Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (38 page)

Except for the few boys who played musical instruments, it was unusual for Garfield’s students to have “interests.” There was a girl who painted—a dainty blonde named Ebba Rapp who wore uneven hemlines and a jabot—and I went to her house for her to do my portrait, a pastel head-and-shoulders that my grandmother kept for a long time. But I don’t remember ever entering our Seattle art museum; nor did I go to a concert till much later, when they had “Symphonies under the Stars” at the stadium in the University, with Michel Piastro conducting. Yet Seattle was an artistic town. It had a Ladies’ Musical Club, run by my great-aunt Rosie, who had gone to Vancouver once with Chaliapin, the Cornish school of drama and art, which also offered eurythmics, a stock company, and (soon, if not already) a repertory theatre run by Mr. and Mrs. Burton James. But none of this seems to have “related” to the adolescent population, which entertained itself by eating sodas and sundaes, swimming and diving in the various lakes, playing popular records, and going with dates to the movies—something my grandparents would not let me do.

I could go to the movies with
them,
sitting in loge seats—a torment; I did not wish to look “different”—to the Saturday matinee of the stock company with my grandmother and one of her sisters, go shopping with her in her electric, take a family ride in the Chrysler around Lake Washington after Sunday lunch, pick out “Marcheta” to myself on the piano, persuade my married uncle’s friends to hear me recite “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” play practical jokes on the telephone (“Have you got Prince Albert in a can? Well, let him out”), and once or twice a year go to a tea-dance at the DeMolay Temple (Masonic) in ribbed silk stockings with a coerced partner who, like me, had never learned to dance. I could send in coupons from the cheap magazines I read for samples of nail polish, freckle cream, bust-developer, put Cutex nail polish on my mouth in the guise of lipstick when I thought my grandmother was downtown, make messes in the kitchen trying over-ambitious candies like marshmallows—a sticky, gelatinous mixture hopefully (note correct use of word) cut in cubes and rolled in floury sugar. I had dropped piano lessons on leaving the convent; the only sport I knew how to do was swimming (breast stroke, side stroke, overarm side stroke; no crawl); I was unaware of masturbation—except maybe for boys? In short, I had no real occupation, and my sole real interest—the stage—required an audience.

At Garfield I tried out faithfully for skits and playlets that were done outside class hours under the coaching of a teacher. This was independent of the regular school play (
Dulcy,
that year, by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, starring a “Dumb Dora”); it was more like what is now called a workshop, held in a disused classroom in the school basement without lights, scenery, or costumes, and with only a faithful few signing up for it regularly. I hardly know how to tell this, but one afternoon, in a sketch we were doing—for practice, with only the teacher watching—I was cast as Larry Judson’s wife. Yes, the captain of our football team. He was a senior with dark-reddish curly brown hair, reddish-brown eyes, and well-cut manly features, possibly a dimple in the sturdy chin. If I remember right, he played end, my favorite position. What possessed the teacher to cast me, a freshman and only thirteen, opposite Garfield’s idol, with whom I was secretly in love? And that was not all. In the playlet
he had to put his arm around me
and hold me to his chest, though the “heart” he pressed me to was a little too high for my head to rest against without stretching—I had not yet got my full growth.

That this should have been happening to me was so like a dream that today I ask myself whether it was
not
a dream. Odd that a football star would want to be an actor. And yet there was Paul Robeson, who had been All-American at Rutgers and then played on Broadway (1923) in
The Emperor Jones.
In any case, after that, Larry Judson smiled at me whenever he met me in the mid-morning tidal flow around the bulletin boards in the main hall—a faint, full-lipped smile that told me, I guessed, that he remembered. And once, it seems to me, as I was skirting the school playfield, a ball thrown or kicked by him hit me in the midriff, making me feel like St. Francis receiving the stigmata. But this memory is very fuzzy. I am not sure whether it was a football or a baseball or even a tennis ball and maybe I have imagined the whole thing. When I was sent off to the Seminary, I lost sight of him. I only know that he did not become an actor, did not play football for the U, perhaps did not
go
to the U. I wonder whether anyone still alive, besides me, remembers him treading the boards at Garfield and could tell me what became of him.

But I truly did play his wife; all at once I am completely sure of this, for I have recalled an odd detail. That dark-brown suit, almost chocolate-colored, a real man’s suit, smelled when he “clasped me to his heart.” It was not an armpit reek of stale sweat announcing that the suit needed a trip to the cleaner’s; it was more of a closet smell, as though the suit had been hanging quite a while in an airless space. And it was somehow a
mature
smell, reminding me now of the collective B.O. of my grandmother’s clothes when I got a whiff of them all together in her closet. It belongs to the aging process; I have noticed it on my own clothes in these last years when they have spent a winter in an unopened closet without benefit of mothballs. Maybe it has something to do with the oily or tallowy secretions of the sebaceous glands. Could my “husband” have been wearing a middle-aged man’s suit? That might have been passed on to him from an uncle who had died? I try to recall whether it was two-piece or three-piece. Did I encounter any vest-buttons in our hug? I am not sure. All I can bring back is a sense of the color and heaviness of the cloth, which “put age on” him, giving him a sedate, settled look.

Now something else comes back to me that I had entirely forgotten.
Larry Judson was Jewish.
I do not know how or when I learned it, certainly quite a bit after we played husband and wife. I think a Jewish friend told me, as if it were a thing I should have known already. To me, though, it was a stunning surprise. “Larry
Judson?”
I was shocked. I was a quarter Jewish myself and I had already had a Jewish love-object—my second cousin, Burton Gottstein, in his sophomore year at the University, velvet-eyed and lustrous as a black pearl. At the Sacred Heart I had decided that the degree of consanguinity (we were actually first cousins once removed) could not prevent our marrying in the Church if he would consent to take instruction. Now I had left the Church, so Larry’s Jewishness should not have bothered me on that score: no need to be married by a priest. Anyway marriage was no longer in my mind—a sign surely that I was maturing. Just worshipping him from not too far off was enough. Why, then, was I so taken aback? It was a sort of disillusionment, like learning the real names of one’s favorite movie stars—I could have slain the relative who brought me the tidings that Ricardo Cortez was plain Jake Krantz. On the screen he would never be the same for me. In Larry’s case, though, I was able to accept the undeception. The suit and the mature smell, I guess, had prepared me for swallowing a dose of reality. In my soul, without knowing it, I was getting ready to be sorry for the boy-man.

At that point I had not given much thought to Jews or what it meant to be one. There were several kinds evidently (corresponding, I now see, to the degree of assimilation): the kind represented by my grandmother and her sisters; another represented by their brother, Uncle Elkan Morgenstern, and his huge-breasted little wife, Aunt Hennie (in that family girls were fat and boys went through some rite at the age of confirmation called the bar mitzvah with presents and a party afterwards, where you got sweetbreads and mushrooms in patty shells, cheese puffs, and Crab Louie); and still a stranger kind, in funny clothes, whom I used to look at from the Madrona streetcar, which went by their houses—the poor Orthodox Jews from the Pale.

In the Pale, which Larry’s parents probably came from, little boys wore long dark trousers and resembled little men. Philip Rahv used to tell me, years later, of how he had felt marked as an immigrant in a Providence, Rhode Island, grade school by the Old Country long trousers his mother dressed him in. And I remember how Philip used to call my five-year-old Reuel “little man.” In 1925-26, in Seattle, I could have known nothing about the Pale and its customs. Yet on the broad porches of those multi-family dwellings—wooden tenements—that I stared at from the streetcar, I had seen quite young bearded men wearing shiny black hats and thick dark suits and old bearded men in black skullcaps and their undershirts and, no doubt, pale boys, too, looking old and solemn for their size. And nearer home, our next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gerber, afflicted with heavy accents, had two long-nosed sons, Len and Sid, who dressed “old” and kept apart from the neighborhood. Unlike my young uncle Harold and his friends, they were destined for “business,” I heard, as though it were a vocation, like the priesthood. Larry’s brown suit may have spoken to me in a foreign language that I was nonetheless vaguely able to decipher of a fate in store for its wearer—a doom of premature manhood already thickening his jowls. That was the price he would have to pay for his parents’ being poor Jews—a price Burt Gottstein, who belonged to “their” best fraternity and would soon join a smart brokerage house, would know nothing about.

I am guessing, of course. All I am certain of is that Larry, our school star, disappeared from my ken as though swallowed up. Maybe his parents moved. My memory of him stops with the suit, the hug, the piteous little “racial” realization framing the whole like a black mourning border. And I remember nothing further of those after-school dramatics. Maybe I ceased to sign up for them because the teacher failed to give me another leading part. Or spring came, and I got interested in the track team, following them to meets in the afternoons, which might have made a “conflict” with the acting workshop: I traded Larry Judson for Bill Albin.

