Next to Czerna in the bed was a pale, sharp-nosed, blue-eyed Jewish girl, thin and quite a lot younger and named, as I remember, Florence. After a little while, this Florence, a University student, apparently, who had a rather acid personality, got up without a word and went into a smaller room. If I recall right, she had nothing on and was flat-chested. As she dressed in the smaller room (sweater and skirt?), she kept throwing ironical remarks into our conversation. I had the impression that she disliked me, but maybe it was Ted. Perhaps she merely disliked our intrusion. Czerna, on the contrary, who now rose and put on a bathrobe, seemed amused by being “caught” with Florence or by having Florence “caught” with her; she was the indolent, experienced woman, and Florence was the thin-bodied boy, with eyes like ice.
Without Ted’s actually telling me, I had understood with promptitude that these women were lesbians. We had a case like that in the class below ours in school. At sixteen or nearly, unlike Ted, who was thrilled, I think, by the evidence we saw, I retained my cool. I was not interested in being a lesbian myself, having been groped more than once by hairy girls who had had me to stay the night. My heart was set on men and boys. Sex and love and social conquest were inseparably wedded in my mind with men, even though the male organs were far from beauteous in my eyes. But I was attracted to Czerna aesthetically, as a superb foreign object, as a possibility of what one might become, with resolution.
She was the most sophisticated person I had yet been exposed to. Yet there was no sign of pose or forcing. My memory of her is made up of a few strong, central images, without much detail to fill them out. I see curls of smoke lazily exhaled by her broad nostrils, but I cannot remember what cigarettes she smoked, whether she used a holder, or whether in fact they were small cigars she puffed at, like Amy Lowell. In school that spring, after lights out, sitting on my window sill, I had been trying to teach myself to inhale and would get so dizzy in the process that I feared I would fall out. At the same time I was trying to settle on “my” brand of cigarette. When I eventually hit, that fall, on Marlboros, the ivory-tipped kind, was I copying Czerna? Looking back, I would say that she was more a Melanchrino type. I was forming my persona with such little touches, like the Greek “e”s and tall, scroll-like capital “M”s of my handwriting, which I still have. But what personalizing touches, if any, I took from Czerna I now forget. It was her insouciance, above all, that I would have wanted to imitate. I certainly did not want to have a man like little Carl Wilson for my husband; it was too high a price to pay for a free hand.
I do not know how many times I went with Ted to Czerna Wilson’s house on Queen Anne Hill. Enough to have seen her in several changes of costume. There was a long close-fitting garment of the kind later called a hostess-gown, maybe several of these, and then I remember at least once finding her dressed to go out—in a soft beige suit with a flaring back that resembled a lady’s riding-habit; her braid was done up in a chignon under a small hat, and there was a frilled blouse. The conversation was always about books and art: Aubrey Beardsley, Pierre Loüys, Robinson Jeffers. Yes, Jeffers, above all: Tamar, Roan Stallion, The Tower Beyond Tragedy. Though the author in his picture did not look much like an “urning,” his themes were phallic, elemental, incestuous, sodomitical, and he lived in a tower in Carmel. For me, he was a taste, like olives, gladly shed a few years later when Edmund Wilson told me that he was a false prophet. Whatever else I may have learned from Czerna I have banished from my mind except the interesting word “cunnilingus.”
She made no advances to me, and I never went there without Ted till one day toward the end of the summer when she told me that she would like me to come to a party, by myself, as Ted could not make it. Her reasons were probably those of any other hostess: the need at a party where there would be single men of a new nice-looking girl. I had just let my hair grow into a knot at the nape of my neck, and my prayers were being answered—I was finally getting pretty. Not as beautiful as my mother, “the most beautiful woman in Seattle,” but not bad, let us say winsome, because of my Irish blood.
