In fact, Miss Preston did open a school near Phoenix, but I never heard how it fared, nor what happened to her sister. Once again it was the way of the Far West, possibly attributable to the vast expanses of geography: one did not “keep up” once the train whistle blew. Still, it seems to me now that once, after I had published something—a magazine piece—she wrote me a friendly letter, enclosing a photo of her school, and I hope I answered. Nothing further. I have heard twice from gentle little Miss McKay, our Physics teacher, but never from any of the others. Miss McKay wrote that Miss Mackay had married—a surprising piece of news.
The Seminary is still there, more thickly ivied, or, rather, Virginia-creepered, than it was in my day. Bishop Keator’s likeness still hangs in the Great Hall. But now they call it the Annie Wright School, and graduates (oh, dear) are called “Annies.” In the photos they use in fund-raising pamphlets the school looks quite “prestigious.” Maybe there are fewer desertions from the boarding department at the end of sophomore year. In the publicity material there is hardly any mention of faculty, and in a letter I received a few years ago from the headmaster, inviting me to visit, there was one awful mistake in grammar.
Yes, a headmaster. The whole story of the social evolution of our Pacific Northwest is hinted at there. Starting out with a “principal,” Mrs. Lemuel Wells, 1884, and continuing in that forthright style through to Miss Preston, we sank (aping eastern schools) to a “headmistress” with Miss Ruth Jenkins and her several successors till we have finally arrived at a “headmaster” with the incumbent and his grammarless predecessor. It is the story of a loss of regional identity, and I doubt that anyone else feels the shame of it as keenly as I do, I who left the Northwest at twenty and never came back, who only half-live in the United States, who have not attended a single school reunion. Weep with me, Reader, for all those resolute bishops, starting with Bishop Paddock, for all those widows of clergymen (Mrs. Hiatt, Mrs. Constance Aylwin, Mrs. Keator) doubling as teachers of Sacred Study, for the Vassar-trained Miss Atkinsons, both of them, and every old-maid teacher of Burke and Addison, for bath schedules, gym bloomers, pen nibs and inkwells, for clog dancing and “quiet hour,” Puss ’N Boots, and Pig ’N’ Whistle, for macaroni-and-cheese and chocolate ice-cream with marshmallow sauce, for deep-voiced “Papa” Wallace, our choir conductor, and “Good King Wenceslas,” “He who would valiant be,” and the red camellia tree by the cloister steps—for what was, ineluctably, and on whose like no “Annie” will ever look.
7
NOW, TO TELL YOU what happened next, after graduation, I must go back a whole year to the summer of 1928, when the American Bar Association held its convention in Seattle. It was in the month of August. In honor of the occasion, the local chapter was staging a pageant on the signing of the Magna Carta. As a former president (1896-97) of the State Bar Association and of the City Bar Association (1909-10), my grandfather of course had tickets for the event, scheduled to take place in the Outdoor Theatre at the U.
Not only did he have to go; he wanted to go. He was hooked on the theatre. When he had taken my grandmother to New York the previous winter—her first trip—on his way to Washington to hear testimony in a case of the government against a shipping company, they had opened every theatre, she complained, because of his habit of arriving an hour before curtain-time, ahead of the ushers—he was the same way about trains. That was when they had seen The Green Hat and my grandmother had found a dressmaker to copy Katharine Cornell’s second-act ensemble of thin kasha-colored wool and beige caracul trim—the elegant dress and matching jacket that now hung in her crowded clothes closet above rows of “Louis”-heeled shoes. Anyway, my grandfather was hell-bent on being at that pageant and determined, on account of his leading position in the legal community, that the rest of his family should be on hand, too.
I resisted. I loathed being seen at any function with my family, for it exposed the fact that I was still treated as a child. Every Thursday night (the maid’s night off), I died of mortification when we went to dinner at my grandfather’s club and he greeted us, coming in from the men’s side, by clapping his hands and kissing my painted grandmother on both cheeks.
