A good deal of stress has been laid on the unprepossessing appearance my classmates and I made. I felt the same way, on the whole, about my class in boarding school and even, to some extent, in college. That was why my eyes were always on the older girls, and why I courted a popularity with them which, in the nature of things (for of course they looked down on me), I could not have. I do not possess any photographs of my class in Forest Ridge, but recently some pictures have turned up of my class in boarding school which more than confirm my memory. Why this class, the class that graduated from school in ’29 and from college in ’33, should have been homelier than the classes preceding it is a mystery, perhaps there was something in the air. But it explains the feeling I had as a young girl of something unattainable, something just ahead of me—beauty, virtue, grace—that I could never catch up with.

My grades went to pieces in public high school; I nearly failed English, which was normally my best subject. The atmosphere in public high school was, in many ways, like that of the parochial school, except that the education was poorer and there was no discipline. It was the style to have crushes on boys, and I had a crush on the captain of the football team and on the captain of the track team, so that I spent my time following athletic events, as a member of the cheering section, instead of studying. The school was called Garfield High, and I was one of its most ardent rooters; I followed basketball too, back and forth across the city, to the various high schools we played. I was not allowed to go out with boys, but one night the captain of the track team drove up to my house in his roadster and honked for me to join him. My grandfather flashed on the front porch lights and thundered at him to go away, and that was the end of my conquest.

Another of the track man’s admirers was a shy, intellectual Jewish girl named Ethel Rosenberg (she later changed her first name to Teya) who was also an enthusiast for Walter Pater. She and I became friends; we lived not far from each other. Through her family, who were typical Jewish intellectuals and very hospitable, though not well-to-do (the father was a tailor), I came to know the artistic colony in Seattle and to read serious books. But all this took place on a different plane from my other activities. The only point of fusion had been the track man.

After a year of public high school, my grandparents concluded that there was nothing to do but put me into boarding school, away from the distractions offered by the opposite sex. A convent, this time, was not considered; I was old enough, now, my grandfather said, to choose for myself in religious matters. An Episcopal boarding school in Tacoma, the Annie Wright Seminary, was selected, though I myself had wanted to go to the Anna Head School in California, because Helen Wills had gone there. But the family thought it wiser to keep me nearer home.

Meanwhile, my brothers remained in Saint Benedict’s Academy, my youngest brother, Sheridan, had joined the other two. They were kept there, with the nuns, during Christmas and Easter vacations, in the summer, they were parceled out among relations or sent to camp. It was six years before we saw each other again, and then they were almost strangers to me, so different had been our bringing-up. I was a child of wealth, and they were little pensioners on the trust fund that was left by my grandfather McCarthy when he died. My share, which was equal to each of theirs, never did more than pay my school board and tuition; the Prestons took care of the rest. All my brothers’ expenses, however, were itemized and deducted from the account. The Preston family “remembered” them with checks at Christmas and birthdays, but that was all. Except on these occasions, their existence seems to have been overlooked.

When I review my grandfather’s character, I find this very puzzling. He was not the man to neglect an obligation; his bills were paid the day he received them—a habit still recalled by my New York dentist with awe. Order, exactitude, fairness—these were the traits my grandfather was famous for and the traits I always found in him. Wow, especially knowing what he did of the treatment we had received in Minneapolis, did he fail to concern himself with what happened later to my brothers? I cannot explain this.

He was not an ungenerous or an unfeeling man. He had been strongly attached to my mother. “The Preston family wanted all of you,” my mother’s old friend writes me, as if in extenuation. Failing to get all four of us, my grandfather may have responded with a kind of masculine pique, holding himself stiffly aloof from what had been refused him, i.e., my brothers. Or he may have been angered by the slurs cast on him by the McCarthys: my uncle Harry, a few years before, had written a bank in Seattle to inquire into his financial position. Whatever the reason for this surprising indifference, I cannot deny the fact of it. Nor can I deny that I felt it, too. Until I was grown up, the idea never crossed my mind that something might have been done by the Prestons for my brothers as well as for me. The only persons, evidently, to whom this idea occurred were the McCarthys.