Nine Years

You will want the short version, and the short version is this: I grew up in an institution, I was good at it, and being good at it is a skill I did not want and have not been able to put down.

At fourteen I had the highest column on the wall. This was not virtue. It was arithmetic, and points bought Sundays in the classroom with the shelf. So I had no demerits most weeks, for nine years, and by the time I was eighteen I had read every book on the top two rows twice, which is forty-one books, and I can still list them.

At fourteen I also did the second thing, which was to stop being angry in public. That is not the same as not being angry. I want to be exact, because people hear the first thing and assume the second. The anger stayed. It just went into the pocket with the other objects, where it sat, and it has never once leaked, and I sometimes think that is the whole of my personality and that everything else is manners.

Miss Farraday left in the spring I was fifteen. Her hip had gotten worse, and she was sixty or near it, and the board let her go at the end of the term, and Mr. Crane gave her a clock and said the word service three times in front of the whole dining room. I carried her box to the van. She had forty-one books of her own that she was taking with her and one box of paper, and I asked her if I could write to her, and she looked at me for a second and said yes, and gave me an address in the next county, and I wrote to her four times in five years and she answered every one.

I did not cry when the van went down the drive. I stood in the doorway and counted the wheels, and then I went back in and finished the day. That is what I had instead of crying by then.

At sixteen I was given a class. This is how it worked at Ellerslie: if you were over fifteen and had no demerits and could read, and if there was a shortage, you taught. The shortage was permanent, because the pay was a bed and the food, and the food was the mush. I took the second grade at seven in the morning, eleven children, and I did it for five years, three as a student and two as an assistant, and I did it well.

Here is the curriculum I actually taught, which has nothing on it that appears on a form.

First: how to divide one bowl of mush into two bowls that both look full. The trick is in the rim, and you learn it by watching a child’s face, because a child judges the portion by the circumference and not the depth, and if you ladle wide you can take a third and nobody counts.

Second: how to stop a child crying without touching her, because at Ellerslie you were not permitted to touch a child, and if you thought about it for a while you understood that the rule existed for good reasons and was still wrong. You learned to do it with your voice, which is a low voice, and with a job, because a crying child will take a job before she takes a hand. Give her the chalk. Give her the errand. Nine times out of ten she takes it and the crying stops in the middle of the breath.

Third: how to fill in a form. This is the one that made my whole life. There is a way to fill in a form that makes the person reading it decide in your favor, and it has nothing to do with lying. It is order, and it is brevity, and it is never leaving an empty line. I learned it at seventeen by being made to copy Mr. Crane’s monthly returns, and by noticing which children’s names came back circled from the county and which did not.

I turned eighteen in April and the gate opened and I did not go. That surprised some people and it did not surprise me. I had a bed, a class, four dollars a week in a jar, and no address, and the outside is a place where you need an address. So I stayed on as an assistant, which was permitted to twenty, and I taught the second grade and helped Miss Farraday’s replacement, who lasted nine months, and I kept the books for the refectory, and I was, by any measure you want to use, the most reliable person on that property.

The letter came in the spring I was twenty. It was from Lackawanna and it was not from Vera.

It was from Kate, and it was one page, and it was written the way Kate wrote, which was in a list. Dora had married in September, to a man of fifty-one with a house north of the city and a business in parts, and the wedding had been at the church on Ridge Lane, and there were two hundred and ten guests. Kate had taken a position at a church agency in Buffalo, and she gave the address, which I have never used. Bram was between things. Vera had had a small stroke in the winter and her left hand did not work well and the house was being run by a girl from the neighborhood.

Then the list ended with a paragraph, and the paragraph was the reason Kate had written, and I want to reproduce it exactly, because I have kept the letter for thirteen years and I can. It said: “Mother asks me to tell you that she does not write your name. I am telling you so that you do not hear it from someone else. There is no money.”

There was no money. That was the whole of it. Kate had written to close an account, and she had done it competently, and she had signed it with her full name.

I read that letter twice and put it in my coat.

Then I went to the office and used the typewriter that was kept for the monthly returns, and I wrote forty-one words into the classified section of a paper in Buffalo, which is the nearest city that has one, and the words were these: Household position wanted, female, 20, church-raised, references, experienced with young children, can teach, will live in, no family near, write to Miss R. Amory, Ellerslie, Bliss, NY.

It cost nine dollars and I paid it out of the jar. That is a postcard-sized thing, forty-one words, and I want to say what it is, because it looks like nothing and it was the first thing I ever did in my life that was for me and not against somebody.

The reply came in eleven days. It was on paper the color of a grocery bag, handwritten, in ink, in a hand that was plain and not fancy and did not slope, and it said: We have one child here, a girl of nine, French and English, and I am looking for a teacher and not a governess, though I cannot promise you the title. The house is large and the family is small and the work is real. I do not need references. I need somebody who will not be frightened of a quiet road.

Then, on the back, she had copied out the bus schedule from Bliss to Canandaigua in pencil, with the two connecting times, and the fare, which was $41.50, and she had circled the 2:10.

Her name was at the bottom, and the name was Bea Truitt, and there was no rank after it, which I noticed.

I read it three times. I read it in the pantry with the door on the latch, which is where I read everything that was mine. Then I folded it along the creases it already had and put it inside the front cover of the book I had out of the shelf that week, which was a paperback of poems with a cracked spine and a coffee ring on the cover, and which I had kept for seven years because it had come out of a mattress and had been lent to me by a girl in the bed eight inches away.

Then I walked down to the office and asked the woman there for the form.

She asked me what form. I said the payroll form, and she looked at me, because I was paid in a bed and the food and there was no payroll at Ellerslie for assistants. I said: then the form for the four dollars a week. She got it out, and it had my name typed on it already by the machine, R. AMORY, and at the bottom it had a line for my signature and a line for the date, and I signed it and dated it and asked her for my copy.

I still have that copy. It is the first document in the world with my name on it that I asked for.