Chapter 19   BOWDOIN COLLEGE: Page Street, Mill Street: Class and Political Radicalization - Life among the Gentry; Life among the Canucks       And now we had a third son - Tommy! The birth was an uneventful one, thanks to the gentle support of my new obstetrician, Dr. Stevens. I was so elated by its relative ease in comparison with the first two that as soon as I was wheeled into my private room I jumped out of bed and ran over to the phone to call home. Bucky answered the call, and I said joyously, "Mary had her baby! It's a boy!" "Oh, that's grand," says Bucky. Pause. "Well, who's this?" "It's Mary!" She fell out! Great joke &endash; but I was overjoyed at having avoided so much pain and misery for once!.   After I had left for the hospital in Portland, my mother and Bill had moved all our worldly possessions to the new house we had rented - the home of the Kölln family at 72 Page Street, they being on Sabbatical in Germany. Fritz was the head of the German department, and the house was big and square in the best New England nineteenth century architectural tradition. The family was quite traditional in the middle class German mode, and their house was comfortable but old-fashioned. I came back with the new baby to a strange house. its kitchen all heaped up with boxes of miscellaneous objects - clothes, books, kitchen tools, lamps, toys, baby equipment, and very little else of any value. Discouraging. And of course Bill hadn't had time to begin sorting things out.   Tommy proved to be a patient, self-contained soul, unlike his passionate older brother Peter &endash; which was just as well, since he also proved to have inherited the same lactose intolerance that had plagued so many of my mother's family members. Additionally, he began developing symptoms of mild asthma under the stress of a cold &endash; and as time went on, developed anemia because of his inability to assimilate solid food. But these were all transitory problems which gradually assumed less and less importance as he grew older.   But the main source of stress for me was the antagonistic nature of my last encounter with my father, which left a very bad taste in my mouth, and added de-pression to my sense of overload. The whole scene was, after all, in sharp contrast with what had gone before, living on the farm with two &endash; three, during the period when Bucky was in residence - sources of child support in my mother and Teddy, both of whom had always greatly enjoyed the company of Billy and Peter!     It was a pretty mixed year, Bill feeling stressed by the demands of the new job, I overwhelmed with the demands of a new baby, plus a toddler and a youngster to look after, plus the regular evening task of reading his assignments to Bill. The house was heated by a huge monster of a coal furnace, which had to be serviced and fed, the fire started every day with firewood and then coal heaped on top of the wood fire. The ashes had to be shoveled out into metal ashcans every day and put out for trash collection once a week. The two older boys now began getting frequent colds and ear infections, and the baby, like his next older brother, had severe dietary problems based on intolerance of cow's milk, since I had been forced to abandon breast feeding twice in the face of inverted nipples that refused to emerge, and subsequent breast abscesses! Additionally, he began having mild attacks of asthma brought on by his congestion! I had plenty to worry about.   We found two student boarders to help pay the monthly rent for that big house - Brent Baer and Province Henry. They were ideal for our purposes, neither of them being particularly sociable, although they were not at all unfriendly. Brent was a somewhat withdrawn but amiable epileptic and Provie, a GI Bill student returnee and Newton Stallknecht's brother-in-law, was virtually stone deaf, and a great eccentric. They were in and out, and even helped out occasionally, stoking the huge coal furnace or hauling out the ashes, but otherwise inconspicuous. We quickly became used to having the use of a car only during the winter months when Bucky lived with us, and developed several methods of getting around in Brunswick, including the town bus, our two bicycles and a splendid wagon big enough to hold all three boys and our bags of groceries. Bucky arrived in October in her old grey Studebaker, but it was now pretty decrepit - and also too small for us all to fit into, although it still ran, so we persuaded her to buy a new car - a maroon Willys Jeep station wagon.   I didn't establish any close bonds with other faculty wives, except, of course, Dorothy Korgen, whom I already knew from our years on the point. I was too busy with children, illness, the pains of adaptation, I guess. I remember feeling friendly enough toward a number of people, especially the wives of other members of the philosophy department, but never felt very close to any of them. Walter Solmitz, like Bill, was a part-time member of the philosophy department but mostly a member of the German department. His wife Ellie was a gentle soul, very quiet and thoughtful, very devoted to her son David.   