Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (48 page)

When Pauline did not come back, it was clear that Hat and Betty would soon be following—we had them on borrowed time. I think of my efforts to “hold” Hat for the Seminary—a hint of how it might feel to try to hold a man who was counting the hours till he was free. We had our Irishry in common and also tone-deafness, the latter much more pronounced (I hope) in her case, making it painful for anyone but another tone-deaf person to be near her in chapel. That horn-voice, octaves below the rest of us, flatted out the hymns like an untuned barrel organ. She was worst on the slow ones—“Fairest Lord Jesus,” “Now the day is over,” “Jesus calls us,” which were the ones I loved best. It was like a halitosis affecting the ear. But I did not mind sitting next to her, even sharing a hymn book with her, for to my mind there was something aristocratic in that brute oblivious blare.

Looking on a hymnal together morning and evening was a tie of sorts; her daily closeness encouraged me to try, like a courting male bird, to interest her in the daring books I read and the bold ideas I was voicing. But, like a genuine gouty Blimp, she was indifferent to reading. As with C and lower C-flat, she did not “hear” a difference between James Branch Cabell and
Sorrell and Son.
I was mad about acting and reciting, but she could no more impersonate an emotion than carry a tune; I suppose she was too incurious to play a part. Nor did atheism hold any charm for her. She was not a Roman Catholic, which gave believers a good foundation for doubting; she was the only Irish person I had ever met to be a born Protestant. Still, to my satisfaction, if not through my efforts—possibly despite them—she lasted till June. In the fall, then, she did go east to one of those schools. Dobbs Ferry, I guess, because two years later I chanced to see her in Grand Central Station, in a smart tailored suit, with her big feet in smart, mannish shoes, when I was taking the train to Poughkeepsie. I was proud of Vassar and despised all finishing-schools, but it was James Branch Cabell all over again: she was unaware of a change in our relative standings and looked down on me from her superior height with a bluff, forbearing smile. I might as well have been going to visit a relative in Sing Sing—the Ossining stop.

Or could she have been at the Bennett in Millbrook, also served by Grand Central? The thought is tempting, because of the Bennett Greek play, well known at the time. At Vassar our beginning Greek class under Mrs. Ryberg went over in a rented vehicle to see them do
The Trojan Women
in Gilbert Murray’s translation. Terrible: picture a bare-armed, barelegged chorus in purple pepluses swaying and moaning on the grass in the hot Dutchess County sun. I like to think of Hattie being imperturbable in a peplus. But where she really went, after Annie Wright, I suppose I shall never know. In the alumnae notes for the Class of ’29, the only Spokane girl whose doings are ever chronicled is, naturally, Dodie Matthews.

It is no doubt to Annie Wright’s credit, to that of all those Episcopal bishops who had a hand in its making, that on the whole we could not keep smart, social girls very long. Probably there was too much emphasis on studying, and the faculty, some of it, was too good. How good they could be as sheer educators I did not fully appreciate till I decided early in my junior year that I wanted to go east to college.

Such an ambition was rare then for a girl from the Northwest (it was commoner among boys, who were divided between Princeton, Harvard, and M.I.T.); normally Stanford, with its quota of one-eighth girls, was the height of Annie Wright aspiration. Among us, the majority who aimed at college at all, rather than at a June wedding, had their sights on the U of Washington and were already worrying about whether to go Kappa, Theta, or Gamma Phi. I was determined not to let the U happen to me, and Stanford, we heard, typed a girl as a grind and homely; if I was doomed to stay in the West, I would almost rather go to Reed, the crazy college in Oregon that did not have marks, so probably no sororities either … But I had let the decision wait too long. I had been taking the wrong courses to prepare for an eastern college (
Cooking,
good Lord, with pretty little Mrs. Morrill, a Simmons graduate!), and junior year was too late to start. Or would have been if the Seminary had not risen to the challenge.

