Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (49 page)

With the day girls it was different. For Tacoma, Annie Wright equaled Seattle’s St. Nicholas socially and gave a good education besides; it was the school to go to. Accordingly, our day girls were more glamorous than our boarders. Inevitably there were a few freaks among them, but mostly they were pretty and came from old families—the two Henrys, Elizabeth and Edith, “Baby” Griggs—or had a rich, important father—“El” Perkins’, for instance, a real rough diamond who owned the Tacoma newspaper—or were striking and exotic, like Wilhelmina and Marie-Louise Quevli, who looked like South Sea Islands beauties but whose father was a doctor and Danish. There were poetry-reading Elizabeth Hosmer, who was going to Stanford to study pre-med, and brainy, horsey Dorothy Walker, whose father was an army doctor at Fort Lewis. It was lucky we had the day girls to raise the social tone, even the darling little Catholic LaGasas in the lower school, whose stout mother wearing a vast mink coat took me to eleven o’clock Mass on Sunday—their father was a doctor, too.

That the Tacoma girls appeared to have more interesting parents than most of the others may have been related to the fact that Tacoma, the fief of the Weyerhauser timber family, was not only a lumber town but a port. Liners left for Japan and China and the Philippines and even for Liverpool and Glasgow, via the Suez Canal. The Seminary, which looked down on an arm of Puget Sound, was close to the railroad tracks (occasionally on our walks we saw hoboes) and to a paper mill smelling of rotten eggs (H2S, little Miss McKay said) when the wind was wrong. In comparison with Seattle, Tacoma was in decline, and this helped to give it an aristocratic air, as though it were the older city. Fort Lewis probably contributed, too, to the Old World feeling of Tacoma, and the fort, which still had some cavalry, no doubt explained the good riding-horses and delightful trails a short distance from the city. Our girls signed up for riding lessons (an extra) at Captain Proby’s riding-academy, but rough Captain Proby fell out of Miss Preston’s favor, and instead we went on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings to the stables of Major Mathews, a gentler English officer who had settled with his short-haired wife in our Northwest. They gave us tea and let us smoke when no chaperon accompanied us. Unlike Captain Proby, Major Mathews did not force us to ride in the ring. He let us explore the woodlands, passing by the shores of a little lake, where violets grew in the spring and where along the bank we sometimes saw iridescent water snakes that scared the horses. Once he dismounted and cut me a branch of flowering dogwood and once he used his hat to hold violets.

He taught us to post—we used an English saddle—and how to keep our mounts to a trot. Breaking from a trot into a canter was against the rules of horsemanship and showed that you were not in control of your animal. The right way was to go from a walk to a canter. You should take care not to let the horse have his head; sensing your inexperience, he could bolt. Sometimes a canter would turn into a gallop, but a riding-horse was not supposed to gallop—that was for cowboys on the plains. If a girl’s horse ran away with her, she was to throw the reins over his neck, but Major Mathews could be counted on to head him off if necessary.

One of the horses I rode—a bay—was a single-footer; according to Major Mathews, quite a few of our Northwestern horses were. It was a different gait, more like a rocking-horse. Another, a dappled gray named Bluebell, was a retired race horse, who neither trotted nor cantered but ran. If I recall right, Major Mathews said that was characteristic of a race horse—a long flying stride. I was never a very sure rider, although I loved it with passion, and he was careful of what horses he gave me. The Ford girls, coming from Montana, could be trusted on anything. But one of my horses had a mouth so tender that you could ride him on the snaffle, not using the curb at all.

The Mathewses themselves were mild English people fond of tea and reading. My hours of purest, most intense happiness at the Seminary were concentrated in Saturday-morning spring rides through the woods with another girl and Major Mathews: white-flowering dogwood, violets in thick carpets—purple and white—dark low-branching pines snatching at one’s hair (“Hyd Absalon thy gilte tresse clere”), and water snakes, blue, glossy green, and velvet black straight out of “The Ancient Mariner” slithering along the swampy edge of the little lake while the neighing horses reared. I cannot explain why no one was afraid. On the way back to school in the automobile (depending on the chaperon), Major or Mrs. Mathews would let us stop at a take-out place on the highway and have hot barbecue rolls.