A Magna Carta pageant, moreover, was the type of event—middle-class, boosterish, “educational”—that I spurned in any circumstances. More “Lincoln apple sauce,” as Mark Sullivan had written of the native variant; more boloney. While I was not actually on the side of bad King John, the hallowed civic character of the Great Charter was enough to turn me against it, especially when touted by a bunch of corporation lawyers.
We quarreled. My grandfather refused to hear of my staying home, called me “Young lady,” doubtless swore—“Hell and damnation,” his only oath. Finally I submitted, planning to sulk tight-lipped through the evening. After dinner we all got into the car and drove to the University district, with my uncle Harold—probably glowering, too—at the wheel. Frank, who as a lawyer had to go anyway, would have come in his own car, with Isabel and maybe her brother Dell, who was in the electrical-supply business but was writing a book illustrated with his own drawings on Paul Bunyan and his ox.
To start with, I imagine, I refused to look at the grassy stage. But at some point my attention must have been caught, by a voice that made my eyes turn to seek the figure it belonged to. It was the leader of a group of knights. He wore a helmet and a suit of chain mail with a red cross on the breast—the whole no doubt made of dishrags as in our plays at the Seminary. It was still light, and I could consult the program: “The Red Cross Knight, Harold Johnsrud.” The name meant nothing to me. He had a crisp voice and very pure diction, a slender waist and a fairly tall figure, taller at any rate than his followers, ranged behind him in a wedge. You could not see much of his head and face because of the side pieces of his helmet, but he was dark, and there was something oddly compressed about his features—a broken nose, it turned out.
Above all, he had “presence”; he was arresting. And this quality in him was often remarked on; it was not just a young girl’s notion that he “stood out” under the lights on the greensward representing Runnymede. I cannot explain why that should have been. His part, of the Red Cross Knight, was not important historically, unless he was meant to be Robert Fitz-Walter, leader of the barons, but Fitz-Walter, as I dimly remember, was a different character in the pageant, played by a different actor. No Red Cross Knight figures in the Britannica account of the day; he must have been someone very minor. Did Johnsrud covet the part of the wicked King John, which would have suited him well—“ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins,” the Britannica says? Perhaps the author of the pageant, finding a gifted mummer on his hands, had invented the character for Johnsrud. Whatever it was, there was a theatricality in him that commanded attention—that was why he got jobs rather easily. That night, in the Outdoor Theatre my grandmother and I exchanged glances; maybe my grandfather, too, gave a forcible nod of approval.
The reader has guessed that this Red Cross Knight is going to be my husband. Yet for a while that summer in Seattle I could not even find out who “Harold Johnsrud” was. I might have forgotten about him had it not occurred to me that a person to ask was Ted Rosenberg. As I feared, Ted knew nothing of the Bar Association pageant, but her brother Dan did, the tall older brother who was in the Speech Department at the University and who was the family’s real intellectual, played the jazz violin, and in later years, under the name Van Dragen, went to Hollywood and became a speech coach for big film stars. Not only did he know about the pageant; he knew Harold Johnsrud.
Dan said that he had come to Seattle from New York to help his friends Burton and Florence James start the Seattle Repertory Theatre—real repertory (as opposed to stock), our first. Mrs. James would be directing, and Burton James and Harold Johnsrud would share the principal male parts. Right now they were looking for a theatre, with the idea of eventually building one in the University district. I don’t recall what else I heard, but probabl
y the Magna Carta pageant had been entrusted to the Jameses by the local bar association.
Ted promised to introduce me to Johnsrud the next time he came to their house. In her program for my intellectual development, introductions—to people as well as to books—played a big role always. She had already engineered my admission to Czerna Wilson’s “salon” (her idea) and now (my idea) she would bring me together with a real actor from New York. The introduction to Czerna in the long run did not lead far, even in its side effects, except that it deepened my grandmother’s suspicions of my truthfulness. But the meeting with Dan’s friend was deeply consequential: so many long roads in my life lead back to it. Indeed, if anybody ever played the Fates to me, it was the Rosenberg family in their little frame house not far from the Madison Avenue streetcar line. My own grander house, with its carriage block incised “1893” and its view of Mount Rainier, was ten minutes walk farther along, above the Lake.
So Ted got her hospitable mother to invite me to lunch. It was a Sunday, and Johnsrud had been invited to lunch by Dan. For me the great problem, naturally, was what to wear. The August weather decided me to put on my new dress. It was a tennis dress, sleeveless, in soft white cotton with a big green V inset in the front, at the décolleté, which made a V of its own against the bare skin of my chest. I pictured it, except for the green V, as something Helen Wills or Helen Jacobs might wear on the courts. My grandmother and I had sent in for the pattern from Vogue, and I had cut the dress out with her help, and sewed it on the machine, not counting the hem, which of course was hand-sewn. It had only just been finished, the first dress I ever made.
There was only one slight drawback. It was a bit short, showing half of my kneecaps at a time when this was not “in.” But I persuaded myself to wear it anyway; it was the only new thing I had. Unfortunately, my grandmother, absorbed in the rituals of her own toilet, did not see me before I left for the Rosenbergs’; otherwise, she would have made me change. As I walked along the sidewalks, the dress got shorter, or so it felt: cut rather close to the body as far down as the hips, it was twisting around and hiking up. My entire knee was now showing. At the Rosenberg house, they were too kind to make any comment. And if they had, what could we have done? Little Mrs. Rosenberg could hardly have let it down for me while cooking lunch.
Out the window on the landing leading up to her room, Ted and I could see Johnsrud and Dan in the backyard below; they were fencing. Tall, big-boned Dan, with his owly glasses and buck teeth bared, looked a little ungainly. But Johnsrud was lissome, with a perfect fencer’s body; only his bald head, seen from above, like a skull fitted on for a fancy-dress party, appeared incongruous—I had not been prepared to find him bald on top, with that slender figure. Ted and I did not know enough about fencing to tell who was winning.
I have the sense that I talked a lot at the lunch table, to cover my shame about the dress. The whole family was there: Dan and little Jess, who was two years behind Ted at Garfield High School and would grow up to be a lawyer, Mother and Father, Till and Ted. While I talked, Johnsrud’s eyes came to rest on me curiously from time to time, as though he could not put me together. Something I said made him smile to himself and glance quizzically at Dan. There could be no doubt that he had observed my too-short dress. Misled by my bare knees, he was treating me as a child, and the books I knowledgeably mentioned—wasn’t that the summer I was trying to read Zarathustra?—in order to seem older than I was, far from correcting the visual impression, only confirmed it, making me sound weirdly precocious, I guess. Though I was still forbidden to wear real lipstick, starting on my sixteenth birthday this last June 21, I was allowed Tangee, a stick of colorless salve supposedly good for chapping, that turned a brilliant orange when you applied it to your mouth; no doubt I had applied it as thickly as possible that morning. Needless to say, my Helen-Wills, Helen-Jacobs dress, apart from its shortness, must have looked crudely home-made.
It was the pits, as people say now, a fierce humiliation of all my pretenses. There was a quality in Johnsrud that, together with Dan’s lofty manner, made my brave performance more painful than it might have been with a different young man as witness. His was a mocking nature, as was shown by the quizzing wrinkles around the eyes and the habitual lilt of one dark eyebrow. If he understood (as I feared he might) that I had come here especially to meet him and was doing my utmost to make an impression on him, that ironical look of his twitted me for my girlish folly. Sympathy with failure was not a strong point with Johnsrud. In short, he was cruel, like so many young men of the period (a debt they owed to Nietzsche or, more directly, to Shaw). When they were kind, it was condescension.
