The Johnstown Girls

Chapter 6. Ellen and Anna: Autumn 1907

129 T H E J O H N S T O W N G I R L S ■ Melba Van Husen owned the Brownstone in New York that had been broken up into rooms for rent for which she sought working women and NYU students of a certain character. She charged them eight dollars a week and for that they got breakfast and dinner daily, peppered, in each case, by the word respectable, amazingly fit into sentences and paragraphs that would seem to have no particular use for it. Sometimes there were respectable eggs or a respectably cooked beef roast with potatoes. Ellen took a room there. Her room was tiny and fitted out with a gas fireplace that required coins to operate. The university buildings were around the corner. Although Ellen walked to Washington Square, most of her classmates—in this case both men and women—commuted. The program Ellen had entered was the graduate program in education. “Why don’t you take a teaching job now?” her Aunt Hester had wanted to know, for she was already more than qualified with four years of college when some teachers had only two. Ellen said, “This will make me the best teacher.” “You don’t have to be best, do you?” But Ellen managed to nod disarmingly. Her uncle and aunt finally took her to the train station and watched as she boarded for the long ride to New York. Ellen and Anna Autumn 1907 130 K AT H L E E N G E O R G E So she’d made it there finally. She often stood at the window of her room, lonely and wondering if she should give up all this nonsense and go back home. But she loved meeting the people in her classes and she especially liked those who were themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. A small social group formed naturally of Irish, Poles, Italians , Greeks, people from all over the world who had fought hard to make it to a university. When they weren’t in their small group, many of them tried to fake it, to pass as long-term American residents. But they had somehow found each other—the strivers. The things they carried for lunch often looked more appealing to her than the steady diet of ham and bread she was allowed to keep in the house kitchen for her lunches. The small traces of accents in their speech fascinated her. The lack of politeness in some of them, the sense of rush and tumble as they fell into classes and rushed out, did not appall her. Some walked long distances, others took the Broadway coach that was public transportation, others came over from Brooklyn, and everybody talked about the subway system that was going to open soon and bring some of them to school on underground trains. Things changed in amazing ways. If you thought ahead, you realized that someday the men who scooped up horse dung probably would not be needed anymore. The world was changing—movement was changing —and one sign of it was the increasing number of horseless carriages on the street. All this started a few years before. She had been a regular Sunday guest in the home of her best friend at the Pennsylvania College for Women. Progress was all the talk at those Sunday dinners. The conversations with Susan Gresham’s father came back to her. He had wanted an automobile, was eager for the day he would own one. Susan. Her friend. Ellen was here partly because Susan had died close to the end of her senior year and she, Ellen, was the substitute. What the parents could not do for their daughter, they did for Ellen. They supplied the tuition money and the travel money to get her to New York. At the window one day she watched three street sweepers, two lamplighters , and several couples walking by, aware of feeling bereft. She was very lonely, but if she left, she would be a great disappointment to the Greshams. And Susan would have encouraged her to stay, to find her way. 131 T H E J O H N S T O W N G I R L S Finally she turned from the window. Three Dickens novels sat on her desk. She’d read them before, more than once actually, but the assignment she faced now...