"Will the Young Ladies Take Partners..."

by GRETCHEN FINLETTER

1

OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES, as they were called twenty-five years ago, meant the culture and beauty which could not be found within the walls of the school from nine to one o’clock. The activities consisted of music lessons, dancing school, going to museums, and Health, which meant walking in Central Park and visits to the dentist. The dentist worked like an electrician, wiring teeth front and back, and it was quite unfashionable not to have in your mouth a lot of fancy things which had to be tightened every two weeks.

Parents were as diabolic then as now at beating the game, and adroitly worked out a system of killing two birds. On the long trips by streetcar in the search for aesthetic frills, the child was accompanied by a governess trying to force a rapid conversation in a foreign language. An exhausted little girl would return home in the evening with both a new brace and the passé antérieur fixed in her jaws. Then she had her supper, tried to whistle through the latest addition to her teeth, and did homework.

Miss Spence held two activities during the school hours. The first was called Gym, and took place once a week for half an hour. A visiting lady gymnast appeared in a pair of enormous black satin bloomers. The girls then marched in columns about the assembly room to music from Le Prophète. For eight minutes she led them in calisthenics, which were done very gently with the arms, to a waltz. Then everyone skipped to a polka, and Athletics were over for another seven days.

The other activity was Art. School art never changes much. We drew a pear next to a plate, in charcoal. We made the shadows by smudging the charcoal darkly with our thumbs; we made a highlight on the pear and the plate by rubbing two neat white spots with a soft eraser. We had two weeks’ instruction in wet wash, in clay, in bookplate designing. Our parents received the results as Christmas gifts. In the spring there was an exhibit at which each child stood blushing beside “Design in Batik,” “Original Drawing,” “Poem in Gothic Lettering,” “Glazed Placque for Paperweight.” Art was not a heartbreak for perfection, filled with Left Bank yearnings. It was fun.

2

MY SISTER and I had first music lessons on West 85th Street. To get there we took three streetcars and climbed four flights of stairs. Mrs. Stagman had a special system of instruction. Her first command after greeting us was, “Take an apple.” We each took an apple and gripped it, and then, removing the apple but keeping the hand in the gripping position, transferred it to the piano. A quarter was then placed on the back of the hand and we were told that we were now in the correct position for the piano. We went twice a week on this journey for the apple, and it took my father several months to realize that we were not bounding ahead as he had expected. We were then transferred to the Institute of Musical Art.

Uncle Frank Damrosch was the head of the Institute and it was the most important and serious school of music in the country. Among its pupils then and later were: Risé Stevens, Yehudi Menuhin, and Richard Rodgers. The student s were studying to become professional artists and were working long hours. The Institute was at the opposite end of the city, in a beautiful old building near Washington Square. It took half an hour by streetcar to get there. Into this scholastic and serious atmosphere, Polly and I bounded one day as the youngest pupils, in Peter Thompson sailor suits.

We were beginning to be faintly aware that learning to play the piano meant work, and so we optimistically hoped that, as our uncle ran the school, it would be a family affair and he would in a friendly way not expect too much of that practicing nonsense. We associated him with lighting the tree at Christmas and with other happy occasions. We expected the spirit of holiday cheer would continue. We were quickly disappointed.

My uncle welcomed us and then expressed his high hopes for us. This had an ominous sound. He introduced us to our teacher, Miss Lockwood, who was a little startled by our small size but concluded, I think, that we must be prodigies. She was a very serious lady, dedicated to the cause of music and believing that one must begin with fundamentals.

She started us immediately on harmony and counterpoint and wrote some notes rapidly on a blackboard by way of illustration. She then presented us with two musical notebooks and told us that we would begin by working on simple composition. Making black dots and hooking tails onto them seemed easy, and we learned to draw very beautiful clefs.

After a few weeks Miss Lockwood hopefully gave us the assignment of an original theme with variations, to be written first in the major and then the minor key. Not being quite sure what “original theme” meant, I stole the tune of “Ach, du lieber Augustin” and brought it carefully transcribed with one major chord at the beginning and a strange, sour chord at the end. Miss Lockwood played it, added a few harmonies of her own, and tactfully did not accuse me of plagiarism.

Polly then placed her composition on the piano. It was several pages long and written with very black pencil. Miss Lockwood looked, and looked again. There were quarter notes, trills, chords, sharps, flats, and a number of written commands and suggestions as to interpretation. “A tempo, ritard, fortissimo, piu, piu, piu, mosso.” Miss Lockwood left the room and returned with my uncle, who was carrying the composition. He looked perturbed, but he loved Polly.

