O Boy! Chapter 7 - The End of High School

Although I wasn't aware of it, by the time I left California, I was ready to start a new chapter in my life. The train trip across the country lasted over 4 days from May 22 to May 27, 1931. It was arranged that I would travel with Virginia Hoover, a young woman about 20 years old, who was going as far as Chicago. She was quite attractive and soon acquired some male attention. The excitement of pressing my nose against the window was quite enough for me as the miles sped by. Eating in the diner was an adventure; wandering back to the observation car, closing windows against the black balls of soot that drifted in; the train was hot and dirty, a far cry from the air‑conditioned travel we now take for granted. I was amazed at the snow on the Rockies, noted in my diary the places we stopped: Denver, Omaha, Chicago. My sister Molly managed to get on the train at Elyria, Ohio and ride with me to Cleveland, a distance of 35 miles that gave us an hour together. She treated me to a chocolate mint ice cream soda.

I had to change trains at Albany, and the last lap of the trip consisted of a scenic view of the Hudson River as we chugged toward New York where mother and father were to meet me. All the pent up excitement of getting home began to well up inside of me, and I remember the almost unbearable emotional high of those last miles. I smoothed my pink linen dress a dozen times and suddenly there I was at Grand Central Station. Coming toward me right next to the train were my mother and father. Mother was wearing a navy blue suit with a crisp white blouse and Father looked his incredible dear way, and I burst into violent tears. I was totally unprepared for such an uncontrollable expression of emotion and thought they would think I was unhappy, which made me even more tearful and unable to communicate. But fortunately they understood, and there were wonderful warm hugs and kisses and more embraces. I wrote in my diary that it was the happiest day of my life.

John and Dick were waiting for me at home, and how good they looked to me! During my absence John had grown taller than I. This was one of the first things I noticed and I felt secretly relieved that one more bone of contention had been eliminated. I was reminded of long arguments when John would claim that he could beat me wrestling. I was good at arguing but suspected I might not come up to a physical test so I had always avoided the proof. One day I could think of no more arguments and we went out back to have it out. John knocked me flat and I came in the house bawling. But at least that argument had been settled once and for all. Now I could adjust to the new status of my big younger brother.

Dick was no longer a baby but a 6 year old! I remember that I still loved him in a very special way, but I was surprised to see him act like an ordinary child whimpering about something.

Molly and I began to draw closer. My parents had some worries about her friendships in Oberlin, and they began to confide in me. This made me feel very grown up, and I began to feel like a go‑between for I could see two different points of view.

My relationship with my brother Paul deteriorated during my senior year in high school. He graduated from Yale in 1932 and had to suffer the indignities of being home in the depths of the Depression. I was trying to hold my head up in the high school popularity contest by memorizing jazz songs (you could buy a newspaper size sheet of words for a nickel). I was fiercely into trying to make the scene and bewildered at his intolerance and scorn of some of the things I thought were important.

My relationships with my friends were something else. Claire had become pretty. Evelyn was to be sent to the Northhampton School for Girls in the fall to be groomed for entering Smith College. I considered them my two best friends and was somewhat shocked when they tried to catch me up with all that had happened while I was in California. They informed me that they had replaced me with a new friend named Alice Corneille, though they assured me that now that I was home they would always put me first.

Naturally, I was anxious to meet Alice. She was the oldest girl in a large family, Depression poor. She had the lean look and high cheek bones of a consumptive movie star without any of the glamour. And she was smart and she was a non‑conformist. We talked books and ideas, but I hated going to her home, for her father was a large and leering man who seemed genial in a coarse way but slightly threatening too. The next year when Alice graduated from high school she was accepted at Barnard College and a friend of ours named Frederick (Turk) Mills was persuaded to give her free transportation since he was a respected Economics professor at Columbia/Barnard and drove in to New York daily. He must have seen the spark of ambition in Alice, for within a day or two he asked her, "Would you like to be president of your class at Barnard?" Imagine asking this out of the blue to a nobody who could barely afford the clothes and books to go to school. "I can show you how to be president if you want to be," he went on.

"First you have to realize that everyone else feels the way you do ‑ new and strange. So if you put up the posters, if you send out the letter, if you..." He outlined the steps it would take. "And I'll help you." So Alice became president of the freshman class at Barnard, went on to become student body president and married the son of Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. I hope she lived happily ever after.

One day shortly after I got home Claire and Evelyn and I were locked in one of our intimate adolescent girls' sharing sessions. Someone proposed that we each say what we wanted most in life and then years later we would see how much of what we hoped for would come true. Evelyn announced that she wanted to be rich; Claire said she wanted to be famous, perhaps a famous actress ‑ at least have a career; then they turned to me. I said I wanted to have a happy marriage and a happy family. How their derisive hoots of laughter hurt! But I stuck to my guns even though they scoffed at such a dreary ambition. Evelyn served in the Waves in Australia during the war and later married an attorney. When we visited her in Bernardsville, New Jersey she seemed to have achieved her ambition and my ambition. Claire married the son of the local pharmacist after starring roles at the University of Michigan's musical productions. When we visited them in Tiburon, California in 1970, she looked as if her charm lasted as long as she had a Scotch and soda in reach. I certainly achieved my ambition and have never regretted it.

As I settled into the routine of home and high school I had a lot of things to sort out. All the goodness and conformity of my childhood had reached a peak at the Newhalls. The devastating, unacknowledged fact of my life, which was beginning to destroy me, was the knowledge that while I was in University High School in CaliforniaI hadn't made a single real friend, either male or female. My clothes were ugly, I was a little plumpish. I was awkward, self centered. I was an adolescent.

The world was turning sexual but my perception of that world was too primitive to help. Sex education didn't help. I first heard of it in the biology class at University High. I had never heard the word "venereal", and that is what I remember most. My mother thought she had told me the facts of life, i.e. that the male gave the seed to the female and the baby grew inside the female and was ejected through the vagina. She assumed that I would understand that the seed went in where the baby came out, but I jumped to the conclusion that the seed must have something to do with one's navel since I couldn't see what else that was good for. The dirty jokes my Havens cousins told me helped me conclude differently.

The primitive urges to be dated and mated sent me to a frantic search of the dictionary. The discovery of a book by Margaret Sanger in my mother's bottom bureau drawer I think the title was "Happiness in Marriage" was a relative gold mine, though terribly inexplicit at certain points. I would haul it out whenever my mother was out of the house and then sneak it back before she returned. Not to be popular, especially with the boys, was an unadmittable failure. One must pretend that one was popular at all cost. It seems as if my mother could have helped me more than she did, but she did help me in a very basic way.

Several weeks after I had returned from California, I laid my soul bare to her about not being popular. She was understanding and wise and loving. The main thing I remember her saying was from the Bible, "If you would have friends you must show yourself friendly." She counseled me to be kind and friendly toward the girls I didn't like, and see if I could forget myself in trying to make THEM feel better. It was the best advice she could have given me, and I remember trying it out on Lillian Bopp and Sadie Bankel (we were lined up alphabetically for gym class). I was a total snob up until that moment in my life. I had four life long friends. But I thought of girls like Lillian and Sadie as being slightly smelly lower class. That moment was the beginning of my seeing that EVERYONE has hurts. I have never been as unpopular since. But it was an uphill climb. Evelyn Langmuir quoted Marge DeMott as saying, "Carol's not nearly as much of a goody‑goody as she used to be..." A definite rung up the ladder!

I went to Miss Blankenhorn's dance class a few times. The charge was $l per session and Claire Gorman's mother drove several of us. The first night I wore my most precious possession, a dainty 18 karat gold ring with 3 small matching deep blue sapphires. My father had given it to me when it fit my middle finger and I had treasured it until it was too small for my ring finger but too big for my little finger. When I mentioned the problem in the car, Mrs. Gorman said she would keep it for me‑‑I handed it to her and never saw it again. I asked her for it several times, but she simply treated the matter as if it were not important. I don't suppose she had the faintest idea how cruel this seemed to me.

At the dance class I was again dreadfully conscious of my clothes being wrong. It never occurred to me that the reason I was a bit of a wallflower was that I was younger than the others and almost totally inexperienced, that I might grow up some day. I just accepted the idea of instant and total failure. I mostly remember Norman Ruhle's sweaty palms; it never occurred to me to take pity on him or any of the other callow youths I stumbled around with.

