When the California judge severed the matrimonial tie that was binding. I decided to go to New York. I entrained from Los Angeles decked out in some new grass widow's weeds, but I didn't feel much like a gay divorcee. I'd worn a ring on my finger and a ring in my nose so long, freedom didn't feel comfortable. I decided to take a year of graduate work at Columbia University because it was a long way from California. Although I entertained the usual maniacal idolatry of my native state, the place was suddenly cluttered with sentimental landmarks upon which I was frequently moved to shower mournful tears. Since the rainfall situation out there was adequate without my reinforcements, I decided to take my tears elsewhere.
Before actually enrolling at Columbia, I went forth and looked over a few of the more impressive secretarial schools in New York, the kind that serve their students a cup of tea in the afternoon and guarantee all graduates pink, plush jobs.
I, however, was different. I could buy my good little black dress from Saks, pay my tuition, and have my tea, but they wouldn't guarantee me placement. One of the personnel interviewers asked me if she could be frank. She said she thought it would be a fine thing if I enrolled in her school (I think she figured the finger exercises would be good for me) but she feared she couldn't place me as a secretary.
"I don't think you'd be quite active enough--shall we say?--for the life."
"Shall we say that you let me be frank for a while?"
I didn't make that crack, of course. That's what I wished I'd said after I got home.
Instead, in meek surrender, I went back up to Morningside Heights and enrolled in the School of Business at Columbia, signing up for an accelerated course in shorthand and typing offered yearly to twenty-five career-crazy college graduates. I felt like a jaded old hag among all the bright and eager just down from Smith and Wellesley. The placement service at Columbia had a much more hopeful attitude toward me. The counselor even rashly assured me that I would be easier to place than most, since I had had some experience, and that I could demand a better starting salary. She even got me a part-time job after class hours wasting stationery in one of the university offices.
I had regarded learning shorthand and typing as a dull chore to be endured for the sake of the economic tool that would thereby fitted to my hand. it turned out, however, to be very interesting to me. This was probably due entirely to the instructress, Miss Zila McDonald, who really put buck and wing into her teaching methods. She was a versatile person who thaught sharthand and typing by day and then at night wrote very charming books for children.
It was while I was in New York that I discovered in a small way just what happens to people who are unwise enough to get their pictures in the newspapers. Mother always had a theory that if you led the good life, you never got your photograph in the paper, unless you happened to be elected President of the United States, got married, or died honorably.
Well, I led the good life all right, within fairly generous bounds anyway, but I got my picture in a New York paper and it wasn't because I happened to be President of the United States. On the final analysis there was really no reason at all for this phenomenom.
Being a Californian, I had had no convenient oppoortunity to learn to ski. That winter in New York, however, I just happened to fall into a crowd who chattered on and on about wax and bindings and slalom races and Christies and a lot of other things that I still don't understand. All this talk went into my blood like a hopped-up transfusion. I too began whatching the temperature and scanning the boards in Grand Central to see if any ski trains were scheduled.
Finally, one day i took the fatal step that was to land me on my fanny many a future time. I went into Best's and bought myself a neat but not gaudy ski suit, complete with a heavy cableknit turtle-neck sweater and a cap to match. It involved such an heavy expenditure that I couldn't afford not to use it. So, to protect my investment, I went to Macy's and bought skis, boots, trappings and a pair of ski poles. The latter were ripped to piece by a skeptical but indulgent friend. He attached the ski-pole ends to a pair of my light-weight wooden crutches.
The first ski train that left New York that season had me on it with a crowd of my skiing friends and about five hundred other enthousiasts. We only went as far as Phoenicia. Off the train, one of my cohorts helped buckled on my lone ski, and I started pushing myself around with the crutch-ski poles to get the fee of it.
I wish I could say that before the winter was over I was coming down the memorial ski slide like a wind straight out of Scandinavia. Such was notthe case, however. I finally got to the place where I could skim up and down the gentle slopes of a golf course, but that was all. Still, at least two fellow amputees have accomplished what I couldn't. Yves Gosselin, a student at Laval University at Lac Beauport, P. Q., and Bert Porter of Rutland, Vermont, both have proved that the downhill slalom can be executed with exceptional professional skill and speed by onelegged skiers. I had a lot of fun anyway, with my unimpressive ups and downs and got plenty of use out of the skiing togs--in fact, I practically wore the seat right out of the pants. However, on that first trip to Phoenicia, I wasn't even sure I could stand up on a ski. By the end of the day, I was sure on that point at least; I couldn't.
Since this was the opening day of skiing for New York, several of the newspapers sent photographers out to get humaninterest shots of the winter frolickers It seems that I was a human-interest shot. Two photographers came up before I'd gotten a hundred yards from the train and asked if they could take my picture.
"For goodness'sake, why?" I asked.
"Because a girl with one foot who can ski is damned interesting," one of them said.
