So then did my impulse to write come out of my allowed quota of private, unvoiced anti-Semitism? I hope not. If it were true, I ought to quit writing. I prefer the explanation that a fierce dislike of self-deception had something to do with it. Moreover the nicer explanation is more convincing, I am relieved to see, in that self-deception remains, in my book, a major sin or vice whereas any dislike of Jews I had as a girl has been, let us say, pretty well sublimated. But I cannot let it drop there. Where did the hatred of self-deception come from? To have been so violent, it must have contained a fear. Yet, so far as I know, I never harbored such a fear. Nor can I find any grounds for it in my make-up. True, through fear of a monstrous guardian, I had become a terrible liar and I was only now getting over it; the Seminary helped, even though there were many silly rules, such as the prohibition of fountain pens (because the girls, shaking them down, could splatter the walls), that made one impatient to break them and then, when caught, deny it. Yet lying to parents and teachers is a quite different thing from lying to oneself. I suppose the first can lead to the second, but the process, I think, generally begins with the lie told to oneself and goes on to the lie told to the world. And yet, in all honesty, I don’t recall lying to myself, ever, though I do recall trying to. On the other hand, if I had lied, would I know? How, unless someone else caught me? And who could that be? Unless there is in each of us a someone else watching—what used to be called our conscience. I believe that there is: I know that other person. But even if I can accept that I am not a dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite, do not habitually lie to myself, it does not resolve the question of what made me so sensitive at the age of fourteen to the perils of self-deception. Perhaps I got it from reading—wasn’t Sir Roger de Coverley an example of the vice?—or had been painfully familiar with it in a previous life. I can never know the answer.
Miss Atkinson, I see, was not my only reader in the school. On the back of “What Doth It Profit a Man,” to my mortification I come upon a penciled note in my handwriting: “If you don’t like this, why all right, neither do I. If you say you do, I know you’re lying.” This may have been addressed to my seat-mate, the proud, tall, languid, bronze-eyed Ellin Watts, from Portland, though I wonder whether I had the courage to take that tone with her. Or Katie Urquhart, pale, with flaring nostrils, another member of Lampie’s nightly court? In any case, if there was an answer, it was not written on the back of the story.
It seems reasonable that I sent some of my stories to Mark, but what he said I cannot guess. I know that I sent a story about a prostitute (not Gracia, another one, with “eyes like dirty dishwater”) to a boy named Ed Bent at the University of Idaho in Moscow. How our correspondence began, I don’t know, unless it was through an intermediary, like blind-dating by letter. Perhaps I imagined that still another male correspondent would add to my prestige. However we started writing, before long I sent him that story, and he replied more or less in kind. That is, not being up to fiction, he did the equivalent by mail of “talking dirty” to me. What this consisted of, exactly, I have forgotten; doubtless a censor has been at work. In those days there could have been no question of four-letter words between us, and I doubt whether he dealt very concretely with the subject that was on his mind, i.e., mentioned his member in so many words as excited, inflamed, etc., or gave it a Christian name. But I remember being slightly repelled by what were probably innocent or ignorant male fantasies and by the handwriting (which I can still see, though the words have faded from my memory): sloping, close-set, characterless, like a boneless handshake, running evenly across his embossed fraternity-house paper. Evidently there had been a sad misunderstanding: what had begun, on my side, as a literary encounter of minds had turned into a callow campaign on his part to paw me with smutty language. But since Moscow, Idaho, was hundreds of miles away, I felt safe: sticks and stones could break my bones but words could never hurt me. As they kept getting thicker in their envelopes (requiring extra stamps), far from arousing me, his letters “turned me off,” and eventually, when I continued not to answer them, they stopped. It was ironical that by the time my grandmother found a stack of them in my bedroom, and read them, they might as well have gone to the dead-letter office.
