Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (43 page)

In any event I would not see them all for several weeks, not until Christmas vacation. And now comes another hiatus in my memory. Of the time in school between Thanksgiving and Christmas I remember only insignificant details having nothing to do with him, such as reading
The Merchant of Venice
after lights out in my closet by means of a bridge lamp laid on its side and shaded by a bath towel, such as Sir Roger de Coverley and isosceles triangles and Vachel Lindsay’s two nieces whose parents were missionaries in China. On a more personal plane, I remember singing a new (to me) Christmas hymn, “A Virgin Unspotted,” as we marched in procession into chapel, and the strange emotion that came over me as I caroled the words out, my heart singing for joy in Mary Virgin, though Mary I was and virgin I was not. In the Episcopal hymns and liturgy, I was experiencing what psychiatrists call “ideas of reference.” With the Advent hymns now posted in chapel I recognized my Jewish relations and raised my voice for their safety: “Rejoice, rejoice! Em-ma-a-anuel will ransom captive I-i-israel.” Without ever recovering a trace of the faith I had lost in the convent, I was falling in love with the Episcopal church. I did not believe in God’s existence but, more and more, as Christmas approached, I liked the idea of Him, and chapel, morning and evening, became my favorite part of the day.

Meanwhile I must have been in correspondence with Forrest, whom I still could not call “Forrie.” I feel sure that we were writing to each other because how else did we arrange to meet on that same corner on an afternoon of Christmas vacation? But here comes a peculiar, almost unnerving, thing: not only do I not now remember how we made the date, but until a few days ago I had forgotten that we ever had one. In my memory the image of him standing by the car and holding up that transparent sack of rubber or fishskin was the finale—CURTAIN. If you had asked me, I would have said that I did not see him again till many years later, when I was grown up.

Well, that is true, but not the way I have been remembering it. The truth is that somehow or other we did make an arrangement to meet. I was on the corner, waiting, and he never came. I do not know how long I waited. I went into a drugstore and pretended to look at magazines; I went into a grocery store—the Piggly Wiggly—and looked at the fruit. I walked up and down the sidewalk. I counted the Madrona streetcars. I dared not linger more than an hour lest people become curious. 34th and Union was not far from where Mark Sullivan lived. I promised myself that if the Marmon had not appeared when three streetcars had reached the end of the line I would give up. I tried counting up to a thousand. I decided that he must have come while my back was turned, in the drugstore, so it could be my own fault. Finally, stopping every few steps to look over my shoulder, I walked slowly to the next corner, took a last look behind me, and then went rapidly home. In my memory this day, too, as it comes back to me, feels like a Saturday, and I have the feeling that I posted myself on the same spot the next day, in case there had been a mistake. But the next day I did not wait so long.

Why didn’t I telephone him? At fourteen and a half, I did not have the courage; actually, I am not sure I would today. He had told me not even to
write
to him at home. If I had tried to reach him at the Phi Delt house, I would have got some pledge—besides, they were on Christmas vacation. There was nothing to do but wait till I got back to school. Then if he did not write me, I would write him. If today there is something “philosophical” in my attitude to grief or disappointment, it may have been born then.

I think he wrote me when I was back at Annie Wright, but I may have sent him a cry of wild reproach to which his letter was an answer. In any case, it was short, the shortest he had yet penned, and offered no real excuse. He was sorry but he had been “held up”; for the rest, it was one of those letters of commonplaces of the “Hope you are fine and painting the school red” type. Something like that. And no
“Hasta la vista.”
But the awful thing was that
it was not signed.
Not even a pusillanimous “F,” which he had put on his last letter, I now seem to recall. Just a wavy line after the last sentence.

The letter cut off all hope. It told me, among other unbearable things, that my grandfather’s judgment had been right. The letter was like a signed, or, rather, unsigned, confession. And I was too young to be able to pardon him, which might have sweetened the bitter dose for me. Children do not pardon. Far from forgiving, I could not even understand. I knew that men tired of girls who gave themselves too easily, but so suddenly, so soon? Had I failed, in the car, to move the way you were supposed to? And, having failed on my first trial, would I ever get a chance to do better?

