Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (41 page)

We had met at Lake Crescent that summer. I was staying, the same as every year, in a hotel cottage with my grandfather, who approved of the American-plan food, the great Douglas firs, the dappled morning walk up to misty Marymere Falls, the bridge games and poker and the five holes of golf. I hated golf (one of the joys of growing up was that I would not have to play it any more), but I could swim and dive in my new “Tomboy” bathing suit (maroon-red turtle-neck with a long buttoned vest that tended to rise over your head when you dove and little separate pants underneath) and know that I was watched from pier and porch by admiring older people awed by my long immersions in the icy water. I could teach myself to row. I could switchback (adding a new word to my vocabulary) up old bald-pated Storm King with my uncle Harold and his friend Mark, eat a box lunch at the summit and run all the way down. The changeless idyll began with a ferry ride to Port Townsend; then there was the train ride to Port Angeles and the opening in our compartment of an unvarying shoe box of exquisitely packed thin chicken-liver sandwiches and deviled eggs, then the jitney ride through the mountains to our destination, which really was crescent-shaped and a bright celestial blue.

In this paradise, there were no boys for me, though—only the horrible Blethens and an ass named Warren Boole who was going to Lawrenceville and had a nose with nostrils like a bellows. I could vamp him, I found, in my new green tiered dress—made for me by my grandmother’s dressmaker, Mrs. Farrell—and some perfume and earrings, but it was not worth it, too disillusioning to see him “turn on” like a wind-up toy while his indulgent parents watched. Then, with the summer almost over,
he
came to Singer’s Tavern in the Marmon, I don’t know why, possibly just as a predator, looking around. He found only me, to judge by the result.

I would have expected him to be interested in “Missy” Lewis, a tall fair beautiful girl with braids around her head who went to the Anna Head School in California and was eighteen years old. But maybe Missy was too well protected by her married brother Richard and his stout, dark, golf-playing wife or by her own straight-browed look of virtuous reserve or simply by the fact that she stayed home in their group of cottages after supper. Anyway he danced with me the first night on the hotel porch, to the two-piece female band, and the next morning he took me rowing on the lake, down toward the steep bulk of green Sugar Loaf Mountain, till my grandfather, straining his eyesight on the pier, angrily waved me back to the hotel landing. By lunch-time the gray car and its driver were gone (was he sizing up Rosemary Point, down the lake, supposed to be less exclusive?), but that night he danced with me again, holding his cheek closer to mine and softly singing into my ear a song that was new that summer: “Sweet Child.”

“Sweet child,/ You’re drivin’ me wild./ That’s puttin’ it mild./ Sweet child, I’m wild about you.” He made it “our” song, private, extremely suggestive, and I was dizzied by the thought that a liability, my age, was turning into an asset through the pulsing of his voice softly beating into my ear. Meanwhile in the big main lounge my grandfather at the poker table with Judge Alfred Battle, Mrs. Battle, Mr. Edgar Battle, Colonel Blethen, Mr. and Mrs. A. J. Singer noticed nothing wrong—he would not have been aware of the words of a popular song. Through the glass doors, if he looked, there was only ballroom dancing to be seen. To me, though, the tune “called” like the pounding of a tom-tom deep in the jungle. It needed only a bar or two hummed in his baritone to have me throbbing with excitement the next day as he walked me along a path through the woods. We were following Marymere Stream to where it emptied into the lake at a little sandy beach, which for some reason was seldom visited—the walk from Marymere Falls turned off toward the hotel a little farther up. Now I ask myself whether “Forrie” Crosby had been at Singer’s before or did he find this secluded spot, protected from the wind and from prying eyes, by a natural talent, like a dowser’s?

We were alone in that small sunny cove at the edge of a cool woods of maidenhair ferns and virgin spruce. His arm was around my waist; he was turning me toward him. Then, before we could kiss—he had full, rather flat, sensual lips, shirred like tight-pulled material—my grandfather came thundering down the path. He had an air of being in the nick of time and perhaps he was—compare Don Giovanni and Zerlina’s fearful shriek. I was ordered back to my room in our cottage, and my grandfather, I gather, then “told the man off.” I could have wept when I heard that he had “given the fellow a first-class scare”; in his high-laced shoes (or was he wearing golf knickers and the appropriate footwear?) that pillar of the bar association would have carried quite a lot of conviction.

