Читать книгу My First Hundred Years - Donald R. Fletcher - Страница 15

From the landing there were four more steps to upstairs, four more of these padded steps. As I climbed them, I looked up. There was a hallway, and at the end of it an open door.

There she was! That had to be right! I knew that skirt! The rest of her was hidden by the doorway, the way she was sitting. I could just see the ankle-length skirt and her feet; but I knew the skirt.

It looked far away, infinitely far. Could I reach it? Could I get to it? I took quick steps. She heard me, and I could see her face, smiling at me. The skirt—I was close to it—and seeing her now, as she was, above it. That, just that, was what mattered. The whole scene is still vivid to me: how I felt on Mother’s first visit.

“Why, Don, dear!” she was saying. “I didn’t expect you to come over from the dormitory.”

I wasn’t saying anything. I wasn’t crying, either. I was just pressing close to her, close to that skirt that had been so impossibly far away. Mother had come up to see us after our first couple of months at Pyongyang Foreign School. Perhaps Elsie had written her that I was homesick, although I tried not to let it show. Now her visit gave me a tremulous happiness; but the visit was short. When she left, a wave of homesickness washed over me again.

It was a wave, though, and waves pass. Although Elsie and Archie were making their own friends, I had them with me in the dormitory. The dorm, at that time, was just one building, two-and-a-half stories, housing forty or fifty of us in rooms on the second floor and in large open areas on the third, up under the sweep of the heavy, clay-tiled roof. Secure doors on each of the upper floors separated them in two halves, girls on one side and boys on the other. The ground floor was for the kitchen, dining room, living room, and the matron’s small bedroom and bath; the laundry was in the basement.

I lacked the outgoing nature of my siblings, I nonetheless experienced pleasurable times. I’m remembering one spring evening of that first year. I was behind the dorm, on a steep bank where flowering weeds grew among some trees. I had found a slender, pliable stick, which was my sword. I was wielding it in knightly combat, beheading weeds of my enemies, when Ben, one of the high school boys, came up where I was—a unique event for me.

Ben joined in, had me describe my combat and shared in my make-believe world. After a while, he said, “Yonder, there is a damsel who is waiting for me. You will excuse me, Sir Knight, as I go to meet her!”

I have never forgotten Ben’s kindness to a younger, solitary boy on that spring evening. Possibly Elsie put him up to it. If so, I never knew.

A new thing for me in dorm life was that there were many girls—older as well as of my age group. Of course, I didn’t speak to them; but there were two whom I selected as the most beautiful and bewitching. The older and taller one, whose blonde hair hung in waves, I privately called the “Queen,” while the other one, was “Princess.” Only later did I learn that these two, whose real names were Marilyn and Rachel, were sisters.

One day in late spring, after dinner, our housemother called us together in the living room. She told us that Marilyn was sick, very sick, and had been taken to the hospital. She led us in a fervent prayer for Marilyn’s recovery and told us also to pray in our rooms.

The next day, the principal gathered all of us, those from seventh grade on up, in the Assembly Hall, to tell us about Marilyn—that it was meningitis. The doctors were doing what they could, but the fever was very strong. Marilyn and Rachel’s parents would be coming from Chefoo, in China, as soon as they could.

He invited us to kneel at our benches, and anyone who wished to, one by one, to lead us in prayer. I was in awe, hearing the emotional outpouring of my schoolmates—particularly one of the senior boys, who began to pray and broke down, while several senior girls were sobbing.

That evening word was passed that Marilyn had died. The light of my Queen had gone out. I didn’t cry, as that senior boy had done. I asked Elsie to let me, and I went to climb that bank behind the dorm, finding an open place where I could sit still for a while, letting my feelings sink into place before I went up to the third floor, where Archie and I had our beds, side by side.

The next year I was in eighth grade and more confident. In our small school at that time, seventh and eighth grades were in one classroom on the ground floor. (Elsie and Archie had moved upstairs to the high school.) I began to speak up more and take initiative; and I began to notice girls of my own age. One of them was Beatrice—called Bea. Dark haired, with eyes that could flash, she was bright and a leader. In class I was sometimes in competition with her. That winter, though, there was one rare and memorable experience.

