Instead of dictating, he talked. On the awful chasm of difference between Harvard and Yale, perceptible in American intellectual history of the present day (e.g., Luce and Archie MacLeish were Yale, Franklin Roosevelt was Harvard); on the early days of John L. Lewis and the rebel mine workers of Illinois; on how I ought to go to graduate school and earn a Ph.D., even at Yale if I had to (Ben of course was Harvard), for without a Ph.D. I could never have a serious career as a critic; on old German cities in the Rhineland (Ben came from Frankfurt am Main); and on the structure of American society (America was the classless society, though not the kind Marx had pictured; Marx could not have foreseen this country of ours, where everybody, workers included, was middle-class).
I listened and laughed, my fingers idle on the keys. Some of his theories offended my patrician prejudices, for I liked to think that I came from a superior class, the professionals, who, together with a very few old-family financiers and land-poor gentry, were different from other Americans, whereas Ben scoffed and snorted at the notion of an American patriciate even more than at the notion of an American proletariat. It was easier for him to convince me of the vast distinction between Yale and Harvard, the more so as it embodied an aristocratic prejudice (Ben being, naturally, a snob in these matters, like most deep-dyed men of the left, not excepting Karl Marx). And he impressed me with the vital necessity of my having a Ph.D., to the point where I got on a train to New Haven to look at the graduate school, spending the night with Arthur Mizener, who was working on a doctorate, and his pretty wife, Rosemary Paris, the Perdita to my Leontes in the Outdoor Theatre at Vassar.
But that was the closest I got to a Ph.D. Something else had happened. When the first Moscow trial took place and Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed in August 1936 (and the Spanish Civil War began), I did not know about it, since I was in Reno. Shortly after that May Day parade, I had “told” John, who was back from playing Winterset on the road. I said I was in love with John Porter and wanted to marry him. This was in Central Park while we watched some ducks swimming, as described in “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment.” Except for that detail, there is not much resemblance between the reality and the story I wrote two years later—the first I ever published. When I wrote that story (which became the first chapter of The Company She Keeps), I was trying, I think, to give some form to what had happened between John, John Porter, and me—in other words, to explain it to myself. But I do not see that I was really like the nameless heroine, and the two men are shadows, deliberately so. I know for a fact that when I wrote that piece I was feeling the effects of reading a lot of Henry James; yet today I cannot find James there either—no more than the living triangle of John, John Porter, and me.
John Porter was tall, weak, good-looking, a good dancer; his favorite writer was Rémy de Gourmont, and he had an allergy to eggs in any form. He went to Williams (I still have his Psi U pin) and was the only son of elderly parents. When I met him, he had been out of work for some time and lived by collecting rents on Brooklyn and Harlem real estate for his mother. The family, de-gentrifying, occupied the last “white” house in Harlem, on East 122nd Street, and owned the beautiful old silver Communion cup from Trinity Church in Brooklyn; it must have been given to an ancestor as the last vestryman. After the Paris Herald and Agence Havas, Porter had worked in Sweden for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but since then had been unable to connect with a job. Collecting rents on the wretched tenements still owned by his parents was his sole recourse, and most of the poor blacks who lived in them dodged him as best they could, having no earnings either. The Porters were very close with the little they had; they neither drank nor smoked and disapproved of anybody who did. The old father, who had once been an assemblyman in Albany, was deaf and inattentive, and John hid his real life from his mother.
He was in love with me or thought he was; my energy must have made an appeal to him—he probably hoped it would be catching. Despite his unemployment, dour mother, and rent-collecting, he was gay and full of charm. He was fond of making love and giving pleasure. By the time John came back from the road, Porter and I had a future planned. Together with a journalist friend who had a car, he was going to write a travel book on Mexico. Mexico was very much “in” then among sophisticated people, especially because Europe, what with Hitler and the fall of the dollar, was looking more and more forbidding. Hence John Porter and his co-author had readily found a publisher to advance $500 on a book contract with royalties.
