Finally, at the end of the summer, the school staged a theatrical event, with parts for everybody. Mrs. Browne directed; it was a fantasy with a good deal of miming and perhaps had to do with a voyage of exploration. We summer-school students were assigned the role of pirates in a corps-de-ballet interlude that was imagined as happening under water, in Davy Jones’s locker, at the bottom of the sea—our pirate ship had been sunk. Obviously none of us had lines to speak; the sub-aqueous illusion demanded that we not open our mouths. During rehearsals, dark-eyed, gracious, twinkling Mrs. Browne (she was Medea, Burns Mantle tells me, in a 1920 Broadway production of the Euripides) waxed eloquent to the cast on the subject of illusion in the theatre, using our band of pirates to illustrate the principle. We were to move so as to create the illusion of a resistance offered to us by the water, that is, slowly, heavily, with groping hands extended against a counter-force—veering, twisting, turning, drunkenly reeling when a current swayed us. We wore black caps with the Jolly Roger emblem and loose black trousers, carried cardboard knives and cutlasses, which we were meant to wave in murderous style, always bearing in mind, though, the resistance of the water in those lower depths. And we were supposed to undulate as a single body acted on by the watery force, as a whole rather than as individuals—no one was to stand out.
In Maurice Browne’s autobiography, Too Late to Lament, I find the explanation. The play, called The Princess Who Wouldn’t Say Die, had already been put on by the Brownes in Carmel and was repeated—I’m not sure when—in London. It was one of their workhorses. Here is his word-picture of the scene (our scene) in the watery depths: “ … passengers and crew, sunk to the bottom of the sea with Davy Jones and all his pirates, wavered rhythmically but not realistically with teetering arms and legs … Enchanted audiences grew helpless with laughter. We had learned to apply to comedy those lessons which The Trojan Women had taught us in tragic dance, Medea in lighting,” etc.
I do not know what my grandparents made of this performance, my grandfather, in particular, who was used to applauding me in the leading part in school plays: “Toy Yah, Toy Yah, he have call me his son-daughter!” “And I shall extinguish the flames of my own ruin in the conflagration of all Rome!” Watching me sway and reel with a dozen others, he may have dryly regretted his investment in the Cornish School training. Or he may have been indignant, quite simply, at what he felt was a misuse of my talent.
I understand now what a sad cheat it all was, almost necessarily so. Any summer theatre, calling itself a school or not, takes on groups of fees-paying students or “apprentices” with the unspoken reservation that none of these aspirants will ever set foot on the stage in a speaking part. Actually, in most summer theatres, the apprentices never get to tread the boards even as walk-ons. Today’s domestic farces and “situation comedies” have no parts for spear-carriers. Instead they are put to work building and painting scenery and are grateful for the privilege of being physically close to “names.” Summer theatres are in business, and audiences come to see professionals; the principle applies wherever tickets are sold.
Today, as a professional myself (though in a different trade), I tend to share Mrs. Browne’s view or, rather, that of Miss Nelly Cornish, who must have faced the problem in every department of her school, each art student, for example, wanting personal attention paid to his or her work by Mark Tobey or Morris Graves. Somehow that must have been better in Rembrandt’s time: Rembrandt (like a summer theatre) at least got some work out of his pupils, who pitched in and did the journeyman work on commissions and that way could benefit from the master’s corrections. Anyhow, if I was cheated, I deserved to be. I would have wrecked any play they had let me open my mouth in, with or without phonetics. If I hold something against Mrs. Browne, with her deeply musical voice and soft gray marcel wave (and it sounds as if I do), it is simply that she went too far in “including” us in her production: those pirates, those ridiculous pirates! That was the real fraud. There was no need beyond dreadful gentility to cast us in anything. This was not real work, like painting flats, which has to be done, but “made” work given us to seem to repay our (quite high) tuition. It was a version of feather-bedding. It was not just my ego that resented being a pirate; it was my common sense. I felt silly—absurd.