Behind the high ground on which our school, dormitory, and a number of missionary homes were built, the land fell away to a wide, level valley. There were mud-walled, thatch-roofed houses with rice paddies, and among them, a small river, the Pothong (POH-tong). The large Taetong River flowed past Pyongyang, far away on the other side of the city, as it was then.

In the cold north Korean winter that I’m writing about, both rivers were frozen over. There came, one Saturday, an evening of clear sky and full moon. Some of the older kids, and some adventurous teachers, arranged a new and one-time-only event for all of us who wanted to join in: a moonlight skate on the Pothong. Elsie, Archie, and I went, and in the excited group gathered in light and shadows at the river’s edge, putting on our skates, I saw that Bea was there.

The better skaters took off quickly, Archie among them. The rest of us did some circles, getting the feel of the ice. Then I saw that some of the older kids were pairing off, skating side-by-side and matching strokes, while they crossed arms, holding hands, left with left and right with right. I went up to Bea and asked if she’d like to try it.

We weren’t skilled on skates but found that it went quite well. We followed those who were skating up the river, away from houses and people, but always we stayed near others of our group who were passing in one direction or the other. Bea had a fur-trimmed jacket, and mittens with fur on the back. She was also a “dormite” (as we called students living in the dorm), whose parents were in China, an area near Korea, and this was real fur.

I got to know those mittens well, as we kept skating together a long time. Bea seemed to like it, and I knew that I did. We went quite far up the small river, skirting places where the current had made the ice rough. It was hard to spot and negotiate them in the moonlight, but that made the adventure more enjoyable. The emotion of that night is with me yet, after these many decades.

As I said, this moonlight skate on the Pothong happened just once; but there were also walks home from study hall at night, sometimes with Bea. We dormites had study hall each school-day evening, all of us in seventh grade and above. There were two forty-five-minute periods, with the lower three grades staying for just one period and the upper three for both.

It certainly wasn’t far from study hall to dorm—maybe eighty or a hundred yards; but we didn’t have to walk fast, and it provided a brief, sentimental interlude. It turned out that Johnny, a classmate who also fancied being with Bea, began to try to get in ahead of me some evenings. She seemed to have the same smile for both of us, and to prefer, quite often, to walk with her girlfriends instead.

As we moved up the ladder in school there were other emotional interests, but Beatrice was always there in my thought, at least in the background. Finally, in my senior year she was totally eclipsed by my infatuation with Edna.

Edna’s family was in Seoul, her father a missionary doctor like mine. There was a small English-language school in Seoul, but Edna had apparently been getting behind academically, so her family decided to send her to PYFS. I was ahead in school, fifteen and beginning my senior year. Edna, a freshman, was, I think, fourteen, or near to that. Physically, she was precocious, with the full figure of a girl three or four years older than she was. She was accustomed to being the center of boys’ attention—and to dealing with that.

There was a boy my age, a junior, whose name also was Archie. My brother Archie, and Elsie, too, had graduated and gone to the US to college, while I was now on the top rung of the ladder, a senior. Archie proved to be my intense rival for Edna. He was rather handsome, which I was not; although he was not a good student, which I was. Edna played us off against each other, keeping both of us on her string. I was alternately elated and plunged in gloom. She would let me feel that she really enjoyed being with me, then would be talking and laughing with Archie, leaving me on the outside.

As the year ended, though, I felt that Edna was closer to me. I went off to college, taking her picture with me, an enlargement that I framed and kept on the wall of my room for a year, although I didn’t hear anything more from her. Korea was far away, certainly in terms of correspondence. With my new life, a nostalgic idealization was enough—until that, too, began to fade.

With Bea, in time, there was a sort of revival. We made contact again, through another high-school friend. I was now engrossed in English studies at Princeton and was experimenting seriously with writing poetry. In one brief message, Bea wrote that she believed in me. That gave me a lift, and the theme of a lyric poem. Later, in my senior year, I made Bea an impulsive, quixotic proposal of marriage.

There was a Christian summer-conference center outside of Asheville, North Carolina, that my siblings and I had contact with and where we spent most of the summer of 1938. The center, called Ben Lippen, had a large, reconstructed building on a hilltop, and there was talk that summer about putting it to use during the school year by establishing an academy for boys. I naively thought that I could make a strong bid to be named principal or headmaster of the school.

It was my senior year at Princeton. Having a strong academic record, I wanted to try for a Rhodes Scholarship. Because my dad’s three brothers and his sister all lived in Nebraska, he considered that his home state. As I had no home elsewhere in the United States, I was going to make my application from Nebraska, traveling out there during my winter vacation for an interview.

