15

IT was because of Mary Goodwin, and her devotion to the cliffs and the solitude and the stillness and the wind, that in the beginning I knew the tip of the peninsula more intimately than any other part. Mary had spent all the nineteen summers of her life there in her mother’s cottage next to the lighthouse, and she used to tell me about it during a winter that I spent in bed in a Boston hotel apartment. That winter, for an unknown reason, my heart was beating much faster than was good for it, rest had been ordered, and I was being kept in bed month after month. Nobody ventured and I least of all would have ventured to try to uncover the unacknowledged thing which only my heart knew about and to which only my heart was giving the needed expression, with no help or sympathy from my mind. For a long time I had kept myself coolly detached from any feelings of sorrow or frustration, and I was beginning to crystallize into a cheerful spinsterhood. Therefore I didn’t listen to what my heart was trying to tell me about myself. I wouldn’t listen when destiny sent Mary to me to guide me in the right direction, just as God once sent the great whale to guide and enlighten one of His most inattentive and disobedient children.

In the beginning of our friendship I felt surprised that anyone so young as Mary should like me, for she was only nineteen and I was twenty-nine. Her youth made me suddenly feel uncomfortable and unsure of myself. For I had always avoided meeting beautiful and worldly-looking girls with the same care and intensity with which I had invariably noticed and stared at them from a safe distance. In theaters and restaurants I always picked them out from among the ordinary people and lost myself in contemplation of them, almost as if I left my own body and entered into theirs. The ones who looked as if they were good or intellectual did not interest me. I liked to watch only those who looked as if they were bad, that is, sensual, cruel, and worldly. I liked the ones whose arrogance gave them absolute ease and simplicity of movement. I would watch a ravishing beauty go slowly down the aisle of a theater, with her evening cloak hanging off her shoulders and her escort hovering close behind her. I would watch her turn and go into the row where their seats were, and as she moved with cool nonchalance toward her place I could see for a moment her profile or her full face. I would stare at her even after she sat down, when all I could see was her hair, her neck, and her shoulders, and the profile of her escort’s face turned toward her smiling, while she coldly disregarded him for a moment until she chose to turn and reward him. It was her purity of movement as she came in that I deeply admired, and then after she sat down, her essence of stillness—nothing unsure, nothing faltering. In contrast with that perfection I looked with contempt upon the way the rest of the audience took their seats—I hated the fussy, broken, clumsy movements of elderly ladies or of vulgar young ones, as they went bobbing or prancing down the aisles, and then, once seated, their perpetual twisting and turning and fluttering of hands, and heads, and shoulders. My eyes would go back from them to the absolute calm and stillness of my beauty. In public places, for I never met them in my private life, wherever one or more of these exalted beings were to be seen, I always picked out one among them and identified myself with her. For in such a girl I remembered something which I had forgotten until each time when I saw her again. I remembered the person whom I secretly, childishly believed I had been meant to be. As I stared at her I felt toward that regal girl a prescience, a clairvoyant intimacy, as if I had been she in another incarnation. In part of myself, I believed, I knew, that either I had once been able or without my present fatal disguise I would now be able to feel and look and move the way she looked and moved, as destructively and cruelly perfect and calm and exalted as she, who by her entrance made the rest of the audience suddenly change into a crowd of shapeless, comic, wriggling caricatures of human beings. In order to stir me deeply and to give me the illusion of my affinity with her, my interchangeableness with her, it was necessary that she should not show any signs of possessing any of the things which were valued in my world, such as a bright mind or a sense of humor. It was necessary for my admiration that her miraculously perfect physical flowering should be combined with superb coldness and arrogance. The possession of sheer beauty and its powerful action on others must be her only gift. Whenever I occupied a seat in a theater I had to slyly manage to sit on one of my own feet in order to lift me up a little higher, and also I had to stuff a part of my coat under me, furiously intending that nobody should notice my tricks. Without them I could not see over the top of the seat in front of me, much less over the other people’s shoulders and around the backs of their heads. Even with these awkward and clumsy devices of mine, my foot and ankle aching painfully after an hour or two in that position, I was not any higher than a ten-year-old child; and yet from this humiliating level I utterly forgot the little locksmith that I was, while my eyes, just clearing the tops of the seats in front of me, made me believe that in the conspicuously beautiful and regal girl I was gazing at, who was in everything the very antithesis of me, I was staring at my own defrauded self and feeling vicariously my own rightful feelings of proud separateness and ease in contrast to the crowd of fidgeting, homely people around us.