Yet let me try to be just. Mrs. Browne did have a lesson for us, namely, that illusion in the theatre is tied to the imagining of a “counter-force” (here represented by the specific gravity of fluids): the actor playing a drunken man depicts not staggers but the effort to walk straight. But if that was what she was trying to demonstrate, she misread her audience. We were too young and avid for fame to catch on. We wanted Cornish to let us act, rather than to teach us the principles of acting.
It would be wrong to say that I got nothing out of Cornish. Quite a bit less, certainly, than I got out of the summer I spent at typing school one year later, on my grandfather’s recommendation. But not only did I learn to skip correctly at Cornish, I met a girl wonderfully named Marmion Connor whom I liked, and I became conscious of Bach. One night in the Cornish auditorium, our teacher Louise Soelberg did a kind of solo dance (eurhythmics, I suppose) to the music of a Bach cantata, Liebster Herr Jesu. Later, at Vassar, we saw Mary Wigman (I hated her), but the Cornish evening was my first experience of modern dance, as well as of Bach—we did not get him in our “Symphonies under the Stars” with Michel Piastro in the stadium. Miss Soelberg stood stage center in her gray ballet dress, moving only her head, white arms, long neck, and torso in accord with a voice and with notes struck by an offstage instrument. Her legs and feet and her rather expressionless flat Scandinavian features remained utterly still, giving an impression of exquisite control. That evening cast a spell on me—I even decided to add German to the languages I was promising myself to learn at Vassar, starting with Persian. “Liebster Herr Jesu,” “Dearest Lord Jesus”—it did not sound too hard. I loved the bare stage, the solitary, barely moving figure, the single unseen instrument (a clavichord?), the voice. I must have felt something like what others were feeling on first seeing Martha Graham.
No, I am not forgetting Johnsrud. He was Louise Soelberg’s “friend.” That was why I was hearing his name, it turned out; Ted Rosenberg, as usual, knew. And as usual she was right: on the last night of the summer-school term, the school had a dance in the big upstairs practice room, and Johnsrud came with Miss Soelberg. They danced with each other, both very straight and tall. I did not think he would notice me in the crowd of watchers, but he did. When someone else claimed Miss Soelberg, he came over. Nothing this time about the child Mary; instead, without preamble, he asked me to dance. I was not a very good dancer; like so many boarding-school girls, I tried to lead. But with his hand on my back I followed, not thinking about my feet. I must have talked a blue streak, for he learned that I had been accepted at Vassar and was going east next month, which prompted him to tell me that he, too, was going east in September, to New York, to look for a part in the fall season on Broadway—the producers were already casting. I may have told him that I had to stop over in Minneapolis on the way, to see my other grandmother, which may have prompted him to tell me that he, too, had Minnesota in his background—he was born there, delivered by Sinclair Lewis’ brother, Dr. Claude Lewis, the local doctor, and he had gone to Carleton College, whose president was still his friend. A strain of boastfulness was already evident in his character, though maybe not to me. In any case, he said, it was the end of Seattle for him; he had done all he could. I wondered about Miss Soelberg but of course did not ask. (In reality, as I have learned, from that autobiography of Maurice Browne’s, she followed “Nellie Van” and himself to Dartington Hall and then joined the Joos Ballet as a prima ballerina.) Instead, we talked about a freckled boy in the eurhythmics class who was going to the Carnegie Playhouse in Pittsburgh: Clarrie Kavanaugh. When our dance ended, I think Johnsrud told me, lightly, to look him up in New York, but I did not take that seriously, for how would I find him wh
en I went there with my grandmother and Isabel—assuming that I would have the daring to try? Yet I was happy to know that we were both bound for New York next month; it was a sort of bond.
We stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel, my grandmother and Isabel and I; it was where my grandmother had stayed with my grandfather on her earlier visit, when they had seen Katharine Cornell in The Green Hat. Just above the Biltmore, on Madison Avenue, between 45th and 46th Streets, very convenient to the theatres. We would have three days of theatre-going in New York before they took me up to Poughkeepsie for registration.
