The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 1 (1/5)

I

Mother Grace was proud of her daughter with her restless brain in spite of the crudities of her adolescence. Cigarettes and her freedom of speech were not so objectionable as her religious pose, nor indeed as that phase which comes to all youth when they feel that they are misunderstood.

Mother Grace’s pride was not that of a mother whose egotism is satisfied that she has produced an intelligent continuation of herself.

“No, you recognize me as an individual,” her daughter pointed out in what Mother Grace had come to term as one of her frequent harangues. “Most mothers refuse to recognize their children as individuals with minds and aims of their own. Usually the instinct of motherhood is merely a desire to perpetuate themselves or their husbands. At least women act that way. And when their children are born they say, ‘this is mine,’ or ‘this is my husband’s child,’ and they don’t recognize their children’s rights at all.

“Now the fact that you gave birth to me, Mother, I shall regard merely as an incident. If you hadn’t done it, somebody else would. So we won’t let the mother and daughter relationship stand between us in our friendship. Just the same, there are ties of blood, of course and I shall always cling to you just as I cling to Adele. I don’t expect her to exert any authority over me and I don’t expect you to. But you can give me advice of course, because you are older and more sensible than I. But you needn’t ever expect me to follow it, or get mad if I don’t. If I make mistakes by not taking it, I’ll have to suffer for it.”

“And so shall I,” added Mother Grace mentally, for after all she knew what it was to be a mother.

All this was rather irritating to her at first but after thinking it over, she decided it was part of June’s newfound ability to reason, to flaunt her ideas in her mother’s face. And further reflection showed her that it was the flaunting of them and not the ideas themselves to which she objected.

On the occasion when her mother did venture to remonstrate⁠—“Oh, June, don’t be such a prig!” her daughter disarmed her by an immediate acceptance of the word.

“How can I help but be, when you and Adele insist on thinking differently about human relations?”

Yes, she was a prig, she thought, and the real reason for it was her ever changing and modifying ideas.

Day by day they twisted into new shapes, and while she held them she must needs state them with all earnestness and conviction. And with all the more conviction because in so short a time another thought would come, bringing doubts.

Why couldn’t she formulate a satisfactory program for life and stick to it? Why couldn’t she reach some conclusion about human relations and then hold it?

If she could only see clearly as her father obviously did, distinguishing exactly between right and wrong, good and bad.

There was Regina for instance. She knew exactly what a good woman was and what a bad one. Not that she would ever condemn what she considered a bad one. She prided herself too much on her tolerance. She knew too, exactly what her principles would allow her to do, in her relations with men, present and future.

When June stopped to think about it, she realized she was capable of doing anything⁠—capable of following her desires, wherever they led, and justifying herself for so doing. And whether her reason would be treacherous in this justification she did not know.

There are certain stock situations in one type of novel which the very young girl reads. June and her friends at the age of thirteen had often discussed them with mingled and pleasurable emotions. Why the words blush and bride were always associated. What a wedding night felt like. Why a wife always hid her face in her husband’s breast and dilly-dallied about telling it when she was going to have a baby. Why be so reticent about it, anyway? All the world gave birth.

June had decided upon the way she would act. She’d face her husband triumphantly across the breakfast table and announce: “I’m going to have a baby!” And if she acted immodestly proud, it would be with the consciousness that she was taking part in a grand movement. It was quite proper for the husband to be astonished and pleased as though he hadn’t thought her capable of it. “Why you cute dear! What a wonderful thing to do,” he should say, showing a befitting admiration for a function he could never possibly perform himself.

As it was, the situation could only be treated that way once or twice. Each time it happened there would be less triumph for the woman and less wonder for the man. Hadn’t she heard her mother say, before Glubb’s arrival, “Yes, damn it, I’m going to have another.” Then why all this flumdididdle about the little shirt or bootee hidden in a workbasket?

