Meredith thought that being there was the most exciting day of her life, and there was a luncheon afterward at the Mayflower Hotel for her grandparents’ friends. Meredith watched the other guests with great interest, and the family went back to New York the next day on the train. She knew she would remember every detail of the day forever, and she hugged her grandfather extra tight before they left.
“I’m so proud of you, Grampa!” she whispered fiercely, with a look of immeasurable admiration, and he held her and smiled for a moment, with a knowing look.
“I’m going to be proud of you one day too, Merrie.” As he said it, she knew she wanted to live up to his faith in her. She just didn’t know how she would do it yet, but hoped that one day she would.
* * *
—
After the exciting days of her grandfather’s swearing-in, her thoughts turned to going back to school in September, and she felt glum again. She wasn’t looking forward to it. She was going into eighth grade at Marymount, where she’d gone to school before. It was the same all-girls school she’d attended from kindergarten until they left. She liked her coed school in Germany much better, and having friends who were boys as well as girls. Everything about being back in New York felt like a return to her early childhood, and she had started growing up in Germany, she was a teenager now, and wanted a change. She had five more years to attend at Marymount before she’d graduate from high school.
The final weeks of summer seemed interminable. They had rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a week, as they always did, and another one on Cape Cod after their trip to Washington. It was fun playing on the beach with Alex, and she made friends with some girls her age staying in nearby houses, but it all seemed boring to her now. She’d had more fun in Italy and the south of France during her summers in Europe, but she didn’t say that to her new friends.
In the fall, she started eighth grade at Marymount, and Alex started nursery school. There were different teachers, but the classrooms were familiar and looked just like the ones Merrie had attended in the lower grades before they moved. She missed speaking German more than ever. For lack of anything else to do, she applied herself to her schoolwork and got good grades, which pleased her parents. She made a few friends, and reconnected with some of her old ones, but her life experience was different now, and broader than the girls her age. She cared about social and political issues, which set her apart too. By the time she’d been back for a year and started high school, Germany seemed like it was a lifetime away. Her parents acted as though they had never left the States and thought that Meredith had adjusted well. They had no idea how lonely she was at times, and how out of step she felt with her classmates. Alex had forgotten all his German after a year. They’d received Anna’s wedding pictures, and she wrote to tell them she was expecting a baby, and sounded delighted about it.
Meredith visited her grandparents in Washington several times, and her grandfather had her come to his chambers at the Supreme Court, which fascinated her. She wrote a paper about it for school, and told her classmates she wanted to be a lawyer one day, like her father and grandfather. They laughed at her when she said it. They all wanted to get married and have babies. Only about half of them wanted to go to college, and only because their parents said they should. The other parents didn’t care. They thought girls didn’t have to go to college, as long as they got engaged within a year or two of high school graduation. The goal for their daughters was marriage, not an education. Meredith couldn’t imagine anything dumber than not going to college and just getting married and having kids. She wanted to do a lot more with her life than that. She stopped talking about law school, because her classmates all thought she was weird when she said it. And her parents didn’t like the idea either. Her grandfather was the only one who thought it was the right path for her.
She signed up for some volunteer work at school, but the only thing her parents would let her do was tutor younger students, which she didn’t love. She had hoped to do something more interesting like serve meals at a soup kitchen, but they thought she might catch an illness from the people there. None of the options seemed meaningful to her, and high school felt like a desert she had to crawl through in order to get to college, but her parents had strong opinions about that too. They wanted her to go to an all-female college, either Vassar or Wellesley. Her mother had gone to Vassar, so they put a lot of pressure on her to choose that. It was an excellent school for women, and she couldn’t think of where else to go. She would have liked to try for Radcliffe, the sister school to Harvard, but her father told her that her mother would be really upset if she didn’t follow tradition. To make them happy, she applied to Vassar and got in, so her fate was sealed. She was going to Vassar in the fall, just as her mother had done. It felt like a cookie cutter life to her, following in her mother’s footsteps. She was determined to be her own person, but didn’t know how to break out of the mold. Her parents had such rigid ideas about what was expected of her, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. But she didn’t want to be her mother either. She dreamed of getting more out of life than a husband and children, and playing bridge.
She was fiercely excited two weeks before her high school graduation when the Supreme Court ruled for integration of white and colored children in schools, in the Brown v. Board of Education case, striking down the earlier Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which was in favor of segregation. It was a landmark ruling and Meredith called to congratulate her grandfather.
“It was the only proper thing we could do,” he said reasonably, and Meredith told him how proud she was of him. The case had been presented to the Supreme Court three years in a row, and chief counsel for the NAACP Thurgood Marshall had argued eloquently in front of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the court’s final opinion. Meredith had even caught a glimpse of her grandfather on the news on television that night. She was bursting with pride that he had been part of it.
He and her grandmother attended her high school graduation, and afterward they took her to Europe for a month as their gift to her. She had a fantastic time with them. She wanted to go back to Germany to see her friends, but it wasn’t on the itinerary, and her grandparents told her maybe another time. She would have liked to see Anna, their old nanny, who had two children by then, and they looked sweet in the pictures she sent. They were both girls and were towheaded blondes just like her.
In Paris, she stayed at the Ritz with her grandparents and went to museums every day. Her grandfather took her shopping and bought her a beret. They went to Notre Dame and Sacré-Coeur, and had lunch in bistros and cafés. She loved being with them, and from there they went to London and visited the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, and the Tate Gallery, and they took her to several plays and a production of the Royal Ballet. After that they traveled to Rome and Florence, to visit churches and art, and the monuments of Rome. They ended the trip in Venice, where they rode in gondolas and wandered the streets for hours. It was the best present of her life, and she loved being with them. She felt like a world traveler again, and was starting to get excited about college. Even if Vassar hadn’t been her ideal choice, it was still her first step in adulthood. The school claimed that it encouraged independent thinking and hard work, which made it slightly more appealing to Merrie. Her brother, Alex, was eight by then and sad that she was leaving, but she promised to come home often to see him, and said he could visit her at college.