Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  I must have choked down more than I would have thought possible for I can hardly remember the dance. It was in a sort of shed—not even a barn; and there were a lot of rough-looking, unshaven, coatless men pushing and grabbing and yelling while an old woman played the piano. I was frightened, and we did not stay there very long. There was nobody of our own sort or age present, only hands from a ranch and a few older women. The men in our party seemed very white and civilized and out of place in this setting. I stuck close to Bob Berdan, who appeared much more attractive than he had an hour or so before. I could almost imagine that he had been to college.

  Perhaps we bought another pint there.

  Some hours later, I woke up in a strange room and found there was a man in bed with me. It took me a minute or two to recall who he was: Bob Berdan, of course. My date. We were in a double bed; overhead, hanging from a cord, an unshaded electric light bulb was burning. I had no idea what time it was; probably it was morning, the morning after. And I had no recollection of the room or how we had got there. As everything whirled around me, I felt a wan relief in being able to recognize him at least. I had only known him a few hours, but at any rate I knew him. And it could have been anybody. I was undressed, I could tell from the touch of the sheet on my bare shoulders, and I was afraid to raise the covers to explore any further. I lay absolutely still, staring up at the unfinished beams of the ceiling. In the next room, I could hear a phonograph and voices. I felt that my life was over. Bob was asleep; one of his arms was around me. As I lay there, grimly taking stock, he woke up and his arm tightened; he started muttering tenderly. Men, I had heard, were like that after. ... I was too horror-stricken to finish the thought. The very first night, the very first man, I said to myself, paying no attention to him, absorbed in my own stolid woe. I did not blame him, but I would have blotted him out if I could.

  He was offering me reassurances, I slowly realized. Nothing had happened, he kept murmuring; he had not harmed me. I dared not believe him. But he pulled off the blankets to show me and, sure enough, I was not really undressed. It was only my dress and shoes that were gone. I was in my slip and underclothes, and he was dressed too, except for his coat and shoes.

  I had been sick, he explained, and the girls had taken my dress to try to wash it. We were in his house; they had put me to bed and I had passed out there. This was not all, I was certain; it did not explain what he was doing there, with his arms around me. I decided not to inquire. If there had been a certain amount of necking (which now began to come back to me, hazily), I did not want to hear about it. The main thing, the miraculous thing, was that my age had spared me. His voice was full of emotion as he told me that he would never take advantage of a sweet kid like me. He had fallen for me, the girls declared, teasing; the sound of our voices had brought them in from the next room to corroborate what he was telling me. Nothing had happened, they attested; they had been there all the time.

  Had I drawn a blank, they inquired, solicitously. I had to ask the meaning of this expression. Was it different, I wished to know, from “passing out”? Oh, very different, replied Ruth: you walked around and did and said things which you could not remember afterward. A peculiar smile, reminiscent, flitted across the assembled faces; I buried my head in the covers. It was all right, said Ruth, kindly: Betty used to draw blanks too, when she was younger. (“Younger?” I cried to myself. How much younger? Twelve?)

  Matter-of-factly, just as though this happened every day, the girls helped me into my dress, which they had sponged out and ironed. Wasn’t it lucky, they commented, that Bob was a married man? Bob kissed me good night, tenderly, and Frank Hoey, who seemed a trifle embarrassed, drove us home in the dawn. I was nerving myself to face Judge and Mrs. Bent, irate, on the stairway, in their night clothes, but no one was up at the Bent house. When we came down to breakfast, finally, Mrs. Bent was busy with the iron. The only question she asked was an absent one: “Did you have a good time?” “Bob Berdan took a tumble for Mary,” Ruth vouchsafed, with a laugh. “Oh,” said Mrs. Bent, incuriously. “Bob’s a nice fellow; is his wife still away?”

  During the next weeks, I worried about what Mrs. Bent thought. She must have known that Betty was with Acey and that I was with Bob Berdan nearly every night. But in her mind, apparently, we were out with what she called “the crowd,” which included Frank Hoey’s sister and the pharmacist’s daughters. She must have felt there was safety in numbers or that a married man was a chaperon; that seemed to be how she viewed Bob Berdan, who was nearly twenty-five. Yet what did she suppose the crowd did, from eight until three in the morning? She must have heard me being sick, time and again, in the Bent bathroom and noted my green face at breakfast.

  That was the awful thing. Virtually every night was a repetition of the first one. I could not learn to drink their liquor, but I would not stop trying, so that I was either passed out or sick on every one of our dates. We were forever driving somewhere (or, rather, nowhere), and the parade of cars was forever halting for me to throw up by the roadside. As soon as I had done so, the bottle would be passed again. When I was conscious, I was frequently speechless, owing to the fact that there was a gulp of moonshine in my mouth that I had not yet been able to swallow; it would sometimes take ten minutes to work it down. It was all a matter of practice I told myself; look at Ruth and Betty. They never got sick or passed out. And they were always able to tell me what I had done during the hours I could not remember, or rather what I had not done, which was all I cared about hearing. Half the town, I think, knew about me and Bob Berdan, down to the detail that he was not “taking advantage” of me, on account of my age and inexperience. He was sweet on me, everyone said, and I accepted it, though I could not imagine why he should be, considering.