It may be that Porter already had the idea of the Mexican book at the time he met me and merely needed the thought of marriage to spur him on. In any case, I fitted into the picture. After Reno, where my grandfather was getting me the best law firm to file for divorce, Porter would wait while I visited my grandparents in Seattle, and then the three of us would start out from New York in the friend’s small car. It would be an adventure.
And Johnsrud? He took it hard, much harder than I had been prepared for. I felt bad for him; in fact I was torn. The worst was that, when it came down to it, I did not know why I was leaving him. I still had love of some sort left for him, and seeing him suffer made me know it. Out of our quarreling, we had invented an evil, spooky character called “Hohnsrud” (from a misaddressed package) who accounted for whatever went wrong. Our relations in bed, on my side, were unsatisfactory, and infidelity had shown me that with other men this was not so. It was as though something about John, our history together, made me impotent, if that can be said of women. I had no trouble even with the worn-out little actor in the Adler elevated shoes. Yet I doubt that sex was really the force that was propelling me; had we stayed together I might well have outgrown whatever the inhibition was. I was still immensely impressed by him and considered myself his inferior. Hence it stupefied me, shortly after our breakup, to hear Frani say, by way of explanation: “Well, your being so brilliant must have been difficult for him.”
It is a mystery. No psychoanalyst ever offered a clue, except to tell me that I felt compelled to leave the man I loved because my parents had left me. Possibly. What I sensed myself was inexorability, the moerae at work, independently of my will, of my likes or dislikes. A sweet, light-hearted love affair, all laughter and blown kisses, like Porter himself, had turned leaden with pointless consequence. Looking back, I am sorry for poor Porter, that he had to be the instrument fated to separate me from John. And for him it was a doom, which took him in charge, like the young Oedipus meeting the stranger, Laius, at the crossroads. I wonder whether he may not have felt it himself as he finally set out for Mexico, where he would die of a fever after overstaying his visa and going to jail. All alone in a stable or primitive guest quarter belonging to a woman who had been keeping him and then got tired of it.
Meanwhile, though, before I left for Reno, Porter and I went out for a few days to Watermill, Long Island, where his parents still owned a moldy summer bungalow in the tall grass high up over the sea. With us was a little Communist organizer by the name of Sam Craig. I have told the story of that in the piece called “My Confession” in On the Contrary. The gist of it is that the Party was sending him to California in a car some sympathizer had donated. But Sam did not know how to drive. So he had asked Porter, a long-time friend, to take the car and give him driving lessons on the lonely back roads around Watermill. Sam was a slow learner, to the point of tempting us to despair for him. On the beach, all that week the red danger flags of the Coast Guard were out, and we swam only once in the rough water. In the evenings, over drinks in the moldy old house lit by oil lamps, Sam was trying to convert me to Communism. To my many criticisms of the Party, he had a single answer: I should join the Party and work from the inside to reform it. This was a variant on “boring from within,” the new tactic that corresponded with the new line; the expression seems to have been first used in 1936. Evidently Sam was thinking of termite work to be done on the Party itself, rather than on some capitalist institution. Very original on his part, and he nearly convinced me.
In the end, I said I would think it over. Sam passed his driving-test and went off by himself in the car, heading west. As I wrote in “My Confession,” I ask myself now whether this wasn’t the old car that figured in the Hiss case—the car Alger gave to the Party. I never learned what happened to Sam, since I never saw or heard of him again. He may have perished in the desert or gone to work recruiting among the Okies or on the waterfront. And here is the eerie thing about the Porter chain of events: everyone concerned with him disappeared. First, Sam; next, the man named Weston, Porter’s collaborator on the Mexican guidebook, who vanished from their hotel room in Washington after drinks one night at the National Press Club, leaving his typewriter and all his effects behind.