“Tell me,” he began, “this Tone Poem that you have written must have been quite difficult.”

“Oh, no,” said Polly looking like a modest Mozart, “it went very fast.”

“Here for instance there are four whole notes in one measure and the key is indicated by two flats and three sharps. I am not familiar with that key. You do not find it necessary as a composer to follow the rules of harmony laid down by Miss Lockwood?”

The answer was evasive. “Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t.”

“And did you write this at the piano?”

“I wrote it all,” cried Polly triumphantly, “in the Madison Avenue streetcar!”

“Ah,” said my uncle, and he eyed the composition again. “If you wall let me keep this, I think I will show it to your dear father. Pianistically the problems you present will interest him. Now why don’t we all leave Miss Lockwood and listen to a very good recital of Schumann. He is not so intricate a composer, but we think that, in a small way, he had talent too. By the way, Polly, haven’t you lost another tooth?”

My uncle transferred us from Miss Lockwood to a humbler teacher who with cynical realism started us learning to play the scale of C.

I have often wondered why the rate of suicide among music teachers is not higher. It is a dreadful thing to know how beauty sounds, and then to hear it hammered out in all shapes and forms. My sisters and I in the next few years raised an army of piano teachers as large as Kitchener’s Mob. Polly was the only one who really played well and deserved the efforts of that gallant group that we successively broke.

My father was too busy with his own career to do more than jump in and out in the role of adviser. If we were not good enough to become professionals, and that meant really good, he was not interested in having us become amateurs. Schools were always making the major demand of time for homework; music meant hours of practicing. In that age-old tug-of-war, the music teachers lost.

3

WE WANTED to go to dancing school. We loved to dance, but our dancing was an inventive form of our own, and we wanted to learn “steps.” My mother entered us in Tanief’s Dancing School.

Mr. Tanief, a Russian with large, muscular legs, believed in a very expressive form of the art full of folklore and symbolism. He requested us to buy ballet slippers and tambourines. His own tambourine was decorated with many bright silk streamers and he urged us to adorn ours also. My mother, either becoming a little depressed as each new art that her daughters espoused entailed more and more equipment, or perhaps economically feeling she had done enough by us with the ballet slippers, gave us each only one ribbon. In the tarantella our tambourines looked like forlorn polliwogs with long red tails, and we never could make her understand why this was so peculiar.

Mr. Tanief so loved to dance that most of the hour was taken up in his showing us how to do it and then waiting impatiently until he could spring in again among us with a great bound and dance some more himself. He would weave in and out, his arms outstretched and his eyes not fastened critically upon our legs and arms, but on some far-off audience in St. Petersburg. If we clapped him when he clicked his heels three times together in the air, he would disappear and then run out and bow to us with the great manner of the star acknowledging his public.

When a parent appeared to see how a child was progressing, to Mr. Tanief it was a new audience. He would put on a performance of “The Wedding Feast” or “The Sword Dance,” whirling about well to the front himself and allowing the pupils to assume graceful but stationary poses in the background. This was very charming, but if a mother still insisted on an example of her daughter’s progress, Mr. Tanief would call the child to him, place his hand on her head, and say: “Yes, yes. Art is long. We understand each other. Is it not?”

But I wanted to go to a regular dancing school. The desire to be a sheep with the sheep was already becoming my major ambition, and in a city of five millions there was, I felt, only one place to learn to dance: where my friends from school went — Dodsworth’s Dancing School. More than that, I told my mother, with a trembling lip, I could not possibly be seen there unless I had a pair of high white kid buttoned boots. More equipment, but my patient mother bought them for me.

If Mr. Tanief’s dream was to perform before the Tsar and receive from him a decoration, Mr. Dodsworth saw himself sitting in the kingly loge with the Tsarina and conferring the honor. He was a complete royalist, not merely at heart, but with every fiber of his being. His great ambition was to bring back the minuet.

Though the classes were held every afternoon, Thursday was felt to be The Day, and when a girl first joined, Mrs. Dodsworth quickly wrote the mother that Mr. Dodsworth would consider it desirable if she came twice a week.

