We’d pivot to face the flag, bend our heads for a moment of silence, then place our hands over our hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. After which Miss Nolan would announce the name of the patriotic song we’d sing—“America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America” or, my favorite, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Miss Nolan would then make a downward motion with her hands and we’d sit.
But on the day Beth was dying, I didn’t hear Miss Nolan enter the classroom. I wasn’t aware of the class rising, or saying the Pledge of Allegiance, or singing a patriotic song. While all of that went on around me, Beth peacefully died. Just like that. When the class took their seats again, I looked up, stunned by grief.
Miss Nolan was looking right at me.
“Ann,” she said, “you will stay in for morning recess because you refused to do the morning exercises.”
It was the first time I’d ever had to stay in for recess, and if truth be told, that was almost a relief. I was terrible at kickball and jump rope, afraid of the monkey bars, and as a mostly friendless kid never really invited to be part of playground activities. When I wasn’t playing jacks, I sat alone and made up stories in my head. It was also the first time I’d ever gotten into trouble, and I worried about what else it might mean. What if Miss Nolan made my mother leave work and come to school? What if she sent me home? I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the big hand on the clock dropping into place at 10:10, when the bell would ring and send everyone, two by two, into the playground.
Finally, 10:10 came, the big hand on the clock clicking noisily into place. The bell rang. The class filed out. And Miss Nolan, sitting regally at her desk, beckoned me forward. Clutching Little Women, I made my slow way up the aisle to her. So terrified was I that I still remember that I was wearing a pink-and-white polka-dot dress that day, and that I held the heavy book to my chest.
Miss Nolan turned her rheumy blue eyes toward me.
“Why didn’t you do the morning exercises?” she asked me. “What were you doing?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t put into words the enormity of the effect this book had on me, how I could think of nothing else, how I reread sentences out loud just for the magic of them.
Finally, I held Little Women out in front of me and managed to sputter, “Beth died.” Having said it out loud, I burst into tears and dropped to the ground with grief.
At first, Miss Nolan looked bewildered. But quickly she ordered me to get up.
“You’re reading Little Women?” she asked, looking at the book in my hands.
Unable to muster any more words, I nodded.
“And you understand it?” she asked.
Again, I nodded.
Miss Nolan considered this for what seemed a very long time. Then she asked me to tell her what the book was about.
At this, I began to talk—about Marmie and the March sisters and the plays they put on, about Laurie next door and vain Amy and Jo who wanted to be a writer and how Beth died. I told her it was about family but also about war and dreams and writing and . . . “And,” I said, “everything. It’s about everything.”
Now it was Miss Nolan who nodded. She paused, then pointed to the books—Childhood of Famous Americans—that lined the bookshelves in the back of the classroom.
“I don’t want you to go out to recess anymore,” she said. “I want you to stay inside and read all those books.”
And I did. I read every one. Then Miss Nolan gave me all the third-grade books, and I read every one of them too. By the time I left her class, I’d finished half of the fourth-grade books as well.
How can I describe what reading gave to me? An escape from my lonely school days, where girls seemed to speak a language I didn’t understand. A glimpse into the possibilities of words and stories. A curiosity about the world and about people—the young Amelia Earhart seeing her first airplane, Helen Keller’s silent world, Nancy Drew solving mysteries, David Copperfield surviving the streets of Victorian London.
My parents learned about life from hardship. My mother lost her father when she was only sixteen. She had to drop out of high school, where she was the social committee chairman and a star softball player, and go to work in factories: bleaching linens, making artificial flowers, attaching snaps to American Tourister luggage. My father dropped out of school too, to escape poverty in rural Indiana. He joined the navy, and by traveling around the world learned how to eat in a restaurant, what kind of cocktail to order, how to tie a tie and polish his shoes. They married young—she was nineteen and he was twenty-one—and grew up together, learning how to raise babies and cook dinner and save money and build a home.
Me? I learned from books.
For as long as I can remember, I wanted something big, something I could not name. I did not know what it was, only what it wasn’t. It wasn’t in my small hometown. It wasn’t nine-to-five, or ordinary, or anything I had ever seen before. I would sit on the landing at the top of the stairs at home and look out the little window at Aunt Julia and Uncle Joe’s house across the street. Someday I will go beyond there, I would think. I’d look at the rooftop of Auntie Angie’s house. And beyond there. Then I’d look at the hill where Auntie Rosie and Uncle Chuckie’s houses sat. And beyond there. I’d focus on a distant point, and think: Someday I’ll even go beyond there.
This was in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I’d grown up with the Vietnam War playing out on television. My brother, Skip, had changed from a boy in raspberry shorts and a matching polo shirt to a long-haired, bearded, cutoff jeans–wearing hippie. Newspapers splashed pictures of student protests, and the Kent State shootings, and marijuana and LSD. The same radio station played the Carpenters’ “Close to You” and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.” In such an upside-down world, how would I get beyond there? What did I want? Why did I feel this way? What did I believe?
In 1967, when I was ten years old, our town finally got a library.
I went there twice a week, walking past the children’s section and heading right for adult fiction.
I can still remember craning my neck to look at all those beautiful books. I whispered the writers’ names: Evan Hunter, Victor Hugo, Harold Robbins, Herman Wouk, Fred Mustard Stewart, Dashiell Hammett, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker. So many books! At random I pulled one from the shelf. And then another. I filled my arms with books.
And I read.
I read about small-town gossip in Peyton Place and inner-city schools in The Blackboard Jungle; I read about Hollywood in Valley of the Dolls and a horrific crime in In Cold Blood. In that library I was handed a blueprint on how to live the mysterious, unnamable, big dream life I wanted. I was handed books. And through reading them, I grew up to find that very life.
Lesson 1: How to Dream
? Marjorie Morningstar BY HERMAN WOUK ?