Still considering the stock situations, the most delightful one of all was that in which a girl was forced to confess to her husband that she had had a lover before she met him. It was full of emotional possibilities and more interesting to consider, from every standpoint, than June’s favorite romance writers ever meant it to be. At the age of twelve it was easy and interesting for June to conceive of herself facing the realization of a loss of virtue and the necessity of confessing it to a husband. At the age of eighteen, more sexless and unemotional than ever before by reason of increasing mental activity, it was harder than ever to see wherein lay the crime of love out of bounds. In all the books she read⁠—English as well as Russian and French translations⁠—conventions were forgotten, love was treated aesthetically and morals, as the world knew them, ignored. It was for the weak to be uplifted or cast down by the world’s opinion. In literary history people had lived as they’d seen fit to live and the race had benefited by the stimulating companionships of men and women even though they rested on the basis of sex.

“But⁠—” Mother Grace pointed out when once June was trying to give expression to her muddled thoughts, “I don’t see how the convictions of genuises as to sex and life in general, affect you who have to live and work with the great mass of people in the world.”

But didn’t Mother Grace herself condemn the conventional reaction of the husband in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles? Who had been wrong in that case⁠—the husband for leaving Tess on the wedding night because a momentary weakness made her the victim of a man she’d have to submit to even if she had struggled? Or Tess?

“But that’s only a novel you’re talking about.”

Continuing her line of thought June decided that the only reason to condemn Tess was for her submitting without love. That made an unbeautiful splotch on her life. If she had loved her seducer heart and soul, however, it was still less probable that her “sin” would have been forgiven by her husband. Why should a woman justify herself by saying it was only her body which sinned, not her soul?

Suppose she said to her husband⁠—“Yes, this man was my lover and every moment I spent with him was beautiful. The experience made me more alive to the beauty of the world and I am more human because I loved so much. But it passed. We grew past it, and now we are not lovers, but friends.” June could not imagine it said without disastrous consequences.

It seemed that love with all its possibilities of bigness could not stand such a revelation. It was always demanded of a woman to say that a former lover had been just an incident, bringing no beauty or gladness into her life. This was jealousy. And when June tried to contemplate that she could not, for she could not yet realize love.

“Why is it so unusually hard for me to think straight?” she demanded.

“God knows,” said Mother Grace, “I don’t. But I’ll trust to your instinct not your mind, to take care of you through life.” And blessing her, June went out to find a job.

At dinner time several days later she burst into the house after an afternoon in the city and told her mother with glowing eyes that she had found work to do.

“Every afternoon this week I’ve taken my clippings from the school paper and the town paper and gone to newspapers. And even though I visited several every afternoon, I’ve only managed to see three city editors. Those office boys are the devil to get past and I wouldn’t tell them I was looking for a job. I just said I wanted to see the editor on business, and didn’t look important enough to have business, or else the city editors were really busy, so I didn’t get in. I saw the editor of the Tribune and he told me I was very young and that newspapers weren’t the place for young girls. So did the next one. He said he’d never allow a daughter of his to work on a paper. I wish they wouldn’t be so paternal. Both of them said my stuff was good and that a country newspaper was a nice place to work and one of them even gave me the address of an agency where you can apply for work in the country. They were very nice and after I got in to see them, relaxed and chatted very affably.

“After trying to get in on all the big papers I thought of that little labor paper that I brought home the other day. It’s socialist and has most of the news of the big sheets even if it hasn’t the advertisement. That’s the difference in bulk, really. You didn’t read it and I’ll get another for you. The editorials are all for labor and most of the news is written from the standpoint of the socialist.”

“Oh, June,” Mother Grace protested, “you know how opposed your father is to any socialism or anarchy. He thinks reformers all foreigners or laboring men. This is much worse than it would have been if you found a job on a regular paper.”

“It’s quite a respectable looking office,” June assured her. “It looks like all the other newspaper offices, only smaller and all the men working there were Americans that I could see.

“They didn’t seem to have any office boys⁠—only a copy boy and he was rushing downstairs to the press room when I went up and didn’t pay any attention to me. You could see right in the editorial room over a counter. Some men were working at typewriters and three men were sitting around a desk reading copy. A little blond man with a nice face went by and asked me what I wanted and I told him the editor.

“ ‘I’m it,’ ” he said, and opened the swing gate for me to go in. He led me in a private office on one side marked “managing editor” and I was scared. The managing editor seems to be so much more important than the city editor.

“I told him what I wanted and he laughed, not nastily, but as though it were a great joke.

“ ‘Why, we have hardly enough money to pay the office boy,’ he said, ‘let alone a woman reporter.’

