Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  On the downtown side of 46th Street between Fifth and Madison I met him, coming toward me, the only person I knew in all New York. He seemed pleased to meet me. I told him about my fight with the Preston ladies, and naturally he was on my side. Then he made a suggestion: if I still wanted to see some art today, a few blocks off there was a show by Archipenko, the modernist sculptor, which he had been thinking of going to. It was on the top floor of a smart department store, Saks Fifth Avenue—to me that seemed a bit strange. We went through aisles of gloves and stockings and costume jewelry and then we were in the elevator. I was too much excited as my savior guided me through the evidently very advanced, non-representative exhibits to be anything but confused. Archipenko, I gathered, was a Russian and an extremist. He believed in pure forms. I did not quite grasp it, but that did not bother me. For me, the marvel was simply in being there, as though by a miracle. And it had happened so swiftly, as things did in New York: an hour before, I had never heard of Archipenko and now I was gazing at curious metal shapes of his making. In my hand was a catalogue; Johnsrud had taken one for me from a stack on a desk.

  He walked me home to the Roosevelt, which he seemed to regard as a droll choice of hotel, fairly expensive but not classy, I guessed. Yet, as we stood in front of the hotel saying good-bye, he suddenly offered to take me to a matinee the next afternoon, down in Greenwich Village. If my grandmother agreed, he would come to get me around noon. I dared not ask him up to our little suite of rooms (anyway he had an appointment), but I was wild with joy. To think this had happened on my first day in New York. When I went upstairs, my grandmother and Isabel were there, and, to do them justice, as astounded as I was by the remarkable event that had befallen me. Not finding me on their return, they had worried; now they were relieved of guilt pangs by the statistically wondrous chance that had brought this man to 46th Street at the very moment that I, thanks to our fight in the museum, was coming along it without a friend in the world. At first they could not take in that this was the Red Cross Knight in the Magna Carta pageant—what a tale to tell Grandpa! If my grandmother finally remembered the Knight (and now I am not sure whether she did or not), it might well be in some typically derogatory way (“the one with the crooked nose in the armor”). Yet in the hotel room, to complete the miracle, she was all smiles; perhaps she was sorry for having given in to Isabel on the American Wing.

  Because of Johnsrud, we made peace with each other. Though I was brimming over with triumph, I managed not to gloat over Archipenko and Saks Fifth Avenue; I let them marvel at the catalogue. On their side, no difficulty was made about his taking me to the play the next day; he would bring me home before dark, in plenty of time for us to have dinner and see another play—Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, I think it was, or Journey’s End, with an all-male English cast (produced, though I did not know it, by the husband of Ellen Van Volkenburgh Browne). The oddest part was that they were letting me go out not with a boy but a man, who was losing some of his hair. In fact, he was only twenty-six, nine years older than I. Still they knew nothing about him; I suspect Isabel told herself that he was someone I had met at the Cornish School. It occurs to me that the explanation lay in a place where I would not have thought to look for it—myself. With the prospect of me on their hands for several days and especially after this morning’s dispute, they may have welcomed Johnsrud: he came to those two women as a savior too.

  It was a play by Mike Gold that he took me to see. Somehow I must have known—or did he have to tell me?—that Mike Gold was a Communist writer who had a regular column in the Daily Worker. The play, laid in Mexico, was called Fiesta; I suppose it had a connection with the Mexican revolution of a few years back. I did not find it very good but I enjoyed it and enjoyed being with him in the old Provincetown Theatre, where the early O’Neill plays had been done. We rode downtown on the subway—my first subway ride—and he put me in a seat against the wall, at the end of a bench, and then sat himself down beside me. So I would not have to sit next to a Negro, he explained, with his raised eyebrow. I understood the joke, which was not against Negroes but against people like Isabel, who would certainly take that precaution if she had to ride in the subway. We also took the subway back.

  I cannot remember whether I saw him again before we went up to Vassar. It may have been the next day—or was it weeks later?—that he took me to see the Georgia O’Keeffes at the Stieglitz gallery and made me look at the Fuller Building on 57th Street and at Bonwit Teller as the best examples of modern design New York had to show. And when did we do the Staten Island ferry ride? In any case, whenever we said good-bye, he instructed me to write to him.

