Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (75 page)

On the walls we had Van Gogh’s red-lipped
“Postmaster” (John’s guardian spirit) from the Hermitage and Harry Sternberg’s drawing of John looking like Lenin. Then there were Elizabeth Bishop’s wedding present, bought in Paris—a colored print, framed in white, rather surreal, called “Geometry,” by Jean Hugo, great-grandson of the author—and Frani’s wedding present—a black-framed, seventeenth-century English broadside, on “The Earl of Essex Who cut his own Throat in the Tower”—not Elizabeth’s Essex, brother to Penelope Devereux, but a later one, no longer of the Devereux family. Probably the apartment had built-in bookcases, which (already!) held the 1911
Britannica
. I am sure of that because I wrote a fanciful piece (turned down by
The New Yorker
) called “FRA to GIB.” I don’t know where that
Britannica
, the first of its line, came from or where it went to; maybe it was Mrs. Howland’s. On the floor were, I think, two Oriental rugs, hers also, obviously. In two white
cachepots
(Macy’s) we had English ivy trailing.

To reassure a reader wondering about our moral fiber and ignorant of those Depression years, I should say that Mr. and Mrs. Howland (I could never call them “Lois” and “Harold”) kindly made us feel that we were doing them a service by “storing” their things while they, to economize, lived at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, Mr. Howland being out of a job. We had bought ourselves a tall, “modernistic” Russel Wright cocktail shaker made of aluminum with a wood top, a chromium hors d’oeuvres tray with glass
dishes (using industrial materials was the idea), and six silver Old-Fashioned spoons with a simulated cherry at one end and the bottom of the spoon flat, for crushing sugar and Angostura; somewhere I still have these and people who come upon them always wonder what they are.

Late one morning, but before we had got the beds made, “Mrs. Langdon Mitchell” was announced over the house phone, and the widow of the famous (now forgotten) playwright sailed in to pay a formal call, which lasted precisely the ordained fifteen minutes, although we were in our nightclothes and she, white-haired, hatted, and gloved, sat on a Hepplewhite chair facing our tumbled sheets. We must have met this old lady at one of Mrs. Aldrich’s temperance lunches in the house on Riverside Drive, where the conversation was wont to hover over “dear Sidney and Beatrice [Webb]” and Bis Meyer, my classmate, daughter of Eugene Meyer of the Federal Reserve Bank, was described as “a beautiful Eurasian,” a gracious way our hostess had found of saying “Jewish.” John and I had gone up to Rokeby, in the country, for Maddie Aldrich’s wedding to Christopher Rand, a Yale classics major and an Emmet on his mother’s side whom Maddie had met, hunting, on weekends. At the wedding, Maddie’s cousin Chanler Chapman (
A Bad Boy at a Good School
, son of John Jay Chapman and model, in due course, for Saul Bellow’s
Henderson the Rain King
) had spiked Mrs. Aldrich’s awful grape-juice “libation”
and got some of the ushers drunk. Now the couple had an all-blue apartment with a Judas peephole in the door, Chris had a job with Henry Luce, on
Fortune
, and Maddie had started a business called “Dog Walk.”

Just now I spoke of dances at Webster Hall, organized by the Party. That was where, in fact, I had met John Porter (I had better start calling him “Porter,” so as not to mix him up with “John”), who had been brought by Eunice Clark, the “spirit of the apples” classmate who had edited the Vassar
Miscellany News
. Eunice was always trendy, and I guess we were all what was later called “swingers”; Webster Hall was an “in” thing to do for Ivy League New Yorkers—a sort of downtown slumming; our uptown slumming was done at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, usually on Friday nights. Maybe real Communists steered clear of Webster Hall, just as ordinary black people did not go to the Savoy on those Friday nights when so many white people came.

I remember one Webster Hall evening—was it the Porter time?—when John and I had brought Alan Lauchheimer (Barth) with us and he found some classmates from Yale there, in particular one named Bill Mangold, who would soon be doing public relations for medical aid to the Loyalists—a Stalinist front—and with whom I would later have an affair. At Webster Hall, too, we met the very “in” couple, Tony Williams, a gentleman gentlemen’s tailor (see “Dog Walk” and the Budge-Wood laundry firm), and his
wife, Peggy LeBoutiller (Best’s); they knew Eunice Clark and her husband, Selden Rodman, brother of Nancy Rodman, Dwight Macdonald’s wife.