Probably I did weep; his persistent chaperonage seemed expressly directed at robbing me of any chance in life. Though kindly and well disposed most of the time (Lewis Stone was his favorite movie-actor), he was a tinder-box when anything off-color was mooted; when I teased him one morning for helping Miss Thompson, the pretty brown-eyed violin of our duo, down from a teetery log bridge into his outstretched arms, he went red in the face and shouted. Nor was this the first time he had thundered onto the scene when I was alone with a man by the lake shore. The previous time had been with that gigolo Mr. Jones from New York, who had asked me to take his picture with a fish he had caught, and afterwards Mark Sullivan and my uncle Harold had delighted in doing imitations of the imagined scene: Mr. Jones holding the salmon-trout in one hand and my thirteen-year-old form in the other; Mr. Jones dropping the salmon and fleeing into the woods as the Honorable Harold Preston, breathing heavily and adjusting his spectacles, rounded the corner.

Still, there was a difference. I had been angry with my grandfather over the Mr. Jones episode because his absurd suspicions made himself and me ridiculous. The whole hotel was laughing. Now it was my grandfather’s
interference
that made me resentful. His suspicions, possibly over-alert, were not absurd. They were well grounded in Forrie Crosby’s age as compared with mine—“sweet child.” I am not sure, though, whether I sensed that then, whether, amid my wails of protest, I knew in my soul what the seductive fellow was “up to.” But I know it now. It seems to me also that Mark and Harold did not find this episode quite so risible as the other.

Like my grandfather, like any of the hotel guests, they were able to see that the interest of a twenty-three-year-old (or twenty-six-year-old) ordinary sensual man in a fourteen-year-old girl must have some ulterior purpose. In the earlier case, it was possible that poor Mr. Jones (suspected of being a mulatto because of his yellowish eye-whites) had really wanted to have his picture taken. But it was hard to find an innocent explanation to cover the present case. And if one could have been found, I would not have wanted to hear it. Anything that
sought an explanation
for his interest in me was too wounding to my self-love to be borne. To have people wonder about that interest, searching for clues, told me the one thing that I was closing my ears to: quite simply, that I was a juvenile. If he had taken Missy Lewis rowing on the lake, no one would have thought anything of it; her brother,
in loco parentis,
would not have been on the pier frantically waving them back.

I myself, I guess, felt no need of a theory to account for the observable data. He had fallen in love with me, I must have told myself. It happened constantly in books and films: two people danced together and immediately were “smitten”—Dan Cupid’s arrows. I was a little young, but people often told me that I seemed older than my age, because of all the books I read. Just as one example,
he
thought I was seventeen … It was typical of my grandfather’s outlook to treat me purely in terms of my years. And of my sex. Although surprisingly broad-minded in some ways—about leaving me free to choose my own religion and not trying to censor my reading-matter—he had the hidebound idea that socially girls needed more control than boys. He did not stop to consider my feelings: I had not been out of sight of the hotel more than ten minutes when he came rushing out after us. And now his old man’s vanity was satisfied to have driven my swain away. That afternoon, the Marmon was gone, before we could even say good-bye. But in September I would be going to Annie Wright—I had made sure on our walk that he knew. He would write to me, he had promised, holding me close. When a man declared he would write to you, that was a real sign.

Did I really believe all this? Did I dream of being “pinned” by his fraternity pin? Or did I suspect that at the first opportunity he was going to be my seducer? I had got plenty of warnings, certainly, from the
True Story
and
True Confessions
I read. Or (most likely) did I simply stop thinking and let myself be carried ahead like Maggie Tulliver on the flooding river in
The Mill on the Floss?
The fact is, I have hardly any recollection of what went through my mind between the time he left Lake Crescent and that wintry afternoon in the car with the celluloid side-curtains buttoned or snapped down. At Singer’s I know that I took walks—sentimental pilgrimages—in the late afternoon to our little lonely cove, once with Mrs. Judge Battle (Madge), my favorite grown woman, in a natural-silk loose-fitting suit and wide Panama hat—strangely, I was happy, with the tall, beautiful woman in the golden light. And I can hear myself pumping out “Sweet Child” on the player piano over and over till someone complained.