  My grandmother and Isabel were certainly not shocked that he had taken me to a play by Mike Gold—the name would not have meant anything to them. I doubt that either of them had heard of the Daily Worker. Communism was not one of our family bogeys. That may have been a result of my grandfather’s radical Republicanism in his days in the legislature. Unlike the McCarthys, though occasionally hot-tempered, he was tolerant. I never heard him fulminate against the IWW or even mention Communism, pro or con. It was true that he did not like Al Smith.

  As for Johnsrud, I do not know why he took me to see a play by Mike Gold. Possibly as a jape or he knew somebody in the company and had free tickets—or both. He was certainly not attracted to Communism; he had his own brand of radicalism—the populist streak. As for me, I find I have forgotten where I stood on Communists in 1929 and what I knew about them. I was aware that there had been a revolution in Russia; my picture of it must have been formed in Minneapolis by the Sunday-magazine section of the paper, where I would have seen pictures of the murdered Tsar’s family, the girls in their long white summer dresses and the boy in something like the sailor suits my brothers had had in Seattle. With my interest in royalty, I would have studied those faces and maybe known some of their names. Still, though I surely knew the name of Rasputin (as well as those of the Austrian Archduke Rudolf and poor Maria Vetsera and, for that matter, of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, cruelly executed, and his spouse, Carlotta), I feel doubtful about the names Lenin and Trotsky: when did they enter my consciousness? I think back to driving through Taylor Gate in a station taxi with my grandmother and Isabel and ask myself whether I could have been aware, as a registering freshman, that Lenin had died five years before and that Trotsky, already expelled from the Party, had just been exiled. Surely not. Those events, momentous for my personal history, had not counted among Current Events at Annie Wright—rather, we got the Kellogg-Briand pact. I no longer saw Mark Sullivan, who might have told me something, and the Rosenberg girls, although Democrats, were not really interested in politics. I was matriculating at Vassar in the dawn of what I later knew as “third-period Stalinism,” and it would take me eight years and a failed marriage to find out what that was.

  Having seen me installed in my room, which shocked my grandmother by its lack of amenities, she and Isabel left, with assurances from the house warden that a lamp, a rug, bedcover, and so on, could be bought downtown at a store called Luckey Platt. I was alone (no roommate!) in Davison Hall on the Quad, probably still wearing the smart new Oxford gray suit I had traveled in, with a royal-blue silk blouse and matching cloche hat, the whole utterly out of keeping with my campus circumstances. Soon I would have to eat in the dining-­hall with perfect strangers. The outlook was as friendless as New York had been until I saw Johnsrud coming briskly toward me on East 46th Street. It would be better when classes started, but on that first night I did not know a soul at Vassar, unless you counted Flea Lee, which I was wise enough not to do.

  Actually, there was a girl from Seattle in our entering class. My grandmother had found out her name—Glee Jamison; she was the granddaughter of Mr. Skinner of Skinner and Eddy, shipbuilders, the defendants in the case for overcharging brought by the government that my grandfather, appointed Master in Chancery, had gone to Washington the winter before last to take evidence in. That was when
my grandmother, who stayed in New York, had got her kasha-colored suit like Katharine Cornell’s.

  He had decided against Skinner and Eddy but in doing so seemed to have gained the respect of Mr. Skinner, who told me that he was “the only honest lawyer in Seattle”—it was not the first time I had heard that said. The Skinners, thinking obviously of the Vassar-bound granddaughter, had invited me to dinner at their Seattle house, and my grandfather, with some misgivings, had decided that I could accept. They were the first plutocrats I had met, and though he disapproved of the class they belonged to (and maybe specifically of their trying to cheat the government), he let me go with the stipulation that I take no more than two (!) cocktails—Bacardis, they turned out to be, in a silver shaker. These were the first cocktails, though not the first drinks, I had tasted, proof of Mr. Skinner’s wealth and power. At dinner, that night, he had spoken expansively of inviting me to their suite at the Savoy Plaza when they came to New York in October—that was where they always stayed. Nevertheless, once at Vassar, I made no effort to find Glee. When we finally met—she was fattish and blonde and blue-eyed—we saw we had nothing beyond Seattle in common. She did not like Vassar, I gather, and left before the end of freshman year. My grandfather never asked about her, as if to illustrate his lack of interest in the class of businessmen and their progeny. Some time in the fall I did go to that suite in the Savoy Plaza, and the day afterwards the Skinners’ son-in-law and business partner, Bill Edris, took me to lunch at a restaurant called L’Aiglon and made a rough pass at me, which I never spoke about.

