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One day not long ago, when I was in Boston for a brief stay,
a friend called me at my hotel and asked me if I would go
with her that afternoon to have tea with Miss Eleonora
Sears. I demurred. My friend misunderstood my hesitation and
began to bolster her invitation with a host of facts about
Miss Sears: she was the most spectacular daughter of a long
line of Boston Searses, famous in her youth for feats of
strength and skill and endurance; a debutante of the early
nineteen-hundreds who had kept on going for years after she
came out; one of the first well-known American girl athletes
and, in a way, the first of the outdoor girls; ex-tennis
champion, equestrienne, athlete at large, friend of man and
beast—Boston at its briskest, Boston at its most
emancipated. As my hesitation nevertheless continued, the
encomiums came faster and finally gathered into an avalanche
of satiric invective. It was high time for me to abandon
this pose of shyness. Miss Sears was friendly and simple and
nobody to be afraid of, and, in any case, my friend would be
right over to fetch me.
Had she but known it, she did not have to tell me about Miss
Sears. My hesitation had been due to amazement; I was
stunned by this sudden and unexpected intrusion of the
actual into the legendary. For I had suffered over Miss
Eleonora. Because of my youthful preoccupation with her, I
had endured the taunts of my companions when I was a boy in
Worcester, Massachusetts. For many years, I was not only in
love with Miss Sears but, as I shall later explain, I had
made with her an identification of which she was unaware.
Thus when my friend tossed this astonishing invitation into
my lap, it was as startling to me as if I had been an
art-struck youth asked casually to go to a tea dance with
Venus de Milo or to drop in for lunch with Mona Lisa. I
knew, of course, that Miss Sears still existed and that she
was in all probability almost as active a lady as she had
been when, in my adolescence, I had cut her pictures out of
the Boston papers. I had known then that she existed, but I
had not thought that it was in a world where one could go
and see her. She might just as well have been living on
Mars.
Actually, I owed Miss Sears for more than serving as the
unwitting object of my affections. Through her, I got my
first glimpse into the mysterious and rather frightening
world that I sensed must be spinning outside the close
confines of Providence Street, Worcester. The revelation
came one summer morning when I was making my daily trudge to
Lake Quinsigamond. It was an illumination, not, perhaps, as
profound or disturbing or epochal as those described in the
memoirs of the saints and prophets, but cozier.
Miss Sears first attracted me by wearing a derby hat. I had
thought that this was a form of headgear reserved especially
for men; my uncles, who were peddlers and small tradesmen,
wore derbies. When I came upon a news picture of Miss Sears
in hers, I saw at once that she did it with more chic. The
photograph—from the Sunday-magazine section of the Boston
Herald, I believe—also showed her getting on a horse.
There was something about her that appealed to me so
strongly that I cut the picture out and tucked it into the
frame of the mirror over the bureau in my bedroom. This was
a mistake. One of my best friends saw the picture when he
dropped in the next morning to pick me up for our walk to
Lake Quinsigamond. He was contemptuous; in his
bedroom, he pointed out disdainfully, he had William
McKinley.
In the summer, the lives of the boys of the Providence
Street School centered around Lake Quinsigamond. This was a
lovely lake—or so it seemed to us then—four miles long,
dotted with islands, about four miles distant from the
double-decker tenement houses of Providence Street. We went
to sleep at night dreaming of the Lake and of the moment
when we would arrive the next morning at what we called "the
tank"—a swimming pool built at the edge of the water and
presided over by a wizened deity in trunks named Jerry Daly.
Non-swimmers and weak swimmers were confined to the tank.
The great day was when Jerry considered you an able enough
swimmer to be allowed to dive from the platform
outside and swim in the lake itself. And the feat for which,
as we grew older, we lived and labored was to swim from
Jerry Daly's to an island about a mile and a half distant.
The day I accomplished this, I felt an ecstasy of
achievement I have not known since.
There was a trolley to the Lake, but for us boys from
Providence Street the five-cent fare was prohibitive. Every
day of our summer vacation, we would roll our bathing trunks
into towels and walk to the Lake for a blissful hour or two
with Jerry Daly, and then walk home again. There was a
tradition among us that swimming in the rain had a special
excitement, so storms did not deter us. We would walk down
the steep decline of Providence Street—past the mercifully
shut winter prison of the school, past the dingy small shops
of Grafton Street, with their proprietors lounging
skeptically in the doorways, waiting for customers—until we
came to the old Union Station, with its tall clock tower,
where we were sometimes held up for twenty minutes by the
slow crawl of interminable freight trains. This station was
very familiar to me, principally because, to satisfy an itch
for travel, I had often boarded the incoming trains from
Springfield or Boston and sat on the plush seats while the
train stopped to take on Worcester passengers. I would get
off at the last minute before departure, with the worldly
air of one who has just completed a fatiguing journey.
Beyond the station began the upgrade of Shrewsbury Street,
which was almost as steep as Providence. It climbed into
Belmont Street, and Belmont led to the Lake. We would settle
down to the long climb like passengers settling down for a
transcontinental tour, and pass the time by discussing
technical questions about the breast stroke and the
Australian crawl. On lower Shrewsbury lived the Italian
colony, and the women were usually out on summer days,
hanging up their washing. On the Fourth of July, the
fireworks display furnished by this group of citizens was
the most flamboyant in town. Almost at the end of the long
trek, we would pass the State Insane Asylum. That was always
a landmark we were glad to see ahead, for when we got to it,
we knew the promised water was tantalizingly near. We would
cross the street to get closer to the fence around the great
enclosure of the Asylum, because in that way we could
sometimes catch glimpses of the inmates, who would glower
and scream at us or laugh obscenely, and this was both
terrifying and diverting. Many years later, when I was at
Harvard and taking a course in abnormal psychology, my class
made a trip to inspect this very institution. I remember a
horrid demonstration of a disease of immobility; a patient's
arm, pushed up into the air by an attendant, remained fixed
where the attendant put it and the sufferer's position would
not change, although it was grotesquely uncomfortable, until
the attendant moved the arm down again. I remember, too,
that I looked away from this spectacle for a moment and
realized suddenly that from here I could easily get to Jerry
Daly's. But it was December, and we were summoned
peremptorily to inspect some paretics.
For our mothers, the Lake was a terror and a menace, and it
made the summer holidays hateful to them. There were
occasional drownings, and scandals that were even darker
events than sudden death. The Lake took you right through
the various stages of adolescence; it was the focus of a
mass libido. At first, your god was Jerry Daly. When you got
a little older, it was Mr. Coburn, the proprietor of
Coburn's Boat House, at whose establishment, for twenty-five
cents an hour, you might rent a rowboat or a canoe. When we
young stalwarts took to rowing, four or five of us would
chip in to hire a boat for an hour. Canoeing was considered
effeminate, and we made fun of the older boys who took girls
out in canoes. But a day came when we did it ourselves, and
from then on the reign of Jerry Daly receded. Graceful
manipulation of the canoe became the ideal, rather than
feats of endurance and strength in the water. One summer,
there was a revolution, when we all abandoned ordinary
paddling and took up the "Indian stroke." This meant that
you never took your paddle out of the water but instead
right-angled it swiftly at the end of each stroke and cut
the water, as if with a blade, for the next push. Once we
had mastered the stroke, we felt very swan-like.
The Providence Street mothers had a special hatred for
canoeing. Canoes were volatile and dangerous. Jerry Daly
used to boast that he had never lost a boy, and I'm sure he
never did. But every once in a while the Worcester
Gazette reported drownings from canoes, especially at
night. For us boys, a yearning to paddle the Lake at night
succeeded our earlier longing to swim in it in the daytime.
But for our mothers, the physical hazard of canoeing was
almost eclipsed by their sense of its threat to chastity.
One day, the whole street buzzed with scandal. Because of an
evening in a canoe, one of our best-known young ladies had
hastily to announce her engagement to a young man far below
her in the Providence Street social scale. (The outsider
might have thought that all Providence Street was fairly
homogeneous as far as class distinction went, but he would
have been wrong. Socially, it was as stratified as a
geologic formation.) There was sufficient reason that the
statement "He took her canoeing" had a knowing overtone of
the illicit.
It was, therefore, a tremulous moment when you handed your
girl off Coburn's rather rickety dock and she settled
herself against the cushions while you masterfully seized
the paddle in the back seat and shoved off. Across the lake,
the water mirrored resplendently the dazzling lights of
White City, an amusement park with ferris wheel,
chute-the-chutes, and penny peep shows. You paddled past the
merry-go-round on the near side as it churned out the "Poet
and Peasant Overture," and presently von Suppé's
rhythms competed with those of the dance-hall orchestra just
beyond, which was probably playing a popular tune of the
time, a song extolling the delights of travel on "The Old
Fall River Line," the lyric of which conveyed the impression
that for general indulgence the Fall River boats were no
more than enlarged canoes. By the time you went under the
Old Aqueduct, the sounds of the merry-go-round and the dance
band had become faint and, ahead, the Lake opened out into
darkness, mystery, and that unknown danger of which the
Providence Street mothers were afraid.
