My First Hundred Years. Donald R. Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ all of us, those from seventh grade on up, in the Assembly Hall, to tell us about Marilyn—that it was meningitis. The doctors were doing what they could, but the fever was very strong. Marilyn and Rachel’s parents would be coming from Chefoo, in China, as soon as they could.

      He invited us to kneel at our benches, and anyone who wished to, one by one, to lead us in prayer. I was in awe, hearing the emotional outpouring of my schoolmates—particularly one of the senior boys, who began to pray and broke down, while several senior girls were sobbing.

      That evening word was passed that Marilyn had died. The light of my Queen had gone out. I didn’t cry, as that senior boy had done. I asked Elsie to let me, and I went to climb that bank behind the dorm, finding an open place where I could sit still for a while, letting my feelings sink into place before I went up to the third floor, where Archie and I had our beds, side by side.

      The next year I was in eighth grade and more confident. In our small school at that time, seventh and eighth grades were in one classroom on the ground floor. (Elsie and Archie had moved upstairs to the high school.) I began to speak up more and take initiative; and I began to notice girls of my own age. One of them was Beatrice—called Bea. Dark haired, with eyes that could flash, she was bright and a leader. In class I was sometimes in competition with her. That winter, though, there was one rare and memorable experience.

      Behind the high ground on which our school, dormitory, and a number of missionary homes were built, the land fell away to a wide, level valley. There were mud-walled, thatch-roofed houses with rice paddies, and among them, a small river, the Pothong (POH-tong). The large Taetong River flowed past Pyongyang, far away on the other side of the city, as it was then.

      In the cold north Korean winter that I’m writing about, both rivers were frozen over. There came, one Saturday, an evening of clear sky and full moon. Some of the older kids, and some adventurous teachers, arranged a new and one-time-only event for all of us who wanted to join in: a moonlight skate on the Pothong. Elsie, Archie, and I went, and in the excited group gathered in light and shadows at the river’s edge, putting on our skates, I saw that Bea was there.

      The better skaters took off quickly, Archie among them. The rest of us did some circles, getting the feel of the ice. Then I saw that some of the older kids were pairing off, skating side-by-side and matching strokes, while they crossed arms, holding hands, left with left and right with right. I went up to Bea and asked if she’d like to try it.

      We weren’t skilled on skates but found that it went quite well. We followed those who were skating up the river, away from houses and people, but always we stayed near others of our group who were passing in one direction or the other. Bea had a fur-trimmed jacket, and mittens with fur on the back. She was also a “dormite” (as we called students living in the dorm), whose parents were in China, an area near Korea, and this was real fur.

      I got to know those mittens well, as we kept skating together a long time. Bea seemed to like it, and I knew that I did. We went quite far up the small river, skirting places where the current had made the ice rough. It was hard to spot and negotiate them in the moonlight, but that made the adventure more enjoyable. The emotion of that night is with me yet, after these many decades.

      As I said, this moonlight skate on the Pothong happened just once; but there were also walks home from study hall at night, sometimes with Bea. We dormites had study hall each school-day evening, all of us in seventh grade and above. There were two forty-five-minute periods, with the lower three grades staying for just one period and the upper three for both.

      It certainly wasn’t far from study hall to dorm—maybe eighty or a hundred yards; but we didn’t have to walk fast, and it provided a brief, sentimental interlude. It turned out that Johnny, a classmate who also fancied being with Bea, began to try to get in ahead of me some evenings. She seemed to have the same smile for both of us, and to prefer, quite often, to walk with her girlfriends instead.

      As we moved up the ladder in school there were other emotional interests, but Beatrice was always there in my thought, at least in the background. Finally, in my senior year she was totally eclipsed by my infatuation with Edna.

      Edna’s family was in Seoul, her father a missionary doctor like mine. There was a small English-language school in Seoul, but Edna had apparently been getting behind academically, so her family decided to send her to PYFS. I was ahead in school, fifteen and beginning my senior year. Edna, a freshman, was, I think, fourteen, or near to that. Physically, she was precocious, with the full figure of a girl three or four years older than she was. She was accustomed to being the center of boys’ attention—and to dealing with that.

      There was a boy my age, a junior, whose name also was Archie. My brother Archie, and Elsie, too, had graduated and gone to the US to college, while I was now on the top rung of the ladder, a senior. Archie proved to be my intense rival for Edna. He was rather handsome, which I was not; although he was not a good student, which I was. Edna played us off against each other, keeping both of us on her string. I was alternately elated and plunged in gloom. She would let me feel that she really enjoyed being with me, then would be talking and laughing with Archie, leaving me on the outside.

      As the year ended, though, I felt that Edna was closer to me. I went off to college, taking her picture with me, an enlargement that I framed and kept on the wall of my room for a year, although I didn’t hear anything more from her. Korea was far away, certainly in terms of correspondence. With my new life, a nostalgic idealization was enough—until that, too, began to fade.

      With Bea, in time, there was a sort of revival. We made contact again, through another high-school friend. I was now engrossed in English studies at Princeton and was experimenting seriously with writing poetry. In one brief message, Bea wrote that she believed in me. That gave me a lift, and the theme of a lyric poem. Later, in my senior year, I made Bea an impulsive, quixotic proposal of marriage.

      There was a Christian summer-conference center outside of Asheville, North Carolina, that my siblings and I had contact with and where we spent most of the summer of 1938. The center, called Ben Lippen, had a large, reconstructed building on a hilltop, and there was talk that summer about putting it to use during the school year by establishing an academy for boys. I naively thought that I could make a strong bid to be named principal or headmaster of the school.

      It was my senior year at Princeton. Having a strong academic record, I wanted to try for a Rhodes Scholarship. Because my dad’s three brothers and his sister all lived in Nebraska, he considered that his home state. As I had no home elsewhere in the United States, I was going to make my application from Nebraska, traveling out there during my winter vacation for an interview.

      The trip to Nebraska by Greyhound bus would take me through Wooster, Ohio, and I knew that Bea was a student at Wooster College and living with her family there that year. What more natural than to arrange a stopover and a date with her?

      We borrowed the family car and went for a drive. It was dream-like to be seeing Bea again and talking with her. I told her about Ben Lippen and the plans for the boys’ school, and I proposed to her. We could begin a life together, serving in the new school. Would she do that?

      It was quixotic, a completely imaginative proposal. Bea had her feet on the ground, much better than I. Her answer wasn’t brusque, but it was clear enough; no. She knew me, even though we had been going our separate ways since graduating from PYFS. She told me how she had stayed in China for a year after graduation, and how she formed a close relationship with an American sailor in that place and time. These things are real, as she pointed out, but they pass.

      We drove back to her house and, later that night, I was again on my way to Nebraska. As a footnote, my bid for a Rhodes was also unsuccessful.

      *****

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