Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (52 page)

6

S
EATTLE IS OFTEN COMPARED
to San Francisco. It is spread out on hills (First Hill, Capitol Hill, Second Hill, Queen Anne Hill, all told the Roman seven, though some have been leveled) and ringed almost entirely by water (Elliott Bay, Lake Union, Green Lake, Lake Washington, the canal). It has cable cars, Orientals, a skid row, and a Bohemia. The University district, across the canal from the city proper, matches Berkeley, across the Bay Bridge. Both cities grew rich on a gold rush (my grandmother’s father, described as a “broker,” was a forty-niner in San Francisco); the Klondike came in 1897, when my grandmother and her sisters were already matrons in Seattle.

Both were ports trading with Japan, China, the Philippines, Hawaii; both harbored a White Russian population, mainly from Harbin in Siberia. Each had had a famous fire. The climates are similar, mild, without a real winter but with plenty of rain—good for the complexion. As a natural wonder San Francisco has the Golden Gate. Seattle has Mount Rainier. Both have good things to eat, in restaurants and on home tables. Seattle’s are Dungeness crabs and little Olympia oysters and Columbia River salmon; San Francisco’s are sourdough bread and abalone. Both are “wide open” towns—ships in the harbor, sailors in the streets; in my time Seattle had loggers and trappers, too. Both had smart shops, jewelers, furriers, well-dressed women. My grandmother, well off but not rich, owned six fur coats: a mink, a squirrel, a broadtail, a caracul, a moleskin, a Persian lamb, besides a skunk jacket and a suit with copious monkey trim.

Compared to San Francisco, Seattle was hardly cosmopolitan. Yet we had our own new smart hotel, the Olympic, with a palm court and violins playing at tea-time; we had theatres besides the Henry Duffy stock company—at the Moore, in 1907, Laurette Taylor had got her start, playing regular leads. We had the Ladies’ Musical Club (with Aunt Rosie as its dynamo), the Seattle Symphony, and, soon to come, “Symphonies under the Stars” in the University stadium (copying the Lewisohn in New York), with Michel Piastro, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, conducting. My grandmother, who played the piano but liked her comfort, objected to the cold nights and stone seats. I went with a new friend named Evelyn Younggren (Swedish father, Italian mother, fair silky hair, dark-brown eyes, cloak of soft gray wool buttoning up to the small chin, whose poetic looks I never forgot and borrowed for the heroine of a novel). Under the brilliantly lit skies, I first heard the words “Scarlatti,” “saraband,” “Couperin,” and classical music became romantic to my tone-deaf ear. It was a change from “Valencia,” played over and over on the family phonograph, even though I did not follow a single sound the orchestra made, apart from an occasional resemblance to the Gregorian chant I remembered from church. For that reason, surely, I liked early music better than the three B’s—“You’re in modality, not in tonality,” a musician friend told me later, at Vassar.

Our city also had the Cornish School, run by old Miss Nellie Cornish, where Mark Tobey taught painting and Maurice Browne and his wife, Ellen Van Volkenburgh, pioneers of “serious” drama, directed the theatre. Like San Francisco, we had a Chinese Opera. We had the Pike Street Market, with stalls of Japanese truck-gardeners and bright colored stands of fish from river, lake, and sea, and open-air shops of Far Eastern merchandise—crystals, kimonos, incense-burners, fans. And we had more Jews (a “cosmopolitan element,”
vide
Hitler and Stalin) than you would find in South Bend, Indiana. Yet our only poet, as far as I knew, was a child prodigy named Audrey Wurdeman, the daughter (I think) of an army colonel; this girl, no older than I, was
published,
with her picture (not bad-looking) in the paper.

