Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (51 page)

I do not know whether it was this episode—a creeping fear, that is, of being punished for it, she as perpetrator and I as accomplice—that inspired us to run away. I do not even remember how soon the one followed on the other. And after all what rule had she broken? The dress was her own property, so that she ought to have been free to hack it to pieces. And yet it had been a sort of murder; I felt it myself then, silently watching her. Probably it was the first sign of an attack of hysteria that would come to a pitch, for her at least, in our leaving.

For years I forgot about Molly and the dress. Then, fifty years later, the cut-up dress and the pinking shears surfaced, as if regurgitated, in a novel I was writing. In
Cannibals and Missionaries
one young woman remembers of another that in school on a Sunday afternoon she had cut up her clothes “in a fit of misery and boredom while her roommate looked on.” In the novel the school is Putney.

I think we finally took the interurban to Seattle. By the time we reached there, we had been missing all day. I doubt that Molly was still with me when I arrived at 712 35th Avenue. Maybe we had telephoned from downtown. My grandfather was home from the office, and I learned that our cases had already been separated administratively. Harold Preston and Adelaide B. Preston (who considered themselves cousins, descended from a pair of brothers who had emigrated in the eighteenth century, one to western Massachusetts and the other, my grandfather’s forebear, to what is now Vermont) had been conferring by long distance and agreed that Molly, when found, was to be expelled forthwith. But I was suspended “till I could get a better attitude.”

To the family, I managed a pert little laugh and “How am I supposed to do
that
?”
but privately I estimated that it would take me three days, sleeping late in my own room and eating Lavinia’s cooking. More than that would be boring. On the fourth morning I could announce a change of attitude and be driven back to school. I reflected on what fools older people were. But it occurs to me as I write this that Miss Preston, who probably knew girls better than I knew adults, had counted on my absence to last just that length of time, not so long as to affect my schoolwork and not so short as to let my classmates feel that I was getting off too easy. “Well, Cousin Mary!” she said approvingly, on the prodigal’s return, taking me onto her slippery lap.

At home, during my “suspension,” I was not scolded or lectured. If my grandmother did not take me with her on her daily prowls through Frederick’s and Magnin’s, it must have been to avoid questions as to why I wasn’t in school. She was ashamed for me, I guess, while I was feeling—or acting—boastful. It must have been aggravating, as people said then, for her to hear me repeat that sentence about my attitude and follow it with that short, sarcastic laugh. But I did show one sign of repentance or at least of a sense of the fitting: I did not ask to go to the movies.

In the long run my exile and rapid restoration did teach me a lesson, if not the one intended. I learned the utility of high marks. Wild horses, needless to say, could not have got Miss Preston to expel a junior with a straight A and A+ record (I had not yet hit Advanced Algebra and the binominal theorem) who was going to go east to college carrying Annie Wright’s name with her. I had not realized that when I “ran away.” I had thought that except for a miracle I would be kicked out. Now I knew, and knew, too, that I was getting a first real taste of unfairness. I was glad not to be expelled and sorry as well—nobody really likes to be the beneficiary of a flagrant injustice. Miss Preston doubtless argued that I had been led astray by the Haynes girl, and it was true that the idea had been hers. But it was unlike me, as Miss Preston herself pointed out, shifting my weight on her lap, to have followed Molly’s lead. I don’t know the reason. Simple boredom maybe. Maybe, weary of my successes, I really wanted to get kicked out of school for a change and so was disappointed when instead they killed the fatted calf—one wonders about the Prodigal Son’s true feelings. Still, even if I was tired of school and myself in it, could I actually have wished to try being a wild, crazy person like Molly? Most likely, I was just being companionable, which was a good side of my character.

I never saw Molly again. I never knew whether her remaining clothes were packed up by the house-mother and sent to her or whether her family came and got them. Before long, all the Hayneses were quietly withdrawn, and no further word was heard of them. The “pool” from which the Seminary drew was so large geographically and socially that it was common for girls who left (even a Pauline Paulsen!) to drop totally out of sight.

At any rate Molly’s fate was sad to think about. It was evident that she was a white blackbird at the Seminary and so, one way or another, would have managed to get herself expelled; in school, character
is
fate. Still, I did not like what the episode showed me. Although a rebel, I did not care to picture authority as weak, putty in my hands, and so on. For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer. I preferred to see Miss Preston as fair and just rather than as a principal who could be bought with good marks. I would find the same problem with Dean Thompson at Vassar.

