Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  My grandfather did not care; he never cared what people thought of him, so long as he was doing his duty. And he expected me to be perfectly happy, taking walks up to the waterfall with him and the judges’ and colonels’ ladies; measuring the circumference of Douglas firs; knocking the ball around the five-hole golf course; doing the back dive from the springboard while he looked on, approving, with folded arms; playing the player piano by myself all afternoon: torn rolls of “Tea for Two” and “Who” and one called “Sweet Child” that a young man with a Marmon roadster had sung into my radiant ear on the dance floor until my grandfather scared him off.

  Sweet child, indeed! I felt I could not stand another summer like that. I had to go to Montana, and my grandfather, I knew, would let me if only I could persuade him that the trip would be broadening and instructive; that is, if in my eyes it would be profoundly boring.

  It did not take divination on my part to guess what would fit these requirements: Yellowstone Park. The very yawn I had to stifle at the thought of geysers, Old Faithful, colored rock formations, Indians, grizzly bears, pack horses, tents, rangers, parties of tourists with cameras and family sedans, told me I had the bait to dangle before his kindly-severe grey eyes. It was too bad, I remarked casually, in the course of my last school letter home, that the trip was out of the question: the girls had been planning to take me on a tour of Yellowstone Park. That was all that was needed. It was as simple as selling him a renewal of his subscription to the National Geographic. The ease of it somehow depressed me, casting a pall over the adventure; one of the most boring things about adolescence is the knowledge of how people can be worked.

  I ought to go to Montana, said my grandfather decidedly, after he had looked up Judge Bent in a legal directory and found that he really existed: a thing which slightly surprised me, for in my representations to my grandparents, I always had the sensation of lying. Whatever I told them was usually so blurred and glossed, in the effort to meet their approval (for, aside from anything else, I was fond of them and tried to accommodate myself to their perspective), that except when answering a direct question I hardly knew whether what I was saying was true or false. I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into terms they could understand. To keep matters straight with my conscience, I shrank, whenever possible, from the lie absolute, just as, from a sense of precaution, I shrank from the plain truth. Yellowstone Park was a typical instance. I had not utterly lied when I wrote that sentence. I entertained, let us say, a vague hope of going there and had spoken to the Bent girls about it in a tentative, darkling manner, i.e., “My family hopes we can see Yellowstone.” To which the girls replied, with the same discreet vagueness, “Umm.”

  At home, it was settled for me to entrain with the girls shortly after school closed, stay three weeks, which would give us time to “do” the Park, and come back by myself. It would only be two nights, my grandfather pointed out to my grandmother; and Judge Bent could put me on the train in care of the conductor. The two girls nodded demurely, and Ruth, the elder, winked at me, as my grandfather repeated these instructions.

  I was mortified. As usual, my grandfather’s manner seemed calculated to expose me in front of my friends, to whom I posed as a practiced siren. My whole life was a lie, it often appeared to me, from beginning to end, for if I was wilder than my family knew, I was far tamer than my friends could imagine, and with them, too, as with my family, I was constantly making up stories, pretending that a ring given me by a great-aunt was a secret engagement ring, that I went out dancing regularly to the Olympic Hotel, that a literary boy who wrote to me was in love with me—the usual tales, but I did not know that. All I knew was that there was one central, compromising fact about me that had to be hidden from my friends and that burned me like the shirt of the Centaur: I could not bear to have anyone find out that I was considered too young to go out with boys.

  But every word, every gesture of my grandfather’s seemed designed to proclaim this fact. I perceived an allusion to it in the fussy way he saw us off at the Seattle depot, putting us in our drawing room with many cautions not to speak to strangers, tipping the Pullman porter and having a “word” with the conductor, while my grandmother pressed a lacy handkerchief to her eyes and my uncle grinned and the old family gardener and handy man advised me not to take any wooden nickels. During this degrading ordeal, the Bent girls remained polite and deferential, agreeing to everything (it was always my tendency to argue). But as soon as the train pulled out of the station, Ruth Bent coolly summoned the conductor and exchanged our drawing room for two upper berths. They always did this on boarding the train, she explained; two could fit very comfortably into an upper, and the money they got back was clear profit.