Walter was a tall, painfully courteous man, very German, tall and dark, with the melancholy of the Jew he was, a bit withdrawn but very gentle and kind. He had come out of a concentration camp, and of course, lost his German identity. He should have been teaching philosophy, not German, LONGED to be accepted in the philosophy department, but no one would let him switch - just fill in occasionally. Ellie was more realistic, but Walter suffered from a sense of stigma, being a proud man - was finally seeing a Jungian therapist, and in therapy for years! We only heard from them at Christmastime during the next eleven years, so it was a lot later that we began to hear what was really happening.   It was after Bill got the job at the State University of New York in Albany in 1961 that we heard from Ellie that Walter was still suffering terribly with lack of self-esteem and depression. I spoke with him on the phone, but he put me off very gently - and a few days after that we heard he had cut his wrists while she and David were away from home for a couple of days! In the tub! I was pretty bad off myself at the time, so took it very hard! I was nearly ready for the funny farm myself at that point! And I still feel rotten about it!   OF COURSE it could have happened with any therapy, not just Jungian. No one is God! Hearing it also helped me come out of my trance to some extent, made me realize I wasn't as bad off as I had believed! But the sound of Walter's calm, gentle voice still haunts me. I realized then for the first time that there was NOTHING I could do, that there was a limit to my ability to change things!   But that realization was still a long way off in the future. During the fall of 1948 I joined a community drama group and had a small part in several plays during the school year including "John Loves Mary," "Seven Against Thebes," in which I was Ismene, "You Touched Me!" by Tennessee Williams and "The Little Foxes" (I was the black maid!). In spite of the demands on every minute of my time, however - or perhaps at least partly because of it - I felt more and more out of joint with life. It was really my first move away from my family, and the sense of the unpleasantness involved in the move continued to oppress me beneath the rest of my busy life. Our sexual dysfunctionality as a couple also lingered in the background as a never-relieved source of frustration, although it really didn't occur to me at the time that there might be something I could do about it. Like everything else in my life, it was just what was happening. But I think it was this gnawing sense of inchoate hunger as much as anything else that led to my repeated "accidental" pregnancies during this period.   Early in 1949 I became pregnant again, and by mid-April I began cramping with a threatened miscarriage. My doctor, a young man newly arrived in Brunswick, prescribed stilbestrol and heavy sedation. It didn't halt the process, so, in spite of nearly a week in bed, in the end I started to bleed quite heavily, and had to be driven in an ambulance to the Maine General in Portland to be taken care of by the obstetrician who had delivered Tom. The experience was a strange one. I had eaten a heavy supper of corned beef and cabbage, and because the bleeding was pretty heavy, they took me right up into the operating room, and the anesthetist began anesthetizing me while Dr. Stevens was still scrubbing. Evidently the gas made me feel nauseated, and I began to vomit, so she had to let me up to do so.   But that's not really what I remember as my experience. I was far away in a strange country being held down by four Dominicans all dressed in black-and-white habits! I remember struggling, trying desperately to get away from them, because they were trying to do something to or with me that I profoundly did not want them to do! Suddenly I heard a woman's voice, saying, "Dr. Stevens, you'd better come here. We can't hold her." I opened my eyes immediately, suddenly back in the operating room. "Oh, why didn't you say something to me?" I remarked, lying quietly again. It was a scene that was to take on meaning I would never have dreamed of, over thirty years in the future! The woman anesthetized me again, and Dr. Stevens did the D & C.   