The Gilded Years (10 page)

“Not at all,” said Porter. “You hadn’t any idea that I was planning on coming. And Miss Taylor has been wonderful company.”

“Wonderful company who will be leaving you now,” said Lottie, taking her roommate’s arm. “Anita, if you don’t make it to Belle’s card party tonight, we shall all understand. We’ll miss you terribly, but we’ll make do. I’ll simply have to lead the entertaining. Monocles for all.”

Anita thanked her, and Lottie executed a formal Japanese bow and left her with Porter, though Anita imagined she was just around the corner listening with Anna.

“I brought you flowers, Miss Hemmings. Anita,” Porter said, holding out a bouquet. “Many of the Harvard men told me to bring daisies, which they claimed is the official flower of Vassar College, but those seemed too simple for a first formal meeting. I then considered red roses, but they seemed quite the opposite, too correct. So I chose pink. Pink roses. Softer than red, and more in keeping with your personality, I believe.”

“They are perfect. And perfectly me. Thank you, Porter,” said Anita, bringing her nose to them and inhaling the scent.

“At what time is your card party this evening?” asked Porter. “I promise not to keep you.”

“It’s not until midnight,” said Anita.

“Ah,” he said, breaking into a laugh. “I am sure I will be able to return you safely to your room before midnight.”

He looked at Anita and blushed. “Not to your room, of course. I meant to say, right here. To this very respectable public parlor.”

“How about some air?” Anita suggested before Porter’s embarrassment overwhelmed him further. “Shall we walk outside? That is, if you’ve already placed your name with the maid?”

“Yes, I have registered. Lottie assisted me.” He cleared his throat, nervously. “A walk sounds perfect,” he added. “You may not believe me, but I haven’t spent much time on your campus. I came to a Phil Day dance as a sophomore, but haven’t returned since.”

“I don’t believe we met then,” said Anita, remembering herself at the dance two years before. She had been asked by several men for a place on her dance card but had declined almost all.

“We did not,” said Porter, his eyes fixed on her arresting face. “I would have never let you go.”

Anita, discomposed, turned quickly away, and they headed out the back door of Main near the clamorous heating plant. As soon as they made their way down the stairs, Porter stopped on the path and turned to Anita.

“I’m sorry I didn’t write to tell you I was coming to campus. I was afraid you might encourage me not to. I felt—after meeting you last weekend—I felt that I had to come. And right away. I hope you’re not angry with me and that you might have some time for me today. Not just a few minutes, but hours. Though I do not want to impose on you or your day.”

“I’m very surprised to see you,” Anita said candidly.

“But are you
happy
that I came?” he asked, putting his hand on her cheek.

She didn’t jump, as she thought she might the first time a man touched her face. Instead she breathed in the feeling it gave her, the loop of pleasure it sent through her body, and said, “Yes. I really am.”

“I’m so glad,” he said, and they walked in silence toward the observatory. As they approached, Anita gave him a brief history of the domed building, a Main in miniature, citing the achievements of Vassar’s great astronomer, Maria Mitchell.

“The distinguished Miss Mitchell was a professor here for twenty-three years,” she concluded. “She used to throw a dome party every year for the senior class, just the women and the telescope, celebrating the sky. I imagine it must have been lovely.”

“I’m a vocal supporter of women’s education,” said Porter. “I’m from Chicago, which is the Wild West compared to New York, and my parents are very modern. My mother always says she wished she had the opportunity to attend a women’s college. She’s very involved with suffrage now,
which is great mental stimulation for her, but even without a college education, she’s more intelligent than the rest of us. A quality I appreciate.”

“So few women attended college in your mother’s generation. I suppose it’s still that way,” Anita said. “I believe only three percent of Americans are in college at all.”

“But here you are,” said Porter. “Extremely smart and intimidatingly beautiful.”

“I can’t agree with either of those statements,” Anita replied, her face burning up to her ears. “But I am happy here.”

“I can see that,” said Porter. “And now I want to know why. Now that we aren’t surrounded by Harvard men, and Lottie Taylor, tell me everything there is to know about you.”

