Occasional Prose (42 page)

Rather surprisingly, Miss Brayton was an author, an historian, and not a bad one. Her books—
George Berkeley in Apulia
,
George Berkeley in Newport
,
Scrabbletown
—were handsomely produced, well written, and carefully proofread. She is thought to have got her start as a garden-club chronicler. She had been attracted to Berkeley for the obvious reason that the idealist philosopher had spent three years in “Whitehall,” a house in Middletown, near Newport and the rocks called Purgatory and Paradise. But I am not sure to what extent she had looked into his philosophical writings. After Bishop Berkeley came
Scrabbletown
, a biting analysis of records found in a trunk in a Massachusetts town between Fall River and New Bedford; this is the most personal and the best, in my view, of her books. There were the makings of an intellectual in Miss Brayton, I always thought. That she did not use her mind more fully, direct it to more interesting ends, was her own doing and represented a choice in life.

It must have had to do with “Father.” During my years in Portsmouth, it was my firm conviction that she had made a devil’s pact with him. It partly concerned the house. She wanted the house and garden, and in order to get them she had to wed herself to him, stay with him, turning into a spinster, while her sisters left home (one went to Bryn Mawr) and made their own lives. She loved her mother and she may have put it to herself that she stayed to protect her, interpose her small figure between her and the tyrant, fight her battles for her, including the Battle of the Stair Carpet.

But her mother died, and Alice stayed on with him, doubtless thinking that, having made the loving sacrifice, now at least she should get the good out of it—the house and old Joe’s topiary. There must have been a large share of the money too, to judge by her
train de vie
—winters at the Colony Club, a well-paid pair of nice servants, Joe and Bertha (Bertha must have been French Canadian but Miss Brayton called her French, pretending that that was why she cooked so well), gardener and gardener’s helpers, the cost of publishing her books, donations to the Preservation Society, membership in Bailey’s Beach, furs, and couturier clothes from Bergdorf. She had the usual charities and subscriptions of a society woman. Yet the strange thing was that when you saw her, winters, in New York in her long mink coat and smart small gray hat on her way to a wedding or a matinée, she looked like an old rural body—liver-spotted hands under the white gloves, weathered cheeks, strawy white disobedient hair rearing up beneath the hat brim. Toil had left its signature on her.

She emphatically did not belong, and much of that emphasis was her own. She capitalized on her homely traits, on the Scrabbletown in her. The Lizzie Borden connection, for instance, which may once have been an embarrassment (“
Not
a cousin,” her nephew firmly told me). Now she plumed herself on it; someone had sent her a record that she delighted in putting on the phonograph: “Oh, you
can’t
chop your
mama up
in
Mass
a
chu
setts,
Not
even if it’s done as a
surprise
. ...” She was proud of her Yankee cunning. In dealing with the New York maids at the Colony Club, she boasted, she always got her room made up before anyone else’s; that was simply because she always left her door ajar and an open box of chocolates on her dresser (“Never fails to lure ’em”). Her laconic wit put you in mind of a sharp rustic having the last word.

My favorite illustration of that is a true story that took place in Portsmouth one Sunday morning when I brought an old White Russian, Serge Cheremetev, to see her and her garden. Both of these old people were what they claimed to be—he was a former governor of Galicia under the Tsar, his uncle invented Boeuf Strogonoff—yet there was something spurious somewhere about both of them, and each felt it in the other. Ignoring her topiary, Cheremetev, dressed in an ancient suit of coffee-colored silk and carrying a stick, began to talk of the roses on his former estate in Grasse; she countered with a terse dismissal of roses, having only a few “pernettys” to show. Her rows of espaliered fruit trees, so exciting at the time to Americans, said little to him. Still less did her gourds. If he tapped her Sensitive Plant lightly with his cane, he did not stay to witness the quivering response. I was dying with shame for both of them:
she
was boasting more than usual, and in Cheremetev’s hoarse rasping voice, a repeated “honored lady” crackled like gunfire.

Since things were not going well in the garden, I suggested that she show him the house. He glanced at the library, somewhat overstocked with detective stories, that lined the walls of the billiard room; he was a rare-book dealer in Washington and she was a member of the Hroswitha Society, but no common chord was struck. In the front parlor, he peered at a Piranesi on the wall. Just below it on a table stood a small bronze statue that echoed a detail in the engraving; the arrangement was one of Miss Brayton’s witty visual puns, and underneath the statue or beside it was a rare edition of Piranesi plates—I forget which—that had belonged to the Tsar. Cheremetev, by invitation, examined the flyleaf, which stated in the imperial handwriting that the book had been the property of Nicholas II of Russia. “Ah, dear lady,” he croaked, “I see you have the book of my godfather, the Tsar.” Miss Brayton started, as if for once taken aback; her blue eyes took in her dark-eyed visitor with his Tartar cheekbones. Then she let out a sort of cackle: “You’ve got the blood. I’ve got the book.” Mr. Cheremetev bowed. She had won. Yet if I had had only her word for the story, I would not have believed it.

She had come a long way up from the cotton mills to be able to meet the Tsar’s godson in single combat in her front parlor, and he of course had come a long way down. On her side, it was the privet animals—the legacy of her pact with the devil—that had put her in a position to score. First of all, they had put her on the social map, marked Cory’s Lane as an outlying bastion of Newport, which was still
the
society to get into while the summer lasted. But first Father had to die for her to emerge as a debutante on the Newport scene. That happened in 1939. She was sixty-one years old.