Miss Justine Browne, our vice-principal and the school “brain,” had me send for catalogues from Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe—my three choices. When they came, that hawk-beaked Athena with pale oysterish eyes seated me at her table—the top spot in the dining-room, just below Miss Preston’s table for two—and the thick catalogues passed from hand to hand for our wondering study. Miss Browne liked Radcliffe best, mainly because it shared some classes with Harvard. But Radcliffe had an entrance requirement of four years of Latin—the catalogue left no doubt of that—while Bryn Mawr and Vassar, apparently, would accept three. But I was just
starting
Latin that fall with Miss Mackay: junior year plus senior year made two. So unless that requirement could be waived (and Miss Browne said it couldn’t), it looked as though I could forget about studying for the College Boards. If Providence did not intervene, in its Providential way, I was sunk.

Providence entered in the form—dark, thin, knobby—of Miss Ethel Mackay (pronounced “McEye”), a Scot in her late thirties, a product of Girton and Edinburgh and the strictest teacher in the school. In an earlier memoir I have called her “Miss Gowrie.” Now she decided that I could do three years of Latin in two if I read Caesar with her in private lessons while having Cicero next year in class. If we started this spring, then during the coming summer in Seattle, where she would have a furnished room with a screened porch in the University district, we could fit in the campaign against the Germans (Book IV) and the famous bridge across the Rhine. Luckily Latin came easy to me thanks to my Catholic background; from
agricola, agricolae
(first declension)—I felt as if I had known it in a previous life. And not only
“Gallia est omnis divisa in partis tris,”
but
“Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae”
—the war and brave little Belgium had taught us all
that
lesson from the start of Book I.

Yet not even Miss Mackay and my cradle Catholicism could have squeezed a fourth year (Virgil) into me, with the result that I never had the
Aeneid.
So I am unfinished in my Latin, like the little prince in my father’s fairy story who, when changed into bird form, lacked a wing because his little sister failed to complete one sleeve of his enchanted sweater.

At Vassar that was an oddity that set me apart from eastern girls, who had all done the
Aeneid
in their fourth year of high school. And that, in turn, may have led to my taking Virgil’s
Bucolics
and
Georgics
in college—something that ordinarily only a Latin major (which I was not) would have done. So oddity compounded oddity, as often happens. Indeed, my curious and slightly excessive Latinity at Vassar may have been compensation for the hole in my language credits that Miss Mackay and I had patched over at Annie Wright during our tutorial “hours.” In Vassar’s Latin Department, headed by stately white-haired Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, author of
Horace and His Art of Enjoyment,
not only did I, an English major, take the
Bucolics
and
Georgics,
Horace’s
Odes
and
Epodes,
Horace’s
Satires
and
Epistles,
the course titled “Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid,” the course titled “Juvenal, Martial, and Pliny,” but also a half-year course in advanced Caesar (
De Bello Civile
),
a half-year one-hour course in a late Latin figure called Aulus Gellius, another in Roman comedy, and half-year three-hour courses in Medieval and Renaissance Latin. Some of this (not Aulus Gellius, who was taught by a handsome young widower) was explained by the fact that my field was English Renaissance, with its strong classical tinge; some of it (Catullus and Juvenal) answered to real passions, and some consisted of what are now called ploys. But ploys are seldom idle. The basis must have been the deficiencies, as I felt them, of a Northwestern education, which I sought to correct by additives, as riboflavin is mixed into “enriched” bread. Somewhere in the course of it, I missed Tacitus, which always shocked Edmund Wilson.

Of course the Seminary (like Garfield High School, probably) offered four years of Latin; some of my friends were taking Virgil, though they never used him afterwards, as at Vassar I really could have—my prosody was always weak. One of those bishops, who came west in 1900—the school had been founded by another bishop in 1884, when Washington was still a territory—wanted the Seminary “to be the Wellesley, the Smith, the Vassar of the west.” But though Annie Wright, being only a prep school, could scarcely achieve that, it
was
equipped to prepare any girl who wanted it for admission to those colleges. When I took the College Boards, in a university classroom in Seattle, I had had plenty of French (taught by native French-speakers), I had had one year of “hard” science—Physics—three years of math, stopping short of calculus; if I had desired German, there was old Madame Haynes, the Austrian the girls made pie-beds for, to teach it. In English, after the two Vassar-trained Miss Atkinsons, we had Miss Clare Hayward, who gave us English literature from
Beowulf
onward. Under the two Miss Atkinsons, we had learned “Tomorrow and tomorrow,” “We have scotch’d the snake not killed it,” “Muling and puking in its nurse’s arms,” “The quality of mercy,” besides having Sir Roger de Coverley, Burke,
Silas Marner,
the “Dissertation upon Roast Pig”—the standard offerings guaranteed to turn the standard young person against English literature for up to twenty years.

