Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (78 page)

That was all. At some point that autumn his mother wrote me, demanding that I pay her for the telephone calls he had made to me in Seattle. I refused. Next, his parents wanted to know, perhaps through a third party, whether I had heard from him at Christmas—they had not. But my memory here is hazy. And I cannot remember when I finally learned of his death. It was more than a year later, and it seems to me that it came to me in two different versions, from different sources. Certainly the second was from Marshall Best, the Viking Press editor who lived at 2 Beekman Place and served those meatballs baked in salt. He was a devoted friend of Porter’s and, if I may say it, quite a devoted Stalinist sympathizer. By now, naturally, what with the Trotsky Defense Committee, he disliked me on political grounds. It may have given him some satisfaction to tell me a piece of news that was not only painful but also reflected poorly on me. As though I
were the principal cause of Porter’s death. And perhaps, in truth, I was. His mother must have thought so.

If it had not been for me, he would never have
been
in Mexico. He would still be collecting rents for his parents. And, if I had gone along with him, instead of copping out, I would
never
have let him overstay his visa, which had caused him to land in prison, which caused him to contract diphtheria or typhus or whatever it was that killed him when, on his release, the woman he had been living with let him come back and stay in her stable.

Well. As an English writer said to me, quoting Orwell, an autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good.

I am not sure why I lost my feeling for Porter. At the time I thought it was his letters—wet, stereotyped, sentimental—that had killed my love. The deflation was already beginning, obviously, when I met the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt on the train that was taking me west. The letters and phone calls completed the process. Whatever it was, I now realize that I positively disliked that Fred MacMurray look-alike when I saw him gazing fondly down at me when he met me on my return. The distaste was physical as well as intellectual. I could not stand him. He had become an embarrassment, having served his purpose, which I suppose was to dissolve my marriage. I was appalled, for him and for myself.

Did he notice that I had changed? Nothing was
ever said, and I tried to hide it.
“Succès?” “Succès fou!”
had been our magic formula after love-making, and
“Succès fou!”
I went on duly repeating, I imagine. I was telling myself that it was only a few days; in a few days he would have left. Such cowardice was very bad of me. If I had had the courage to tell him, he might not have started out without me. Yet I am not sure. Would my having “the heart” to tell him have made the difference? Probably the truth was that Porter
had
to go to Mexico; his bridges were burned. That applied to all three of us. Nothing could return to the
status quo ante
. John and I had left 2 Beekman Place behind, to the tender mercies of Albert B. Ashforth, who painted our pretty apricot walls another color, I suppose. The Howlands’ furniture had been passed on to a friend of Alan Barth’s named Lois Brown. A trunk with my letters and papers in it went to storage, never to be reclaimed. Johnsrud had moved back to the Village. While waiting for my grandfather to fix things up with Thatcher & Woodburn in Reno, I had stayed with Nathalie Swan in her parents’ Georgian house in the East 80s. No, nothing could go back to what it had been. Old Clara returned to her funeral-parlor business—she was proud of having buried a fighter named Tiger Flowers. I never ate her smothered chicken again. Poor “Hohnsrud” of course had died.

Moreover, Porter was sensitive—think of his allergies. He must have heard the difference on the
telephone while I was still in Seattle; I am a fairly transparent person. And if he guessed my changed feelings, he kept it strictly to himself. The question I should ask myself is not did he know, but how
soon
did he know. It is a rather shaking thought.

Two

T
HE ONE-ROOM APARTMENT
I moved into on Gay Street had eleven sides. I counted one day when I was sick in bed. The normal quota, including floor and ceiling, would have been six. But my little place had many jogs, many irregularities. There was a tiny kitchen and a bath suited to a bird. It had been furnished by the owner of the building, an architect by the name of Edmond Martin whose office was on Christopher Street. I am not sure he ever built anything, but he had a genius for getting the good out of space that was already there. At no extra charge, he made me a thin, teetery bookcase to fit into one of the nine perpendiculars—he loved to be given a problem. One nice feature was that the little bath had a window beside it so that you could look at the sky while you
bathed. Another amusing oddity of the apartment was that, small as it was, it had two street entrances: one on Gay Street and one, leading through a passageway, to Christopher Street, where the bells and mailboxes were. Mr. Martin, who was an engaging person, owned another old house, on Charles Street, in which Elizabeth Bishop lived. Her living-room was bigger than mine and had a fireplace, I think. It must have been through her that I found the Gay Street apartment after Porter left. Or else it was the other way around and she found her place through me. All Mr. Martin’s rents were reasonable, and he took good care of his properties.

