Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (42 page)

Nonetheless, as often happens with lonely young creatures, I found companionship. In poetry. Indeed, I wonder whether poetry would have any readers besides poets if love combined with loneliness did not perform the introductions on the brink of adult life. By luck, on the study-hall shelves, I came upon Manly’s
English Poetry, 1170-1892
—the volume I spoke of a while ago as turning up here in Maine and where then, in my hour of need, I encountered the Cavalier Poets. “Go and catch a falling star,” “Why so pale and wan, fond lover?”—I had the conviction that Suckling, Donne (whom I took for a Cavalier), Carew, and the others were writing directly to me and about me. In Manly, later in study hall, I would find “Sister Helen” and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and Thomas Hood, but the insouciant Cavaliers were tied to Forrest Crosby.

The girls could not get telephone calls (calls from our families went through Miss Preston, our principal), so it must have been in one of those letters that he told me when and where to meet him. Thanksgiving would have been our first chance. At the time, the Seattle girls at the Seminary traveled by boat, a two- or three-hour trip, with a chaperon, although I once took the “interurban”—a cross between a streetcar and a train that was a little less slow—and by my senior year the new Seattle-Tacoma highway had changed all that, making weekends, even Sundays, in the bigger town possible. But in my sophomore year it was different. I remember the quantities of baggage we took with us and the effect of seeing the seniors in peppy furs like caracul and pony, topped by little hats—they were dressed to kill for the “big” football game at the University stadium and the house parties that went along with it. At home, we must have had the usual Thanksgiving bird, carved by my grandfather and preceded by Olympia oyster cocktail. Then, with palpitating heart, and pale as death, doubtless, I met Forrest Crosby, on the next afternoon. But no. I think there were two meetings, two days running: for
it
to have happened the first time, without some preliminary, would have been going too fast.

But
how
did we meet, since he could not come to my house to get me? At my age, a hotel lobby was too exposed. No, it was on a downtown street corner, after three, when the light was beginning to fade. If I was seen, I could be downtown shopping or going with a girl to a movie. It seems to me that it was on Union or University Street, not far from the Public Library, that I waited, but only for a few minutes; he was almost on time.

After that, there was nothing to do but ride around or park. He could not take me tea-dancing at the Olympic Hotel; he could not take me to the movies; he could not take me for a sundae or a toasted-cheese sandwich at one of the usual meeting-places in the University district. If it was on Saturday, he could not take me to the football game—the last of the season. In November, he could not take me swimming or rowing. Roadhouses, where we might have danced, were hardly ever open in the afternoon. The necessity of not being seen and reported to my grandmother meant that none of the ordinary ways of passing the time were open to us, which was bound to leave us in the end with no recourse but sex.

Hence I might say that what happened was my grandparents’ own fault;
they
had forced me into clandestinity. If I had been free to meet him innocently, I would not have met him guiltily. This was true up to a point and in a general way. The tight rein they tried to keep on me while my contemporaries were allowed to run loose was a mistake and kept me from having any easy or natural relation with boys; I never even learned to dance with one of them properly. Moreover, the prohibitions I labored under led me into all kinds of deceptions. I lied to my grandparents about where I had been, with whom, how long, and so on. I lied to my partner in deception, in this case Forrest Crosby, because I was sure he would despise me if I avowed my inexperience, and I lied to other girls to keep them from knowing of my trammels, in short from discovering all of the above. This lying became a necessity, imposed by my grandparents in the first instance, but then the habit was formed, as the wish to appear other than I was permitted to be dominated every social relation except those with my teachers.

Yet, true as all that may be, the other truth is that my grandparents’ prohibitions were far from being the cause of what happened to me on the passenger seat of that Marmon. Had they let Forrest Crosby come to the house, he would have seduced me with greater ease, probably on their own living-room sofa after they had retired.

