Growing Up Innocent in a Quiet Age

The following is an excerpt from an as yet unpublished novel by Ms. Becker. Although the author uses fictional names, she describes the 90-page work, entitles Rules, as "very autobiographical."

January 3, 1956--It was the only mail in my box that Thursday after New Year's. The heavy, white envelope was addressed to me, Janet Pressell, 55A Shepard Street. The engraved return address read:

Office of the Dean

Fay House

Radcliffe College

10 Garden Street

Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

There was only one reason a Dean should write to me. I out the envelope back, unopened. I could always pretend I never got it. Or I could fake amnesia, like Joseph Cotton in that movie. A convincing case of amnesia would wipe out all traces of Janet Pressell. Then, after some artistic plastic surgery and some intensive dieting, she could emerge as Victoria de la Mandolin, tall and willowy a femme fatale on twenty continents.

Or, even better, maybe I could run my life backwards, like a movie reeel, and cut it before the point where I met Christopher.

My little plot had backfied. I had thought I could make this handsome, not Jewish, Oxford-educated poet fall in love with me if I stayed overnight at his house. Then we would get married. I would cook for him and clean his house. (I neither knew how to cook nor how to clean, but these could not be difficult to learn).

While I did the housework, Christopher would compose poems, and the sun whould shine into the windows of our cheery little home all day. There would be a number of children with blond hair and pert, turned-up noes and English accents born to us, and the burden of Jewishness would be lifted from me because I was the mother of these angelic children.

My life would now miraculously work. I would paint, or write, or play music--whichever of my talents I chose to pursue--and at night there would be mad, sexual orgies ending with me and Christopher Iying spent and beautiful as beached fish on the bed.

That was the dream. Instead, the morning after I stayed with Christopher, he left me doing the breakfast dishes while he went off to spend New Year's Eve in New York with another woman.

It would all have been corny if it weren't so sad. "Don't strain yourself," were Christopher's parting words. "Just leave the dishes in the sink." But I washed every one as reverently as if it were a part of him, and then I snooped all through the tiny house, hoping to get a clearer fix on him by absorbing the flora and fauna of his life into my skin.

HJe became a rack of pipes, a Bellini bust of a Young Boy, a first, signed edition of Frost's North of Boston. This man had everything! And I had lost him! Never, never would I be able to find a man like that again.

"Don't strain yourself." He didn't know the half of it. It was illegal for seniors at Radcliffe to stay out all night without signing out, and I had not signed out when I spent the night with him.

How could I be so brazen as to write in the book that my "host" was Christopher Bishop? But to put anyone else's name would habe been to lie. I couldn't do that. So I wrote nothing in the sign-out book. And someone had noticed.

During the week of Christmas Vacation I lived at Founders' House, the place they kept open for students who couldn't go home for the holidays. I had stayed to be with Chrostoper, but even with him gone I still tried to live as if he watched my every move. To be worthy of him. I did not eat any candy. I read all of Shakespeare's sonnets, and when they flooded the Cambridge Common for skating. I took out my skates and went there.

I had not been doing my wobbly routine for three minutes before an insistent greeting caught my attention. A tall girl whom I vaguely recognized said he had the job of checking the Founders' House sign-out book, and she knew I had been out all night without signing out. Would I report myself?

"No," I said, after a long moment. I couldn't see that it was anybody's business what I did. "But we have an honor system," she reminded me.

"Lord, Lord." I thought, looking into the depths of her uncomplicated face. "I'll have to report you if you don't report yourself," she announced.

"Good. Do it," I said. For a minute she stood and looked at me. Then she turned and skated off, leaving me with the feeling I might have spoken too hastily.

Here in my box, no doubt, was the proof. I finally got up the courage to open the envelope, but it took a while for the message inside to register:

Dear Janet: I regret that it has come to my attention that you were absent overnight from Founders' House without signing out on the night of Saturday, December 29. A hearing of your case before the Honor Board has been scheduled for Tuesday, January 8, at 10 a.m. in my office. If you find that you are unable to appear at that time, will you please notify this office immediately?

Very truly yours,

Katherine Tracey, Dean of Students

Hic et ubique? A black certainly threatened to overwhelm me, the kind that prompts one child to tell another who has just shut the family cat in the freezer, "You're going to get it!"

On the other hand, maybe this appearance before the Honor Board was the long overdue opportunity for me to make myself known to the College.

I was sensitive as an Aeolian harp, intelligent as I.A. Richards, and there was as yet no indelible sign on the Cambridge landscape that I had been there. A trial could change everything.

I saw myself standing before the Board, wearing my black turtleneck that made me look thin and vulnerable. Dressed this way, I would surprise them with my inner strength, my courage to give all for love. And I wouldnever disclose Christopher's name. If they tortured me, I would never give it. Also, it occurred to me that if, by some lucky and unlikely chance, I was pregnant, and I had kept Christopher out of the trial, he might marry me. Certainly, a trial couldn't hurt.

So what does a Radcliffe Joan of Arc do till the day of her martyrdom? There are no prison walls on which she can mark the passing days with a bent nail; only the Harvard Coop Calendar. There is not high, slit-like window through which the sun can halo her as she sits in her cell; only the noise and clatter of Briggs Hall. There are no guards to whom she can confide her visions.

In Briggs Hall she doesn't actually get much in the way of visions. It is this which prompts her to goto the movies. In the warm, popcorn-smelling dark of a movie theater her mission is always real. An auto da fe at the entrance to the Harvard MTA station seems not out of the question. All that stands between her and sainthood is daylight