In fact, Miss Hayward did not come to us until we were seniors, at the same time as Miss Marthe Simpson, who was young and half-French and taught Art and made amusing floppy puppets. But junior year we had Mrs. Hiatt, with her eyeglasses on a chain, a wit and the widow of a clergyman; we had had Miss Dorothy Atkinson with
her
eyeglasses on a ribbon and her fondness for Mencken, and throughout there were timid little Miss Helen McKay, and shy, stiff Miss Mackay herself.

On the whole our teachers were greatly superior to our girls, and that was a large part of Miss Preston’s dilemma. A Dorothy Atkinson was wasted on a De Vere Utter or a Voynne Setzer or on a chronic case of boredom such as Ellin Watts. The girls could not use what the star teachers had to give. Besides, the star teachers, like Miss Mackay, were almost all hard markers and likely also, when it could not be avoided, to report infractions of the rules. Our school could not maintain an elite status socially while offering anything like a serious education. In the East no doubt it could have; you could point to Saint Tim’s, Walnut Hill, and, at that time, Madeira, as well as day schools like Chapin and Brearley in New York. But the real problem facing Miss Preston was the Northwest itself. Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Alaska constituted the reservoir she had to draw from, with occasional girls appearing from Hawaii and British Columbia. And though it happened that girls went east to be “finished,” not only at the Masters and Bennett but even at places like the House of the Pines, the opposite was unthinkable. To induce an eastern girl to come west, the Seminary would have had to turn into a ranch, with cowboys.

Moreover, in our own state of Washington, girls were more likely to come to us not so much from Seattle (which had its day school, St. Nicholas, for the upper crust) as from places with names like Cle Elum and Hoquiam and Chehalis. In Montana it would be Kalispell (Clover Rath) and White Sulphur Springs (the Ford girls), not Butte, which I think had a kind of real society that had evolved from its primitive days as a wild copper-mining town. This human material that came to us for processing was unclassifiable socially; it was, so to speak, too fresh, like meat that has not been hung.

In Seattle (and in Spokane and Tacoma) stratification had developed, a layering considerably aided by the society column of Colonel Blethen’s Seattle
Times,
which told who lunched with whom at the Olympic Hotel on Mondays—the day when it counted to be seen there—and this was a service not only to those who had a table every Monday (including an old Sacred Heart girl like Mary Fordyce Blake) but to many who would never have one, such as my friend “Ted” Rosenberg and her sister Till. It was best, evidently, to
be
somebody, with one’s name in the paper every Tuesday, but next best was to know who
were
the somebodies. It may seem strange that Jewish intellectuals were interested in the society column (Ted and Till read
Vogue,
too, I guess, besides
Vanity Fair
),
but that may have been a healthy sign:
nihil humanum mini alienum puto.
Eventually I, too, would be “seen lunching” at the Olympic Hotel, though more often than not “with Mrs. Harold Preston and Mrs. M. A. Gottstein,” in other words my grandmother and Aunt Rosie.

It may be that the first families of Seattle, so clearly identifiable to themselves, feared to expose their daughters to the contagion of rooming with the daughters of the first families of Wenatchee and Walla Walla—site of the penitentiary—and Chehalis. Why, a parent from there could be
anybody
with the price of the tuition, a Federal judge or state senator but equally well a druggist or feedstore owner. The miscellaneousness of the school’s boarders (typified by fanciful or just plain misspelled first names such as “Hermoine,” “Rocena,” “De Vere,” “Voynne,” “Betye”) had been there from the start, it seems. An account (1884) by the first Bishop of Spokane, whose wife was the first principal, describes a girl who came from Alaska by wagon train, camping out at night and taking almost a month on the way, girls who came from the Hawaiian Islands, girls who went to bed in their clothes, girls who had never been taught to say their prayers. “But most of the girls were nice and well-behaved.”