Hold on! All the time I have been writing this, a memory has been coming back to haunt me:
he did come to my house.
In the summer-time, after Lake Crescent, and for some reason—perhaps sheer surprise at the daring of it—my grandmother let me receive him. On the living-room sofa, after she had gone up to bed. And he did start to seduce me right then and there, with the lights on. He was on top of me when something happened. Someone interrupted us. Perhaps it was my grandfather, returning from his club, who surprised us and told Forrest to get out of the house. Or Harold came in, and Forrest hastily left of his own accord. Anyway, we were on the sofa (the only time I ever was, with a man), and he fled, and after that he wrote to me at Annie Wright. I did not see him again till that wintry day, probably in Thanksgiving vacation.

On that first afternoon (I think) we drove around, we talked, we parked and kissed each other and maybe went a little bit further—I am not sure. I was wildly excited but not sexually excited. At the time, though, I was unaware of there being a difference between mental arousal and specific arousal of the genital organs. This led to many misunderstandings. In my observation, girls tend to mature as sexual performers considerably after puberty, contrary to common belief, and this is confusing for young men and for the girls themselves, especially when mental development, with its own excitement, has far outdistanced the other. I do not know the explanation but am sometimes tempted to agree with the theory that the orgasm in human females is learned from the male.

In any case, the excitement, almost ecstasy, I felt in that first embrace is hard to remember back to, since sex, by now familiar, gets in the way. Surely that bliss had more to do with love, with the tremulous persuasion that his kisses and caresses and murmured words were proofs of an eagerness for me that could only mean love on his side, than with anything like estrus. Possibly, from the signs, he himself felt that I still needed a bit more preparation, since after a while, if I recall right, he started the motor and drove me to a corner near home.

If I recall right, it was at that same corner (Union and 34th) that he picked me up the next time. And this time, the Saturday, I was more nervous. It was not that I was greatly afraid of being seen—I could lie. No, I think that I knew now what we were going to do. And I did not want to. Having finally realized what was in the cards, had been in the cards since Lake Crescent, I was scared silly. Maybe he then explained to me in so many words what we were going to do, which should have been a good move in principle; it would have made me more scared temporarily, when I saw the inexorability of what was coming, but it would also give me time to get used to the idea while he drove rapidly along the boulevards, looking for a lonely place to pull off the road. When he found one that satisfied him, he stopped the car and looked steadily at me with a faint amused smile. I must have appeared piteously tense.

As if resigned, he drew me to him, settling my head on his shoulder, and started asking me about Annie Wright and the different girls there. Like Scheherazade, I was only too pleased to talk. I must have told him about the Quevli sisters, day girls who seemed to be the prize cultivars of the school, or my desk-mate in study hall, Ellin Watts from Portland … Then something prompted me to mention a small jazzy senior who wore bobbly earrings, a lot of lipstick, and a “fun” fur coat and had a peculiar name—De Vere Utter. “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, some sarcastic teacher had said. He nodded. “Windy fucked Vere Utter,” he observed. The casual way he dropped that, as a datum of passing interest, froze me in his “easy” embrace. What could I answer? I was horror-struck.

Unless he was one of those men who like to talk dirty to anybody they are about to sleep with, he was exerting himself, probably, in the cheeriest way he knew, to diminish my fears of what, buttoned in his fly, lay in store for me: if a popular Annie Wright senior had done it with his friend Windy, no need for me to feel strange. He could not imagine, I suppose, that this was the first time I had heard that word, though I must have seen it scrawled on Minneapolis fences on the way to the parochial school. Of course I knew what it meant: to fuck was to do
it
straight, with no love, the way men did with prostitutes. And he was preparing to fuck me. The message had come through clear and strong.

I did not turn a hair, so far as he could see. But I felt as if I had died. I thought dimly of Vere Utter and how she would take it if she guessed that Windy had “told.” I was distantly sorry for her, seeing her screwed-up little monkey face and short buck teeth with a smear of lipstick on them and the dance step she tapped out on the forward deck of the ferryboat—poor Vere. I don’t seem to have felt the same pity, in anticipation, for myself, that is, to have foreseen what Forrest would be telling Windy about me. Perhaps I was still trying to think that with me it would be different: what he was starting to do as he unbuttoned himself and pulled aside my step-ins would not be f- - -ing.

