Anybody Can Do Anything (13 page)

Because I was the originator of several chains I got ninety cents from the first four, eighty cents from the next eight, seventy cents from the next sixteen and so forth. As each share was turned into the office I entered the name on a
chart so that I knew who had bought from whom and where the dimes were or weren’t.

After the first week the office was a madhouse, and I had to hire four girls to help me and every night at home all the family sat around and picked dimes out of Mary’s and my dime cards. One night we counted seventy-two dollars’ worth of dimes. All day long people stormed into the office demanding a share in Prosperity and then rushed out again to sell their shares and start their chains. I knew that there had to be an end to this delightful game some time because Seattle only had about 300,000 citizens, but I didn’t anticipate how or when it would come.

One day after the office had been running for about six weeks, a fat man came in and asked me to explain the dime card game to him. I did, slowly and succinctly and he said, “That’s it, sister. I’m closing up this joint!” Whereupon he called in a huge task force of policemen, who came loping in swinging their billy clubs. All the girls who were working for me began to bawl, and I tried vainly to locate Mr. Wilson, who had gone to the bank.

“I’m from the D.A.’s office and I’m going to take you all to the station house,” the fat man said. I said, “You are not. We only work here and anyway what’s the matter?”

“Plenty’s the matter,” said the fat man.

Then a photographer took a lot of pictures of the policemen seizing the files, which was pretty ridiculous as nobody was holding on to them. Finally in an hour or so a small pleasant gray-haired man appeared, dismissed the fat man, sent all of us home, and that was that.

“Crime is too nerve-wracking,” I told Mary. “Just get me a plain job.” So she did. Typing estimates for an engineer. The work was dull and so was the engineer but it was a job.

9: “All the World’s a Stage and by God Everybody in This Family Is Going to the Foreign Movies and Like Bach”

It seems to me, as I look back, that when we were the poorest we had the most fun. Our ability to enjoy ourselves in the face of complete adversity was astounding to the people who believed that you had to have money to have fun; appalling to those others who believed that it is an effrontery for the poor to laugh. I am not sure that individually we would have been so “happy in spite of it all,” but together we felt we could survive anything and did.

The world was a very sad place, in those days. The people who had jobs were so obsessed with the fear of losing them that they balanced precariously on each day of employment like a hummock in a quicksand bog, and the people who didn’t have jobs had their eyes so dimmed by the fear of hunger, sickness and cold that they walked right over golden opportunities without seeing them. I belonged to the latter group—Mother and Mary to neither.

Mary, one of those fortunate people who are able to bring forth great reserves of strength and fortitude during times of stress, accepted the depression as a personal challenge. She always had a job, she tried to find jobs for her family
and hundreds of friends and, while she was looking, propped up everyone’s limp spirits by defying big corporations.

When the telephone company threatened to disconnect our telephone because the bill hadn’t been paid, Mary marched right down to see the president and told him that if he cut off our phone and left us with no communication with the outside world, she was going to sue him personally. Her exact words, which she recounted to our amusement at the dinner table, were, “I told him a telephone and telegraph company is a public service operating under a special grant from the state. If you cut off my telephone you will not be performing a public service and I will sue you. In fact from this day on I’m going to be known as the biggest suer in the city of Seattle.” It did keep the telephone from being disconnected and it certainly bolstered our morale. She tried the same thing with the power and light company, but they turned off the lights anyway and for a week or so left us to burn old Christmas candles and not iron.

During this interlude, Mary, who was inclined to keep up with our friends of private school days, brought home to dinner a terribly snobbish young man who remarked, as we sat down to our candle-lit vegetable soup, “You Bards absolutely delight me. You have a simple meal of vegetable soup and toast and then you make it elegant by serving it by candlelight.” He was so elegant, of course, that he didn’t go out into the kitchen to note that we were also washing the dishes by candlelight. When he left he amused us greatly by standing by the front door for a full ten minutes flipping the switches and trying to make the porch light go on. Finally he called to Mother, “Sydney darling, I hate to mention it but your porch light’s burned out. Have one of the great beasts who come to court your daughters put a new one in.” When we all laughed he thought he’d been witty and repeated his asinine remark.

When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a
bucksaw and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took turns sawing up fallen logs. We were just splitting up the first cut on our first log when two park gardeners came up and asked us what the hell we thought we were doing. Mary told them exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it and to our surprise and relief they helped us saw and carry the wood up to the house, and after that saved logs and bark for us.