Selden and Alfred Bingham (son of Senator Bingham of Connecticut) were editors of
Common Sense
, a La Folletteish magazine they had started after Yale. “Alf” was married to Sylvia Knox, whose brother Sam was married to Kay McLean, from Vassar; both were trainees at Macy’s. At a party at the Knoxes’ I met Harold Loeb, the technocrat and former editor of
Broom
, and a character in
The Sun Also Rises
(related also to Loeb of Leopold and Loeb, murderers). Leaning back on a couch while talking to him about Technocracy and having had too much to drink, I lost my balance in the midst of a wild gesture and tipped over onto a sizzling steam radiator. Since he did not have the presence of mind to pull me up, I bear the scars on the back of my neck to this day.

Before that, Selden, in black tie, had led a walkout in support of a waiters’ strike at the Waldorf, which Johnsrud and I joined, also in evening dress—Eunice was wearing a tiara. At another table Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun got up to walk out, too. The Waldorf dicks chased Selden out of the Rose Room and into the basement, where they tried to beat him up. Then he was taken to be charged at the East 51st Street police station while some of us waited outside to pay his bail and take him back home to Eunice. It was all in the papers the next day, though
Johnsrud and I were too unknown to be in the story. The reader will find some of it, including Eunice’s tiara and a pair of long white kid gloves, in Chapters Six and Seven of
The Group
. I always thought it was not a Communist-inspired show. Rodman and Bingham, I supposed, must have been drawn into it somehow by Heywood Broun, the labor-liberal columnist of the old
World
, who had already led a walkout on behalf of the striking waiters at the Algonquin, where he, like Dorothy Parker, regularly lunched. Yet I have just learned (fan me with a brick, please) from Harvey Klehr’s
The Heyday of American Communism
that in New York, at the time, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union was “dominated by two Communists, Mike Obermeier and Jay Rubin.” Klehr does not mention the Waldorf strike. But in another place he writes that by 1937 (two years later) Heywood Broun was “a devoted fellow-traveler.” To me, the walkout brought a different disillusionment. It was the only time I saw Dorothy Parker close up, and I was disappointed by her dumpy appearance. Today television talk shows would have prepared me.

At Selden and Eunice’s apartment—in a watermelon-pink house on East 49th Street—in the course of a summer party in the little backyard, I met John Strachey, then in his Marxist phase (
The Coming Struggle for Power
) and married to Esther Murphy (Mark Cross, and sister of Gerald Murphy, the original of Dick Diver in
Tender Is the Night
). I was shocked when he went
to the toilet to pee—they were serving beer—and left the door open, continuing a conversation while he unbuttoned his fly and let go with a jet of urine. English manners? I wondered. Or was it the English left?

At Dwight Macdonald’s apartment near the river, on East 51st Street, I went to a cocktail party for the sharecroppers, wearing a big mustard-yellow sombrero-like felt hat from Tappé that Mannie Rousuck, a friend of Tappé’s, had procured for me—as my son, Reuel, summed it up later, Mannie was “a good getter.” Fred Dupee, a Yale classmate of Dwight’s, was much taken with my hat; he was just back from a year in Mexico, and I was meeting him for the first time. I was struck by his very straight, almost black hair, like an Indian’s, by his blue eyes, and by a certain jauntiness. This must have been about the time of his conversion to Communism. Or had that already happened in Mexico? At any rate the Party would soon put him to work on the New York waterfront, distributing leaflets; then they made him literary editor of
New Masses
. It was possibly through Fred that Dwight, who was still on
Fortune
, was giving a party for the sharecroppers and making an embarrassed speech before literally passing the hat. I was familiar with fund-raising events downtown, in the Theater Union’s ambience: they charged a quarter for horrible drinks in paper cups to help the Scottsboro Boys or silicosis victims, and you sat on the floor with your legs sticking out. The Macdonald drinks were free and
in glasses, and to sit on they had dark-blue outsize furniture looking like a design edict and made by a firm called Modernage.