In fact, he became very educational, encouraging me to sit up and examine his stiffened organ, which to me looked quite repellent, all flushed and purplish. But in the light of the dashboard, I could not see very well, fortunately. He must have thought it would be interesting for me to look at an adult penis—my first, as by now he must have realized. Then, as I waited, he fished in an inside breast-pocket and took out what I knew to be a “safety.” Still in an instructive mood, even with his erect member (probably he would have made a good parent), he found time to explain to me what it was—the best kind, a Merry Widow—before he bent down and fitted it onto himself, making me watch.

Of the actual penetration, I remember nothing; it was as if I had been given chloroform. How long it lasted, whether or not we were kissing—everything but the bare fact is gone. It must have hurt, but I have no memory of that or of any other sensations, perhaps a slight sense of being stuffed. Yes, there is also a faint recollection of his instructing me to move, keep step as in dancing, but I am not sure of that. What I
am
sure of is a single dreadful, dazed moment having to do with the condom. No, Reader, it did not break.

The act is over; he has slid under the steering-wheel and is standing by his side of the car and holding up a transparent little pouch resembling isinglass that has whitish greenish gray stuff in the bottom. I recognize it as “jism.” Outside it is almost dark, but he is holding the little sack up to a light source—a streetlight, the Marmon’s parking lights, a lit match?—to be sure I can see it well and realize what is inside—the sperm he has ejaculated into it, so as not to ejaculate it in me. I am glad of that, of course, but the main impression is the same as with the swollen penis; the jism is horribly ugly to me, like snot or catarrh, and I have to look away.

Soon he drove me back to what was turning into “our” corner—34th and Union, at the end of the Madrona car line, near what I think was the Piggly Wiggly store. I got out of the car and quickly walked the four and a half blocks home, past Mary McQueen Street’s house and the little new Catholic church with the modern stations of the cross. Nobody saw him with me, and there were no telltale traces on my step-ins for the maid to find when she washed—if the hymen was punctured, it did not bleed, then or ever. I have no memory of what story I told at home to account for my afternoon, nor of what I thought and felt that evening. Since it was Saturday, did I go with my grandparents after dinner to the current attraction at the Coliseum or the Blue Mouse—Seattle’s quality movie-houses? I wonder what was playing that Thanksgiving week in the year 1926.

The next day there would have been the inevitable Sunday lunch with my married uncle, Frank, and his wife, Isabel, my uncle Harold, who had to have a special first course because he did not eat tomatoes, and maybe Aunt Alice Carr or Aunt Eva Aronson (both in fact great-aunts). We would have started with a thick slice of tomato on a bed of crabmeat and alligator pear topped by riced egg yolks and cut-up whites mimosa style and Russian or Thousand Island dressing, the whole surrounded with a chiffonade of lettuce, and we would have finished with ice-cream (possibly peppermint at that season, made with candy canes) cranked that morning on the kitchen porch by the old gardener-driver and left to ripen under burlap; in between would have been a main course of—very likely—fried chicken, and at the high point of the meal my grandfather would have said “Allee samee Victor Hugo,” referring to a restaurant in Los Angeles. On this Sunday I would have been spared the after-lunch ride around Lake Washington, for I would have been driven to the dock in good season (a favorite expression with my grandfather) to catch the ferryboat back to the Seminary.

I wish I knew what was going through my head during that meal. Was I accidentally remembering parts of the day before (“WINDY FUCKED VERE UTTER”) and trying to push the recollection away? Or was I feeling superior to my table-mates because I knew something they would never guess? Since yesterday afternoon I was no longer a virgin—how horrified Aunt Alice Carr with her spindly legs and old-maidish ways would be, how her frizzy head would tremble on the weak stem of her neck! For an insight into my state of mind I try thinking now of Emma Bovary at table with Charles after one of her trysts. It is not hard to guess what
she
felt. Boredom, obviously, excruciating boredom. And a Seattle Sunday at 712 35th Avenue could have given cards and spades to Yonville L’Abbaye. It was not that my grandfather, taken by himself, was uninteresting to talk to—that applied to my grandmother, too—the tedium was in their life. So, given the fact that I was old for my years and had read
Mademoiselle de Maupin,
if not yet
Madame Bovary,
I may conclude that my supreme emotion that Sunday in the bosom of my family was something between exasperated boredom and haughty disdain.