Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  As is frequently remarked, we’re currently enjoying an autobiography craze in American literature. But there are secular memoirs and then there are secular-saints’ memoirs. I’m uncomfortable even imagining the books written by Dooley and Killilea rubbing covers on the same shelf with, say, a memoir like Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, which chronicles the details of her sexual affair with her father. I cite Harrison’s book as an extreme example of this latest generation of memoirs in which the reader is treated as a confidant, someone who will understand even the most aberrant of behaviors. Notice I said “understand” rather than “forgive” because I don’t think Harrison and her contemporaries are looking for forgiveness from their readers. “Coming through” and “surviving” are the sought-after states; if there’s any forgiveness desired, the autobiographers (not their readers, or God) dispense it to themselves. The chasm between pre–Vatican II secular-saint memoirs like Dooley’s and Killilea’s—which were ostensibly written to serve as instructional guides in faith and sacrifice—and the current crop of first-person narratives is as deep as the chasm separating the pious Middle Ages and the humanist Renaissance.

  It’s not just that being an Irish Catholic American is the norm in these Catholic secular-saint stories I’ve recalled so far, it’s that being Irish Catholic is synonymous with being a true-blue American. The election of the country’s first Catholic president looms on the horizon as a casual inevitability in these memoirs, whose multivolume narratives concentrate on the 1950s but whose life-changing brushes with destiny (Karen Killilea’s premature birth; Dr. Tom Dooley’s first Navy tour of duty) occur during World War II. The war finally made Irish Catholic Americans “white,” concluding a process of immigrant assimilation that had begun decades earlier—as historian Linda Gordon says in her brilliant work of narrative history The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. And, as I’ve suggested, the wartime spirit of patriotic self-denial found a congenial ethnic counterpart in the Irish Catholic martyrly temperament. The Sullivans—that doomed family of five sailor brothers who all drowned on the same ship early in World War II—might well serve as the spiritual emblems of this specifically Irish Catholic strain of patriotic martyrdom. In fact, at the very end of the rousing wartime film made of their story, The Five Fighting Sullivans, the grinning faces of the five sailors float, ghostlike, on the screen, letting the audience know that even death can’t dampen their boyish Irish American spirits.

  Irish Catholic patriotic martyrdom is the prime ingredient of a popular fictional series of secular-saint stories, the Beany Malone books, which were published from 1943 to 1969. The Beany books are a kind of Catholic version of the Nancy Drew mysteries—with spiritual and moral dilemmas, rather than missing jewels or haunted houses—at the core of the plots. Girls—in particular, Catholic girls—were the intended audience for the Beany books, and consequently, they functioned as primers in how to behave as a good Catholic adolescent and young woman. But the Beany books also leavened their lessons with action and adventure. Over the course of their long serialized run, these novels presented—over and over again—age-appropriate versions of the female spiritual extreme-adventure tale to impressionable young readers like myself.

  The Beany books were written by Lenora Mattingly Weber, a veritable one-woman female-juvenile-fiction factory. For more than forty years she wrote books and short stories, but she’s best known for the Beany Malone series. Weber’s life (apart from her writing) sounds like Little House on the Prairie crossed with Annie Get Your Gun. Raised by her homesteading family on the plains of Colorado, the teenaged Weber tamed broncos, chopped railroad ties into firewood, and rode in rodeos and Wild West shows. As an adult, Weber was not only a successful author but also the mother of six and an avid cook, swimmer, and horse-back rider. What a gal! While lesser girls’-series authors have faded into obscurity, Weber’s legend lives on. There’s now a Lenora Mattingly Weber Society and a Lenora Mattingly Weber website, and the Beany Malone books have all been reprinted.

  The Beany novels served up many of the charms of the Karen memoirs in fictional form, and for me, certainly, paramount among those charms was the lure of a big family. Marie Killilea evoked a picture of a house bursting at the seams with children, relatives, friends, neighbors, animals, music, and laughter, as well as commingled tears. Indeed, the life of the Killilea house exerts such a powerful pull that, in that second memoir, both now-adult daughters, Gloria and Marie, drop out of the public spheres of office work and college, respectively, to return home and busy themselves there. As an only child, I envied the Killileas their pandemonium. I wanted brothers and sisters so that my own place in the sun wouldn’t be so hot. Rereading the Karen books, I can remember as a child even fantasizing that, should anything happen to my parents, I, too, like daughter Gloria, would be adopted by a big family just like the Killileas.