The next time I saw him was at the Metropolitan Theatre, when he played in The Wild Duck in the late autumn, probably during Thanksgiving vacation. Ted and I went to a matinee and afterwards she took me backstage to his dressing-room. It was a production that I still clearly remember, the best Ibsen I have seen to this day. Burton James played the photographer Hjalmar Ekdal, and Johnsrud was his friend and evil genius, Gregers Werle, intruding on the Ekdals’ semi-bohemian and self-deceived family life with “the claim of the ideal.” Immersed in that performance, from Mrs. Sorby’s tinkling laugh in the first scene to the gunshot at the end, I came to understand Ibsen, at least as fully as I ever shall. Johnsrud as the baleful Gregers (often thought to be based on Kierkegaard, with his thirst for the absolute, but why not on Ibsen himself, the Ibsen of The Enemy of the People and Pillars of Society?) wore a tightly fitting gray suit of an old-fashioned cut that brought out something knifelike in his appearance; I remember his Gregers always in profile, with that bald skull and mended broken nose, while Hjalmar was mostly full face to the audience, soliloquizing even when speaking dialogue. This effect—the relation of a knife and a spoon—must have been carefully studied by Florence James, the director, possibly seeing a dramatic use for a narrow, two-dimensional quality in the character of Johnsrud himself. There was a lot of Gregers in him, of the pontificator, the home-truth teller; maybe it is a Scandinavian type of being. In any case, when it was over, Ted took me to his dressing-room. He met us in the doorway, and as he talked to Ted and listened to our praises, he glanced at me and appeared to search his memory. “Ah. So this is the child Mary.” That was all. I heard the amusement in his voice, the Standard-English accent drawing my name out to ¢meari—the correct pronunciation, as I learned the following summer when studying the Daniel Jones phonetic system.
I saw him play once more at the Metropolitan Theatre—the Seattle Repertory still did not have its own house—when he and Burton James were doing The Jest, a John and Lionel Barrymore vehicle that had played on Broadway in 1919. It was adapted from a play by the Italian Sem Benelli that Sarah Bernhardt (in the John Barrymore part) had staged and toured in before the war. The story, a florid melodrama set in Renaissance Florence, had to do with two bitter enemies, one a moody artist and the other a brutal mercenary. In Seattle, the John Barrymore part (the artist) was played by Burton James, and Johnsrud took Lionel’s. Of his performance, not much comes back to me—chiefly the use he made of his shoulders to suggest primitive strength. They were high and surprisingly broad, as if built out by pads, like those in football uniforms, in contrast with his lithe slender frame and tapering waist; in fact, he had played football in college and owed his broken nose to it. I thrilled to The Jest, so baroque and violent, though it did not move me as deeply as The Wild Duck had done, but I don’t recall visiting him backstage in his dressing-room this time. Perhaps I had gone in the evening with Grandma and Grandpa rather than to a matinee with Ted.
I did not see him again till late the following summer, after I had graduated from Annie Wright. But I began to hear his name spoken at the Cornish School, where I was taking a summer course with Ellen Van Volkenburgh Browne, before going to Vassar in September. Ted and Till were impressed to know that I was studying theatre under her at Cornish, and I was impressed myself. She had great prestige as a directo
r, though I could never quite find out why, unless it was that she and her husband, Maurice Browne, the inventor of the term “little theatre,” were in some way connected with the Elmhirsts, who owned Dartington Hall in England—a famous Devonshire property that had an experimental school and an arts center—and the Elmhirsts were in some way connected with the Whitneys. In fact, Dorothy Whitney, who first married Willard Strait, founder (with Croly) of The New Republic, after his death married Leonard Elmhirst, an Englishman, and started the Dartington Hall complex with some more of her Whitney money. But I did not know that then, though doubtless Johnsrud did; it was the type of information he was master of. All I knew or, rather, learned was that studying theatre—which to me meant acting—under Mrs. Browne really meant under: one was supposed to be content to look up to her.
At Cornish, I did not study acting, let alone act; with the rest of the enrollees, I was put to doing eurhythmics, which were taught by Miss Louise Soelberg, a pale young woman in gray dancing tights with a bun. Our class took place in an exercise room; to the music of a piano, we pranced about, girls and gangling boys, in a long line that formed an ill-shapen circle. Sometimes we extended our arms and waved them; at other times we skipped. The one accomplishment I learned at Cornish was skipping, which I still do quite well, bounding springily through the air. The idea, of course, was that we were training our bodies to be expressive on the stage. We also took phonetics with a Mrs. Lois Hodgson to purify our diction. I acquired the Daniel Jones phonetics’ dictionary and learned how to write my name in phonetic symbols: ′mεari máka: thε. But wild horses could not have got me to pronounce it that way.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 42