That happened when I was home on vacation, between sophomore and junior years. I am not sure why I had kept them—as trophies or because already I had a respect for the historical record that would not let me destroy any piece of paper with writing or typing on it. But there is no mystery about why I had brought them home; obviously I could not leave them at school. My grandmother had no hesitation about destroying the whole lot, but not, I think, before she had shown at least a sample to my grandfather and their married son, my uncle Frank, then a young lawyer in my grandfather’s firm. I don’t suppose any legal action was contemplated (on sending obscene matter through the mails, surely a Federal offense), but the discovery of that trove in one of the drawers of my violet and pale-green bedroom furniture brought on a full-scale family crisis—the first and last I remember in Seattle.
There was talk of taking me out of Annie Wright, but where they thought of sending me, short of a reformatory, I do not know. And it was not just a question of the morals of a minor; a crisis in belief was shaking the Preston family—a credibility gap. My grandmother could not accept that this twisted Ed Bent in a fraternity house in Idaho was someone I had never met. For her, the only sense in such a correspondence would have been familiarity between the two parties: somehow, while I was meant to be safely at the Seminary (my worst crime being possession of a fountain pen), we had met at “a wild party” and “gone the limit.” For her, that explanation, while not exactly an excuse, would have been more acceptable than the incredible truth, which was that her granddaughter, barely yet in silk stockings, had written some crazy story about a prostitute and sent it to a total stranger. For her, in fact, poor woman, the improbabilities began with my writing a story like that, for no reason (a pity I had not thought to say that I had hoped to sell it to True Romances), and what did I know of prostitutes, who had told me about them? That it had all come out of my imagination was almost worse than the thought that somebody had shown me a real “house” in Seattle’s red-light district.
Finally I must have been accorded a suspension of disbelief, for I was sent back to the Seminary in September, without a word’s passing, thank God, from my grandfather to Miss Adelaide Preston on the need for keeping a watch on my mail. He was too kindly, the dear, upright man, to want me to be spied on. Nor would he have liked to have that stout spinster (with whom he had discovered a common ancestor back in northern England) learn what “Cousin Mary” had been up to while in her care. Also, it seems to me, he was not nearly as upset as my grandmother; I guess because my misstep (if I could be believed) had been a mental sin, linked to a talent for words—the real blame, he probably decided, lay with that fool boy in Idaho. My grandfather was always indulgent where my mind’s adventures were concerned. It must have been some time, though, before my grandmother could feel the same about me; I fear it is perfectly likely that she never trusted me again.
Nevertheless she let me have my first evening-dress that summer. It was made for me by her dressmaker, Mrs. Farrell, and I cannot think why, except to have in my closet just in case … I was still not allowed to go out with boys; at Lake Crescent, as she must have known, evening-dresses weren’t worn. She could not have been looking ahead to junior prom, in the spring, for I remember my prom dress, which was much more sophisticated: flame-red chiffon, straight cut, with tiers of short ruffles. This dress—could it have been for the wedding of a Morgenstern cousin?—was yellow chiffon, with a round neck, a fairly full skirt, and an uneven hemline that finished in picoted points. It had a narrow silver belt and a bunch of red cherries at one hip. I had silver slippers to wear with it. That first, girlish, evening dress lived on in my memory to figure in an essay I wrote on George Orwell in 1969. Orwell, when Eric Blair, aged seventeen, had written to a schoolmate
describing the terrors of a night spent outdoors in a farmer’s field. That brought back to me the night I spent in the “backyard of a university student I loved,” dressed in an evening gown (“a bride of Death was the principle of my costume”) and hoping to commit suicide. The student was Mark Sullivan.
I cannot say exactly why I was roaming around his backyard with a bottle of iodine in my hand all dressed up to kill myself. It was a cold night; the house was dark. Either Mark was not home or the whole family was asleep. The time was around midnight. I think I was relieved to find, on edging softly past the garbage cans into the backyard, that the window I imagined was his showed no sign of life inside. Though my plan was to kill myself in serenade posture, so to speak, below his window, he was the last person I desired to see. It would have been awful if he had caught me parading around like a mummer. I was also afraid of waking his parents or some neighbor who might call the police. As I wrote in the Orwell essay: “Though eager to die, I was terribly fearful of being caught trespassing before I could swallow the iodine and be discovered on the premises as a corpse.” That was partly true—indeed wholly true except for “eager to die.” I no more wanted to die than I was in love with Mark.