  Ruth Bent was the boldest person, for her age, I had ever met. She was seventeen, two years older than her sister, and she looked, to me, about forty. She had reddish-brown frizzy hair and she wore earrings, eyeglasses, picture hats, printed chiffon dresses, a deep purplish red lipstick, and Golliwog perfume. Her voice was deep, like a man’s; her skin was swarthy and freckled; her eyebrows, shaped with tweezers, were a dark chocolate color. She had a good figure, small, with a sort of shimmying movement to it. In school she had the name of being fast, which was based partly on her clothes and partly on the direct stare of her reddish-brown eyes, very wide open and rounded by the thick lenses of her glasses so that the whites had the look of boiled eggs. She made me think of a college widow.

  Actually, she was a serious girl, in her own inscrutable way; she sang in the choir and was respected by the school principal. No one knew quite what to make of her. It was argued that she was common (I could not help thinking this myself) and that her sister, Betty, was more the school type. Betty was a boyish girl with a short haircut, a wide thin face, high cheekbones, and clear grey-green eyes. She had a broad flat mouth and a big elastic Western smile that disclosed shining teeth. Her lipstick was Tangee. She had a lighter voice than her sister’s and a light, scherzo touch on the piano; she played at school recitals.

  Both girls were very good dancers. And they both liked to ride, which was how we had become friends. In the pocket of her black riding habit (Betty wore jodhpurs), Ruth always had a package of cigarettes, which she calmly took out as soon as we were mounted, right in front of the English major who was the school riding master. The major liked both girls and let them have the best horses and ride wherever they pleased. The Bent girls had some quality—levelheadedness, I suppose—that reassured older people. They never got into trouble, no matter what they did, while I was either in high favor or on the verge of being expelled. Unlike me, they did not seek to make a point; they merely did what they wanted, in a bald, impersonal way, like two natural forces—a sultry dark-browed wind and a light playful breeze. Their self-possession, I felt, must rest on an assured social position at home. In Montana, they said, they had a very lively crowd and their family gave them complete freedom. Their town was small, but there was always a party going, and they had friends all over the state. I would have plenty of dates, they promised me, in Medicine Springs.

  Geography, in those days, left me cold; it reminded me of grade school, slide lectures, and the stereopticon. Consequently, I had not bothered to look up Medicine Springs on the map. It had once been a spa, the girls said, and this was enough for me to place it up in the north, near Canada, where I supposed the mountains were; I thought vaguely of Saratoga Springs, horse races, big rambling hotels in Victorian architecture, gamblers, mining men from roaring Butte. It astonished me to learn, in mid-journey, that Medicine Springs was in the center of the state and that we were going to have to change trains to get there. It was nowhere near Yellowstone Park, I discovered with a guilty tremor; in fact, it was not near any place I had heard of. It did not even figure on the railroad map on our timetable.

  We changed—I forget where—and t
ook a dusty little branch train with hard board seats. I had never seen a train like this, and a gloomy premonition overtook me as we jolted along across a prairie, the two girls in high spirits at the prospect of getting home. I kept looking out the window for scenery, but there was nothing, not a river, not a hill, not a tree—just a flat expanse of dry grass and gopher mounds, with a few houses strung along at the rare stations. Medicine Springs, when we reached it, was a small, flat, yellowish town set in the middle of nowhere. There was one wide dusty main street with a drugstore and a paintless hotel; several smaller streets crossed it, ran for a block or two, and then stopped. You could take it in at a glance. Behind the hotel there were the “springs” alluded to in the town’s name; they consisted of a dirty, sulphurous, cement swimming pool with one half-dead tree leaning over it. The heat was awful, and the only shade apparent was provided by telephone poles. I could not believe that my friends lived here and supposed, to myself, that we must be going to a ranch somewhere out of sight on the prairie.

