Coming of Age Read online

  By December of 1917, Luther, George, and their parents had moved into a rented farmhouse in Pughtown.

  With Americans now fighting overseas, all the talk at the Cressmans’ table was about joining up. Fearing that the family might not be together again for a while, Mrs. Cressman summoned all her sons home for Christmas. To counterbalance the “heavily male contingent” she asked George to invite his “bright young student” Margaret, and her classmate, Esther, the sheriff’s daughter, for Christmas lunch.

  After the meal the brothers took their guests outside to French Creek, where the snow was deep and the ice was hard. Esther, a “thorough extrovert, was full of fun and laughter and willing to try almost anything,… quite the perfect foil for the rather intellectual Margaret.”

  Luther found himself skating with Margaret. With hands crossed, they circled the pond again and again. Luther pointed out a group of young children playing Crack the Whip.

  “Look at that little fellow,” he said, pointing to a small boy at the end of the line, now sitting on his bottom on the ice. “He’s the lash. That’s just what I always was. I used to clean up yards of ice and not with my skates.”

  Margaret laughed.

  Pressing his luck, Luther took a gamble and started telling Margaret the story of Antigone, his favorite character in Sophocles’ play by the same name. Antigone was willing to go to her death in defense of her beliefs; she was, in Luther’s mind, “a timeless heroine.” He was gratified to see that Margaret seemed to respond to the story.

  A few nights later, on New Year’s Eve, Margaret returned to the farm to visit with Luther. Bundled up against the cold, they set out on a walk toward Daisy Point. Stars sparkled in a black sky.

  After about half a mile, they turned back. “We had said little, but our bodies by some subtle means exchanged messages as we walked arm in arm, our shoes crunching the dry snow in the bitter cold.”

  Seeing that they were almost home, Luther stopped. He turned Margaret toward him. For a moment they stood facing one another. “I love you, Margaret,” he said, stepping forward to embrace her.

  She lifted her veil worn against the cold. “I love you, too, Luther,” she replied.

  They kissed.

  “Does this mean we’re engaged?” she asked.

  “I think it does,” Luther said. “I really think so.”

  “I do, too,” said Margaret.

  For these two innocents, he just twenty years old, she barely sixteen, it was a kiss that sealed a secret, an engagement that they would keep hidden from family and friends.

  They walked back to the farm, both awestruck by the enormity of what had just happened.

  Luther did not delude himself about the obstacles that lay in their path. They both knew that he would be going off to war soon.

  After college graduation Luther attended an ROTC camp. Trained for individual combat, the cadets were taught how to use bayonets by confronting bloodless, inanimate dummies on stakes. Commands were shouted, meant to drive them forward. “Grunt when you shove your bayonet into his guts, twist it.”

  In all this Luther excelled. The school-type exams designed to measure proficiency in the required skills identified him as an exemplary soldier. He was instructed to report to the Field Artillery Officers’ Training School at Camp Taylor in Kentucky. Steeped as he was in humanistic values, this prospect presented an insoluble moral dilemma:

  We found ourselves part of a great machine organized for destruction. The object to be destroyed was always spoken of as the “target.” … The sensitive and imaginative among us could not help but find conflict between the utter brutality of the behavior for which we were being trained and the moral values on which our lives were based.

  For Luther, “The haunting question of ‘Why did one, I, have to kill?’” would not go away. Finally, he decided that, at war’s end, he would devote himself to the ideal of eliminating war. He would study for the ministry, for the priesthood of the Episcopal Church.

  Then the influenza of 1918 struck, a pandemic responsible for fifty million deaths worldwide. Reaching Camp Taylor, it spread through the barracks where Luther was stationed, sending four out of five men either to the hospital or to their grave. In an effort to control the disease, the commanding officer quarantined all personnel for six weeks. By the time the danger of contagion lifted, the Armistice had been signed; the war was over.

  Luther was free to be with Margaret.