  It seemed to me, often, that I was taking advantage of him. I grew a little tired of his kisses, which did not excite me, perhaps because they were always the same, leading nowhere but to more kisses. I felt he was sentimental, which made me impatient. When I saw him in the drugstore, with his white coat and ripply hair, I was embarrassed for him, just because I could see him so clearly from the outside, as a clerk, who would always be a clerk, limited, like his kisses, flat, like the town.

  And yet I liked him. I think it was that I was sorry for him, in some faraway part of myself, the part that was already back in Seattle while the rest of me was locked in his arms. I really looked on him, though I was not aware of it, as I did on other adults, seeing him as circumscribed and finite and yet encumbered, like all the rest of them, with a mysterious burden of feeling. In the back of my mind, I had a child’s certainty that I was moving, going somewhere, while the grownups around me were standing still. I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought “easy.” Bob’s restraint on this score was his sole source of fascination for me, paradoxically. Here, his being older and married put him somehow beyond me.

  Yet I was glad, I know, of the respite, when, after ten days of Medicine Springs, the girls grew restless and we went off with Frank and his sister on overnight trips to Helena and Great Falls. I had suggested Yellowstone, hopefully, but the girls temporized. If we went to Yellowstone, they said, the family would want to go too. We could do that later, when we got back. The idea of sightseeing had begun to appeal to me. In Medicine Springs, the only things we had done that would bear repeating were an afternoon visit to a sheep ranch, where they were slaughtering some lambs, and a morning visit to a cow ranch, where I rode for five minutes on a mutinous old horse and tried in vain to trot in a Western saddle. One night, in the car’s headlights, we had seen the red eyes of a loco horse reflected. That was all, except for the thunderstorms that took place every evening at dinner time and left the sky on the horizon a pale green. In a word, nothing to write home about.

  In Helena and Great Falls, we stayed at hotels, ordering gin from the bellboy to drink in our rooms. I liked the gin quite well, mixed with lemon soda and
ice. Nothing to write home about, either, though on the ride up to Helena I had had an odd experience. As usual, we had a bottle of moonshine with us when we started out and we passed it back and forth, as usual, while we drove along. The road was rough and once, when it was my turn, I spilled a few drops on my silk stockings. That night when we were changing for dinner I found little holes in my stockings everywhere the liquor had spattered. I showed them to the girls, who positively could not understand it. The liquor, they pointed out, had been analyzed by Bob in the drugstore.

  We made jokes about it and kept the stockings for a trophy; yet the incident, so to speak, burned a hole in our minds. In Great Falls, Ruth suddenly decided that she did not like the looks of the bellboy who had brought us the gin. It tasted all right; it smelled all right; but Ruth remained suspicious, her dark brows drawn together, as we had one drink and started on a second. About halfway through the second, with one accord we set down our glasses. Ruth packed the bottle to take back to Medicine Springs for analysis. It was wood alcohol, sure enough, Bob Berdan told us a few days later. If so, we should have been dead, since we had each had two or three ounces of it. In fact, we felt no ill effects; perhaps the local moonshine had developed a tolerance in us—a tolerance not shared by my stockings. But the two incidents made us warier and tamer. That night, in Great Falls, we went respectably to the movies and then back to bed. The next morning I found a book store and while the others waited in the car I hurried in to make a purchase: the latest volume, in a boxed deluxe edition, of James Branch Cabell.

  I was tremendously excited by this act. It was the first expensive book I had ever bought with my own money. The whole trip to Montana for a moment seemed worthwhile, as I stood in the wide dull main street with the book, wrapped, in my hands. I was in love with Cabell and had written him many letters that I had not had the courage to mail. Why, it would change my grandmother’s whole life, I used to tell her, if she would only let herself read a few pages of Cabell or listen to me recite them. Now, as the owner of a limited edition, I felt proudly close to him, far closer than to Bob Berdan or to the girls, who were already honking the horn for me to get in and join the party. They could never understand—only Cabell could, I supposed—what finding this book in this out-of-the-way place meant to me. That was the way it went, in Cabell; horns honked, alarm clocks shrilled, cocks crowed, to bring the ardent dreamer back to the drab, mean routines of middle-class reality.

  And yet a strange thing happened when I finally opened the book, taking it carefully from its waxy wrapper. I was disappointed. I told myself that it was not a very good Cabell; perhaps he had written himself out (I knew about that, of course). But all the while I suspected that it was not the book, which was no different from other Cabells; it was me. I had “outgrown” Cabell, just as older people had said I would. For the second time in Montana, I felt that my life was over. I put the book aside quietly and now I cannot remember whether I ever finished it.

  The next thing I recall is being on the train, going home. We had never got to Yellowstone, naturally, and my conscience was bothering me. I felt I had nothing to show for the visit—not even a proper array of lies, for the Bent household possessed no encyclopedia in which I could have boned up on the Park, while the girls, for their part, had only the haziest memories of Old Faithful and bears. My grandfather, in his youth, had been a geodetic surveyor during college vacations, and he would be bound to ask a lot of questions that I had no means of answering. Were there mountains there, for instance? What tribes of Indians? What kind of rock? Did we stay in a hotel or camp out and if so, where? Yellowstone was a big place. The paucity of my information made me conscious of the enormity of the deception I was going to have to put over. It was not the fear of being found out, even, that was troubling me as the train brought home nearer and nearer. Not being the kind of person who took refuge in monosyllables, I felt I owed my grandparents the courtesy of a well-put-together and decently documented lie.

  Fortunately, a party of tourists, two men and two women, fresh out of Yellowstone, boarded the train. They had a bottle with them in the observation car and were very lively and friendly, treating me as an equal, though they must have been around thirty. They were able to help me a little, when I explained my predicament, but they did not have the grasp of detail that my grandfather expected from a narrative. To my critical ear it sounded as if they had hardly been in Yellowstone at all. I attributed it to drinking; they were having too good a time, on the train, to put their minds on scenery and Indians and what kind of bears.

  A fatherly old conductor kept watching them as they bought me lemonades. On the second day out I was sitting with them in the observation car when the conductor stuck his head in the doorway and beckoned to me. He led me into an empty drawing room, asked me to sit down and, looking at me gravely through steel-rimmed glasses, told me that I must not talk to those people any more. “Steer clear of them,” he said. “Give them a wide berth.” Why, I wanted to know; but instead of answering this question he swerved off on a tangent and announced that he had been studying me and that I was one of the cleanest, sweetest, truest young girls it had ever been his pleasure to observe. It was because of this he was speaking to me now, as he would to one of his own daughters or granddaughters. There were tears in his eyes, I saw, as he warmed to his subject. “Stay that way,” he said. “Clean and sweet and wholesome.” I dropped my eyes, abashed and yet touched by this notion. I did not get exactly what he was driving at, but I supposed my friends in the observation car must be cardsharps or something of the kind. Even so, I did not see what harm they could do me and my curiosity was roused. “What’s wrong with them?” I said bluntly. “Don’t ask me,” said the old conductor. “Just take my word for it and stay away from them.” I persisted, and at last he told me, lowering his voice and glancing away from me. “They changed berths,” he said. “Last night.” I did not take in his point at first, for I had supposed they were married. Thinking it was my innocence, he elucidated. When they had got on at the Park, he said solemnly, the two women were together and the two men were together. “During the night ...” He broke off.

  “Oh,” I said, flatly, meaning, “Is that all?” “Do you understand?” he asked. I nodded. “So you see why you mustn’t talk to them?” I supposed I did, from his point of view, and I nodded again, reluctantly. A month before I might have argued the issue, for how could I have been safer than with two men and two women who only had designs on each other? Or I might have defied him. But now I did not have the heart to go against his instructions. It would crush him if he caught me talking to them after what he had told me; he would see that he had been duped in me. And I felt too old and weary to explain why I was not shocked.

  On the other hand, it seemed rather mean to drop my new friends out of hand just to spare the conductor’s feelings. I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides. On that occasion, as generally in the future, I compromised. That is, I steered a zigzag course between the conductor and the two couples, talking to them when the conductor was not looking and leaving them abruptly, with some unlikely excuse, when I would glance up and find his old eyes on me. This jerky behavior, and the copious, dazzling smiles with which I tried to mitigate it, must have made both parties think I was deranged.

  Back in Seattle, I found myself still serving out my sentence of childhood, which had three more years to run yet: I was eighteen, a freshman home from college, before I was able to sweep down the staircase, dressed in the height of fashion, and find a boy waiting, in uneasy conversation with my grandparents. Even then, my grandfather, as he raised his soft cheek for a kiss, would mortify me by the inevitable question: “Home by eleven?”

  The trip to Montana left no outward scars. Indeed, it was educational, in that I could not bear the taste of whisky for years afterward; even now I cannot take it strai
ght—I gag. And my ardor for dates was somewhat subdued, for the time being; more than a year passed before I began meeting boys on the sly, in the afternoons. I do not know whether my grandparents guessed that I had never been to Yellowstone. I think they must have, eventually, for they did not ask too many questions. In a gloomy way, I was happy to be home again. At home, at least I could be romantic, lying on the sofa in the evenings, reading and dreaming, and looking out across our terraces to where the moon made a path on the lake, a path that beckoned to suicide, as I wrote in a school composition. Across the room, my grandparents played double solitaire, and when my grandmother lost she would send me upstairs to fetch her petit-point handbag out of the drawer that contained her handkerchiefs, her pearl opera glasses, and her pearl-handled revolver. The phone seldom rang, and I was almost glad of it, because if it were a boy, I would have to make some excuse to explain why I could not go out that night or any other night he proposed. At home, nothing ever happened, but it was an atmosphere in which one could think that the unknown, the improbable, might occur in the depths of the familiar, like the treasures I could find in my grandmother’s bureau drawer.