Our life at this time was so busy, so filled with day-to-day living that I was unable to develop a perspective that might have led me to formulate a plan for alleviating my inner imbalance, but I was certainly aware of an unmet need for an understanding of myself that I did not have. I guess I count as the first of my therapeutic connections my friendship with Sam Mencher - the instructor in the Sociology Department who had become friends with the whole family. It became a kind of lifeline for me to talk with him. Sam and I had many, many hours of conversation, and I learned a lot about life and people from him. Gradually, over the four years of Bill's appointment I guess I fell in love with him, and probably would have succumbed to a sexual affair with him if he had suggested it, but he was a lot of things, all of them perhapses - perhaps too fussy, perhaps too realistic, perhaps too cynical, perhaps too honest, perhaps too untrusting, perhaps too loyal to Bill - perhaps a mix of all or none of the above. Looking back, I have a feeling that the foremost deterrent was his respect for Bill's and my marriage, flawed as it was! He liked women and spent a lot of his free time with wives of faculty members, but I never heard of his establishing sexual liaisons with any of them.   Sam also liked Bill a lot, and we spent many evenings drinking beer and laughing and talking. Sam was also more or less a political radical, and saw through the genteel façade of the "Bowdoin family" myth President Sills and his wife loved to talk about and promote. Being in a sense outcasts from that family was a real bond. I suppose Sam and we were all conspicuous as outcasts in the eyes of a lot of people at Bowdoin (although not overtly, and not with everyone), Sam for being Jewish as well, we for our non-conventional behavior, even though a lot of that came from having so little money.   In many ways living at 7 Page Street was a pleasure, however, in spite of the difficulties I have mentioned. Bill was able to begin inviting Bowdoin students to the house for philosophical conversations, which Provie Henry also attended. I remember three of them especially - Phil Cole, who became quite a good friend, of Bill's, "Zeke" Bekele, from Ethiopia, and Willy Barnstone, who has become quite a notable scholar, translator and poet! When Willy was ready to graduate, he asked us to keep beautifully-framed Van Gogh prints for him. I still have them, and am waiting for him to come and retrieve them!   A contemporary image of Willy Barnstone, taken from his website   "Zeke" was the American nickname given to him by his Bowdoin student friends in place of his Ethiopian name, Zeleke. Zeke was small-boned and exquisite in frame and features! The first time he came to visit, Tommy, about six months of age, was in his playpen. Zeke picked him up, laying his smooth, eggplant-colored cheek against Tommy's snow-white one - Tommy being somewhat anemic. The beauty of this contrast made me gasp!     One day after my parents got back from their trip around the world, my mother called and asked if we knew anyone who might like a job washing windows at the farm. I asked around, and Zeke said he'd like to do it. My mother picked him up and drove him out there. I heard from her later what happened. She said that everything went well until she called him into the kitchen for lunch and my father came in to join them. He took a look at Zeke, and left the room. When my mother followed him to ask what was wrong, he told her that he had no intention of eating with a negro! Of course the fact that Zeke's father was an ambassador cut no ice with him! - not that it should have! Prejudice is best dished out raw!   Having a proper house, we were able to invite friends of Bill's for visits, and Rod and Martha Kenner took us up on the invitation. It was a notable event. It turned out that Martha, a southern woman, was highly psychic and had even seen the ghost of her earlier lover, who had been killed in the war. Also she was an adept at using the oija board. Rod had to persuade her to do so, but she finally agreed. It was truly amazing. All she had to do was to put one finger on the board and it would whiz around spelling words like a typewriter! Both Bill and she were very ambivalent about this process, but Rod and I were clearly both aficionados &endash; I never having even known of the existence of this phenomenon until now, he a longtime fan, when he could get Martha to engage.   Bill had been visiting an optometrist, a Dr, Russell, who had offered to try to build him a pair of telescopic lenses. He told us he would like to test out how much Bill could actually see in an unfamiliar setting &endash; and invited us to dinner. It was an amazing experience. Sitting in his little living room, we could see a corner of the kitchen where an old-fashioned GE refrigerator stood. Sitting on the opposite side of the room, Bill was able to identify its make very readily. But, even more remarkably, he was also able to look through the front windows out into the street about twenty feet away and give the names of the makes of cars passing in the street! Dr. Russell told us that, judging from his measurements, Bill couldn't possibly see any of these things! What I surmise from this discovery was that most of Bill's vision was somehow synthesized out of very scanty raw data by the acuity of his powers of perception and interpretation!   