She had a deep, vibrant voice, and to hear her intone the General Confession night after night (“We have left undone … And we have done … And there is no health in us”) struck responsive chords throughout the still chapel. She was an emotional woman, and her sentimental history was an open book to more than a decade of Annie Wright girls: she had obviously been in love with Bishop Keator, whose large portrait, seated, in white lawn and episcopal purple—rochet and chimer—hung over the big stone fireplace in the Great Hall. If she wept on Fridays when we sang 117, it was because Bunyan’s hymn had been his favorite, too.
From his demi-profile portrait, he must have been a handsome man, dark-eyed, ruddy, dynamic, graying, with a Celtic look about him. He and Miss Preston had created the Seminary almost ab ovo. He had found her, teaching, somewhere in the East and brought her out west to be principal when the school was still in the gaunt old firetrap building, full of rats, that went back to Bishop Paddock. He and Miss Preston had dreamed the new school together, choosing the site (in Old Tacoma, high over Commencement Bay), studying blueprints, finding the architect, the landscape gardener, picking the hedge material and the creeper to festoon the Tudor-style buildings, getting advice on swimming pools. In those days Tacoma was diocesan headquarters, and the magnetic bishop had his office in the old school, down the hall from Miss Preston’s obviously, all through the time of building. When the new school finally opened, in 1924, they had been together eleven years.
In my time, his widow, a tall sweet-voiced, gray-eyed woman, taught us Sacred Study and led the choir. Whenever in the course of a homily Miss Preston at the lectern mentioned Bishop Keator’s name, out would come her handkerchief to mop up the tears running down her broad cheeks. Sometimes, as she continued to sniff, we girls stole looks at Mrs. Keator dry-eyed in her place in the choir; there was never a sign of emotion on her beautiful calm face. It was hard to know what to make of this. Did Miss Preston cry because he had been her lover or because he hadn’t? Either way, she certainly gave the appearance of grieving for him as if she were his widow and the Seminary their child.
Like so many things at the Seminary, Miss Preston’s tears were unfailing at the mention of the bishop’s name. In our class we had a girl by the name of Frances Ankeny who was exactly the same; only what set her waterworks going was the song “Juanita.” As it happened, that was one of Miss Preston’s favorites for the Sunday-evening sings we often had after high tea in the Great Hall. But our principal had not noticed that whenever the piano tuned up with “Far o’er the fountain,” Frances would start crying. Like other mischievous and observant girls, I had, and if, on some particular evening, it looked as if Miss Preston were going to forget “Juanita” or had decided that “Santa Lucia” sufficed, I would ask if we couldn’t have it, please. I believe it was pure, disinterested cruelty that prompted me—a vivisectionist inclination such as causes boys to tear the wings off flies. The fact that this girl’s grandfather, Levi P. Ankeny of Walla Walla, had defeated my grandfather early in the century in a race for the U.S. Senate would not have played any part.
“Gladly the cross I bear”—Mrs. Johnson was Miss Preston’s. What caused her to bear it gladly, or at least to dourly embrace it, we had no way of knowing. It appeared as if Mrs. J. had fallen on evil days—all her jewelry was costume—while a number of things about her suggested that she had once been a nurse. Her large, soft, somewhat pendulous body looked at home in the white nurse’s uniform she wore when for a few weeks she actually took over the infirmary. She was conversant with a great many diseases and their remedies. And, at least in our part of the world, the nursing profession was not made up of Florence Nightingales—at fifteen, thanks to Harold and his friends, I was well aware of the reputation nurses had. But if Mrs. Johnson was down on her luck and Miss Preston was “tiding her over,” the motive remained obscure. Given Miss Preston’s upright and open character, it would hardly have been blackmail. The two ate together at the small round table where Miss Preston had once throned it alone, but our poor principal spoke charily. They seemed to have no history in common beyond a surname that lingered as a vestigial trace in the “P.” of “Mrs. Blanche P. Johnston,” so listed—note the “t” suddenly materializing—in the school catalogue.
Of course it was wrong to infer that she had been a loose woman. We had never even seen her smoke a cigarette or smelled liquor on her breath. The most we could be sure of was that her hair was tinted; you could tell by the gray at the roots. But just watching the pair of them in the dining-room made us feel that the difference between them was more striking than it should have been. It told against her. The verdict on which all could agree was that Mrs. “Johnston” was common. Among a little circle of Annie Wright girls of that time a snobby game was played to decide who was common and who was vulgar. Somebody (I suspect myself) thought you could make it more interesting by decreeing that vulgar (e.g., Al Smith) was better than common (e.g., Mrs. William Randolph Hearst). Vulgar was frankly plebeian, and common was cheap middle class. So if we had pronounced Mrs. J. vulgar, she would have scored higher in our books.
I thought Mrs. Blanche “Johnston” was awful, starting with her name. But the subject did not much interest me. If asked, I might have said that it was common to discuss her so often. Obviously Miss Preston had brought her to the school from a sense of duty, and we were making it harder for her by our attitude. Our watchful eyes were fixed on them in the dining-room, especially when Miss Preston was entertaining some diocesan dignitary. In the infirmary, we noted Mrs. Johnson’s white nurse’s shoes. It went without saying that parents coming to visit the school at Founder’s Day or Field Day would make a point of looking her over, remarking the tinted hair and matching gold-rimmed glasses, the jiggling earrings and the cleft too visible in her flouncy chiffon neckline. And on her side, naturally, Mrs. J. would talk an arm off them. Not that our parents, by and large, were in a position to judge. Many of them had huge beams in their own eyes, even in the matter of dress. But all the more reason, then, for our principal’s sister to be above reproach. A judicious parent like my grandfather, a true admirer of Miss Preston as woman and educator, might well have advised her to “space” her sister’s visits to the school.
To have opened the subject with a teacher was unthinkable unless we wanted to get a reprimand. Most of us, seeing Miss Preston’s tight lips and set jaw as she sat facing her sister at table, expected that somehow she would manage so that Mrs. J. would not return in the fall. Like the Haynes clan, like Vachel Lindsay’s other niece, and, alas, like Hattie Connor, she would be leaving us, and nobody would be discussing her any more. So convinced was I of this thesis that I ventured to name her that summer to Miss Mackay while we did Caesar in Seattle. But Miss Mackay denied any knowledge of Mrs. Johnson’s plans and redirected my attention to our text. And sure enough, when school reopened in September, and the entry hall was full of new girls, returning girls, parents, the first sight that met our eyes was Mrs. Johnson herself on the staircase, effusive, with bells on, a reception committee in one person offering her rouged cheek to be kissed. This fall, she told us with a broad wink, we seniors would be coming to her to be excused from athletics. In other words, when we had the curse. By good luck the allusion passed over the head of my grandfather, who probably had forgotten that girls had periods. With a handshake for Miss Preston and a nod to my friend Jean Eagleson, my grandmother gave me her own rouged cheek; we said good-bye.
6
SEATTLE 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, li
ke 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.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 39