In my mind, Seattle’s Bohemia was identified geographically with Queen Anne Hill, the highest part of the city, formerly a “good” neighborhood with large old frame houses painted in dark colors and looming up from overgrown yards. It looked down on Elliott Bay. My grandparents’ pale-gray house was in Madrona, between Cherry and Columbia, looking out across the Lake toward Fuji-like Mount Rainier. In front we still had a carriage block engraved “1893,” where the horses used to be drawn up to the curb. On the street side, to the left of the front door a narrow porch wound around toward the rear, and on the right there was a swelling bay window two stories high containing on the ground floor an étagère full of Tiffany glass. In back there were a wide porch and two grass terraces going past the rose beds and corn and peas and asparagus and artichokes down to where the red currants grew. Despite my tenure in this paradise, where ice-cream was churned every Sunday morning on the kitchen porch, where my grandmother’s pearl-gray electric was charged every night in the stately garage (until she got the Chrysler), where you could watch the crew races on the lake from the third-floor sleeping-porch outside the maid’s bathroom, restlessness had set me to exploring, by foot, streetcar, and cable car all the far-flung districts of Seattle, from Alki Point to Laurelhurst to Seward Park. And I longed to “come from” Queen Anne Hill.

Not Mount Baker, where my grandfather’s partner Mr. Thorgrimson had a new house and a lot of tulips, not Broadmoor, a development centered on a new golf club attractive to successful automobile dealers among the “young marrieds,” not The Highlands (Jimmy Agen) next to the Seattle Golf Club, not even that green point of land near the Tennis Club—the old Alexander place, they called it—where, beside a tall poplar, a weeping willow bent over the Lake. No; Queen Anne Hill. A few “early settler” girls from the Sacred Heart (was one of them Eugenia McClellan?) had their houses there, I remembered, but I did not know where. On a dismal afternoon, procuring a transfer, I would take the long streetcar ride up the steep grade just to look at the secretive, half-run-down neighborhood, which had scarcely a soul on the sidewalks; you could not see in the windows, boarded up or with drawn shades or set back behind rambling porches, vines, once-ornamental shrubbery. They said that it was up here that the White Russians lived, but I am not sure it was true.

It was through Ted Rosenberg, herself very much a plains-dweller, that I penetrated this terrain. She had managed to get herself introduced to a person who lived there, the fabled Czerna Wilson, known to all Seattle by rumor, Ted assured me. She was married to Carl Wilson, a classmate at the University of my uncle Frank and owner of the Archway Bookstore, a big dusty downtown place that I turned up my nose at but that had belonged to his father and was probably the oldest in town. Ted thought that Carl might be a fraternity brother of Frank’s. Frank would certainly have heard of Czerna and so would my aunt Rosie, as an intellectual. She was not sure about my grandmother, since Czerna was hard to meet unless she had a reason for wanting to know the person. You would never see her, it seemed, in a place like Frederick’s tea-room; she never went out—people were brought to her, just like in a European capital. In fact, Czerna was Czech, or believed to be. But no one really knew how or when she had come to Seattle or where little Carl Wilson had found her. There was a feeling that she had had a profession, such as dancer, before. As a young officer, Carl (unlike my uncle Frank, who never got out of training-camp) might have made it overseas and found her at the end of the war, when the Austrian Empire was falling to pieces—she might have danced or sung in a night club.

By the time I met her, I already knew a good deal about her, thanks to Ted, who was excited by her. According to Ted, she did nothing but read advanced books and lie on the floor of her living-room when “receiving,” which was morning, noon, and night. It was the equivalent, for Seattle, of a salon—the first time, I think, that I had heard that notion aired; we would not have got that far yet in French. For some reason, even before meeting Czerna, I was slightly curious about her husband. Ted said that he stayed away from home generally when she received, implying, I supposed, disapproval of something. Still, as a bookstore owner, he must have had one foot in Bohemia, the other being in textbooks.

Let me describe how she appeared to a sixteen-year-old girl. I wrote a description of her, I remember, for my English class that fall. She had thick, almost negroid lips, ashy skin, green eyes, and bronze-colored hair that she wore in a heavy pigtail going down her back to her hips. She was not beautiful but she looked erotic and dangerous. It was her slow, lazy movements, matching a slow, lazy voice, which, I now realize, had no Central Europe in its accent. Could she have been an octoroon, I wonder, and “Czerna” an assumed name, drawn, say, from Czerny piano exercises, which every beginner knows about?

Lying on her cushions on her floor, with her bronze pigtail beside her or under her strong, straight spine, she was not fat but she was solid; her waist was thick, like her lips, like her braid. From my present perspective, I cannot guess her age, but probably she was “old”—thirty, if she was contemporary with my uncle. The marriage with Carl was not new, although they had no children.