  Judge Bent was at the depot, a sallow, middle-aged man with dark hair and a modified cowboy hat; he put our bags in his car, and I got set for a long drive. But in a trice we had arrived at the Bent home. It was somewhat larger than the other houses we had passed and it had a front porch and a tree. Another dwelling with a tree was identified by the girls as “The Manse”; I looked in vain for mosses. These two frame houses and one other, which professed to be haunted, constituted the town’s “residential” quarter.

  Mrs. Bent came to the door, and I tried to put on a pleased and excited expression. But everything I saw shocked and almost frightened me; the modest size of the house, the thin walls, the absence of books and pictures, the lack of any ornament or architectural feature, the table already set in the middle of the afternoon without a flower or a centerpiece, the fact that Mrs. Bent evidently did her own work, that there was no guest room and that I was to share a room and closet with Betty and a bath with the whole family. This feeling on my part was not precisely a snobbish reaction; if the Bents had been poor, I would not have felt so ill-at-ease and indeed paralyzed. What struck me here was a sense of disorientation. Knowing the Bents not to be poor, I could not “place” them. The girls, I perceived, were unaware of my difficulties. They did not catch even a glimpse of their home refracted from my glazed eyes. This was a relief, but at the same time it amazed me. In their place, I would have died of mortification.

  This disregard was typical of the Bent household. The two girls, while perfectly affectionate, took no notice of their parents, who might as well have been a pair of mutes at the family board. I had been trained not to talk at table until drawn out by my hosts, but neither Judge nor Mrs. Bent appeared conscious of a social duty to find out who I was, where I came from, what my parents did. I was there, simply, and they accepted my presence. The only fact I ever elicited about them was that Judge Bent had taken his law degree at Madison, Wisconsin. My provenance, theirs, were as indifferent to them as that of the baked potato that the judge silently helped onto my plate.

  Mrs. Bent’s function seemed to be to answer the telephone and iron the girls’ summer dresses. She never wanted to know who was calling or where the dresses were to be worn. I wished she would ask, that first night at dinner, for this was a question that interested me. Despite what I had seen of Medicine Springs, my hopes began to stir again when I perceived that we were to have dates that night. The girls were talking of a dance, out of town, on the prairie; someone named Frank was coming to call for us with his car. I was too uppity to dream of cowboys, even if the girls had not warned me that they were all dirty, spitting old men. But from casual bits dropped by the girls, I was piecing together, once more, an image of what the true West must have in store for me—smooth, sleek boys whose fathers owned sheep or cattle ranches, who wore white linen suits and drove roadsters and probably went east to college. I imagined a long piazza, a barbecue pit, and silver flasks glinting in the moonlight.

  But there were no boys in Medicine Springs; all the men in Medicine Springs were married.

  This bitter news came to me slowly, and it was prefaced by other information that slightly blunted its effect, like a preliminary dose of Novocain. They were not all married; there was one dim exception, the “Frank” who had come to fetch us in an old Ford. He was a young man of twenty with glasses and hair that stood straight up; he clerked in the hotel in the summer and in the winter he went to the state college at Bozeman. His father, Mr. Hoey, was the hotelkeeper. The Hoeys and the Bents and the people who owned the drugstore made up the local aristocracy. That was all there was. There had once been a clergyman, but he had died, and a circus family, but they had gone away. I now say to myself that there must have been a doctor, at least, and an undertaker, but memory shakes its head. No. Probably the pharmacist combined these functions.

