Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (64 page)

Unless I am mixed up, and it was not the Chicago, Milwaukee but one of the others that followed the Missouri? No current map is useful, for current maps do not show railroad lines—still less,
defunct
railroad lines—but highways. With a magnifying glass, I can trace the Missouri from its headwaters (found by Lewis and Clark) on the border between southwest Montana and Idaho, then north to the Dakotas, then south again to the Nebraska line, but where the railroad tracks lay (or still lie?) remains dark to me.

Anyway, as I remember, the Chicago, Milwaukee went through more varied and interesting country than the other two. It was not a prairie train nor an iron horse of the wilderness; it stopped at Butte in Montana rather than at an entrance to Glacier or Yellowstone Park, with grizzly bears or geysers. I forget which of the railroads went through the Bad Lands of South Dakota—a fearsome spectacle, only equaled by the so-called
terre squallide
of central Sicily.

The Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul was anchored on St. Paul, while the other two were anchored on Chicago, so I suppose it was the train my parents took to go to Minneapolis in 1918, when we all sickened with the flu. It would have been the natural choice, and I wonder whether the reason I preferred it, without even guessing at this history, was that the scenery it traversed was for me quintessential train scenery, its route, half-recognizable, was
the
fateful route.

Yet for some reason—perhaps because the Chicago, Milwaukee was on the verge of receivership during the time I was at Vassar—I usually went east on the Great Northern, Jim Hill’s line (“I like Jim Hill,/ He’s a good friend of mine,/ That’s why I am riding down Jim Hill’s main line”), the most northerly one, which was to northwestern railroading what the Yankees were to baseball. And just for that reason, because it was the most powerful, I did not care for it.

I never liked the Yankees or Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or any of those Sultans of Swat. I was a Giant fan, a passionate Polo Grounds-goer; my loves were Bill Terry, Blondy Ryan, Dick Bartell, Travis Jackson (the captain and third baseman), and of course Carl Hubbell and Hal Schumacher (“Prince Hal”); I did not even reject “Fat Freddie” Fitzsimmons, a pitcher who was getting old. It will be seen that, apart from pitchers, my favorite players were all infielders—the brains of a baseball nine. In those days, most intellectuals, I think, were Giant fans, except for an element, still in school then, that was for the Dodgers, and another, smaller, for the Cardinals. All National League teams.

Well! It must have been my grandfather who chose the Great Northern. To me, it was epitomized in the “Great Big Baked Potato” featured in its promotional literature. On the Empire Builder, the star train, they made a point of the hefty meals served in the diner—big manly steaks and chops to accompany that Idaho potato, lathered in butter (this was before sour cream and chives), when at the time my taste ran to refinements on the order of mushrooms under glass.

All our railroads were proud of their linen napery and the hotcakes they served for breakfast with sausages and lots of maple syrup. Real? I now ask myself. No; most likely, imitation. Probably the catering services reckoned that Far Westerners could not tell the difference. Certainly I myself did not know the difference then between Log Cabin and the real thing. Indeed I thought that Log Cabin
was
the real thing and would faithfully ask for it by name in a grocery store, the way I asked for Del Monte peaches, testifying to my consumer education. (As you can see, Reader, I do not care for that side of myself, which I have not completely shed, however; how can I as long as
knowing
concerns me?) And while we are on that subject, I can quote Proust, speaking of Swann as one who had inherited from a rich and respectable middle-class family “the knowledge of the ‘right places’ and the art of ordering things from shops.”

In their accommodations, the trains of the Northwest were pretty much alike. It was before the days of roomettes; I traveled in a lower, behind dark-green curtains, which the porter would twitch to wake me in the morning. Night and morning, to avoid acrobatics in the berth, I changed from day to night wear and back in the ladies’ room, which had a toilet, hot and cold water for washing and drinking, plentiful towels, and, in front of a long mirror, a row of receptacles for hair combings. All the trains had observation cars—sometimes an open one (more adventurous) coupled onto a glassed-in one. In the open one there was giggling about kissing in the tunnels (it was pitch-dark), and until electrification came you could get a cinder in your eye. Off the closed-in observation car, also known as a lounge, with swivel chairs and a beverage service, there was a bathroom, in which you could arrange with the porter to have a bath or a shower. The eastern trains, between New York and Chicago, had a telephone in the observation car, but I don’t think our trains had that—only telegram blanks. The porters shined your shoes and brushed your clothes. There was a booth for playing cards, and warnings posted against card sharps. Even if nothing much happened, the trip was a continual excitement, and I was almost sad each time when it ended.