  Anyway I could not count Glee as a person I knew. And I could expect no social help from my senior adviser, a soap-and-water Christian by the name of Hope Slade, who probably did not take to me in my royal-blue blouse. As Flea Lee may well have warned me, the senior adviser routine was a formality, honored only on Registration Day, while the parents were still there.

  As it turned out, it was not hard to meet other girls in my dormitory. Indeed it was easy. That was the trouble. I was soon trying to shake the first friends I made. The queerest of these was the girl across the hall, a poor little plucked chicken by the name of Jane Westermann, who had a collection of lariats and bridles and a sister named Helen, known as “Peter.” It was Peter who picked me up in the hall before dinner the first night, to introduce me to Jane, her little sister. This amounted to a kind of pimping (for which she doubtless deserved credit; not every older sister would do it) and was effective at the outset: Peter, a knowing junior with hard blue eyes and blond hair cut like a man’s, was attractive, positively alluring to a literary freshman; she belonged to an intellectual set that lived in Josselyn and had arcane standards of judgment that terrified non-initiates. Such brilliant, glittery upperclassmen were a vanishing species, dating back maybe to the era of Edna Millay; there were none in the class that followed and emphatically none in mine. Possibly the species of college wits went out with the onset of the depression.

  In any case, though I was flattered to be singled out by Peter and even dazzled for a time, the price—friendship with poor Janie—soon began to seem too high, especially as the pitying smiles of Peter and her friends for some of my literary tastes, for my interest in “activities” (such as the freshman debating squad) were all too intimidating. Dropping sad Janie with her absurd lariats was fairly forgivable if only it could lose me the frightening attentions of her older sister. Within a few weeks the Westermanns and I were barely speaking. I think I felt slightly guilty, though, when Jane left college at the end of freshman year, taking her horsey gear with her. She went out west to a ranch, we heard, and that was not surprising; she was surely happier there. What was odd was to learn, from an advertisement in some college publication, that her sister, after graduation, had joined her in running the ranch—a peculiar career choice for a literary intellectual. In the Fiftieth Year Bulletin of the Class of ’33, Jane’s address is a box number in Bozeman, Montana; maybe Peter is still with her (no address is given for her in the Register of Living Alumnae); I remember hearing years ago that they had both married cowboys.

  Though I rapidly shook the Westermanns, Peter may have left an imprint. It may have been from her that I learned to scorn college sings, tree ceremonies, “Vassar devils” (a fudgey mixture of devil’s food cake, chocolate sauce, and, I guess, ice-cream), the Outing Cabin, the Cider Mill. In the fall of 1929, all that Vassar folk lore seemed to me as corny as my grandmother McCarthy’s electric doughnut-maker. In my four years at Vassar I went maybe twice to the Cider Mill, a nice walk through Dutchess County apple country, but I never had a “devil,” which is why I am not sure of what goes into them. But were those aversions spontaneous? I can see them now as partly a contagion from Peter Westermann.

  The next friends I made lived in Davison Hall, too. They were Alice Butler from New Haven, Virginia Johnston from Waterbury, Helen Edmundson from Pittsburgh, Elinor Coleman from New York, and Betty Brereton (a navy daughter) from Washington, D.C. Alice had gone to Abbott Academy, Helen to Madeira, Elly to a day school, Horace Mann, in New York; the rest I don’t remember.