“ ‘That’s all right,’ I told him, ‘I wasn’t expecting a big salary. I am sure you need a woman reporter. I can picket with strikers, and write human interest stories of strikes, and as you know the clothing workers and waitresses are striking now. And they’re predicting it will be a hard winter and there are all sorts of sob stories to write.’

“ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘women reporters are always a good thing, but we’re broke, simply broke.’ And then I showed him the things I’d done and he approved and I told him I could live on a small salary. You see after being to all the other papers I’d made up my mind that I’d have a job.

“He went on to tell me that some weeks the paper was so broke they had to issue half pay, and sometimes they had to take up a collection from the staff to pay for cuts for the next day’s paper. He seemed to really want to hire me, but not to see his way clear to do it.

“Then I had an inspiration. You’ve noticed accounts of this squad of policemen who are living on a diet and showing how cheaply working people can live if they do it scientifically. And those society women in Chicago who are feeding themselves in a club on a quarter a day. I asked Mr. Bright⁠—that was his name⁠—why I shouldn’t constitute myself a diet squad of one and live on five dollars a week. Lots of factory girls are living on that and I had lived comfortably on nine in the country. I pointed out to him that working girls couldn’t very well club together the way these ‘squads’ are doing and that I’d like to show how it would work out.

“ ‘Of course it won’t,’ he said, ‘but if you’ll try that for a month, and work for five a week, I’ll raise your pay to twelve.’

“So I told him I would and now if you don’t mind, I’m going to move and live in a tenement.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” cried Mother Grace.

“You can tell father I just decided to go away and be independent just as I did that last year at college. Then he can’t blame you. He’ll only commiserate with you at having a thankless child. And you know, Mother Grace, I always wanted to live away from home and be independent.”

“Why you want to, I don’t see,” cried Mother Grace in despair.

“It’s just a case of living one’s own life, though that’s a trite way of putting it.”

“But I never wanted to live my own life.” And June in her triumph forbore to point out to her mother that hers was a new and more adventurous generation.

“There’s another reason why it’s best for me not to live at home,” June added. “The Clarion is a morning paper and I start to work at three in the afternoon and don’t know exactly what time I’ll be through. And it’s quite possible I’d run into father around twelve or even get home later than he did. And it wouldn’t only be one row but many of them. He’d quarrel about my working and about what I’m working at, and the hours I work. You know very well, too, he wouldn’t quarrel with me. It would be with you. He doesn’t seem to realize that we’re old enough to reason with. Why, only last Sunday at dinner he turned to you and asked you if I liked the breast or the dark meat, just as though I weren’t old enough to speak for myself. And instead of coming to me he’d ask you why I wanted to work and why you couldn’t persuade me that it was impossible for young girls to be out at night alone.”

“I know⁠—I’ve always borne the brunt of the misbehavior of all of you.”

“But if I actually got out, and proved myself to be beyond your influence, he couldn’t scold you for what I’d done, could he? I’ve got to go, mother dear. I’ve been home two months now and there is no work or anything to look forward to. It will be easier for you and for me too. I’ll just pack my suitcase and leave.”

The upshot of it was that June, with a thrilled feeling of adventure at her heart, kissed Mother Grace and Adele goodbye and took the car to the Clarion office the next afternoon.

“I’ll telephone you every afternoon, and come home on my nights off. And you and Adele will have to come often and have dinner with me. I have about an hour off and we’ll go to Chinatown and have chop suey. It’s near the office.”

Mr. Bright, the editor, had told her that in view of the fact that she had to find a home, she need not appear at the office until five. So leaving her heavy suitcase by the side of the desk which had been allotted to her, she set out through the East Side streets.

The Clarion office did not occupy a place of dignity on Park Row. You got off the subway, the elevated, the surface car, whichever you happened to be riding on, at Brooklyn Bridge, and walked down that dingy section of the Row given over to pawnbrokers, saloons and recruiting stations. Just before you reached Chatham Square, that gloomy crossroad where all streets lead out under shadowing elevated tracks to still gloomier regions, you turned down a little side street to the east and after passing three saloons, this was before prohibition, and two warehouses reached the Clarion offices which occupied a loft above the Meisel Printing Company.