  Lots of interesting siblings, a big old house, animals, recurring calamities, and the subtle curb of Catholicism to keep everything and everyone in check—there you have the entertaining lures of both the Killilea memoirs and the Beany books. Consider the surefire lure of the opening sentence of the very first book, Meet the Malones. “Mary Fred Malone had just bought a horse.”29 Ahhh. As the scene unfolds, we learn that sixteen-year-old Mary Fred Malone (more about that masculine moniker in a minute) has bought the horse, called Mr. Chips, from his stable owner with the fifteen dollars that she had in her pocket to buy a prom dress. Sweet Mr. Chips, beloved by all the girls who, like Mary Fred, have learned to ride on him through the years, has strained a tendon. Because World War II has just begun (the attack on Pearl Harbor takes place a month before this story opens), there’s no room in the stable for him to recuperate: all stalls have to be filled with able horses in order to meet the demand for military riding lessons. Mary Fred to the rescue! Through a snowstorm, she leads the limping Mr. Chips home to the Malone house on the then-bucolic outskirts of Denver and settles him in to the stone garage that originally had been a stable. Fortunately, the Malones’ mother has been dead three years, so she can’t object, and their father, crusading newspaperman Martie Malone, is a benign and distant patriarch whose work often takes him far from home. The Malone kids—four in all—are largely on their own.

  Absent parents! Autonomy! A house with an empty stable to spare for a horse! What girl reader could resist the opening of the Beany Malone books—especially a girl reader like me who would have had to lead that horse up two flights of apartment stairs and park it in the living room, where my always present parents would worry about what the landlord would say?

  When Mary Fred enters her comfortably shabby and sprawling house, we alert readers will recognize, in fictional form, many of the same elements that made the Karen books so appealing. First, there’s the large whirling dervish of a family. Apart from the erratically present paterfamilias, Martie, there’s oldest daughter Elizabeth, who throughout the series is given the saintly tag description: “her hair was an aureole about her face.” 30 Indebted to Jane Bennet of Pride and Prejudice and Meg March of Little Women for her characterization, Elizabeth is sweet, pretty, and, like those lovely old sisters of classic girls’ fiction, rather dull. She’s recently married to Lieutenant Donald McCallin and off living with him in a succession of Army camps. Next in line is Mary Fred herself, whose distinct physical features are her “unruly dark hair” and her gray eyes framed by dark lashes, “put in [by God] with a dirty finger” 31 as the Irish say. Mary Fred’s younger brother, fifteen-year-old Johnny, is the literary genius of the family. Kind and endearingly absentminded, Johnny often has to be reminded to push his swoop of black hair out of his eyes and to tear himself away from his typewriter for meals. ( Johnny is the same lanky, black-Irish physical type as Dr. Tom Dooley and, until late in the series, he shares Dooley’s distracted disregard of the fairer sex.) Thirteen-year-old Beany (real name: Catherine Cecilia) is the most practical family member; in the parlance of Harkness High, which all the young Malones pass through, Beany, like Mary
Fred, is a “mop squeezer” rather than a “stude” or a “queen.”32 When we first meet Beany, she’s planning to sew curtains and buy paint to redecorate her bedroom by herself. To complete the character-as-defined-by-hair lineup of the Malones, Beany sports stubby “roan” braids, as well as a sprinkling of freckles across her face and the same sooty eyes as Mary Fred.

  The other literary feature that the Beany Malone series shares with the Karen books is its basic plot trajectory: temptations, minor calamities, and major crises arise, and all are met, eventually, by the Malones’ Catholic ethos of self-abnegation. The Beany Malone stories are much lighter in tone than the autobiographical sufferings of Karen and her family, but the presence of sin and tragedy also pervades the series: beloved characters die, young children are neglected and abused, the old are forgotten and lonely. The Malones, like the Killileas, offer up their own silent sufferings as a spiritual bulwark against, not a solution to, the evils of this world.