The first time Ted took me to see her, it was in the morning, the summer after junior year at Annie Wright. I never learned what qualifications Ted had offered on my behalf—possibly my “story,” orphanhood, my beautiful mother, my grandmother, and the rest. It was ten or eleven o’clock, but Czerna was still in bed, a low, wide, couch-like affair, in a big living-room like a studio, rather bare but containing scatter rugs, throws, and books. Volumes on thick paper of Pierre Loüys—
The Songs of Bilitis
and doubtless
Aphrodite
—with appropriate nude lithographs were lying about. I failed to realize how daring that was, confusing the turn-of-the-century male Sapphic with the author of
Pêcheur d’Islande
(Pierre Loti) whom we had just been having in French at the Seminary.

Next to Czerna in the bed was a pale, sharp-nosed, blue-eyed Jewish girl, thin and quite a lot younger and named, as I remember, Florence. After a little while, this Florence, a University student, apparently, who had a rather acid personality, got up without a word and went into a smaller room. If I recall right, she had nothing on and was flat-chested. As she dressed in the smaller room (sweater and skirt?), she kept throwing ironical remarks into our conversation. I had the impression that she disliked me, but maybe it was Ted. Perhaps she merely disliked our intrusion. Czerna, on the contrary, who now rose and put on a bathrobe, seemed amused by being “caught” with Florence or by having Florence “caught” with her; she was the indolent, experienced woman, and Florence was the thin-bodied boy, with eyes like ice.

Without Ted’s actually telling me, I had understood with promptitude that these women were lesbians. We had a case like that in the class below ours in school. At sixteen or nearly, unlike Ted, who was thrilled, I think, by the evidence we saw, I retained my cool. I was not interested in being a lesbian myself, having been groped more than once by hairy girls who had had me to stay the night. My heart was set on men and boys. Sex and love and social conquest were inseparably wedded in my mind with men, even though the male organs were far from beauteous in my eyes. But I was attracted to Czerna aesthetically, as a superb foreign object, as a possibility of what one might become, with resolution.

She was the most sophisticated person I had yet been exposed to. Yet there was no sign of pose or forcing. My memory of her is made up of a few strong, central images, without much detail to fill them out. I see curls of smoke lazily exhaled by her broad nostrils, but I cannot remember what cigarettes she smoked, whether she used a holder, or whether in fact they were small cigars she puffed at, like Amy Lowell. In school that spring, after lights out, sitting on my window sill, I had been trying to teach myself to inhale and would get so dizzy in the process that I feared I would fall out. At the same time I was trying to settle on “my” brand of cigarette. When I eventually hit, that fall, on Marlboros, the ivory-tipped kind, was I copying Czerna? Looking back, I would say that she was more a Melanchrino type. I was forming my persona with such little touches, like the Greek “e”s and tall, scroll-like capital “M”s of my handwriting, which I still have. But what personalizing touches, if any, I took from Czerna I now forget. It was her insouciance, above all, that I would have wanted to imitate. I certainly did not want to have a man like little Carl Wilson for my husband; it was too high a price to pay for a free hand.

I do not know how many times I went with Ted to Czerna Wilson’s house on Queen Anne Hill. Enough to have seen her in several changes of costume. There was a long close-fitting garment of the kind later called a hostess-gown, maybe several of these, and then I remember at least once finding her dressed to go out—in a soft beige suit with a flaring back that resembled a lady’s riding-habit; her braid was done up in a chignon under a small hat, and there was a frilled blouse. The conversation was always about books and art: Aubrey Beardsley, Pierre Loüys, Robinson Jeffers. Yes, Jeffers, above all:
Tamar, Roan Stallion, The Tower Beyond Tragedy.
Though the author in his picture did not look much like an “urning,” his themes were phallic, elemental, incestuous, sodomitical, and he lived in a tower in Carmel. For me, he was a taste, like olives, gladly shed a few years later when Edmund Wilson told me that he was a false prophet. Whatever else I may have learned from Czerna I have banished from my mind except the interesting word “cunnilingus.”