As for Seattle, in the last two summers I spent there, it had showed itself in quite a new light. Having reached the age of eighteen, I was allowed finally to go out with boys, and soon a number of young men were calling for me in their cars. The one I liked best was homely, with yellow hair and big teeth and a stooping walk. John Powell had graduated from M.I.T. and so was slightly older, about twenty-three; he drove an old touring-car. My grandfather, who knew his parents, took a shine to him. “He certainly is a handsome man,” he would say without fail, to the amusement of the ungainly subject himself when I repeated it. The thing that attracted me most in John Powell was that he did not try to “make” me or not very hard. He just liked to talk and drink. He had a brother, George Powell, who was at Princeton and fought to get his hand up my skirt night after night tirelessly in his two-seater car. When he gave up hope, he ceased to ask me out. There were a number of other boys, the Badgeleys, for instance, Chick and Ed, who went to the University (Ed was my friend), and Hal Gates, a small flashy Californian with a new red Ford touring-car. With the exception of John Powell, all of them “wanted only one thing.” The sole difference was the degree of persistence. When they saw they could not get beyond necking, they were irritated, though some showed it more than others. The younger they were, the worse.

On the other hand, there was the Navy. Every summer, the fleet was in, eager to meet girls and go dancing. My friend Francesca Street and her sister Mary McQueen had many beaux among the young officers, and now I, too, during “Fleet Week,” was able to go aboard the ships with them and to the hotels in town where you could dance. The ship I came to know best was the
Maryland,
where there was a popular officer, a lieutenant j.g. known as “Steamie” Stone, who was a great organizer of fun and parties. To my relief, the Navy was much less aggressive with girls than the Seattle boys. Perhaps it was just more sophisticated. The only problem with the young officers was that they expected you to take an interest in the ship and its fittings, an interest I found it hard to simulate. The cannon they showed me, the nests of guns on the deck, all in a high state of polish, the winches, pulleys, compasses, cleats, barometers, wheels, all that nautical ordnance was the same from ship to ship, that is, boring: when you had seen the
Maryland,
you had seen them all. Nonetheless I enjoyed the slightly racy stories these Annapolis men told and the funny songs they knew.

Besides the randy boys and the young officers in summer whites, there were also the men. The Street girls’ father, Mr. Street, a widower, and Broussais (“Bruce”) Beck, whose wife owned the Bon Marché department store and who pretended to an interest in the fine arts. Twice he got me to meet him at the Washington Hotel and tried to persuade me to go up to a room he had taken. It must have seemed strange to him that I agreed to meet him at the hotel, on the mezzanine floor, and then jibbed at what should have been the logical sequel. To me, what seems strange is the opposite: my inability to refuse in the first place—was it curiosity? The most embarrassing part of being pursued by Bruce Beck came when he started calling me at home. “Who was that man?” my grandmother would say sharply, as if his mature years were imprinted on his dulcet voice. I would have to make up some lie to shield him, for his wife, Mrs. Beck, was a devoted client of my grandfather’s and later of my uncle’s, and it would be shameful if my grandfather or Frank discovered what Bruce was up to. In fact, as I eventually learned, his habits were no secret in the town; my only distinction was to be a bit young for him.

Thinking back, I see that those two summers home from college were an illustration of what, except for Johnsrud, I might have become, now that I was starting to fit into Seattle. My grandmother had concurred in my joining the Tennis Club, the place to belong for the younger set; it was on Lake Washington, not far from our house. I swam and watched tennis matches and gave an occasional small luncheon. On the raft there was a good deal of repartee, denoting social acceptance, though my feelings were hurt one day when I overheard two boys assess me as I stood poised for a dive: “Kind of broad in the beam?” said one, and the other agreed. I was and always would be a flat-chested, wide-hipped girl; it was a matter of bone structure, everyone said. I was also bow-legged—had I been allowed to walk too early?—and this greatly bothered me. I read of operations in which they broke your legs and reset them again straight, but my grandmother, of course, would not hear of that. I was not a movie star, she tartly pointed out. Having experienced the dire effects of an unsuccessful facelift, she was unlikely to sympathize with my dream of cosmetic surgery on my legs. And perhaps she was right that the malformation was not very noticeable. As I grew older, I forgot about being bow-legged and only remembered, briefly, when I looked at full-length photographs, especially those taken from the rear. Yet even now, out of the blue, I wonder whether that operation would have made me taller, not that I am short. And anyway why should I care now, when nobody but a doctor is studying me from the neck down? In a bathing suit on the Seattle Tennis Club raft every one of my bodily shortcomings was conspicuous.