The trip to Nebraska by Greyhound bus would take me through Wooster, Ohio, and I knew that Bea was a student at Wooster College and living with her family there that year. What more natural than to arrange a stopover and a date with her?

We borrowed the family car and went for a drive. It was dream-like to be seeing Bea again and talking with her. I told her about Ben Lippen and the plans for the boys’ school, and I proposed to her. We could begin a life together, serving in the new school. Would she do that?

It was quixotic, a completely imaginative proposal. Bea had her feet on the ground, much better than I. Her answer wasn’t brusque, but it was clear enough; no. She knew me, even though we had been going our separate ways since graduating from PYFS. She told me how she had stayed in China for a year after graduation, and how she formed a close relationship with an American sailor in that place and time. These things are real, as she pointed out, but they pass.

We drove back to her house and, later that night, I was again on my way to Nebraska. As a footnote, my bid for a Rhodes was also unsuccessful.

*****

Let me turn back to PYFS and to a different memory from that time. We had a Boy Scout troop there. Its organizing scoutmaster, Mr. Shaw, was a strong figure, a missionary stationed in Pyongyang who had been in France in World War I—in the mud, gore, and gas attacks of the trenches. He wouldn’t talk much about it, although he did collaborate, one year, as adviser for an original school play that had some dramatic, poignant war scenes. I don’t know what rank he held in the Army—he had left that behind—but he was an excellent scoutmaster, using his free time and a blend of genial kindness and strict discipline to train us.

I was in eighth grade, as I remember it, when I started out as a Tenderfoot. Here was a ladder to be climbed. I worked my way up, passing each test, learning what needed to be learned, to arrive at First Class rank. Mr. Shaw made sure that the induction ceremony for First Class, held in the living room of his home, was solemn. A board held twelve candles, which the candidate was to light, one by one, as he recited the twelve Scout Laws.

This was a supreme moment for me, and I was approaching the final law. Then, suddenly, the room went dark. When I could see again, I was on a couch, looking at the ceiling and at Scoutmaster Shaw. He had seen the instant when I had started to faint. The room was warm; I had skipped dinner to be ready on time; and I was looking down at all those lighted candles. He moved so quickly that he caught me, before I would have gone, face down, on top of them.

Mr. Shaw did not continue with the scout troop, but Mr. Chandler, a teacher in our school, took it up. As we Scouts moved up in high school and there were other interests, many of the older boys dropped out. My brother, Archie, was getting more into sports and such. In his same grade, though, was Dave, who kept on with Scouting. Dave set his sights on being the first in our troop to reach the rank of Eagle Scout, and I wanted to follow him. Eagle meant earning twenty-one merit badges, of which, as I recall, Camping was one that was required.

Although I lived in the dorm with few resources, fortunately for me Dave’s family was there in Pyongyang, and quite close by. His dad had found a good location for camping on the level ground beyond the Pothong River. Dave and I hiked out there. He had a pup tent that we set up. I think we even made a campfire, before we pushed ourselves into the pup tent for the night.

It was fascinating and a bit scary to be out there in dark solitude, just the two of us. We could hear an occasional sound from the village across the fields—a child’s crying, some thumping sounds and a dog barking. Then it was quiet.

After a bit, abruptly, we sensed something moving quite close by. I clutched the tent flap, holding it tightly closed. The sound came close, and for a long moment there was a snuffling right at the edge of our tent. More sniffing, moving around to the other side, and then it went away.

“One of those village curs,” Dave said. “They’re always hungry. Good I didn’t have any food out there in my back pack.”

“Yeah,” I answered, glad to have the assurance and to have silence again.

Dave achieved Eagle Scout rank that spring, before he graduated and left for college. I finished it in the fall. The Eagle Scout badge was like a medal, with the eagle suspended from a ribbon. A Scout could go on, after gaining the twenty-one merit badges for Eagle, and earn five more for a Bronze Palm, to pin on the Eagle ribbon. I did that—to enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishing something more and, I admit, to surpass Dave’s mark.

Far back along the way since then, I lost that trophy. With so many moves and so many homes through the years, a number of valuables disappeared—among them, my Phi Beta Kappa key and the Eagle Scout badge.