Go tell it on a mountain, brother, I thought. Maybe then someone will listen.
The street depressed me; it always did. The ugliness, the pervasive sense of hopelessness. The waste. And we were all to blame—mankind was to blame. We had all created the Telegraph Avenues of this world just as surely as we had created war and nurtured greed and applauded the actions of fools and knaves these past eighty-odd years. Some century, the twentieth. The age of enlightenment, understanding, wisdom, and compassion.
Cynical philosophy on a cold, bleak October morning. Maybe I ought to stand next to the guy with the leaflets, I thought, and shout it out for all to hear. Then passersby could laugh at me too: just another freak in the Telegraph Avenue sideshow.
The UC campus was something of an antidote for the depression, at least. Clean, attractive, well cared for; crowded with kids who for the most part looked like typical college students. I wandered among them, past the Student union and Ludwig's Fountain to Sproul Hall. Sproul was where the registrar's office was, on the first floor. Except for a couple of student clerks, there was nobody in it when I entered. The rush for fall registration had long since ended and things were quiet here at this time of year.
The clerk who waited on me was a young woman with a body like a colt and a face like the colt's mother: pointy ears, hair that hung down over her eyes, a long muzzle, and lots of teeth. I told her my name was William Collins and that I was a writer doing a biography about a former Cal student in the thirties, a well-known mystery writer named Harmon Crane. She had never heard of Harmon Crane—she didn't read mysteries, she said snootily; they had no redeeming literary merit; she read Proust, Sartre, Joyce.
Proust to Sartre to Joyce, the old double-play combination, I thought in my lowbrow way. But I didn't say it.
I said I was trying to track down information about Harmon Crane's first wife, Ellen Corneal, who had also been a student at UC in the early thirties, and would it be possible for her to let me see Ellen Corneal's records? She said no, absolutely not, it was against school policy. I argued, reasonably enough, that those records were now half a century old and that no harm could possibly be done by me seeing them at this late date. I appealed to her sense of literary history, even though we were only talking about a lowly mystery writer here. I can be persuasive sometimes, and this was one of them: I could see her weakening.
“I can't let you see the records,” she said. She was firm about that. “Definitely not.”
“How about if I ask you some questions and you tell me the answers?”
“I can't answer any questions about a person's admissions materials,” she said.
“Then I won't ask any.”
“Or about transcripts.”
“No questions about those, either.”
“Or written evaluations, personal or classroom.”
“Just background data, that's all.”
She relented finally, said it would take a while to look through the files, and suggested I go away and come back again in an hour. So I went out and walked around the campus, all the way past the Earth Sciences buildings to the North Gate and back again, and was standing in front of the horse-faced clerk in exactly one hour.
“You're very prompt,” she said, and showed me some of her teeth. I half expected her to whinny a little to emphasize her approval of punctuality.
I asked her some questions about Ellen Corneal's family background; she kept the records at a safe distance while she consulted them and provided answers, as if she were afraid I might leap over the counter and yank them out of her hands. But what she told me wasn't very helpful. Ellen Corneal had been born in Bemidji, Minnesota; her mother had died when she was two, her father when she was eleven, and she had come to California to live with a maiden aunt after the father's death. She had no siblings and no other relatives. The aunt had been sixty-two-years old in 1932, when Ellen Corneal entered UC, and would now be one hundred and fourteen years old if she were still alive, which was a highly unlikely prospect. The Corneal woman had dropped out of school in 1933, after marrying Harmon Crane, but had returned two years later to finish out her schooling and earn her degree.
“In what?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“In what did she earn her degree? What was her major?”
“Oh. A B.A. in cartography.”
“Map-making?”
“That is what cartography is, sir.”
“Uh-huh. An unusual profession.”
“I suppose you might say that. At least it was for a woman back then.”
“Women have come a long way,” I said, and smiled at her.
She didn't smile back. “We still have a long way to go,” she said. From the ominous note in her voice, she might have been issuing a warning. I wanted to tell her that I wasn't the enemy—Kerry had once called me a feminist, in all sincerity, something I still considered a high compliment—but trying to explain myself to a twenty-year-old woman who read Proust and Sartre and Joyce and thought mysteries were trash was an undertaking that would have required weeks, not to mention far more patience than I possessed. I thanked her again instead and left Sproul Hall and then the campus through the Bancroft gate.