Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (65 page)

Then there was
Blow, Whistles,
by Sarah Atherton, a Bryn Mawr woman in her early forties who was the daughter of a Pennsylvania mine operator. John had helped her adapt it from a factory novel she had published called
Blow Whistles, Blow.
She was a hospitable person who lived in South Norwalk with her husband, Luther Bridgeman, a telephone-company executive. Both these well-meaning, high-minded people thought the world of John and often had him out to stay. Mrs. Bridgeman was trying to escape from her class and did her own cooking; it was from her that I learned how to be sure your egg whites are stiff enough for a puffy omelet or a soufflé: invert the bowl, and if they don’t slide, they are ready. I still use that test (better than the one where you drop a whole egg on the surface; if it doesn’t sink, they are OK), and think of her while I do it—that is immortality. And I have passed the torch on to younger people who don’t use a mixer.

Among the actors that summer I remember Richard Whorf, who in the theatre was like a utility infielder in baseball—he could do anything from painting scenery to writing scripts. And it was that summer, I think, that John first worked with Lloyd Nolan, a wonderful actor. And there was Joanna Roos, who had been with John in
Uncle Vanya,
playing Sonia; Joanna’s much older husband, Edward Rickett, a church organist, was the collaborator of W. S. Gilbert after Sullivan’s death.

Most of the company lived in dormitories—a converted barn and stables on the Vanderlip property. Rehearsing next week’s play while this week’s was playing got everybody on edge. And because of rehearsing late, John usually stayed over; he had a bed with the Sherwoods in the gatehouse. But then he would stay up drinking with his younger brother, Byron, whom he had brought on to help out. Though Byron planned to be a newspaperman, he could drive a car to meet trains, move furniture, hold the prompt book, and hear actors who needed it in their lines. He was a smallish, sandy person with a sharp nose and reddish-brown eyes; the mother’s Irish blood had come out in him, and his favorite word was “cock-eyed.” He and John drank a lot and sometimes Byron fought with him. I knew about it because Kay McLean, my classmate, had landed a job as a stagehand with the company, moving and painting flats; she and Byron were having some kind of love affair—what it amounted to in those dormitory conditions John and I could not tell. After the first weekend, when John and I had quarreled coming up the Hudson in a friend’s erratic motorboat, I tried to keep out of his way and not make any demands, even though I had stayed in the East for the sole purpose of being with him. I spent Saturdays with him, coming up by train, seeing the play, discussing it, and going back to New York the next morning.

I had a job. I had guessed that my grandparents would let me spend the summer in the East if I found some work that paid a little and was connected with the arts; hence I jumped at the chance offered me by the theatre’s publicity agent, a friendly girl from Cleveland named Terry. She introduced me to E. J. Rousuck, an art dealer, also from Cleveland, who agreed to hire me as a secretary for eleven dollars a week. What Terry did not say—did she know?—was that the Carleton Gallery, where I would be working, specialized in dog paintings. I found a cheap room in a brownstone house in the East 6o’s belonging to the parents of a classmate; several other Vassar girls were camping out there, too.

Thanks to my grandfather’s foresight, I knew how to type, and my lack of shorthand made no difference to Mr. Rousuck. Instead of taking dictation from him, I wrote our letters myself directly onto the typewriter. Mainly these were letters inviting people to have their dogs painted by an English sporting artist, Maud Earl, who also did Chinese silk screens of birds and flowers which we were empowered to offer, too. Miss Earl, who was close to eighty and a celebrity in her field, got a good likeness of the poor animals we sent up to her apartment from our gallery whenever one arrived by Railway Express, in a cage, barking furiously and usually—we could tell—unfed.

We also sent out letters describing already painted paintings of dogs—nineteenth-century oils, usually pointers and setters posed in profile—and once in a while a horse painting of some famous steed or of mares and foals. For a few days (on consignment) we had a Remington bronze for sale. We did not handle cats.