The year passed quickly. At the end of it we knew we had to look for a house we could afford. As long as we lived at 7 Page Street the gap between our lifestyle and that of other Bowdoin faculty was not so conspicuous, being principally ideological, but that residence was only for a year, so in June we began looking for a place to rent. I suppose that choosing to live in the French Canadian mill district down on the Androscoggin River during Bill's second year as an instructor was the last straw. A year of renting the Kölln's house had eaten up most of our meager savings, and we had to live on Bill's even more meager salary as an instructor. The house we found was one we could afford, at $8 a week, a tiny house without central heating down on Mill Street right above the river bank with a train chugging past our back yard twice a day. It was a wonderfully cozy, charming little house. We grew to look forward to the chug chug chug of the train as it slowly slid past. We bought a super wagon that would hold all three kids, and used to pull them along when we went on errands, not having a car - except when Bucky came for her extended visits.   An ironic note concerning the unconventionality of our location was struck around Christmastime. In the genteel tradition that had governed this Ivy League college for generations, President and Mrs. Sills delivered Christmas wreaths to the entire faculty in person! We almost didn't get ours, apparently because they couldn't figure out the location of our "Mill Street" address. When they finally did come, a day or two before Christmas, they were both apologetic and embarrassed, and clearly, also acutely uncomfortable with us. We had violated a double taboo against fraternization with BOTH working class AND French Canadian people! Oh, well … .   In the spring of 1950 Peter, who was now a little over three years old, began exploring the back side of our house lot as it backed up onto waste land in the middle of a large town block with houses all around the periphery. One day he came home from one of his excursions with several cookies in each hand. Since eating of this kind still spelled a bout of a couple of days of scalding diarrhea, I was at a loss to know how to handle it, not wanting to curb his adventurousness. I finally found a large square of cardboard, wrote on it with a felt pen in large letters, "Please do not feed me. I get very sick." I punched holes in all four corners, added reinforcements around the holes and threaded them with long strings, with which I then tied the card to his back. He wore the sign cheerfully, and the problem did not reappear.   We lived there for two (school) years, 1949-50 and 1950-51. I still go to Brunswick in the summer almost every year, but the little house no longer exists, alas. They tore it down to widen Mill Street as a by-pass to accommodate through traffic. My recollection of that house and of our two years there still fills me with nostalgia. We were really on our own for the first time, the size and cost of the house fitted our purse, and it felt good to be there, as it were, on the right level, seeing that we could indeed make it very well without my parents' help, support and monitoring attention! Bucky still came to live with us as she had on the farm for six months of the year, still paid us $100 a month, which I was able to save, thus building back our bank account to a more comfortable level. Our three little boys were delightful kids. Our French Canadian neighbors were friendly. Without daily farm chores to be performed we had more time for just living. Bill had a hard time keeping up with his lectures, but I did quite a lot of evening reading after the kids were in bed, and our life went along quite well from day to day.   Early in the second September I began looking for a part-time job I could do with three young children, and landed one teaching bed-ridden kids at home. They gave me a stack of school books to pick from to use. Most of them I left behind at home. I found a young woman to come in for a couple of mornings a week to take care of the kids. This new situation had an unexpected bonus. Billy, who was four-and-a-half, began asking Barbara, the baby sitter, questions about some of the books, and before I knew what was happening, had learned both to read, to figure and even began writing stories using phonetic spelling, like a story I saved in his "baby book" entitled "On the Moon," which he described as having "no er newer," (no air anywhere) and "vre jagd mawtns" (very jagged mountains). I didn't make any money to speak of, but it was a good learning experience, and the kids benefited. It also meant that my life was becoming even more separated from the general run of faculty wives than had happened when we moved down to the French mill district. Looking back it amazes me how strong and how virtually universal those prejudices really were!   