The worst feature of this story is that I do not know the ending, not even now. After Frani’s return from her Seattle visit, there was nothing in her conversation or behavior to show whether she had noticed anything … what shall I say … Levantine? Or not. And I had no way of determining whether her opinion of me had altered. She had made me the Madonna—beautiful and good—in a Christmas tableau she directed senior year. Would she still do that?
If I asked her now to think back more than fifty years to that visit, she probably would not remember. Anyway I would be too shy to bring it up. And, supposing I overcame that and asked, how would she differentiate at this remote distance what she knows of my story today, having read my memoirs, from what she may have made out for herself sitting opposite my grandmother in the grass-papered living-room of the Seattle house? My punishment, I guess, for that old sin of mine (a variety of false witness) is that I shall never find out.
My friendship with Frani Blough, which went back to freshman year in the Chem Lab, was a watershed for me at Vassar. She was the reason Ginny and I were going to move to Cushing and that I went there on my own when Ginny did not come back. Frani was my first and for a while my only literary friend. Both her parents had been teachers. Her father, from Indiana (like Miss Sandison), was a metallurgist when he was recruited by the Aluminum Company of America (Mellon), and her mother had taught high-school English in Iron Mountain, Michigan. There was a lot of that left in small, sandy Frani; I remember hearing her say that the depression had not affected her parents because they lived on the income of their income, that is, rather modestly. They owned what had been the first Mrs. Mellon’s little house known as “the Jewel Box” in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh, not a fashionable neighborhood; Mrs. Blough collected china, including a line of Toby jugs on the mantel-piece in the dining-room, washed her breakfast dishes in a bowl of hot water at the table, which she claimed was an old American custom; she “took in” numerous periodicals such as The Nineteenth Century and After (which eventually turned into Twentieth Century), and Life and Letters Today, English journals mainly that were spread out for reading on a library table as in an English country house; she was interested in the College Boards and in her Scottish ancestors and had been with Mr. Blough “over the sea to Skye” as well as several times to the Lake Country; she taught a class in English for poor girls in the downtown YWCA and had Frani and me give lectures to it when I came to stay in the spring of senior year; both she and Mr. Blough were fond of the theatre and went with a bachelor friend of the family to whatever play John happened to be in that came to Pittsburgh—that had included Uncle Vanya with Lillian Gish, whom they took out to supper afterwards. Mr. Blough was short, dark, spry, and humorous; his family name, I believe, was a corruption or re-spelling of a Swiss name, perhaps “Blau”; when prohibition ended, he was fond of serving sparkling Vouvray.
Frani was their only child; her first name was pronounced “Fraynee” and was a Swiss “little name,” I think. It was very like her parents (as if Blough were not enough!) to have given the child a baptismal name that was bound to be mispronounced and required erudite footnoting. All my life I have been correcting people—the latest being Vassar’s last president—bent on calling her Franny.
Frani had been to Bath and knew Dove Cottage before she reached puberty; she knew Botticelli and Fra Filippo Lippi. Yet she had had time to be sent to various camps, especially a sailing one on Cape Cod, where red-haired Miss Belding, the Vassar Physical Education head, had been a moving spirit, along with “Dr. B.,” who taught us Freshman Hygiene. She had gone to the Walnut Hill School, in Natick, Massachusetts, where she and Elizabeth Bishop had studied with a wonderful English teacher named Miss Prentiss. But Bishop, though she was a year older than we were, did not arrive at Vassar until our sophomore year.
By that time I had been to visit Frani at the end of the summer at Osterville, on Cape Cod, where we played golf—the last time, mercifully, I ever would—at the Wianno Golf Club, took Mrs. Blough, who did not drive a car, to the hairdresser, and dropped in on one of Mr. Blough’s associates, a first vice-president of the Aluminum Company of America, who had green silk wallpaper in the living-room of his summer house. Soon “E. B.,” as his wife always called him, would be a vice-president of Aluminium Ltd. (Canadian) because of some ruling of the Anti-Trust Division that had obliged the Mellon interests to break up their monopoly. Anyway he had bought Frani a nice new little Ford that summer, and we went off in it to visit Pittsburgh friends of hers in Maine, at Biddeford Pool, where they had a cottage.
