During these respites, the recollection of our parents formed a bond between us and our grandmother that deepened our mutual regard. Unlike our guardians or the whispering ladies who sometimes came to call on us, inspired, it seemed, by a pornographic curiosity as to the exact details of our feelings (“Do you suppose they remember their parents?” “Do they ever say anything?”), our grandmother was quite uninterested in arousing an emotion of grief in us. “She doesn’t feel it at all,” I used to hear her confide, of me, to visitors, but contentedly, without censure, as if I had been a spayed cat that, in her superior foresight, she had had “attended to.” For my grandmother, the death of my parents had become, in retrospect, an eventful occasion upon which she looked back with pleasure and a certain self-satisfaction. Whenever we stayed with her, we were allowed, as a special treat, to look into the rooms they had died in, for the fact that, as she phrased it, “they died in separate rooms” had for her a significance both romantic and somehow self-gratulatory, as though the separation in death of two who had loved each other in life were beautiful in itself and also reflected credit on the chatelaine of the house, who had been able to furnish two master bedrooms for the emergency. The housekeeping details of the tragedy, in fact, were to her of paramount interest. “I turned my house into a hospital,” she used to say, particularly when visitors were present. “Nurses were as scarce as hen’s teeth, and high—you can hardly imagine what those girls were charging an hour.” The trays and the special cooking, the laundry and the disinfectants recalled themselves fondly to her thoughts, like items on the menu of some long-ago ball-supper, the memory of which recurred to her with a strong, possessive nostalgia.
My parents had, it seemed, by dying on her premises, become in a lively sense her property, and she dispensed them to us now, little by little, with a genuine sense of bounty, just as, later on, when I returned to her a grown-up young lady, she conceded me a diamond lavaliere of my mother’s as if the trinket were an inheritance to which she had the prior claim. But her generosity with her memories appeared to us, as children, an act of the greatest indulgence. We begged her for more of these mortuary reminiscences as we might have begged for candy, and since ordinarily we not only had no candy but were permitted no friendships, no movies, and little reading beyond what our teachers prescribed for us, and were kept in quarantine, like carriers of social contagion, among the rhubarb plants of our neglected yard, these memories doled out by our grandmother became our secret treasures; we never spoke of them to each other but hoarded them, each against the rest, in the miserly fastnesses of our hearts. We returned, therefore, from our grandparents’ house replenished in all our faculties; these crumbs from the rich man’s table were a banquet indeed to us. We did not even mind going back to our guardians, for we now felt superior to them, and besides, as we well knew, we had no choice. It was only by accepting our situation as a just and unalterable arrangement that we could be allowed to transcend it and feel ourselves united to our grandparents in a love that was the more miraculous for breeding no practical results.
In this manner, our household was kept together, and my grandparents were spared the necessity of arriving at a fresh decision about it. Naturally, from time to time a new scandal would break out (for our guardians did not grow kinder in response to being run away from), yet we had come, at bottom, to despair of making any real change in our circumstances, and ran away hopelessly, merely to postpone punishment. And when, after five years, our Protestant grandfather, informed at last of the facts, intervened to save us, his indignation at the family surprised us nearly as much as his action. We thought it only natural that grandparents should know and do nothing, for did not God in the mansions of Heaven look down upon human suffering and allow it to take its course?
There are several dubious points in this memoir.
“... we had not known that we had carried the flu with us into our drawing rooms.” Just when we got the flu seems to be arguable. According to the newspaper accounts, we contracted it on the trip. This conflicts with the story that Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula had brought it with them. My present memory supports the idea that someone was sick before we left. But perhaps we did not “know” it was the flu.
“... we saw our father draw a revolver.” If Uncle Harry is right, this is wrong. In any case, we did not “see” it; I heard the story, as I have said, from my other grandmother. When she told me, I had the feeling that I almost remembered it. That is, my mind promptly supplied me with a picture of it, just as it supplied me with a picture of my father standing in the dining room with his arms full of red roses. Actually, I do dimly recall some dispute with the conductor, who wanted to put us off the train.
“We awoke to reality in the sewing room several weeks later.” We cannot have been sick that long. The newspaper accounts of my parents’ death state that “the children are recovering.” We must have arrived in Minneapolis on the second or third of November. My parents probably died on the sixth and seventh of November; I say “probably” because the two newspaper stories contradict each other and neither my brothers nor I feel sure. I know I was still sick on the day of the false armistice, for I remember bells ringing and horns and whistles blowing and a nurse standing over my bed and saying that this meant the war was over. I was in a strange room and did not understand how I had got there, I only knew that outside, where the noise was coming from, was Minneapolis. Looking back, putting two and two together, it suddenly strikes me that this must have been the day of my parents’ funeral. My brother Kevin agrees. Now that I have established this, or nearly established it, I have the feeling of “remembering,” as though I had always known it. In any case, I was in bed for some days after this, having had flu and pneumonia. Kevin says we were still in our grandmother’s house at Christmas. He is sure because he was “bad” that day: he punched out the cloth grill on the library phonograph with a drumstick.
