Shelter

WE chose ‘Shelter,’ so named on the high-school curriculum, as an appropriate subject for our daughter Sally, in her senior year, by a process of elimination. As we saw it, given the choice of one out of three so-called ‘domestic sciences,’ ‘Shelter’ seemed to us the least of three evils. To be sure, we did not know what “Shelter was, but it had the virtue of being an unknown quantity, whereas we had already sampled, vicariously, ‘Cooking’ and ‘Millinery.’

In our peregrinations with the Army, Sally had had ‘Cooking’ all the length of the Pacific slope, from Tacoma to San Diego, arriving always just in time to learn about ‘cream sauce’ and ‘chocolate fudge.’ It seems, according to Sally, that the schools maintain a highly ethical attitude toward encroaching on the bakery business hence the omission of the making of pies, cakes, or bread. To be sure, Sally learned a great deal about salads. She could make an excellent imitation of a candle and stick out of a slice of pineapple by punching half a banana up through the hole and simulating dripping wax and fire by mayonnaise and pimento. Also she learned how to make a porcupine out of a pared apple by punctuating it thickly with blanched almonds. Once she served us cucumber pigs, which strolled heavily through lettuce on peanut legs.

Under the ægis of ‘Millinery,’ for a whole year we were forced, out of consideration for Sally, to appear in hats of her concoction, her wonderful imagination imparting to us all a rakish and flighty air which we were not reluctant to abandon.

There was something suggesting a peaceful, impersonal quality in the word ‘shelter.’ I secretly hoped it would point the way for my Sally, who looks for all the world like an adorable baby with her round blue eyes and close-cropped curls, to a refuge from a ‘hard-boiled’ world.

‘It may teach her how to get on her own,’ suggested the Father of Five, hopefully.

Sally’s brothers had their interpretations.

‘It probably is a snap course,’ Tom observed tersely. ‘Trust Sally. She may learn to come in out of the rain, which will help.’

‘Or where to go when the teacher gets rambunctious,’ added Malcolm.

But ‘Shelter’ proved to have none of these aspects so highly desirable from the family point of view.

Sally came home after the first round with a perplexed brow. We fell upon her eagerly.

‘What’s it all about?’

‘I don’t know exactly, yet. We have to come to-morrow prepared to explain the Darwinian theories of the Descent of Man and the Origin of Species. And we have to tell all about the doctrines of Malthus and a man named Karl Marx.’

‘Is that all!’ groaned Tom superciliously.

‘What have they to do with shelter?’ I made bold to inquire.

‘Oh, we’re just going back to the beginning of everything.’

‘In that case,’ commented Father, ‘Adam and Eve ought to be the logical starting point. Did they or did they not have shelter? I don’t think I ever heard.’

‘Oh, yes indeed,’ Sally agreed. ‘We had them in class to-day. We got all the way from them to Darwin.’

‘Something like Lindbergh’s Chinese namesake — One Long Hop,’ Tom inserted.

‘To-morrow we take up H. G. Wells.’

‘Seems to be a panoramic view of Man in general,’ mused Father.

‘Yes. It’s awfully hard, but I do think it’s rather splendid, don’t you? Later we go much more into detail.’

‘I should hope so,’ was Father’s secret comment to me.

At dinner a few days later Sally asked her father, ‘Did you ever think much about prisons, Dad?’

‘Prisons? Nothing more than to feel grateful that I was never asked to inspect one personally. Why?’

‘They seem to be so badly managed,’ Sally heaved a sigh. ‘I wish I could do something about them.’

Father hid his surprise behind a napkin.

‘How do you happen to feel this concern, might one ask?’

‘Well, you see, we’re having them in “Shelter.” Betty took “Orphan Asylums” for her special topic, and I took “Prisons.” They come under the head of “Involuntary Shelter.’”

‘I’ll tell the cockeyed world they’re involuntary!’ ejaculated Tom.

‘I’ve been reading a wonderful book on Crime and Prison Reform. It seems all the prisons need to be completely reorganized. You’ve no idea what a social sore-spot they are, Dad. I think you ought to try to be influential and look into them,’

‘Yes, Dad,’ agreed Malcolm, ‘you ought to resign from the Stock Exchange and get a job as warden at Folsom.’

‘I can’t see anything funny about it,’ said Sally. ‘Since I’ve learned what I have in “Shelter,” I for one should admire him very much more if he did.’

‘Is n’t this prison business rather unnecessary?’ my husband asked me in private. He is distinctly mid-Victorian in his attitude toward his daughters.

After that, we withdrew from the parlor to study ‘Shelter.’ For prisons were as nothing to what followed. The Negro Problem, Tubercular Sanitariums, Juvenile Courts, and Houses of Correction — on we went through the ramifications of human institutional misery. For I too studied ‘Shelter.’ I found myself nightly interpreter, deadening the pain and softening the blow for our young innocent.

One night we retired to a remote bedroom for a lesson which Sally explained would be a death blow to Grandma if she should overhear it —‘The Effect of Venereal Disease on Population.’ Polygamy and polyandry were discussed.

‘I’m glad it’s only girls. I shall die in class to-morrow.’

At this juncture I myself was ready to call a halt. But Sally maintained, with tears in her eyes, that she had to have another unit in ‘domestic science’ or she would never get her college ‘recs’ (popular parlance for ‘recommendations’). And if I stirred up a rumpus the teacher would flunk her.

‘ By the way, Sally, I don’t believe I ever hoard what finally happened in “Shelter,”’ my husband said one evening toward the close of the semester.

There was an ominous pause while Sally blushed and looked at me.

‘ She got canned, I’ll bet,’ cried Tom.

‘Indeed she did n’t. “Shelter” is a profound subject, and Sally got an A.’

‘Shelter? Shelter?’ mused Grandma. ‘We never had that subject when I was young. I do believe in sheltering young girls, and I am glad the public schools are looking into these things.’