Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  She regarded me then with a certain relaxing of her thick wrinkles, and her heavy-skinned hand, with its wedding ring, came down on my shoulder. “Uncle Myers thinks you took it,” she said in a rusty whisper, like a spy or a scout. The consciousness of my own innocence, combined with a sense of being let into the confederacy of the two sisters, filled me with excitement and self-importance. “But I didn’t, Aunt Margaret,” I began proclaiming, making the most of my moment. “What would I want with his silly old butterfly?” The two sisters exchanged a look. “That’s what I said, Margaret!” exclaimed old Aunt Mary sententiously. Aunt Margaret frowned; she adjusted a bone hairpin in the coiled rings of her unbecoming coiffure. “Mary Therese,” she said to me, solemnly, “if you know anything about the butterfly, if one of your brothers took it, tell me now. If we don’t find it, I’m afraid Uncle Myers will have to punish you.” “He can’t punish me, Aunt Margaret,” I insisted, full of righteousness. “Not if I didn’t do it and you don’t think I did it.” I looked up at her, stagily trustful, resting gingerly on this solidarity that had suddenly appeared between us. Aunt Mary’s pale old eyes watered. “You mustn’t let Myers punish her, Margaret, if you don’t think she’s done wrong.” They both glanced up at the Murillo Madonna that was hanging on my stained wall. Intelligence passed between them and I was sure that, thanks to our Holy Mother, Aunt Margaret would save me. “Go along, Mary Therese,” she said hoarsely. “Get yourself ready for dinner. And don’t you say a word of this to your uncle when you come downstairs.”

  When I went down to dinner, I was exultant, but I tried to hide it. Throughout the meal, everyone was restrained; Herdie was in the dumps about his butterfly, and Preston and Kevin were silent, casting covert looks at me. My brothers, apparently, were wondering how I had avoided punishment, as the eldest, if for no other reason. Aunt Margaret was rather flushed, which improved her appearance slightly. Uncle Myers had a cunning look, as though events would prove him right. He patted Sheridan’s golden head from time to time and urged him to eat. After dinner, the boys filed into the den behind Uncle Myers, and I helped Aunt Margaret clear the table. We did not have to do the dishes, for at this time there was a “girl” in the kitchen. As we were lifting the white tablecloth and the silence pad, we found the butterfly—pinned to the silence pad, right by my place.

  My hash was settled then, though I did not know it. I did not catch the significance of its being found at my place. To Margaret, however, this was grimly conclusive. She had been too “easy,” said her expression; once again Myers had been right. Myers went through the formality of interrogating each of the boys in turn (“No, sir,” “No, sir,” “No, sir”) and even, at my insistence, of calling in the Swedish girl from the kitchen. Nobody knew how the butterfly had got there. It had not been there before dinner, when the girl set the table. My judges therefore concluded that I had had it hidden on my person and had slipped it under the tablecloth at dinner, when nobody was looking. This unanimous verdict maddened me, at first simply as an indication of stupidity—how could they be so dense as to imagine that I would hide it by my own place, where it was sure to be discovered? I did not really believe that I was going to be punished on such ridiculous evidence, yet even I could form no theory of how the butterfly had come there. My first base impulse to accuse the maid was scoffed out of my head by reason. What would a grownup want with a silly six-year-old’s toy? And the very unfairness of the condemnation that rested on me made me reluctant to transfer it to one of my brothers. I kept supposing that the truth somehow would out, but the interrogation suddenly ended and every eye avoided mine.

