Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  It started, in fact, with Green Mansions, with that girl, Rima, who was meant to be the spirit of the South American rain forest and flitted about, naked, among the trees. Somehow I had been led to expect, possibly by the glow of Ted’s countenance, that some torrid scenes were coming—Rima was not naked for nothing. But in reality, alas, she was; she violated that literary principle—wasn’t it Chekhov’s­?—that a loaded gun hanging on the wall in the first act must go off in the last. Yet Ted, I perceived, did not mind Rima’s being a disembodied spirit; she liked her better that way. That was one of the pitfalls of modern literature, I soon learned; it did not always live up to its promises. I had been let down already by Conrad’s The Nigger­ of the Narcissus, when I took it out of the public library the year before, thinking that the dirty word “nigger” in the title was going to couple perversely with the white narcissus bloom, but then “Narcissus” turned out to be the name of a boat. Marius the Epicurean was another misleading title, a real cock-teaser (or allumeuse, if you prefer) for the expectant young reader.

  To be truthful, what I was hoping for from books described as modern or daring (and from classical sculpture) was to see the fig-leaf stripped off sex. Someone had finally told me the rudiments of the act, but I did not feel wholly convinced that that was what men and women did. There was the usual difficulty in picturing respectable people, i.e., my grandparents, doing it, and in fact something in the sexual conjunction does arouse a natural skepticism, whoever the parties involved: “For Love has pitched his mansion/ In the place of excrement.” But unless someone has experienced sex or a close approach to it, stories and poems do not tell much about it; if one has, they may act erotically as reminders. In my case, what might have been helpful were scientific manuals (unavailable), but even with scientific manuals (remember Ideal Marriage?), some prior knowledge or practice is generally required for full enlightenment. It is something like the Uncertainty Principle: if you are distant enough from the experience to need instruction, you are too remote to be benefited. Possibly blue movies shown in the classroom by a teacher with a pointer are what is really wanted. Or is the famous “need to know” of children just another ignis fatuus?

  At any rate I felt the need, and Ted apparently did not. At the same time, I could tell that for her there was a strange vibration in Green Mansions, something thrilling and esoteric, that remained hidden from me. Now I know its name: literary art. We called it beauty then, and for a long time I had trouble perceiving it without being nudged, at least when it was of human manufacture; I could recognize it in sunsets, dew, wild flowers, fireflies, snowflakes, and the like. The excitement that literary art could produce in someone like Ted confused me, therefore, leading me to look for a set of thrills and revelations that literature does not give.

  My own preferred authors that year were Adela Rogers St. Johns and Thyra Samter Winslow (both Saturday Evening Post, if I remember right), and the English Berta Ruck, an Enid Blyton of her time, who wrote about the Land Girls of World War I. But I did not try to proselytize, except now and then my grandmother. Ted, meanwhile, was eagerly sharing her heap of treasures with me: Pater, of course, Oscar Wilde, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, The Crock of Gold. When she gave me one of her Paters (it may well have been the deadly Marius), she wisely sugared the pill with the whispered tale that Pater had done his utmost to save Oscar Wilde from ruin by pleading with him not to publish The Picture of Dorian Gray. “It will bring us all down,” he cried, weeping, having taken the train from Oxford to London to stop him, but the reckless Oscar persisted. I do not know where Ted got this literary anecdote or whether she invented it. I have never seen it in any book. Indeed, I have never seen it stated that Pater was a homosexual.

  The romance of this story, for Ted, lay in the suggestion of a liaison between the two men; that is obvious to me now. Later, I gather, she became an overt lesbian, moving to California and changing her name from Ethel-Ted to Teya, though I have learned to my surprise that, some time before that, she was married briefly to a tennis star called Billy Newkirk. But at Garfield in her crushes—all purely mental, I assume—she did not distinguish between the sexes, any more than between football and track; she distributed her love equally between Larry Judson and Bill Albin. I thought of her then as a sort of deep-voiced boy; somewhere in my mind or in a lost album is a picture of her playing baseball, with springy legs spread apart and a catcher’s mitt. More girlish, though, was her perpetual weaving of romances, as though to cover the nudity of everybody’s life. She spun her webs around Kathleen Hoyt and her tartan cloak, around Estare Crane and her spit curl; it must have been she who told me Larry Judson was Jewish. She was sweet on my grandmother, whose tragic story she seemed to know, just as she knew about my parents, and I could never tell whether it was as a beautiful woman that Augusta Morgenstern interested her, or as a Jewess, or as the wife of Harold Preston, for she was sweet on him, too, and so was Till. My grandmother, in turn, liked them both and put down her book to chat with them, which was rare with her when I led a friend into the living-room, with its shirred pongee shades and fancy grass wallpaper.