Porter searched for a week, enlisting police help; they canvassed the Potomac, the jails, the docks, the hospitals, they talked to those who had last seen him. The best conclusion was that he had been shanghaied. By a Soviet vessel? Or that he had had some reason to want to disappear. But without his typewriter? A journalist does not do that. He was never found.
Meanwhile, I, too, had dropped out of the picture. I was in New York, at the Lafayette Hotel, and concurring by telephone with the decision Porter came to: to go on without Weston and get the book started, while he still had the car and half the advance. Of course I had qualms. Even though he had taken it with good grace when, on my return from Reno and Seattle, I had got cold feet about the Mexican trip. I forget what reason I gave. The fact was, I had lost my feeling for him. But I let him think I might join him once he had “prepared the way.” From Washington he wrote or telephoned every day; after he left, I wrote, too, day after day, addressing my letters to Laredo, general delivery. I never heard from him again.
Late that fall, a crude-looking package from an unknown sender arrived in the little apartment I had taken on Gay Street in the Village. Having joined the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, whose members were getting a certain number of anonymous phone calls—Sidney Hook, we heard, looked under the bed every night before retiring—I was afraid to open the thing. As far as I could make out from the scrawled handwriting, it came from Laredo, on the Mexican border; conceivably there was a connection with Trotsky and his murderous enemies in Coyoacán. I am ashamed to say that I asked Johnsrud if he would come over and be with me while I opened it. He did. First we listened, to be sure we could not hear anything ticking—but inside all we found was a quite hideous pony-skin throw lined with the cheapest, sleaziest sky-blue rayon, totally unlike Porter, who had a gift for present-giving. I had already ruled out any likelihood that the crudely wrapped package had anything to do with him, even though Laredo had been on his way. The sleazy throw confirmed this. On Johnsrud’s advice probably, I wrote or wired the sender. In reply, I got a telegram: PACKAGE COMES FROM JOHN PORTER MEXICO.
That was all. At some point that autumn his mother wrote me, demanding that I pay her for the telephone calls he had made to me in Seattle. I refused. Next, his parents wanted to know, perhaps through a third party, whether I had heard from him at Christmas—they had not. But my memory here is hazy. And I cannot remember when I finally learned of his death. It was more than a year later, and it seems to me that it came to me in two different versions, from different sources. Certainly the second was from Marshall Best, the Viking Press editor who lived at 2 Beekman Place and served those meatballs baked in salt. He was a devoted friend of Porter’s and, if I may say it, quite a devoted Stalinist sympathizer. By now, naturally, what with the Trotsky Defense Committee, he disliked me on political grounds. It may have given him some satisfaction to tell me a piece of news that was not only painful but also reflected poorly on me. As though I were the principal cause of Porter’s death. And perhaps, in truth, I was. His mother must have thought so.
If it had not been for me, he would never have been in Mexico. He would still be collecting rents for his parents. And, if I had gone along with him, instead of copping out, I would never have let him overstay his visa, which had caused him to land in prison, which caused him to contract diphtheria or typhus or whatever it was that killed him when, on his release, the woman he had been living with let him come back and stay in her stable.
Well. As an English writer said to me, quoting Orwell, an autobiography that does not tell something bad about the author cannot be any good.
I am not sure why I lost my feeling for Porter. At the time I thought it was his letters—wet, stereotyped, sentimental—that had killed my love. The deflation was already beginning, obviously, when I met the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt on the train that was taking me west. The letters and phone calls completed the process. Whatever it was, I now realize that I positively disliked that Fred MacMurray look-alike when I saw him gazing fondly down at me when he met me on my return. The distaste was physical as well as intellectual. I could not stand him. He had become an embarrassment, having served his purpose, which I suppose was to dissolve my marriage. I was appalled, for him and for myself.
