An American Idyll by Cornelia Stratton Parker

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Besides being of real influence on the campus, he had the respect and
confidence of the business world, both labor and capital; and in
addition, he stood as the representative of the Government in
labor-adjustments and disputes. And--it was of lesser consequence, but
oh it _did_ matter--_we had money enough to live on!!_ We had made
ourselves honestly think that we had just about everything we wanted on
what we got, plus outside lectures, in California. But once we had
tasted of the new-found freedom of truly enough; once there was gone
forever the stirring around to pick up a few extra dollars here and
there to make both ends meet; once we knew for the first time the
satisfaction and added joy that come from some responsible person to
help with the housework--we felt that we were soaring through life with
our feet hardly touching the ground.

Instead of my spending most of the day in the kitchen and riding herd on
the young, we had our dropped-straight-from-heaven Mrs. Willard. And see
what that meant. Every morning at nine I left the house with Carl, and
we walked together to the University. As I think of those daily walks
now, arm-in-arm, rain or shine, I'd not give up the memory of them for
all creation. Carl would go over what he was to talk about that morning
in Introductory Economics (how it would have raised the hair of the
orthodox Econ. I teacher!), and of course we always talked some of what
marvelous children we possessed. Carl would begin: "Tell me some more
about the June-Bug!"

He would go to his nine o'clock, I to mine. After my ten-o'clock class,
and on the way to my eleven-o'clock lecture, I always ran in to his
office a second, to gossip over what mail he had got that morning and
how things were going generally. Then, at twelve, in his office again.
"Look at this telegram that just came in." "How shall I answer Mr.
----'s about that job?" And then home together; not once a week, but
_every day_.

Afternoons, except the three afternoons when I played hockey, I was at
home; but always there was a possibility that Carl would ring up about
five. "I am at a meeting down-town. Can't get things settled, so we
continue this evening. Run down and have supper with me, and perhaps,
who knows, a Bill Hart film might be around town!" There was Mrs.
Willard who knew just what to do, and off I could fly to see my husband.
You can't, on $1700 a year.

I hear people nowadays scold and roar over the pay the working classes
are getting, and how they are spending it all on nonsense and not saving
a cent. I stand it as long as I can and then I burst out. For I, too,
have tasted the joy of at last being able to get things we never thought
we would own and of feeling the wings of financial freedom feather out
where, before, all had been cold calculation: Can we do this? if so,
what must we give up? I wish every one on earth could feel it. I do not
care if they do not save a cent.

Only I do wish my Carl could have experienced those joys a little
longer. It was so good--so good, while it lasted! And it was only just
starting. Every new call he got to another university was at a salary
from one to two thousand dollars more than what we were getting, even at
Seattle. It looked as if our days of financial scrimping were gone
forever. We even discussed a Ford! nay--even a four-cylinder Buick! And
every other Sunday we had fricasseed chicken, and always, always a
frosting on the cake. For the first two months in Seattle we felt as if
we ought to have company at every meal. It did not seem right to sit
down to food as good as that, with just the family present. And it was
such fun to bring home unexpected guests, and to know that Mrs. Willard
could concoct a dream of a dish while the guests were removing their
hats; and I not having to miss any of the conversation from being in the
kitchen. Every other Sunday night we had the whole Department and their
wives to Sunday supper--sixteen of them. Oh dear, oh dear, money does
make a difference. We grew more determined than ever to see that more
folk in the world got more of it.

And yet, in a sense, Carl was a typical professor in his unconcern over
matters financial. He started in the first month we were married by
turning over every cent to me as a matter of course; and from the
beginning of each month to the end, he never had the remotest idea how
much money we possessed or what it was spent for. So far as his peace of
mind went, on the whole, he was a capitalist. He knew we needed more
money than he was making at the University of California, therefore he
made all he could on the outside, and came home and dumped it in my lap.
From one year's end to the next, he spent hardly five cents on
himself--a new suit now and then, a new hat, new shirts at a sale, but
never a penny that was not essential.