  Our friendship that first year was almost entirely bookish, on a separate plane from the other friendships I was beginning to make: with a pug-nosed Virginia who lived in Denny Blaine; with Mary McQueen Street and her sister, Francesca, who lived on 35th Avenue but really came from the South; with Ethel Scott and Mildred Dixon, who already dated and lived in a run-down section of mainly two-family houses and grassless front yards … I ask myself whether it was because Ted was Jewish that I did not try to mix her with the others, but actually none of my new friends mixed; I went to each of their houses separately in the afternoon—my grandmother’s strange inhospitality made it too hard to ask them home in the evenings. Besides, the bookishness into which Ted with her shining eyes had initiated me was a bond between us that kept us apart at times even from her sister.

  I wish I could chart her enthusiasms, as a service to intellectual history. Beyond those I have already mentioned, I remember Aubrey Beardsley, Lord Dunsany, possibly Vachel Lindsay, because he came from Spokane. Among the influences reaching me through her, it is not always easy to distinguish the aesthetic movement from cele­brations of “queer” sex. But I gather it was not always easy for the evangelists of both or either in their day. Their day: the peculiar thing about the modern authors Ted reveled in was that they were nearly all antiques. This was probably more of a commentary on Seattle than on Ted. Our city, despite its artistic reputation (or perhaps because of it), was remote from the vanguard; its most advanced circles might have still been reading The Yellow Book.

  Aestheticism, unfortunately, was the key. Clearly there was not much roughage to stimulate the brain in those on the whole limp leather volumes that were coming my way. Anatole France, eventually (“The Procurator of Judaea,” Thaïs, The Red Lily), but no Shaw or Wells. I ask myself how it happened that Ted never discovered Joyce. But wait! Now that I think of it, I can recall Pomes Penyeach: “Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,/ Where my dark lover lies./ Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,/ At grey moonrise.” Surely that is an ex libris of Ted’s, marked by her inspiration (including my belief that Rahoon—actually the Galway cemetery—was in the South Seas, a confusion maybe with Rangoon, the capital of Burma). Still, I have no memory from this period of A Portrait of the Artist (not yet a Modern Library title?), which would have given us more to chew on.

  I try to bring back a typical evening at 712 35th Avenue during the spring term at Garfield; the year is now 1926. My grandfather’s chair is vacant; he has put down The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page and gone to his club for a rubber or two of bridge. In her chair my grandmother, who by now has probably finished The Peasants by that Pole, is reading another long dull book, this time by a Dutchman called Couperus, who did not win the Nobel Prize. I am lying on a sofa with a mystery story, Cleek of Scotland Yard, or a new Berta Ruck, Leaves of Grass havin
g fallen from my hand. My young uncle Harold, a sophomore at the U, is in his quarters off the landing with his cronies. The telephone does not ring, which is just as well, since if it should be a boy for me, I shall have to refuse any date he proposes and get him off the line as fast as I can without his guessing that I am only thirteen years old and for that stupid reason prohibited even from flirting with him on the telephone. All at once there is a thundering on the stairs; my uncle and his friends are going out.

  They have names for each other like Goose and Flamingo; a fat one, Don Dickinson, older brother of Kenny Dickinson, is called the Toad, and they call me the Niece. Our big gaunt maid Lavinia is Leviathan. Two of the troupe are still seniors at Garfield—John Lewis and Paul Janson—and of course they know my age and condition of servitude. My uncle comes into the room and kisses my grandmother’s cheek; “’Night, Niece,” he adds, waving. It is too early, still, for me to go to bed, and I have nothing left to read but the paper and Leaves of Grass.

  Rescue, however, is in sight, though I do not yet realize it. Among Harold’s cronies is one who does not call me the Niece as regularly as the others, who sometimes stops to talk to me in the downstairs back hall, who went to Garfield and had Mr. Post, knew Mary Brinker, and far in the future will marry Estare (Esther?) Crane of the single black spit curl and work for the Seattle Times before dying young. That is the Mark Sullivan whom I mentioned earlier. Some time soon (if he has not already started), he will undertake on his own hook to correct my reading. The first thing will be to try to cure me of Adela Rogers St. Johns.