For the next decade of my life I spent too much of my time trying to conceal the fact that I was smart, trying to pretend I was more sophisticated than I really was; trying to act in such a way that the males I encountered would be attracted. Most of this was doomed to failure because I was obviously operating from a self‑centered motive. But there were break‑throughs, and by my senior year in high school, I at least had a boy friend and a number of girls who liked me well enough to include me in their social events. I belonged to two elective clubs besides being part of the glee club, orchestra, etc. And I had a part in the senior play which brought me unexpected applause even though it was a comic role. And as a member of the Yearbook Staff I discovered that I had a lot of innovative ideas.

I began to smoke at 15. My cousins, Margaret and Evelyn Havens, had taken me out for an all‑day canoe trip on the Manasquan River. As soon as we got out of sight of my grandmother's house they pulled out a flat‑fifty of Lucky Strikes and asked if I smoked. I said "no" rather primly. Then Margaret asked if Molly smoked. Again I said "no". Then she asked, "If Molly did smoke would she tell your mother?" I said, "Of course."

Well, when I got home and told Molly this, she laughed and said in a big‑sisterly way, "Oh I smoked with them when I was 11..." The next day I went off with Evelyn Langmuir and we experimented together. After that Evelyn and I would take periodic trips in her family's Buick and try to perfect the art. Mainly I breathed in pseudo‑sophistication more than carcinogens. I wanted desperately to seem to be the very thing I was not: a woman of the world.

On my sixteenth birthday I came down with scarlet fever. It had been a rough year for the family. Molly and Paul were both away at school. John and Dick had taken turns having scarlet fever and had both been very ill. Now it was my turn. The standard treatment was to be isolated in the County Hospital at Oradell for six weeks. As soon as the Doctor had diagnosed it, the ambulance was called, and I was driven the ten miles or so to a bleak group of buildings. There were none of the amenities of a private hospital. I was not terribly sick, but I was thoroughly miserable. We were served dreadful food. I have a much too good appetite, and it is truly the only time in my life when I have thought the food was terrible. We were used to Spartan food at home, but it was always tasty and made of real ingredients. I am convinced that there was some kind of graft going on, for the trays would look presentable, but dishwater soup and bread that tasted like sawdust were regular.

The only way one could have visitors was for them to stand outside the window and yell back and forth. I was put into a room with a dark haired woman about 35. She was a bitter divorcee but she and I made the best of being roommates. She had a stack of True Story and True Confessions magazines beside her bed that was over 2 feet high. And she let me read through the entire stack. Since we were not allowed to take anything home with us from the contagious ward, I was relatively starved for any kind of reading material. The other person I remember in that hospital experience was a lecherous doctor. I hated him. I'm sure he had failed at, or been fired from, better hospitals. He didn't assault me, but he always managed to touch me unnecessarily and to make suggestive remarks. One day they got me up for an examination. I stood by a steel table. Suddenly I felt as though a propeller was going around in my head, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor staring at a wastepaper basket while several nurses hovered around. I had banged my head as I collapsed, and I was trundled back to bed. At last the day came for me to be released. I had lost about ten pounds, my hair was stringy and my skin looked gray.

Some time later, some of the honor students were allowed to take the day off to visit the County Courthouse at Hackensack. It was a drive of ten or fifteen miles and we set out in Evelyn's car, feeling very important and of course the cigarettes were part of our act. After we had been taken on the official tour of various offices and the jail, we were turned loose. Not feeling in a hurry to get back to classes, some of us wandered into the back of the "Vice Court". I couldn't understand a lot of what they were saying but it sounded awfully interesting.

After we got home my father asked me about the day. When I mentioned "wandering around", he remarked with a sudden sober look, "There are things in that courthouse I wouldn't want MY daughter to listen to." That made it even more interesting. I didn't want to be bad but I didn't want to be dumb either.