  There were also in Davison, among the freshmen, some New York society girls, mainly from Chapin, whose deaf-sounding voices were constantly calling to each other in corridors, out the windows, across the dining-hall. “Cum-cum!” they called, for Comfort Parker, “Rosil-l-­la!” for Rosilla Hornblower, “A-lye-dah!” for Alida Davis. A whole bevy of them, trilling and cawing, lived in Davison and behaved as if no one else did. As it turned out, most of those detested New York girls left Vassar (no more “A-lye-dah,” no more “Cum-cum”), and those who stayed were the nucleus of what, by senior year, became my “group.” Yet the aversion they inspired that first year in corridors and dining-hall served to draw me together with Alice Butler, Helen Edmundson, and so on, most of whom would soon leave Vassar, too. Our resentment of the bird-chorus of New York debutantes must have made us stick together in sheer self-protection; otherwise we had nothing in common, though of course we never admitted that. We thought we liked each other. The only one I truly liked, though, was Virginia Johnston, from Waterbury and Baltimore, a cool beautiful math major; we had got to be friends through sitting near each other in Durant Drake’s Philosophy 105. Sophomore year, when the others except Betty Brereton mercifully left, Ginny and I became roommates after a fashion, turning my single room into our bedroom and hers, across the hall, into our study. It was not a very practical arrangement. I kept her awake at night, talking, and we soon reverted to two singles. At the end of the year, Ginny left to get married to Dick Goss of Scovill Brass, Waterbury. When I moved to Cushing at the beginning of junior year, again I was all by myself.

  Johnsrud had given me his address: 50 Garden Place, Brooklyn. Not to seem too eager, maybe I let a week elapse before writing. My letters to him are lost—if he kept them, like me, he probably failed to pay the storage bill on old trunks he sent to the warehouse when we broke up—so I cannot cite what I told him. But I can guess, from my word-perfect recollection of a sentence in his reply. “I thought you would find Vassar brittle, smart, and a little empty,” he wrote.

  “Brittle, smart, and a little empty”—wow! The words ravished me. I kept saying them over and over. But did I believe them? I cannot tell. Maybe they described Flea Lee and Peter Westermann, but they certainly did not apply to my gang in Davison; none of whom with the exception of Ginny could remotely pass for smart, let alone the rest of those things. And hearty, outspoken Miss Kitchel, my faculty adviser, whom I had in freshman composition (English 105)? Or the seniors I admired—tall, serene, beautiful, blue-eyed Elizabeth Beers, for instance, who had just been elected chief justice.

  I would think that my letter to him recounting my first impressions had simply been telling him what I thought he would like to hear, feeding him his own idea of Vassar; I would think that if I did not have copies of letters I wrote that same year to Ted Rosenberg in Seattle and that her family thoughtfully saved. There Johnsr
ud’s phrasing (without attribution) recurs as my own observation. On November 1: “But there is too much smart talk, too many labels for things, too much pseudo-cleverness. I suppose I’ll get that way, too, though I’m doing my best to avoid it. The scenery is nice in a way, but it’s much too pastoral, if you see what I mean. Nice little rounded hills and shorn fat trees. It looks like an English country­side. It is too domesticated. I am homesick for geometric lines, points, and angles.” Again, after Christmas: “As for me, I do nothing but bewail my fate for being in this damned assured stupid college and write letters even more assured and stupid than the college. What the hell?”

  I wonder how much of this can have been sincere. The only thing I remember is the feeling about the scenery. The gently rolling Hudson River countryside was so like the landscapes in English literature that I recognized it in a way. And this was a sort of coming home—pleasurable, though perhaps at first I really did miss the “geometric” firs and spruces of the Puget Sound country. In other words, the feelings I remember, of rapturous discovery that was like a rediscovery, are almost the opposite of those I wrote down.

  This is alarming, above all to one who has set out to write her autobiography. It raises the awful question of whether there can be multiple truths or just one. About truth I have always been monotheistic. It has been an article of faith with me, going back to college days, that there is a truth and that it is knowable. Thus Vassar either repelled me on the whole by “cleverness” or it didn’t. Even allowing for variance of moods, both cannot be true. I see only one way out of the dilemma I am placed in by my own letters. It is an Einsteinian solution, basing itself on the premise that time fatally intervenes between what is seen and the seer. What I foresaw in the first letter—“I suppose I’ll get that way, too”—has in fact happened: I have changed; I have become like Vassar or, better, Vassar changed me while I was not looking, making me more like itself. If I can no longer feel what I felt about the college when I wrote to Ted, it is because I, too, the product of a Vassar education, am now brittle, smart, and a little empty. And oblivious of it.