  Mark was a tall, somewhat knobby boy with a red face (hence Flamingo, I suppose), a blinking, flannelly Irish type very different from the male McCarthys with their green eyes and thick dark lashes. His teeth were poor, and I did not think he brushed them enough, which was true of a number of Harold’s friends. He wore slightly ragged sweaters, usually red, and his socks hung down. He was the son of a Seattle policeman and had a sister named Marcile. Every summer my grandfather took him with us to Lake Crescent in the Olympic Mountains. He and Harold shared a double cottage, and I shared one with my grandfather that had two rooms with separate entrances—my grandmother stayed home in Seattle, not liking the mountains and being afraid of the water because of some experience with a rowboat when she was young. She had box lunches packed for us to take on the ferry to Port Townsend, whence we rode on the train to Port Angeles and then a rattly bus past dark-green Lake Sutherland to Singer’s Tavern on beautiful Lake Crescent, “a jewel in the heart of the Olympics,” as the publicity leaflet said. My grandmother was happy shopping at Frederick’s every day; my grandfather was happy playing poker and bridge at Singer’s with his contemporaries, Judge and Mrs. Alfred Battle, Mr. Edgar Battle, Mr. and Mrs. Boole, Colonel Blethen of the Times, and every morning leading a party of walkers up to the Marymere Falls. He approved of the food in the hotel dining-room; one night, after dinner, he sent a dollar bill to the chef “with my compliments.”

  Mark and Harold, the Flamingo and the Goose, would never dance in the evenings to the two-piece band of young-lady musicians on the hotel porch, but they played golf and tennis a lot and at least once a summer took me along, to climb the peak called Storm King, though never the redoubtable Sugar Loaf, across the lake. Once Mark, all by himself, and without any trail, explored the hidden waterfalls that rose above Marymere like a secret winding staircase with green overgrown landings cut into the mountain side. I believed—and it may have been true—that he was the first person ever to have followed them to the top. At my pleading, he promised to take me with him the next time he undertook it, but probably my grandfather told him no, too dangerous for a little girl, and I remained unfulfilled—to this day I am a romantic of waterfalls. He and Harold did not go in swimming, I think—maybe because of the icy lake water—but my grandfather always made one of them accompany me in a rowboat when I took one of my “championship” swims to Rosemary Point, the next resort, and perhaps Mark, out of his good nature, occasionally watched the after-breakfast diving exhibition I put on at the hotel pier.

  At Singer’s he and Harold were mainly spectators of the human comedy, which included a lounge lizard from the East, me pumping the player piano, my grandfather’s watchfulness over my virtue, the framed poems and mottoes on the walls of the big card room (“Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne,/ He travels the fastest who travels alone”), the golf on the five-hole course.

  Mark, who was a humorist, wanted to be a reporter or feature-story writer—at the U he was on the daily paper and magazine—and premonitions of the blue pencil led him to take up an ironical attitude to red-faced Colonel (“General,” by preference) Blethen, which pleased me, since I did not like the Blethen boys, Bobbie and Billy, and it did not wholly displease my grandfather, who considered the newspaper-owner a “martinet.”

  The authors Mark admired ought to have been a counterweight to Ted’s “pashes”: Mencken, above all; Nathan; Dreiser; Ben Hecht; Carl Van Vechten; Ernest Boyd. I can fancy an invisible struggle of the two opposed forces for possession of my mind, except that I do not think Mark saw enough of me during his visits to Harold to be aware of Ted’s influence. Nor (the same as with Ted) was I always responsive to his urging: Jim Tully, the hobo poet, was as lost on me as Marius the Epicurean. And, again, there was my expectation of sex: Mark’s favorite book, which he left for me one night on the back-hall table, was Mademoiselle de Maupin, in English, by Théophile Gautier; the heroine dressed in men’s clothing, and the book was reputed to be “hot,” but if there was anything erotic there, I was utterly unable to find it. It was another disappointment, like Green Mansions, that I kept to myself. Other recommendations of Mark’s misfired. I preferred Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn—an error; it should have been the opposite. I was too young for Dreiser’s The Genius, a well-thumbed volume which was left for me on the hall table, too; Moby-Dick, likewise, was way over my head—that I had seen the movie, The Sea Beast, with John Barrymore, was more a hindrance than a help. Nevertheless Mark was having his effect. I was soon reading The American Mercury and had induced my grandmother to subscribe to Vanity Fair, a Condé Nast publication that I could look at the day of its arrival in the sewing-room, along with her Vogue. And he had made me seriously wonder about Berta Ruck.

