For whatever reason, I thought my arrival at Vassar would be more monumental. Perhaps I pictured cheers? Instead, I was one more in a teeming crowd of young women (which was quite thesensation! I’m not used to being around so many girls my own age). There are about a hundred girls in my class, and we will all be living in a dormitory together.
October 8
First few weeks have flown by! Must try to be better at chronicling my life, otherwise future biographers will be stymied about my formative years. (Thought this an entertaining quip and shared it with Miss Blanchard down the hall, who regarded me quite blankly. Perhaps I’m not as funny as I thought.)
In the first few days, I took exams to place me in my classes. Went to the chapel to receive our schedule, as follows:
Latin
French
German
Rhetoric
Algebra
Geometry
Hygiene
I am quite miserable at everything outside of maths.
The breakfast bell wakes us at 7:45 every day, and lunch is just past noon. Supper’s at six, and chapel half past. The other girls are from all over the country—Miss Gallaher is from Kansas, Miss Clayden from Albany. Everyone is brilliant. I used to consider myself decently intelligent, but now I am afraid I am exceptionally mediocre.
All the teachers are lovely, but most striking is Professor Perkins, who is dark-haired and handsome, with sad eyes. Unfortunately, yesterday at lunch with Miss Alice Brady and Miss Maria Carpenter (of Boston and New York, respectively) I was informedallthe girls in our class are taken with him. Another example of my extreme ordinariness, I am afraid.
Apparently I am most of note for being from Nantucket, which I realized when I mentioned home today. Everyone asked if I’d known Miss Mitchell, and when I said yes, they clustered about my skirts like children at story time. I had little to say, even though my memories of her are so strong: kind and steady and sure of herself. Though she left the Quakers, they left a strong imprint on her from childhood. She was so unlike Mama, who worries and corrects me about everything. Miss Mitchell corrected me, too, when I didn’t understand how to use the telescope or said something silly about the planets, but she was kind and patient and exactly how I want to be someday.
Andrea Darrel’s diary became sparser over the next years, picking up mostly when she headed home to Nantucket for the summers, or when she was stressed about a class or a friendship or a new lecturer she hero-worshipped. (Or when she was irritated with her mother or sister Hattie, with whom she must have maintained a lively correspondence, given they always seemed to be asking if she’d met anyone eligible at nearby West Point.)
I learned the details of her life, though: she played doubles tennis with her classmates and went out on the lake and attended organ concerts. She wrote with great excitement of each newscientific discovery, from the first open-heart surgery to enthusiastically following the discussion of canals and seas on Mars, which had once been considered a certainty but which experts became skeptical of in the mid-1890s.
As graduation approached, her journals became expansive again as she tried to capture the end of an era. In November she wrote about wearing bloomers and sweaters on a rainy afternoon for the first-ever field day; in March she wrote about the heated presidential race between two men I had never heard of, William McKinley and William Bryan (presumably one of these men won?). And by May, she was filled by nostalgia for college and hope for the future.
May 5, 1896
What a night!
The astronomy club had its annual Dome Party tonight. We were told to bring poems, and some of the girls had the nerve to write rather good ones (Miss Slate set hers to music, and it was appallingly lovely). We sat at little tables under the dome and ate and laughed and shared our mostly horrible poetry.
Then Miss Antonia Maury arrived! Miss Maury is not just an alum, she works at Harvard Observatory (funded by Miss Maury’s aunt, Mrs. Draper). She has calculated orbital periods and discovered a binary star. But she made it quite clear she doesn’t consider the Observatory a perfect place—Dr. Pickering, the director, received credit for her discoveries, and she only made 25¢ an hour, half the salary of her male colleagues. She quit forthese reasons once before, and only returned because Dr. Pickering especially asked her.
I know this should infuriate me, and it does, but I still want to work at the Observatory. After she read her poem, I made my way over to her. We both graduated with honors in physics, astronomy, and philosophy, and so I hope that will help me the way it helped her, even if her connections are far superior to mine—her family is made up of physicians and scientists and teachers.
She rather scoffed at me when I told her I hoped to work at the Observatory. “And make little money and receive no credit? It would be easier to work elsewhere.”
“I don’t want to work elsewhere,” I said. “I want to be an astronomer. I can fight for credit, if I have discoveries to fight for.”
She cannot be more than half a dozen years older than me, but she shook her head like she was weary as Atlas. “You are so young and hungry still,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she meant it as a compliment or an insult. “If you want it so badly, I’ll make an introduction.”
I want it so badly I would bleed out my entire heart to have it. And now I think I have it. I think I may be on my way to becoming an astronomer.
May 12, 1896
Everything is a “last” these days—our last recital, last time on the lake, last walk through the orchards. Last exam! We all promise we’ll return, but it won’t be the same.
We went out on the lake tonight, the senior girls, with the sunsetting in a blaze and the stars shining bright. We were very loud, lit with some wild fire, singing and laughing and half dancing, and when we returned to the seniors’ hall we continued to make a spectacle of ourselves, and I am sure I did not imagine the younger classes looking on with envy. We’re at the peak of everything, of life itself, it feels. We have the whole world in front of us and it feels like we’re about to jump off a cliff and fall forever.
