Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (50 page)

The benefits were a friendship with Margaret Carpenter that lasted intermittently through her years at Whitman, in Walla Walla, and mine at Vassar but also, more immediately, a “man” for junior prom that spring: Donnie Fisher, Margaret’s cousin, Tacoma’s answer to Jimmy Agen in Seattle. Every Seminary girl knew about Donnie Fisher. The surprise was that he was Margaret Carpenter’s cousin. With him as my partner, my dance program was full, and she had told him to send me gardenias for my flame-red chiffon dress with tiers of picoted ruffles. Above, on the balcony, sophomores and freshmen and the middle school were allowed, before bedtime, to watch the dancers in the Great Hall below.

If it had not been for those May Queen politics, I would have been among them. There was nobody I could ask. Mark Sullivan had got married, and because of my grandparents’ absurd attitude I never met any other boys. I would have been ashamed to ask my uncle. No; if it had not been for this miracle constituted by Donnie Fisher, I could see myself on the balcony looking over the oak railing with the eighth grade. I would have been almost like that poor Naomi Elmendorf last year, whose “man” never came and who sat her senior prom out in a matronly green silk dress with three-quarters sleeves waiting for at least a message, which never came either. A teacher sat with her on the balcony, holding her big hand. Why couldn’t she have been allowed to wait in her room? Anyway, this year
I
was spared. I could have fallen in love with Margaret’s charming cousin if common sense had not told me that he would remain impervious, however alluring I tried to be. Since I did not get my hopes up, it did not hurt too much when I never saw him again.

Junior year, I suppose, marked the furthest point in my absorption by the Seminary. I was not exactly happy; after Ruth Williams left, I had no real friends. But I had learned how to exercise power over my circumstances, which was like mastering the over-arm carry in lifesaving. I could hardly have been accused of having “school spirit,” yet a note from that time kept for all these years by our class Maid of Honor to the victorious May Queen shows me cheering fiercely for the juniors in a basketball game against the seniors, in which Hattie Connor, no less, had refereed, along with the addressee of my note:

I don’t want you to think that I meant anything of what I said about you—didn’t. But just the same Molstad had 7 [fouls] and Stimpson 3 personal and 1 tech. What does Hattie Connor know about basketball to suit her for the job of keeping score? My God, on Field Day the juniors are going to have something to say about the referees. No crushes! There were four Molstad crushes keeping score or time. Oh, I’m mad.

Better than basketball I remember our Saturday shopping trips, with a chaperon, to downtown Tacoma. We had our own bank accounts, to teach us to handle money, which we mostly spent on Christmas Night perfume and Guerlain bath powder. Then we would have tea at the Old Tacoma Hotel, which had white-haired black waiters, like a Pullman dining-car, and wonderful thin sandwiches. Or we would go to the Puss ’N Boots (or was it the Pig ’N’ Whistle?) for “sweetheart” sundaes. We saw John Barrymore and Dolores Costello and the first talking movie—Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer,
which I hated.

But the best was when the Stratford-on-Avon players came to Tacoma, and Miss Preston let us go; she may even have let us go on two different nights. Despite the name, they were not a Shakespearean troupe; they were specialists in Shavian comedy and they were not English but Canadian. And Tacoma—not Seattle!—was the town they chose to visit. This was my first real theatre, nothing to do with the Henry Duffy stock company in Seattle, who were specialists in
The Cat and the Canary
and
The Bat.
I remember the philosophical old hotel waiter, played by Balliol Holoway, in
You Never Can Tell,
and a dazzled overall impression of perfect finish. We had had the brilliant idea of inviting Miss Preston herself to be our chaperon; she wore a low-necked dress, and the evening was a riot of pleasure. Though I had never seen highly skilled actors perform before, I had a sense of recognition—the same as with Latin—as though I had met the theatre in a previous incarnation. Miss Preston’s next venture into the theatre arts was a projection she arranged in the gymnasium of a silent Swedish film based on
Jerusalem
by Selma Lagerlöf—first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in 1909. The sub-titles were in Swedish and the action seemed to take place in the Holy Land, inhabited, peculiarly, by gaunt, mad-looking Swedish farmers—was it a story of an emigration or was it some modern religious parable? Nobody could guess.