On the rest of us--there he needed a curbing hand! I discovered him
negotiating to buy me a set of jade when he was getting one hundred
dollars a month. He would bring home a box of peaches or a tray of
berries, when they were first in the market and eaten only by bank
presidents and railway magnates, and beam and say, "Guess what surprise
I have for you!" Nothing hurt his feelings more than to have him suggest
I should buy something for myself, and have me answer that we could not
afford it. "Then I'll dig sewers on the side!" he would exclaim. "You
buy it, and I'll find the money for it somewhere." If he had turned off
at an angle of fifty degrees when he first started his earthly career,
he would have been a star example of the individual who presses the
palms of his hands together and murmurs, "The Lord will provide!"

I never knew a man who was so far removed from the traditional ideas of
the proper position of the male head of a household. He felt, as I have
said, that he was not the one to have control over finances--that was
the wife's province. Then he had another attitude which certainly did
not jibe with the Lord-of-the-Manor idea. Perhaps there would be
something I wanted to do, and I would wait to ask him about it when he
got home. Invariably the same thing would happen. He would take my two
hands and put them so that I held his coat-lapels. Then he would place
his hands on my shoulders, beam all over, eyes twinkling, and say:--

"Who's boss of this household, anyway?"

And I _had_ to answer, "I am."

"Who gets her own way one hundred per cent?"

"I do."

"Who never gets his own way and never wants to get his own way?"

"You."

"Well, then, you know perfectly well you are to do anything in this
world you want to do." With a chuckle he would add, "Think of it--not a
look-in in my own home!"

* * * * *

Seattle, as I look back on it, meant the unexpected--in every way. Our
little sprees together were not the planned-out ones of former years.
From the day Carl left Castle Crags, his time was never his own; we
could never count on anything from one day to the next--a strike here,
an arbitration there, government orders for this, some investigation
needed for that. It was harassing, it was wearying. But always every few
days there would be that telephone ring which I grew both to dread and
to love. For as often as it said, "I've got to go to Tacoma," it also
said, "You Girl, put on your hat and coat this minute and come down town
while I have a few minutes off--we'll have supper together anyhow."

And the feeling of the courting days never left us--that almost sharp
joy of being together again when we just locked arms for a block and
said almost nothing--nothing to repeat. And the good-bye that always
meant a wrench, always, though it might mean being together within a few
hours. And always the waving from the one on the back of the car to the
one standing on the corner. Nothing, nothing, ever got tame. After ten
years, if Carl ever found himself a little early to catch the train for
Tacoma, say, though he had said good-bye but a half an hour before and
was to be back that evening, he would find a telephone-booth and ring up
to say, perhaps, that he was glad he had married me! Mrs. Willard once
said that after hearing Carl or me talk to the other over the telephone,
it made other husbands and wives when they telephoned sound as if they
must be contemplating divorce. But telephoning was an event: it was a
little extra present from Providence, as it were.

And I think of two times when we met accidentally on the street in
Seattle--it seemed something we could hardly believe: all the world--the
war, commerce, industry--stopped while we tried to realize what had
happened.

Then, every night that he had to be out,--and he had to be out night
after night in Seattle,--I would hear his footstep coming down the
street; it would wake me, though he wore rubber heels. He would fix the
catch on the front-door lock, then come upstairs, calling out softly,
"You awake?" He always knew I was. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed,
he would tell all the happenings since I had seen him last. Once in a
while he'd sigh and say, "A little ranch up on the Clearwater would go
pretty well about now, wouldn't it, my girl?" And I would sigh, and say,
"Oh dear, wouldn't it?"

I remember once, when we were first married, he got home one afternoon
before I did. When I opened the door to our little Seattle apartment,
there he was, walking the floor, looking as if the bottom had dropped
out of the universe. "I've had the most awful twenty minutes," he
informed me, "simply terrible. Promise me absolutely that never, never
will you let me get home before you do. To expect to find you home and
then open the door into empty rooms--oh, I never lived through such a
twenty minutes!" We had a lark's whistle that we had used since before
our engaged days. Carl would whistle it under my window at the Theta
house in college, and I would run down and out the side door, to the
utter disgust of my well-bred "sisters," who arranged to make cutting
remarks at the table about it in the hope that I would reform my
"servant-girl tactics." That whistle was whistled through those early
Seattle days, through Oakland, through Cambridge, Leipzig, Berlin,
Heidelberg, Munich, Swanage, Berkeley, Alamo in the country, Berkeley
again (he would start it way down the hill so I could surely hear),
Castle Crags, and Seattle. Wherever any of us were in the house, it
meant a dash for all to the front door--to welcome the Dad home.

One evening I was scanning some article on marriage by the fire in
Seattle--it was one of those rare times that Carl too was at home and
going over lectures for the next day. It held that, to be successful,
marriage had to be an adjustment--a giving in here by the man, there by
the woman.

I said to Carl: "If that is true, you must have been doing all the
adjusting; I never have had to give up, or fit in, or relinquish one
little thing, so you've been doing it all."

He thought for a moment, then answered: "You know, I've heard that too,
and wondered about it. For I know I've given up nothing, made no
'adjustments.' On the contrary, I seem always to have been getting more
than a human being had any right to count on."

It was that way, even to the merest details, such as both liking
identically the same things to eat, seasoned the identical way. We both
liked to do the identical things, without a single exception. Perhaps
one exception--he had a fondness in his heart for firearms that I could
not share. (The gleam in his eyes when he got out his collection every
so often to clean and oil it!) I liked guns, provided I did not have to
shoot at anything alive with them; but pistols I just plain did not like
at all. We rarely could pass one of these shooting-galleries without
trying our luck at five cents for so many turns--at clay pigeons or
rabbits whirling around on whatnots; but that was as wild as I ever
wanted to get with a gun.

We liked the same friends without exception, the same books, the same
pictures, the same music. He wrote once: "We (the two of us) love each
other, like to do things together (absolutely anything), don't need or
want anybody else, and the world is ours." Mrs. Willard once told me
that if she had read about our life together in a book, she would not
have believed it. She did not know that any one on earth could live like
that. Perhaps that is one reason why I want to tell about it--because it
was just so plain wonderful day in, day out. I feel, too, that I have a
complete record of our life. For fourteen years, every day that we were
not together we wrote to each other, with the exception of two short
camping-trips that Carl made, where mail could be sent out only by
chance returning campers.

Somehow I find myself thinking here of our wedding
anniversaries,--spread over half the globe,--and the joy we got out of
just those ten occasions. The first one was back in Oakland, after our
return from Seattle. We still had elements of convention left in us
then,--or, rather, I still had some; I don't believe Carl had a streak
of it in him ever,--so we dressed in our very best clothes, dress-suit
and all, and had dinner at the Key Route Inn, where we had gone after
the wedding a year before. After dinner we rushed home, I nursed the
son, we changed into natural clothes, and went to the circus. I had
misgivings about the circus being a fitting wedding-anniversary
celebration; but what was one to do when the circus comes to town but
one night in the year?

The second anniversary was in Cambridge. We always used to laugh each
year and say: "Gracious! if any one had told us a year ago we'd be here
this September seventh!" Every year we were somewhere we never dreamed
we would be. That first September seventh, the night of the wedding, we
were to be in Seattle for years--selling bonds. What a fearful prospect
in retrospect, compared to what we really did! The second September,
back in Oakland, we thought we were to be in the bond business for years
in Oakland. More horrible thoughts as I look back upon it. The third
September seventh, the second anniversary, lo and behold, was in
Cambridge, Massachusetts! Whoever would have guessed it, in all the
world? It was three days after Carl's return from that awful Freiburg
summer--we left Nandy with a kind-hearted neighbor, and away we spreed
to Boston, to the matinee and something good to eat.

Then, whoever would have imagined for a moment that the next year we
would be celebrating in Berlin--dinner at the Cafe Rheingold, with wine!
The fourth anniversary was at Heidelberg--one of the red-letter days, as
I look back upon those magic years. We left home early, with our lunch,
which we ate on a bed of dry leaves in a fairy birch forest back--and a
good ways up--in the Odenwald. Then we walked and walked--almost
twenty-five miles all told--through little forest hamlets, stopping now
and then at some small inn along the roadside for a cheese sandwich or
a glass of beer. By nightfall we reached Neckarsteinach and the
railroad, and prowled around the twisted narrow streets till train-time,
gazing often at our beloved Dilsberg crowning the hilltop across the
river, her ancient castle tower and town walls showing black against the
starlight. The happiness, the foreign untouristed wonder of that day!