All this was my first experience of the New England seacoast. I remember a drawbridge—didn’t we have them out west?—buying fall apples from a roadside stand, the long curve of the beach at Ogunquit and a hotel where we had tea—and maybe a bootleg cocktail?—on the porch. Finally there were the “pools” like great salt-water puddles, a rundown dock with some sailboats and some lanky, gaunt peeling boys who sailed them, most of whom seemed to be named “Stackpole” (an example of imitative form) and to have gone to Milton Academy. And there was the Schoyer family from Pittsburgh. A tanned dark-eyed mother (no make-up) always dressed in white cotton dresses and white buttoned-up sweaters—it was cold in September; Frani’s friend, Polly, who went to Radcliffe, and two brothers, Bill and Preston. Bill, the older one, went to Yale and wanted to be a newspaperman. There was a wonderful moon reflected in the water, which was going to be too icy to swim in, and we ate clams and lobsters, probably, with Parker House rolls.
They had a big white frame cottage with a porch and perhaps a swing; doubtless the paint was peeling and blistering like those tall boys’ noses. Upstairs there were white iron beds that could stand paint, too. The person I liked best was Polly’s mother, who must have worked very hard to keep it all going. I think her husband had died. When I look back on her, I recall a phrase somewhere in Hawthorne about the dear New England ladies being more ladies than any Englishwoman ever could be. I liked that.
In the fall, when Bill, the older brother, came to Vassar to see me, he was driving an old tin can of a car—a real heap. He was a romantic and fell a little bit in love with me, as we discussed literature and some course he was taking at Yale. As a romantic, he decided to rename me “Poppy,” which was flattering, but it also sounded foolish. We drove around the Dutchess County roads in his car, talking about books and his plans for his life. I don’t think we ever parked. His younger brother, Preston, became a successful war novelist, and Polly’s son, his nephew, is a deconstructionist at Yale.
At Vassar Frani and I, even before I moved to Cushing, continued to be friends. But I cannot date events in our friendship. There was an afternoon we spent climbing apple trees together on Sunset Hill over the lake and talking about Shelley, whom neither of us liked very much. Frani’s drawling little voice came from a nearby branch saying that Shelley’s personality was over-prominent in his poetry, like a too-prominent nose, which made me laugh so that I risked falling out of my tree. That must have been junior year, when we were both in Blake-to-Keats, probably in the spring, when Lockwood was teaching it. Junior year we both read Sanctuary and Death in the Afternoon and did a lot of deriding of Hemingway. But I am not sure when it was that we used to skate at night on that same lake, below Sunset Hill; it might have been the year before. Freshman year we had both taken Miss Olive Lammert of the Chemistry Department out to dinner at the Vassar Lodge and had artichokes or mushrooms under glass—our two favorite things—and when I mentioned brushing my teeth with some abrasive powder, Miss Lammert said dryly, “Why not Sapolio or Dutch Cleanser?” That humorous thrust has lodged in my mind along with the picture of her, as she was found a bit later in the Chem Lab with an empty bottle of poison near her hand—why? Frani and I discussed it with Kitchel and Sandison, who had been Miss Lammert’s good friends, but we never learned any more. Just as we never knew why handsome Miss Tappan of the Classics Department (I had her in Medieval and Renaissance
Latin, and she played Phaedra in Greek in Hallie Flanagan’s production of the Hippolytus) left Vassar our senior year to become an Episcopal nun.
Like me, Frani was taking Classics, which had classes in Avery Hall, the old Riding Academy, behind Main. But Frani was in Greek, and I was in Latin, under stately Miss Haight (Horace and His Art of Enjoyment) and others, although I did take a year of beginning Greek with Mrs. Ryberg, which I did not like—too many small untranslatable words like µηv and δ. Miss Kitchel declared that my Latinate mind (“Johnsonian,” she said, on another day) was too perspicuous for the shadings of Greek; as my faculty adviser, she let me drop Greek after sophomore year—a mistake. But Frani persisted. Having started freshman year, she was able to do both Homer and the dramatists by the time she graduated. Apparently you had to learn a whole new kind of Greek for every author (except that Plato was the same as Xenophon, whom we had in our beginning course). Hearing about those prodigies of language-learning—Dorian, Ionian, Boeotian, Aeolian, Attic—convinced me that I was well out of Greek, after all. It was afterwards that I grew sorry. Old Miss MacCurdy, with her ear trumpet, friend of “dear Gilbert” (Murray), was a saltier personality than gracious Miss Haight, who wore her white hair like my great-aunt Eva’s in noble, layered piles on top of her head.