Mr. Rousuck was a dog fancier and had once had a kennels, where he raised Boston bull terriers; he was the author of a book, the classic, on the Boston bull terrier, which, as became clear to me, he could not have written himself. An old lame sporting Englishman by the name of Freeman Lloyd who wrote for
Field and Stream
had been Mr. Rousuck’s “ghost” before I entered the picture. He could describe the fine points of an animal in technical language; he knew pedigrees and blood lines and the folk lore of turf and field, while I was barely learning to say “dog fanciers” rather than “dog lovers” in my letters. But Mr. Rousuck, while appreciating all this, preferred to have me as his scribe. He had concluded that Freeman Lloyd knew about dogs and horseflesh, but that I wrote a better letter. Perhaps there came days when he would have liked to “cross” us.

A third kind of “missive” to prospective clients (not “customers”) went out under the Carleton Gallery letterhead over E. J. Rousuck’s signature. That was our art-as-investment letter, combined with a general invitation to visit our gallery: “In these times art is a peerless investment, and above all sporting art, which is only now coming to be regarded with due seriousness by connoisseurs of the brush and can still be bought advantageously by those in the know. Do drop in and let me show you, among other treasures, a delightful sporting primitive by the eighteenth-century master, Seymour.” These letters went out to Paul Mellon, John Schiff, Mrs. Hartley Dodge, Ambrose Clark, William Woodward, Walter Jeffords, et al. Apparently some of the recipients actually read them, for now and then a client would “drop in.”

“Gallery” was a funny name for our place of business, which consisted of three rooms on a high floor of an office building—the French Building on 46th Street and Fifth Avenue (I never knew where “Carleton” came from, perhaps from a misspelling of “Ritz Carlton”). The first room, hung with red velvet, was the gallery proper, where our few paintings were displayed. Behind that was a back room, also velvet hung, where Mr. Rousuck received customers and allies. To one side was my little office, in which, if we were lucky, a dog was confined, waiting to be taken up to Maud Earl’s apartment to “sit.” Elliott, a young black man whose job was to move pictures around, mostly stayed in the office with me. It was too bad that I had a phobia about dogs, having been rolled down a snowbank in Minneapolis by a big one when I was small: if Elliott or Mr. Rousuck let the dog we were boarding out of its cage, I could not keep myself from jumping onto the desk until someone caught it and put it back in. In addition to Mr. Rousuck, Elliott, the transient dog, long-staying visitors such as Freeman Lloyd, a dealer called Nick Aquavella and another called Du Vannes, there was Mr. Rousuck’s red-haired mistress, “Cissy” Bozack, from Scranton, Pennsylvania, whom we often had with us, too. Cissy was well fixed but she drank—her husband had met his end by diving drunk one morning into an empty swimming pool.

Mr. Rousuck, I discovered, sometimes slept in the gallery, on the velvet-covered couch where he showed paintings to clients. This was probably when he had been locked out of a hotel room for non-payment of rent. Now and then, I gathered, he would sleep at Cissy’s but did not like to because of her drinking. I suppose that she lent him money to make sure that he ate when he was by himself. It was not a situation in which I could hope to collect my salary; I forget how many weeks he was behind with it, and now and then he borrowed a little money from me. In my opinion, the most imperative thing was that he pay Elliott, which he sometimes did, probably as often as he could. We all, including Elliott, lived in terror of a visit from the city marshal, who might try to hold a sale of the property to collect some unpaid bill. But he appeared only once that August, while Mr. Rousuck was out, and I managed by my tears (unfeigned) to send him away, thus rendering myself invaluable.

The friendship with Mannie (Emmanuel) Rousuck (“Jay” later on, to his social friends; the surname was pronounced like Russeks department store) lasted till he died, in 1970. It even weathered my putting him in a book and his making motions to sue me unless I changed the text. I did, with his assistance, but of course not enough to disguise him from other dealers, who were not deceived by seeing our Maud Earls changed into crystal cuff-links with miniature likenesses of dogs in them. By that time, his gift for salesmanship had inspired a series of important firms to take him on. In the end (I hope) he forgave me, which was large of him. He told me long after how he did it: “I said to myself, ‘If I am not man enough … ’”

I kept on writing letters for him long after I was a professional author: he would send paintings up for me to look at in Wellfleet or wherever I was living, and the delivery boy (a Jewish Elliott, better paid) would wait for me to write my description before taking them back to the gallery—which, after being Ehrich Newhouse, Newhouse, Scott & Fowles (“E. J. Rousuck, Proprietor”), eventually became Wildenstein’s. Over the years the works of art I wrote about increased in value, although he never sent me a Rembrandt, even a debatable one. Apart from the letters, I did brochures and catalogues signed with his name for shows of Fantin Latour, Ben Marshall, Stubbs, Munnings, perhaps Augustus John, and others I forget.

