even in a high-class store on the right side of State Street! One of the lies by which Irma lived was her scorn of materialists who cared too much for money and display, yet I am sure she was secretly wounded because the Caspary name was not among those foremost in local German-Jewish society. But, alas, Papa had not invested in Sears, Roebuck.
Had a young man of the higher social circle wooed her, I imagine Irma would have accepted him and called it romance. But young businessmen on our level, even though they had decent German-Jewish names and were generous with long-stemmed roses and Allegretti’s chocolates, offered neither romance nor comparison with Papa.
The catastrophe that befell him in Memphis was not uncommon. When Papa lost his money is a recurrent phrase on the lips of middle-class daughters. Papa’s proud princess could not accept it as an ordinary phenomenon of bourgeois life. To her it was the ultimate tragedy. That the failure was not Papa’s fault did not console her. Her idol could not be a dupe. He had moved to Memphis to invest, with a number of other experienced mercantile men, all of his savings in a big new department store. In the beginning the store flourished, fulfilling the promise of its promoters. According to Papa it could have gone on making money had not an accountant discovered in rigged ledgers that the promoters had never invested the sums they had promised but started the business with no more than their suckers’ capital. Those men who had believed themselves minor investors and had put all of their money into the business were left with the debts. In the end their names were cleared, but their money was gone.
The Baby had to be protected from knowledge of disgrace. When the newsboy tossed the paper onto our front porch Sister lurked behind the door to snatch it before I could read the shameful news. Talk of the scandal was hushed when I came into the room. I caught the overtones and, because of the whispering, was more deeply hurt than if I had been told outright that Papa’s business had gone bankrupt. My friends, the Hoffman sisters, in whose parents’ surrey I went for drives on summer afternoons, were also daughters of disaster. They discussed it freely. None of us quite understood what had happened and no grown-up ever explained it, so the failure of the Block Mercantile Company became a shadow on my life as though my father were a scoundrel.
With his usual courage and optimism (this was not his first failure) Papa got together a small amount of money and opened a millinery store called Maison Nouvelle. It too failed. Successful in making profits for others, Papa always lost his own money. When he had no responsibility to anyone but himself he probably gave in to his urge toward humanity, a drive not permitted if a man’s sole purpose is to make a fortune.
The double disaster was more than Irma’s pride could bear. Her character changed. She developed eccentricities. Snobbism was compounded by shame. Humor turned sour. The vivacious girl became a bitter old maid; delusions multiplied and the absurd myth of aristocracy swelled into a great absurd bubble while she played the deposed princess and poor Mama, protecting herself against her older daughter’s sarcastic wit, assumed the role of fallen queen. “We’re poor,” sighed the martyrs. Sister drew me closer to her, infected me with her lofty attitudes, clothed me in remnants of her shoddy pride.
I accepted as guilt the fact that we no longer kept a maid (the new, stylish word for hired girl) and managed with only Mama and Irma to keep the house tidy on the days the cleaning woman-laundress did not come in. Irma had a million excuses for the humiliation. We did not live badly. The house was smaller than in grander days, but we needed fewer rooms since my brothers no longer lived with us. It was a comfortable house with “artistic” gas logs in the back parlor and a shower in the bathroom. Later we moved into a flat with only six rooms, another fall from grace, although apartments were becoming fashionable and much richer people lived in our building. Our meals were more than ample, always varied and tasty. Mama was a splendid cook, a gifted dressmaker. She could remodel an old dress in the latest style, and out of remnants from pictures in The Delineator or Ladies’ Home Journal make suits and coats. Irma sewed in labels cut out of dresses bought in more prosperous years.
