Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Job's Daughter

What does it mean to keep a secret for secret's sake?

By Debra Gwartney

The coded handshake, the soft knock at the door, the password always whispered, never spoken aloud--these were the secrets I practiced on the way to each meeting of Job's Daughters. Every other Thursday evening after dinner my mother dropped me at an imposing Masonic temple across town from our house, and I entered through massive wooden doors, each one carved with the Masons' mysterious crest, the letter "G" surrounded by tools like those used in my ninth-grade geometry class. Downstairs, in a small alcove, a changing room set aside for women--its deep-cherry wooden appointments and thick pile carpet emphasizing, again, that the lodge was a place for men, and women were only temporary guests--I slipped a white, floor-length silk gown over my head and thrust my arms into its flowing sleeves. When no one was looking, I tucked a paperback book into its expanse of folds, then secured the chilly fabric to my body as I'd been taught, toga-style, with a purple cord twisted first between my breasts, then tied around my waist first right over left, then left over right.

At thirteen, I had become a member of this bethel of Job's Daughters because my father was a Mason, as were both his father and his father's father. My great-aunt had recently risen to the highest office in the Masonic women's group, Eastern Star (my memory conjures up a title something like "Most Worthy Grand Matron"), and a photo in my grandparents' home showed my father's sister's recent installation as an Honored Queen. I'd often gazed at the purple robe sitting foresquare on her shoulders, its train sweeping out widely behind her, and the heavy, glittering crown fixed amid the knobs and braids of her hair. She held a gold scepter in her hands. This exalted position could be mine too, I was told, if I was patient and steadfast, if I accepted the bond and glory that came with the ritualized secrets every Job's Daughter was told to hold in the most sacred pocket of her heart.

But as we marched into the great hall singing "Onward Christian Soldiers," careful never to turn our backs on the enthroned Queen or the Junior and Senior princesses at her sides, another secret prickled my skin, a realization about myself that I could not reveal: it was the hidden book I was interested in. I didn't care enough about these rituals to endure them for the years it would take to don the tiara and cloak and be seated in a lofty chair draped in velvet.

I plodded once again through the hour, as I did through every Job's Daughters meeting, bored and troubled by an aspect of the ceremony I couldn't yet define. Years later, I would recall the elements of it that didn't add up: behind solid closed doors we muttered passages we'd memorized about the testing of Job's faith, about his calamitous losses, including the horrifying death of his three beautiful daughters. But, each night, we missed the contradiction: while we claimed to grasp the hubris behind Job's accrual of material treasure, each of us longed for the wealth and power symbolized by the dramatically arrayed queen at the front of the room. We knelt in Greek robes, sang "Nearer My God to Thee," and solemnly promised each other that no word spoken behind these doors would ever be revealed to any other person--but our words were hardly rarified: scripture from the Bible, chats about hayrides with the Masonic boy's group, DeMolay, and--the discussion that by far took most of our meeting time--plans for the next installation of an Honored Queen.

What did it mean to keep secrets for secrets' sake? We united over our secret motto, and we cleaved to one another over our secret flower in undying sisterhood. This connection may have sent the spirits of the twenty other girls in the room soaring, but I couldn't make it matter to me.

At the beginning of my second year I'd volunteered to serve once more as Outer Guard. No other girl wanted the position. In the long series of chairs one had to fulfill to become a junior princess, and then a senior princess, and then a queen, it was the farthest removed. When I eventually quit at the end of that term, I'm sure I disappointed my mother, who'd imagined me making it through the steps so she could create an Honored Queen installation only slightly less ornate and complicated than a full-on wedding.

This night, though, still a "Jobie," I slipped out the door after our opening ritual and took my place in a chair outside the large, darkened hall. I gave into the relief that came with that solitude. I wasn't afraid anymore of the scowling patriarchs staring down at me from the walls, reminding me that this temple had held important secrets for one hundred years, a fact a girl like me shouldn't take lightly. I turned away and listened only for my cue to reenter the hall one last time.

In a few minutes I'd be summoned to bow before the Honored Queen and promise her that I would allow no one to enter the convocation or to spy on these clandestine proceedings. Then I'd return to my lone chair in the empty foyer and, without worry of being caught, pull out that novel I'd secreted in my big sleeves. Vonnegut, probably--my grandmother, an English teacher who had a secret society of her own, the PEO, had sent me several that ninth-grade year. I wouldn't absorb the lessons of Job's battles with pestilence and disease that night, nor would I cherish the queen's purple robe curling regally at her feet or whisper promises to honor and preserve my womanly virtues along with the other daughters of Job. Instead, I would let the pages of this fiction completely capture my imagination.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities