Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy [McCarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6597-8
Publisher: Open Road Media

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WHEN I WENT THAT FALL as a boarder to Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, my uncle’s friend Mark had offered to write to me. His letters did not start arriving till after Christmas vacation but then they “saved my life.” Could this homely red-faced boy—by now a junior at the University—have guessed the significance for my social standing at school of having a regular male correspondent even though I was only fourteen? My classmates were mostly a year older but still hopeless babies, not yet weaned from the food packages sent by their mothers, which, despite the rule about sharing, constituted for them the most interesting part of the mail. Poor Jean Eagleson and Barbara Dole, poor Frances Ankeny, Ruth Sutton, Clover Rath, Mary Ellen Warner—if any boy wrote to them, it was a brother.

The girls I admired and wanted to copy were juniors and seniors, some of whom had fiancés who wrote every day. To those girls, who were not all as unapproachable as I originally feared, it was irresistible to pretend that Mark was mine. His letters, running to several pages, tended to bear it out, and a bloodstone ring given me by my great-aunt Alice for Christmas made a “perfect” engagement ring. In case doubts were inspired by the flat stone in its filigree silver setting (to carry 100% conviction it should have been a solitaire diamond), I explained that Mark was poor and bent on being a great writer. He had chosen the bloodstone, I added, to match my green eyes.

The center of my life, though, during that second term in Annie Wright’s new buildings, gabled, dormered, casemented, and beginning to be creeper-covered, with a cloister to walk in on rainy days, which had a camellia tree blooming beside it, was not a man or a boy but Mary Ann Lamping, a senior. Every night after study hall I sat in her room till bedtime with the rest of her clientele, doing my best to amuse that fair-haired, dry-spoken engaged girl, who came from a “social” family in Seattle (her father’s name was Roland), wore a black riding-habit with a stock and bowler hat, was not going to the U after graduation but heading instead for a big wedding with ushers, and already had a “settled” air about her that was part of her allure. An absence of drive was part of it, too: her clipped, dark-blond hair was untouched by marcel iron or water wave; she had indolent, slightly broad hips and elegant tapering legs, never crossed, never folded under her, never wound around a chair leg, but squarely held apart, giving her the lap of a young matron as she sat in her armchair idly buffing her nails. Unusually for a senior, she did not have a roommate; she had no “best friend” in her class and took no part in school activities—riding was not considered an “activity,” not being a team sport or competitive, and cost extra.

In Lampie’s ambience, a fiancé’s lack of

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