Another Yale friend of Dwight’s, Geoffrey Hellman, who wrote for
The New Yorker
, was always at those parties, which happened on a weekly basis and usually not for a cause. Every Saturday, during the party, he and Dwight would have a fight about politics (Geoffrey was a tory), and Dwight would throw him out of the apartment. During the week they would make up, until the next party, when Dwight would throw him out again. This went on as long as Dwight worked on
Fortune
and had that apartment next to Southgate on East 51st Street. When he quit, over a piece he had written on U.S. Steel that the magazine did not like, and moved downtown to East 10th Street, to a walk-up painted black like his brother-in-law Selden’s, he did not have those regular cocktail parties any more or Geoffrey did not come or else a walk-up was not as good a place to throw a friend out of as a modern apartment with elevators to be rung for by an angry host; in any case, those weekly tilts stopped, though the political differences remained.

I don’t think Dwight and Nancy played bridge, but Selden and Eunice did, and Johnsrud and I, if he was not acting, often played with them for small stakes, usually in their ground-floor apartment, with its Diego Rivera print and volumes of Pareto and Spengler and
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
; Selden would be
wearing a black shirt. If we played at our apartment on Beekman Place, we used the beautiful cherrywood card table with the blue suede top and we served Tom Collinses during the game and toasted cheese sandwiches afterward—I was suddenly learning how to cook. We played a lot of bridge during those years (when John was on the road he played poker with the stage electricians), almost always with other couples: the Rodmans, Julia and David Rumsey, Maddie and Chris Rand, maybe Rosilla (Hornblower) and Alan Breed, or our new friends, Barbara Hudnut Boston and Lyon Boston (she was Hudnut beauty products and he was an assistant district attorney). A single man, Marshall Best, who lived in our building and worked at Viking Press, was a good bridge-player and not a bad cook (his specialty was little meatballs baked in rock salt in the oven); he would make a fourth with Frani, if she was in town, or with Nathalie Swan, back from the Bauhaus and studying with Kiesler at Columbia, or my dear, droll Catholic friend Martha McGahan, who, when asked later why she supported the Loyalists, answered, “I’m a Basque.”

When the bridge-playing stopped, it was a sign heralding change, though it happened so gradually that at first no one noticed. For a while, Johnsrud and I got into a fast set of poker players who played for high stakes, mostly seven-card stud, and called each other by their last names: “Mr. Lyd” and “Mrs. Lyd,” for example—she had been Kay Dana, from Boston,
of the class of ’32, and he was Bill Lydgate, the kingpin of the new Gallup Poll. Those poker games at the Lydgates’ had a funny sexual electricity about them and the sense of a power charge, maybe because most of those Wasp men in their shirt sleeves worked in the field of opinion, for Luce or George Gallup, testing it and shaping it like bread dough. After we were divorced, Johnsrud boasted to me that he had been having an affair with “Mrs. Lyd” (“Mr. Lyd” commuted to the Institute of Public Opinion Gallup had started in Princeton), and I was not surprised. She was a yellow-eyed lynxlike blonde given to stretching herself like the cats she fancied; there was always one purring on her lap or jumping from her sinuous shoulder. Like most female cat fanciers, she was a narcissist and did not care for
me
, not even bothering to call me “Mrs. John.” And in fact I was out of place in that poker-faced set, all of whom, men and women, had deep, slow-spoken voices, I noticed. When it was my turn to deal, I would always declare draw, jacks or better to open, though I knew that draw, in their book, was the next thing to mah-jongg. For my part, I hated stud, five-card and seven-card alike.

After John and I were divorced, I learned that Eunice Rodman, our bridge antagonist, had been another of his sexual partners. Eunice herself told me, adding the assurance that it was me he loved—she could tell. Actually, I was unfaithful to him myself more than once, but not with anyone we saw regularly as a
couple, and I feel sure he never knew. Two of my adulteries were only once, in the afternoon, and the third was with a little Communist actor who wore lifts in his shoes—too earnest for me to really like.

More important, through
Common Sense
I came to know Jim Farrell—a decisive force in my life, as it turned out. For Selden, I had written a review (very favorable) of
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
, the second volume of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Farrell called or wrote to thank me. All we had in common was being Irish, Middle Western, ex-Catholic, and liking baseball (and I was only half-Midwestern and half-Irish). But Farrell, gregarious and hospitable, took to me anyway, and when John was on the road with
Winterset
, I went to gatherings at his place, though I felt like a complete outsider. Farrell was married to or lived with an actress (Hortense Alden; I had seen her in
Grand Hotel
), but there was nobody from the theatre at those evenings. Now, half a century later, I know that she had had an affair with Clifford Odets and I wonder what Farrell made of that, which may have happened before his time.