Anyway she asked me. Since it was an evening party, I had to invent some lie for my family, of course. Then, doubtless using a transfer from the Madrona streetcar, I went, with beating heart and no idea, I suppose, of how I was going to get home. I remember that there were drinks and that the big, long living-room was full of people, all of them, except Czerna, strangers to me. But they proved to be easy to talk to; particularly some of the men: Kenneth Callahan, for instance, a young painter with a blond moustache, who eventually would be counted Seattle’s third-best painter (after Mark Tobey and Morris Graves); besides him, a White Russian, somewhat older, called Baron Elshin, who had a greeting-card business upstairs in an office-building near the Olympic Hotel—he had a small brown clipped moustache. I think I talked, too, to a young man from one of the papers. The only person who in a sense knew me was Czerna’s husband; exceptionally, he was present that evening, and he took an interest in me, behaving in fact rather protectively, as though Frank’s niece needed to be shielded from Czerna’s crowd. Probably he curtailed my liquor consumption, and it must have been he who drove me home, complete with my alibi, when the streetcars had stopped running. Needless to say, I did not pass on his greetings to Frank.
In Czerna’s crowded living-room that night I sensed that I was “launched.” To a certain extent this proved to be true; it was my coming-out party—the only one I would have. Both Kenneth Callahan and Baron Elshin were soon after me, despite my age. Callahan had no difficulty in persuading me to come to his studio, on First Hill; it was a sort of shed raised on stilts and set back from the street. To reach it you crossed an unsteady wooden bridge—a common feature in poor sections of our hilly town—that ran teetering from the sidewalk across an overgrown ravine to the door. He had invited me to pose, and it was no problem to “sit” for him in the afternoons: I did not have to account for my doings in the daytime, and nobody in the family was likely to be in that neighborhood and spot me hurrying along the shaky approach to his door. He did not invite me to pose nude, but naturally we “went the limit” when he set down his brushes—he mostly did oils. Even after several times (and horseback riding at school), it still hurt; my defloration two years before had not been complete.
On the whole, I was relieved late that fall when Kenneth, having sold almost no paintings, decided to go to sea to earn a living (writing me many letters with little drawings in the margins to Annie Wright). He bored me; he was weak; he lisped slightly, and his studio was squalid. The best thing about it was the companionway-like approach. And some of the things he did in bed made me cringe with shame to think of afterwards.
It was those sexual practices of his—now common, cf. John Updike—that taught me while still a senior at Annie Wright how to deal with shame and guilt. When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine—like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing. Perhaps I did something to my immortal soul in my narrow bed in the room I shared with Marie Althen on the senior corridor. As I forced revolting memories to surge up before my closed eyes, almost burning the closed lids with fiery self-disgust, did I kill a moral nerve? To flinch from such memories, simply suppress them, might have been healthier. Is it right to overcome self-disgust? Well, in any case I learned the trick of it. Nobody told me; I found out the recipe for myself. If sexual guilt is bad for you, what I did was good. But suppose that the act I shrank from remembering had not been something I let a little blond-moustached man do to me but something worse, such as cowardice? Would it be good to force myself to contemplate it over and over, shutting my eyes to relive the shaming moments,
till they lost their power to stab my conscience, their agenbite of inwit? I cannot say, for I never tried that. Perhaps sex—certain forms—was the only thing I did or was induced to do that shocked me badly for myself.
So I was a true girl of my generation, bent on taking the last trace of sin out of sex. According to our current belief, in sex everything is permitted (as Raskolnikov said in another context): one must just conquer a “natural” revulsion. But if, as Raskolnikov learned, the inhibition was really a deep-lying instinct, part of my interior warning system, hence necessary to my animal safety, what stupid thing was I doing? All I knew at the time was that I had devised a method that let me live with myself. It was a bit like the exercise of teaching myself to inhale, as I had been doing last year on my window sill. I was getting myself in training for my adult “career of crime.”
Mr. Elshin was quite another pair of gloves. He was too old-fashioned to do me any harm. One of his absurdities was to call on me at school on a Sunday afternoon, wearing a pair of cream or pale-yellow gloves and carrying a stick. He must have come all the way from Seattle on the interurban. He arrived during visiting hours but of course he was not on the list of approved visitors each girl was meant to be supplied with by her parents. Nevertheless Miss Preston or the vice-principal must have taken pity, for I was sent for to come down to the school parlor, across from Miss Browne’s office. It was quite an embarrassing interview we had, sitting on two straight chairs. No Humbert Humbert, he seemed taken aback by my uniform, and for my part I died at the thought that anybody glancing through the open door could see how crazy my poor old suitor looked, with those gloves and the stick and possibly a pair of spats, too. Before or after this, he took me to the movies in Seattle one afternoon, probably during Thanksgiving vacation, where he held my hand in the dark and embarrassed me then as well.