Edmund Wilson always said that it was my “outlaw side” that was appealed to by Mannie. Perhaps so. Was it my outlaw side that liked being taken to lunch at good restaurants (such as Wilson did not go to), from Voisin to Luchow’s to the Colony? And I liked hearing Mannie’s troubles—it was impossible for him to go straight altogether—and giving him advice. He trusted me (which was not the same as being willing to do what I told him) and depended on me. If he represented an outlaw stripe in my nature, I may have represented for him a “moral” streak in himself. His mother had been maid of honor at the wedding of Rose Pastor Stokes, a once-famous Russian-born Jewish radical and heroine of a “Cinderella story” of the turn of the century. Having first got work in a Cleveland cigar factory (1892), she married a Wasp railway president, who moved out of his Fifth Avenue mansion and into a settlement house—an early illustration of downward mobility. Mannie was fond of telling Socialists, whenever he happened to meet one, that his mother had been Rose Pastor Stokes’ maid of honor, but in later years he did not often meet anyone old enough and radical enough to appreciate what that meant. Once in a presidential election I persuaded him to vote for Norman Thomas; it was easier for him than it might have been to explain it to his new, “Jay,” friends because Norman Thomas raised dogs—Sealyhams, I think.

I ought to add that the later Mannie paid me extraordinarily well, which was certainly part of my motive for continuing with the letters and brochures. And his own motives were a little mixed, too; toward the end of a lunch at, say, the Lutèce, he would pass me his gold pencil and gold-framed memo pad—“Just give me a few lines on Cooper-Henderson.” We never had a love affair, not even what he called “an affair,” and thanks to my intellectual pursuits could not be intimate friends, sharing only a taste for the theatre. Yet his death in 1970 was the first in a series that brought down the pillars of my life. Dear Mannie, who died, charmingly, while being shaved in his Park Avenue apartment, was followed in a few months by Heinrich Blücher (Hannah Arendt’s husband), Rahv, Chiaromonte …

Like Wilson, Johnsrud did not like Rousuck. John knew that he was failing to pay me most of the time and probably knew, too, that he occasionally borrowed bits of money from me. When the Scarborough season ended, I stopped work at the Carleton Gallery and left Barbara Mosenthal’s family brownstone to move into a furnished apartment with John. We had a month before college reopened, the worst month, I believe, of my life. I had not thought that anyone could suffer so much. I cried every day, usually more than once; it would not be false to say that he
made
me cry every day, for there was a kind of deliberateness in it, or so it appeared. And almost the worst was my total mystification. What made him so hateful I never found out, and this left me with a sense of being hopelessly stupid, which I fear John liked.

The place we had rented was only a furnished room, across from Cherio’s restaurant in the East 50’s. Our landlord was a horrible Mr. Schatz with a heavy accent who, obviously guessing that we were not married, pestered us with threatening visits to make sure we were not damaging his property. Its main feature was an outsize “studio couch” covered with a smelly black velveteen drape. It was hot, not a breath of air, not a fan; this was long before air-conditioning. John blamed me for Mr. Schatz (whose name he derided as a variant past of “shits”), and maybe I
was
the one who had found him in an ad in the paper. But our landlord, I think, was only part of a more general grievance he had against me, for wanting to live with him, I suppose, when he wanted to be alone. After those tense weeks with the theatre, his nerves were bound to be irritable. But I was too young to make allowances for that and could only sob at the streams of abuse he subjected me to—sarcasm, irony, denunciation. We must have made love in the midst of all that, but I have no memory of any love-making on or in the studio couch, only of my tears and shaking shoulders, which of course exasperated him all the more.

My being there, clearly, was what he resented. Perhaps he had someone else—one of the actresses from the Scarborough company or more than one. But in that case why had he moved into this room with me? Whosever suggestion it was, he had not had to accept. Or maybe, since he was not working, he just felt the rent was too high. I was surely the one who had wanted to live in the East 50’s. Whatever it was, he was drinking more than usual, spurred on by his brother, Byron.