Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (63 page)

In her background, as in my Minneapolis experience, there had been plenty of old-fashioned cruelty-to-children—orphans in those days seemed to invite it, having no natural protectors. In Bishop’s case, as in mine, there had finally been a rescuer; hers was Aunt Maude, her mother’s sister. That year we took walks along the Pine Walk and talked of books and socialism (I was the conservative), but we never had a class together. The authors she spoke of were almost all new to me: Dorothy Richardson, Wyndham Lewis, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Sarah Orne Jewett. She was reading
Tender Buttons
by Gertrude Stein, and I was reading Rebecca West. I doubt that she was aware then that Sarah Orne Jewett had “a Boston marriage” (as such relations used to be called) with the wife of a publisher. Or was it already on the grapevine?

Bishop herself was interested—or earnestly trying to be—in a young man on the Cape with whom she went off on a boat that summer, in the company of Ev Huntington. Years later, I learned, she believed that I had put one of her own Boston marriages into
The Group.
I had not, but since she never told me of that unshakable conviction of hers, I could not deny it. When we saw each other, nothing was said of it, and I only learned of it—from Robert Lowell—not long before her death. I did not try to disabuse her mind in a letter and waited till I would see her, which never happened. Probably it was hopeless. Frani, without telling me, had already tried to persuade her that she was wrong; Lowell, too, I think. The day she died I had just mailed a letter to her, but on a purely literary subject—no reference, no hint of the “bone” lying between us.

Nor did I ever guess—what I was told during those years by a young male academic with a grudge against her, in an unsolicited communication—that she had me “on the brain.” There was a tin butterfly, he wrote, on the wall of her Boston apartment, in dark allusion to a story of mine, and she used to say of me, “Mary McCarthy? She’s an Irish Jew.” Well! I am sad about all that, but not very, since it does not affect my love for her work and her, too.

Now that I think of it, I am not sure that Bishop lived in Cushing during my junior year. If she had, what I am about to describe could scarcely have happened. I would have had someone that I belonged with to sit next to in the dining-room. Someone, that is, besides Frani, for I would not let myself depend too much on the beacon of that friendly little freckled face to send out welcome signals as I stood uncertainly in the doorway peering around. Lunches were all right—you were in a hurry between classes and just sat down at any vacant place—but dinner was something else. Luckily I cannot recall my sufferings as night after night I surveyed that noisy dining-room, where most of the tables were already filled. The Vassar system of “grouping” was almost fully operative by sophomore year: at the end of freshman year, you had chosen the girls you would live with and, if necessary, had changed halls accordingly. Thus most nights at the dinner-hour each table in the dining-hall was the preserve of a constituted group. If I did not see Frani from where I stood in the doorway (or there was no empty place beside her), I had nowhere, literally, to go. With Virginia in Waterbury already choosing her bridesmaids, I had no group; my friends in other halls (and by this time there were a few) all had groups of their own whom they ate with. And Frani, I had to remind myself, had other friends in Cushing—Clover Benson, for instance, with her fiddle.

That girls could invite girls from other dormitories and be invited to other dormitories themselves (or go to the Lodge, to the Popover, to Cary’s, even downtown to the Nelson House) was the saving element in the system. Not only could a loose end like me go elsewhere; others could, too, so that there would sometimes be vacant places here and there, where a non-insider could sit unchallenged. And that was how, Reader—gradually, very gradually—I came to join the group.

At their table, near the door, there was quite often an empty place. I suspect, thinking back, that it belonged to Kay McLean, a glowing dark girl from Detroit who was the slave of Mrs. Flanagan in DP (Dramatic Production); she was always building scenery and painting flats for “Hallie” and “Lester” (Mrs. Flanagan and Lester Lang, her assistant). Yes, it was Kay, I remember now, who toiled over those statues in the
Hippolytus.
For DP, she would gladly skip dinner night after night and go to Cary’s late for a sandwich with paint in her hair. In any case, quite often there would be this empty place.