“Everything about me,” she said slowly.

She couldn’t tell Porter anything about herself. She couldn’t tell him that her mother ran a boardinghouse in Cottage City every summer, or that her father had recently begun working two jobs, as a janitor and a coachman, cleaning up after and transporting white wealthy Bostonians. She couldn’t announce that she lived in the city’s Negro neighborhood or that she had never left the state of Massachusetts until she was an adolescent, and still had not traveled beyond the Northeast. Was she supposed to talk about her profound fear that she would grow so comfortable at Vassar that her secret would burst out of her like a sneeze? That she would accidentally mention something about her background, her education, her family that would expose her true origins? Or should she admit that she was not supposed to be speaking to him at all? That he should stay away from her, because she was the thing the world reviled most: a Negro woman?

Instead, Anita looked up at his handsome face, smiling
when she saw the freckles on his short nose, and said, “I hope to be a professor after years more study. I’d like to teach Greek, perhaps even here, as I am happy at Vassar and very afraid to leave.”

They walked away from the building, past the museum housing the hall of casts, the art gallery, and the museum of mineralogy and toward the school’s stone western wall. Beyond that was the large lake across Raymond Avenue, the one the girls skated on when the water froze and created beautiful white veins on the surface.

Porter let Anita lead him around the campus and inquired more about her future plans, asking why she hoped to teach.

“Nearly forty percent of the students who graduate from Vassar go on to teach,” she explained. “There are not many other professions open to women, are there? When I first applied to the school, I had my mind set on being a high school teacher, perhaps at the school where I prepped for the entrance exam. But living here, meeting female college professors, being exposed to their levels of learning, I changed my mind. I can’t imagine another school as invested in women’s education as Vassar. It’s not just a finishing school masquerading as a college. The expansion of a woman’s mind is the primary goal here, and the curriculum is just as vigorous as at a men’s college. They want us to be intelligent, academic women first, and everything else comes second, quite the opposite of the priorities in the outside world. I feel like I’ve come alive here, Porter,” she disclosed, surprising herself with the fervor in her voice. “I feel safe, and if I could hold on to that feeling forever, well, I would be very fulfilled.”

“That sounds like a realistic goal,” said Porter, watching her face become beautifully animated.

“I hope so,” she replied. “Though I must confess, a small part of me still dreams of becoming a Greek translator, or perhaps an archaeologist, but I don’t think those are possibilities for someone like me.”

“Someone like you?”

“Female.”

“I am awfully glad you’re female,” he said as the stone gate at the corner of Raymond and College View avenues came into sight. “And you shouldn’t be scared to leave Vassar, as beautiful as it is. You’re going to do wonderful things when you graduate, I can tell. And Vassar will be right here waiting for your return.”

“I hope so,” Anita said, thinking how much she liked being gated inside the Vassar world. “If I could just make it to Greece one day—to see Delphi, the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, the city of Rhodes—that would be a dream. If I have to leave Vassar, I’d like to see a little more of the world than Boston and Poughkeepsie.”

Porter nodded. Anita guessed, from his expression, that he had already been to a great many places, but instead of boasting about his travels, he told her about his life in Chicago and his plans to work for his father’s lumber company after graduating from Harvard.

“You would fall under Chicago’s spell, Anita,” he said. “The population has tripled since 1880; skyscrapers are rising up everywhere. There are languages spoken that you can’t identify, people from all over the world, growth in every industry. It’s fascinating. It doesn’t have the trappings of the East Coast, the separation of the classes, the races, old money, new money. If you are industrious there, the world is open to you, you can make something of yourself.”

“If you’re an industrious man there,” Anita corrected him.

“Yes, that’s true,” he said. “If you are an industrious man. Which I am. I know my father has already done very well for himself, but I want to do even better. I don’t want to be known as the son of. Rather, I want my father to be known as the father of.”

Anita beamed at his ambition and pointed to a stretch of wall where they could sit together.