During these last two years of high school the Depression was steadily deepening for us. Katie had been let go. Our parents didn't share the fine details of finances with us, but we knew that my father had debts from the construction business that had failed and that he had to postpone payments to doctor and dentist. There was no money for anything but absolute essentials. Six dollars was put into the housekeeping purse to last for an entire week. Later it was upped to $7. That did not include the milk bill which didn't get paid on time either. Father would bring home a large pile of day‑old sweet pastry and rolls from the bakery which he got for 10 or l5 cents. Mother would deplore the fact that it was "poor food" but it was often the most tempting treat in the house. It was inconceivable that one would ever expect help from government or charity ‑‑ such things were only for poor people and I think my parents would rather have died than ever admit to that.

I learned to make my own clothes. I was sick of hand‑me‑ downs and I spent many hours figuring out how I could get a dress out of a remnant. Leila Jacobs, one of my mother's best friends, helped me by letting me use her electric sewing machine and later she lent it to me. She taught me whatever I knew about sewing. I learned to make bound button holes and by the time I went to college I had made some things I was quite proud of. I even made the dress that my mother wore to my brother Paul's wedding. I also did a lot of housework. I had learned that if I wanted the house to look nice for my friends I had to clean it up. And I liked putting things in order. No longer was I one of the "little kids" for I would pitch in to help on parties that involved my older siblings, and I began to identify with them. I insisted on having a pair of high heeled pumps. My father and mother gave a flat "no", but somehow I persuaded them.

There was always a big laundry to do each week. My recollection of those two years is that Buzz and I did the washing in the heavy old Savage machine, having to balance it out each time for the spin‑dry. Then hanging it out together. But I did most of the ironing. It used to irritate me in later years when mother would refer to John's ironing shirts. I'm sure that after I went away to college he did do some ironing (there was only one year when neither Molly nor I were at home.) Mother never mentioned the years of ironing when I was the only girl at home during those summers when Molly was at camp and college. She never mentioned the fact that when I graduated from college I assumed my share of household expense until I was married, though she often mentioned how Molly and Paul had done so. I don't know why that should be a thing to remember except that I felt I was taken for granted. If anything Molly was more taken for granted than I was ‑ at least by my brothers, and in different ways. But in a way it helped build a stubborn streak in me that wanted to make my own life and not be swallowed up by my family.

I hate writing about this part of my life because I feel as if I sound so grubbily materialistic and self‑seeking. Perhaps I was. But perhaps I wasn't dumb. I could see both Molly and me being sucked in to being ideal daughters who always helped out the family, always subordinated their social drives to the family welfare.

Now I see the excruciating choices the Depression gave our parents more clearly. When they cut corners out of desperation, part of me appreciated it at the time, but a part of me was having to relate to my friends and peers who all seemed so much richer and well dressed and socially poised, and I had to struggle to keep up. Peers were becoming more important than parents. Looking back I don't know how my parents could have done better‑‑at least they allowed me to rebel.

One painful memory is associated with one of the most thrilling events of this period. Dean Langmuir (Evelyn's father) invited me to go with him and Evelyn to see Walter Hampton in Cyrano de Bergerac. I had read the play, but the New York Theatrical production exceeded my wildest imagination including real horses, cannon, the falling leaves of autumn, the tears to be shed with the marvelous misunderstood hero. Mr. Langmuir became my boss many years later. He loved to spend money and was a marvelous, glamorous host on a number of adventures where he included me with Evelyn, and later by myself. He took us to Coney Island twice and we did all the rides, went on the worst roller coaster, to the best restaurant, taking pictures and reveling in a scene like none other in America.

But back to Cyrano. Before the curtain for the first act went up, Mr. Langmuir leaned over to me and asked pleasantly if I had ever been to the theater in New York before. I nodded a sort of neutral "of course" nod trying to look as knowledgable as possible. Dean, who had an insatiable curiosity pressed the point, "Yes and what have you seen before?"

"Well, uh, er..." I squirmed and finally I had to admit that I had never been to the New York theater in any form. The humiliation of being found to be so unsophisticated was only exceeded by the humiliation of being caught in a barefaced lie. It taught me something I never forgot. In fact Dean Langmuir's youthful enthusiasm and inquiring mind left an indelible impression. He had travelled all over the world and he told me that it was important to ask questions whenever possible. Ask the waiter, the sales‑clerk, the maitre‑de, whoever. The more you are willing to expose your ignorance the more you will learn.

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