My father did not approve of the self-pity and subterfuge but would never criticize the constant whine of poverty since he suffered the guilt of a man who believed himself a failure because he could not provide the luxuries to which his women were entitled. His forbearance as much as their complaints convinced me of our shame. All of this hit at a sensitive period when awareness of unimportance comes to a child in a succession of incomprehensible blows. I had long suffered the knowledge that I was the smallest, most cowardly girl on the block, the first to be caught in running games, the least skilled in sports. To this was added the conviction that I was, among the daughters of prosperous men, the poor little match girl, my rags disguised by a decent dress made over from a grown-up garment of good material.
None of our friends or neighbors was really rich. Comfort with a bit of style was the standard. Why, then, was my sister so furtive about each small economy? Why was it so necessary that she invite her friends to “afternoons” when the cleaning woman in a starched apron served cakes and salads like a full-time maid? Why was Mama, who would sit up all night to finish a new dress, cheated of gratitude? And why was I condemned to skulking through alleys and hurrying, head hanging, on back streets when I carried a bundle of laundry?
The anguish of those errands left a scar kept hidden for over forty years. During that half-mile walk I could think of nothing but my chagrin if some schoolmate should see me with Papa’s laundry in my arms. To have it known that my parents were in such a wretched condition that they needed to save (how much—fifty cents? a dollar a week?) by sending Papa’s shirts and collars to a cash-and-carry laundry would make me the object of scorn. Even Jeannette, my very best friend, was never told of these errands. If she knew, she has never in sixty loyal years mentioned it.
A black man came into my room every night. The curtains whispered of his presence, floorboards groaned under his feet. Shadows moved stealthily in the dark. He came first to the house I was born in. When we moved he followed me to the new bedroom which lay safely between my parents’ and my big brothers’ rooms. In Memphis, where we lived in a big sprawling first-floor flat, he climbed in from the yard. In the Chicago apartment it was no trick for him to climb into my room from the front porch. In the adjacent living room Mama, Papa and Irma sat under the Tiffany lamp, reading or playing cards. When they turned out the lights and went to their rooms, when there were no more footsteps on the street, my window was softly raised and the dark shape appeared.
Sometimes he was no more than a shadow, but at other times I distinctly heard him pad across my small room. I squeezed my eyelids shut so I would not see the glint of his knife. The raised knife was consummation, for after I felt it above me, I fell asleep. The horror went on for years. I was addicted to fear. Like the alcoholic who vows that this will be his last drink, I promised myself each night that tomorrow would mark the end of my senseless habit. I grew older, knew the terror was self-induced, deplored my weak character and continued to wait for the black man.
Why a black man? I was less afraid of them than of the fat beggar who came to our door every month and of gypsy men who appeared occasionally with their brightly dressed women, for I knew from children’s stories that gypsies were ruthless kidnappers. Most of all I feared the bearded Jews who came through the alleys to buy old clothes and discarded pots. “Rags, old iron,” they cried, and I ran into the house to hide from the malevolent “Rex o’lion” man. Smiling black men with pleasant voices often delivered packages or tended the furnace. No one in our house dared utter a word against them. We might scorn the wrong sort of Jews, but prejudice (then called intolerance) was an unforgivable sin, nigger a filthy word.
The street where I was born, Rhodes Avenue, later became the center of Chicago’s Black Belt. The first blacks who came there rented the other half of our double house. There was an outcry by neighbors; petitions were circulated, indignant letters sent to the property-owners. Papa led a small faction against the protestors—he had grown up as an Abolitionist in Wisconsin. It was his contention that our neighborhood was honored by the presence of Judge Barnett and his wife, Ida Wells Barnett, a lawyer and leader of social causes. What right had the neighbors to consider themselves superior? A judge and a woman lawyer could look down on merchants, salesmen, shopkeepers. When the Barnetts moved in we said “Good morning” and “Good evening” and “How are you, Judge?” but no more. There was no friendship, never any neighborly calls and no games with the Barnett children.
In Memphis Papa had become more than ever the black man’s champion. He argued violently with his partners and was said to have struck Mr. Hoffman for ordering a black to step off the sidewalk while he strutted past. Back of our apartment building, as behind many of the city’s proudest houses, stood a row of cabins. Any of these black neighbors could have hoisted himself up on the sill and climbed into my bedroom. My black man was never one of these humble men who came in to do small chores. My black man was the faceless intruder who had climbed to the second story of the Chicago houses. I suffered the same suspense, heard the same creaks and groans, opened my eyes to the same dusky shadow or closed them tight against the sheen of the same raised knife.
To have called for help would have been an admission of cowardice. Papa’s tolerance did not include the fainthearted. I found it easier to suffer the visits of my tormentor than confess to fear.
In the end my enemy was vanquished. One night (I was sixteen or seventeen, I think) I told myself in a burst of platitudes that the time to be afraid was at the moment when he stood above my bed. Then, if my voice was powerless, I’d see the knife descend, feel the pain, perhaps die. Until that time I’d banish the loathsome visitor and enjoy the pleasant bedtime diversion of making up stories about interesting people.
He did not disappear immediately. On many nights when I heard the curtains whisper I cowered under the blanket, hid my head, uttered small experimental croaks to test my voice, waited for the knife to rise and fall. Gradually I got rid of the persistent fellow and for the rest of my life resisted the temptation to cross distant and disastrous bridges. Platitudes, repeated like prayers, healed the wound but did not erase the scars. Forty years passed before I could mention my black man and only now am I able to write about him.
Other secrets were covered over by merciful flesh. For years I forgot that my sister had called me Pig. A dubious pet name, but deserved by a child who soiled and stained and left books and toys scattered all over the house. My socks always tumbled down, my stockings tore at the knee, my shoes unlaced themselves, buttons burst off, hair ribbons untied, schoolroom ink stained my fingers, cocoa spilled on party dresses. The nickname was deserved, and I do not know that I ever protested. Yet when I was past thirty and with friends in a house I had built in Connecticut, I said quite nonchalantly, “When I was a kid my sister always called me…” and could not get the word out. I laughed hysterically. “What did your sister call you?” I tried to say it, but could only giggle. Each time I tried to say the word I was convulsed and helpless. Only when a long dinner was over and other things discussed could I say “She called me Pig.”
With all the scars, restraints, taboos and pride’s value out of proportion to significance, I became bashful and silent in the presence of strangers, of girls I admired and of boys. Shyness crippled a nature that was exuberant, explosive and playful. At home I could let myself go in bursts of hilarity. Never in public. Never in the presence of boys. It was a sorry time for a girl to lose self-confidence.
I loved them ardently—first Papa, then Sister, then Mama. All the affection they showered on me was returned with childish fervor. Every evening except when the rain was too heavy, the wind too cold, the snow too high or dark came too early for a little girl’s venturing out alone, I waited at the corner for Papa to get off the streetcar. We had been friends from the time when we had taken Sunday-morning walks. He would wear his dark blue overcoat with velvet revers, and his derby and carry a silver-topped cane. In summer he treated me to ice cream; in winter there was a striped bag of popcorn and peanuts for the squirrels. Once he confounded me by saying he hoped the squirrels would not mind my wearing their cousins as a muff and tippet. I was ashamed and would never again wear my cherished fur pieces to the park. I believed Papa when he came to the summer resort for his two-week vacations, walked in the woods with me and pointed out the circles of trodden grass where fairies had danced. As I grew older we rode to the end of the streetcar line, took country walks and stopped at country saloons where I waited outside while he fetched beer for himself and soda pop for me.
Walks with Mama were quite another kind of experience. She always called me back to move sedately beside her when I skipped, leaped, jumped over cracks, balanced myself on a coping, hopped on one foot, ran like a hunted animal. Mama wore gloves and a veil, bowed to neighbors, stopped to chat with other ladies. The grocer, the baker, the butcher would say “Good morning, Mrs. Caspary, a nice day, isn’t it? And how’s the little girl?” and give me a banana or a cookie or a slice of sausage. Mama said, “Don’t be so greedy. People will think I don’t feed you enough at home.” She said this too when I ate at other people’s houses, and went on saying it after I was a grown woman, for I could eat like a starving giant at any time of the day or night, and especially after a big dinner, with two helpings of everything and three of dessert.