In Seattle, he telephoned soon after we got back, but my grandmother, when she heard me talking to him, called out to me to hang up. Grandpa must have told her something. “Just tell him you can’t see him.” I hung up promptly, surprising her. I hadn’t been eager to talk to him while she listened. What I really feared, however, was that he would find out, thanks to her interruptions, that I was not allowed to get telephone calls from men or boys. But then at the Seminary letters from him started coming, and I answered:
“La sfortunata rispose.”
Each girl had a list of ten approved correspondents handed in by her family, but that applied only to the letters we wrote; the authorities never bothered with any incoming mail but packages (those containing food had to be shared), and you could always give your outgoing letters to a day girl to mail or drop them into a box yourself during a school walk.

Well, it was not a flood of mail that poured in from him—a single sheet every week or so covered on two sides with round broadly spaced writing. My own letters must have been much fuller. Not only fuller but also passionate. Alas, I no longer have the packet of letters from him tied up in string that was stored in a trunk of papers in a warehouse at the time of one of my divorces and never reclaimed because I did not have the money to pay the bill. Yet it hardly matters: his letters were unrevealing, no doubt deliberately so.

He almost always ended with
“Hasta la vista”
—probably he had taken an elementary course in Spanish—which to me was the most heartfelt moment in his correspondence; I was under the spell of songs like “Marcheta” and “Valencia,” of shawls and castanets, and supposed
hasta
meant “haste.” It was a blow to learn from our school Spanish teacher that the phrase was a standard formula like
Au revoir
and
Auf Wiedersehen.
His letters showed a fondness, too, for such phrases as “Young feller, me lad”, addressed to himself (“Forrie, young feller, me lad”), which he used in conversation as well. The effect on me of this variant of “old man” (as I take it to be) was of a natty worldliness. He signed himself “Forrest,” with a flourish, occasionally “Forrie” in smaller writing—proof, I feared, that he wrote to some other girl or girls more familiar with him than I was and did not always keep us straight. He put no return address on his envelopes and instructed me to write care of the Phi Delt house, not at home or at work. His home, I learned—from him or the telephone directory—was Federal Avenue (Capitol Hill), still a good neighborhood then. Years later, I saw the house, square, fairly well proportioned and without architectural interest.

I did not judge his letters, even if I could not help noting some mistakes in spelling, all the while I was covering the heavy white paper with kisses of joy. I was in love with him, whatever that meant. I did not let myself judge his letters and yet I knew them by heart and was extracting every drop of meaning contained in them, both what I wanted to hear and what I was afraid to. If I had been able to submit specimens to a love laboratory for tests of sincerity, I could guess what the pronouncement would have been. In other words, despite my young years, I knew too well the man who was writing to me, knew him better every week. I did not like his handwriting, so round and sloping, or the way he made his “r”s; without being a graphologist, I sensed a character deficiency in it. And I shrank almost bodily from eye contact with
“Hasta la vista,”
once I had been told what it was. None of this, however, could restrain me from hoping that my instinct—or my intelligence?—was wrong. The best means of ignoring the shortcomings of those letters, which I nonetheless
hung
on as liaison with a future, was to keep reliving Lake Crescent—the past. I was able to summon up the eyes, the voice in my ear, the full, flat, sensual lips, a wristwatch, gray flannel and navy-blue worsted. His physical being and accessories (including the Marmon) had style—they matched each other and the whole entity named Forrest Crosby—and style, a quality strangely lacking in his correspondence, was for me the same as allure or even S.A., as we called it then. I was a sucker for style. The total absence of that quality from the letters I was getting may well have been the result of excessive precaution—they might have told more of their author if I had not been virtual jail bait.

In my room, after evening study hall, I wrote to him and mooned over his image. Annie Wright had assigned me as a roommate the unpopular one of our two Jewish girls, but we had asked to be separated after the first weeks. This left me free to think of him and only him; what should have been fresh impressions—different girls, teachers, food, rules, new surroundings, a new (to me) religion—barely reached me. And for the first and last time in my life I did not talk about the man I was wildly in love with. It was scarcely a matter of choice: I had nobody to confide in. I could tell my love only to him. I had no friends yet; that would come next term when I got to know girls from the class ahead. For the moment there were only my classmates, hopelessly juvenile—their only interest was basketball.