  Aunt Mary’s dragging step went up the stairs, the boys were ordered to bed, and then, in the lavatory, the whipping began. Myers beat me with the strop, until his lazy arm tired; whipping is hard work for a fat man, out of condition, with a screaming, kicking, wriggling ten-year-old in his grasp. He went out and heaved himself, panting, into his favorite chair and I presumed that the whipping was over. But Aunt Margaret took his place, striking harder than he, with a hairbrush, in a businesslike, joyless way, repeating, “Say you did it, Mary Therese, say you did it.” As the blows fell and I did not give in, this formula took on an intercessory note, like a prayer. It was clear to me that she was begging me to surrender and give Myers his satisfaction, for my own sake, so that the whipping could stop. When I finally cried out “All right!” she dropped the hairbrush with a sigh of relief; a new doubt of my guilt must have been visiting her, and my confession set everything square. She led me in to my uncle, and we both stood facing him, as Aunt Margaret, with a firm but not ungentle hand on my shoulder, whispered, “Just tell him, ‘Uncle Myers, I did it’ and you can go to bed.” But the sight of him, sprawling in his leather chair, complacently waiting for this, was too much for me. The words froze on my tongue. I could not utter them to him. Aunt Margaret urged me on, reproachfully, as though I were breaking our compact, but as I looked straight at him and assessed his ugly nature, I burst into yells. “I didn’t! I didn’t!” I gasped, between screams. Uncle Myers shot a vindictive look at his wife, as though he well understood that there had been collusion between us. He ordered me back to the dark lavatory and symbolically rolled up his sleeve. He laid on the strop decisively, but this time I was beside myself, and when Aunt Margaret hurried in and tried to reason with me, I could only answer with wild cries as Uncle Myers, gasping also, put the strop back on its hook. “You take her,” he articulated, but Aunt Margaret’s hairbrush this time was perfunctory, after the first few angry blows that punished me for having disobeyed her. Myers did not take up the strop again; the whipping ended, whether from fear of the neighbors or of Aunt Mary’s frail presence upstairs or sudden guilty terror, I do not know; perhaps simply because it was past my bedtime.

  I finally limped up to bed, with a crazy sense of inner victory, like a saint’s, for I had not recanted, despite all they had done or could do to me. It did not occur to me that I had been unchristian in refusing to answer a plea from Aunt Margaret’s heart and conscience. Indeed, I rejoiced in the knowledge that I had made her continue to beat me long after she must have known that I was innocent; this was her punishment for her condonation of Myers. The next morning, when I opened my eyes on the Murillo Madonna and the Baby Stuart, my feeling of triumph abated; I was afraid of what I had done. But throughout that day and the next, they did not touch me. I walked on air, incredulously and, no doubt, somewhat pompously, seeing myself as a figure from legend: my strength was as the strength of ten because my heart was pure! Afterward, I was beaten, in the normal routine way, but the question of the butterfly was closed forever in that house.

  In my mind, there was, and still is, a connection between the butterfly and our rescue, by our Protestant grandfather, which took place the following year, in the fall or early winter. Already defeated, in their own view, or having ceased to care what became of us, our guardians, for the first time, permitted two of us, my brother Kevin and me, to be alone with this strict, kindly lawyer, as we walked the two blocks between our house and our grandfather McCarthy’s. In the course of our walk, between the walls of an early snow, we told Grandpa Preston everything, overcoming our fears and fixing our minds on the dolls, the baseball gloves, and the watches. Yet, as it happened, curiously enough, albeit with a certain aptness, it was not the tale of the butterfly or the other atrocities that chiefly impressed him as he followed our narration with precise legal eyes but the fact that I was not wearing my glasses. I was being punished for breaking them in a fall on the school playground by having to go without; and I could not see why my account of this should make him flush up with anger—to me it was a great relief to be free of those disfiguring things. But he shifted his long, lantern jaw and, settling our hands in his, went straight as a writ up my grandfather McCarthy’s front walk. Hence it was on a question of health that this good American’s alarms finally alighted; the rest of what we poured out to him he either did not believe or feared to think of, lest he have t
o deal with the problem of evil.

  On health grounds, then, we were separated from Uncle Myers, who disappeared back into Elkhart with his wife and Aunt Mary. My brothers were sent off to the sisters in a Catholic boarding school, with the exception of Sheridan, whom Myers was permitted to bear away with him, like a golden trophy. Sheridan’s stay, however, was of short duration. Very soon, Aunt Mary died, followed by Aunt Margaret, followed by Uncle Myers; within five years, still in the prime of life, they were all gone, one, two, three, like ninepins. For me, a new life began, under a happier star. Within a few weeks after my Protestant grandfather’s visit, I was sitting in a compartment with him on the train, watching the Missouri River go westward to its source, wearing my white-gold wrist watch and a garish new red hat, a highly nervous child, fanatical against Protestants, who, I explained to Grandpa Preston, all deserved to be burned at the stake. In the dining car, I ordered greedily, lamb chops, pancakes, sausages, and then sat, unable to eat them. “Her eyes,” observed the waiter, “are bigger than her stomach.”