Miss Haight, quaffing the old Falernian (as we pictured her in Williams Hall with Dean C. Mildred Thompson and the rest of her cronies), was slightly a figure of fun. Her absurd opening words to an advanced Latin class remain with me: “When Theseus [pause] came to Athens [pause] as it were [pause] in medias res.” And Frani and her friend Clover (who played the fiddle and later won fame as a window-dresser at Elizabeth Arden) had an amusing tilt with her when the new Music building, Skinner, was inaugurated. They were both Music students (Clover was a major), and Music throughout our time had been housed with Classics in Avery but on the top floor. In niches on the stairway were classical statues of Venus and Minerva, which had suffered greatly over the years from the Music girls’ practice of running pencils down their marble curves while going by. To honor the new building Frani and Clover and their friends decided to weave garlands and procure wine for a libation from Signor Bruno, a friendly speakeasy-keeper in downtown Poughkeepsie; they took the statues of Venus and Minerva from Avery and set them up on the lawn before Skinner with garlands around their necks. Then they poured wine, played music, and danced. The next day a letter from Elizabeth Hazelton Haight was on the desk of our Chief Justice. “I regret to be obliged to report to you the rape of Venus and Minerva from the Classics Department.” If she had not gone on to demand the immediate return of the statues and the punishment of the culprits, Miss Haight might have been felt to be horsing around herself on some old steed of parody. But she did not get the benefit of the doubt, and it was noted that Miss MacCurdy, dear Gilbert’s friend, had not added her voice to the denunciation—the rape of Roman statues was outside her department.
An amusing story told about Miss MacCurdy had to do with Mrs. Flanagan’s production of the Hippolytus. Two huge archaic statues of Artemis and Aphrodite made out of papier-mâché by students in Dramatic Production, stood on either side of the bare stage. Phaedra in a classic mask, played by Miss Tappan, spoke her lines in Aphrodite’s shadow; across the stage, Hippolytus, played by Phil Davis, a young widower who taught late Latin and eventually turned into Mrs. Flanagan’s husband, was under the protection of Artemis. Prexy, once a Greek scholar, played Theseus, entering as it were in medias res and taking a position in the middle. I wish I could remember whether they were buskinned. There were also a chorus and a Messenger, played by gaunt Mary Wing, the daughter of Miss Madeira of the Madeira School. Miss MacCurdy with her ear trumpet sat in the front row.
Now, as the story has it, Prexy forgot his lines. But he was a born actor, full of resource: in his head he hastily translated “To be or not to be,” which was about the right length, into Greek, spoke the resulting lines, and nobody noticed a thing. Except old Miss MacCurdy, whose ear trumpet could not be fooled by Hamlet, in Greek or English. She did not let on till after the performance was over and Prexy was receiving congratulations. Then she added her own.
That must have happened during our junior year, which, I now recognize, was my year of election at college. As I said, Elizabeth Bishop had arrived as a freshman when we were sophomores. But I don’t clearly remember her till the next year; we both (I think) lived in Cushing; she took Greek, like her old friend Frani, with Miss MacCurdy, and Verse Writing with Miss Swain. Already that fall, Frani, Bishop, and I began to talk about starting a rebel literary magazine, to be called The Battleaxe (my title). I wrote to John about it (he may not have approved of the name), and late in October Frani wrote to her mother: “Some of us are going to start a new magazine, The Battleaxe—Mary, Clover, Bishop, Kay McLean, Nathalie Swan … and it is really going to be good, a little sock at the Review! Nothing tame, arty, wishy-washy, ordinary or any of the other adjectives applicable to so much college writing.” This did not come to pass until senior year, when it was called Con Spirito (Bishop’s title), a pun joining the musical notation meaning “with zest” to the announcement of a conspiracy.
