Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (55 page)

My punishment came the next morning. In the dining-room, the sight of a sugar-bowl caused me to feel violently sick, and I just made it, gagging, to a wash-basin or toilet. All morning I retched and vomited. My white wool cap and gown were waiting for me on my bed, but I was too sick to put them on. The frightened Marie concluded that I had better send to tell Miss Preston that I could not pronounce the valedictory—I could not even stand up. But I thought of my grandparents, who must have already arrived, and made up my mind to try. I knew my speech by heart, having written it myself and practiced it in our school auditorium. And in case the worst should happen in the middle of it, Marie and I would put a pail backstage.

Moreover time was on my side. The valedictorian
followed
the salutatorian, and that would be Beth Griffith, who could be counted on to give a long harangue while the aromatic spirits of ammonia (which had just been procured, no doubt from the infirmary) got a chance to work in me. After Beth Griffith, there would be “On from Strength to Strength,” our school song, to the tune of “High above Cayuga’s waters.” I put on the white gown and set the white mortarboard on my trembling head. By the time we were on the stage, seated behind the podium, the waves of nausea were subsiding a bit. It was going to be all right. But when I rose to speak, noting my grandparents in the audience, a new sensation seized me—under my robes, in the seat of my pants. The nettles! An intolerable itching. And I could not scratch
there,
publicly.

Not to leave you in suspense, Reader, I gave the valedictory. Palely, I finished; someone put roses in my arms, like St. Elizabeth of Hungary—there must be a photo in some archive. The strange fact was that the moment I began speaking the memorized words, the itching abated. When I stopped, it was completely gone. The nausea went, too. I suppose it was a question of my nervous system: the words forming on my lips acted like leeches, drawing sensation from the rest of my body. It was odd, and even while it was happening I felt that I had learned something—a new law: you can only pay attention to one part of the body at a time.

So our queer class graduated. In June, in Seattle, I took the College Boards, and on June 20, from her furnished room in Seattle, Miss Mackay wrote on my behalf to Vassar—a letter that stayed in the files of the Committee on Admissions unknown to me for fifty years.

Mary McCarthy is a student of quite unusual intelligence. She has studied Latin with me for two years, and in my opinion has a remarkable aptitude for languages. I have always found her industrious and pleasant to deal with in the class-room.

Mary also has considerable dramatic ability, and played the leading part in the senior play this year. She was president of our school French club and secretary of the classical society, and in both capacities proved very efficient, and showed the qualities necessary for leadership. She has a strong will and plenty of ambition, and a magnetic and charming personality.

E. Mackay, M.A. Edin.

Instructor in Latin, The Annie Wright Seminary

Reading that, how can I fail to feel like a worm? Noble Ethel Mackay! The kindly upright woman was greatly deceived in me. In her worst nightmares that dear Latinist could not have pictured my frequentations: Rex Watson in the woods, Evans Buckley in the hearse, Kenneth Callahan in that eyrie reached by a cat-walk, to say nothing of Forrie Crosby in the Marmon roadster sophomore year, before I even
knew
her,
when I was fourteen.
Worst of all, Pelion on Ossa, the mountains of lies. Nonetheless I wonder. Invincible in her ignorance, she may have known me better than I knew myself. That is
,
I
was deceived by the will-less, passive self I seemed to be living with, and Miss Mackay was not.

An old program tells me that on the evening of Class Day, opposite Jean Eagleson, I played in Goldoni’s
The Fan.
Though this must have been a repeat performance, one would imagine that under the circumstances—post-throwing-up, post-nettles—it would have been memorable as an ordeal. Yet I don’t recall it in the least; nothing comes back to me until the next day—Commencement—with all of us in the chapel in our white caps and gowns and the bishop giving out the rolled-up diplomas. That was when the thunderbolt struck; no wonder I forgot everything between the valedictory and then. Miss Preston was leaving! She was not coming back next year. The reason she gave in making the announcement was that she had been asked to open a school in Arizona.

No one believed that. Most of us, I think, supposed that the sad decision had something to do with her sister. According to one theory, Mrs. Johnson had TB, and Miss Preston was taking her to Arizona to cure it, opening a school to support the two of them. (There were two obvious objections to this: that TB victims dramatically lost weight; that a conscientious school principal would scarcely harbor a person suffering from a communicable disease—and in the infirmary, of all places!). Another suggestion was that Mrs. Johnson had cancer, which however did not explain Arizona. More plausibly there were conjectures that the trustees had given Miss Preston six months to get rid of her sister, and Miss Preston had refused. Or else, still more plausibly—forgetting Mrs. Johnson—it had to do with the drop in the enrollment, to which our pitifully shrunken class bore witness. Miss Preston was the responsible party, so she had to go. Whatever the reason, it was evident from Miss Preston’s tears, which for once she tried to master, that the choice had not been her own. Unbelievably, after sixteen years, Miss Preston had been asked to leave, like a student found cheating. That was how it looked and how it probably was. In her office, after the exercises, she took us in her arms one by one—here the fact that we were a small class was lucky—and wept without saying a word.

In fact, Miss Preston did open a school near Phoenix, but I never heard how it fared, nor what happened to her sister. Once again it was the way of the Far West, possibly attributable to the vast expanses of geography: one did not “keep up” once the train whistle blew. Still, it seems to me now that once, after I had published something—a magazine piece—she wrote me a friendly letter, enclosing a photo of her school, and I hope I answered. Nothing further. I have heard twice from gentle little Miss McKay, our Physics teacher, but never from any of the others. Miss McKay wrote that Miss Mackay had married—a surprising piece of news.