When a girl entered the ballroom, she dropped a court curtsy. Mr. Dodsworth and his assistant, both in what is called faultless evening attire and with white kid gloves, responded with deep bows. She then slid across the floor — it was against the rules ever to walk — and joined her friends. They sat in long rows, a mass of curls, hair ribbons, party dresses, and all wearing high white kid buttoned boots and long white kid gloves. From this part of the room there was wafted into the air a considerable smell of naphtha, for the kid shoes and gloves had to be constantly cleaned.

The boys, also in white gloves, and wearing pumps, were on the opposite side. The pumps were always a little loose and were easily kicked about. At the end of the ballroom, on a little raised platform, sat Mrs. Dodsworth in full evening dress, with a black aigrette, writing at a little French desk presumably our very expensive bills.

We learned the Waltz, the Boston, the Lancers, the Schottische, the Quadrille, and Mr. Dodsworth’s chef d’oeuvre, the Minuet. This was danced very stiffly and cautiously, with a good deal of balancing and peering at each other through curved arms and delicately bent wrists.

We began with the waltz, practicing it in a square and then dancing it without a partner about the ballroom. Then came an announcement. “Will the young ladies take partners for the Waltz and the Reverse.” This was a big moment. Tremblingly the girls grabbed each other and started out at first painfully and then with a kind of gamboling boldness. The little boys seized victims and tried to race each other and see who could cover most ground and cut corners fastest. At the dizzy signal for the Reverse the partner would give a yank which was a cue. We would then struggle to unwind ourselves, in a left-handed and unnatural effort to go “the wrong way.”

At some point as we first danced about the room we were supposed to stop for a split second and greet Mrs. Dodsworth. Etiquette did not require the court curtsy, but a shorter knix. This knix was always made by every little girl when she shook hands with an older person, and it became such an automatic reflex of bending the knee with giving the hand, that it took great physical discipline to discard it as one grew older. Many girls when they were fifteen or sixteen would make the embarrassing error of knixing to contemporaries of the opposite sex.

There were two ambitions. The first was never to dance with a boy if it could be avoided. There were only about a fourth as many boys as girls. They obviously did not want to be there, and their protest consisted in dancing as badly as possible and being “funny.” They were frequently reprimanded by Mr. Dodsworth, who began those little talks with a demand for complete silence and then addressed them as “Young gentlemen — if you still deserve the name!” The girls shuddered at this taunt, but the boys surprisingly never seemed to mind.

The second ambition was to get into the third class, second division. No boy ever got beyond the second class, but when a girl reached the point of being tapped for this exalted group, it was done with considerable ceremony. Mr. Dodsworth invited the anointed one to dance with him. She dropped a low, grateful curtsy and with a pale face waltzed rigidly in Mr. Dodsworth’s arms, held seven inches from his beautiful white shirt. At the conclusion he pinned a pale blue ribbon on her chest, on which was printed, strangely enough, “The Golden Rule.” Then, suffused with blushes, she slid back to her seat.

At this time the first faint drumbeats of the jazz age had begun to sound through the land with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” There were rumors, hints, that something exciting was happening, and feet were beginning to tap, tap in a very unorthodox way. Mr. Dodsworth — who was, to say the least, a traditionalist — was squarely on record that only the Boston and a kind of watered one-step would receive his sanction. And he still had his dream for the Minuet.

Mr. Dodsworth was, I think, very gallant to have had such high ambitions, but outside his little ballroom a different world had begun to roar. There was the Dip. In the Boston the lady suddenly dipped deep down to the floor with her back leg well extended, and the deeper she dipped, the more she was admired. Mr. Dodsworth forbade the Dip.

Then came a great dish of forbidden fruit: the Lame Duck, the Turkey Trot, the Bunny Hug, and the notorious Grizzly Bear, At school during recess, younger girls watched wide-eyed as juniors and seniors began showing each other the intricacies of these dances. In the Lame Duck one foot trailed after the other in a big limp; the Turkey Trot was very fast; the Bunny Hug I do not remember; but the Grizzly Bear was very slow and demanded a certain heaving of the shoulders of the partners in unison.

This was too much for Mr. Dodsworth. He made us a warning speech telling us how we would be letting him down if we ever in our lives were caught doing “these modern gyrations.” He gave a humorous imitation of how we would look and we laughed courteously, as expected. In conclusion he remarked significantly: “Shoulders were intended for quite another purpose!”

As we put on our velvet carriage shoes over our kid boots, we pondered over this. What future role was the shoulder to play in our lives? It was just another of the mysteries that were beginning to crowd in on us. There were so many things that were never explained.