Another gap in our sense of being "a part of the Main" was the fact that the Cold War had already begun breeding suspicion and hatred aimed at anyone who was not a conformist. During the presidential campaign of 1948, we - Bill, Sam, another Sociology instructor named Mike, and I &endash; had campaigned for Henry Wallace, who had been Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture but had already been labeled as a Red because the Communists and political left wingers supported him. Even this early on, people were in a very real sense choosing up sides! The issue of who was a "Red," who a "Pinko" or a "Fellow Traveler" began to be raised more and more frequently, and the House UnAmerican Activities began realizing with increasing glee how much hay could be made by both accusation and innuendo. It was to become an industry as the next few years unfolded.   The focus came most heavily to bear on intellectuals and political reformers &endash; and especially, on writers, actors, artists and musicians. Bill's old friend Herman Waldman, a successful character actor in Hollywood, was already under suspicion for being a free thinker who refused to join the anti-Communist ranks! This theme of choosing "sides" in a political climate that was growing increasingly polarized was to become more and more strident over the next four years. Like many others, Herman was forced to drop out of American film-making altogether. He ended up renouncing his American citizenship, changed his name to David Wolfe and went to England to live and work for the rest of his days. But this was not yet the focus of our family concern. What was far more salient to us was the question of Bill's position at Bowdoin. By the spring of 1951 it became clear to us that it would be necessary for us to look again at moving on.   Bowdoin College, like several other small colleges, had a "four years up or out" policy. If an instructor did not receive a promotion to assistant professor by the end of his fourth year, he would not be reappointed as a member of the faculty, and only faculty members with a PhD were ever promoted. I remember attending the APA (The American Philosophy Association) meetings in Worcester that spring. I think we were both still hoping an exception could be made or found for Bill. He had a talk with C.S. Lewis, who had been one of his professors at Harvard. That worthy now only told him that receiving the doctorate was a total pre-requisite, but that in all probability he would not be able to find a teaching appointment at all, considering his visual handicap! Whew! This detached ex cathedra pronunciamento filled me with fury and determination to prove him wrong - but it made Bill collapse in despair! His morale sank so low I could not even persuade him to seek out possible openings in local colleges. He announced that we would be leaving Maine and finding a place to live while he finally wrote his doctoral thesis. Newton Stallknecht and he had several long conversations about the thesis topic. Bill had tried to develop a theory of value of his own for the first tentative version of the thesis, but it had collapsed. Newton advised him strongly to write about a value theory that would dovetail with his own, based on the thinking of some known philosopher. After lengthy discussion, he suggested Alfred North Whitehead. It was an inspired choice! Bill's own views on value flowed so smoothly into Whitehead's metaphysics as to be virtually seamless. And since Whitehead does not have a theory of value per se, the strain of actually developing one of his own was now in abeyance.* The only thing left to do was to find a place to live we could afford. That lack was readily supplied by Bucky, who, on hearing of our plans, immediately asked us to come and live with her in her family house in West Newton - instead of the other way around. She could still live at Journey's End during the warm part of the year, leaving us in the West Newton house, and we could all live together during the winter. *I am in the process of transcribing Bill's PhD thesis onto this website, have recently completed Chapter Six, with one more to go! It is a splendid achievement, which re-reading has reinforced mightily for me! Its import seems to me potentially crucial in resolving the traditional gap between science and religion, between the view of reality as fact and the alternative view of it as process, as an organic whole, a living, breathing, feeling entity that supports us all!! - call that entity God, Allah, Wakontanka, Brahma or Nature. The language in which Whitehead's writing is couched is astoundingly complex and painfully "unpackable," at least for most of us - but Bill has done an extremely painstaking, faithful, scrupulously detailed analysis and synthetic reissuing of Whitehead's writings. I am hoping and praying that one day some Whitehead scholar will come across this monumental work on this website and recognize its value! Go to the Table of Contents page to take a look!   Move to Chapter Twenty  Write me at maryskole@aol.com