Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (47 page)

All of a sudden it strikes me that my main motive for that theatrical suicide was to have an occasion to wear the yellow dress. I see it hanging in my clothes closet—a perfect symbol of deluded expectations. Perhaps actually I never
had
worn it until that night when I stood posing before my cheval glass, cherries dangling on one hip, silver slippers on my feet. Perhaps not having worn it was the entire trouble. So, boldly resolved to kill those two birds with one stone, I took the iodine bottle out of the medicine cabinet, glided down the carpeted stairs, and let myself out the kitchen door, shivering. I had decided against putting on a coat, having no evening wrap of my own and unable, in the circumstances, to borrow one of my grandmother’s—my regular cloth coat would have looked horrible with the uneven hemline of the dress sticking out.

In Mark’s yard, I tipped the iodine bottle to let a drop or two run down my tongue into my throat. I had been trying it at home a few times already, without mustering enough determination to swallow. At Mark’s, contrary to my hopes, though the stage was set, it was no easier, and after half an hour or so of nervous attempts I finally let the burning sensation convince me that I would never succeed in swallowing the whole bottle. Meanwhile the cold was helping me decide to go home, though in the dark, in my pale dress, I felt reluctant to leave that protected enclosure for the open streets. On the way over, I had not even thought to be frightened; doubtless the promise of soon being dead anyway served me as armor. But on the way home, robbed of that assurance, I was full of terrors at every street crossing; doubtless I had gooseflesh along my bare arms, and my thin-soled shoes with Cuban heels made me unsteady on my feet.

I got home. No one had missed me. I let myself in with the kitchen key, which I must have hidden for myself—what a confession!—under the doormat. I tiptoed up the stairs and undressed for bed, first replacing the bottle of iodine in the bathroom medicine cabinet. And in doing so, all at once I felt sadly ashamed of my cowardice. I
ought
to have taken the iodine, having made such a parade of it. There was no excuse. Lack of nerve had stopped me—nothing else. Though a few hours ago I had had no particular reason for ending my days, now I had one, in discovering myself to be such a craven. I went to bed. It was my first encounter with self-knowledge—a very bleak sensation. And, though I cannot truthfully say today that I think a better person would have gone ahead and killed herself, I still feel something of that shame.

Yet as I look back over the episode, so strangely fresh in my memory, down to the grateful feeling of the key in my hand, I am puzzled mainly by the dating of it. It was during a vacation, since I was home from school. If I take into account the coldness of the night, I am inclined to place it at Thanksgiving of my junior year. I would have been nearly fifteen and a half. Yet can that be right? By that time Mark (I think) was no longer writing to me. But couldn’t that have been the reason, then? The best, indeed, that I can think of.

Yes, if we set the time of my “attempted suicide” as the fall of 1927 everything will fit. It was rather an unsatisfactory semester. Miss Atkinson was gone, I did not know where, replaced by her antipathetic sister. Lampie had graduated and among this year’s seniors, no one I liked reciprocated, except Katie Urquhart and there was always doubt as to
her.
I was not yet doing Caesar with Miss Mackay; at Captain Probes riding-school, they made me ride in the ring, a stable boy leading me; I had lost my love for French and had not yet found my vocation for the stage—not till Christmas would I terrify the junior school with my one-man show of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” followed by its encore “A Cask of Amontillado.” By November Katie Urquhart (whose name I loved) from Chehalis was beginning to show a double face; she no longer seemed to remember that our mothers had been Gamma Phi sisters at the U. And, instead of taking Natural Science, I had signed up for Cooking with a pink-cheeked alumna who had gone to Simmons in Boston and married a man named Claude; to my surprise, I had turned out to be the
cancre
of the class—I can still see the lumps in my white sauce and Mrs. Morrill straining them out. The best thing that fall was taking the three-hour boat trip from Seattle to Tacoma—a practice soon to be supplanted by car travel. Obviously, it had been in the previous spring that I wrote those stories about suicide. The evidence bears it out: Miss Marjorie Atkinson could not have written “I hope, Mary dear, that this version of suicide isn’t your own!” And it was not just those suicidal stories and an essay. I have remembered something else.

