Raising Demons (17 page)

On Wednesday morning, and Thursday, and Friday, I sat in the study and did the crossword puzzles in the morning paper, but on Saturday of course there was no nursery school and I nearly went crazy with Barry tagging along behind me everywhere I went, pestering me while I tried to get things done, and I was very glad when Monday morning came around again and he went back to nursery school. Sally told us one day that she had been sent for into the first-grade room to read to the first-graders. Jannie came bursting into the house the day the first tulip came out to shout that she had been chosen for the part of the Fairy Rosabelle in the third-grade musical play, and she would have to sing one song all by herself, and probably dance. A few days later she brought home her music, and I played it on the piano and Jannie practiced it until everyone in the family was infuriated by finding that we were all humming and whistling it; Barry would sing it at breakfast (“I am the Fairy Rosabelle, I bring the spring's first floooooowers”) and by lunchtime I would be forcing myself to sing “Clementine” as resolutely as I could in an attempt to drive the Fairy Rosabelle out of my mind. My husband said that several times he had found himself entering a classroom with the odd little dance step which accompanied the Fairy Rosabelle, and that he had been quite embarrassed when one of his students asked him what was the name of the song he kept whistling.

Before the snow was quite off the ground, the single tulip showing brave and bright against the snow and mud near the barn, Laurie was out in his light jacket, oiling his glove and throwing easy pitches to Rob. The girls received from their grandmother a big box containing two jackets of some plastic material, with silly little matching caps. One jacket was pink and one was blue, and Sally perceived at once that in the jackets she and Jannie looked like Easter eggs, and they capered off to school, singing to the tune of the Fairy Rosabelle that they were two little dancing Easter eggs. Consumption of peanut butter went up that spring to three jars a week. Even Easter egg jackets and the Fairy Rosabelle and the first tulip could not compensate, however, for the pestilence which annihilated our cats, leaving us with only one black kitten, named Yain, who had been the oldest and strongest of the group of Ninki-kittens who traveled with us the summer before we moved into our new house. For a long time Yain went around thinking he was the only cat left in the world, and out of desperation he developed a close friendship with our big dog Toby, who was usually afraid of cats. The vet told us that we must either have the house fumigated or wait several months before getting any more cats, and for a long time while I sat in the study mornings doing crossword puzzles Yain would pace restlessly through the house, looking for another cat.

My husband had by then been teaching for several months, and I was slowly becoming aware of a wholly new element in the usual uneasy tenor of our days; I was a faculty wife. A faculty wife is a person who is married to a faculty. She has frequently read at least one good book lately, she has one “nice” black dress to wear to student parties, and she is always just the teensiest bit in the way, particularly in a girls' college such as the one where my husband taught. She is presumed to have pressing and wholly absorbing interests at home, to which, when out, she is always anxious to return and, when at home, reluctant to leave. It is considered probable that ten years or so ago she had a face and a personality of her own, but if she has it still, she is expected to keep it decently to herself. She will ask students questions like “And what did you do during vacation?” and answer in return questions like “How old is your little boy now?” Her little pastimes, conducted in a respectably anonymous and furtive manner, are presumed to include such activities as knitting, hemming dish towels, and perhaps sketching wild flowers or doing water colors of her children.

I was not bitter about being a faculty wife, very much, although it
did
occur to me once or twice that young men who were apt to go on and become college teachers someday ought to be required to show some clearly distinguishable characteristic, or perhaps even wear some large kind of identifying badge, for the protection of innocent young girls who might in that case go on to be the contented wives of furniture repairmen or disc jockeys or even car salesmen. The way it is now, almost any girl is apt to find herself hardening slowly into a faculty wife when all she actually thought she was doing was just getting married.

I put in four good years at college, and managed to pass almost everything, and got my degree and all, and I think it was a little bit unkind of fate to send me back to college the hard way, but of course there
were
things I might have done—or, put it, people I might have married—which would have landed me in worse positions. Bluebeard, anyway.

The three big thorns in the faculty wife's ointment are her husband, her husband's colleagues, and her husband's students. Naturally a husband presents enormous irritations no matter what he is doing, and I think it is unreasonable to regard a teaching husband as necessarily more faulty than, say, a plumbing husband, but there is no question but what the ego of a teaching husband is going to be more vividly developed, particularly if he teaches in a girls' college. For instance, when I accompanied my husband to a student party and we were greeted at the door by a laughing group of students who surrounded him, calling out, “Hello, there,” and, “You
did
wear the orange tie, after all,” and, “Class was simply
super
this morning,” I could figure, as I stood alone in the hall moodily looking for a place to put my coat, that it was going to be proportionately more difficult, once home, to persuade my husband to put up the new shelves in the kitchen. He was going to lie back in his chair, flaunting the orange tie, and tell me to get a boy for things like that.

Well, I suppose husbands are all alike, at least the husbands of my friends were. Before my husband commenced professor many of my friends had been from the group of faculty wives, although they were in general understandably reluctant to wander out of their proper setting, and it was pleasant, now, to meet them as a colleague. We usually made a comfortable little group as we gathered in the corner just to the right of the doorway at student parties. “Hello,” we cried gaily to one another, “you here
too
?
How
are the children? Did you get to that perfectly ripping affair last night at that other student house? Are the children well? Is there any news of a raise in faculty salaries? And the children—how are
they
?”