  Six or seven years later, on one of my trips east to college, I stopped in Minneapolis to see my brothers, who were all together now, under the roof of a new and more indulgent guardian, my uncle Louis, the handsomest and youngest of the McCarthy uncles. All the old people were dead; my grandmother McCarthy, but recently passed away, had left a fund to erect a chapel in her name in Texas, a state with which she had no known connection. Sitting in the twilight of my uncle Louis’ screened porch, we sought a common ground for our reunion and found it in Uncle Myers. It was then that my brother Preston told me that on the famous night of the butterfly, he had seen Uncle Myers steal into the dining room from the den and lift the tablecloth, with the tin butterfly in his hand.

  Uncle Harry tells me that twice in my father’s diary, on February 28 and November 7, 1916, the single word, “butterfly,” is written over a whole page. Like most of Uncle Harry’s contributions, this gave me quite a jar. Inexplicable, I thought, until I remembered that my father, as a boy, collected butterflies. My grandmother had a case of his specimens. That is the only light I can throw on the notation.

  As for Uncle Myers, Uncle Harry writes that this “mountain of blubber” claimed to have been a pickle-buyer around Terre Haute, Indiana. I never heard of his being a pickle-buyer, but it goes with him, certainly. On the other hand, those trays of candy did have a professional look. My feeling is that he had not worked at anything since marrying my aunt. According to Uncle Harry, the family firm gave Uncle Myers a job, soliciting grain shipments on the road, with a salary of $250 a month, mileage books, and an expense account. The job was supposed to keep him in western South Dakota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana, where living was cheap. His expense accounts—lunch checks of three and four dollars on transcontinental trains—were a stunner to Uncle Harry, who had thought up the idea of sending him into this semi-arid territory.

  If he was on the road, how can he have been at home all the time? I cannot reconcile this, and Uncle Harry’s suggestion—that there might have been two of him—does not really help. He was at home all the time, my brother Kevin agrees. The only exception was a short period when he had jury duty, he used to leave the house in the mornings then, wearing a black bowler hat. I like to think of Uncle Myers as a juror. Kevin believes he may have gone away once on a brief trip—to Elkhart, we would have thought. But this may have represented the time of his employment with the Capital Elevator Company, for I cannot suppose that the firm kept him on very long.

  Kevin adds a note about Uncle Myers and ball games. With my little brothers, Uncle Myers used to stand outside the ball park until the seventh-inning stretch, when the bleachers were thrown open and anyone could come in, free. Thus they saw only the ends of ball games, as we saw only the beginnings of movies. There was a superb consistency in our life, like that of a work of art. That is why even I find it sometimes incredible. A small correction, however, is necessary: I did once see a full-length feature. It was in the church basement or school auditorium, and the name of the film was The Seal of the Confessional. I recall a scene in which an atheist who defied God was struck by lightning. Naturally, it was free.