  * * *

  Now, on this December night in 1921, the street lamps were glittering when Luther arrived at Brooks Hall. Walking through the wide portico into the lobby he was again dusting the snow off his coat. The night-duty nurse sat behind a desk by the elevator. His heart sank when he saw that it was Miss O’Connor, who, he suspected, “thinks I am mostly a bother.” She and all the others knew him as “Margaret Mead’s young man,” a faithful visitor to Brooks Hall, even though he was barred from speaking to her or even advancing beyond the lobby.

  Luther walked up to Miss O’Connor’s desk. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “I hope I didn’t shock you the last time I was here. When I said you should tell Margaret to tell her devils to go home.”

  “Goodness, Mr. Cressman. If you want to talk about devils, don’t we all know what that’s about. We know how active she wants to be. And how difficult it is for her.”

  “Here’s something she might like,” said Luther, handing over the book of Sappho’s poems he’d bought at Brentano’s.

  Once outside on the sidewalk, he leaned back, feeling the snow lightly falling on his face. Craning his neck so he could see up to the seventh floor and the hallway where Margaret was installed, he spotted forms walking back and forth. He imagined Margaret in her nightgown and repeated to himself the words he had uttered so often in letters, “Dearest little girl, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  Standing under a street lamp so that he was illuminated in a pool of light, he waved his hand high over his head, waiting, watching for a sign of recognition coming from the seventh floor. When he got no response he raised his arms again and waved them in great, sweeping exaggerated circles. Still he got nothing back.

  On the sidewalk, people rushed past him, their heads down, avoiding the snow.

  He started to wave again, but became self-conscious. It was foolish to continue making a spectacle of himself.

  Then he saw one of the forms toss her hair in that spirited way Margaret had of announcing herself, with her chin lifted and her head slightly cocked.

  He felt a rush of excitement.

  Standing stock-still he stared up at the window. All of a sudden he didn’t care if people looked at him because he was sure that this time he was seeing Margaret. And, oh, it was good to see her again. Then he thought he saw her looking straight at him. The light behind her made her hair look like a golden mist.

  He thought to himself, “Now, that is the hair and face that I love to kiss and I shall soon be doing it again.”

  A while later, after he’d been sufficiently chilled, Luther walked on Broadway to 116th Street. He went down the stairs into the subway station. Once down on the platform, waiting for the train, he suddenly realized that he felt “all hot and cold and weak.” On the train he started a letter:

  Didn’t you see me wave my hand to you … I raised it several times to my hat but I watched for a wave of recognition from you and though you looked at me I could not see you wave your hand. There were too many people around for me to do much conspicuous waving towards a girls’ dormitory. I had everybody passing by looking up as it was but I did not care for I saw you.

  By the time he got home it was late. He left the letter, unfinished, on his desk. The next morning he added a few sentences:

  I dreamed about you last night. You could not guess what it was about either, I bet. You were not out of quarantine but somehow I was living near you and you came to my room for—guess what! To cut your hair! Can you imagine it! I did it too. I like such dreams.

  3<
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  GIRLS, UNMARRIED AS YET

  I wish that you wouldn’t tell me all the bribes that Dadda concocts because you know that I can’t accept them, it would be a moral defeat for me to give up and come home. I am going to finish this year out. It wouldn’t be worth anything to me if I didn’t.

  —MARGARET MEAD

  March 1922

  Margaret surveyed herself in the full-length mirror that hung on her closet door. She was dressed in the outfit that Mrs. Stengel, her mother’s dressmaker, had made for her—a sensible navy blue tailored suit, appropriate for the month of March and the importance of the occasion.

  Straightening her eyeglasses, taking in the overall effect, she sighed.

  From the next room she could hear peals of laughter. Her roommates were yelling and talking, all at once. “Quiet ladies,” came Léonie’s voice, rising above the others, “I want to read you something. This is serious.”