At the time we ran away, Molly and I may in fact have been the least of Miss Preston’s worries. Every girl in the boarding department was uncomfortably aware of Miss Preston’s sister, a person totally unlike Miss Preston who had appeared in our midst in the fall of junior year. Her name was Mrs. Blanche P. Johnson, and she was a widow, grass or sod. The school function assigned to her was vague, mainly connected with the infirmary, but at times she was given the duties of house-mother.

Except for a large bust, Mrs. Johnson was a most un-motherly person—a tall fat painted overdressed woman decked out in trailing chiffons, large swaying bobbles of “costume” earrings, bracelets, rings, beads, small handkerchiefs drenched in Toujours Moi perfume. Everything about her joggled and jiggled, even the pouches under her eyes when she laughed.

She was the opposite of Miss Preston in her structure and in almost every other respect. Mrs. Johnson was highly talkative, too confidential with some of the seniors; Miss Preston was terse. Mrs. Johnson was tall; Miss Preston was short, and the fat she carried, unlike her sister’s, was solid and corseted. In Miss Preston’s broad, compact face, the long nose and level dark eyes rather suggested a piglet; Mrs. Johnson was a “cow.” Despite her garrulous tongue Mrs. Johnson gave us the impression of being loaded with secrets, like a chocolate box with a false bottom, while, behind the hedge of her taciturnity, Miss Preston, I think, consistently tried to be open and aboveboard with girls and parents. Her tastes and prejudices were all known to us; indeed, they were buckled onto her personality like old-fashioned jet ornaments. Her disapproval of fountain pens, her favorite hymn (117 in the hymnal, Bunyan’s “He who would valiant be,” posted on most Fridays), her favorite carol (“A Virgin Unspotted,” distributed in hectograph, not in the hymnal), her favorite anthem (“For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth”). We knew that she was partial to whole-wheat-bread sandwiches and to a macaroni-and-cheese casserole and that the dessert she thought girls liked best was chocolate ice-cream with marshmallow sauce.

She had a deep, vibrant voice, and to hear her intone the General Confession night after night (“We have left undone … And we have done … And there is no health in us”) struck responsive chords throughout the still chapel. She was an emotional woman, and her sentimental history was an open book to more than a decade of Annie Wright girls: she had obviously been in love with Bishop Keator, whose large portrait, seated, in white lawn and episcopal purple—rochet and chimer—hung over the big stone fireplace in the Great Hall. If she wept on Fridays when we sang 117, it was because Bunyan’s hymn had been his favorite, too.

From his demi-profile portrait, he must have been a handsome man, dark-eyed, ruddy, dynamic, graying, with a Celtic look about him. He and Miss Preston had created the Seminary almost
ab ovo.
He had found her, teaching, somewhere in the East and brought her out west to be principal when the school was still in the gaunt old firetrap building, full of rats, that went back to Bishop Paddock. He and Miss Preston had dreamed the new school together, choosing the site (in Old Tacoma, high over Commencement Bay), studying blueprints, finding the architect, the landscape gardener, picking the hedge material and the creeper to festoon the Tudor-style buildings, getting advice on swimming pools. In those days Tacoma was diocesan headquarters, and the magnetic bishop had his office in the old school, down the hall from Miss Preston’s obviously, all through the time of building. When the new school finally opened, in 1924, they had been together eleven years.

In my time, his widow, a tall sweet-voiced, gray-eyed woman, taught us Sacred Study and led the choir. Whenever in the course of a homily Miss Preston at the lectern mentioned Bishop Keator’s name, out would come her handkerchief to mop up the tears running down her broad cheeks. Sometimes, as she continued to sniff, we girls stole looks at Mrs. Keator dry-eyed in her place in the choir; there was never a sign of emotion on her beautiful calm face. It was hard to know what to make of this. Did Miss Preston cry because he had been her lover or because he hadn’t? Either way, she certainly gave the appearance of grieving for him as if she were his widow and the Seminary their child.

Like so many things at the Seminary, Miss Preston’s tears were
unfailing
at the mention of the bishop’s name. In our class we had a girl by the name of Frances Ankeny who was exactly the same; only what set
her
waterworks going was the song “Juanita.” As it happened, that was one of Miss Preston’s favorites for the Sunday-evening sings we often had after high tea in the Great Hall. But our principal had not noticed that whenever the piano tuned up with “Far o’er the fountain,” Frances would start crying. Like other mischievous and observant girls, I
had,
and if, on some particular evening, it looked as if Miss Preston were going to forget “Juanita” or had decided that “Santa Lucia” sufficed, I would ask if we couldn’t have it, please. I believe it was pure, disinterested cruelty that prompted me—a vivisectionist inclination such as causes boys to tear the wings off flies. The fact that this girl’s grandfather, Levi P. Ankeny of Walla Walla, had defeated my grandfather early in the century in a race for the U.S. Senate would not have played any part.