I am sitting in an open casement window with my legs hanging out while I consider throwing myself down. It is a spring night. The height is great enough, I calculate, for the fall to kill me even on soft grass. It is after lights out, and I am in my nightgown. This is the room, across from Miss Atkinson’s, I had sophomore year after the break-up with my roommate—the same room where I had read Forrest Crosby’s at first regular letters, now tied up in a bundle, as I no longer pore over them for clues as to why he tired of his “Di.” I have switched to reading sad love poems with a dark philosophy, which are going to help me decide to end my life. Not just once; for several nights running I sit there thinking of doing it—depending, probably, on the weather. It would not be on a rainy night.

I remember edging my bottom over the iron bar to the very edge, resting my feet on the gutter and hoping to make myself fall. It reminded me of the attempts to fly we occasionally made as children, standing on a window sill and waving our arms but never taking the plunge. To encourage myself now, I would recite poetry, softly, so as not to attract the night watchman’s attention: “But there were dreams to sell,/ Ill didst thou buy./ Life is a dream, they tell,/ Waking to die.” Or: “From too much love of living,/ From hope and fear set free … ” Or: “You might as well be calling yours/ What never will be his/ And one of us be happy./ There’s few enough as is.” Or: “When I am dead, my dearest.” Eventually I would pull my legs in, drop back into the room, and go to bed. This did not last more than a month. Then that summer, probably, Mark did not come with us to Lake Crescent. And the occasion of my “suicide” under his window may have been an announcement that he was getting married. As my “fiancé,” he was owed that.

The next year when I sat in an open casement window after lights out, I was up to something more dangerous: smoking. I was teaching myself to inhale, with the slight risk of falling out from dizziness since you had to squat close to the edge to keep the smoke from drifting back into the room and alerting a passing teacher. But smoking out the window was junior year, and suicide out the window was sophomore year. Anyway, whenever the failed drama in the Sullivan backyard took place, Mark never knew of it.
No one
knew or suspected. In my pale-green-and-violet bedroom, I hung my evening dress back in the closet, and that was that. Neither did Mark ever guess—how could he?—that an entire girls’ school in Tacoma had heard that he had asked me to marry him when I graduated.

One night, several years afterwards, when I had grown up and was home from Vassar for the summer, I sat in a car on a road that ran above Three Tree Point—a wooded section of “secondary” residences that were often the scene of parties. Hidden in the trees below, a party was going on; somebody, probably my uncle Harold, had brought me to it several hours earlier, and now I wanted to go home. I had made the long climb up the steep log-hewn stairs by myself, hoping that whoever had brought me would follow, but the others were all still down there, drinking and playing music. There was nothing to do but sit in the front seat and wait.

Then Mark appeared out of the darkness, breathless and drunk. He had been at the party, alone (though he was married then, I think), and had decided to come after me. But he had had to toil up a great many of those winding stairs made of logs and grope through discouraging pine woods to find the road and the parked car I was in. He fell into the front seat, put his arms around me, and kissed me. Seeing how drunk he was, I pulled away, sad that it had to be this way
if
it was going to be. I tried to pull away politely, because I liked him, because he was Mark. These woods were reminiscent of Lake Crescent at night, of the times we had walked home Indian file to Singer’s Tavern from Rosemary Point.

He did not persist but stayed in the front seat beside me resting his head on my shoulder. When the others finally joined us (the party was breaking up), he explained with owlish precision what he was doing there. “I climbed stairs and stairs … stairs and stairs … stairs and stairs.” His thickened voice was dreamy, and when it stopped I thought he had gone to sleep. But then he raised his head with a jerk from my shoulder and looked me angrily in the eye. “Stairs and stairs. But she was as cold as an onion.”

5

A
NNIE WRIGHT, TO BE
TRUTHFUL
, was not an “exclusive” school. That may have been why so many girls left, disappointed, after a year or so. In our class of 1929, for instance, what happened to tall Pauline Paulsen, from Spokane, destined by her height, her bearing, her calm gray eyes and soft rounded cheeks, her prowess with the javelin, her basketball, to be a school leader, almost like the one-and-only Retha Hicks, Class of ’25, whom Miss Preston still brought up to us in study hall, wiping her eyes? With Pauline’s poise and good looks, she was even able to carry off a Scandinavian surname—otherwise a thing to be lived down at the Seminary, witness poor, pale-eyed Gudrun Larsen, whose father owned the Blue Mouse movie theatre in Seattle.