It was better to visit him in his little gift-card gallery, which had a showroom window on the corridor, fortunately, so that anybody could see in, and, behind, only a cubbyhole for the telephone. One of my visits inspired him to use the idea of me in a Christmas card, which he then (I suddenly recall) sold to me, as though it had been a commissioned order—two dozen examples, with envelopes to match. The colored drawing he had done showed a thin, prettyish girl with a “cubic” face and angular arms and legs who was wearing a cloak and carrying a pile of Christmas packages; inside was a printed text: “There was a cubic maiden,/ Who had a cubic smile.” This is all I remember of those verses of his except that there was a rhyming line about the cubic maiden walking a cubic mile. Again an embarrassment—how could I send out a likeness of myself as a Christmas card, for even then, I guess, I was said to have a “crooked smile,” which the artist had caught in his drawing? Finding the money from my allowance to pay for them was another difficulty. And how explain to my grandmother what on earth had prompted me to order them? She had no idea of my knowing a “Mr. Elshin” (not a real baron, someone finally told me, but a Russian Jew from Harbin), and I could not invent a plausible circumstance in which I might legitimately have met him. In the whole causal chain that led to the pile of “Cubic Maiden” Christmas cards being hidden, unused, in a bottom drawer in my bedroom, the sole element my grandmother was aware of was my friendship with Ted and her sister, Till.
I think she was vaguely aware, also, of their mother, as someone who went regularly to Aunt Rosie’s reformed synagogue. Like Mrs. S. Aronson (Aunt Eva) and Mrs. M. A. Gottstein (Aunt Rosie), Ted and Till’s mother must have been a contributor to the Famous Cook-book of the Ladies Auxiliary to Temple de Hirsch, third edition, 1925—a book I still own. Could she have been the “Mrs. Flora Rosenberg” of “SPANISH SOUP” (p. 21), “CREAM OF POTATO SOUP” (p. 26), and “LENTIL SOUP” (p. 27)? “Mrs. E. Rosenberg,” of “NO-EGG MAYONNAISE DRESSING” was somebody else. As one of my husbands said, this was the “Take a pound of caviar” cookbook. No bagels and lox. In any case, my grandmother saw no harm in that friendship, possibly because the girls were Jewish, like her, though she herself did not go to the Temple, did not even have a recipe (“Mrs. Harold Preston’s SWEETBREADS POULETTE”?) in the wondrous book. If the girls’ being Jewish warmed her to them, it would have been because that constituted a familiar quantity—she was able to “place” them, as she comfortably placed the Rupps, the Gerbers, Dr. Raymond and his daughter, Louise Owen—families who lived on our block on 35th Avenue. That their father was a tailor, that they did not have an automobile and Till worked in a doctor’s office, she did not hold against them; with her diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, her mink, broadtail, and monkey-fur, her “Louis” heels and safe in the bedroom closet, my grandmother was far too peculiar to be snobbish.
Czerna Wilson got back at me for something, but what I do not know—for not being a lesbian, for having attracted some single men? Most likely, her husband had chided her for luring the niece of his fraternity brother to one of her soirees. At any rate, it was through Frank that she struck. The following summer, when I no longer saw her, she consulted my uncle as a client. It was a will, I think, that she asked him to write for her, and in the course of the sessions in his office, she let him find out that she knew me—what an interesting young girl, how amusing to have her come so often to the house, Carl was quite taken … My uncle, naturally, concealed his stupefaction. But at once, that very night, my grandmother was told. Though a virtual recluse, she was fully aware of Czerna’s reputation. Again I floundered in a nasty morass of deception.
I don’t know what fresh lies I told to minimize Czerna’s delation. For some reason, though, the storm at home this time passed rather rapidly. It was bad enough that I had gone to her house on the quiet, but they supposed it had been in the daytime and with Ted. And they may have been slightly impressed by my “making time” with an undeniable celebrity. It was around that time that my grandmother and my aunt Rosie read The Well of Loneliness (1928). In the back seat of the Chrysler, with my grandmother at the wheel, I heard them discussing what those women “did.” They could not figure out. All at once, Aunt Rosie, lively as a bird, turned around: “I’ll bet she knows.” I told them, but they would not believe it. “In the lowest depths of Montmartre I’ve heard,” murmured my grandmother. “But not among anyone we would ever meet, Mary.” She let the sentence hang, till it turned into a question. Possibly she and Aunt Rosie were considering Czerna Wilson as, still disbelieving, they shook their coal-black heads in their straw hats and eyeglasses.