The Seminary is still there, more thickly ivied, or, rather, Virginia-creepered, than it was in my day. Bishop Keator’s likeness still hangs in the Great Hall. But now they call it the Annie Wright
School,
and graduates (oh, dear) are called “Annies.” In the photos they use in fund-raising pamphlets the school looks quite “prestigious.” Maybe there are fewer desertions from the boarding department at the end of sophomore year. In the publicity material there is hardly any mention of faculty, and in a letter I received a few years ago from the headmaster, inviting me to visit, there was one awful mistake in grammar.

Yes, a head
master.
The whole story of the social evolution of our Pacific Northwest is hinted at there. Starting out with a “principal,” Mrs. Lemuel Wells, 1884, and continuing in that forthright style through to Miss Preston, we sank (aping eastern schools) to a “headmistress” with Miss Ruth Jenkins and her several successors till we have finally arrived at a “headmaster” with the incumbent and his grammarless predecessor. It is the story of a loss of regional identity, and I doubt that anyone else feels the shame of it as keenly as I do, I who left the Northwest at twenty and never came back, who only half-live in the United States, who have not attended a single school reunion. Weep with me, Reader, for all those resolute bishops, starting with Bishop Paddock, for all those widows of clergymen (Mrs. Hiatt, Mrs. Constance Aylwin, Mrs. Keator) doubling as teachers of Sacred Study, for the Vassar-trained Miss Atkinsons, both of them, and every old-maid teacher of Burke and Addison, for bath schedules, gym bloomers, pen nibs and inkwells, for clog dancing and “quiet hour,” Puss ’N Boots, and Pig ’N’ Whistle, for macaroni-and-cheese and chocolate ice-cream with marshmallow sauce, for deep-voiced “Papa” Wallace, our choir conductor, and “Good King Wenceslas,” “He who would valiant be,” and the red camellia tree by the cloister steps—for what
was,
ineluctably, and on whose like no “Annie” will ever look.

7

N
OW, TO TELL YOU
what happened next, after graduation, I must go back a whole year to the summer of 1928, when the American Bar Association held its convention in Seattle. It was in the month of August. In honor of the occasion, the local chapter was staging a pageant on the signing of the Magna Carta. As a former president (1896-97) of the State Bar Association and of the City Bar Association (1909-10), my grandfather of course had tickets for the event, scheduled to take place in the Outdoor Theatre at the U.

Not only did he have to go; he wanted to go. He was hooked on the theatre. When he had taken my grandmother to New York the previous winter—her first trip—on his way to Washington to hear testimony in a case of the government against a shipping company, they had opened every theatre, she complained, because of his habit of arriving an hour before curtain-time, ahead of the ushers—he was the same way about trains. That was when they had seen
The Green Hat
and my grandmother had found a dressmaker to copy Katharine Cornell’s second-act ensemble of thin kasha-colored wool and beige caracul trim—the elegant dress and matching jacket that now hung in her crowded clothes closet above rows of “Louis”-heeled shoes. Anyway, my grandfather was hell-bent on being at that pageant and determined, on account of his leading position in the legal community, that the rest of his family should be on hand, too.

I resisted. I loathed being seen at any function with my family, for it exposed the fact that I was still treated as a child. Every Thursday night (the maid’s night off), I died of mortification when we went to dinner at my grandfather’s club and he greeted us, coming in from the men’s side, by clapping his hands and kissing my painted grandmother on both cheeks.

A Magna Carta pageant, moreover, was the type of event—middle-class, boosterish, “educational”—that I spurned in any circumstances. More “Lincoln apple sauce,” as Mark Sullivan had written of the native variant; more boloney. While I was not actually on the side of bad King John, the hallowed civic character of the Great Charter was enough to turn me against it, especially when touted by a bunch of corporation lawyers.

We quarreled. My grandfather refused to hear of my staying home, called me “Young lady,” doubtless swore—“Hell and damnation,” his only oath. Finally I submitted, planning to sulk tight-lipped through the evening. After dinner we all got into the car and drove to the University district, with my uncle Harold—probably glowering, too—at the wheel. Frank, who as a lawyer had to go anyway, would have come in his own car, with Isabel and maybe her brother Dell, who was in the electrical-supply business but was writing a book illustrated with his own drawings on Paul Bunyan and his ox.

To start with, I imagine, I refused to look at the grassy stage. But at some point my attention must have been caught, by a voice that made my eyes turn to seek the figure it belonged to. It was the leader of a group of knights. He wore a helmet and a suit of chain mail with a red cross on the breast—the whole no doubt made of dishrags as in our plays at the Seminary. It was still light, and I could consult the program: “
The Red Cross Knight,
Harold Johnsrud.” The name meant nothing to me. He had a crisp voice and very pure diction, a slender waist and a fairly tall figure, taller at any rate than his followers, ranged behind him in a wedge. You could not see much of his head and face because of the side pieces of his helmet, but he was dark, and there was something oddly compressed about his features—a broken nose, it turned out.

Above all, he had “presence”; he was arresting. And this quality in him was often remarked on; it was not just a young girl’s notion that he “stood out” under the lights on the greensward representing Runnymede. I cannot explain why that should have been. His part, of the Red Cross Knight, was not important historically, unless he was meant to be Robert Fitz-Walter, leader of the barons, but Fitz-Walter, as I dimly remember, was a different character in the pageant, played by a different actor. No Red Cross Knight figures in the
Britannica
account of the day; he must have been someone very minor. Did Johnsrud covet the part of the wicked King John, which would have suited him well—“ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins,” the
Britannica
says? Perhaps the author of the pageant, finding a gifted mummer on his hands, had
invented
the character for Johnsrud. Whatever it was, there was a theatricality in him that commanded attention—that was why he got jobs rather easily. That night, in the Outdoor Theatre my grandmother and I exchanged glances; maybe my grandfather, too, gave a forcible nod of approval.