During the depression we all came home right after work and Mary brought home to dinner, to stay all night, or to live with us, everyone she met whom she felt sorry for. Some of these people were brilliant, talented and amusing. Some were just ordinary people. Some unconscionable bores. Mary didn’t care. They were alive, or at least pretended to be.

Every night for dinner we had from two to ten extra people to tax Mother’s ingenuity in stretching the meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, chili, tuna fish and noodles, vegetable soup, park wood and beds. After dinner we played bridge or charades or Chinese checkers or the piano, rolled old cigarette butts into new cigarettes on our little cigarette-rolling machine, drank gallons of coffee which was seventeen cents a pound, ate cinnamon toast, read aloud Mark Twain, made fun of each other and all our friends, sang songs, played records, followed the dance marathons on the radio, and complained because our bosses tried to stifle our individuality by making us work.

We were in love most of the time, but being in love in those days didn’t seem to be such a crystallized state as it is today. Nobody had enough money to get off by themselves, let alone get married, so grand passions flamed and t were spent in front of the fireplace reading Rupert Brooke, listening to “Body and Soul” on the radio, or walking up by the reservoir to watch, across its flat black surface, the lights of the city made teary by the rain.

Every Saturday in the fall, Mother made a huge kettle of chili and we all sat around and listened to the football games. Mother, an ardent fan, kept a chart, groaned in agony over the stupidity of the announcers who commented on the crowd and didn’t tell where the ball was and invariably told us that there was no football spirit in the West, we should go to a Yale-Harvard game. When our side made a touchdown we all shouted at the top of our voices, which made the dogs bark, the children wake up from their naps and bawl and our neighbors pull aside their curtains and peer over at us.

I always looked forward to Saturday. I loved the tight expectant feeling I had as I opened the front door and wondered who would be there. I loved Saturday’s dusk with the street lights as soft as breath in the fog or rain, the voices of the children, filtering home from the matinee, clear and high with joy and silliness; the firm thudding comforting sound of front doors closing and shutting the families in, the world out; the thick exciting sound of a car door slamming in front of the house; the exuberance of the telephone bell. Everybody came over Saturday night, brought friends and stayed until three or four Sunday morning.

Sundays were always marked by a strong smell of gasoline and meatloaf and tremendous activity. First we got the children ready for Sunday School, which always meant a wild hunt for matching socks, misplaced mite boxes and Sunday School lessons, then we all pitched in and cleaned the house, Mother made an enormous meatloaf (hamburger was only twelve cents a pound), then Mother and Dede left for church, while Mary and I repaired to a small covered areaway by the basement door, filled a little washtub with clearing fluid and sloshed our office dresses, our skirts, even our coats in it then hung them slightly less spotty and dripping gasoline, on a line under the porch. The cleaning fluid was twenty-five cents a gallon and could be strained through
flannel and used over and over again and doing our own cleaning, beside being an economic necessity, burned our hands and made us feel so virtuous that we often cleaned things that didn’t need it. Big washings gave me the same terrific feeling of godly accomplishment and sometimes I’d get so carried away I’d wash old oriental rugs, doll clothes, big lumpy comforters and a pair of Bagdad portieres we never used, just to be sure that every single thing in the house was clean.

By dinner time the house had been scrubbed and the smells of shampoo and scorch from the iron were mingled with the gasoline and meatloaf. Sunday evenings, which usually drew the biggest crowds of all, ended earlier than Saturday but not as early as they should have considering that Monday was a workday and on Monday night we usually went to the movies because Monday was family night at our neighborhood theatre and an unlimited group arriving together and appearing reasonably compatible could all get in for twenty-five cents.

Tuesday nights we went to bed early unless someone was giving a party. Parties were indistinguishable one from another. They were always given in someone’s apartment; the food was always spaghetti, garlic bread and green salad; the drinks were either bathtub gin and lemon soda or Dago red; the entertainment sitting on the floor and listening to Bach or sitting on a studio couch and listening to Bach. I didn’t care much for Bach, even when partially anaesthetized by bathtub gin, but red-hot nails in my eyeballs wouldn’t have made me admit it, because Mary had made it very clear to me that everybody who was not down on all fours liked Bach, Baudelaire, Dostoevski, Aldous Huxley, Spengler, almond paste on filet of sole, Melochrino cigarettes and the foreign movies.

I liked Baudelaire, Huxley and Dostoevski, I loathed Spengler, felt that almond paste on filet of sole had a lot in
common with chocolate-dipped oysters, Melochrino cigarettes tasted like camel dung and the foreign movies would have been dandy if only they hadn’t been foreign.