At Cushing we belonged to the so-called smoking-room set, consisting of Bishop, Frani, Nathalie Swan (“the Sphinx of the smoking-room”), Ev Huntington, Lou McGeehan, Beth Osborne, Louise Crane, then known as “Auntie.” There was Rhoda Wheeler, who loved to ride, from Adamsville, Massachusetts; she was another Walnut Hill girl and classmate of Bishop’s. Some, like Ev Huntington, who was a senior, did not really live in Cushing, and on some nights the smoking-room would turn into a debating society as girls would drop in from Students or from their own dormitories and we would discuss questions such as “What makes Cézanne’s apples beautiful?” I argued that it was purely the arrangement of the shapes and colors, while hoarse-voiced Eunice Clark, editor-to-be of the Miscellany News, kept earnestly repeating “But it’s the spirit of the apples that counts,” whereupon I led a round of derisive laughter. In New York we had been impressed by the new Museum of Modern Art, where we saw the famous apples for the first time, and somewhere I had learned about Clive Bell and the expression “significant form,” which, to tell the truth, despite my bold assurance, I did not fully understand. Nor do I now. Unless it was only stating that the form is the meaning.
The Cushing smoking-room was a launching-pad for funny stories and songs like the ones composed by Lou McGeehan and Beth Osborne on the French Survey course, which most of us had taken. Snatches from Crouzet—the textbook—were set to a boisterous tune: “Travel’d in India, exotic, le sud de Madagascar,/ Poems that are tragiques and antiques and barbares” (Leconte de Lisle) or “Gentilhomme de campagne,/ Died because too stout” (that was Balzac); “Oh, fille de Necker, what is it all about?” was Madame de Staël. One great hit was Bishop’s composition on living in a room next to the “john”:
Ladies and gents, ladies and gents,
Flushing away your excrements,
I sit and hear beyond the wall
The sad continual waterfall
That sanitary pipes can give
To still our actions primitive.
From the first we had called her Bishop; nobody, unless it was old Miss Fiske, who taught her Anglo-Saxon, called her Elizabeth. Miss Sandison tried Bish for a while, but it did not work.
Small, with hunched shoulders, rounded features, and a high hoarse voice like a boy’s in the course of changing, at Vassar she anticipated the way she looked in later life. I see her playing a little old man—the heroine’s parent—in a dramatization we put on of Dostoevsky’s “Uncle’s Been Dreaming” (I was Sophia, a neighbor lady). Dressed in a little black suit of clothes, her short frizzy ash-blond hair worn in a pompadour and powdered for the part with cornstarch, she was already her future self.
She had a little cough, a mild clearing of the throat, which sounded apologetic, like an old person’s cough. Much of this
was due to severe asthma, which had held her back in school and bothered her all her life. She had lived a good deal with an Uncle Jack and Aunt Ruby in Worcester, where the family had a contracting business, and she lived in fear of the aunt, whose long-haired dogs were a torment to an asthmatic. In the summer sometimes she went to Nova Scotia, where there were relatives she loved—her mother’s people. To all intents and purposes she was an orphan, like me; her father had died when she was a baby (of drink, I thought, but I now learn it was Bright’s disease), and her mother was in an asylum, having tried to kill Bishop with a butcher knife when Bishop was five. The mother did not die till years after the knife episode, which quite possibly (I now think) never happened outside the imagination of some relative or neighbor who claimed to have seen “the crazy woman” eye the child and then eye the big knife. But that was what poor Bishop had been told.
In her background, as in my Minneapolis experience, there had been plenty of old-fashioned cruelty-to-children—orphans in those days seemed to invite it, having no natural protectors. In Bishop’s case, as in mine, there had finally been a rescuer; hers was Aunt Maude, her mother’s sister. That year we took walks along the Pine Walk and talked of books and socialism (I was the conservative), but we never had a class together. The authors she spoke of were almost all new to me: Dorothy Richardson, Wyndham Lewis, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Sarah Orne Jewett. She was reading Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, and I was reading Rebecca West. I doubt that she was aware then that Sarah Orne Jewett had “a Boston marriage” (as such relations used to be called) with the wife of a publisher. Or was it already on the grapevine?
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 47