John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

When she was sixteen in highschool she and a girl named Isabelle swore together that if a boy ever touched them they’d kill themselves. But that fall the girl got pneumonia after scarlet fever and died.

The only other person Eleanor liked was Miss Oliphant, her English teacher. Miss Oliphant had been born in England. Her parents had come to Chicago when she was a girl in her teens. She was a great enthusiast for the English language, tried to get her pupils to use the broad “a” and felt that she had a right to some authority in matters pertaining to English literature due to being distantly related to a certain Mrs. Oliphant who’d been an English literary lady in the middle nineteenth century and had written so beautifully about Florence. So she’d occasionally have her more promising pupils, those who seemed the children of nicer parents, to tea in her little flat where she lived all alone with a sleepy blue Persian cat and a bullfinch, and talk to them about Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson’s pithy sayings and Keats and cor cordium and how terrible it was he died so young and Tennyson and how rude he’d been to women and about how they changed the guard at Whitehall and the grapevine Henry the Eighth planted at Hampton Court and the illfated Mary Queen of Scots. Miss Oliphant’s parents had been Catholics and had considered the Stuarts the rightful heirs to the British throne, and used to pass their wineglasses over the waterpitcher when they drank to the king. All this thrilled the boys and girls very much and particularly Eleanor and Isabelle, and Miss Oliphant used to give them high grades for their compositions and encourage them to read. Eleanor was very fond of her and very attentive in class. Just to hear Miss Oliphant pronounce a phrase like “The Great Monuments of English Prose,” or “The Little Princes in the Tower” or “St. George and Merrie England” made small chills go up and down her spine. When Isabelle died, Miss Oliphant was so lovely about it, had her to tea with her all alone and read her “Lycidas” in a clear crisp voice and told her to read “Adonais” when she got home, but that she couldn’t read it to her because she knew she’d break down if she did. Then she talked about her best friend when she’d been a girl who’d been an Irish girl with red hair and a clear warm white skin like Crown Darby, my dear, and how she’d gone to India and died of the fever, and how Miss Oliphant had never thought to survive her grief and how Crown Darby had been invented and the inventor had spent his last penny working on the formula for this wonderful china and had needed some gold as the last ingredient, and they had been starving to death and there had been nothing left but his wife’s wedding ring and how they kept the fire in the furnace going with their chairs and tables and at least he had produced this wonderful china that the royal family used exclusively.

It was Miss Oliphant who induced Eleanor to take courses at the Art Institute. She had reproductions on her walls of pictures by Rossetti and Burne-Jones and talked to Eleanor about the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She made her feel that Art was something ivory white and very pure and noble and distant and sad.

When her mother died of pernicious anaemia Eleanor was a thin girl of eighteen, working days in a laceshop in the Loop and studying commercial art evenings at the Art Institute. After the funeral she went home and packed her belongings and moved to Moody House. She hardly ever went to see her father. He sometimes called her up on the phone but whenever she could she avoided answering. She wanted to forget all about him.

In the laceshop they liked her because she was so refined and gave the place what old Mrs. Lang who owned the store called “an indefinable air of chic,” but they only paid her ten dollars a week and five of that went for rent and board. She didn’t eat much, but the food was so bad in the dining hall and she hated sitting with the other girls so that sometimes she had to get an extra bottle of milk to drink in her room and some weeks she’d find herself without money to buy pencils and drawingpaper with and would have to go by to see her father and get a couple of dollars from him. He gave it to her gladly enough, but somehow that made her hate him more than ever.

Evenings she used to sit in her little sordid cubbyhole of a room with its ugly bedspread and ugly iron bed, while a sound of hymnsinging came up from the common hall, reading Ruskin and Pater out of the public library. Sometimes she would let the book drop on her knees and sit all evening staring at the dim reddish electriclight bulb that was all the management allowed.

Whenever she asked for a raise Mrs. Lang said, “Why, you’ll be marrying soon and leaving me, dear; a girl with your style, indefinable chic can’t stay single long, and then you won’t need it.”

Sundays she usually took the train out to Pullman where her mother’s sister had a little house. Aunt Betty was a quiet housewifely little woman who laid all Eleanor’s peculiarities to girlish fancies and kept a bright lookout for a suitable young man she could corral as a beau for her. Her husband, Uncle Joe, was foreman in a rolling mill. Many years in the rolling mill had made him completely deaf, but he claimed that actually in the mill he could hear what was said perfectly. If it was summer he spent Sunday hoeing his gardenpatch where he specialized in lettuce and asters. In winter or in bad weather he’d be sitting in the front room reading The Railroad Man’s Magazine. Aunt Betty would cook an elaborate dinner from recipes out of The Ladies’ Home Journal and they’d ask Eleanor to arrange the flowers for them on the dinnertable. After dinner Aunt Betty would wash the dishes and Eleanor would wipe them, and while the old people took their nap she would sit in the front room reading the society section of The Chicago Tribune. After supper if it was fine the old people would walk down to the station with her and put her on the train, and Aunt Betty would say that it was a shocking shame for a lovely girl like her to be living all alone in the big city. Eleanor would smile a bright bitter smile and say that she wasn’t afraid.

The cars going home would be crowded Sunday nights with young men and girls sticky and mussed up and sunburned from an outing in the country or on the dunes. Eleanor hated them and the Italian families with squalling brats that filled the air with a reek of wine and garlic and the Germans redfaced from a long afternoon’s beer-drinking and the drunk Finn and Swedish workmen who stared at her with a blue alcoholic gleam out of wooden faces. Sometimes a man would try to start something and she’d have to move into another car.

Once, when the car was very crowded a curlyhaired man rubbed himself up against her suggestively. The crowd was so thick she couldn’t pull herself away from him. She could hardly keep from screaming out for help; it was only that she felt it was so vulgar to make a fuss. Uncontrollable dizziness came over her when she finally forced her way out at her station, and she had to stop at a drugstore on the way home for a little aromatic spirits of ammonia. She rushed through the hall of Moody House and up to her room still trembling. She was nauseated and one of the other girls found her being sick in the bathroom and looked at her so queerly. She was very unhappy at times like that and thought of suicide. She had painful cramps during her monthly periods and used to have to stay in bed at least one day every month. Often she felt miserable for a whole week.

One Fall day she had phoned Mrs. Lang that she was sick and would have to stay in bed. She went back up to her room and lay down on the bed and read Romola. She was reading through the complete works of George Eliot that were in the Moody House library. When the old scrubwoman opened the door to make the bed she said, “Sick… I’ll clean up, Mrs. Koontz.” In the afternoon she got hungry and the sheets were all rumply under her back and although she felt rather ashamed of herself for feeling able to go out when she’d told Mrs. Lang she was too sick to move she suddenly felt she would suffocate if she stayed in her room another minute. She dressed carefully and went downstairs feeling a little furtive. “So you’re not so sick after all,” said Mrs. Biggs, the matron, when she passed her in the hall. “I just felt I needed a breath of air.” “Too bad about you,” she heard Mrs. Biggs say under her breath as she went out the door. Mrs. Biggs was very suspicious of Eleanor because she was an art student.