Lizzie McDee

Lizzie McDee appears in Mary Antin's account of her American school days as the one classmate who could genuinely rival her. She had red hair and freckles, and carried a Sunday-school manner even on weekdays, a detail that marked her as the moral counterweight to Mary's secular ambitions. She stood below Mary in the class, yet her verses were consistently better than Mary's, a fact that Mary privately acknowledged even as she never had the grace to admit it aloud. Lizzie was the only girl in the school besides Mary who could keep near the top of the class all the year through, give bright answers when the principal or the school committee popped sudden questions, and write rhymes that almost always rhymed.

A Rivalry of Verses and Morals

The rivalry between the two girls played out most visibly in their poetry. Mary wrote about the crystal snow, the ocean blue, sweet spring, and fleecy clouds, and when she tried to drag in a moral it kicked so that the music of her lines went out in a groan. Lizzie's verses, by contrast, all had morals, fitting her Sunday-school disposition. Mary took care to show Lizzie all her poetry, and when Lizzie showed hers in return, Mary did not admire it too warmly. She was determined that this ambitious person should not soar unduly in her own estimation. The contrast between them was not merely personal but ideological: Lizzie's moralizing verses represented the conventional piety of the American classroom, while Mary's nature-filled poems reflected her own untutored sensibility, still learning the craft of metre and accent.

The Rotten Apple Incident

Mary found sweet revenge when Lizzie, one day, volunteered to bolster up the eloquence of Mr. Jones, the principal, who was lecturing the class for bad behavior. Lizzie compared the bad boy in the schoolroom to the rotten apple that spoils the barrelful. The groans, coughs, a-hem's, feet shufflings, and paper pellets that filled the room as Saint Elizabeth sat down, even in the principal's presence, were sweet balm to Mary's smart of envy. The nickname Saint Elizabeth, applied to Lizzie in that moment, captures the double edge of Mary's feeling toward her: admiration for her moral earnestness mixed with a sharp awareness of its comic excess. Mary did not care if she did not know how to moralize, so long as Lizzie's pious performance had fallen flat.

The Show Pupil and the Generous Soul

When Mary's teacher had visitors, Mary was aware that she was the show pupil of the class. She was always made to recite, her compositions were passed around, and often she was called up on the platform to be interviewed by distinguished strangers, while the class took advantage of the teacher's distraction to hold forbidden intercourse on matters not prescribed in the curriculum. When Mary returned to her seat after such public audience with the great, she looked to see if Lizzie was taking notice. Lizzie, who was a generous soul despite her Sunday-school airs, generally smiled, and Mary forgave her her rhymes. This recurring gesture of forgiveness, repeated each time Mary returned from her triumphs, reveals the underlying warmth between the two girls beneath their competitive surface. Lizzie's smile was the one response Mary sought, the acknowledgment of her equal.

The Witness to Vanity

Lizzie could testify that she knew Mary Antin as a vain, boastful, curly-headed little Jew. Mary herself admits this, acknowledging that she had a special style of deportment for Lizzie, one that displayed her own poetry and withheld admiration for Lizzie's. When the great personages who visited the school asked Mary to write to them and exchanged addresses with her, some of these correspondences continued through years. Arlington Street took notice when Mary received letters with important-looking or aristocratic-looking letterheads, and Lizzie also took notice. Mary saw to that. The deliberate display of her correspondence with distinguished strangers was part of the same competitive performance she directed at Lizzie, a way of confirming her own rising status in the eyes of the one person whose judgment mattered to her.

The Price of Honors

Mary paid a price for her honors, suffering from incipient stage fright even when she arose to recite before the customary audience of her class, her voice trembling over the first few words. When visitors were in the room she was even more troubled, and when she was made the special object of their attention her triumph was marred by acute distress. If she was called up to speak to the visitors, forty pairs of eyes pricked her in the back as she went. She stumbled in the aisle and knocked down things that were not at all in her way, and her awkwardness increasing her embarrassment, she would gladly have changed places with Lizzie or the bad boy in the back row, anything only to be less conspicuous. The contrast between her public performance and her private terror, and the fact that Lizzie was the one she would have traded places with, deepens the portrait of their relationship as one of mutual recognition across the divide of temperament.

A Friendship of Equals

Lizzie McDee stands in Mary's narrative as the proof that her achievements were real, because they were measured against a genuine peer. The two girls compared verses, competed for the top of the class, and watched each other's triumphs and failures with an intensity that only equals can share. Lizzie's Sunday-school morals and Mary's nature poems represented two ways of being a good American schoolgirl, and their rivalry was the crucible in which Mary's own ambitions were tested and refined. That Lizzie was the better poet, by Mary's own private admission, and yet received none of the teachers' special attention, is a quiet irony that Mary records without bitterness, as one more instance of the mysterious favor that always seemed to single her out. Lizzie's smile of forgiveness, offered again and again, remains the most generous gesture in the story of their schoolgirl rivalry.