“Gladly the cross I bear”—Mrs. Johnson was Miss Preston’s. What caused her to bear it gladly, or at least to dourly embrace it, we had no way of knowing. It appeared as if Mrs. J. had fallen on evil days—all her jewelry was costume—while a number of things about her suggested that she had once been a nurse. Her large, soft, somewhat pendulous body looked at home in the white nurse’s uniform she wore when for a few weeks she actually took over the infirmary. She was conversant with a great many diseases and their remedies. And, at least in our part of the world, the nursing profession was not made up of Florence Nightingales—at fifteen, thanks to Harold and his friends, I was well aware of the reputation nurses had. But if Mrs. Johnson was down on her luck and Miss Preston was “tiding her over,” the motive remained obscure. Given Miss Preston’s upright and open character, it would hardly have been blackmail. The two ate together at the small round table where Miss Preston had once throned it alone, but our poor principal spoke charily. They seemed to have no history in common beyond a surname that lingered as a vestigial trace in the “P.” of “Mrs. Blanche P. Johnston,” so listed—note the “t” suddenly materializing—in the school catalogue.

Of course it was wrong to infer that she had been a loose woman. We had never even seen her smoke a cigarette or smelled liquor on her breath. The most we could be sure of was that her hair was tinted; you could tell by the gray at the roots. But just watching the pair of them in the dining-room made us feel that the difference between them was more striking than it should have been. It told against her. The verdict on which all could agree was that Mrs. “Johnston” was common. Among a little circle of Annie Wright girls of that time a snobby game was played to decide who was common and who was vulgar. Somebody (I suspect myself) thought you could make it more interesting by decreeing that vulgar (e.g., Al Smith) was better than common (e.g., Mrs. William Randolph Hearst). Vulgar was frankly plebeian, and common was cheap middle class. So if we had pronounced Mrs. J. vulgar, she would have scored higher in our books.

I thought Mrs. Blanche “Johnston” was awful, starting with her name. But the subject did not much interest me. If asked, I might have said that it was common to discuss her so often. Obviously Miss Preston had brought her to the school from a sense of duty, and we were making it harder for her by our attitude. Our watchful eyes were fixed on them in the dining-room, especially when Miss Preston was entertaining some diocesan dignitary. In the infirmary, we noted Mrs. Johnson’s white nurse’s shoes. It went without saying that parents coming to visit the school at Founder’s Day or Field Day would make a point of looking her over, remarking the tinted hair and matching gold-rimmed glasses, the jiggling earrings and the cleft too visible in her flouncy chiffon neckline. And on her side, naturally, Mrs. J. would talk an arm off them. Not that our parents, by and large, were in a position to judge. Many of them had huge beams in their own eyes, even in the matter of dress. But all the more reason, then, for our principal’s sister to be above reproach. A judicious parent like my grandfather, a true admirer of Miss Preston as woman and educator, might well have advised her to “space” her sister’s visits to the school.

To have opened the subject with a teacher was unthinkable unless we wanted to get a reprimand. Most of us, seeing Miss Preston’s tight lips and set jaw as she sat facing her sister at table, expected that somehow she would manage so that Mrs. J. would not return in the fall. Like the Haynes clan, like Vachel Lindsay’s other niece, and, alas, like Hattie Connor, she would be leaving us, and nobody would be discussing her any more. So convinced was I of this thesis that I ventured to name her that summer to Miss Mackay while we did Caesar in Seattle. But Miss Mackay denied any knowledge of Mrs. Johnson’s plans and redirected my attention to our text. And sure enough, when school reopened in September, and the entry hall was full of new girls, returning girls, parents, the first sight that met our eyes was Mrs. Johnson herself on the staircase, effusive, with bells on, a reception committee in one person offering her rouged cheek to be kissed. This fall, she told us with a broad wink, we seniors would be coming to her to be excused from athletics. In other words, when we had the curse. By good luck the allusion passed over the head of my grandfather, who probably had forgotten that girls had periods. With a handshake for Miss Preston and a nod to my friend Jean Eagleson, my grandmother gave me her own rouged cheek; we said good-bye.