It was all theatricals, which I was putting on for my own benefit. I would have “died” had I had any other audience, i.e., if anyone had seen me. Yet something must have put the idea of that charade in my head; there must have been a precipitating cause. I had been crossed in love, all right, but that had been some time back and in any case had nothing to do with Mark. No, it was some trivial chagrin: I had quarreled with my family that evening maybe or a friend had disappointed me or I had nothing to read, having finished my library book. Or—just possibly—Mark had promised to bring me a book that afternoon and had not come. Or had gone up to see Harold without stopping to talk to me. Something like that might account for my wish to lay my death, as tribute or blame, at his door. I knew very well that his feelings for me were kindly but not at all amorous—I was still “the Niece,” alas, and my own feelings were adjusted to that. Perhaps what was troubling me was simply general boredom and a sense of the vanity of human wishes.
All of a sudden it strikes me that my main motive for that theatrical suicide was to have an occasion to wear the yellow dress. I see it hanging in my clothes closet—a perfect symbol of deluded expectations. Perhaps actually I never had worn it until that night when I stood posing before my cheval glass, cherries dangling on one hip, silver slippers on my feet. Perhaps not having worn it was the entire trouble. So, boldly resolved to kill those two birds with one stone, I took the iodine bottle out of the medicine cabinet, glided down the carpeted stairs, and let myself out the kitchen door, shivering. I had decided against putting on a coat, having no evening wrap of my own and unable, in the circumstances, to borrow one of my grandmother’s—my regular cloth coat would have looked horrible with the uneven hemline of the dress sticking out.
In Mark’s yard, I tipped the iodine bottle to let a drop or two run down my tongue into my throat. I had been trying it at home a few times already, without mustering enough determination to swallow. At Mark’s, contrary to my hopes, though the stage was set, it was no easier, and after half an hour or so of nervous attempts I finally let the burning sensation convince me that I would never succeed in swallowing the whole bottle. Meanwhile the cold was helping me decide to go home, though in the dark, in my pale dress, I felt reluctant to leave that protected enclosure for the open streets. On the way over, I had not even thought to be frightened; doubtless the promise of soon being dead anyway served me as armor. But on the way home, robbed of that assurance, I was full of terrors at every street crossing; doubtless I had gooseflesh along my bare arms, and my thin-soled shoes with Cuban heels made me unsteady on my feet.
I got home. No one had missed me. I let myself in with the kitchen key, which I must have hidden for myself—what a confession!—under the doormat. I tiptoed up the stairs and undressed for bed, first replacing the bottle of iodine in the bathroom medicine cabinet. And in doing so, all at once I felt sadly ashamed of my cowardice. I ought to have taken the iodine, having made such a parade of it. There was no excuse. Lack of nerve had stopped me—nothing else. Though a few hours ago I had had no particular reason for ending my days, now I had one, in discovering myself to be such a craven. I went to bed. It was my first encounter with self-knowledge—a very bleak sensation. And, though I cannot truthfully say today that I think a better person would have gone ahead and killed herself, I still feel something of that shame.
Yet as I look back over the episode, so strangely fresh in my memory, down to the grateful feeling of the key in my hand, I am puzzled mainly by the dating of it. It was during a vacation, since I was home from school. If I take into account the coldness of the night, I am inclined to place it at Thanksgiving of my junior year. I would have been nearly fifteen and a half. Yet can that be right? By that time Mark (I think) was no longer writing to me. But couldn’t that have been the reason, then? The best, indeed, that I can think of.
