The Robes of Academe

By Nancy G. Westerfield

Taking my master’s degree in absentia from Indiana University, I never wore my black gown or my mortarboard. In 1950, I had just married a newly hooded PhD, a New Yorker, and we were already off on an August journey by train to his first appointment, teaching English in a small southern state college. That journey would be only the beginning of many journeys in an academic marriage that would last almost fifty years, the two of us linked by choice per aspera ad astra—with lots of academic aspera.

His own doctoral regalia did not travel with us. Lifelong, we would travel light. That black robe with its blue velvet halfchevrons on the sleeves could be rented for any marshaled appearances in May commencement processions wherever he taught. In our dirt-poor lives during those difficult early years of the 1950s, that rental was one more unwelcome expense. But it was cheaper than the investment of a scarce hundred dollars to own his full finery. Only later, in much better times and settled lives, would we acquire his distinctive Indiana University hood, its silken relic of the “clerk” kept carefully folded in tissues for its wearing another May. At his death, many a May after last worn, hood and gold-tasseled mortarboard went for a gift to supplement the costume wardrobe of the local community theater.

What did travel with us on that long-ago wedding day—or rather, was boxed to arrive in Oklahoma when we did, along with his and her books, his-and-her papers, files, clothes—was my parents’ wedding present to me of a forty-pound portable Necchi electric sewing machine. For my father and mother, that $250 appliance was a gift of great price. I think that it was the most expensive thing we owned. We married with $75 between us, and a couple of $25 war bonds, to survive until his first paycheck. The Necchi would figure not insignificantly in my life ahead as a faculty wife.

Poverty was to be the guiding influence in our early married life. That extravagant wedding journey by train—by Pullman —with a wedding night in a Pullman sleeper!—would taper off into plebeian train trips by coach. And there would be many such trips. In all the decades of our marriage, we never owned or drove a car. Being walkers everywhere set us apart as singular, even quirky, in the academic community and at large. “Dr. and Mrs. Walker” we were dubbed at one college. But the economies of walking would, as years went on, make possible summer study and vacations abroad.

His salary would be $3,600 for our first year—minus two days of September because faculty meetings did not begin until after Labor Day. On such resources, my skills at dressing myself, with the Necchi, were an asset. My problem was that in my new life as faculty wife, I did not know how to dress. I had married a professor twenty years my senior. As a college student, I had worn the uniform of the forties: sweater or blouse, skirt, string of pearls, socks and slip-ons. I was noticeably gauche at the afternoon teas I was expected to attend. Tea dresses were flowered, floaty, and feminine. I owned nothing like them. I assumed the hose and heels, but my simplicities of style were, I decided, exactly the person I wanted to remain. Another count against us. “Mavericks” we were called. He never wore a hat, whatever the walking weather. His remaining red hair scattered with the winds.

My comfortable sewing at the Necchi became a form of therapy in my new married life. Its comfort has never abandoned me. I feel it today as I unlock the lid of my venerable machine and lift it to the table among all the books that still surround me in a professor’s house. Over the years, I have come to know other academic women who quilt, sew, embroider, do hook work, and crewel; they, too, know the therapeutic emptying of tensions into neat stitches and the patterns of colored threads.

I do believe that sewing was therapy to my mother also—though hers was a life for far removed from the academic. Ours was a workingman’s family: I would be the only one of the five children to get to college, thanks to scholarships. Poverty and the inner city were what I had grown up with and were all that my mother would ever know. “Eat it all, wear it out, use it up, make it do,” was her New England credo. Besides the Necchi, her personal wedding gift to me was six kitchen aprons, handmade in bright colors, edged with braid. My life, she thought, would be like her own.

She had taught me and my sisters how to sew. They, too, got the wedding gift of a Necchi. At her own knee-action electric Singer, my mother the seamstress skillfully designed, adapted, tailored. She sewed for others besides the family to make a little money. At night, closing the lid on the sewing machine to make it a small table, my mother hand-painted Christmas cards for the Gibson Art Company, earning 10¢ a card. In a far-off girlhood, she had once been encouraged to study art.

The Necchi and I filled the important role of saving money. Sometimes, in our low-paid circumstances as faculty, I thought I filled a negative role: to save money, not to spend it. I was allotted $60 a month for our groceries. I found that I could manage to spare a dollar for two yards of material and sew a new blouse. For years, I dressed myself only in combinations of black and white so that I needed to buy only two colors of thread. With my mother’s skills, I could keep myself not elegantly, but interestingly, dressed. A latent creativity found its first outlet.

Sewing teaches intense application to detail, close concentration on the very small. It teaches the criteria for fine work. This wedding gown off the rack? Look at the ready-to-fray seams, the strings of sequins sequentially sewn, to peel off in sequence. It looks like a Halloween costume. Couture sews sequins individually, as I sew them. Look at this academic vestment, counterpart of clerical vestments. Check for firm seams, wellturned edges. A criterion of fine tailoring, men’s or women’s, is bound buttonholes. I can bind buttonholes. In bound buttonholes, my mother lives on.

Attention to detail served me well as I gradually assumed a place as research assistant to my busy husband. From domesticity like my mother’s, I spent hours in libraries. Libraries, I found, had job openings, part time, for people fond of buttonholing information. A niche for me to make money, to add to the slim teaching salary. The sprightly wedding aprons gave way to a working woman’s professional wardrobe: not exactly a uniform, but a presence different from the sweater-and-pearls of girlhood. I could help support our mutual love of travel and feed my own addiction to fine materials. No more 49¢-a-yard cotton, but maybe raw silk at $15 a yard, or imported tweed at $20.

This morning of the spring semester, fifty-five years after our first arrival together on an August campus, I am getting dressed for class at the university. My senior learning passport entitles me to sit-in privileges in third-year Spanish. I dress a bit self-consciously. Not for me contemporary student grunge: the jeans, the tee, the knapsack. My dressy shirtwaist is of yardage purchased on the Isle of Man, its buttons are from the button store in the railway arcade at Inverness. Glorious! A whole button store! My tailored trousers fit a twenty-six-inch waist. Thanks again, Mother, for those genes, to fit my suit. The artful darts in the shirt conceal the breastlessness of age, as that tissue creeps inexorably down the chest wall. Well, at least not a breastless creature under ground leaning backward with a lipless grin, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot in “Whispers of Immortality.” It was John Masefield, I think, who remarked wryly on one of poetry’s functions: to serve as the consolation for old age. “Beauty, be with me, for the fire is dying.” Now: ready to meet the students’ body. Once, fifty-five years ago, this body was not allowed to appear indecorously wearing shorts outside the confines of the women’s dormitory at Indiana University.

I never earned the letters or the right to the colorful hood that my husband wore. But I long ago, with Dr. Hargis Westerfield’s encouragement, exceeded the number of academic credit hours needed to fill the gap between the mere BA and the ultimate degree. Nor did I qualify for the honor that many young wives of my student generation wryly awarded themselves: the PHT—Putting Husband Through. Perhaps I could, with a beloved one’s approval, embroider for myself in golden threads on the unchesty rich expanse of one of my humble Necchi creations: the scarlet letter A for achievement. Aspera/Astra.

Nancy Westerfield, a poet, was Nebraska’s first National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry in 1975, a resident fellow at Yaddo in 1979 and 1981, and winner of numerous prizes, including the Benét Prize in 1971. She has written articles in Commonweal, Christian Century, and other periodicals; a play; short fiction; and some eight hundred poems. She writes in Academe about her life with her husband, Hargis Westerfield, who was a professor of American studies at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

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