My bed was a narrow studio-couch with a heavy navy-blue cover and side cushions, which made the room into a living-room, and I had a desk with drawers beside a recessed window. I could entertain only one couple at a time for dinner by putting two chairs at a card table and sitting on the studio-bed myself. I invited Farrell and Hortense (Farrell, a true-blue Irishman, always asked for more mashed potatoes), Chris and Maddie Rand, and I cannot remember who else. Probably Martha McGahan and Frani, together or separately. Margaret Marshall.

All this was very different from our life on Beekman Place; it was as though the number of my friends had shrunk to fit the space I now lived in. Not counting Johnsrud, who came around from time to time and made biting remarks, the only men I knew were Mr.
Martin and the husbands of friends. The assiduous men who had been after me while I was married, such as Corliss Lamont and the absurd Lazslo Kormendi, had vanished. Nobody took me out to dinner, and when I did not cook something for myself, I ate at a second-floor restaurant called Shima’s on Eighth Street, where the food was cheap and fairly good. But it typed you to be a regular at Shima’s, because no one, male or female, ever went there with a date. Today it would be called a singles’ restaurant, with the difference that there were no pick-ups. Night after night at dinnertime, I faced the choice of hiding my shame at home or exposing it at Shima’s. I always took a book to bury myself in, on the ostrich principle.

Sometimes on Sundays, Farrell’s kindly publisher, Jim Henle of Vanguard Press, asked me to lunch at the house he and his wife, Marjorie, had in Hartsdale, half an hour or so from New York. But I could not hope to meet any unattached men there, I discovered. It was an office group like a family, headed by Evelyn Schrifte, eventually Henle’s successor at Vanguard; the only author present was Farrell. Still, going out there was fun; I liked the Henles. But apart from those Sundays, the only break in the monotony of my first months as a divorcee on Gay Street was when the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt—real name George Black—came from Pittsburgh and took me to the World Series. The Giants were playing the Yankees, and Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons was pitching in the game
we went to. When, at his insistence, I brought the “man” home, so that he could see how I lived, he was shocked and begged me to move. He still thought he wanted me to marry him, even though I would no longer let him make love to me. In the story I wrote about it nearly four years later (on the Cape during the fall of France), the heroine sees him several times in New York posthumously to their love-affair on the train, but I remember only the once—the excitement of being at the World Series (and with a National League fan; he had arranged our box-seat tickets through the Pittsburgh Pirates), and having dinner with him afterward—at Longchamps, it must have been. I have a very faint recollection of a duck he had shot that started to smell in my icebox because I did not know how to take off the feathers and cook it. In the story, I changed several things about him, including where he was from, in case his wife might somehow come upon it and recognize him. Really he lived in Sewickley, a fashionable outskirt of Pittsburgh, belonged to the Duquesne Club, and worked for American Radiator and Standard Sanitary—plumbing. The man in the story was in steel. (When it came out in 1941 in
Partisan Review
, Jay Laughlin of New Directions was telling people that the “man” was Wendell Willkie, who had run for president the year before.) George Black’s ardor was an embarrassment to me—a deserved punishment. Hard up as I was for male company, I kept him out of sight. None of my friends
knew about him, and until now I have not told his name.

Those must have been the harshest months of my life. My grandfather was sending me an allowance of $25 a week, since the Capital Elevator stocks I had inherited from the McCarthys were not paying dividends any more, or very little. I did some reviews for
The Nation
and I looked for a job. Someone sent me to a man who lived in the St. Moritz Hotel and needed a collaborator for a book he was writing on the influence of sunspots on the stock market. No. At last Mannie Rousuck, now with Ehrich Newhouse and starting on his upward climb, was able to give me half a day’s work at the gallery, writing descriptions of paintings for letters he sent to prospects. Some of the addressees were the same ones we had written to at the Carleton Gallery—Ambrose Clark, Mrs. Hartley Dodge—though my subjects were no longer just dogs but English sporting scenes with emphasis on horses, English portraits, conversation pieces, coaching scenes: I think he paid me $15 a week, which, with the allowance from my grandfather, was more than enough to support me. I could even serve drinks.

