Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  One thing, however, I now think I know for certain: Catiline was a gangster and a ruffian, just as that old bore, Cicero, said. I believe I already knew it that night in the gymnasium. What puzzles me is an eerie sense that Miss Gowrie, unsuspected by me, was my co-conspirator, that our predilections that year kept alternating, like the two little wooden weather figures in a German clock, one of which steps out as the other swings back into the works, in response to atmospheric pressures. I suddenly remember the curious pains that were taken over every detail of my outfitting—how the flame Indianhead was stenciled with gold to make my military cloak far more glorious than history would have permitted, while the outfits of the generals of the Republic were rented in a tawdry lot from a theatrical costumer. A recollection of my own surprise comes back to me, surprise that Miss Gowrie, the pedant, should have let me wear a costume that even I knew was wrong. And I recall, too, how the finest white kid ballerina slippers, used only by professionals, were purchased and dyed crimson to make my calcei patricii mullei (red leather shoes worn by the highest magistrates), with crisscrossed red tapes that Miss Gowrie herself bound up my calves: I was the only performer who had these; even Cicero wore sandals. Everything Catiline wore was of the finest and most costly; he was dressed like a statue in a primitive religious festival—no wonder the seventh and eighth grades applauded.

  I have only to summon up Miss Gowrie’s tall, doll-like figure, with its rigid, jerky movements, and remember the mechanical pivoting of the round head and the short blink of the staring eyes to recognize the possibility of mild, clinical symptoms of the disease that adjusts itself to routine, to the performance of monotonous tasks, while the “real” patient, withdrawn, lives in a world of garish fantasies and symbols. I suspect, suddenly, that my childish rebelliousness and demagogic vanity may have been the tools of some absolutist world-dream of Miss Gowrie’s, just as these qualities, matured in the real Catiline, had been the tools of Caesar. Little as it meant to me then, I cannot get it out of my mind today that Catiline, in his brilliant costume, was a murderer, who slew his own brother-in-law and tortured a man to death.

  In any case, Miss Gowrie certainly repented “Marcus Tullius” with all her Presbyterian conscience. A few days after the performance, she denounced me to the principal for some small infraction of the rules. Next, Caesar was reported, then Cicero. By exam week, the leaders of the Roman republic had virtually all been proscribed. Within the classroom, she was unaltered, patient, and even kindly in her arid, abrupt way. But in the dormitory that peculiar Doppelgänger, her duty, seemed to have taken total possession of her, like an evil spirit. Her drawer was filled with confiscated fountain pens; she tightened up the bath schedule and rapped on the door if you lingered; she seemed to stay up half the night listening for voices talking after lights out.

  But I, too, had a duty, or so I thought—a duty to break the rules and take all offered risks, in order not to graduate in an orderly, commonplace fashion, and as spring advanced into early summer and the last week of school was on us, I had a sense that these two opposed duties were rushing inflexibly toward each other, like two trains on the same track. It happened one night in June; she caught me coming in the gym window on my way back from meeting a boy. We stood staring at each other in sorry recognition, Miss Gowrie in a brown bathrobe and I in my dew-dampened dress uniform. She was a poor sleeper; she had heard a noise and thought somebody was trying to get in to the swimming pool. We both knew that what I had done was the only crime that was considered serious by the principal. Miss Gowrie did not ask where I had been but sent me up to my room, where I could not sleep for wondering whether she would report me in the morning. School was as good as over, but I doubted whether that would deter Miss Gowrie. And if she told, I was finished, I supposed, for it was against my code of honor to lie when you were directly accused.

