Something I had always dimly known....

Dear Tara and Anthony,

With apologies I’m following my urge to advance us to that pivotal point in the novel when Vera, for the first time, sees Miss MacIntosh as she truly is.

But first, as we left off in my previous post, it’s Vera’s fourteenth birthday. How does a girl like Vera, isolated from the world at large, whose only company is a trio of eccentric adults: Miss MacIntosh, Mr. Spitzer, and her semi-conscious mother, celebrate? We can expect Vera’s birthday party to be unusual!

Mr. Spitzer marks the occasion by buying Vera a beautiful party dress, “a filmy white creation perhaps too mature for me.” But unfortunately, Mr. Spitzer cannot stay for the birthday celebration, as he has been obliged to venture off again to “trace a lost heir.” Catherine MacIntosh, as always, is confined to her bed, this time entertaining the P’s in her extensive circle of acquaintances. The only other invitee, the child of a Portuguese fisherman, has come down with a case of simultaneous mumps and measles (!). Thus, only Miss MacIntosh remains.

Unsurprisingly, Miss MacIntosh distains Vera’s new party dress: “was I not ashamed of my immoderate, expensive dress, it’s tiny net ruffles embroidered with tiny seed pearls…the innumerable stitches which had cost some poor seamstress her eyes?”

Perhaps even more so, she distains the girl’s lighthearted mood. Vera swirls and dances in her party dress with an imagined partner. When sour Miss MacIntosh asks who this pretend partner is supposed to be, Vera replies, “Death,” and to Miss MacIntosh’s rejoinder, insists that if she knew Love, she would not dream of Death. During Vera’s dance with Death, Miss MacIntosh, sits in the shadows, perspiring heavily, “her skin seeming to glisten as if she had just come out of water…Her facial expression was vague, undefined, her eyes watering…”  

Later, lying in bed, Vera is fascinated by Miss MacIntosh’s assertion about love, specifically that husbands and wives do not know each other. Vera imagines her future husband: “He must not be ordinary, and ours must not be an average life…To marry some poor shoemaker in Iowa was not my ambition then, certainly. I had seen enough of that mediocre existence.” Hers will not to be the impoverished isolation that Miss MacIntosh promised!

The long night following Vera’s birthday “party,” takes up many chapters in the novel, with Vera fantasizing about her husband, as well as a marriage between Mr. Spitzer and Miss MacIntosh, in which their genders are swapped. Vera is restless, she wants to get out of bed and eat her birthday cake, to awaken Miss MacIntosh, knowing that her nursemaid’s bedroom door always is locked.

Eventually Vera does get out of bed, and we are cautioned that the details of what follows are “blurred,” told through “a veil of oblivion.” (Tara, this relates to your comments on the pact between author and reader to suspend disbelief vs. the unreality within the world Young has created.) Vera walks out of the house and into the darkness. The descriptions of the grounds and the gardens, the marble statues within, the odor of the flowers, and the vegetation, in “knotted growths like the malignance of abundance,” are some of the most sensual and evocative of the novel.

In Chapter 16, Vera joyfully rides her black pony, Falada, through the moon-lit night, across the sea foam on the beach, through the dark allées and orchards of crab apple trees, until finally pony and girl return home, and Vera discovers, to her surprise, that Miss MacIntosh’s bedroom door is not locked, but rather creaking open of itself.  Inside, the moon’s beams illuminate Miss MacIntosh standing by the tall windows. Now Vera sees Miss Macintosh as she has never seen her before, “greatly changed,” and yet, “as if she were something I had always dimly known.”

I will stop here, at the precipice of great revelation(!), but leave you and our readers with the recommendation to listen to the audio files of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling:  https://www.margueriteyoung.site/who-is-marguerite-young/miss-macintosh-my-darling-the-reading-experiment/ (If you do not wish to listen to Chapter 17 yet, you can stop the Chapters 16 & 17 recording at 15:45, before Chapter 17 begins.)

Read by stage actors and recorded in the 1970s, these files have that wonderful, old-timey musical accompaniment and sound effects, as radio dramas did in that time. The audio files were produced by Charles Ruas, who also wrote the introduction for Marguerite Young’s book, Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. Special thanks to my colleague and fellow Miss MacIntosh admirer, Richard Bailey, for discovering these and recommending them to me.