and ridicule her cruelly.
During the next few years Catherine donned an armor of indifference, which she wore as a shield against the attacks of the other children. When the armor was pierced, she struck back with a trenchant, caustic wit. Her intention was to alienate her tormentors so that they would leave her alone, but it had an unexpectedly different effect. She worked on the school paper, and in her first review about a musical that her classmates had staged, she wrote,“ Tommy Belden had a trumpet solo in the second act, but he blew it.” The line was widely quoted, and— surprise of surprises— Tommy Belden came up to her in the hall the next day and told Catherine that he thought it was funny.
In English the students were assigned Captain Horatio Hornblower to read. Catherine hated it. Her book report consisted of one sentence:“ His barque was worse than his bight,” and her teacher, who was a weekend sailor, gave her an“ A.” Her classmates began to quote her remarks and in a short time she was known as the school wit.
That year Catherine turned fourteen and her body was beginning to show the promise of a ripening woman. She would examine herself in the mirror for hours on end, brooding about how to change the disaster she saw reflected. Inside she was Myrna Loy, driving men mad with her beauty, but her mirror— which was her bitter enemy— showed hopelessly tangled black hair that was impossible to manage, solemn gray eyes, a mouth that seemed to grow wider by the hour and a nose that was slightly turned up. Maybe she wasn’ t really ugly, she told herself cautiously, but on the other hand no one was going to knock down doors to sign her up as a movie star. Sucking in her cheeks and squinting her eyes sexily she tried to visualize herself as a model. It was depressing. She struck another pose. Eyes open wide, expression eager, a big friendly smile. No use. She wasn’ t the All- American type either. She wasn’ t anything. Her body was going to be all right, she dourly supposed, but nothing special. And that, of course, was what she wanted more than anything in the world: to be something special, to be Somebody, to be Remembered, and never, never, never, never, to die.
The summer she was fifteen, Catherine came across Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy and for the next two weeks she spent an hour a day before her mirror, willing her reflection to become beautiful. At the end of that time the only change she could detect was a new patch of acne on her chin and a pimple on her forehead. She gave up sweets, Mary Baker Eddy and looking in the mirror.
Catherine and her family had moved back to Chicago and settled in a small, dreary apartment on the north side, in Rogers Park, where the rent was cheap. The country was moving deeper into an economic depression. Catherine’ s father was working less and drinking more, and he and her mother were constantly yelling at each other in a neverending series of recriminations that drove Catherine out of the house. She would go down to the beach half a dozen blocks away and walk along the shore, letting the brisk wind give wings to her thin body. She spent long hours staring at the restless gray lake, filled with some desperate longing to which she could not put a name. She wanted something so much that at times it would engulf her in a sudden wave of unbearable pain.
Catherine had discovered Thomas Wolfe, and his books were like a mirror image of