"Very Junior Miss"

"Very Junior Miss" was one of John D MacDonald's "family stories," the kind he populated the pages of This Week with in the first half of the 1950's. It's very much modeled on the JDM template established for these kinds of tales, where a minor family problem seemingly becomes a bigger one, and where at least one of the parents -- usually the father -- is shown up to be either a fuddy-duddy or a fool. Here we have nearly every feature of this kind of story, including the JDM Suburban Family Unit, which consists of two parents and two children, one a boy, the other a girl. We are presented with a problem that seems intractable but that eventually works itself out in a humorous or lighthearted way, finishing with a wistful observation by one of the parents.

The story is primarily notable for being the first of four John D MacDonald works that would appear in McCall's Magazine over the years. McCall's was, of course, one of the "Seven Sisters," a group of women's magazines published in the Twentieth Century that were known for their vast popularity and influence. The publication began in 1873 as a small periodical known as The Queen, created by one James McCall to disseminate the sewing patterns he designed. The McCall's name was incorporated into the title around the turn of the century and in 1913 the magazine underwent a major redesign where the inclusion of fiction began. Like many other magazines of the time -- ones the modern reader may not associate with publishing quality fiction -- the list of authors whose work appeared in the pages of McCall's is a Who's Who of Twentieth Century fiction. Names such as Booth Tarkington, Zane Gray, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald all contributed original fiction to McCall's. In 1937 it became the first woman's magazine to print a complete novel in a single issue.

By the time "Very Junior Miss" appeared in the January 1952 issue, McCall's boasted a readership of 4.5 million, a huge audience for any author. This particular issue -- advertised as "Our Biggest Fiction Issue" -- contains one complete novel, five short stories and a single "short short story," which happens to be "Very Junior Miss." Yet with the exception of MacDonald, the names of the other authors -- Alice Douglas Kelly, Nadine Hoskins, Felix Noland, among others -- are known to only the most serious students of American popular fiction.

"Very Junior Miss" begins on a Sunday morning in the suburban home of the Morrows, where mother Laura is having another exasperating argument with her daughter Kilty. Three weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday, Kilty is still in the throes of tomboyhood, and her attire and lack of attention to her appearance is concerning her mother. Father Walter is sitting at the table, reading the paper and seemingly unconcerned with the dispute, throwing in a sarcastic remark every now and then. "She's your daughter, too," say Laura to her husband. "Most of the time Kilty looks like a -- like a coal-heaver." There is an outdoor buffet that afternoon at "the club" and Laura wants Kilty to wear her nice green dress and to wash her hair, despite the fact that Kilty will spend most of the day in the pool. Besides, Laura's friend Marie will be there with her daughter Sandra, and Sandra is always well-behaved and nicely dressed.

Admitting defeat, Kilty goes upstairs to change and Laura berates Walter for not showing more support. She tells him "I don't want my daughter to turn out to be one of those big back-slapping women." (I guess we all know what that means!) Walter assures her that all will end well and reminds her that she will soon come to pine for this time in her daughter's life.

"When Kilty starts to become highly conscious of herself as a member of the female species, Laura, I'm going to feel a little sad. It will mean that both of our kids have turned into adults. And after all these years of wishing the process would go a little faster, I'm now beginning to wonder if we won't feel just a little bit lost."

When the family arrives at the club, Kilty is properly razzed by her friends about her appearance. A sock in the arm from Kilty manages to shut up the boys, and the family heads for their table near the pool. It is then that they notice "a group of a dozen girls wearing identical coral-colored bathing suits" walking through the open poolside. It turns out that there is going to be a fashion show that afternoon, and the models are accompanied by a young man wearing "exceedingly bright clothes" and by a "chunky woman with short jet hair."

After lunch is served and prior to the show, Kilty manages to get permission to change into her bathing suit so she can watch the show from the pool. On her way to the locker room she encounters the models being instructed by the "chunky woman" on how to comport themselves, and as she stops to listen, the young man sees her and calls her over. After introductions the man says, "You've got good shoulders and good legs, Kilty... Go tell [the woman] that Carl says you can wear the white." It takes a moment for it to sink in that Carl wants Kilty to appear in the show wearing one of his creations. Kilty is horrified and refuses, but when Carl taunts her with charges of "stage fright," Kilty, behind "tears of frustration," agrees. She puts on the dress, takes a few quick lessons in how to walk properly, then gets ready for her turn to walk down the platform. Only then does real stage fright set in. "'I can't!' [she] said in a small, trembling voice. 'I never should have...'"

MacDonald had already sold two of these kinds of "lesson-learned" family dramas to the popular newspaper supplement This Week when "Very Junior Miss" was published in 1952. He would follow up this tale a year later with the far more adult (and superior) "Forever Yours" in the February 1953 issue of McCall's, relegating his subsequent family pieces (for the most part) to This Week. After "Forever Yours" was published it would be eight full years before his third McCall's submission would appear. By that time MacDonald was a far more mature author, still interested in this particular form of short story, but much better equipped to pull it off successfully. Not that "Very Junior Miss" is a bad work -- for what it was, it succeeds admirably -- but in the canon of MacDonald's output, it's largely forgettable.