I did not see the need of that, and especially of the tiresome increment of Isabel. After all, I had just traveled alone from Seattle to Minneapolis in a lower berth and then changed trains by myself in Chicago. Grandpa had been firm about my making the Minneapolis stopover, so as to see my brothers, who were living with Uncle Louis that fall. I stayed at my grandmother McCarthy’s; Grandpa McCarthy had died, leaving a trust fund for our education (which, Grandpa Preston said, did not begin to cover the Annie Wright bills), but she was unchanged, still wearing those improbable feathered hats. This time, she was intent on buying me an electric doughnut-baker for my college room—in her understanding, today’s equivalent of the chafing-dish. At Donaldson’s department store, I managed to discourage the thought: if she had made me accept it, it would have been an embarrassment to me at college. I knew perfectly well that Vassar freshmen today did not go in for midnight “spreads.” Besides, she would probably have charged it to my trust account, as she did with her Christmas remembrances to my brothers—a fact, however, that I was not yet aware of. In the end, the old lady did not get me any present. Instead, she had the parish priest in to her sun-parlor to warn me that Vassar was “a den of iniquity.” But the priest, too, was uncooperative. After a stiff evening with my brothers at Uncle Louis’, I was relieved to leave for Chicago, where I had the excitement of changing stations to board a New York Central train for New York. In the club car I met my first Vassar girl—a tough, deep-voiced blonde senior called Flea (for Frances) Lee from California, who “filled me in” on the real Vassar in a rather alarming way, warning me, above all, what and whom to avoid. Davison Hall, where I was going to live, on the Quad, was not the worst, she said, of those houses; I was lucky not to be in Lathrop or Raymond. If I had wanted to ride, perish the thought; the horses were no good; better not get roped in to signing up for an “activity”; skip the “J” dances; expect no help from my senior adviser. I forget all the other steers she gave me, this hard, friendly Californian with a heavily made-up full-lipped mouth; I looked forward to seeing more of such an interesting person. But I was disappointed; she never noticed me again. After graduation, she went to work for the new Mademoiselle in the college department, blazing a vocational trail. Class of ’30, she was a real jazz-age person, perhaps the last of the breed, a survival.
In any case, I did not need Isabel to show me my way around. My uncle Frank’s wife—like my mother, a Gamma Phi at the University—must have been thirty-seven in 1929. With me, at seventeen, she took a bright, assured, young-married tone. She and Frank lived directly across from us in a small new frame house, and she was pretty in a high-colored, dark-haired, Scotch-Irish way despite a wobbly chin and slightly goiterous neck. I would have loved her if she had let me when I had first arrived in Seattle six years before. But she could not resist making fun of my poetry-recitations, pretending to want to hear “The Inchcape Rock,” so that a roomful of her friends could be amused. And she would not let me get close to her literally or otherwise. Once I sought to bury my head between her breasts (I was trying to determine how big they were) and was pushed away with one of her sharp laughs. She repeatedly interfered with my grandmother’s guidance to me on the subject of nail polish, lipstick, silk stockings, and so on, but never in the direction of a greater permissiveness. Despite being a younger person and rather clothes-loving, she would not take my part. Her dry, “amused” chatter seemed to parry any intimacy; it was impossible to imagine her and Frank in the conjugal act (easier my ancient grandparents!), which may have explained their lack of children. She called my grandfather “the Honorable” (from the official form of address we found on envelopes addressed to him), which did not displease him, but she had failed to find a teasing little sobriquet for my grandmother, whom no daughter-in-law could have called “Mama” or “Mother.” Speaking about her, Isabel said “Your mother,” “Frank’s mother,” “Your grandmother.”
Of me, she had evidently made a considerable study. I remember her thoughtful comment offered to the world at large one Sunday evening after we had finished one of our maid’s-night-out suppers and were putting the ice-cream goblets into the pass-through to the kitchen: “If she assimilated all she ate, she’d be a mountain.”
I suppose she was never comfortable about the Jewish half of Frank; there were no Jews among the couples who made up their set, mostly lawyers and business executives and their peppy wives, who gave “progressive” dinners, going from house to house and from first course to pineapple upside-down cake, and who named their children “Sara” and “Sheila.” Her own father, who died of cancer of the throat, had been a doctor, and her mother, poor dumpy Mrs. McCormick, was a nondescript gray bundle of polka-dotted clothes, whom Isabel was nervously gay about, doubtless feeling just as ashamed of her socially as she was of Mrs. Moses A. Gottstein and Mrs. Sigismund A. Aronson, who had a good deal more to offer. The sons and daughters of doctors, I have noticed, are often mortified by their mothers, that is, by the women their fathers have married before becoming successful practitioners.