At first I hardly knew any of these mostly rich and handsome girls to speak to, only the Sphinx of the smoking-room, the untalkative Nathalie Swan, and Julia Denison, who was in my Blake-to-Keats class. Bis Meyer, Eugene Meyer’s daughter, who had been one of them the year before, had sat next to me in Miss Snyder’s Narrative Writing (looking over my shoulder at the letters to John I was writing), but Bis had left to do a junior year in Munich. Another one I knew slightly was Maddie Aldrich, she of “a pissing-while” in Miss Sandison’s Shakespeare, but we had never talked, and I understood that she cared only about horses and hunting. Rosilla Hornblower I remembered by name unhappily from Davison in our freshman year. Of them all, the one I liked best was Julia Denison, who looked like Kay Francis in the movies and came from Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Her best friend was Dottie Newton, from West Newton, a suburb of Boston.

On nights when there was an empty place Julia would smile at me encouragingly as I surveyed the diners from the doorway. “Come on, sit with us,” she pantomimed, and the full-breasted, inscrutable Nathalie Swan, who looked like an Edwardian beauty in a corset, would nod a greeting. As it turned out, Nathalie and I, rather than Julia and I, were the ones to become close friends—Julia was inseparable from Dottie, while Nathalie was a loner; she planned to be a landscape architect and took Botany, Art, and Math. Since she liked to read and was Modernist in her tastes, from her corner in the smoking-room she eventually became friends with Frani and Bishop, too. She had a bored voice and a tremendously posh accent, the most so of all those débutantes who had gone to Chapin. Her mother and another young woman had founded the Junior League, which at the start was a social-service endeavor on the part of rich young women not wishing to be idle. Her mother, who had gone to Barnard, “kept up” with Einstein’s second field theory, Nathalie said dryly, on a note of deprecation. This odd, inarticulate girl, so much like a fashionable matron of his youth, greatly discombobulated Edmund Wilson when he met her. “She said she admired Gertrude Stein’s use of metaphor,” he reported with alarm, since the most notable feature of Miss Stein’s writing was precisely the lack of metaphors. I reflected. “She means paradox,” I decided, to his vast relief. At Vassar I was surprised to discover that Nathalie liked me.

Nonetheless the suspense of the dining-room went on for what seemed like months. Not every night, of course, for some nights I ate with Frani and Clover and sometimes I went to another dormitory or off campus. I did not want to abuse the privilege that group was according me. So sometimes I avoided the invitation in Julia’s eye (large and green like my flattering notion of my own) and went to find a seat at some inferior table far down the room. But bit by bit it came to be accepted that my place was
there,
with those select girls; nearly always there was a vacant seat—if it was not Kay painting flats, it was Maddie gone off hunting with a cousin, or Kelly, having supper with her little protégée, Tassie Gesell. I suppose there must have been a dispute among them about allowing me to become a fixture at their table, but they were too well bred to let me sense it.

Upstairs, as it happened, my room was on “their” corridor, almost opposite Nathalie’s—Frani was on the other side of the building. When we were not in the smoking-room playing bridge or pounce, I spent a lot of time in Nathalie’s untidy room (she wore a handsome mandarin coat that her aunt had brought her from Peking), talking till very late at night. I went to Julia’s room, too, but Julia tired easily—she was having some nervous disturbance that caused her pure olive skin to break out. It may have had something to do with her family’s losing their money; when I went to stay with her at Cape Elizabeth over Thanksgiving the following year, I found that they had no servants, so that family and guests all pitched in to make beds and wash dishes while Mrs. Denison, who was an intellectual, cooked and discoursed. Or did Mr. Denison cook and Mrs. Denison discourse? He was a Beaux Arts architect who no longer had clients. They treated the housework as “great fun”—New York society parlance to this day—which was not my attitude, though I threw myself into setting the table for breakfast with Chelsea ware. Like Frani’s mother, the Denisons had wonderful china, but Mrs. Denison at the head of the table did not go through the charade of washing the breakfast dishes at the table since there were no maids to bring her bowls of hot water and snowy linen towels.