"Very Junior Miss" was the only John D MacDonald story to appear in McCall's under the author's original title. As far as I know, it has never been anthologized.

"Forever Yours"

In early 1953 John D MacDonald had marital infidelity on his mind. Of course I'm not talking about his personal life then (of which I know nothing about) but about his writing. He was either finishing up or had already delivered the final draft of his first "mainstream" novel Cancel All Our Vows, which was all about unfaithfulness among the upper middle class of America, and he probably had some things still left unsaid. That novel ends uncertainly after both husband and wife admit their mutual infidelities and face the necessity of making a decision about their future. In "Forever Yours," MacDonald presents a similar couple who are in the throes of attempting a reconciliation. In was published in the February 1953 issue of McCall's, which makes it likely that it was written at the same time.

In "Forever Yours" we have only one unfaithful partner, husband Mel Dennis. He and his wife Carol live in Utica, New York where Mel is an attorney and Carol stays at home raising their seven-year old son Donny. Mel has been naughty. While working on a case he traveled to nearby Syracuse to meet with a witness who could wreck a case his firm had a lot invested in. His job was to convince her not to get on the witness stand, but he ended up convincing her of something else entirely. As he is meeting with her in her home an ice storm hits, downing power lines and making the roads too treacherous to drive on. With her electricity out and her furnace not working, Mel builds a fire to keep things warm, then... well, things get too warm. What began as accidental togetherness becomes an affair when Mel continues driving out to Syracuse week after week, telling Carol and his boss that the witness (never named) is getting closer and closer to agreeing to a settlement.

Unfortunately, Mel and the woman are spotted together at a Syracuse bar by an old friend of Carol's, when Mel was supposed to be in Albany. Busted! Hurt and bitter, Carol reluctantly accepts Mel's apologies and agrees to an unusual means to try and heal their marriage. They send Donny off to camp and rent a remote lakeside cabin about an hour-and-a-half away from town. Mel had said it was their only hope, to talk it out over a "quiet summer" away from everyone. Carol stays at the lake and Mel drives up after work for weekends; Carol's sister Jeana comes up when she can to keep Carol company.

MacDonald gives us lots of sympathetic, realistic dialogue between Mel and Carol as they try to work things out. Sitting on the cabin porch one Friday night, Mel insists that the affair meant nothing, that he was about to end things right before he was caught, and that love never had anything to do with it:

Mel: "The important thing is to get over it -- somehow.Rebuild trust and confidence."

Carol: "And love."

Mel: "Love is still there. You know that, Carol. A thing like this smashes your pride, but it doesn't kill love."

Carol: "I hope you're right, darling."

Mel: "Do you see how helpless I am? What a stupid thing to say: 'Dear, it won't happen again.' I know it won't, but it sounds so asinine to try to say it."

Carol admits that she has trouble trying to forget it, and gets pictures in her mind of Mel and the woman together. "It's like a madness. I can't turn my mind away from it. I hate you then." The fact that the woman continues to try and get in touch with Mel is not helping. On it goes, through most of July, going over the same ground, saying the same things in different ways.

"They had happy times some weekends. Too happy, it seemed. Gaiety had a thin edge of hysteria, and once, in the middle of laughter, her tears came and he could not comfort her."

By August Carol has made a personal decision that she is somehow going to get through this and get things right again. With Mel's birthday coming up she decides to surprise him with a week-long vacation in Bermuda. She has Jeana make the arrangements in Utica and asks that the travel agent mail the confirmation to the local post office so she can surprise Mel with the letter. But as she picks up the mail from the small village post office, there is a square envelope in her bundle, postmarked in Syracuse and handwritten in a woman's hand. "It was another evidence of treachery," she thought, for Mel to have told that woman his birthday and to have given her the address of the cabin. "Sick at heart," she returns to the cabin to await Mel's arrival.

In this era of cretins like Elliott Spitzer, John Edwards and Mark Sanford, the modern reader can be forgiven for laughing out loud at the sentiments of "Forever Yours." It was written 56 years ago in what now seems like another world, but one where men and women were really not so different. MacDonald is at pains to make clear that Mel Dennis is basically a good man who temporarily "went off the beam." Yet in addition to addressing the essential qualities of forgiveness, JDM is really exploring and expressing the essential sadness that an affair brings into a relationship, the permanent scars it leaves and the real struggle there is to try and move on. As Carol tells Mel, "Mostly it's a feeling of something very special having been lost." Still, "loss" for a moralist like MacDonald does not necessarily rule out redemption, as imperfect as it may be. Despite some obvious and perhaps heavy-handed symbolism near the end, this is a sympathetic and well-written story.

In virtually every John D MacDonald story or novel I've discussed so far in this blog, one can point to a setting based on a real-life location where the MacDonalds once lived or where JDM served in the military. The Northeastern city locations are almost always a stand-in for Utica or Syracuse, so it was a great surprise to see both cities named specifically for once. And the lakeside cabin was, of course, Lake Piseco, although that particular location was not named.

"Forever Yours," which MacDonald submitted to McCall's under the title "Don't Look Too Closely," has yet to be anthologized.