MELBA DAY SPARKS

To me the essential center of Jefferson High School and later was Melba Day Sparks. Day was her maiden name and she grew up not far from the school in Portland, Oregon. Sparks was Victor Sparks, her husband, a rather older and very classy man. At one point in their lives, when they lived in Nevada, they kept bobcats for pets as I did later when I was also married to an older man -- not quite so classy as Vic. In fact, Vic and Melba lived in Sparks, Nevada, at one point and she often told an amusing story about trying to convince the operator in town that they had a fire. “Sparks, well, yes dear. I know there are Sparks -- that’s where you live! Now what’s your name?” Vic was very much the man about town and Melba was tall, wore four inch heels most of the time, and did an exquisite makeup. She dressed in knock-out tailored suits. It has only recently occurred to me that she was probably a showgirl when Vic found her. I know she was a Powers model for a while.

But when the new Auditorium wing was built at Jeff, she had a lot to do with designing it so that it was a proper Broadway-style theatre and made sure that she had an office behind the ticket window. She wanted it painted and papered to suit her own dramatic tastes, but the school district said that the job could only be done by union labor. Then she pulled out her union card -- which included even apprentice electrical work -- from working backstage. The wallpaper was black with comedy and tragedy masks. The painted wall was tomato red.

When she first started teaching, it was out in a portable on the playground with a wood and coal stove in the middle. Uninsulated, it was so cold in the really deep winter days that they had to sit in two circles around the stove, taking turns so the outer circle could sit closer and warm up. Then there was an old auditorium where the light booth had a tendency to catch on fire. One night at a production of “Jane Eyre” there was another fire but all the extinguishers backstage had been used up so a young woman was sent to get one from out in the auditorium. She was cautioned not to frighten the audience. Sure enough, when she unhooked the extinguisher from the wall someone asked her why she needed it. “Oh, well,” she explained, “This is 'Jane Eyre' and the house is going to burn up in the next act.” That satisfied the questioner, who was no doubt impressed when the fire happened: it was film footage of a great conflagration that they had shot out at the Portland dump and projected onto the main curtain.

Then there was the boy who fell through the ceiling. A person got at the big fresnel lights up high over the seats by going along a little catwalk above the plaster. The boy missed his footing but managed to hook his arms over the rafters so that only his feet went through. Melba was called by the hysterical other students and rushed in to find his feet slowly bicycling away, disembodied. And the boy who was late to rehearsal. The other students wouldn’t stand for such a betrayal so they hung him from the fly battens. Melba came in just as they dropped the counterweight sandbag causing him to he go up in the air. Luckily they had put the rope under his arms.

We rehearsed six to eight weeks for every play and did three plays a school year plus “assemblies” for national celebrations and a major Rose Festival pageant to present the annual Rose Festival Princess of the high school -- who might become the Queen. Once they were all on swings, like a romantic French painting. Once they came down a ramp through a labyrinth of scrim. Once they opened a door at the top of stairs. We all made thousands of crepe paper roses while we sat in class and listened to our lesson about Greek drama or Shakespeare. I fell in love with Commedia Dell Arte. When Melba got woefully behind, usually just before a grading period, she’d have “flu” and be confined at home for a day or two.

But this was one teacher with whom I and a few others had relationships that persisted beyond school. Melba and Vic asked me to babysit their chartreuse house with the doberman named “Charcoal” (Charkie) and a huge backyard cage of birds, mostly finches but some weaver birds and a few nightingales. The neighborhood wasn’t so dangerous as it became later, but I slept in their bed while they were gone and if there were any noise, I had a battery of switches alongside to turn on lights all around the house. I spent much of the time reading Melba’s “House Beautiful,” “House & Garden,” and “Architectural Digest.” The inside was painted in very dark colors which set off the many exquisite objects and gilded clocks or pictures. (My own office now is a dark grayed-out purple called on the paint chip “Indigine.”) Her dressing table was the kind of glass they use for doors.

In the basement Vic had a specialty food shop where he made “Sparks Charcosalt” for steaks which was shipped all over the country. That’s why the dog was named Charcoal and why the whole house had an exotic delicious smell, partly smoke and partly tropical fruit like guava or mango. They were health nuts and an ozone machine ran constantly in the jungle of plants. On the fireplace mantel was a tiny porcelain nude woman running alongside a cheetah. I was learning a lot more than history of theatre or even interior decorating. I suppose you could call it a “lifestyle.” Vic set up the “theatre board” of the high school with a banquet at the Aero Club where I ate the first aged steak of my life. What a revelation. They drank wine, of course, but not a vapor of it went past student lips.

When I married, bringing Bob Scriver back to Portland for the ceremony, Melba gave me a sheet and pillowcase set edged with tatting that her mother had made and given her for her own wedding trousseau. I still have the set but have never put it on a bed. It’s very beautiful and delicate.

When Melba retired, she and Vic bought a dream place out in Troutdale and called it “Windy Hill,” which it was. They had two dobermans then and a horse and a donkey -- even some sheep to mow the grass. For a few years they enjoyed an ideal retirement and various former students would stay now and then. In fact, I stayed there a few times myself. This time I had my first taste of 100 Pipers Scotch, Melba’s favorite. Excellent. She was supposed to be writing but I’ve never seen any of it.

When I was divorced in 1970, they asked me to come stay with them and take care of the animals. I could have a little suite downstairs and write. The hint was the same as my mother’s -- “now that your life is over...” But that wasn’t the case. I was determined not to be an assistant person anymore.

Then Vic developed cancer. I went to the nursing home to visit him, went into the room where there were several men but failed to recognize him -- he had grown a beard -- and came out stunned and confused. He died soon after. By that time I was a minister and Melba asked me to do the funeral. Other attached students did readings and Melba had memorized a poem which she delivered with great courage. Sometimes I’d go see her after that and she’d be in the dark, drinking. The word went around the teacher circle, which included my mother though she didn’t teach at Jeff. The Japanese community, who farmed out that direction, drew her into their family circles.

After a while she had a new suitor, Otto Henning, but the teachers tut-tutted. “He’s so Germanic,” they said. “Has to be in control. But probably for the best.” Melba asked me to do the wedding. She wore a brocade kimono. Some of her former students danced a pas de deux on the lawn while a steady rain made it a rather squishy event. We all laughed about rain being lucky for a wedding -- fertility, you know. She was a little drunk, which was understandable. They traveled and so on. It seemed a happy marriage. Now and then she’d try to talk to me -- but I was resistant. There was nothing I could do for her and I missed Vic.

Finally the teacher circle said I’d better go see her -- she had cancer of the esophagus. I sat on the edge of the bed beside her but she was too drugged and incoherent to respond, though she tried mightily. I have no memory at all of a funeral or a memorial, though there must have been something. It was Otto’s event. I never saw him again. I’ve been past Windy Hill, but that’s all.

Some of my students have stayed in touch and I moved back here to Montana to be near enough for people to visit if they wanted to. It is the men who come, the kids I taught in the Sixties and Seventies. None of them drink. I’ve never asked any of them to live with me and take care of me and would be disconcerted if they offered! They’re grandfathers, married, getting to the sweet last part of their careers. I write all day and feed the cats.

I ponder all this. It strange how teachers and students can be so intimate and yet how the huge divisions persist.