Our fifth anniversary was another red-letter day--one of the days that
always made me feel, in looking back on it, that we must have been
people in a novel, an English novel; that it could not really have been
Carl and I who walked that perfect Saturday from Swanage to Studland.
But it was our own two joyous souls who explored that quaint English
thatched-roof, moss-covered corner of creation; who poked about the wee
old mouldy church and cemetery; who had tea and muffins and jam out
under an old gnarled apple tree behind a thatched-roof cottage. What a
wonder of a day it was! And indeed it was my Carl and I who walked the
few miles home toward sunset, swinging hands along the downs, and fairly
speechless with the glory of five years married and England and our
love. I should like to be thinking of that day just before I die. It was
so utterly perfect, and so ours.

Our sixth anniversary was another, yes, yet another red-letter
memory--one of those times that the world seemed to have been leading up
to since it first cooled down. We left our robust sons in the care of
our beloved aunt, Elsie Turner,--this was back in Berkeley,--and one
Saturday we fared forth, plus sleeping-bags, frying-pan, fishing-rod,
and a rifle. We rode to the end of the Ocean Shore Line--but first got
off the train at Half Moon Bay, bought half a dozen eggs from a
lonely-looking female, made for the beach, and fried said eggs for
supper. Then we got back on another train, and stepped off at the end of
the line, in utter darkness. We decided that somewhere we should find a
suitable wooded nook where we could sequester ourselves for the night.
We stumbled along until we could not see another inch in front of us for
the dark and the thick fog; so made camp--which meant spreading out two
bags--in what looked like as auspicious a spot as was findable. When we
opened our eyes to the morning sunlight, we discovered we were on a
perfectly barren open ploughed piece of land, and had slept so near the
road that if a machine passing along in the night had skidded out a bit
to the side, it would have removed our feet.

That day, Sunday, was our anniversary, and the Lord was with us early
and late, though not obtrusively. We got a farmer out of bed to buy some
eggs for our breakfast. He wanted to know what we were doing out so
early, anyhow. We told him, celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary.
Whereat he positively refused to take a cent for the eggs--wedding
present, he said. Around noon we passed a hunter, who stopped to chat,
and ended by presenting us with a cotton-tail rabbit to cook for dinner.
And such a dinner!--by a bit of a stream up in the hills. That
afternoon, late, we stumbled on a deserted farmhouse almost at the
summit--trees laden with apples and the ground red with them, pears and
a few peaches for the picking, and a spring of ice-cold water with one
lost fat trout in it that I tried for hours to catch by fair means or
foul; but he merely waved his tail slowly, as if to say, "One wedding
present you don't get!" We slept that night on some hay left in an old
barn--lots of mice and gnawy things about; but I could not get nearly as
angry at a gnawy mouse as at a fat conceited trout who refused to be
caught.

Next day was a holiday, so we kept on our way rejoicing, and slept that
night under great redwoods, beside a stream where trout had better
manners. After a fish breakfast we potted a tin can full of holes with
the rifle, and then bore down circuitously and regretfully on Redwood
City and the Southern Pacific Railway, and home and college and dishes
to wash and socks to darn--but uproarious and joyful sons to compensate.

The seventh anniversary was less exciting, but that could not be helped.
We were over in Alamo, with my father, small brother, and sister
visiting us at the time--or rather, of course, the place was theirs to
begin with. There was no one to leave the blessed sons with; also, Carl
was working for the Immigration and Housing Commission, and no holidays.
But he managed to get home a bit early; we had an early supper, got the
sons in bed, hitched up the old horse to the old cart, and off we fared
in the moonlight, married seven years and not sorry. We just poked
about, ending at Danville with Danville ice-cream and Danville pumpkin
pie; then walked the horse all the way back to Alamo and home.

Our eighth anniversary, as mentioned, was in our very own home in
Berkeley, with the curtains drawn, the telephone plugged, and our Europe
spread out before our eyes.

The ninth anniversary was still too soon after the June-Bug's arrival
for me to get off the hill and back, up our two hundred and seventeen
steps home, so we celebrated under our own roof again--this time with a
roast chicken and ice-cream dinner, and with the entire family
participating--except the June-Bug, who did almost nothing then but
sleep. I tell you, if ever we had chicken, the bones were not worth
salvaging by the time we got through. We made it last at least two
meals, and a starving torn cat would pass by what was left with a
scornful sniff.

Our tenth and last anniversary was in Seattle. Carl had to be at Camp
Lewis all day, but he got back in time to meet me at six-thirty in the
lobby of the Hotel Washington. From there we went to our own favorite
place--Blanc's--for dinner. Shut away behind a green lattice
arbor-effect, we celebrated ten years of joy and riches and deep
contentment, and as usual asked ourselves, "What in the world shall we
be doing a year from now? Where in the world shall we be?" And as usual
we answered, "Bring the future what it may, we have _ten years_ that no
power in heaven or earth can rob us of!"

* * * * *

There was another occasion in our lives that I want to put
down in black and white, though it does not come under wedding
anniversaries. But it was such a celebration! "Uncle Max" 'lowed that
before we left Berkeley we must go off on a spree with him, and
suggested--imagine!--Del Monte! The twelve-and-a-half-cent Parkers at
Del Monte! That was one spot we had never seen ourselves even riding by.
We got our beloved Nurse Balch out to stay with the young, and when a
brand-new green Pierce Arrow, about the size of our whole living-room,
honked without, we were ready, bag and baggage, for a spree such as we
had never imagined ourselves having in this world or the next. We called
for the daughter of the head of the Philosophy Department. Max had said
to bring a friend along to make four; so, four, we whisked the dust of
Berkeley from our wheels and--presto--Del Monte!

Parents of three children, who do most of their own work besides, do not
need to be told in detail what those four days meant. Parents of three
children know what the hours of, say, seven to nine mean, at home; nor
does work stop at nine. It is one mad whirl to get the family ears
washed and teeth cleaned, and "Chew your mush!" and "Wipe your mouth!"
and "Where's your speller?" and "Jim, come back here and put on your
rubbers!" ("Where are my rubbers?" Ach Gott! where?) Try six times to
get the butcher--line busy. Breakfast dishes to clear up; baby to bathe,
dress, feed. Count the laundry. Forget all about the butcher until
fifteen minutes before dinner. Laundry calls. Telephone rings seven
times. Neighbor calls to borrow an egg. Telephone the milkman for a
pound of butter. Make the beds,--telephone rings in the middle,--two
beds do not get made till three. Start lunch. Wash the baby's clothes.
Telephone rings three times while you are in the basement. Rice burns.
Door-bell--gas and electric bill. Telephone rings. Patch boys' overalls.
Water-bill. Stir the pudding. Telephone rings. Try to read at least the
table of contents of the "New Republic." Neighbor calls to return some
flour. Stir the pudding again. Mad stamping up the front steps. Sons
home. Forget to scrape their feet. Forget to take off their rubbers.
Dad's whistle. Hurray! Lunch.--Let's stop about here, and return to Del
Monte.

This is where music would help. The Home _motif_ would be--I do not know
those musical terms, but a lot of jumpy notes up and down the piano,
fast and never catching up. Del Monte _motif_ slow, lazy melody--ending
with dance-music for night-time. In plain English, what Del Monte meant
was a care-free, absolutely care-free, jaunt into another world. It was
not our world,--we could have been happy forever did we never lay eyes
on Del Monte,--and yet, oh, it was such fun! Think of lazing in bed till
eight or eight-thirty, then taking a leisurely bath, then dressing and
deliberately using up time doing it--put one shoe on and look at it a
spell; then, when you are good and ready, put on the next. Just feeling
sort of spunky about it--just wanting to show some one that time is
nothing to you--what's the hurry?

Then--oh, what _motif_ in music could do a Del Monte breakfast justice?
Just yesterday you were gulping down a bite, in between getting the
family fed and off. Here you were, holding hands under the table to make
sure you were not dreaming, while you took minutes and minutes to eat
fruit and mush and eggs and coffee and waffles, and groaned to think
there was still so much on the menu that would cost you nothing to keep
on consuming, but where, oh, where, put it? After rocking a spell in the
sun on the front porch, the green Pierce Arrow appears, and all honk off
for the day--four boxes of picnic lunch stowed away by a gracious
waiter; not a piece of bread for it did you have to spread yourself.
Basking in the sun under cypress trees, talking over every subject under
heaven; back in time for a swim, a rest before dinner; then dinner (why,
oh, why has the human such biological limitations?). Then a concert,
then dancing, then--crowning glory of an unlimited bank-account--Napa
soda lemonade--and bed. Oh, what a four days!

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