With the departure of Miss Dorothy Atkinson at the end of sophomore year, I lost my audience for the stories about prostitutes and housewives with “eyes like dirty dishwater” that she had encouraged me (once) to send to H. L. Mencken. Now I wanted to be an actress, rather than a writer, whereas my grandfather thought I had the makings of a lawyer. At the same time my screen idols changed: Pola Negri and Barbara Lamarr gave way to straight-browed Eleanor Boardman; Ricardo Cortez was replaced by Ronald Colman. And when in English class we read
The Idylls of the King
with Miss Atkinson’s sister, Miss Marjorie Atkinson, I encountered in literature and immediately recognized my fatal type of man. King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain. Not the mighty giant-fighter of
Syr Gawayne and the Grene Knighte
(a fourteenth-century alliterative poem unknown to me even by name), but a Tennysonian figure, debonair and disabused.

He won my heart once and for all during his visit to the countrified castle of Astolat seeking an unknown knight—in reality Sir Lancelot—who had won a tourney at Camelot and then disappeared, covered with wounds. Unaware of his identity, the Lily Maid and her father are nursing him. Gawain is quite taken with the Lily Maid—“well, if I bide, lo! this wild flower for me”—till he shrewdly senses the lie of the land: she loves the wounded knight. So he entrusts her with the diamond he is carrying to confer on the winner of the tourney and dryly tells her good-bye.

For if you love, it will be sweet to give it;

And if he love, it will be sweet to have it from your own hand;

And whether he love or not,

A diamond is a diamond. Fare you well …

Being Sir Gawain, he cannot forgo a final trenchant hint: “Yet, if he love, and his love hold,/ We two may meet at court hereafter … ” Having guessed that it is Lancelot, he is wondering of course what Queen Guinevere will say. Saying nothing further himself, he “Leapt on his horse, and carolling as he went/ A true love ballad, lightly rode away.” Cool and dry was Sir Gawain. The faithful Sir Bedivere pronounced a fitting elegy on him after he was slain in the great battle of the west against his brother Modred, the horridest name in literature: “Light was Gawain in life and light in death was Gawain.”

It strikes me now, nearly sixty years too late, that Sir Gawain, whose name was seldom paired with a lady’s, was the perfect type of homosexual. But the thought could not have crossed my mind then. I liked everything about Sir Gawain, even the pronunciation of his name (not “Gawáyne,” but “Gów-wain,” the first syllable accented and rhyming with “cow”); he reminded me of Ronald Colman and vice versa. To prefer Gawain, an accessory lord, to the great and somber Lancelot (“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,/ And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true”) may seem like preferring Horatio to Hamlet. Yet it was not a ploy. Far from seeking to be different through my foible, I kept trying to get others to share my craze for him, just as I had tried to get my grandmother to like Ricardo Cortez, while she remained true to Adolphe Menjou. I always sought to proselytize.

What I thrilled to in Sir Gawain must have been his sophistication. In that he resembled “the wise youth Adrian” of
Richard Feverel,
another who enchanted me with his disabused ways—it has taken me most of a lifetime (see earlier) to perceive that Meredith intended him, obviously, as a caricature. Later, more nobly, there came Berowne and, best of all, Mercutio (“’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve”—
dies
)
.
I ask myself now whether these blasé young men (leaving out Mercutio) were not second-raters. Could I have fallen in love, in real life, with Sir Gawain in a red two-seater? Certainly he could have been my seducer with no trouble whatever. I wonder about love, though. Does one fall in love with an appalling second-rater? A lot of literature suggests that one does, but I do not believe it. I agree with Plato that one loves the good.

But let me leave the discussion of love for a later chapter.

Sticking to the spring of 1928, when I was still fifteen, I wonder whether Sir Gawain was less a light of love, really, than an alter ego—a projection of some nutty image of myself. Myself as a sophisticate and highly skilled renouncer (Gawain, seeing it is hopeless,
renounces
the conquest of Elaine). I was infatuated with the person I wanted to be like.

But why a man, then? Among my own sex, Elaine the Lily Maid was not to be thought of—too pastel. But even in
King Arthur,
there was a fair choice of sinners: Guinevere, Iseult … Yet their lack of freedom, their passiveness, indeed their married state discouraged identification. The exceptions to that seemed to be either witches (Vivien, Queen Morgana le Fay) or women
nobody
would want to resemble, such as (let’s forget the dames and damsels of King Arthur’s court) Messalina, on the one hand, Carrie Nation, on the other.