“‘There is someone here to see you’—the maid met me one afternoon with this announcement.” I believe this is pure fiction. In reality, I had already seen the people who were going to be my guardians sometime before this, while we were convalescent. We were brought down, in our pajamas, one afternoon to my grandmother’s sun parlor, to meet two strangers, a man and a woman, who were sitting there with the rest of the family, like a reception committee. I remember sensing that the occasion had some importance, possibly someone had told us that these people were going to look after us while Mama and Daddy were away, or perhaps stress had merely been laid on “good behavior.” Or could it have been just that they were all dressed in black? The man evinced a great deal of paternal good humor, taking my brothers, one by one, on his lap and fondling them while he talked with my grandparents. He paid me no attention at all, and I remember the queer ebb of feeling inside me when I saw I was going to be left out. He did not like me, I noticed this with profound surprise and sorrow. I was not so much jealous as perplexed. After he had played with each of my brothers, we were carried back upstairs to bed. So far as I remember, I did not see him or his wife, following this, for weeks, even months. I cannot recall the circumstances of being moved to the new house at all. But one day I was there, and the next thing I knew, Aunt Margaret was punishing me for having spoiled the wallpaper in my room.
The reader will wonder what made me change this story to something decidedly inferior, even from a literary point of view—far too sentimental; it even sounds improbable. I forget now, but I think the reason must have been that I did not want to “go into” my guardians as individuals here; that was another story, which was to be told in the next chapter, “Yonder Peasant,” unlike the chapters that follow, is not really concerned with individuals. It is, primarily, an angry indictment of privilege for its treatment of the underprivileged, a single, breathless, voluble speech on the subject of human indifference. We orphan children were not responsible for being orphans, but we were treated as if we were and as if being orphans were a crime we had committed. Read poor for orphan thro
ughout and you get a kind of allegory or broad social satire on the theme of wealth and poverty. The anger was a generalized anger, which held up my grandparents as specimens of unfeeling behavior.
My uncle Harry argues that I do not give his mother sufficient credit: if she had lifted her little finger, he says, she could have had me cut out of his father’s will. He wants me to understand this and be grateful. (I was fourteen or fifteen when my grandfather died.) This is typical McCarthy reasoning, as the reader will recognize: “... clearly, it was a generous impulse that kept us in the family at all.”
Nevertheless, in one sense, I have been unfair here to my grandmother: I show her, as it were, in retrospect, looking back at her and judging her as an adult. But as a child, I liked my grandmother, I thought her a tremendous figure. Many of her faults—her blood-curdling Catholicism, for example—were not apparent to me as faults. It gave me a thrill to hear her go on about “the Protestants” and the outrages of the Ku Klux Klan; I even liked to hear her tell about my parents’ death. In her way, “Aunt Lizzie,” as my second cousins used to call her, was a spellbinder. She spent her winters in Florida, but in the summer she would let me come in the afternoon, quite often, and sit on her shaded front porch, watching her sew and listening to her. Afterward, I was allowed to go out and give myself a ride on the turntable in her big garage—a sort of merry-go-round on which the chauffeur turned her cars, so that they never had to be backed in or out. Besides her Pierce-Arrow, for winter use, she had a Locomobile, canvas-topped, for summer, which she sometimes took me driving in, out to Minnetonka or Great Bear Lake or Winona. Once we visited an Ursuline convent, and once we went up to St. Joseph to look at St. Benedict’s Academy. On these occasions, in her motoring costume, veils, and high-crowned straw hat, she was an imposing great lady.
You felt she could be “big” when she wanted to. “My mother was square,” says Uncle Harry. She also had a worldly side, fancying herself as a woman of fashion and broad social horizons. One summer, she and my grandfather took me with them to a snappy resort in northern Minnesota called Breezy Point. It was run by a man named Billy Fawcett, the editor of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang; there I first saw a woman smoke. On the way back, we stopped to visit my grandfather’s brother, my uncle John, just outside Duluth, where the grain-elevator company had its main offices. He had a large country house, with formal gardens and walks, set in a deep forest. They showed me phosphorescent wood and fireflies; there were fairies in the garden, they said. Before going to bed, I left a note for the fairies in a rose, fully expecting an answer. But the next morning there was only dew in the rose, and I felt very troubled, for this proved to me that fairies didn’t exist.
There was a spaciousness in my grandmother’s personality that made her comfortable to be with, even though you were in awe of her. Marshall Field’s, she often related, had offered her a thousand dollars for a tapestried chair she had sewn, but she had promised the chair to Uncle Louis, so, naturally, she had had to turn down the offer. This impressed me mightily, though I wondered why she did not just make another one if she had wanted to sell it to Marshall Field’s. Whenever I went shopping with her, I felt that she was about to give me a present, though there was nothing, except her manner, to encourage this notion. On my way east to Vassar, she did propose buying me an electric doughnut-maker for my room. Fortunately, I refused; I later discovered that she was in the habit of deducting the presents she gave my brothers from the trust fund that had been left them. Thus her ample character was strangely touched with meanness.