Yes, if we set the time of my “attempted suicide” as the fall of 1927 everything will fit. It was rather an unsatisfactory semester. Miss Atkinson was gone, I did not know where, replaced by her antipathetic sister. Lampie had graduated and among this year’s seniors, no one I liked reciprocated, except Katie Urquhart and there was always doubt as to her. I was not yet doing Caesar with Miss Mackay; at Captain Probes riding-school, they made me ride in the ring, a stable boy leading me; I had lost my love for French and had not yet found my vocation for the stage—not till Christmas would I terrify the junior school with my one-man show of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” followed by its encore “A Cask of Amontillado.” By November Katie Urquhart (whose name I loved) from Chehalis was beginning to show a double face; she no longer seemed to remember that our mothers had been Gamma Phi sisters at the U. And, instead of taking Natural Science, I had signed up for Cooking with a pink-cheeked alumna who had gone to Simmons in Boston and married a man named Claude; to my surprise, I had turned out to be the cancre of the class—I can still see the lumps in my white sauce and Mrs. Morrill straining them out. The best thing that fall was taking the three-hour boat trip from Seattle to Tacoma—a practice soon to be supplanted by car travel. Obviously, it had been in the previous spring that I wrote those stories about suicide. The evidence bears it out: Miss Marjorie Atkinson could not have written “I hope, Mary dear, that this version of suicide isn’t your own!” And it was not just those suicidal stories and an essay. I have remembered something else.
I am sitting in an open casement window with my legs hanging out while I consider throwing myself down. It is a spring night. The height is great enough, I calculate, for the fall to kill me even on soft grass. It is after lights out, and I am in my nightgown. This is the room, across from Miss Atkinson’s, I had sophomore year after the break-up with my roommate—the same room where I had read Forrest Crosby’s at first regular letters, now tied up in a bundle, as I no longer pore over them for clues as to why he tired of his “Di.” I have switched to reading sad love poems with a dark philosophy, which are going to help me decide to end my life. Not just once; for several nights running I sit there thinking of doing it—depending, probably, on the weather. It would not be on a rainy night.
I remember edging my bottom over the iron bar to the very edge, resting my feet on the gutter and hoping to make myself fall. It reminded me of the attempts to fly we occasionally made as children, standing on a window sill and waving our arms but never taking the plunge. To encourage myself now, I would recite poetry, softly, so as not to attract the night watchman’s attention: “But there were dreams to sell,/ Ill didst thou buy./ Life is a dream, they tell,/ Waking to die.” Or: “From too much love of living,/ From hope and fear set free … ” Or: “You might as well be calling yours/ What never will be his/ And one of us be happy./ There’s few enough as is.” Or: “When I am dead, my dearest.” Eventually I
would pull my legs in, drop back into the room, and go to bed. This did not last more than a month. Then that summer, probably, Mark did not come with us to Lake Crescent. And the occasion of my “suicide” under his window may have been an announcement that he was getting married. As my “fiancé,” he was owed that.
The next year when I sat in an open casement window after lights out, I was up to something more dangerous: smoking. I was teaching myself to inhale, with the slight risk of falling out from dizziness since you had to squat close to the edge to keep the smoke from drifting back into the room and alerting a passing teacher. But smoking out the window was junior year, and suicide out the window was sophomore year. Anyway, whenever the failed drama in the Sullivan backyard took place, Mark never knew of it. No one knew or suspected. In my pale-green-and-violet bedroom, I hung my evening dress back in the closet, and that was that. Neither did Mark ever guess—how could he?—that an entire girls’ school in Tacoma had heard that he had asked me to marry him when I graduated.
One night, several years afterwards, when I had grown up and was home from Vassar for the summer, I sat in a car on a road that ran above Three Tree Point—a wooded section of “secondary” residences that were often the scene of parties. Hidden in the trees below, a party was going on; somebody, probably my uncle Harold, had brought me to it several hours earlier, and now I wanted to go home. I had made the long climb up the steep log-hewn stairs by myself, hoping that whoever had brought me would follow, but the others were all still down there, drinking and playing music. There was nothing to do but sit in the front seat and wait.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 35