Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  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.

  Then there was Blow, Whistles, by Sarah Atherton, a Bryn Mawr woman in her early forties who was the daughter of a Pennsylvania mine operator. John had helped her adapt it from a factor
y novel she had published called Blow Whistles, Blow. She was a hospitable person who lived in South Norwalk with her husband, Luther Bridgeman, a telephone-company executive. Both these well-meaning, high-minded people thought the world of John and often had him out to stay. Mrs. Bridgeman was trying to escape from her class and did her own cooking; it was from her that I learned how to be sure your egg whites are stiff enough for a puffy omelet or a soufflé: invert the bowl, and if they don’t slide, they are ready. I still use that test (better than the one where you drop a whole egg on the surface; if it doesn’t sink, they are OK), and think of her while I do it—that is immortality. And I have passed the torch on to younger people who don’t use a mixer.

  Among the actors that summer I remember Richard Whorf, who in the theatre was like a utility infielder in baseball—he could do anything from painting scenery to writing scripts. And it was that summer, I think, that John first worked with Lloyd Nolan, a wonderful actor. And there was Joanna Roos, who had been with John in Uncle Vanya, playing Sonia; Joanna’s much older husband, Edward Rickett, a church organist, was the collaborator of W. S. Gilbert after Sullivan’s death.

  Most of the company lived in dormitories—a converted barn and stables on the Vanderlip property. Rehearsing next week’s play while this week’s was playing got everybody on edge. And because of rehearsing late, John usually stayed over; he had a bed with the Sherwoods in the gatehouse. But then he would stay up drinking with his younger brother, Byron, whom he had brought on to help out. Though Byron planned to be a newspaperman, he could drive a car to meet trains, move furniture, hold the prompt book, and hear actors who needed it in their lines. He was a smallish, sandy person with a sharp nose and reddish-brown eyes; the mother’s Irish blood had come out in him, and his favorite word was “cock-eyed.” He and John drank a lot and sometimes Byron fought with him. I knew about it because Kay McLean, my classmate, had landed a job as a stagehand with the company, moving and painting flats; she and Byron were having some kind of love affair—what it amounted to in those dormitory conditions John and I could not tell. After the first weekend, when John and I had quarreled coming up the Hudson in a friend’s erratic motorboat, I tried to keep out of his way and not make any demands, even though I had stayed in the East for the sole purpose of being with him. I spent Saturdays with him, coming up by train, seeing the play, discussing it, and going back to New York the next morning.

  I had a job. I had guessed that my grandparents would let me spend the summer in the East if I found some work that paid a little and was connected with the arts; hence I jumped at the chance offered me by the theatre’s publicity agent, a friendly girl from Cleveland named Terry. She introduced me to E. J. Rousuck, an art dealer, also from Cleveland, who agreed to hire me as a secretary for eleven dollars a week. What Terry did not say—did she know?—was that the Carleton Gallery, where I would be working, specialized in dog paintings. I found a cheap room in a brownstone house in the East 6o’s belonging to the parents of a classmate; several other Vassar girls were camping out there, too.

  Thanks to my grandfather’s foresight, I knew how to type, and my lack of shorthand made no difference to Mr. Rousuck. Instead of taking dictation from him, I wrote our letters myself directly onto the typewriter. Mainly these were letters inviting people to have their dogs painted by an English sporting artist, Maud Earl, who also did Chinese silk screens of birds and flowers which we were empowered to offer, too. Miss Earl, who was close to eighty and a celebrity in her field, got a good likeness of the poor animals we sent up to her apartment from our gallery whenever one arrived by Railway Express, in a cage, barking furiously and usually—we could tell—unfed.

  We also sent out letters describing already painted paintings of dogs—nineteenth-century oils, usually pointers and setters posed in profile—and once in a while a horse painting of some famous steed or of mares and foals. For a few days (on consignment) we had a Remington bronze for sale. We did not handle cats.

  Mr. Rousuck was a dog fancier and had once had a kennels, where he raised Boston bull terriers; he was the author of a book, the classic, on the Boston bull terrier, which, as became clear to me, he could not have written himself. An old lame sporting Englishman by the name of Freeman Lloyd who wrote for Field and Stream had been Mr. Rousuck’s “ghost” before I entered the picture. He could describe the fine points of an animal in technical language; he knew pedigrees and blood lines and the folk lore of turf and field, while I was barely learning to say “dog fanciers” rather than “dog lovers” in my letters. But Mr. Rousuck, while appreciating all this, preferred to have me as his scribe. He had concluded that Freeman Lloyd knew about dogs and horseflesh, but that I wrote a better letter. Perhaps there came days when he would have liked to “cross” us.