There were a number of English influences playing on the Seminary, modifying the social climate, just as the Japanese current brought us mild winters. Not just Miss Hayward and the Mathewses and Miss Mackay. Of the two gardeners, who also tended the furnaces, as I said, one was a Yorkshireman, and the other, even more strangely spoken, a Lancashireman. I do not know whether this was policy on Miss Preston’s part, to promote a classy image of the Seminary or whether it merely corresponded to a demographic fact: in 1900, I see in the
Britannica,
the foreign-born population of Tacoma (11,032 out of a total of 37,714) included 1,534 English-Canadians and 1,323 English. The proximity of Vancouver and Victoria, in British Columbia, added a note of Englishness, too, audible in the speech of Puget Sound people, who have been spared the furry California accent (a contamination from the Middle West; my grandmother and great-aunts, born in San Francisco, were too old to have caught it). Our school library took
Punch
and
The Illustrated London News.
Our reading lists for English had no American classics that I remember—no
Moby-Dick
or
Scarlet Letter
—though maybe American literature would not have been found on any private secondary-school list then. Well, yes, there was Poe, but he was not considered to be classwork, and, for some reason, Ambrose Bierce—I remember Miss Hayward’s giving us “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

Certainly, on my own, I had started reading American poetry: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound (“The Ballad of the Goodly Fere”), Edna Millay, Conrad Aiken, E. A. Robinson, even Louis Untermeyer (“Jig to be Danced on the Grave of an Enemy”). But in class, until senior year, it was
The Idylls of the King
all the way. All this was a far cry from the true American taste evinced in my grandfather’s library. Of course it contained Dickens and Dumas and the Russians and Bulwer-Lytton, but for my grandfather, apart from these classics, good reading consisted of
Tom Sawyer,
a set of Frank Stockton, Bret Harte (a great favorite), and maybe Booth Tarkington. I doubt that he ever read Galsworthy or Bennett or Wells. To him
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927) was my grandmother’s library book.

The “Englishness” of Annie Wright was like a whiff of well-used Yardley’s lavender. You would not have found anything like it, I think, in the eastern schools of that time. Yet surely there was no intention on Miss Preston’s part to make snobs of us; she was strong on tradition, which she believed was vital to the morale of a school, and possibly to her mind a Yorkshire gardener and
Punch
were part of the school’s ivied personality, something for the girls to remember, like the Sunday-night sings in the Great Hall and macaroni-and-cheese (good) for Friday lunch and Wednesdays in Lent.

But the faculty, insofar as it was superior, was surely a wasteful luxury, however badly paid. The average Annie Wright parent was in no position to appreciate a Miss Ethel Mackay with her whistling false teeth. My grandfather, being a lawyer, and my friend Jean Eagleson’s father, an orthopedic surgeon, were exceptional—you had to have some education to practice those professions. But the average father, even when he had gone to the U and graduated (thanks to Spanish and business courses) belonged to the great mass of illiterates that knows how to read and write. That was why girls who got bored, like the heavy-lidded Ellin Watts, found a sympathetic ear at home.

Money and culture rarely mix. That was not a peculiarity of the recently settled Pacific Northwest. There is a universal law requiring (truly!) that 99% of the rich be retarded culturally. By and large, Seattle, as I remember it, was not a more uncultivated city than Waterbury, Connecticut (brass), but there was not so much
old
money in Seattle as in a comparable town back east. Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation. It buys and subscribes to magazines, which it does not read, supports symphony orchestras and art museums, sends its children to good schools, where they will make poor grades. That is all there is to it. As in Toqueville’s time, the brains of our country are located in the professional class—doctors, lawyers, teachers. Today that class has grown much bigger, but the increase in numbers has only made its members less distinct from the surrounding business society. In any case, poor Miss Preston. Even with the Episcopal Church behind her, she could not make superior education a marketable commodity in the state of Washington.

Our class shrank, like a wasting body, as it made its way through the classrooms up to graduation. One by one or in droves they left us: the tall trio from Spokane, Vachel Lindsay’s fat older niece, Ruth Williams of The Dalles, Hazel Trethewey, Scheilda Mae Libby, Imogene Brubaker, Bernice Galt … Roughly the best and the worst. And we gained only a roommate for me senior year—red-cheeked Marie Althen of Tacoma, adopted daughter of German-speaking Alsatian parents.