Because of this memory or this illusion of identity, nothing would have induced me to face one of these fortunate contemporaries of mine. I owned a little arrogant set of substitutes for those things which I believed were really mine, and these sustained my self-esteem in the world I lived in, which after all was not even that world of fashion where I felt that my other self belonged. In the world I lived in my talents and my jokes and my mask of childish charm were always treated as evidence that I was a superior and valuable human being. In order to maintain my own beguiling jolly feeling of superiority I could not afford to let anything shatter my precious little set of substitutes. I had to stay always carefully among the kind of people, the literary and artistic people, or the humble, simple people, who valued my various exhibits. Most people I ever met did seem to value them, and my self-esteem rarely suffered. There were in fact only two kinds of persons, and they were really one kind, who could destroy me and all my little tricks with one casual glance. They were that heartless and worldly and beautiful young woman, wherever I saw her, whoever she happened to be, and the adoring young man who inevitably accompanied her. As long as they were unaware of me I could stare at them and forget myself utterly as I merged in them, but I could never let it happen that they should look at me or speak to me. For I knew from experience that if they should merely pass by me near enough for either of them to give me an accidental, instant’s glance, that glance, first of cold curiosity and then of immediate dismissal, would tell me as cruelly and explicitly as words could have done that by their ruthless standard I didn’t even exist. Whenever that glance touched me I could not deceive myself; I knew as they knew that my substitutes were worthless, that as a young, feminine human being I was a grotesque, pitiable failure, and there was no help for it. One such encounter destroyed all my defenses as one bomb destroys a building, but they were no sooner all in ruins around me than I began to repair and build them up again with a curious, indestructible persistence. But it was much pleasanter not to have the bomb hit me.

Although Mary Goodwin was young, and beautiful, and worldly-looking, yet she never gave me that destroying glance, for there was something lovably obtuse about her. She didn’t seem to notice my age, my old maidism, or even my physical imperfections. I soon discovered that she herself was shy and rebellious and ill at ease in the rich, correct, Episcopalian world she was born in. It was not an intellectual rebelliousness, but the rebelliousness of a humorous but uneasy child who does not understand his own uneasiness; and she expressed it like a child by willfully annoying and shocking the conventional people around her. She expressed anger and jealousy and love with childish violence and simplicity which made her unpopular with her contemporaries. She was erratic and reckless and innocent, she existed in a dream, and she had soft, excited eyes.

I was fascinated by her continual devotion to her face. She was the first person I had ever known of the generation which was responsible for introducing the art of make-up into good social standing. It was an entirely new thing in those days, such deliberate painting and powdering. It seemed very dangerous, as if it must surely lead to immoral adventures, and was therefore very fascinating for me, an uninitiated spinster, to watch. She was always having to go to the nearest mirror to put on fresh mascara. She beat her powder puff over her face with such violence and lavishness that the front of her black dress was always dusty with it. Besides being untidy and irresponsible, she was absent-minded and forgetful and always late. These shortcomings and her complete innocent unawareness of them struck me when they came into my spinsterish, orderly life as being refreshingly novel things. This probably explains why she was not uneasy with me and liked me. I was the first grown-up person who never tried to change her. I was amused and fascinated by her exactly as she was. Sometimes she had the odd charm for me of making me feel young and ignorant.

