An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Youth Passing

69 Youth Passing We often Went to euroPe in the summer for two or three weeks. People have been amazed at the apparent wealth of my family. They’ve asked, “Were you rich?” No, not at all rich. A very modest situation actually. We didn’t think we had to travel grandly. Father didn’t think so. There was, at that time, a one-class group of steamers called the North German Lloyd, which took about ten days to cross the Atlantic. When we arrived we would stay in boardinghouses. Father’s idea was we should, of course, learn the language of the country, so we went to a place where they would speak German or French. My sisters and brother did not really care much about learning languages. They wanted to make jokes among themselves and play games, but I wanted to learn the language. So at dinner I would always ask that I should sit on the end of the family string, and then I would certainly have somebody of the language to talk to. It often worked out very well. The time I remember was when two very elegant Englishmen were the people next to me. I was about twelve years old, with long, braided hair hanging down, so there was no chance of any dallying. But I waited to hear them speak. How would British English sound? What would the accent be? After two courses had passed and the third and last course was coming, one of them said, “Tomorrow is Friday, is it not?” I held my breath. The other answered, “Quite so, quite so.” That was when I learned the Queen’s English and my love of languages. • One summer we went to Germany. Another, France. Quite often we went to Switzerland, which, Mother said, was a particularly nice, clean country. You didn’t have to worry about lice or fleas, like you did in Becoming ruth underhill 70 France and Italy certainly. Of course, you learned some German in Switzerland, and we stayed at these rather cheap places there. When we were going from one village to another, we walked. The Swiss do that, so Father said, “Why can’t we do it? We don’t have to take a carriage, to pay for it. We’ll walk.” So we did. It really was a good training for a child. • The Ossining School for Girls was a yellow wooden building—long, high, and studded with windows. I enjoyed my years at that school. Even now I can feel a little tremor that is “wild with all regret” at Figure 10. Portrait of Ruth at about twelve years of age, circa 1895. Youth Passing 71 the remembrance of the big school room with its dark hardwood floor and the grand piano on the platform. We girls—thirty or forty of us—sat on curve-backed double seats with a double desk in front of us containing a hollow for books. Every morning there, we had chapel when the lovely, elderly voice of Miss Fuller intoned softly, “The Lord be with you.” The words of the Lord’s Prayer, with that peculiar phrase about leading us not into temptation, never seemed to me like English words with normal meaning, so I did not ask myself what the phrase meant. I did not even feel that I was speaking to the Lord. I was reciting a beautiful and gentle spell that broke my life in two and placed a section of it in the realm of learning. Learning without bounds! It included Greece and its gods, the wild, tapestried history of Europe, the poets with their lovely, rhyming words—“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.”* I did not know what my occasional tears meant either. Those words, like the Lord’s Prayer, were like bars of music meant to waft one into a dream. We had American history, but that was too full of dates and the homes of presidents. I never have known them after McKinley. And we had civics. An utter bore! I do wish someone could have made me want to understand the workings of the United States government. But Latin! What a thrill it was to acquire that first simple sentence. Ranae sunt in aqua. “The frogs are in the water.” Worlds opened to me with those liquid sounds, and I did not mind the declensions and...