"Well, I can't ski." I said. "I've only had this ski on for five minutes and I haven't done anything impressive yet but fall down."
"Oh. that's O.K.," the photographer said. "You don't have to get technical about it."
"Go ahead and let him take your picture," my friends all urged.
"Why don't you wait until later?" I suggested.
"Maybe I'll know how to ski in an hour or two."
"We can't wait till you learn to ski, we've got a deadline to meet."
Two photographers took my picture and so did a lot of unofficial stray sheep lugging Brownies. I could almost hear Father's voice booming clear across the continent. "Exhibitionist!"
Fortunately nobody I knew ever saw the picture. It wasn't in the Times or the Herald Tribune. But everyone I didn't know saw it.
The papers were already on the streets--or to be more precise, I should say in the subways--when we got back to New York. I got just the merest glimmer of what I was in for when we piled our skis into a cab to go home.
The cab driver turned around and said, "Je-sus! I was just wishing I could lay eyes on you, kid. I was just now looking at your picture in the paper. I sure would like to see you ski."
"Oh, that was all a terrible mistake," I apologized. "I can't ski."
"That's what you say. You're just modest. But the paper says different and that's good enough for me."
That was good enough for a lot of others as well.
When I got back to my apartment house the elevator boy was absolutely beside himself. I felt as if I'd gone out that morning an ugly duckling and returned a swan.
"Say, they got your picture in the paper! I was telling a guy, friend of mine, that I knew you real good and he didn't believe me. I said I sure knew you."
"Well, that's right, you sure know me real good," I agreed. "You can tell him I said so."
"Well, you see, this guy is skeptical. He says if I know you so good why don't I introduce him. He said two bucks I didn't know you at all. I said, "Done.
Where's your friend?" I sighed with resignation. "With that kind of money involved, you'd better bring him around."
"He's down to the poolroom on Amsterdam--just two blocks from here. I'm supposed to be off duty now, but I stayed on till you got back. But I'm not asking you to go down to a poolroom. I wouldn't ask that of you."
"I'm sure you wouldn't. We better go now, so that I can get back and see how many of my bones are broken."
He offered to split the two dollars with me, but I figured it wasn't really honest money, and I wouldn't touch a penny of it.
For the next two weeks everywhere I went elevator boys, butcher boys, Western Union boys, pouchy old boys, and just plain little boys nailed me. "Say, aren't you the lady that skis?"
I finally just answered "Yes." From then on I spent every week end I could at Great Barrington or Placid or any place that had enough snow for me to fall down in. I had to learn to ski. It was the only way to make an honest woman of me. It nearly killed me.
One of the most interesting encounters that resulted from that picture in the newspaper was my run-in with the law. I was walking along Fifth Avenue one afternoon when a big Irish policeman down the block took after me at a gallop. "Pardon me." he puffed when he caught up, "Aren't you the lady that skis?"
"Well, sort of."
"I thought so." He grinned from ear to ear. "My sister has only one leg and she saw your picture in the paper and she said she'd sure like to meet you. She doesn't get around too well herself and she'd like to know how you possibly manage to ski. I told her I was sure I'd seen you on my beat once or twice right here on Fifth avenue and that if I ever saw you again, I'd speak to you."
"I'd be very happy to meet your sister," I said. And then I remembered a conversation I'd had just that day with Jessie Fenton, a novelist friend of mine for whom I was doing some typing. She was threatening to go out and pick up a New York policeman because she needed some authentic background material for an arrest scene in her book Down the Dark Street. Here was the man for Jessie, complete with an amputee sister for me.
"Why don't you bring your sister and come up and call on me some evening?" I suggested, and I whipped out a card and wrote out my address. "Could you come on Tuesday?"
"Sure can!"
We had quite a party. Dr. and Mrs. Fenton came, and so did my current beau, who didn't approve of my picking up a policeman on Fifth avenue.
"What's the matter with policemen?" I asked him "You're just a glorified flatfoot with arch supporters yourself." He was with Army intelligence, a sort of a prewar cloak-and-dagger boy.
My roommate was also present to cast her gloomy disapproving countenance on the proceedings.
The sister was a charming young woman, and we spent most of the evening handing each other the usual sisterhood chitchat. Mrs. Fenton got all the answers for her arrest problem from the policeman. He blushed with pride and began composing his sentences carefully when he realized that he was contributing to literature. He entertained us for the remainder of the evening with some lurid and amusing incidents from his twenty years' duty as one of New York's Finest. Even my roommate--even my beau-- admitted that it was a most successful soiree.
A few days later the policeman delivered me a summons over the telephone. He said that he and his sister wanted to return my hospitality. I accepted promptly. They gave me dinner in a very nice restaurant off Washington Square. We had a pleasant time.The cop dropped his sister off at her apartment in the Village and drove me uptown alone.
It seemed that the policeman didn't want all one-legged girls to be sisters to him. He tried to put the long arm of the law around me. Thus ended a beautiful friendship.