  The next day, after lunch, I was called into the principal’s office. Miss Gowrie had reported me. After the first few minutes’ colloquy, in which the principal did not ask what I had been doing, I saw that I could graduate after all if I would make the concession of lying: I was the top student in my class, and the school, I perceived, was counting on me to do it credit in my college boards. We assessed each other steadily; we both understood the position and understood that the lie was a favor being asked of me, not only for my own sake and the school’s but on behalf of poor, misguided Miss Gowrie, who ought to have known better than to prowl about at night in her bathrobe in the last week of school. A sense of power and Caesarlike magnanimity filled me. I was going to equivocate, not for selfish reasons but in the interests of the community, like a grown-up, responsible person. I hesitated, seeking a formula that would not compromise principle too greatly. “I went out to smoke,” I finally proposed; this was true in the sense that at any rate I had smoked. The principal sighed, accepting this farfetched explanation. In a moment, I was on her lap and we were crying, chiefly from relief but partly, or so I sensed, in farewell to my childhood; I suddenly felt old and tired, like the principal herself. A few days later, our class graduated, and Miss Gowrie, in an old silk print dress, sat in the audience watching us with a hurt, puzzled expression as we pronounced our triumphant salutes and valedictions in our white caps and gowns, wearing our new pearls and wrist watches and pendants, surrounded by baskets of roses and irises sent by our relations and admirers.

  Miss Gowrie did not return to the school, and I saw her only once more—that summer, following the college boards, when I asked her to lunch with me in a department-store tearoom in Seattle. It was a queer, empty meeting. She bore me no grudge for graduating, but I could see that she could find nothing to say to me now that the context of work and discipline was gone. She blinked at me bewilderedly as I smoked and talked showily about modern literature and college and tried to gossip about the school. I had brought my Caesar along, and together, at Miss Gowrie’s demand, we went over the translation that had been set in the college-board exam. I had not done as well as we had hoped. She ate a crackly dessert called “frange” that was popular in our city and experienced a slight indigestion. Filled with guilt, boredom, and a sense of helpless treachery to this mysterious individual who seemed to be wanting something I did not know how to give, I became confused and left my Caesar on the luncheon table. But if Miss Gowrie saw it as we were leaving, she said nothing and went her terse way, back to Canada and Empire. When I called for the book later, at the store Lost and Found, they told me it had not been turned in. Aside from the Latin grammar, the only souvenir of our acquaintance left to me was the pair of ballet slippers of the very finest kid that remained in my closet for fifteen years.

  There are some semi-fictional touches here. My midyear exam paper for instance: I do not really know whether or not I was asked to contrast the two Haeduan brothers or whether I wrote, The death of Dumnorix is ironic because a fickle man dies adjuring his followers to keep faith with him.” But this was the kind of question Miss Gowrie would have given and the kind of answer I might have made. At some time, certainly, during the term I was asked to contrast the two Haeduans. The notion that Dumnorix was like an American Indian came to me much later, when I happened to be reading about the rising of Pontiac. This Indian chief had a brother who reminded me, at once, of Diviciacus. It is true that those two Gauls stuck in my mind like burrs. At one time, during the war, I had the idea of writing a novel, with historical interludes, about divided allegiances; one interlude was going to be devoted to the two brothers, and another to Parnell.

  Miss Gowrie was always reporting her favorites for breaking the rules. She did report me for smoking, but I don’t think this happened the day after “Marcus Tullius.” This is an example of “storytelling”; I arranged actual events so as to make “a good story” out of them. It is hard to overcome this temptation if you are in the habit of writing fiction, one does it almost automatically.

  I was discovered coming into the gymnasium after meeting a boy one spring evening, shortly before g
raduation. I think it was Miss Gowrie who caught me, but I am not positive. Sometimes I feel it was and sometimes I feel it wasn’t. I recall the sequel more clearly. The principal did invite me to equivocate as to what I had been doing. She was a great crier, and she cried again when I graduated, calling me “Cousin Mary” (she had the same name, Preston, as my grandfather, and they had done their genealogies together), and predicting that I would be an “ornament” to the Seminary. I cried, too, and our joint tears persuaded me that I had been a model pupil all along.

  Miss Preston would have had to expel me, though, if the truth had come out, for the boy I had been meeting, in the woods back of the Seminary, was a strange person, a juvenile delinquent. He had lost one leg in a hunting accident and gone to the bad; his sister, I believe, had been a day girl at the Seminary, so that his case was well known to the principal. In reality, our meetings were innocent. We only smoked and talked, but no one would have credited that. I tried to put a darker complexion on it myself and wrote him a poem in study hall that showed the influence of Swinburne, Edna Millay, and possibly Dowson. I still know the first lines by heart:

  Oh, boy that I have loved and shall not see again,

  Be this to you a last and sweet farewell.