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” I read with interest in some book I had spirited into study hall. But the saying did not seem to be apposite. I had no means of dealing with the pain I was feeling; nothing like it had ever happened to me. I was in torture, but there was no one I could tell, no bosom I could fling myself on. My grandmother was too old and unsympathetic, and anyway my lying ruled her out. I could not tell a teacher, least of all the severe Miss Dorothy Atkinson, the English teacher with puffs of ash-blond hair over her ears and glasses on a chain whom I admired. Tears did not help without a comforter; I would have preferred to howl, but you could not do that at the Seminary, even if you did not have a roommate the walls were too thin. I did not consider suicide; that came later, when I no longer had a reason for it.

My sole resort, as often happens, was him, the cause of the pain. I could write to him, and I did, a very long letter, which I spent hours revising and maybe polishing since it was the last, I guessed, that he would ever receive from me. The burden of it was that I hated and despised him: I was grateful to have seen him finally in his true colors so that I would never have to see him again. While loosing the vials of my wrath, I may have alluded to his faults of spelling—I hope so. I was desperately burning my bridges, so as to give myself no encouragement for expecting an answer.

In full awareness of the consequences, I folded the thick screed into a big envelope and addressed it to him. But before putting on the stamp I wrote “I love you” in the place the stamp would cover. Not altogether satisfied with that, I carefully turned it upside down, which in stamp language meant “Look underneath.” Then I gave the letter to be mailed. In terms of gambling, it was a weakly hedged bet I was placing. The chances of a grown man’s looking under a postage stamp were piteously small, even with the nudging of the wrong-way-up Lincoln or Washington. Boarding-school-girl code anyhow—how would he know it? The only way he could have discovered those three little words would have been if the stamp had fallen off the envelope. My message had the same fate as the note to the fairies I had put into a rose in Uncle John’s garden in Duluth one summer evening.

My love slowly withdrew from him, like a puddle drying up. For months, maybe a year, I kept looking for the Marmon whenever I went downtown in Seattle, especially in the vicinity of Seneca and Spring Streets, where I felt his numen at the wheel of every automobile. Sometimes I would think I saw the car’s hood, heavy-set on the high chassis, coming toward me, but when I looked more closely, the car, although gray and a roadster, would be a different make. There could not have been many Marmons in Seattle.

Were there many Forrest Crosbys? Luckily not, perhaps. Yet he was scarcely an original. He was banal, even in the hold he had on my awakening sensual imagination. It was not only the bright-blue eyes, the crisp hair, the pursed, amused mouth, but also, I think, the car, the pipe, whatever shoes and socks he wore. It was his accessories that seduced me, as in an advertisement, and they included his name, which, like so many names in Seattle (Armour Spaulding!), seemed pseudonymous, creations of a press agent.

As they said of such men a bit later, he was a wolf, but a wolf with consistency of style—apparently he did not find sheep’s clothing becoming. What was unusual about him, probably, was the priority of style over substance, also the fact (which might seem to be contradictory) that he “wanted
only one thing.
”
Most men, in the end, want much more.

I suppose I am sketching the outlines of a Don Giovanni, one of the few I have known. That would explain what he “saw” in me. It was not my being pretty (I am not sure I was, and, till the senior yearbook, no photo exists to say yes or no) or “fresh.” It made no difference whether I was intelligent or stupid, passionate or cold. In the “boundary situation” (Karl Jaspers) constituted by the chill seat of a roadster, those qualities buttered no parsnips. What he wanted from me was what Don Giovanni wanted from fat and thin, chambermaid and lady, old and young:
“il piacer di porla in lista”
—that was all there was to it. That his organ and sperm repelled me suggests that on my side the attraction did not go deep despite the superficial power it exerted. It was like a kind of hypnotism, which I believe does not go deep either. I obeyed his command to open my legs, having gone too far not to finish the task, but it was chiefly my muscles that submitted; my mind held itself apart, not finding him, to my surprise, very interesting. In the same way, a hypnotist can make you carry out any quantity of orders but he cannot make you do anything that goes against your nature. Just as nothing can force us to
like
a hated vegetable, so I could never respond in depth to the man made manifest in those colorless letters.
Hasta la vista.

I have been able to verify this judgment, for I met him again ten years later, and at that time, within his limits, he “fell for” me, and I had, I suppose, a kind of revenge. It was through Windy Kaufman that we met again; Windy was still his friend and still drove a motorcycle. I forget how I came to know Windy, but he took me riding with him more than once on his motorcycle. My family was shocked, but I enjoyed it, and my grandmother knew his mother. Mindful of what had happened to Vere, I took care not to give him “ideas,” as we used to say, though I dared not let myself hope that Forrie had failed to confide in him—whenever my name was mentioned, did Windy observe “Forrie fucked her”? I could not guess from his demeanor. Then one day when he telephoned (“It sounds like that Kaufman fellow”), he proposed spending the evening with some other people at the house of a friend of his.

That was Forrest, in his Federal Avenue house, sitting with a pipe at one end of a long leather couch—very little changed, less changed than I was myself. But he recognized me—perhaps Windy had prepared him—and seemed pleased; probably he had forgotten the circumstances that had terminated our connection. The next night he telephoned, and I took the call in my grandmother’s bedroom. No longer needing to hide anything from her, I told her who it was. But she had no recollection of the name.

The ending is obvious. He wanted to take me out, and I refused. He called once or twice more, but it was always the same: I would not go out with him. He still had some sort of allure about him: there was a little of Humphrey Bogart (not yet a film actor) in his deep, dry voice. But I was not tempted. I did not want another seduction, this time on a hotel bed or on his parents’ “davenport”—that would cost me the ground I had regained. But he pretended not to understand my refusals. “You go out with Windy,” he argued. At the same time he seemed quite well aware of the cool tit-for-tat that was continuing by telephone, and in some way it amused him, as if he were outside it, like a Ping-Pong game he watched while applauding my sometimes deft returns. There were high spirits in those repeated Noes of mine. I was laughing at the whole position; it was gratifying to my pride to see his renewed desire for me as a species of regret. It was clear to me now that cowardice had been the villain that killed his appetite. And he, behind the plaintiveness, behind the coaxing and wheedling, was chuckling for some reason himself. My refusals told him, doubtless, that he was still and forever my seducer—to all eternity: if I went out with Windy (his Leporello), it was because the servant presented no danger.

He never married, and the next time I came back to Seattle, married myself for the second time and with a baby to show my grandmother, I heard he had died. It gave me a funny feeling to hear that: I was just twenty-seven, and the first man I had ever slept with was gone. I wondered whether I could have something like an Rh-positive factor that did not combine well with the males I associated with: Mark Sullivan was dead, my first husband was dead, as well as the young man I had left him for—John Porter; and now Forrest Crosby. Of the series I would miss him least (most of all I would miss my grandfather, who had died “in good season,” a year and a half earlier, aged seventy-nine), but still his passing, putting an end to a rake’s progress, would leave a little rip or tear in the fabric of my life not easily rewoven.

4

W
HEN I WENT THAT FALL
as a boarder to Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, my uncle’s friend Mark had offered to write to me. His letters did not start arriving till after Christmas vacation but then they “saved my life.” Could this homely red-faced boy—by now a junior at the University—have guessed the significance for my social standing at school of having a regular male correspondent even though I was only fourteen? My classmates were mostly a year older but still hopeless babies, not yet weaned from the food packages sent by their mothers, which, despite the rule about sharing, constituted for them the most interesting part of the mail. Poor Jean Eagleson and Barbara Dole, poor Frances Ankeny, Ruth Sutton, Clover Rath, Mary Ellen Warner—if any boy wrote to them, it was a brother.