Sister carried Jordan almonds in her pocketbook. We sucked them and recited poetry when we walked to the Blackstone Library, each carrying five books. Houses along the way were ivy-covered and set back on fine lawns. In summer the maples and oak trees provided cool green canopies and in autumn flamed against the sky.
Holidays in the country were pure ecstasy. My bouquets wilted before I brought them home, but I felt sorry for the poor plucked wildflowers and kept them in water long after they were dead. Under trees when sunshine made of branches, twigs and leaves an intricate design of varied greens I enjoyed the loveliest daydreams.
My dreams were stories of love, sacrifice and devotion. Never in the first person. The characters were made up and shaped to whim and desire. I told myself stories in full sentences. At a time when my reading was undiscriminating and diversified, my dreams combined the styles of Bulwer-Lytton and James M. Barrie with a touch of E. F. Benson or George Barr McCutcheon.
Fancy merged with play. The dream could be exposed when there were symbols, dolls, paper dolls, costumes and stage properties. The grown-ups never belittled the dignity of imagination. Just as in my earlier years Mama had set places at the table for my imaginary friends, she helped plan the menu, the decor and the trousseau for a doll’s wedding.
During a measles epidemic I woke one morning to find the dolls in the crib stricken: Irma had painted pink dots on their bodies. She drew pictures, too, for the magazines I handprinted and sold to aunts and cousins for a nickel a copy. Mama upholstered furniture and made lace curtains for my doll’s house. Papa brought ribbons and remnants, buckles, gold braid, feathers and artificial flowers from millinery workrooms to adorn the costumes for plays I wrote and staged. They wanted me involved in games and dreams so that they would not have to concede that Baby was growing up.
My best friends were girls with enough imagination to share the excitements of my private world but not so inventive that their creations could compete with mine. I was willing, so long as I directed the show, to make concessions to their dreams. With Ruth the inhabitants of the doll’s house were English nobles and millionaires; Jeannette snubbed these babyish games but would join me in making cardboard rooms for paper dolls who went to boarding school or college and attended football games with boys. Only Eleanor was allowed to dominate a fantasy that went through our freshman year in high school.
I had cultivated Eleanor’s friendship in fourth grade when I heard that her mother was an authoress. Except for Rosalie G. Mendel, author of Spark, A Dog, I had never seen a writer. Eleanor’s mother’s books were on the shelves of the library, displayed in bookstore windows, reviewed in the newspapers. Eleanor lived intensely in her fancies but was certainly not lacking in worldly knowledge. With our braids tucked under the collars of winter coats we went to movie theatres that advertised films For Adults Only. Clara Kimball Young swooned in the arms of Harry Morey; Theda Bara held men helpless in her powdered arms; Norma Talmadge with grapes clustered over her ears writhed on an Oriental rug, inviting the passions of Eugene O’Brien.
It was in our first year of high school that Eleanor’s outrageous romance with Francis X Bushman began. Her letters about him were slipped between the pages of geography books exchanged between classes. In the letters we were full-grown and apparently living in different cities, since all of our communication was by correspondence. Her first letter told of their meeting on a streetcar. Francis X had stared and smiled and, as I recall, got off the car when she did, found an excuse to talk to her and, after a long walk, suggested another meeting. In succeeding letters she wrote of the growth of their love, of the suffering caused by quarrels, of the joy of reconciliation and finally of their marriage. During the semester she gave him a number of children.