Nonetheless I was despondent. If I had been given to self-pity, I would surely have fallen into it. I did not much regret breaking up with John, especially because he was taking a sardonic, mock-courteous tone with me, and I had almost forgotten Porter. It was not that I wanted either of them back. I saw plenty of John
as it was, and I would have been horrified if Porter had appeared on my doorstep. There was no room for him in my multi-faceted apartment. My renting it showed that I had not thought of him as being in my life at all.

At some time during the autumn I had driven to Vermont with Mannie, to see a collection of sporting art that would be very important to him and, incidentally, to see the autumn leaves. On another Saturday I had gone up to Vassar to see Miss Sandison (Miss Kitchel was on sabbatical), and we had talked of my discovery of left-wing politics, which she knew all about, as it turned out, having subscribed to
New Masses
or read it in the library while I was still in college. Then we talked of love, which she knew about, too, even more to my surprise. I can still hear her light, precise voice tell me that you must “learn to live without love if you want to live
with
it.” In other words, not to depend on having love. You must come to real love free of any neediness. This thought greatly struck me, and still does. I am sure it is true but, unlike Miss Sandison, I am not up to it. I have seldom been capable of living without love, not for more than a month or so. That afternoon, in her small sitting-room in Williams, where our Renaissance seminar had been held, pouring tea again, she told me a little about her private life. There had been a man (at Yale, I gathered), but, though they were lovers, they did not marry. “I could think
rings
around him,” she remembered with a
mournful little laugh. Maybe that was always the fly in the ointment. She was too intelligent for the men she chanced to meet.

I was moved by that long conversation, inspired by it to try to be like Miss Sandison. She was clear-eyed, a heroine like Rosalind and Celia. I was not so brave. Many years later, after her retirement, her dauntless character was put to the test. First of all, on becoming an
emerita
, she worked as a volunteer for the Civil Liberties Union in New York (single-handed, she said in a shocked tone, she had straightened out the awful disorder of their files), and also for the Heart Association, that perhaps in memory of Miss Kitchel, with her flushed cheeks, who had died in Toledo of heart trouble. In New York, after a while, Miss Sandison lived alone; her sister had died, too. But then she had to give up her volunteer work, because she was going blind. Frani, who lived nearby, used to go in and read to her and wrote to me in Paris about it. I intended to write, so that Frani could read the letter to her. But I didn’t. Time passed. Her address, in Frani’s handwriting, pleaded with me daily on my desk. At last I learned from Frani that it was too late: Miss Sandison was dead. She had found she was going deaf, on top of being blind, and took the logical step. Without telling anyone, she carefully arranged her suicide—death-by-drowning—putting weights in the pockets of her dress, filling the bathtub, and climbing in. Perhaps she took some sleeping pills, to keep
herself from involuntarily coming up again. She even put a message for the cleaning-woman on her door, so that the woman would not be frightened by finding her body. I do not know how she managed, with only the sense of touch to help her. But she did.

And to think that I never wrote. Of course that September or October day was not the last time I saw her. We were reunited a number of times—with Miss Kitchel when I was teaching at Bard forty minutes off up the Hudson—and then, alone. I remember things she said during those later meetings, especially the first one, when I had left Wilson and was living with Reuel, aged seven, in Upper Red Hook, though then it was Miss Kitchel who spoke the immortal sentence over our Old Fashioneds: “Tell us you didn’t marry him for love!” She was speaking, naturally, for them both. I remember how well they both looked, Miss Kitchel with her slightly faded blue eyes and Miss Sandison with her deep, sparkling dark ones, and the Covermark now hiding the disfiguring birthmark on her cheek. I was filled with love for both of them, and the fact that I was teaching literature—my maiden effort—put us on terms of greater parity. Yet, of all our meetings, the most memorable for me has always been that fall afternoon in 1936 with Miss Sandison when I was trying to learn from her how to live alone. In reality I was doing it at Bard in those first months of teaching; I had firmly given up any notion of a new marriage and pictured myself romantically as a sort of
secular nun. But Miss Sandison and Miss Kitchel never came to see me at Bard—now, I wonder why not; perhaps just the fact that they were not motorized and I was. Miss Sandison never saw my place on Gay Street or any place I lived, even when it was with her sister’s furniture. I always went to her, at Vassar, and if I took her and Miss Kitchel out, it was downtown to a Poughkeepsie restaurant. This points to a reticence in our relation, characteristic of Miss Sandison, though not of me. She had read Wilson’s work and she and Miss Kitchel had listened to Johnsrud read his first play aloud on their screened back porch. But she probably knew very little, unless from other sources, of John Porter and his successors in my life.