  You are too young for me and far too evil.

  Oh, boy whose beauty proved too great for me,

  Smile but a little now and let me go.

  The only truth in this poem was that I was slightly afraid of this good-looking boy. I was touched by his empty trouser leg and fascinated by the stories I had heard of his criminality, it was rumored that he had been in reform school. His actual age was seventeen—one year older than I was.

  This episode, now that I examine it, does reflect the two themes of “The Figures in the Clock”: juvenile delinquency versus maturity. The crippled boy was, to me, a sort of Catiline, that is, a wild, defiant mirror image that I was reluctantly outgrowing. This was why I felt old in comparison to him, though when I made myself an Older Woman in the poem, I thought it was only to give a sad effect. His name was Hex (king), which made a funny link with my Latin studies. I noticed this at the time. That name was part of the charm he had for me, as we sat, side by side, on a little hill, his crutch thrown down, while younger members of his outlaw band circled the woods behind us, to warn us if anyone were coming. The poem was false, and yet it was true. It “tells the same story” as “The Figures in the Clock.”

  My grandfather was enthusiastic about “Marcus Tullius.” He declared, quite seriously, that it was the best play he had ever seen. I understand why a lawyer would like it, no doubt, he was on Cicero’s side. We stood up and clapped long and loud, and as I pick out his spare figure now in the audience, another piece in the pattern falls into place. Caesar, of course, was my grandfather: just, laconic, severe, magnanimous, detached. These are the very adjectives I might use to describe Lawyer Preston, who was bald into the bargain. Catiline was my McCarthy ancestors—the wild streak in my heredity, the wreckers on the Nova Scotia coast. To my surprise, I chose Caesar and the rule of law. This does not mean that the seesaw between these two opposed forces terminated, one might say, in fact, that it only began during my last years in the Seminary when I recognized the beauty of an ablative absolute and of a rigorous code of conduct. I was not prepared for this recognition; it was like an unexpected meeting. That is the reason, I suppose, for the flood of joyful emotion released in me by Caesar and the Latin language and for the fact that I feel it still.

  The injustices my brothers and I had suffered in our childhood had made me a rebel against authority, but they had also prepared me to fall in love with justice, the first time I encountered it. I loved my grandfather from the beginning, but the conflicts between us (the reader will hear of them presently) somewhat obscured this feeling, which poured out with a rush on Caesar, who, in real life, would have been as strict as my grandfather (“Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”), but whom I did not have to deal with personally.

  In the Seminary, we had Sacred Study under the widow of a bishop. As a Catholic, I had come to know the New Testament well—it is not true that Catholics do not read the Bible. In the Episcopalian school, we concentrated on the Old Testament. The sentence that still rings in my ears is one from Micah. “And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” This moved me powerfully when I first heard it in Mrs. Keator’s classroom (I believe she also wrote it on the blackboard), and it seemed to me that a new voice had spoken, the plain Protestant voice of true religion.

  At the same time, I took advantage of the fact that I was still, officially, a Catholic to get out of going on Sundays with the rest of the girls to the Episcopal church, where the dean regularly delivered an hour-and-a-half sermon. The Catholic mother of some of our small day pupils took me with her to the Catholic church, where the noon Mass lasted only fifteen minutes. The school chapel services, morning and evening, I greatly enjoyed, in spite of being an atheist. I loved the hymns and the litanies and hearing our principal intone at nightfall: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”

  My grandfather, during this period, used to express the hope that I would be a lawyer. But I still dreamed of becoming an actress; I had starred in three school plays, and the summer after I graduated from Annie Wright, the family let me go to drama school (the Cornish School in Seattle), which was a sorry disappointment to my ambitions, for I only learned eurhythmics and played the wordless part of a pirate in a scene that, for some reason, was supposed to take place under water: we pirates, all girls, made strange, rhythmic movements to create a subaqueous effect. In college, my hopes revived, I was in several plays and took the role of Leontes in A Winter’s Tale during my senior year. But the actor I later married came to see my performance and told me the truth: I had no talent. I had begun to feel this myself, so without further discussion I gave up the dream that had been with me thirteen years, ever since I had been Iris in a parochial school play about the kingdom of the flowers. I started to write instead, which did not interest me nearly so much, chiefly because it came easier. At the very time I was renouncing the stage, unknown to me Kevin at the University of Minnesota was beginning his acting career.