I have stressed the family’s stinginess where we were concerned, the rigid double standard maintained between the two houses, yet my grandfather, according to Uncle Harry, spent $41,700 for our support between the years 1918 and 1923. During this time, the Preston family contributed $300. This peculiar discrepancy I shall have to deal with later. What interests me now is the question of where the money went. Approximately $8,200 a year was not a small sum, for those days, considering, too, that it was tax free and that nothing had to be put aside for savings or life insurance. Could some of the money really have been embezzled, as we children used to think?
With that figure before my eyes, I understand a little more than I did of my grandparents’ feelings. In view of his check stubs, my grandfather would have had every reason to assume that we children were being decently taken care of in the house he had bought for us. I do remember his surprise when he found that we were being given only those two pennies to put in the collection plate on Sundays. But he did not see us very often, and when he did, we did not complain. This seems odd, but it is true. I do not think. we ever brought our woes to our grandparents. When we finally spoke, it was to our other grandfather, the one we hardly knew. We were afraid of punishment, I suppose. The only form of complaint, from us, that was visible to the family was that silent running away. It was I who spent the night in a confessional and a day hiding behind the statue of Laocoön in the Art Institute. That was as far as I got, for I did not have the carfare that was needed to get me to that red brick orphan asylum. Kevin was hardier. Traveling on a transfer he had somehow acquired, he reached a yellow brick orphan asylum called “The Sheltering Arms” that was run by the Shriners. He did not like it as well, in spite of its name, as the red brick one, and though he peered over the wall for a long time, in the end he was afraid to go in. A householder found him crying, fed him, and eventually the Pierce-Arrow came with Uncle Louis to get him, this made the householder think Kevin a terrible fraud.
The family, I think now, must have been greatly perturbed by our running away. It meant either that we were unhappy or that we were incorrigibly bad. I had stolen a ring from the five-and-ten, and my aunt had had to march me back with it into the manager’s office. Kevin had altered his report card when the prize of a dime (no, a nickel) had been offered to the one with the highest marks, and one month I had torn and defaced mine because I was afraid to show a low mark at home. At home, threats of reform school hung over us; yet at school, paradoxically, we, or at least I (I cannot remember about Kevin), stood high in conduct. And when I went to my weekly confession, I seldom got anything but the very lightest penance—those little Our Fathers and Hail Marys were almost a disappointment to me. As my grandmother must have known, I was a favorite with the parish priests.
My present impression is that my grandparents slowly came to realize the true situation in our household and that they themselves were on the point of acting when my other grandfather intervened. Looking back, I believe my grandmother was planning to enter me in the Ursuline convent we visited, certainly, that was the hope her behavior on the trip gave rise to. No doubt, they blinded themselves as long as possible, for to admit the truth was to face up to the problem of separating us children and either putting us in schools to board (for which we were really too young) or distributing us among the family (which my aunts and uncles would probably have resisted) or letting the Protestants get some of us. That was what it always came back to, as the reader will see in the next chapter.
A Tin Butterfly
THE MAN WE HAD to call Uncle Myers was no relation to us. This was a point on which we four orphan children were very firm. He had married our great-aunt Margaret shortly before the death of our parents and so became our guardian while still a benedict—not perhaps a very nice eventuality for a fat man of forty-two who has just married an old maid with a little income to find himself summoned overnight from his home in Indiana to be the hired parent of four children, all under seven years old.
When Myers and Margaret got us, my three brothers and me, we were a handful; on this there were no two opinions in the McCarthy branch of the family. The famous flu epidemic of 1918, which had stricken our little household en route from Seattle to Minneapolis and carried off our parents within a day of each other, had, like all God’s devices, a meritorious aspect, soon discovered by my grandmother McCarthy: a merciful end had been put to a regimen of spoiling and coddling, to Japanese houseboys,
iced cakes, picnics, upset stomachs, diamond rings (imagine!), an ermine muff and neckpiece, furred hats and coats. My grandmother thanked her stars that Myers and her sister Margaret were available to step into the breach. Otherwise, we might have had to be separated, an idea that moistened her hooded grey eyes, or been taken over by “the Protestants”—thus she grimly designated my grandfather Preston, a respectable Seattle lawyer of New England antecedents who, she many times declared with awful emphasis, had refused to receive a Catholic priest in his house! But our Seattle grandparents, coming on to Minneapolis for the funeral, were too broken up, she perceived, by our young mother’s death to protest the McCarthy arrangements. Weeping, my Jewish grandmother (Preston, born Morganstern), still a beauty, like her lost daughter, acquiesced in the wisdom of keeping us together in the religion my mother had espoused. In my sickbed, recovering from the flu in my grandmother McCarthy’s Minneapolis house, I, the eldest and the only girl, sat up and watched the other grandmother cry, dampening her exquisite black veil. I did not know that our parents were dead or that my sobbing grandmother—whose green Seattle terraces I remembered as delightful to roll down on Sundays—had just now, downstairs in my grandmother McCarthy’s well-heated sun parlor, met the middle-aged pair who had come on from Indiana to undo her daughter’s mistakes. I was only six years old and had just started school in a Sacred Heart convent on a leafy boulevard in Seattle before the fatal November trek back east, but I was sharp enough to see that Grandmother Preston did not belong here, in this dour sickroom, and vain enough to pride myself on drawing the inference that something had gone awry.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 5