Well, there was the Maid of Orleans, but I did not want to dress in men’s clothes or have visions. For me, the attractive person in that story was Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, her brave, dissipated captain—again my fatal type. I thought I might have been Eleanor of Aquitaine, despite her slightly masculine personality. There was the rub. Though I identified myself in my reading with a certain kind of man (tending toward the rotter), I never in real life wanted to be a man or even a mannish woman.

That was the moment when I was nearing my zenith at the Seminary. I had power; I rode Bluebell and the bay; Major and Mrs. Mathews liked me; my application had gone to Vassar with my grandfather’s check; sitting beside Miss Mackay, alone in her classroom, I was reading about the Veneti and their long boat-hooks; I had made Miss Marjorie Atkinson cry in class with my well-aimed satirical shafts; I had been invited by the Ford sisters to visit them in Montana; I had found “Sister Helen” by Rossetti in Manly’s
English Poetry
and recited it, changing voices the way the choir did between King Wenceslas and the page in the Christmas carol. Then, all of a sudden, the whole house of bright face-cards tumbled; I was suspended from school and could count myself lucky not to be expelled.

One day with another girl I went A.W.O.L. For no reason; just to have something to do. Probably it was in the doldrums after Easter. I remember the two of us in a streetcar; perhaps we were aiming at Point Defiance, which had an amusement park, or at any rate rides—closed, though, for the winter. Having discovered that, we might have taken the streetcar back to school and got some light penalty for the escapade. But unaccountably we didn’t. Maybe my partner in crime was running away from a promised interview with Miss Preston. Or simply we were dissatisfied with the tame result, so far, of our deed. In the streetcar, I remember, we passed a file of Annie Wright girls hatted and gloved on a walk with a teacher, and the sight somehow encouraged us, as we laughed and jeered, to maintain our distance from them. I was afraid that they might see us, whereas Molly, my associate, seemed to want them to.

She was a strange girl, that Molly Haynes, one of the several Hayneses in the school, all very blonde, almost albino, with long, double-jointed legs, beak noses, big protruding teeth, receding chins, dark eyes, and dead-white skins, like circus clowns’. Their father, who had the funny first name of Ancil and was said to be
very
self-made, had determined to put his girls in the Seminary right in the middle of a term. Molly was the oldest and had been assigned to the sophomore class; she was the only one I got to know. All the Hayneses were sloppy; there were spots on their uniforms, and the school’s black cotton stockings hung in wrinkles on their long legs. A little one, with the funny name of Ancil also, had a long, skinny, tow-colored braid, like a piece of fraying white rope. Because of the dark eyes, the suspicion arose that the whole sisterhood had dipped their bony heads in peroxide.

Viewed on her own, apart from those weird sisters, Molly was a droll, entertaining girl. She was rather intelligent, I discovered, though you might not guess it from her grammar and pronunciation; I don’t think any of the Hayneses had ever read a book outside of school. But Molly visibly thought (tapping her teeth was the sign) and had her own wry philosophy of life.

Before we ran away, there had been a strange episode in her room one Sunday afternoon during “quiet hour.” Visits back and forth between mid-day dinner and supper were allowed on Sunday, when many of the girls were out with their parents; you had to sign up ahead of time and not more than three to a room. Anyway, that Sunday Molly decided to show me her clothes. She had a whole closetful of them—very extreme, in design and cut—which she could not wear at the Seminary: at dinner we put on dress uniforms made of crepe-de-chine in three different solid colors—blue, deep pink, and green—with white collars and cuffs—and in the daytime we had our middies, skirts, and ties. Maybe Molly had been burning to model her own clothes to someone. I sat on her bed, not much interested, while she paraded them. But I could not help noticing that her underwear, slightly dirty, showed in the low-necked ones and the big raw bones of her upper chest stood out. Unable to praise, no doubt I grew uncomfortable. She must have been aware of it, for suddenly her mood changed. She turned on the dress she had been modeling—a satiny affair in zebra stripes—ripped it from her back and proceeded to attack it with a pair of pinking shears. She went at it, bare-shouldered, in her bra and slip, wildly laughing till her waste-basket was full to overflowing with ribbons of shiny black-and-white material, notched by the teeth of the pinking shears. Gasping and heaving, she explained that she had done it to satisfy me, because I had not liked the dress.