At this time Bushman was under contract to the Essanay Studios on Chicago’s North Side. Forerunners of the bobby-soxers (in ribbed black stockings), we rode on El trains from the South Side to Ravenswood and hung about the studio entrance in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. Too proud to stand about idly, we picked cocoons off the trunks of the willow trees in front of the studio. In order to save the trees from destruction by Notolophus leucostigma, our zoology teacher offered a fraction of credit for every thousand cocoons his pupils brought in. Eleanor and I had no trouble in passing this course. We filled dozens of candy boxes with cocoons.
Newspaper movie columns carried coy allusions to Bushman’s wife and five children. He and the studio’s press agents denied the rumors. Eleanor set out to investigate. A FOR RENT sign had been put up in the window of his apartment. With a senior girl who wore a Woolworth’s wedding ring and looked old enough to be married, Eleanor went to look at the apartment. They found the actor at home with his wife and five children. This could not dampen a spirit like Eleanor’s. She wrote a new series of letters in which Bushman divorced his wife to marry her. She bore him two or three more children. The game ended when the newspapers announced that Bushman was actually divorcing his wife to marry his leading lady, Beverly Bayne.
I don’t remember if the altar was taken down when this news struck. The altar, set up in a corner of her bedroom on a table draped with velvet and adorned with some dusty Christmas-tree branches, bore a picture of Bushman. Candles were lighted and, kneeling, Eleanor sang to the tune of the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffmann: “Oh, Francis dear, we thee adore.…” Craving Eleanor’s approval, I set up a miniature altar in my doll’s house which I no longer played with but which I cherished because my collection of furniture was much admired by older people. By this time I had become Eleanor’s best friend. I ate dinner at her house, stayed overnight and often, standing silent in the hall, looked through an open door to watch her mother, the authoress, sitting up in bed with a clipboard, writing a book.
I had a low opinion of high school boys, but if the homeliest and stupidest had twice looked in my direction I’d have torn up my books in ecstasy. In the study of English, history and public speaking I did rather well, in mathematics and science managed to scrape through, but when it came to the study of the adolescent male, I was definitely retarded. One summer while I was in the country, making bouquets of wildflowers and fitting my daydreams to the Wisconsin landscape, Eleanor and Jeannette took up the study of coquetry. In August when I came back to Chicago, my chums had learned to bat their eyelashes, gasp in admiration and think of cute things to say.
Their finishing school had been the shore of Lake Michigan. Neighborhood kids spent long hot days lolling on the sand, diving into the breakers, eating hot dogs and ice cream cones and, when they reached high school age, flirting. They gathered into little groups, superior and impregnable, often around a boy who had brought a ukulele. Back in Chicago after a blissful holiday in the country, I was introduced to this dazzling world by my girl friends, who now considered me a drag but were too loyal to ditch an old chum. Since I had not learned to flutter my eyelids, gasp in admiration of adolescent wit or say cute things, I was ignored by the boys.
For consolation and companionship I renewed my friendship with Ruth, who had ranked third on my list of best friends. Ruth was—next to me—the smallest girl in all of our classes and the brightest. Once Ruth told me that her father was sixteenth cousin to the Czar of Russia. This was no doubt because she knew and suffered the contempt of neighbors like my sister who thought Russian Jews unworthy. It was Ruth’s habit to make up stories to compensate for small inferiorities. She told them with such conviction that I could never contradict her. During the war her father became a profiteer in the meat business and moved his family to Toronto. Ruth was sent to boarding school. Two years later she spent a holiday with us. We slept together in a wide bed. Somewhere I had heard that girls fell in love with each other but had not believed it until Ruth confessed that she had taken part in orgies.
“What do they do?” I asked.
“Hug and kiss and rub each other’s stomachs till they get passionate.”
She suggested a trial run. We lay in the dark hugging and kissing and raised our nightgowns to rub each other’s stomachs. “Is that all there is to it?” I asked. “Don’t you feel passionate?” All I felt was boredom and the need for sleep.
“You’re frigid,” Ruth declared.