There is a certain state of ennui in which I become engulfed almost immediately when confronted by a flickering, speckled film and a lot of unfamiliar actors batting their eyes and saying,
“A bisogni si conoseen gli amici”
or
“Adel sitzt im Gemuthe nicht im
geblute
,” or
“A pobreza no hay verguenza”
or
“Battre le fer pendant qu’il est chaud”
or
“da svidanya.”

The foreign movies were on Wednesday nights at eleven-thirty at a University district theatre. The reason I kept going, aside from a false pride that made me say I thought they were “magnificent,” “a new approach,” “delicately directed,” etc., when I really thought most of them were boring and dull, was the fact that after each one the theatre management served little cups of black coffee and free cigarettes.

“An amazing picture, grrrrreat photography,” I announced loudly in the foyer of the theatre, as I stuffed my pockets with cigarettes, after having slept through
Rocket to the Moon,
a ridiculous picture in which the poorly made-up actors and actresses had themselves shot to the moon and were shown lurching around in its barren craters, speaking German and being otherwise hysterical about a questionable achievement.

We saw a French film of Joan of Arc which showed only the heads and shoulders of the actors. “Terribly new approach,” I said, grabbing at the cigarettes and trying to shake off the stiffnecked feeling of having spent the evening peering over a high board fence.

The Constant Nymph,
however, an English picture starring Elizabeth Bergner and Robert Donat, I still consider the best adaptation of a book and the most delightful moving picture I have ever seen. Mary also liked it but our
friends were not enthusiastic—”Pleasant little thing,” they called it, ashamed because they had enjoyed it and it had been in English.

One winter Saturday afternoon, quite by accident, as we were walking through the University district, my sister Dede and I discovered what was to become one of our chief and most enjoyable forms of free entertainment.

“I wonder why all those people are going into the basement of that church?” I asked Dede, as we strolled along the street. “Let’s go in and find out,” Dede, always one to face things, said. So we did and found that Miss Irma Grondahl was presenting her pupils and herself in a piano recital. Having nothing else to do we decided to stay and seated ourselves on folding chairs in the front row. Immediately Miss Grondahl, in a long gold velvet cape, appeared and assuming that we were relatives of some performer, solicited our help in moving the upright piano over to the left side of the stage and arranging large bouquets of dusty laurel leaves along the footlights.

The recital began and was more or less routine, except that all the performers made mistakes, swayed back and forth like pendulums as they played and even a baby only about four years old, who played “Baby Bye See the Fly, Let Us Watch Him You and I,” standing up, used the loud pedal.

Then Miss Grondahl announced that she would play “Rustle of Spring” and “Hark, Hark the Lark.” She had shed her gold cape and was simply clad in a sleeveless black satin dress and some crystal beads. She settled herself on the piano bench, folded her hands in her lap and began to sway. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and then suddenly, like running in backdoor in jumping rope, she lit into the first runs of “Rustle.” Miss Grondahl was a vigorous very loud player but what made her performance irresistible to Dede and me were the large tufts of black
hair which sprang quivering out of the armholes of her dress each time she lifted her hands at the end of a run or raised her arms for a crashing chord.

After that we rarely missed a recital. We watched the neighborhood papers and clipped out the notices and attended every single singing, dancing, elocution or piano recital that didn’t conflict with working hours and was within walking distance. We grew very partial to modern dance recitals whose uninhibited antics, often resembling the pangs of childbirth or someone who had just been stung by a bee, so delighted us that we were sometimes asked to leave, but singing was our favorite.

We learned almost immediately that, as we invariably became hysterical with mirth at the first frenzied shriek of the first performer and singing teachers were wont to salt their audience with friends and relatives, the very back row was the safest place to sit. If we were fortunate enough to locate and attend a voice recital where one of the performers was tone deaf or there were some thick mashed-potato contraltos, our joy was complete.

Our attendance at recitals so stimulated our appetite for simple pleasures that we began clipping out and attending other little functions. The Annual Tea of the Northwest Driftwood Society was remembered for its few guests and enormous platters of open-faced sandwiches which we wolfed down as we exchanged opinions on patina, good beaches and time of year to look.

Most groups of Penwomen had very little food but lots of cigarettes; we were too young and regarded suspiciously by most garden clubs; but North American Indian Relic Collectors, the Society for the Protection of the Douglas Fir and the Northwest Association of Agate Polishers, etc., were glad to see anybody.