  Yellowstone Park

  THE SUMMER I WAS fifteen I was invited to go to Montana by Ruth and Betty Bent, a pair of odd sisters who had come that year to our boarding school in Tacoma from a town called Medicine Springs, where their father was a federal judge. The answer from my grandparents was going to be no, I foresaw. I was too young (they would say) to travel by train alone, just as I was too young (they said) to go out with boys or accept rides in automobiles or talk to male callers on the telephone. This notion in my grandparents’ minds was poisoning my life with shame, for mentally I was old for my age—as I was also accustomed to hearing from grownups in the family circle. I was so much older in worldly wisdom than they were that when my grandmother and my great-aunt read The Well of Loneliness, they had to come to ask me what the women in the book “did.” “Think of it,” nodded my great-aunt, reviewing the march of progress, “nowadays a fifteen-year-old girl knows a thing like that.” At school, during study hall, I wrote stories about prostitutes with “eyes like dirty dishwater,” which my English teacher read and advised me to send to H. L. Mencken for criticism. Yet despite all this—or possibly because of it—I was still being treated as a child who could hardly be trusted to take a streetcar without a grownup in attendance. The argument that “all the others did it” cut no ice with my grandfather, whose lawyer’s mind was too precise to deal in condonation. He conceived that he had a weighty trust in my upbringing, since I had come to him as an orphan, the daughter of his only daughter.

  Yet like many old-fashioned trustees, he had a special, one might say an occupational, soft spot. Anything educational was a lure to him. Salesmen of encyclopedias
and stereopticon sets and Scribner’s classics found him an easy prey in his Seattle legal offices, where he rose like a trout to the fly or a pickerel to the spoon. He reached with alacrity for his pocketbook at the sight of an extra on the school bill. I had had music lessons, special coaching in Latin, tennis lessons, riding lessons, diving lessons; that summer, he was eager for me to have golf lessons. Tickets for civic pageants, theater and concert subscription series, library memberships were treated by him as necessities, not to be paid for out of my allowance, which I was free to devote to freckle creams and Christmas Night perfume. Some of the books I read and plays I saw made other members of the family raise their eyebrows, but my grandfather would permit no interference. He looked tolerantly over his glasses as he saw me stretched out on the sofa with a copy of Count Bruga or The Hard-Boiled Virgin. I had been styling myself an atheist and had just announced, that spring, that I was going east to college. The right of the mind to develop according to its own lights was a prime value to my grandfather, who was as rigid in applying this principle as he was strait-laced in social matters.

  The previous summer had been made miserable for me by his outlandish conduct. At the resort we always went to in the Olympic Mountains (my grandmother, who did not care for the outdoors, always stayed home in Seattle), he and I had suddenly become a center of attention. The old judges and colonels, the young married women whose husbands came up for the week end, the young college blades, the hostess with the Sweetheart haircut who played the piano for dancing, the very prep-school boys were looking on me, I knew, with pity because of the way my grandfather was acting—never letting me out of his sight, tapping me on the dance floor to tell me it was my bedtime, standing on the dock with a pair of binoculars when a young man managed to take me rowing for fifteen clocked minutes on the lake. One time, when a man from New York named Mr. Jones wanted me to take his picture with a salmon, my grandfather had leapt up from the bridge table and thundered after us down the woodland path. And what did he discover?—me snapping Mr. Jones’ picture on a rustic bridge, that was all. What did he think could have happened, anyway, at eleven o’clock in the morning, fifty feet from the veranda where he and his cronies were playing cards? The whole hotel knew what he thought and was laughing at us. A boy did imitations of Mr. Jones holding the salmon with one hand and hugging me with the other, then dropping the salmon and fleeing in consternation when my grandfather appeared.