  In Meet the Malones, the paramount crisis is war. World War II figures here as much more than a backdrop or a plot device; in this first novel of the series, wartime self-denial explicitly joins forces with the Catholic propensity toward martyrdom to make the Malones and, perhaps, by implication, a nation of gallant American families like them, unbeatable. The story has barely begun when father Martie volunteers to replace his newspaper’s injured war correspondent and flies off to Hawaii, where he remains for most of the story, but not before delivering a rousing, blink-back-your-tears speech to his children: “I’d rather stay home and argue with you kids, and have old Red [the Malones’ Irish setter] sleeping on my foot in the evenings. But it’s like going into service, you can’t think of what you’d like, or what you wouldn’t.”33

  No sooner has one Martie temporarily disappeared (as he does in all the novels) than another Martie materializes. Two-week-old Martin Donald MacCallin arrives in the company of his exhausted (but still lovely) mother, Elizabeth. When her officer husband was called to battle, the pregnant Elizabeth began a railway journey back to the Malone-family homestead, planning to have her baby there. But her train was sidetracked in order to let troop trains go by, and Elizabeth had her baby alone, in a hospital in a small Wyoming town. When her money ran out, Elizabeth left the hospital early and forged her way, by train and car, to the Malone doorstep. In her first conversation with Mary Fred, Elizabeth immediately proves that she’s a self-denying chip off the old block:

  “You should have telegraphed us,” [says Mary Fred].

  “No,” [Elizabeth] said slowly, “it wouldn’t have been right to worry you. . . . In times like these, . . . everyone has his own burden, and no one else should add his. Don has his; Father has his; and this was mine.”34

  After her strength begins to return, Elizabeth really shows herself to be an apostle of the timely creed of patriotic martyrdom when, still bedridden, she delivers these orders to Mary Fred and her friends as they prepare to attend a square dance at the local airfield: “ ‘Now listen, gals, be sure you go out there to this soldiers’ dance with only one idea—not to have a good time yourselves but to give them one. Because you’ve got other good times ahead of you. But these kids—we don’t know what’s ahead for them. . . . Just forget about yourselves. Though I suppose it’s hard for youth not to be selfish,’ she added.” 35

  The epic battle that takes place within the souls of young girls between the innate selfishness of youth and the selflessness called for by God and country is the overarching motif of all the Beany Malone books.

  The typical plot of the thirteen novels that follow Meet the Malones finds Beany being temporarily seduced by the pleasures of this world proffered by school chums or other family outsiders. At the eleventh hour, Beany always realizes that the saintly virtues of self-denial, modesty, generosity, and love of one’s fellow humans are the only worthy values for a Malone to embrace. After all, the Malones, being upright Irish American Catholics, are spiritually and morally superior precisely because they know how to tough things out. “The Malones,” pronounces their housekeeper, “are the beatenest. . . . The Malones can stand up to things that’d just flatten anybody else right out.”36

  Beany assumes the mantle of series heroine in the second novel, Beany Malone (1948). But why? Wasn’t spunky Mary Fred suitable in just about every way to carry on as the everygirl heroine of Weber’s series—not the oldest, not the youngest; not the prettiest, not the plainest? The answer, I think, resides in the first book’s description of Mary Fred as a “fresh air fiend” with “unruly hair.” Note, also, that she’s vigorously athletic and the kind of girl who forks over prom-dress money to buy a horse. From the get-go, in fact, Mary Fred’s dethronement was foreordained by her dubious first name. With the towering exceptions of Jo March in Little Women and Laura Ingalls in the Little House books—and maybe, just maybe, one or two more characters I’m not thinking of—no unreconstructed tomboy over the age of twelve serves as the primary heroine in girls’ juvenile fiction—and most certainly not Catholic girls’ juvenile fiction. The figure of the tomboy, while entertaining, is too disturbing, too potentially subversive, to flourish. More often she’s a foil, confirming, by contrast, the heroine’s femininity. The archetypal example is George Fayne in the Nancy Drew novels. Sporty, close-cropped George despises daintiness and squeamishness—as embodied in the character of her plump, pretty blond cousin, Bess Marvin. Consequently, for nearly eighty years, Nancy Drew has maintained her position as the ideal feminine compromise candidate, smack in the center between George’s butch bravado and Bess’s girly-girl fragility.