As our class ranks thinned after sophomore year and the glamorous seniors of the Class of ’27 graduated, I adapted myself to the thin rewards of reality. I became a success in the school while remaining darkly aware of how little that meant. Hopeless as an athlete (except for swimming and riding, which were neither of them team sports), I won fame as an actress. It turned out that I had a talent for being scary that was greatly relished by the lower school: my deep contralto recitation, with gestures, of “The Fall of the House of Usher” had the little ones shrieking and cowering in their seats in the gymnasium; a week or so later, as an encore, I gave them “A Cask of Amontillado.” Soon I was being cast as the star of any play our crazed elocution teacher (let go the next year) decided to put on. I remember best
The Son-Daughter,
an ancient David Belasco hit in which I played the motherless daughter of a “rejecting” Chinese mandarin (Dr. Dong Tong, acted by the impassive Hattie Connor) who had wanted a son. Togged out in a red watered-silk blouse with frogs (rented from a costume house) and black, Chinese-style trousers, I had an old amah for my confidante, and I can still hear my ecstatic final lines as I stood stage center on my dainty maimed feet: “Toy Yah! Toy Yah! He have call me his son-daughter!” Without wanting to be too sure of it, I guessed that the play was bad, whereas I knew, without having to be told by a teacher, without even thinking about it, that a Goldoni we did later was good. How? Was it because it was slightly boring in comparison?

I don’t remember what we did about my hair in
The Son-Daughter.
In other plays it was powdered with cornstarch to make it gray and tucked behind my ears if I was playing a male part. With my straight dark hair and severe profile, I made a rather convincing man, above all because I could deepen my voice. Normally I preferred to be the heroine, but I did not mind being cast as that great swaggerer Catiline when the Latin Club did Miss Mackay’s
Marcus Tullius.
I would not have wished to be Cicero’s pretty daughter, Tullia, still less Terentia, his wife. But all that was senior year and yet to come.

Junior year I threw myself into school politics. The big event was the election of a May Queen, in theory the most beautiful senior. In practice, beauty was not really the issue or not always. The whole school voted, except the primary grades and the teachers, and often it became a popularity contest, complicated by crushes and by feuding. It had not been a good idea of Miss Preston’s to divide the school into Blues and Greens, as in ancient Byzantium, for purposes of basketball rooting; in our junior year, the factions spilled over into the May Queen voting. The middle grades, it had been discovered, i.e., the sixth, seventh, and eighth, were the “swing vote,” so after lunch the girls from the upper school went to the lower classrooms to canvass for one candidate or the other—as in real politics, the choice had been narrowed to two.

That year (1928) in the outside world, adults were divided between Hoover and Al Smith—feelings were hot on both sides. My grandfather became very angry with Harold, who would be casting his first vote: “You mean to tell me that in
a national election
you plan to take the word of a sixteen-year-old girl against mine?” As a political veteran, leader of the liberal Republicans in the state senate, he was outraged all that summer that Harold was lending an ear to my anti-Hoover arguments. In our school May Queen tumult, naturally I had been a leading agitator. Indeed, without me, there would have been no tumult: Katie Urquhart, from Chehalis, would have had a vast majority. Her opponent, Margaret Carpenter, was my creature.

In beauty, they were evenly matched: neither had much claim. Maggie, who came from Cle Elum, had thick white, slightly pitted skin, dark-red hair, and a placid look. Katie was a thin, strange-looking girl with big flaring nostrils like those of a hungry animal on the scent of prey. We had been friends; it was I who had pushed her for May Queen, drawing converts to what was basically an unlikely cause. I had loved the “qu” in her name, which spoke to me of Highland blood, and I had looked up the Urquhart plaid (squares of dark green and pale green crossed by a bright red line) in the school library and may even have found Thomas Urquhart, translator of Rabelais. Her mother had been a Gamma Phi at the University with my mother and remembered beautiful, sweet Tess Preston. Then something happened, I have no idea what. But I turned on that girl with a vengeance and never forgave whatever it was she said or did. It was my idea to put up Maggie Carpenter against her, and every day as the campaign heated up I was in the middle-school classrooms, haranguing the sixth and seventh grades (the eighth was already won over) on how repellent Katie Urquhart really was—that sallow skin, those yellow eyes, those avid nose-holes, almost scary. I was boldly drawing on the capital of my Poe recitations. And our side won! I had discovered in myself a gift for politics and electioneering and tasted the thrill of power.