  At any rate, I was so dashed by this lesson in small-town sociology, which the girls imparted on the way down to the hotel, and by the sight of the hotel lobby, which contained three straight-backed chairs, three cuspidors, a desk with a register, some flypaper, and Mr. Hoey in his shirtsleeves, that I could hardly take in the next tidings: on my first official date, I was going to have to go out with a married man. Betty too. There they stood, the husbands, waiting for us beside their cars: a small black-haired man called “Acey,” who did automobile repairs (he was Betty’s), and a tall wavy-haired blond named Bob Berdan, who worked in the drugstore (he was mine).

  Later, Ruth explained that the men here married early or else went away to work. That winter there had been several marriages, which left only Frank, who belonged to her, as the elder sister, and Acey, who belonged to Betty and was practically single since he was getting divorced from a wife who had run away from him. Usually, there were boys staying in the town, but this summer they had been lucky to get Bob Berdan, whose wife was away visiting her relations. Every single girl was after him; he was the handsomest man in Medicine Springs and very hard to please.

  Of the three men, he was certainly the best looking; I had to admit that, as he put out a large hand with a ring on it and stood looking down into my eyes. He was common; his hair was too wavy; his skin was too dark for his hair; and he had a white toothpaste-ad smile that made me think of his work in the drugstore. But from a distance he could pass. He had an old touring car, which he was waiting for me to get into; Betty had already joined Acey in his salesman’s coupe.

  What was I to do? My grandfather would have told me to say good night, politely, and ask to be taken home. Just because the others had fixed it up for me was no reason for me to fall in with their plans. Today, in my grandfather’s place, I would give the same counsel, which shows how out of touch, how impractical, older people are. In reality, I had no choice but to get into the car, which I did, seating myself nervously in the far corner. The three cars, with Frank and Ruth in the lead, started out in procession across the prairie. I could see that in the car ahead of us Betty’s head was on Acey’s shoulder. Was I expected to follow this example too? My date, I was glad to find, was busy manipulating the wheel and singing last year’s love songs in a croony voice. Peering at his arrow-cut profile, I began to feel a little less terrified.

  Before long, the first car stopped and we all followed suit. I thought there was something wrong; the road was very bad, almost a wagon trail. But it seemed that we were pausing to have a drink. Frank got out of the first car and came back with a pint bottle, which he passed to Acey and Betty and then to Bob and me. I took a mouthful and gagged. It was the first time I had ever tasted hard liquor, but I did not want them to guess that; the few sips of champagne and half-glass of Canadian beer that had been allowed me at home, on special occasions, had prompted me to boast of my drinking prowess. With Frank and Bob watching, I tried once more to swallow the burning stuff in my mouth; instead, I gagged again and the liquor spilled out all over my face and neck. Bob got out a handkerchief and advised me to try again. I could not get it down. By this time, the whole
party had joined us. “Is that whisky?” I asked cautiously; it did not smell like the whisky my grandfather drank. It was moonshine, they said; corn whisky, but the very best; Bob always tested it at the drugstore. One by one, they tilted the bottle and drank, to show me how to do it. It was no use. My throat simply rejected it; I gagged until the tears came. Ruth proposed that I should hold my nose, and in this way I managed to get down a large gulp, which made my stomach rock.

  I did not like it at all; the lift they spoke of did not come; I would rather have had my throat painted with Argyrol by the doctor. But they kept passing me the bottle; we stopped repeatedly on the way to the dance to have another swig; eventually, to my horror (for I thought at last it was over), Bob produced a fresh pint from the side pocket of the car. They did not force me to drink; I was free to refuse, as my grandfather could have pointed out. They just watched while I did it and they noticed if I merely put my lips to the bottle. I was ashamed to keep holding my nose, but there seemed to be no other way to swallow, until at length I discovered that I could take a gulp and hold it in my mouth and work it down gradually, when no one was looking, a few drops at a time. This prevented me from talking for long periods. Bob Berdan sang, and I rode along tight-lipped beside him, with a mouth full of unswallowed moonshine, which washed around my teeth as the car bumped along the rutted road. After a while he threw his arm lightly over the back of the seat.