Despite the late start, when I met her ten years later, she had made it. Her social strategy, as carefully worked out as a Napoleonic battle plan, was based on reaching the child that she counted on finding in every Newport dowager and tycoon.

After Father was gone, she started giving her lawn parties, featuring a big rented merry-go-round near the gate on the Priory side and a clambake on the beach below the railroad tracks, with well-stocked bars dotted about in between. These parties were an instant success; old-time leaders like the Misses Wetmore were teetering down the slope in their heels and long dresses to view the oddity of the clambake.

It was the child in Miss Brayton who knew that to succeed you must make a party an adventure or a treat. Even an ordinary afternoon visit to her garden, ending with a tray of strong martinis, obeyed a canonical rule of children’s parties: each guest must get a present to take home. In the summer it was flowers from the garden, which she picked as you walked along and unexpectedly handed you on the front porch as you left, or fruit (her white clingstone peaches, a variety no longer to be found in catalogues, a basket of figs, or her slipskin grapes, Delaware or Catawba). Then—aside from the clipped animal and geometric figures, appealing to the scissors artist in all of us—she had funny plants like that Sensitive Plant, which quails when you strike it, carnivores like the flycatcher and pitcher plants, freaks like the parrot tulip (new then), and the tropical-looking bamboo.

With these arts and wiles, she swiftly conquered the territory she had designs on, designs perhaps dating back to her maiden visit to Bellevue Avenue with the Fall River or Tiverton Garden Club, where the society bug may have first bitten her—why not in Mrs. Arthur Curtiss James’s blue garden, whose grass was once said to be dyed? It was at about the same time that she had got her start as a writer, too, in her local
Garden Club Bulletin
. Father’s death, when it finally came, had had a double effect, opening the gate of ivory as well as the gate of horn. It had not only set her free to pursue her social ambition. It was what had allowed her to become an author. The first of her Berkeley books,
George Berkeley in Apulia
, came out in 1946; Thomas Brayton had been dead seven years, some of which she must have used for travel and self-education. After that came
George Berkeley in Newport
(1954) and after that
Scrabbletown
, which peculiarly has no date but which I know came out toward the end of my years on Union Street—1949–54. Following that, her publications were of less interest, probably because she was no longer interested herself. The two paths that had been opened up to her by her father’s death, though she may not have thought so, were divergent. She could not take both even if suddenly having so much more money seemed to promise it. She chose society—the Chilton Club, the Colony, opera seats, Joe’s chauffeur’s uniforms.

She could not have maintained “Green Animals” and herself in the Bellevue Avenue orbit and continued to be a scholarly historian with a lively pen for the simple reason that she had run out of local material—after Berkeley, what? There were only Governor Arnold’s burying-ground and the so-called Viking tower. If she was determined to stay put at the place where she had arrived, she could not move on mentally. That she should become a
social
historian in the line of Henry James and Edith Wharton was out of the question. To do that would have required a real break, and probably she was not up to it because she had stayed with Father too long, bargaining for freedom. Who sups with the devil must bring a long spoon.

Though she claimed off and on to be a Quaker I think she had no particular religion. She was a natural rebel (that was the great thing about her), naturally independent in her views, and what she worshipped was a kind of intelligence that, given her self-imposed limitations, had to be visual and aesthetic. Once I heard her enunciate almost fiercely the principle she lived for, standing by her mantelpiece, chin out, like one willing to be counted. “
Taste
!” she cried, virtually shouting. “T-A-S-T-E.” She spelled it out as if we might fail to understand her and then struck her small chest. “I have it. T-A-S-T-E.” She stared at us all belligerently. “Yes, Miss Brayton. Of course you have.” We laughed. “Obviously you have.” The proof was all around us, in the flames leaping in the fireplace, in the shaker of unbeatable martinis, in the sandwiches of thin-cut soft white bread, thick white meat of chicken, and “Bertha’s mayonnaise.” But it was tasteless of her to say so. Once the word was pronounced, you had lost the thing it was meant to designate: an eye, an ear. It was embarrassing and sad, as if poor little Psyche had spilled the hot wax of her taper on a sleeping Cupid. Wishing she wouldn’t, we hastily left.

She was ninety-four when she died in 1972, leaving “Green Animals” to The Preservation Society of Newport County. I was no longer living in the U.S. and had not seen her or had news of her for more than ten years. Her relatives, probably forgetting about me or thinking I would not be interested, did not send me an announcement of decease or an obituary notice from the paper. But I see from
The Great Public Gardens of the Eastern United States
that she left no endowment and the garden depends for its maintenance on gate receipts and profits from the gift shop. Does this mean she was living on capital at the end, like the grasshopper in the fable? Or expressing in that spare legacy her Yankee faith in the self-help principle? “Green Animals,” like a relief client, should learn to be self-supporting. Somehow the end and final secret of her story must lie laconically in the willing of her property. If she intended “to live on,” she may have hoped to be planted, warts and all, like a tiny rugged Turkish acorn up by the lily pool and turn by force of character into an indomitable tree.

December 1983

*
In fact, her nephew tells me, I was shown the wrong house, the property of some other Braytons. Her own had been torn down.

A Biography of Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963
New York Times
bestseller
The Group
.

McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and
How I Grew
(1987).

A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in
The Group
. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the
Partisan Review
circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and the
New York Review of Books
.