  Similarly, Beany figures in Weber’s series as the happy attainable medium between Elizabeth’s Madonna-like presence and Mary Fred’s slapdash self-presentation. The series’s estimation of Mary Fred as being an untraditional (and, therefore, problematic) female character extends even into the last novel, Come Back, Wherever You Are. While in that book Beany is a merrily frazzled mother of two, Mary Fred and her husband struggle with what we would now term “infertility problems.” In keeping with the suffering-in-silence ethos of the series, Mary Fred ultimately decides to mother the troubled children her psychiatrist husband treats and to give up the selfish quest to have children, biological or adoptive, of her own.

  Beany is sixteen years old when she displaces Mary Fred. In Beany Malone, she also takes over the care and feeding of her family. The family patriarch, pneumonia-weakened Martie, on doctor’s orders, has departed for Arizona to recuperate from a plane crash he survived in a Wyoming blizzard. (Like any self-respecting martyr would, Martie contracted pneumonia when he insisted that another passenger take his place on the rescue truck and then had to wait hours in the freezing cold for the truck to return.) Beany chafes at her many domestic duties, especially when she compares her life to that of her new friend, Kay Maffley, a shy beauty with taffy-colored hair and perfect clothes. Kay lives in a playhouse of an apartment with her mother, Faye, who credits her youthful looks to her philosophy of “never put[ting] myself in a position that might turn out unpleasantly.” 37 Beany envies Kay her soft cocoon and temporarily tries to emulate Faye’s “don’t stick your neck out” attitude, until she sees—with a jolt—what collateral damage such selfishness can cause. In the final novel of the series, Come Back, Wherever You Are (1969), Kay dies young, leaving a husband and a little boy to Beany’s care. Her nurse ascribes Kay’s death to Faye’s maternal narcissism: “You might say she was doomed . . . maybe from the time she was a child, and had no one to see that she built up health and strength.” 38 (While the Beany books condemn Faye’s parental neglect, Martie Malone’s absences are approved because he’s always called away to be of service to others, and of course, he is the dad, not the mom.)

  Weber ingeniously rings changes on this formulaic struggle between the forces of self-interest and self-denial throughout her series—an advantage that series fiction has over one-shot novels and nonfiction. Some of the novels stand out for their ingenuity, others because they mark watersh
ed changes in the Malones’—or the nation’s—life. In Beany Has a Secret Life (1955), for example, Beany briefly joins a “secret club” at Harkness High that, in this McCarthy-era novel, serves as a miniaturized representation of the Communist Party. In the penultimate book of the series, Something Borrowed, Something Blue (1963), Beany gets married. Like many another smart, courageous, and independent heroine in fiction, Beany settles for a schlemiel. Throughout the course of the series, Beany sequentially kept company with two young men: Norbett Rhodes, a junior Heathcliff with attitude problems, and Andy Kern, a handsome and cheerful Marine who, significantly, always wants to “play it light.” 39 Toward the end of the series, Beany begins to take inexplicable notice of Carlton Buell, the judge’s son who lives next door and who has served, throughout most of the books, as Johnny’s silent sidekick. Weber works hard to make over Carlton into a hunk, but even her mighty efforts fall short. To highlight Carlton’s caretaking, altruistic side, Weber has him running a recreation center for underprivileged kids when he and Beany fall in love. The kids at the center charmingly mispronounce his name as “Mr. Bull,”40 but stolid Carlton always seems more like an ox. His romantic appeal isn’t enhanced by his chaste habit of mumbling “Brakes!” 41 and pulling away whenever his smooching sessions with Beany grow dangerously rapturous.