I never saw Czerna Wilson again and do not know what happened to her. At some point, I gather, she and Carl Wilson were divorced and at some later point he became a millionaire, through a monopoly he established in the circulating-library business in the Northwest. In my day, unless I am mistaken, the Archway Bookstore did not even have a circulating library—my grandmother got her Bromfields and Hergesheimers from Frederick’s and a lady named Mrs. Evans, and I took out my own advanced fiction from the blind Harry Hartmann’s pace-setting bookshop.
No one in Seattle, that I’m aware of, remembers Mr. Elshin. Kenneth Callahan became the program director of the Seattle Art Museum, as well as a high-ranking local painter. He married, and I think his wife was some kind of artist, too. I never saw him again either. I was in Tacoma when he shipped out on that freighter—on the Hawaii run—from which he wrote me so many letters that I answered in study hall. Then I stopped; I got tired of hearing from him. A reference book places that trip of his in 1927, which would have been junior year, but that must be a mistake. Unless he shipped out twice?
It was not the last time that letters completed my disillusionment with a man. In that respect, being literary has been a lifesaver for me; put to the test of correspondence, few infatuations, on my side, survive. Even a great passion cannot survive a series of long, “wet” letters. The men I have clung to, all of them, including my son, Reuel, have “written a good letter.”
But to think back, once more, to Kenneth Callahan, it seems to me that these pages are the first
I have ever “let on” about him. Unless I told Ted something, though certainly not all, when the “sittings” were going on. Occasionally I have asked myself whether the same applied to him. Did he never talk about me, to his wife, his painter friends, other people in Seattle’s small Bohemia? It would have been natural for him to do so, since I had written about myself in books and widely circulated magazines and thus made myself, if not public property, at least an interesting topic for reminiscence. Yet if he “told” people, no word of it, no repercussion, has ever reached me on my subsequent visits to Seattle, when I went to see my grandmother and more recently my uncle Frank.
Now and then, coming upon his name in a feature in a newspaper on the art of the Northwest, I would wonder what he had done with those oils he painted of me. In short, having become “Kenneth Callahan,” did he realize that I had become “I”? If so, probably too late. Like any poor artist, like the young Picasso, for example, he must have used the canvas of old work to paint new work on top of. Canvas cost a lot. So I, who was not yet “I,” had been painted over or given a coat of whitewash, maybe two or three times, till I was only a bumpiness, an extra thickness of the canvas. Somewhere not long ago I read or heard that he had died.
As I make myself look back with older eyes on that time in my life, another question occurs to me. Have I done Czerna Wilson an injustice? When she let the cat out of the bag to my uncle, is it possible that she did it innocently, not intending me any harm? In other words, is it conceivable that she had no inkling of what a bombshell she deposited on Frank Preston’s desk? That would imply, of course, that she had no inkling of having a bad name. The answer is no. She knew very well the picture she presented to the community, of a veritable temple harlot. If she did not deliberately promote the impression, she lazily let it shape itself around her, like those drifting curls of smoke. I am reminded, not exactly of the Nita Naldi of Cecil De Mille’s The Ten Commandments, then the screen’s own thick-lipped, heavy-hipped embodiment of every Thou Shalt Not—Czerna was less coarse and fleshy than that—but of the tribe of Astarte, or Ishtor, or Ashtoreth, icons of venery for those awe-struck decades, icons, I suspect, of her own indolent self-worship. She knew what she was doing, even though I do not. I leave her, then, in my uncle’s office in the Northern Life Tower, prompted to consult him by who knows what amused whim, wearing the severe suit with the flare at the skirt of the jacket and a smart pair of oxfords; she leans forward, looking up at him from under her felt hat brim out of those sultry green eyes, as he lights her cigarette for her. A Melanchrino, a Sobranie? “Kind of a character, that Czerna,” he now remembers, making the “r”s very western.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 40