Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (40 page)

Our friendship that first year was almost entirely bookish, on a separate plane from the other friendships I was beginning to make: with a pug-nosed Virginia who lived in Denny Blaine; with Mary McQueen Street and her sister, Francesca, who lived on 35th Avenue but really came from the South; with Ethel Scott and Mildred Dixon, who already dated and lived in a run-down section of mainly two-family houses and grassless front yards … I ask myself whether it was because Ted was Jewish that I did not try to mix her with the others, but actually none of my new friends mixed; I went to each of their houses separately in the afternoon—my grandmother’s strange inhospitality made it too hard to ask them home in the evenings. Besides, the bookishness into which Ted with her shining eyes had initiated me was a bond between us that kept us apart at times even from her sister.

I wish I could chart her enthusiasms, as a service to intellectual history. Beyond those I have already mentioned, I remember Aubrey Beardsley, Lord Dunsany, possibly Vachel Lindsay, because he came from Spokane. Among the influences reaching me through her, it is not always easy to distinguish the aesthetic movement from celebrations of “queer” sex. But I gather it was not always easy for the evangelists of both or either in their day.
Their day:
the peculiar thing about the modern authors Ted reveled in was that they were nearly all antiques. This was probably more of a commentary on Seattle than on Ted. Our city, despite its artistic reputation (or perhaps because of it), was remote from the vanguard; its most advanced circles might have still been reading
The Yellow Book.

Aestheticism, unfortunately, was the key. Clearly there was not much roughage to stimulate the brain in those on the whole limp leather volumes that were coming my way. Anatole France, eventually (“The Procurator of Judaea,”
Thaïs, The Red Lily
), but no Shaw or Wells. I ask myself how it happened that Ted never discovered Joyce. But wait! Now that I think of it, I can recall
Pomes Penyeach:
“Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,/ Where my dark lover lies./ Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,/ At grey moonrise.” Surely that is an
ex libris
of Ted’s, marked by her inspiration (including my belief that Rahoon—actually the Galway cemetery—was in the South Seas, a confusion maybe with Rangoon, the capital of Burma). Still, I have no memory from this period of
A Portrait of the Artist
(not yet a Modern Library title?), which would have given us more to chew on.

I try to bring back a typical evening at 712 35th Avenue during the spring term at Garfield; the year is now 1926. My grandfather’s chair is vacant; he has put down
The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page
and gone to his club for a rubber or two of bridge. In
her
chair my grandmother, who by now has probably finished
The Peasants
by that Pole, is reading another long dull book, this time by a Dutchman called Couperus, who did
not
win the Nobel Prize. I am lying on a sofa with a mystery story,
Cleek of Scotland Yard,
or a new Berta Ruck,
Leaves of Grass
having fallen from my hand. My young uncle Harold, a sophomore at the U, is in his quarters off the landing with his cronies. The telephone does not ring, which is just as well, since if it should be a boy for me, I shall have to refuse any date he proposes and get him off the line as fast as I can without his guessing that I am only thirteen years old and for that stupid reason prohibited even from flirting with him on the telephone. All at once there is a thundering on the stairs; my uncle and his friends are going out.

They have names for each other like Goose and Flamingo; a fat one, Don Dickinson, older brother of Kenny Dickinson, is called the Toad, and they call me the Niece. Our big gaunt maid Lavinia is Leviathan. Two of the troupe are still seniors at Garfield—John Lewis and Paul Janson—and of course they know my age and condition of servitude. My uncle comes into the room and kisses my grandmother’s cheek; “’Night, Niece,” he adds, waving. It is too early, still, for me to go to bed, and I have nothing left to read but the paper and
Leaves of Grass.

Rescue, however, is in sight, though I do not yet realize it. Among Harold’s cronies is one who does not call me the Niece as regularly as the others, who sometimes stops to talk to me in the downstairs back hall, who went to Garfield and had Mr. Post, knew Mary Brinker, and far in the future will marry Estare (Esther?) Crane of the single black spit curl and work for the Seattle
Times
before dying young. That is the Mark Sullivan whom I mentioned earlier. Some time soon (if he has not already started), he will undertake on his own hook to correct my reading. The first thing will be to try to cure me of Adela Rogers St. Johns.

Mark was a tall, somewhat knobby boy with a red face (hence Flamingo, I suppose), a blinking, flannelly Irish type very different from the male McCarthys with their green eyes and thick dark lashes. His teeth were poor, and I did not think he brushed them enough, which was true of a number of Harold’s friends. He wore slightly ragged sweaters, usually red, and his socks hung down. He was the son of a Seattle policeman and had a sister named Marcile. Every summer my grandfather took him with us to Lake Crescent in the Olympic Mountains. He and Harold shared a double cottage, and I shared one with my grandfather that had two rooms with separate entrances—my grandmother stayed home in Seattle, not liking the mountains and being afraid of the water because of some experience with a rowboat when she was young. She had box lunches packed for us to take on the ferry to Port Townsend, whence we rode on the train to Port Angeles and then a rattly bus past dark-green Lake Sutherland to Singer’s Tavern on beautiful Lake Crescent, “a jewel in the heart of the Olympics,” as the publicity leaflet said. My grandmother was happy shopping at Frederick’s every day; my grandfather was happy playing poker and bridge at Singer’s with his contemporaries, Judge and Mrs. Alfred Battle, Mr. Edgar Battle, Mr. and Mrs. Boole, Colonel Blethen of the
Times,
and every morning leading a party of walkers up to the Marymere Falls. He approved of the food in the hotel dining-room; one night, after dinner, he sent a dollar bill to the chef “with my compliments.”