All honors would have been Pauline’s had she stayed with us: May Queen, Field Day champion, salutatorian, choir soloist, president of the senior sorority. She was one of three tall beauties from Spokane: herself, Hattie Connor (black hair, high color, blue eyes “put in with a sooty finger,” odd, top-drawer accent that I now place as Canadian), and greenish-eyed Betty Reinhardt (only five eight and not exactly a beauty—skin—but counting as one of them because Nature loves a triad and the three were friends). Attached to them, like a burr, was long-nosed, nosy, dark-eyed Josephine Matthews, who had been in school with them across the mountains in Spokane. When Pauline did not come back for junior year, I felt the deprivation almost like the loss of my parents, although I had never been close to her. None of us had. She was a pillar of the school structure and impersonal, as pillars are meant to be.

The Spokane three kept to themselves; they might have been day pupils, so little did they mingle after school hours with the rest of us boarders. I cannot even remember where their rooms were. Nor did they have anything to do with two other girls from Spokane (besides Dodie Matthews) we had with us: nieces of the poet Vachel Lindsay, one very white and fat, one small and spindly, whose parents were missionaries in China.

I have never been to Spokane, though I used to wake up and peek out at the brilliantly lit station, raising a corner of my lower-birth window shade in the train going east. But I have a magical picture of it, thanks to those three tall Graces: a river running through the center of town and creating two great foaming waterfalls, harnessed to make electricity that glittered all night long; on its bank or nearby, the Davenport Hotel, with a dark paneled lounge, a roaring fire, and leather “davenports” on which tycoons sat with their handsome, well-dressed wives. In addition, the 1911
Britannica
supplies a Federal building, the Paulsen building (yes!), the
Spokesman Review
building, a Northern Pacific railway depot, a Great Northern depot, Gonzaga College (R.C.) for boys, Spokane College (Lutheran), surely for boys, too, and Brunot Hall (P.E.) for girls, obviously Annie Wright’s east-of-the-mountains shadow in which our tall three would have been star day pupils.

That Pauline did not come back was interpreted by me, I guess, as a “rejection” of the Seminary, and Miss Preston must have seen it so, in more practical terms: it was a blow to the school, her life’s creation, to lose a pearl like Pauline at the end of the sophomore year. What a relief it would have been to hear that Mr. Paulsen’s fortune had been swallowed up in a bank failure, thus forcing dear stalwart Pauline to go to public high. But no reason—or excuse—was ever given us. Perhaps she went east to a finishing-school—the Masters at Dobbs Ferry or the Bennett at Millbrook, both favored by Northwestern parents. We never heard.

It was the same with Ellin Watts, from Portland—five ten, willowy, silver-bronze “page boy” bob, but she was in the class ahead, not in our class, and her languid, sleepy-lidded, disdainful (even when occasionally friendly) manner could have warned of a coming defection. And, as though to refill the Oregon quota, there was a new girl that fall, Ruth Williams, from The Dalles, quite tall, with a knot of dark hair, even white teeth, and a brilliant set of widely spaced dark-blue eyes, who was somehow related to the Agens, a Seattle first family that lived in The Highlands, by the Golf Club—her older sister, Florence, taught in the lower school. Ruth Williams was my friend for a few dazzling weeks of my junior year, sailing into my room like a walking Debrett, telling me who was who in Puget Sound society, holding out the wild hope of introducing me to Jimmy Agen, great golfer and rated the catch of Seattle, still more desirable than Léon Auzias de Turenne, captain (we believed) of Harvard’s tennis team and Davis Cup alternate. Never had Annie Wright seemed so full of promise. Yet breathless Ruth stayed with us less than a year and even so outstayed her glory. Possibly she was on a scholarship because of her sister and had been warned to settle down and improve her grades. Anyway, after mid-years or some other marking-period, she, too, disappeared, like a falling star, leaving only the strange place-name, The Dalles, behind her. According to Webster, the word, of French derivation, denotes “rapids above a flat, slablike rock bottom, in a narrow, troughlike part of a river.” There are several dalles in the American West, but the dalles of the Columbia River (I learn from the faithful
Britannica,
my life’s companion, only one year older than I) were famous for their beauty. Yes, Ruth did say that, and I remember picturing her town as a ford paved with smooth flagstones in a brown transparent river, where speckled trout jumped. But shouldn’t it have been salmon? Is it too late for me, I wonder, to make a trip to The Dalles and Spokane? Both could be done, by car from Seattle, in two or three days. I cannot make out whether I am destined to see those places, ringed with fading ink on my life’s yellowing map, or destined never to see them.