Of course, if one of us ever happened to mention that she was getting a new refrigerator, or that her husband had just had an article published in the
Wiltshire Archeological and Natural History Journal
, or that they were turning in the old car on a new convertible, a certain coolness was apt to arise. Someone might come out with the story of a woman
she
knew who got herself hopelessly tangled in the descending top of
her
convertible and was late for a Trustee Tea, or someone would tell about what happened to some friends of hers with their new refrigerator the night they went out and left it alone for the first time, or we might mention with becoming modesty the articles
our
husbands have had in the
Journal of American Ethnobotany
, or the
Physical Culture Quarterly
. These coolnesses developed easily into open quarrels, with consequent feuds and taking sides and the comparative merits of publication in Wiltshire and East Lansing openly discussed, and the husbands bowing distantly in the faculty lounge.

I found, however, that there
were
sizable advantages to our connection with a college community. It was easier to get a piano tuner, for instance, and information, such as how to lay out a basketball court, or how to figure compound interest on a mortgage, was easily obtainable from the reference books in the library. Once, when my husband was out of town and I wanted to start the little wood-burning hot-water heater which was attached to our furnace, I took advantage of living in a seat of learning, and called the chemistry professor and asked him how you started a little wood-burning hot-water heater. He said that he personally lived in a college house which had electricity laid on, but why didn't I try the logic professor, who was accustomed to working out problems and things? The logic professor said that his work was purely theoretical, and the person I really wanted was the natural science man who ought to know how to start fires from camping out looking at ferns and stuff. The natural science man said that everyone knew that forest fires destroyed millions of dollars of animal life every year and if I wanted to start a fire I ought to get hold of the painting teacher who could probably bring over some turpentine and old canvases. The painting teacher said well, he
knew
turpentine was no good, but one of the literature teachers had been at Yaddo once, and
he
ought to know something, after all. The literature professor said that aside from washing himself in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire he managed to keep pretty well away from the stuff. I finally called the college president and he said he had the same sort of gadget in
his
house, and he came down and started it, but it went out.

Unlike faculty wives, students are nice girls who have come to college to get an education. The students I encountered had very little concern with anything outside of getting an education and so could not be expected to waste much time investigating the home lives of their teachers. I never, for instance, met a student who was the least bit interested in my sketches of wild flowers, and their anxiety to know the ages of my children was, to say the least, perfunctory. On the other hand, almost all the students I met were well mannered, civil, and nicely brought up. They were extremely thoughtful, and courteous to the point of chivalry. They were kind to children and to animals. If they slammed a door, it was never knowingly in the face of a stray puppy or a small baby. If they knocked someone down, it was inconceivable that it should be a teacher or another student. If they brought up some date who played professionally for the Green Bay Packers, he would carefully avoid practicing his inside blocking on someone's roommate's mother. I can say, categorically, that I never saw any student, of whatever year, kick a sick cat. They were, as I say, neat, well mannered, and demure. Their clothes were subdued, sometimes so much so as to be invisible. When they gave parties they took pains to invite only the most congenial people, such as their teachers and selected other students. I never, for my own part, found any difficulty in declining an invitation to a student party, if I got one at all, or in leaving, once I was there. I learned to have nothing but admiration for the student's faith in her teachers, and the kind of innocent devotion which was frequently so touching; I am reminded of the student who crept up, one spring dawning, to leave a basket of fresh strawberries upon her teacher's pillow. Or the student who resolutely refused to remove a lilac sweater her teacher had once admired, and became known, by her junior year, as “The Purple Kid,” although she dropped out, abruptly, during one Christmas vacation and was only seen once thereafter, in Paris with a retired manufacturer of pinball machines.

Perhaps the only quarrel the faculty wife might have with her husband's students is their spirit of pure scientific inquiry; they were very apt to throw out the baby, as it were, with the bathwater, particularly when baby-sitting. As a matter of fact, I once had a conversation with a student upon this very topic; it was rather late at night, and we were among the dregs of a student party. She was there because she was a hostess and I was there because it was beginning to look as though there was no good way of getting my husband home. I was wearing my “nice” black dress and holding a glass of ginger ale and she was wearing a strapless short evening dress, pink, with gardenias in her hair, and holding and perhaps even drinking a glass of the punch they had been serving at the party, made of equal parts of sweet vermouth, vodka, and cold cocoa. We were sitting on the floor and I had already asked her about her vacation and she had told me she spent six weeks working as a feather duster in a museum, sometimes dusting feathers and sometimes feathering dusters, and that she had found the work very constructive and very useful in influencing her in the eventual choice of her senior program, and I had told her that my little boy was three now. After a short, agonized silence, broken only by the harmonies of six voices doing something from
La Bohème
in another corner of the room, she turned to me and asked, “Listen, when you were young—I mean, before you kind of settled down and all, when you were—well,
younger
, that is—did you ever figure you'd end up like this?” She waved her hand vaguely at the student living room, my “nice” black dress, and my glass of ginger ale. “Like
this
?” she said.

“Certainly,” I said. “My only desire was to be a faculty wife. I used to sit at my casement window, half embroidering, half dreaming, and long for Professor Right.”

“I suppose,” she said, “that you
are
better off than you would have been. Not married at all or anything.”

“I was a penniless governess in a big house,” I said. “I was ready to take anything that moved.”

“And of course you
do
make a nice home for your husband. Someplace to come back to, and everything so neat.”

“My spinning lacks finesse,” I said. “But I yield to no one on my stone-ground meal.”

“And
he's
lucky, too, of course. So many men who marry young silly women find themselves always going to parties and things for their wives' sake. An older woman—”

“He was only a boy,” I said. “How well I remember his eager, youthful charm; ‘Lad,' I used to say, fondly touching his wanton curls, ‘lad, youth calls to youth, and what
you
need—'”