Mark and Harold, the Flamingo and the Goose, would never dance in the evenings to the two-piece band of young-lady musicians on the hotel porch, but they played golf and tennis a lot and at least once a summer took me along, to climb the peak called Storm King, though never the redoubtable Sugar Loaf, across the lake. Once Mark, all by himself, and without any trail, explored the hidden waterfalls that rose above Marymere like a secret winding staircase with green overgrown landings cut into the mountain side. I believed—and it may have been true—that he was the first person ever to have followed them to the top. At my pleading, he promised to take me with him the next time he undertook it, but probably my grandfather told him no, too dangerous for a little girl, and I remained unfulfilled—to this day I am a romantic of waterfalls. He and Harold did not go in swimming, I think—maybe because of the icy lake water—but my grandfather always made one of them accompany me in a rowboat when I took one of my “championship” swims to Rosemary Point, the next resort, and perhaps Mark, out of his good nature, occasionally watched the after-breakfast diving exhibition I put on at the hotel pier.

At Singer’s he and Harold were mainly spectators of the human comedy, which included a lounge lizard from the East, me pumping the player piano, my grandfather’s watchfulness over my virtue, the framed poems and mottoes on the walls of the big card room (“Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne,/ He travels the fastest who travels alone”), the golf on the five-hole course.

Mark, who was a humorist, wanted to be a reporter or feature-story writer—at the U he was on the daily paper and magazine—and premonitions of the blue pencil led him to take up an ironical attitude to red-faced Colonel (“General,” by preference) Blethen, which pleased me, since I did not like the Blethen boys, Bobbie and Billy, and it did not wholly displease my grandfather, who considered the newspaper-owner a “martinet.”

The authors Mark admired ought to have been a counterweight to Ted’s “pashes”: Mencken, above all; Nathan; Dreiser; Ben Hecht; Carl Van Vechten; Ernest Boyd. I can fancy an invisible struggle of the two opposed forces for possession of my mind, except that I do not think Mark saw enough of me during his visits to Harold to be aware of Ted’s influence. Nor (the same as with Ted) was I always responsive to his urging: Jim Tully, the hobo poet, was as lost on me as Marius the Epicurean. And, again, there was my expectation of sex: Mark’s favorite book, which he left for me one night on the back-hall table, was
Mademoiselle de Maupin,
in English, by Théophile Gautier; the heroine dressed in men’s clothing, and the book was reputed to be “hot,” but if there was anything erotic there, I was utterly unable to find it. It was another disappointment, like
Green Mansions,
that I kept to myself. Other recommendations of Mark’s misfired. I preferred
Tom Sawyer
to
Huckleberry Finn
—an error; it should have been the opposite. I was too young for Dreiser’s
The Genius,
a well-thumbed volume which was left for me on the hall table, too;
Moby-Dick,
likewise, was way over my head—that I had seen the movie,
The Sea Beast,
with John Barrymore, was more a hindrance than a help. Nevertheless Mark was having his effect. I was soon reading
The American Mercury
and had induced my grandmother to subscribe to
Vanity Fair,
a Condé Nast publication that I could look at the day of its arrival in the sewing-room, along with her
Vogue.
And he had made me seriously wonder about Berta Ruck.

Even before summer, I must have already suspected that I would not be returning to Garfield. I do not remember whether, finally, that was cause for grief or not. Maybe I was glad, on the whole, to be removed from the excitement of boys, since it would be two more years before I would be allowed to go out with one of them—my grandmother had statutory ages for everything, sixteen for boys, fourteen for real, non-ribbed silk stockings, fifteen perhaps for lipstick (Tangee). The E, the D, and the several D-minuses that came my way at the end of the grading period were fresh arguments for a change of scene. Meanwhile, in the last days of the term, while my grandfather from his office was writing in for boarding-school catalogues, I found that I had made my mark at Garfield High, albeit ambiguously. Despite Ted’s briefings, our school intellectuals had been known to me only by sight.
But they knew me.
When the yearbook, edited by
them,
came out in due course, that became clear. There I was, almost the only freshman so singled out, on a page of that year’s memorable personalities with an appropriate sport, hobby, or pastime listed opposite each. I never sought to learn who or what had “elected” me to that company—a hidden enemy or just some senior having fun on the basis of information supplied by one of my associates. I could choose to think that it was teasing or I could choose to think that it was meant to hurt, but this was how, toward the bottom of the page, I appeared: “Si McCarthy. Tiddledy-winks.”

3

I
N MY FIRST YEAR
at Annie Wright Seminary, I lost my virginity. I am not sure whether this was an “educational experience” or not. The act did not lead to anything and was not repeated for two years. But at least it dampened my curiosity about sex and so left my mind free to think about other things. Since in that way it was formative, I had better tell about it.

It took place in a Marmon roadster, in the front seat—roadsters had no back seats, though there was often a rumble, outside, in the rear, where the trunk is now. That day the car was parked off a lonely Seattle boulevard; it was a dark winter afternoon, probably during Thanksgiving vacation, since I was home from school. In my memory it feels like a Saturday. “His” name was Forrest Crosby; he was a Phi Delt, I understood, and twenty-three years old, a year or so out of the University and working for his family’s business—the Crosby Lines, which went back and forth across Puget Sound to points like Everett and Bremerton. He was medium short, sophisticated, with bright blue eyes and crisp close-cut ash-blond curly hair, smart gray flannels, navy-blue jacket, and a pipe. He had a friend, Windy Kaufman, who was half-Jewish and rode a motorcycle.

He believed I was seventeen, or, rather, that was what I had told him. Afterwards I had reason to think that while I was adding three years to my age he was subtracting three from his. So in reality he was an old man of twenty-six. Probably we were both scared by what we were doing, he for prudential reasons and I because of my ignorance, which I could not own up to while pretending to be older. My main aim in life, outside of school (where I could not hide the truth), was to pass for at least sixteen.