She lay down. She sat up. Tut-tut! Nurse Lugton commanded, her gruff alto a rope. She tried to hang on. She wadded the cotton balls again and stuffed them into her ears. She wiggled her toes, checking—they had not seized—and forced herself to walk to her desk, to pick up her pen. But the speech was so dull, and the Quarterly on the bed so bright, its crimson cover and raised seal beckoning. Until recently, the Quarterly had been printed in a flat, dull gray. At least there had been that.
Katherine Graver is getting on famously at Physicians and Surgeons. And speaking of doctors, Dina Papineau begins her internship in a Midwestern hospital shortly. What a lot they must know!
Hannah Bugbee reports that she has never been so busy or so happy in her life! College not excepted? She is to be the Song Director at Aloha Camps next summer.
Our class is now the proud possessor of thirty-one infants and children, according to the secretary’s records.
Dorothy Sprague is at the Hampton Institute again. I will quote from her own words: “I am thoroughly absorbed in my work here of teaching to eager, interesting, appreciative human Negro boys and girls. I feel glad to be making a concrete difference rather than the quite lofty speeches I used to deliver on campus. I am not engaged. I am particularly happy that Radcliffe has proved open on the race question!”
Roberta Salter I have seen at the New York Radcliffe lunch very gay and enthusiastic. Her activities include choral singing and a course at the Metropolitan Museum. She enjoys entertaining and welcomes visitors—let Ro-Ro know if you are in New York!
What could Bea possibly add? She did not recognize a single name. Her blood rattled in her ears. She pulled out the cotton. The noise of the whistle buoy exploded in her chest: What about youuuuu? She had not graduated from Radcliffe. She had barely lasted ten weeks, and half her time there she spent fiddling with the wicked brace Lillian had had made for her. Shrinks the stomach, strengthens the back, reforms a girlish posture! the advertisements promised. The brace’s top edge dug into her ribs, its bottom into her hip bones or, if she was sitting, into the tops of her thighs. During her lessons at the conservatory, she shifted and sagged, her fingers cold, her stomach empty. A tiredness overtook her. She floated outside herself, the floating part watching the playing part falling asleep as it played. The music reeked of competence. Master B. smiled painfully. His disappointment was clear. She wasn’t to be his star pupil after all; she would not make him famous. His certainty was like a blade through Bea’s ribs. She had not been taught to bear up against people’s judgments. She had been taught to take them seriously because until the trouble with the baby, she had only been judged well. She turned Master B.’s hostility on herself. Her supposed talent at the piano was a lie, her true mediocrity another secret she would have to keep. (She refused to perform.) The brace made her body a lie. Not a single person, not even Uncle Ira, knew the full truth. When she considered confessing to her roommate, an Eliza Dropstone from Needham, a kind, horsey, not-very-serious student who told Bea her secrets in a loud, conspiratorial whisper (she liked a boy, she couldn’t understand a word Professor M. said, she had kissed her dog before she’d left home, but really kissed it, like a boy), Bea’s throat began to close.
In her isolation, Bea felt absurd. She could say nothing without feeling she was lying. Her very being, the air she moved through, seemed to drip with falseness. Except when asked a direct question, she stopped talking. She did not join the clubs that met in the Yard. She did not join them because she did not talk and because the brace made it impossible to sit on the ground and because she was too hungry to listen anyway. Hungry yet fat. She had assigned herself a diet of fruit and cottage cheese but each night, when she removed the brace before bed—a finicky and covert operation undertaken beneath her robe, facing the wall, so that her roommate wouldn’t see—her stomach hung down her front like a third, misshapen breast.