When she had finished her maquillage and was brushed off and ready to go out she was to me almost terrifyingly beautiful. She was beautiful because of the way her face was made and because of the eyes she had, and she was worldly-looking because of her determined, serious efforts to be so. She wore black, Parisian clothes and a small string of pearls, and she almost succeeded in her ambition to look at nineteen like an experienced woman, but was hindered by her naïve self-consciousness and shyness. These stood in her way very badly with the men she really liked and wished to conquer. She had her bold, amazing flirtations with enthusiastic taxi drivers and admiring maîtres d’hôtels, but in her own world she was paralyzed with shyness and could not speak. Therefore, of course, I could never really be afraid of her, even in her most beautiful and successful moments. Also she had an endearing way of remembering me and noticing me even when she seemed most absent-minded and unobservant. She always treated me as if I were something rare and valuable in her eyes. She would interrupt one of her long silences by suddenly exclaiming, “I adore you, Kitty!”

Of all I liked about her the thing I liked the most was her laugh. It was a scarcely noticeable laugh at first. It consisted of a sudden, responsive shine in her eyes and a soft, murmurous giggle in the same tone as her speaking voice, which was of the husky, torch-singing kind. She talked very little, and she expressed most of her feelings of appreciation or sympathy or pleasure by that laugh and a childish jerky nod of the head. I must have done most of the talking because the two things I remember more than anything else about the times when she used to come and sit with me are her silence and the monotone of her laugh making an accompaniment to whatever I was telling her. Her laugh was one of the nicest sounds I had ever heard, and belonged to the category of certain primevally sweet and strangely touching sounds whose charm you cannot ever really account for. It belonged to the same family of sounds as the murmuring of pigeons that I used to hear on the hotel window sill that spring.

One reason why she talked so little was because she was afraid of me, she told me afterward. I impressed her at first as being terribly sophisticated about writing and writers, which awed her and attracted her too, because next to having romantic adventures she wanted to be a Bohemian and a writer. But she would always begin to talk without shyness whenever she happened to think about Castine. I am sure I must have thought then that she was quite as expressive about Castine as anyone needed to be. This was only because I never got from anything she told me any vision of Castine or the faintest foreknowledge of what Castine was going to do to me. But now as I look back I can see that she was describing that maddening place with the same inarticulate and helpless love with which years later I stumblingly and frantically tried to describe it myself to strange people in strange places.

That long winter in bed in Boston was made forever memorable for me by two things Mary did. She brought me a pair of foolish, beautiful lovebirds whom we named Ethel Monticue and Mr. Salteena, or the Young Visiters. The minute domestic and amorous life of these two young “visiters” in their red cage I found as entertaining as a long domestic novel by Arnold Bennett. It helped me to pass the time just as an endless novel would have done. Second, she obstinately insisted that I should go to Castine. In May, when it began to be hot in the city, her mother came up from Hartford to see her and called on me with Mary and brought me an official invitation to Castine. I decided that I was not quite well enough to be a guest, but before the summer was over I had made the journey, with Ethel Monticue and Alfred Salteena, and installed myself in the Brophy boardinghouse.

I stayed for two consecutive summers, and the best part of those summers Mary and I spent together on her cliffs, with the wind and the sound of the bell buoy in our ears. Mary wrote poetry and read it aloud to me, and I dreamed about the endless novel I was writing. Mary was always hopelessly, speechlessly in love with somebody, and we would talk for hours on the cliff about her adored one, who somehow never quite noticed her or, what was almost worse, noticed her only until he noticed someone else more. But we both knew that something wonderful would happen to Mary. She was much too beautiful and loving for it not to happen. She felt the same greedy longing for experience and the same convictions about her capacity for love as I had once felt about myself; but hers were legitimate desires and convictions, I thought, while mine, it seemed, were not legitimate because of my deformity, and I had renounced them. Because of my years I felt older and wiser than Mary, but in actual experience I was as ignorant and young as she. The cliff proved to be a point of departure for both of us. Like two chrysalises, passive and still and waiting, we sat on the cliff rapt in the dreamlike, trancelike unreality which is the prelude to experience for every imaginative being. After that perfect prelude the moment for action came to Mary and me simultaneously at the end of the second summer, in the season of the drummer boy. Then we both took the dramatic leap into our lives and our futures. Mary went with me to Judge Patterson’s office on the September day when I signed the deed to my house and land, and then she left for Hartford to marry Willy and sail for Paris.