  A third kind of “missive” to prospective clients (not “customers”) went out under the Carleton Gallery letterhead over E. J. Rousuck’s signature. That was our art-as-investment letter, combined with a general invitation to visit our gallery: “In these times art is a peerless investment, and above all sporting art, which is only now coming to be regarded with due seriousness by connoisseurs of the brush and can still be bought advantageously by those in the know. Do drop in and let me show you, among other treasures, a delightful sporting primitive by the eighteenth-century master, Seymour.” These letters went out to Paul Mellon, John Schiff, Mrs. Hartley Dodge, Ambrose Clark, William Woodward, Walter Jeffords, et al. Apparently some of the recipients actually read them, for now and then a client would “drop in.”

  “Gallery” was a funny name for our place of business, which consisted of three rooms on a high floor of an office building—the French Building on 46th Street and Fifth Avenue (I never knew where “Carleton” came from, perhaps from a misspelling of “Ritz Carlton”). The first room, hung with red velvet, was the gallery proper, where our few paintings were displayed. Behind that was a back room, also velvet hung, where Mr. Rousuck received customers and allies. To one side was my little office, in which, if we were lucky, a dog was confined, waiting to be taken up to Maud Earl’s apartment to “sit.” Elliott, a young black man whose job was to move pictures around, mostly stayed in the office with me. It was too bad that I had a phobia about dogs, having been rolled down a snowbank in Minneapolis by a big one when I was small: if Elliott or Mr. Rousuck let the dog we were boarding out of its cage, I could not keep myself from jumping onto the desk until someone caught it and put it back in. In addition to Mr. Rousuck, Elliott, the transient dog, long-staying visitors such as Freeman Lloyd, a dealer called Nick Aquavella and another called Du Vannes, there was Mr. Rousuck’s red-haired mistress, “Cissy” Bozack, from Scranton, Pennsylvania, whom we often had with us, too. Cissy was well fixed but she drank—her husband had met his end by diving drunk one morning into an empty swimming pool.

  Mr. Rousuck, I discovered, sometimes slept in the gallery, on the velvet-covered couch where he showed paintings to clients. This was probably when he had been locked out of a hotel room for non-­payment of rent. Now and then, I gathered, he would sleep at Cissy’s but did not like to because of her drinking. I suppose that she lent him money to make sure that he ate when he was by himself. It was not a situation in which I could hope to collect my salary; I forget how many weeks he was behind with it, and now and then he borrowed a little money from me. In my opinion, the most imperative thing was that he pay Elliott, which he sometimes did, probably as often as he could. We all, including Elliott, lived in terror of a visit from the city marshal, who might try to hold a sale of the property to collect some unpaid bill. But he appeared only once that August, while Mr. Rousuck was out, and I managed by my tears (unfeigned) to send him away, thus rendering myself invaluable.

  The friendship with Mannie (Emmanuel) Rousuck (“Jay” later on, to his social friends; the surname was pronounced like Russeks department store) lasted till he died, in 1970. It even weathered my putting him in a book and his making motions to sue me unless
I changed the text. I did, with his assistance, but of course not enough to disguise him from other dealers, who were not deceived by seeing our Maud Earls changed into crystal cuff-links with miniature likenesses of dogs in them. By that time, his gift for salesmanship had inspired a series of important firms to take him on. In the end (I hope) he forgave me, which was large of him. He told me long after how he did it: “I said to myself, ‘If I am not man enough … ’”

  I kept on writing letters for him long after I was a professional author: he would send paintings up for me to look at in Wellfleet or wherever I was living, and the delivery boy (a Jewish Elliott, better paid) would wait for me to write my description before taking them back to the gallery—which, after being Ehrich Newhouse, Newhouse, Scott & Fowles (“E. J. Rousuck, Proprietor”), eventually became Wildenstein’s. Over the years the works of art I wrote about increased in value, although he never sent me a Rembrandt, even a debatable one. Apart from the letters, I did brochures and catalogues signed with his name for shows of Fantin Latour, Ben Marshall, Stubbs, Munnings, perhaps Augustus John, and others I forget.