I am sorry now for Isabel, who eventually tried to be friends with me, sorry for her childlessness, her insuperable shallowness, which could not be remedied by travel, by incessant “keeping up” with art, music, architecture, gardening, gourmet cooking—all the known deepeners and broadeners except, I guess, sex. I do not think she wanted to be what she was—a person short on true emotion. She was a clever housewife; she was economical, could sew her own curtains and hang them; she taught me how to do fringed tablecloths and matching napkins for bridge tables by pulling out threads from the raveling edge of the material. She also showed me how to make a “sandwich loaf” with little sandwiches inside, though I was too clumsy to follow her instructions. She was onto icebox cookies early. She knew how to cut bread and spread colored fillings on the bias to produce a rainbow effect. Naturally she was one of the first, after the Second War, to catch onto drip-dry, so useful for travel. Today, if she were alive, she would have a Cuisinart and one of those sets of little wheels for her suitcases. Her temper was invariably cheerful. All this should have made her an ideal daughter-in-law, if not an ideal wife. My grandfather liked her—she played cribbage with him—but about my grandmother I never could tell. She gave Isabel enviable presents every Christmas—last year a beautiful gray squirrel coat, when I did not even have an ocelot. But maybe fur coats did not mean much to my grandmother, who had so many of her own; eventually, one Christmas, she gave our maid, Lavinia, a very stylish, well-cut muskrat. Not by a look or a sound would she divulge her private thoughts about Isabel, despite the opportunities I put in her way. Nobody in our family (excepting me) ever let his private feelings be seen. The only thing I was sure of in respect to my grandmother and the McCormicks was that she was crazy about Isabel’s handsome brother, Dell. She bloomed whenever he came to the house; it was the one time you could count on her to be willing to tell stories of early days. But Isabel bloomed herself when Dell came, even after he married Mabel. And so, very likely, did I.
To get back, however, to the fall of 1929, when we were all three staying at the Roosevelt, I was sad that my grandmother, for whatever inscrutable reason, had seen fit to bring Isabel along. She was everything in Seattle that I wanted to get away from. Anything I thought of doing she would be bound to oppose. Actually, on our first night, it was my grandmother who had picked out the play we went to see—Let Us Be Gay, wi
th Francine Larrimore, a Rachel Crothers comedy that was still running from the previous season—and we had all agreed on a restaurant, the Lobster, which was on our way from the hotel to the theatre.
The next morning we planned to go to the Metropolitan Museum. There, at the top of the great staircase, our differences came to a head. On our left were Italian paintings, which was where I wanted to go—I loved Botticelli and thought I could glimpse one around the corner, in the first room—but my grandmother and Isabel were determined to see the American Wing, which was in another part of the museum and whose very name offended my ears—I imagined “Paul Revere” silver, spinning wheels, “testers,” butter crocks. In other words, they wanted to look at antiques, and I wanted to look at art. We quarreled. With a final furious word, I pulled myself, half-weeping, from Isabel’s grip, which sought to propel me in their direction, but instead of turning, as I should have, into the first Italian room, where I might have found calm and Titians, I flung myself at the staircase. And fell. All the way down, bouncing from marble step to marble step; if I recall right, there are no landings to interrupt the long flight of stairs from top to bottom. At the bottom, winded and tearful, I picked myself up. It was a wonder I was not hurt. Evidently my relatives had not witnessed the prolonged epic fall (like that baby-carriage in the film Potemkin, of which I was not yet cognizant); they were already on their way to the Paul Revere silver and the butter crocks. I was too shaken to try to go back upstairs. Instead I walked out to Fifth Avenue and got on a double-decker bus, which, I reasoned, was going in the right direction. New York looked easy to find your way around in. If I got off at 46th Street and turned left, after one long block I would be at the hotel.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 43
