An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Do Good to Others

29 Do Good to Others “Be a sWeet girl,” is what they told me. “If you are sweet, if you love your family and do good to others, then, at the proper time, He will come, with all the virtues that a husband should have—and, of course, good looks and good manners too. Don’t be impatient and seem to want Him, for only vulgar people do that. While you are waiting, you can occupy yourself with good works and with improving your mind.” Something went wrong between me and this future. I did wait. I did improve my mind, but I did not make the status of a sweet girl. Then why not give it up early in the procedure, break from my cell with a hell of a yell, and start the career that, actually, I began only in middle life? That part, I cannot explain. Around me, I see colleagues who began careers when I did, only they were in their twenties, while I was over forty. Now, when I am retiring, they are at their peak and I note, with a twinge like the nastiest indigestion, that I must accept this. Oh Time, unlock the vault that contains my dormant years! You can’t? Then at least tell me why they were dormant. Why did I not give up the attempt at sweet girlishness and get out? Comforters tell me I was born in an age when that was not done, but wasn’t I born with a brain? Couldn’t I have seen? Time won’t even answer that question without some work on my part. On the following pages, I plunge into that work. • “Elsie,” I called excitedly. “See if you can kick your fat!” I must have been six at the time. With a neighbor child, I was running down the grassy hill beside our house at the top of the village. It seemed to me an interesting athletic feat to raise my fat little legs high enough to smack my buttocks, but my exhilaration came against a cold, granite barrier. Becoming ruth underhill 30 My parents were sitting on the porch. “Piazza,” we called it in those days, with the z’s pronounced in the American way, not the Italian. “Ruth,” said Papa, “don’t say that!” “Say what?” I was as dumbfounded as the kitten I have now is when I roar at him to get off the table, where he can see meat just like that which I gave him on the floor a few minutes ago. He does not mistake the roar. He jumps down and sits drooping. I drooped too, for no one ever disregarded Papa’s commands. I stood by the piazza steps, pulling down the pink gingham skirt that I had rumpled around my waist. Papa and Mama were both sitting there in rocking chairs, as they did almost every evening. I looked at Mama for some consolation, though of course I knew she would not go against Papa. Mama’s face looked very much as I have once or twice seen my own in the mirror when I happened to part my black hair and my gray eyes looked serious, but I do hope I have never drawn my features into that gently pitying expression that Mama so often turned on me. Figure 5. Portrait of Ruth Underhill (left) and possibly her sister Margaret in front of their childhood home in Ossining-on-theHudson , New York, circa 1890. Do Good to Others 31 “We don’t talk like that about our bodies, dear.” Should I ever dare to use the word fat again? I sarcastically thought but didn’t ask. I was being invaded by a misery and shame so deep that I thought I might never run down that hill again. “I don’t want to play anymore,” I told Elsie abruptly. She began to propose other games, but I turned my back on her. When Mama began to pull down my pink dress, I jerked away. I never did run down that hill again. Papa was not really terrible. We called him “Papa” in those early days, though later the style changed to “Father.” He was a tall, slender man. When Mama told me that he weighed 150 pounds, I thought how tremendous that was. In those days, I seem not to have noticed the piercing gray-blue eyes that...