At the time of my involvement with Miss Sears, these hazards
were still well ahead of me. After my friend had made fun of
me for having Miss Sears' photograph in my bedroom, my
affair with her went underground. I went on gathering
photographs and clippings of my heroine, but in secret. I
had photographs of Miss Sears getting on and off horses,
sitting securely on them, and leaping fences. That there
existed people who used horses merely for riding was in
itself extraordinary, and it added greatly to the aura
surrounding Miss Sears. Once, I am sure, she not only rode a
horse but wore simultaneously a glittering silk hat of the
kind we called "stovepipes." Stovepipes, as we knew them,
were the hats rented by bridegrooms for public weddings in
Horticultural Hall, on Front Street, an auditorium that was
considered the last word for elegant Providence Street
weddings. It had a highly polished floor, and before the
ceremony we boys would skate madly about on it till we were
stopped by our elders. An uncle of mine was married there,
and I remember him in a long, rented frock coat and a
stovepipe hat as he stood in position, enduring the
protracted, rather sad service conducted in Hebrew.
One day, Miss Sears' life took on a new direction that
brought her, in a moment of ecstatic amalgamation, close to
me. She developed a new and unexpected talent, a
potentiality of which she herself, perhaps, had only
recently become aware. She had always ridden horses and
played tennis and danced, but now she began to walk. The
newspapers started to apply to her a strange, new word. She
became what they reverently called a pedestrian. I carefully
spelled the odd word out to myself and kept repeating it
wonderingly on my walks to the Lake. I hadn't the faintest
idea what it meant. I thought it must be the noun to
describe some obscurely fashionable habit that could be
familiar only to those who lived in the realms inhabited by
Miss Sears. For a long time, I did not connect the word in
the newspaper headlines and under the photographs with the
activities described in the articles that accompanied them.
In these articles, I read with amazement that Miss Sears,
when she wanted to go to New York from Boston, disdained the
Merchants' Limited and simply walked. She thought nothing,
it appeared, of strolling from Newport to Montreal. The
records of these extended walks filled columns in the Boston
papers, and I took an intense pride in her mileage. And
then, one day, as I was passing the Insane Asylum, there
happened in my mind one of those instantaneous collocations
which, I suppose, in loftier spheres have by quick mutation
advanced the frontiers of philosophy and science. When the
sportswriters or social-column reporters said that Miss
Sears was a pedestrian, they merely meant that she was a
walker. Miss Sears and I were pedestrians together!
I began to multiply feverishly in my mind. Every day in
summer, I walked eight miles—four miles to the Lake and four
miles back. In two weeks, that made a hundred and twelve
miles. That must he as far as from Boston to New York. Of
course, Miss Sears did it all in a day or two, but after
all, I consoled myself, she devoted her entire time to it.
As soon as I discovered this community of interest between
Miss Sears and myself, I no longer kept my infatuation for
her a secret. I became quite brazen about her and flaunted
our relationship. I carried my clippings in my pocket on the
way to the Lake, showed them to the other boys, and compared
my tallies with hers. At first, my companions were amused,
and then scornful. One day, one of them taunted me. "Why
don't you quit Worcester and walk to Boston and marry Miss
Sears?" he asked.
"I don't intend to marry," I said with dignity, "but I think
we can be friends."
So odd is the course of destiny that this ambition was
actually realized, at least for a few hours, on the occasion
that I met Miss Sears for the first and last time. For
within an hour after my Boston friend rang me up, I found
myself in Miss Sears' drawing room, and there she was coming
toward me to greet me. Her pedestrianism, as she crossed the
room, met all my expectations; it was still elastic and
lively. She was slim, tweedy, and, although her hair was
gray, the whole impression she conveyed was youthful. Her
eyes were very blue and very clear. She said that she was
glad to see me. I told her at once that during my childhood
in Worcester I had been, like her, a pedestrian. Miss Sears
mistook, somehow, a past avocation for a present one.
"What was your last walk?" she asked, without beating about
the bush.
I had just come from the Pacific Coast. I don't know what
made me say it, unless I thought it would make Miss Sears
smile. "Los Angeles to San Francisco," I told her.
"I've done it." said Miss Sears crisply. "How long did it
take you?" |