(A few paragraphs back, I was wondering whether anyone could tell me what became of Larry Judson. Since I wrote—and published—those words, two people have told me, one of them being Larry Judson himself. He remembers treading the boards and thinks the teacher was named Miss Aiken—Yes! But his letters, two by now and both very nice, say he is only partly Jewish, a quarter, like me. And for fifty-two years he has been married to a Miss Birdie O’Rourke. The man’s suit is explained by facts he relates: he was older than the rest of us, working his way through high school as a salesman for
Pictorial Review,
the way others worked their way through college.

But there is another stage episode of my Garfield year, which I do not know where to situate. Perhaps quite early, before Larry and the skit. The problem is that the person it happened to, the heroine of the occasion, has become unrecognizable to me, so that I cannot account for her feelings and behavior. That is not true of the convent: in my slightly spotty blue serge uniform, unrelieved by any good-conduct ribbon, I am my familiar self, younger. But in trying to describe what I can remember of the Garfield time, I have been noticing a contradiction. From the record I know that I was wild about public high, to the point of losing my head and having to be removed by my grandparents. But what I put down does not sound that way; it sounds scornful. Evidently the self that felt the attraction of Garfield’s mob scene has been sloughed like a snake’s skin. Or brutally killed, leaving me, the person I am now, as the sole survivor. “I know not the man,” St. Peter said, denying Jesus, and I can say, with greater truthfulness, of that thirteen-year-old pennant-waver, “I don’t know that child.” In what I am about to relate the disassociation is almost complete, resulting in big patches of amnesia. I do not even know what I looked like or what I wore that year—no photographs have survived from the period.

Once upon a time, then, I appeared on the stage at Garfield before a good-sized audience and scored a real success. It was an event, I think, for freshmen, designed to bring out the talents of the entering class—something like “amateur night” in the movie theatres and vaudeville houses of those days, when volunteers mounted the stage to do solo acts and were judged by the amount of applause they received. If I reconstruct it right, you could sing or yodel or tap-dance or play an instrument such as the banjo or you could recite, but it had to be something light—nothing on the order of “Lord Ullin’s Daughter.” I had chosen a comic monologue by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock: “I had a little dog and her name was Alice.” It was meant to be delivered in a doleful deadpan voice that would make the recitation all the more hilarious. Well, I brought the house down—a slightly untoward surprise (even though I had aspired to it), as I had always thought of my muse as tragic. They clapped and cheered and possibly stamped; if there was a prize, I won it. Then why does a clear recollection of that red-letter day, as if too painful, refuse to reach consciousness?

I can see several answers. First, they were laughing
at
me, rather than
with
me, or, as we used to say in boarding-school, I was being funny-peculiar, not funny-haha. Perhaps so: the recitation may have succeeded in a partly unintended way, causing an
excess
of applause. Second, plagiarism. Could I have pretended to have written that skit myself? And then did some teacher confront me with my theft? Possibly. There was a precedent in my history: back in grade school, I had stolen copiously from
Our Sunday Visitor
for my prize-winning essay on the Irish in American history. Still, that was different:
then
I did not know it was wrong;
now
the uneasiness surrounding the blank in my memory may suggest guilty feelings. Yet a temptation to steal somebody else’s words was not my thing; perhaps I was too conceited for it.
So,
third, my claque.

Probably the real answer lies there. But to explain I shall have to go back and account for the improbable fact of my having a claque. It was the crowd from Mercer Island, halfway across Lake Washington, whom I had come to know slightly the previous summer through staying with the Berens twins from Forest Ridge. Today Mercer Island is reached by a bridge and is much like any other outlying section of the city. But in those days you took a ferry to get there; it was rural, and behind its farmland and dark spruce trees rose Seattle’s claim to fame in our geography books—snowcapped Mount Rainier. Looking across from my grandmother’s tall house on moonlit nights, I saw the moon make a silver path across the black lake water that corresponded with the daytime route of the ferryboat. The band of rooters occupying the first rows of our Garfield auditorium on the day of “Alice” came whooping to school on the ferry every morning and went home by the same means every night—the tooting ride back and forth seemed to have welded them into a vociferous unit like the anvil chorus. I shut my eyes and try to see that cheering-section individually, but they have stuck together in a lump, like candy in a coat-pocket, like their fatal watchword—“Let’s stick together, kids.” In the blur I can pick out only one face, that of Josephine Hoey (pronounced “hooey”), their leader: glasses, pale eyes, pale lashes, skin the color of junket, fish mouth. When she laughs, she chortles; her fattish shoulders shake.