Rich Garners
a short story by Milly Heller
Toni got home for winter break from Newcomb College and found a document centered on the desk of her childhood bedroom. It was a transfer application to the University of Minnesota. UMinn? Back in high school, Toni suggested applying to UMinn, and her mother scoffed. Toni still found that funny because her mother, who came over to St. Paul from Lithuania at the age of seven, had been lucky to get a scholarship to secretarial college. The UMinn application was for this fall, 1951, Toni’s junior year. She leafed through it. Yes, UMinn cost less than Newcomb but her father had just said, on the drive home from the train station, that his insurance agency was going great guns. He said it with the delight he still felt, after over forty years in this country, at trotting out gee-whiz American expressions, no matter how dated.
Toni held the application by the tips of her fingers as she walked downstairs. Her parents were sitting at the dining room table, which meant formality, meant business. Toni dropped the application onto the table. Her father looked embarrassed, but her mother said, with some defiance, “We’d hoped for news by now.” They explained if she didn’t have a boyfriend at this point, with only two years of Tulane’s boys above her (Newcomb was Tulane’s sister school), odds were diminishing she’d meet anyone. They didn’t have to add they meant a Jewish boy. UMinn, they said, would give her a fresh start.
Toni said, “I can’t leave Newcomb, not now.” Last year she might’ve welcomed the chance to come home. The thick air and heavy seafood of New Orleans nauseated her. The other Jewish freshmen were from the South and already friends with each other, thanks to elaborate family connections. They thought St. Paul was a city in the state of Minneapolis. They asked Toni why she kept saying you gize instead of y’all. “Toni, we are not guys.”
It took months, but she finally caught onto the mix of hilarity and seriousness that pervaded campus. She pledged the sorority for Ashkenazi Jews, AEPhi, and its president deemed the skits Toni wrote for convocation “sophisticated,” a big word at Newcomb. Her French professor asked her to tutor freshmen who didn’t have her “grasp of the passé compose.” Toni reported those and other triumphs in letters home, imagining her parents basking in each achievement, but now she knew Phi Beta Kappa would disappoint them, unless the key came with a boyfriend.
“You’ll have a high old time,” her father said, “at UMinn.” Her mother listed members of their congregation whose sons and daughters, “wouldn’t want to be anyplace else.” The way her parents nodded at each other at the end of their sentences, instead of climbing over each other’s words as usual, told Toni they’d rehearsed their lines. Her father said they didn’t want her to leave college when she got engaged, but to graduate wearing cap, gown, and ring. “No college dropouts in this family.” His eyes misted. He’d left Vilnius at the age of eleven, alone and in poverty, and Toni knew his pride at sending her and her older brothers—she was the youngest by six years—to college was vast and deep. No college dropouts in this family. He said it again. This time his voice rang among the crystal decanters on the sideboard, and he allowed, as if to illustrate the perils and prejudices he’d surmounted, his long-banished Lithuanian accent to emerge and roll the r in dropout.
Her parents didn’t mention UMinn for the rest of the vacation. Toni knew they trusted in her history as a dutiful daughter. Her friends in St. Paul teased her about how many cardigans she wore beneath her wool coat and how constantly she shivered. They had one interest in New Orleans: Bourbon Street. She noted their Midwestern accents (you gize, you gize). At four every afternoon the sky darkened to midnight; snow puddled sadly on the sidewalk. To capture St. Paul in winter an artist would need only a stick of charcoal while Newcomb, even in December, burned like a fever dream. No palette could contain the range of tropical reds and purples… a painter would need to melt gems …. She set the image aside to work up as an ode and, if brave enough, submit to The Arcade, Newcomb’s lit mag.
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