  About the tin butterfly episode, I must make a more serious correction or at least express a doubt. An awful suspicion occurred to me as I was reading it over the other day. I suddenly remembered that in college I had started writing a play on this subject. Could the idea that Uncle Myers put the butterfly at my place have been suggested to me by my teacher? I can almost hear her voice saying to me, excitedly: “your uncle must have done it!” (She was Mrs. Hallie Flanagan, later head of the federal theatre.) And I can visualize a stage scene, with Uncle Myers tiptoeing in and pinning the butterfly to the silence pad. After a struggle with my conscience (the first Communion again), I sent for Kevin and consulted him about my doubts. He remembers the butterfly episode itself and the terrible whipping, he remembers the scene on Uncle Louis’ screened porch when we four, reunited, talked about Uncle Myers. But he does not remember Preston’s saying that Uncle Myers put the butterfly there. Preston, consulted by long-distance telephone, does not remember either saying it or seeing it. (He cannot have been more than seven when the incident happened and would be unlikely, therefore, to have preserved such a clear and dramatic recollection.) It still seems to me certain that we at least discussed the butterfly affair on Uncle Louis’ porch, and I may have put forward Mrs. Flanagan’s theory, to which Preston may have agreed, warmly. He may even, says Kevin, have thought, for the moment, he remembered, once the idea was suggested to him. But this is all conjecture, I do not know, really, whether I took the course in Playwriting before or after the night on Uncle Louis’ porch. The most likely thing, I fear, is that I fused two memories. Mea culpa. The play, by the way, was never finished. I did not get beyond the first act, which was set in my grandmother’s sun parlor and showed our first meeting with our guardians. It was thinking about that meeting, obviously, that nagged me into remembering Mrs. Flanagan and the play. But who did put the butterfly by my place? It may have been Uncle Myers after all. Even if no one saw him, he remains a suspect: he had motive and opportunity. “I’ll bet your uncle did it!”—was that what she said?

  It was fall or early winter, I wrote, when my grandfather Preston arrived from Seattle and listened to our tale. Kevin thinks it was spring. We both remember the snow. Probably he is right, for he recalls a sequel to this story that took place in summer, after I had gone and the household had been broken up. He and Preston were taken, temporarily, to stay at my grandmother McCarthy’s house. For the first time, they enjoyed the freedom of the streets; up to then, we had all been kept behind our iron fence. He and Preston borrowed a wagon from a neighbor girl named Nancy and rode up and down Blaisdell Avenue, past the house we had lived in. To their surprise, Uncle Myers was still there, sitting on the front porch with Sheridan on his lap. The two little boys rode the borrowed wagon along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, screaming names and taunts at Uncle Myers, reveling like demons in their freedom and his powerlessness to harm them; “Yah, yah, yah!” Uncle Myers made no response, he simply sat there, a passive target, with Sheridan on his knee. No doubt, all the neighbors were watching. For Kevin, as he tells it, Uncle Myers’ helplessness slowly took the pleasure out of this victory parade, he felt embarrassed for the motionless fat man and drove the wagon away.

  A few days later, they went past the house again. It was empty. Something tempted them to try to get in, and they climbed through a basement window that was open. The house looked very strange, all the furniture had been removed. Suddenly, a fury seized them; they began ripping off the wallpaper—the wallpaper we had been punished for spoiling. They tore it off in strips and then they flung open the medicine cabinet. Someone had forgotten to empty it, and all the family medicines were there, together with an empty jar of Aunt Mary’s beef tea. They threw the medicine bottles at the walls, smashing them, a horrible orange color—the prevailing tone
of the medicines—was splattered over everything. They were revenging themselves on the house. After they had wrecked it to the limit of their powers, they climbed out through the basement window.

  When what they had done was discovered, my grandmother undertook to punish Kevin. She spanked him, in her bathroom, with her hairbrush, putting him firmly over her knee. It interested him to find that her spanking did not hurt. Prone in her grasp, he howled dutifully, but inwardly he was smiling at her efforts. He thought of Aunt Margaret’s hairbrush and Uncle Myers razor strop and felt a tenderness for my grandmother—the tenderness of experience toward innocence. That fall, he and Preston were sent to St. Benedict’s Academy, after a summer stay at Captain Billy Fawcett’s Breezy Point.

  A final note on Aunt Margaret’s health regimen. I have a perfect digestion and very good health; I suppose I owe it to Aunt Margaret. It is true that we children were sick a great deal before we came to her, and no doubt she hardened us with her prunes and parsnips and no pillow and five-mile hikes. Kevin used to have two snapshots, one taken by Aunt Margaret and one by Uncle Myers; they were inscribed “Before the Five Mile Hike” and “After the Five Mile Hike.” The one showing Uncle Myers, in a cap, has mysteriously disappeared during the last year or so. My brother Preston thought he had a photo of him, but that, too, is gone. It is as if Uncle Myers himself had contrived to filch away the proof that he had existed corporeally.