  Even before summer, I must have already suspected that I would not be returning to Garfield. I do not remember whether, finally, that was cause for grief or not. Maybe I was glad, on the whole, to be removed from the excitement of boys, since it would be two more years before I would be allowed to go out with one of them—my grandmother had statutory ages for everything, sixteen for boys, fourteen for real, non-ribbed silk stockings, fifteen perhaps for lipstick (Tangee). The E, the D, and the several D-minuses that came my way at the end of the grading period were fresh arguments for a change of scene. Meanwhile, in the last days of the term, while my grandfather from his office was writing in for boarding-school catalogues, I found that I had made my mark at Garfield High, albeit ambiguously. Despite Ted’s briefings, our school intellectuals had been known to me only by sight. But they knew me. When the yearbook, edited by them, came out in due course, that became clear. There I was, almost the only freshman so singled out, on a page of that year’s memorable personalities with an appropriate sport, hobby, or pastime listed opposite each. I never sought to learn who or what had “elected” me to that company—a hidden enemy or just some senior having fun on the basis of information supplied by one of my associates. I could choose to think that it was teasing or I could choose to think that it was meant to hurt, but this was how, toward the bottom of the page, I appeared: “Si McCarthy. Tiddledy-winks.”

  3

  IN MY FIRST YEAR at Annie Wright Seminary, I lost my virginity. I am not sure whether this was an “educational experience” or not. The act did not lead to anything and was not repeated for two years. But at least it dampened my curiosity about sex and so left my mind free to think about other thing
s. Since in that way it was formative, I had better tell about it.

  It took place in a Marmon roadster, in the front seat—roadsters had no back seats, though there was often a rumble, outside, in the rear, where the trunk is now. That day the car was parked off a lonely Seattle boulevard; it was a dark winter afternoon, probably during Thanksgiving vacation, since I was home from school. In my memory it feels like a Saturday. “His” name was Forrest Crosby; he was a Phi Delt, I understood, and twenty-three years old, a year or so out of the University and working for his family’s business—the Crosby Lines, which went back and forth across Puget Sound to points like Everett and Bremerton. He was medium short, sophisticated, with bright blue eyes and crisp close-cut ash-blond curly hair, smart gray flannels, navy-blue jacket, and a pipe. He had a friend, Windy Kaufman, who was half-Jewish and rode a motorcycle.

  He believed I was seventeen, or, rather, that was what I had told him. Afterwards I had reason to think that while I was adding three years to my age he was subtracting three from his. So in reality he was an old man of twenty-six. Probably we were both scared by what we were doing, he for prudential reasons and I because of my ignorance, which I could not own up to while pretending to be older. My main aim in life, outside of school (where I could not hide the truth), was to pass for at least sixteen.

  We had met at Lake Crescent that summer. I was staying, the same as every year, in a hotel cottage with my grandfather, who approved of the American-plan food, the great Douglas firs, the dappled morning walk up to misty Marymere Falls, the bridge games and poker and the five holes of golf. I hated golf (one of the joys of growing up was that I would not have to play it any more), but I could swim and dive in my new “Tomboy” bathing suit (maroon-red turtle-neck with a long buttoned vest that tended to rise over your head when you dove and little separate pants underneath) and know that I was watched from pier and porch by admiring older people awed by my long immersions in the icy water. I could teach myself to row. I could switchback (adding a new word to my vocabulary) up old bald-pated Storm King with my uncle Harold and his friend Mark, eat a box lunch at the summit and run all the way down. The changeless idyll began with a ferry ride to Port Townsend; then there was the train ride to Port Angeles and the opening in our compartment of an unvarying shoe box of exquisitely packed thin chicken-liver sandwiches and deviled eggs, then the jitney ride through the mountains to our destination, which really was crescent-shaped and a bright celestial blue.