“I’m excited to return next year,” said Porter after he had laid out his suit jacket for Anita to rest on. “A great many Poles work for my father. I’ve been trying to learn the language at Harvard from some of the janitorial staff, but I’m not proving to be much of a linguist, unlike you. Still, Chicago, it’s the future of America. So many people say we will never meet the standards of New York, but it’s exactly the lack of those standards that makes it so exciting. There’s a freedom to the city. It’s because of that, the fact that there are so few conventions to be broken, that I plan to return.”

“It all sounds wonderful,” Anita replied. “I don’t know much about it. We have a few girls here from Chicago, but they don’t speak about it quite the way you do.”

“You should speak with my mother. She likes to think of herself as the unofficial mayor. She’ll lead the suffrage movement for the whole state of Illinois soon.”

Anita nodded, thinking about her own mother, who had attended school for just two years in Virginia before the Civil War.

Despite that, Dora Hemmings knew what education meant for her children. Ever since her two eldest had shown academic promise, she and her husband, Robert, had lived frugally and saved for their children’s studies. The tuition at Vassar was four hundred dollars a year. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Frederick was a senior, was
similarly expensive. Though younger than Anita, Frederick had not prepped for the entrance exam after high school and found himself entering college the same year as his sister. But unlike Anita, he had been awarded several scholarships, as he was not attending the school under false racial pretenses. The institute accepted Negro students, and Frederick was able to study chemistry. Anita never spoke of her brother, and the few times she had been forced to, she used the story that he was a white student at far-flung Cornell University. He, like Anita, was poised to graduate in the spring.

She thought of what her mother could have done if she’d had the opportunities Porter’s mother had. Would her mother be a voice for suffrage if she was not supporting an overworked husband and working herself? If she were able to pass for white? Anita liked to think that she would be.

“Anita,” said Porter, looking down at her. “You look pensive. Are you sure it’s all right that I’m here? Am I making you uncomfortable? Or, perhaps, you don’t have an interest in seeing me past one afternoon. Maybe I interpreted the day differently than you. I just—”

“No, Porter,” she said, interrupting him. “I’m very glad you came to Vassar. I shouldn’t be as glad as I am. It scares me quite a bit. But I’m very pleased you’re here.”

And with that reassurance, he leaned down and kissed her. The first kiss of her life. As his lips met hers, she stopped thinking of herself as Anita Hemmings the Negro—Anita Hemmings the liar, the coward, the dreamer—and let herself be simply Anita Hemmings, a girl being kissed under the pine trees on a beautiful autumn day.

A
nita’s first three years at Vassar had been a spiral of intense academia, but the fall of her senior year marked an unexpected turn. A pile of elegant letters from Porter Hamilton sat on her desk, their arrival now the pinnacle of Anita’s day. She did not stray from her classes or activities, remaining the top student in Greek and lead soprano in the choir and Glee Club, but the world felt as if it had suddenly tilted. College ticked on, but because of Porter, and Lottie too, Anita was enjoying Vassar more than she ever had. Everything seemed more vibrant, alive, and full of possibilities.

But even more, she appreciated the sense of safety she felt with Lottie and Porter in her life.

Their friendship gave her a feeling of immunity. Having two such prominent people around her, she thought, meant her secret was safer, as if being associated with a Hamilton and a Taylor had whitened her even further.

“Anita!” shouted Lottie, causing Anita to spin around in the warm water she was immersed in. Lottie, Caroline, and Belle had burst into the Alumnae Gymnasium swimming room, where Anita had just completed a lesson.

“The sophomores have changed their plans and are planting
the class tree today,” exclaimed Lottie. “Those little fresher spies are positive that they’re planting on Friday, so the sophomores are going to blitz them and do it today. Get changed quickly. We have to head to the laboratory and help them. I’ve never seen a freshman class with more spies than 1900!”

“But I thought the sophomores were going to do it very late? Everyone said two o’clock in the morning,” Anita said, struggling to clamber out of the swim tank with her long wool bathing suit sticking to her body.

“Not so,” said Lottie shaking her head. “I am the tree master at this school. Not one freshman was at our ceremony, remember?”