But I am anticipating. Back in the Cushing smoking-room, it is still junior year, and it is then in the late spring without my knowledge that my life’s course is being decided. Room-drawing. Juniors drew numbers to determine what rooms they would get the next fall as seniors in Main. A low number was good. Frani and Clover and I had made up our minds to be a group of three and, to our amusement, our group drew quite a low number, which was wasted on us since we were only three and did not care where we lived. The nicest rooms were the suites in the two towers, but for those you had to be six or eight.

Meanwhile the group consisting of Julia, Dottie, Maddie, and so on had got a high number. This was sad for them because, being six, they had hoped to get one of the towers. In Cushing they had been seven, but Nathalie had decided to do her senior year at the Bauhaus in Germany, studying architecture. Six with a high number risked being strung out over the top floor of Main or even being separated. Hearing about our low number, the group woke up to the interest of making a deal with us. If they were to take two of us to “group” with them, using our low number, they could get the South Tower. The two towers were considered the most desirable because each tower was completely by itself, with the bedrooms opening off a common sitting-room and its own baths and toilets; of the two, the South was the nicest. Calculations were swiftly made. Two of us could join the group from Cushing, with whom I was friends anyway, and the third would live in the North Tower with a group of “achievers” that had a fairly low number but was lacking one member. In the event, that proved to be Frani, who had an “achiever” side herself, thanks to her mother, and so got along well with them. In our last year, then, Clover and I lived in single rooms opposite each other in the South Tower, while Frani, on the other side of Main, across the roofs, roomed with Alice Dodge in the North Tower.

The arrangement worried Miss Sandison. She was fond of Frani, and the association with the “achievers” seemed to bode ill. What could I do, she asked me, to counter the influence? It was pleasing to be consulted, begged even to help, as though the two of us would be saving Frani from the clutches of Satan, when it was the president of Students, the vice-president of Students, the president of the senior class, a hockey-playing stalwart of the Community Church, the editor of the
Vassar Review,
we were speaking of. No better example could be found of non-conformity as an intellectual principle than Miss Sandison’s lively fear of the corrupting potential of those squares. She dreaded what they might do to Frani’s integrity—I can hear the word pronounced in her pretty, fastidious voice—just as she was concerned over what Dr. Bowdler’s shade could do to the integrity of a Shakespearean text: Launce and his dog.

But what of me, Reader? Did nobody ever worry about the effect on a girl from the Northwest of exposure to the contagious disease of snobbery and the New York Social Register? Perhaps my teachers counted on the counter-influence of Johnsrud. Or else they considered that in my case the damage had already been done, the fat was in the fire,
alea jacta est.
But it may be, too, that, in their view, social ambition occurred too classically in literature to be regarded as greatly harmful, lying so very close, as it did, to the passion for excellence, beauty, fine ornament, and to the gift of worship. What English major was—or ought to be—free from the vice?

9

T
HAT SUMMER I
did not go home to Seattle. The summer before—after sophomore year—had been the last time, had I only known it. When I came back to Seattle after that, it was for visits, even if my grandmother continued to speak of “Mary’s room.” And the trains were different.

The trains were part of being a girl from the Northwest. It took nearly four days to cross the continent. Coming home from Vassar on the Lake Shore Limited or the Wolverine, you changed at Chicago for one of “our” trains—the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific. They took different routes, and I think they had different depots in Seattle. The one I liked best was the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, which was a bit like preferring Diderot, given the choice Voltaire-Diderot-Rousseau, or Turgenev, given the choice Turgenev-Dostoevsky-Tolstoy. I loved its route, midway between the other two; for nearly a day it followed the course of the Missouri, so that out the window you could watch the great river’s story unroll from its source as a “forks” or confluence of three Rocky Mountain streams, to its union with other streams—the Milk? the Platte?—even if you had to miss its final glorious meeting with the Mississippi above St. Louis.