  Turning back to the mirror, the task at hand, Margaret’s gaze settled on her hairdo. Her hair, long, wavy, and honey-colored, was ordinarily her best feature. As a little girl, this was the hair her grandmother had lovingly brushed every night before she went to bed. For years she’d worn it loose and over her shoulders, but now, in deference to the seriousness of the occasion, the final debate of the year between Barnard and the girls from Wellesley, she had arranged it in an elaborate coif, a concoction that had taken nearly an hour to effect. The style—parted down the middle and wound over wire “cooties”—was not flattering.

  While she didn’t look her best, the hairstyle, Margaret reasoned, wasn’t going to matter—it was going to be what she did onstage. For such a slip of a girl she had a remarkably powerful presence—and she knew it. She’d once said to a friend, “If I were a man, I would probably be one of those bantam fighters.… I think of myself as being small and fighting back … and so I speak with the voice of someone who is David vis-à-vis Goliath.”

  The year was 1922, and Margaret Mead was a junior at Barnard College in New York City. Ever since she’d transferred to Barnard the year before, she’d shared a dormitory style apartment at 606 West 116th Street with four other girls. Although the roommates had been thrown together by chance, she and the others—Léonie Adams, Pelham Kortheuer, Deborah Kaplan, and Bunny McCall—got along quite famously. Margaret had immediately taken charge of the room, selecting fabric for a new set of drapes, organizing formal afternoon teas, and introducing her roommates to Luther’s friends at the seminary.

  She was immensely happy.

  Every letter home bubbled over with news of whichever matinee she’d just seen, from Madame Butterfly to Hedda Gabler, or the special little bookstore that she and Luther had discovered, or the outing they’d made to Coney Island. She told her mother, “I don’t see how I ever could have gone anywhere else. To be up in here in this wonderful place and part of this great cosmopolitan university.… I just love it, love it, love it.”

  Margaret had the plain but endearing face of an eager schoolgirl. With blue eyes, set under eyebrows that were unfashionably thick, and a prominent chin, she exuded a bit too much determination to be called pretty. She took her grades very seriously and was in the habit of reporting all her academic triumphs to “Dadda,” the name she called her father, Sherwood Mead, a professor at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce.

  She was also known to have strongly held opinions, and in spite of having a penchant for delivering these in a bossy tone, her diminutive size caused friends and family to address her in letters as “Girlie,” “Little Girl,” or “Dear Little Mar.” Dadda, however, had gone one step further and named her “Punk.”

  Margaret had come to New York at a time when young ladies, including all of her roommates, were rebelling against the institution of marriage. They prided themselves on being what the magazines called “flappers,” girls who drank, smoked, and dressed like tomboys. They sat up late into the night discussing how James Joyce’s Ulysses had been unfairly banned and agreeing that the so-called Bolshevik takeover was a bunch of reactionary propaganda.

  And while these girls might have dreaded ending up old maids every bit as much as their mother’s generation had, they maintained they were not attending the university merely to find a husband. It was not commitment they were after, but romance and adventure. They idolized the Greenwich Village poet Edna St. Vincent Millay for applauding the merits of free love, and subscribed to her motto, “My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night.”

  Margaret and her roommates so personified the flapper attitude that one of Barnard’s professors singled them out, remarking to Léonie Adams, “You girls who sit up all night readin’ poetry come to class lookin’ like ash can cats.” The nickname stuck. From then on they were known around campus as the “Ash Can Cats.”

  Every one of them ridiculed the idea of marrying young and starting a family—everyone, that is, except Margaret. In spite of the sea change that was occurring around her, Margaret was wholeheartedly committed to marrying Luther Cressman. As far as she was concerned, “He made all the nonsense about dates—or not having dates—irrelevant.”

  Basking in Luther’s devotion, Margaret never had to feel she was “among the rejected and un-chosen.” From the safety of a secure relationship, she watched as the others surrendered themselves to the highs and lows of infatuation. While her roommates turned their dressing tables into shrines dedicated to the promise of the night, littered with pots of makeup, mascara brushes, and perfume bottles, Margaret’s table was covered with books. Her vision of the future included marriage to an Episcopalian minister, setting up house in a rural parish, raising a passel of children, and immersing herself in a career, as yet to be determined.