The queer thing is that I enjoyed those summers. Though I considered myself “engaged” to Johnsrud, that did not inhibit me with other males. Once I even made love with a man I met at the Becks’ summer place, on Three Tree Point: George Guttormsen, a University quarterback, who, I think, was All-America and who was now in the Law School—later he joined my grandfather’s firm. He was an intelligent young man, a sort of intellectual even, a freak case of a football star who was Phi Beta Kappa and good-looking as well. But it was the end of my last summer (1931) when we met and excitedly made love. So that I never saw him again. When finally I came back to Seattle—from Reno, by Union Pacific, after getting a divorce—either he was married or I did not know that he was with Preston, Thorgrimson, and Turner. In an alternative life, I hope, he could have been mine. On a loose page of one of my Vassar letters to Ted Rosenberg (undatable, as the first page and envelope are missing), I have come upon this: “You say you suppose I have forgotten about George. No, I haven’t, completely. I shall be very much interested in any bit of news you can send me … ” So I told her about him. I wonder how much.

Except for that and evenings with Evelyn Younggren at our “Symphonies under the Stars,” I have no recollection of anything intellectual or cultural in those two entire summers. Not of books I read, pictures I looked at, plays I saw. I don’t even remember a movie from that time. I did go to typing school the first summer, but that was my grandfather’s idea. It was as though the whole mental side of me had been switched off and the current diverted to swimming, the Tennis Club, the Navy, clothes from I. Magnin, from shops named Helen Igoe and Henry Harris—I had a semi-real French designer suit (“Patou first copy”) to wear back to college which I did not tell my grandmother the true price of. The sole revelation that burst on me in those vacations was tequila served in a glass whose rim was rubbed with lime and sprinkled with salt. And—oh, yes—a discovery John Powell and I had accidentally made: hard cider, if you freeze it, will turn to applejack.

My reason for not going home the summer after junior year was of course Johnsrud. After two up-and-down winters on the fringes of Broadway employment, he had got a job with a rich young man named Shepard directing a summer theatre at Scarborough, New York. It was up the Hudson, near Tarrytown, on the edge of the Vanderlip property; a young lawyer who represented the company lived with his actress wife in the gatehouse of the estate.

It was a very ambitious program John was going to do: eight new plays in an eight-week season. Only an amateur producer would have dreamed of it. In the normal summer-stock program there may be a couple of new plays; the rest are stand-bys—
Auntie Mame, A Lion in Winter, Amadeus.
When the producer acquires the rights, he can buy, from Samuel French, what they call in the profession the stage-manager’s working script: every cross, every entry, every exit, every piece of stage business of the original production is noted—in those days a copy of that used to cost around $1.95. But with eight new plays, Johnsrud had to map out the stage business himself every week for eight weeks. I don’t know whether the idea of doing all those new plays was his own or Shepard’s. And if the producer was a débutant, John, who was twenty-nine, had never directed a play in his life—the closest he had come was being assistant stage manager for Jed Harris’
Uncle Vanya
and
The Inspector General.
Knowing nothing about the theatre professionally, I did not guess what a crazy enterprise this was.

Only one of the eight plays had ever been done anywhere—a Victorian melodrama called
The Ticket-of-Leave Man,
which had not been played for fifty or sixty years. So naturally no working script existed. John’s thought was to stage it straight, counting on the laughs to come from the material itself. This was before
The Drunkard,
and a fairly original idea—John and his actors had fun with it. But
The Ticket-of-Leave Man
was far and away the
easiest
play they put on. In my memory, the best was probably
The Heavenly Express,
by Al Bein, a proletarian play about hoboes, set in a box car and on a siding. Bein was a rhapsodist, and it had a wild, poetic quality, as if written for strings, but when it finally reached Broadway—not till 1940—it failed.