Did he notice that I had changed? Nothing was ever said, and I tried to hide it. “Succès?” “Succès fou!” had been our magic formula after love-making, and “Succès fou!” I went on duly repeating, I imagine. I was telling myself that it was only a few days; in a few days he would have left. Such cowardice was very bad of me. If I had had the courage to tell him, he might not have started out without me. Yet I am not sure. Would my having “the heart” to tell him have made the difference? Probably the truth was that Porter had to go to Mexico; his bridges were burned. That applied to all three of us. Nothing could return to the status quo ante. John and I had left 2 Beekman Place behind, to the tender mercies of Albert B. Ashforth, who painted our pretty apricot walls another color, I suppose. The Howlands’ furniture had been passed on to a friend of Alan Barth’s named Lois Brown. A trunk with my letters and papers in it went to storage, never to be reclaimed. Johnsrud had moved back to the Village. While waiting for my grandfather to fix things up with Thatcher & Woodburn in Reno, I had stayed with Nathalie Swan in her parents’ Georgian house in the East 80s. No, nothing could go back to what it had been. Old Clara returned to her funeral-parlor business—she was proud of having buried a fighter named Tiger Flowers. I never ate her smothered chicken again. Poor “Hohnsrud” of course had died.
Moreover, Porter was sensitive—think of his allergies. He must have heard the difference on the telephone while I was still in Seattle; I am a fairly transparent person. And if he guessed my changed feelings, he kept it strictly to himself. The question I should ask myself is not did he know, but how soon did he know. It is a rather shaking thought.
Two
THE ONE-ROOM APARTMENT I moved into on Gay Street had eleven sides. I counted one day when I was sick in bed. The normal quota, including floor and ceiling, would have been six. But my little place had many jogs, many irregularities. There was a tiny kitchen and a bath suited to a bird. It had been furnished by the owner of the building, an architect by the name of Edmond Martin whose office was on Christopher Street. I am not sure he ever built anything, but he had a genius for getting the good out of space that was already there. At no extra charge, he made me a thin, teetery bookcase to fit into one of the nine perpendiculars—he loved to be given a problem. One nice feature was that the little bath had a window beside it so that you could look at the sky while you bathed. Another amusing oddity of the apartment was that, small as it was, it had two street entrances: one on Gay Street and one, leading through a passageway, to Christopher Street, where the bells and mailboxes were. Mr. Martin, who was an engaging person, owned another old house, on Charles Street, in which Elizabeth Bishop lived. Her living-room was bigger than mine and had a fireplace, I think. It must have been through her that I found the Gay Street apartment after Porter left. Or else it was the other way around and she found her place through me. All Mr. Martin’s rents were reasonable, and he took good care of his properties.
My bed was a narrow studio-couch with a heavy navy-blue cover and si
de cushions, which made the room into a living-room, and I had a desk with drawers beside a recessed window. I could entertain only one couple at a time for dinner by putting two chairs at a card table and sitting on the studio-bed myself. I invited Farrell and Hortense (Farrell, a true-blue Irishman, always asked for more mashed potatoes), Chris and Maddie Rand, and I cannot remember who else. Probably Martha McGahan and Frani, together or separately. Margaret Marshall.
All this was very different from our life on Beekman Place; it was as though the number of my friends had shrunk to fit the space I now lived in. Not counting Johnsrud, who came around from time to time and made biting remarks, the only men I knew were Mr. Martin and the husbands of friends. The assiduous men who had been after me while I was married, such as Corliss Lamont and the absurd Lazslo Kormendi, had vanished. Nobody took me out to dinner, and when I did not cook something for myself, I ate at a second-floor restaurant called Shima’s on Eighth Street, where the food was cheap and fairly good. But it typed you to be a regular at Shima’s, because no one, male or female, ever went there with a date. Today it would be called a singles’ restaurant, with the difference that there were no pick-ups. Night after night at dinnertime, I faced the choice of hiding my shame at home or exposing it at Shima’s. I always took a book to bury myself in, on the ostrich principle.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 57