  Margaret was the only one of her friends who had not yet cut her hair in the new style, the bob. Chopped off at chin length, with a fringe of bangs over the forehead, this wildly popular hairdo was the emblem of the flapper. Above all, it was a statement of something they all believed in—a woman’s right to be assertive in the world.

  For her part, Margaret was not lacking in boldness, but her hair—long and golden and the only aspect of her appearance that she really liked—made a different statement. And while she was quick to make the disclaimer that she cared very little about how she looked, defiantly wearing her eyeglasses no matter what the occasion, she was loath to give up her one tenuous claim to beauty, writing home to her mother, “I haven’t bobbed my hair yet because the apartment objected.”

  * * *

  Margaret, now crossing campus, couldn’t help but reflect on how different things were since she’d transferred to Barnard. Not that long ago she’d been a freshman at DePauw University in the small town of Greencastle, Indiana. Looking back, it seemed like someone else’s life.

  For a girl who’d grown up on a farm in Bucks County, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, DePauw had been an unlikely choice. In fact, it had never been a choice at all. When the question of what college to attend had been raised and Margaret had announced she wanted to apply to Wellesley, her mother’s alma mater, Dadda had said she wasn’t going to go to any college at all. His decision, he said, was based on bad news he’d received about one of his business ventures. He simply couldn’t afford the tuition.

  Fortunately her mother had figured out that the easiest way around Dadda’s objections was to appeal to his vanity. When Emily suggested that Margaret attend his alma mater—DePauw—Dadda promised he would find the money to send her.

  Margaret had looked forward to DePauw with excitement, and a touch of apprehension. While she could hardly wait to partake of the “intellectual feast” she imagined was waiting, her main preoccupation had been how to make friends, and lots of them. Her mother had tried to help by letting her plan her wardrobe with Mrs. Stengel and by allowing her to pick out the color scheme for her dorm room, which they had finally decided would be old rose and blue.

  Once at DePauw, Margaret had immediately thrown herself into the whirl of Sorority Rus
h, writing to Mother:

  The invitations to the sorority rush parties came out this morning. I received a Kappa invitation for which I understand I should be extremely grateful.… I’m going to their party tonight. My roommates both got Tri Delt invitations. These are not bids to enter the sorority, it’s just a preliminary rush party.

  She arrived at the Kappas early, before any of the others. She was wearing a dress she had designed herself, an eccentric frock that was supposed to “represent a field of wheat with poppies against a blue sky.” The skirt, made of a stiff silver-green material, was accordion-pleated; the blouse was a loose-fitting, diaphanous affair, cut from Georgette crêpe.

  Margaret and the other rushes mingled in the foyer, before they were guided down the receiving line of sorority sisters and into the parlor. Seated on a straight-backed chair, Margaret sipped tea and kept up a constant flow of small talk. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, she failed to notice how the girls were reacting.

  Apparently, the Kappas found Margaret’s Main Line accent affected, her dress unfashionable, and her lack of makeup an unforgivable social gaffe. It was not until five days later that she learned she was one of only a handful of freshman who had not received an invitation to join a sorority. Ostracized by the popular girls, excluded from the fraternity parties, she could look forward to spending her weekends alone in the dorm.

  It was the first time in her life she had experienced organized rejection. The pain was intense. When she turned to her parents, Dadda refused to coddle her:

  Don’t let this fraternity thing get on your nerves. If you do good work and make yourself strong in your class, they will be fighting for you before the year is out. I hope you will throw them all down and do it publicly, that is, if you are sure they are as snobbish or as clannish as you say. I am disturbed that you pay any attention to the matter.

  Margaret was not appeased. As the weeks dragged on and her letters dwelled on how lonely she felt, her father wrote again: