Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  The room I was given had been redone for me; I had lots of pretty new clothes, made by my grandmother’s own dressmaker; the gardener drove me about in the electric and let me practice steering; I did not have to wear glasses any more, as I had had to in Minneapolis, and I could read anything I wanted to in the family library: Dickens and Frank Stockton and Bulwer-Lytton and Sienkiewicz, and the Elsie Dinsmore books, which had belonged to my mother. I could look through the stereopticon, or play an old record of “Casey at the Bat” on the new Victrola. Everything we had seemed superior to anything anyone else had—the flowers in our garden, the vegetables on the table, which we grew ourselves in the lower back yard, instead of getting them from the store, as other people did. We had strawberry beds, too, and rows of currant bushes, a crab-apple tree and two kinds of cherry trees, black and Royal Anne, and, something very special for Seattle, my grandmother’s favorite, an apricot tree. At Christmas, we had our own holly, cut from a tree in the front yard; the idea that this was better than other holly persisted in my grandmother’s mind until the very end, for every year until she died, a box would arrive for me, just before Christmas, in New England, from Seattle, packed full of holly from the Preston tree. My grandmother’s gardening was a distinguished, personal thing; she never joined a garden club or pored over seed catalogues, or exchanged slips or compared notes with other gardeners. Every morning after breakfast, she gave directions to the old gardener, descending from the back porch in a straw farmer’s hat and a smock, with a basket over her arm, to pick flowers for the day’s bouquets and supervise the new asparagus bed he was laying out or the planting of the new variety of sweet corn they were trying.

  She was greedy, in a delicate way, picking daintily at her food, yet finishing off a whole bowl of fresh apricots or a dozen small buttered ears of the tenderest white corn. She had a cormorant’s rapacity for the first fruits of the season: the tiniest peas, the youngest corn, baby beets cooked with their greens. This emphasis of hers on the youth of the garden’s produce made her fastidious appetite seem a little indecent—cannibalistic, as though she belonged to a species that devoured its own young.

  “Take a spring chicken,” many of her recipes began, and the phrase often salted her conversation. “She’s no spring chicken,” she would say of another woman. Baby beets, new potatoes, young asparagus, embryonic string beans, tiny Olympia oysters, tiny curling shrimps, lactary ears of corn—like my grandmother’s clothes, our food was almost too choice, unseemly for daily use. The specialties of our table were like those of a very good hotel or club: Olympia oyster cocktail and deviled Dungeness crabs; a salad, served as a first course, that started with a thick slice of tomato, on which was balanced an artichoke heart containing crabmeat, which in turn was covered with Thousand Island dressing and sprinkled with riced egg yolk; a young salmon served in a sherry sauce with oysters and little shrimps; eggs stuffed with chicken livers. We ate this company food every day; every meal was a surprise, aimed to please some member of the family, as though we were all invalids who had to be “tempted.” On Sundays, the ice cream, turned by the gardener in the freezer on the back porch, was chosen to suit me; we had strawberry (our own strawberries), peach, peppermint (made from crushed candy canes), and the one I was always begging for—bisque. Our icebox always contained a bowl of freshly made mayonnaise, a bowl of Thousand Island dressing, and usually a chicken or a turkey and a mold or bombe with maraschino cherries, whipped cream, and macaroons or ladyfingers in it. My grandmother’s own palate was blander than the rest of the family’s. I associate her with sweetbreads, with patty shells, and with a poulette sauce.

  Or, if I shut my eyes, I can see her at the head of the table, on a summer morning, wearing her horn-rimmed reading glasses, the newspaper before her on a silver rack; there is a bowl of fresh apricots in the middle of the table, and as she reads, her bare, plump white arm, as if absently, stretches out toward this dish; her slender, tapering fingers pinch the fruit, and she selects the choicest, ripest one. The process is repeated until the bowl is empty, and she does not look up from her paper. I had a tremendous appetite myself (“If she assimilated all she ate, she’d be a mountain,” my uncle’s wife used to comment after a Sunday-night supper), but my grandmother’s voracity, so finical, so selective, chilled me with its mature sensuality, which was just the opposite of hunger. I conceived an aversion to apricots—a tasteless fruit, anyway, I considered—from having watched her with them, just as though I had witnessed what Freud calls the primal scene. Now I, too, am fond of them, and whenever I choose one from a plate, I think of my grandmother’s body, full-fleshed, bland, smooth, and plump, cushioning in itself, close held—a secret, like the flat brown seed of the apricot.

  This body of hers was the cult object around which our household revolved. As a young girl, I knew her shoe size and her hat size and her glove size, her height and weight, the things she ate and didn’t eat, her preferences in underwear and nightgowns and stockings, the contents of her dressing table in the bathroom, down to the pumice stone which she used for removing an occasional hair from under her arms; one of her beauty attributes was that her white, shapely arms and legs were almost totally hairless, so that she never had to depend on a depilatory or a razor. No other woman has ever been known to me in such a wealth of fleshly, material detail; everything she touched became imbued for me with her presence, as though it were a relic. I still see her clothes, plumped to her shape, hanging on their velvet-covered hangers in her closet, which was permeated with the faint scents of powder and perfume, and the salty smell of her perspiration; she comes back to me in dress shields, in darned service-sheer stockings (for morning), in fagoting and hemstitching, in voile and batiste, in bouclé and monkey fur, in lace, dyed écru with tea.

  I never saw her undressed. Once, when she was in her seventies, I did catch a disturbing glimpse of her thighs, which were dazzling, not only in their whiteness and firmness but in the fineness of the skin’s texture—closer to a delicate chiffon than to silk or satin. Disturbing, because I knew she would not want to be looked at, even in admiration. She shared with my grandfather the mysteries of the big bathroom, but until she became bedridden, no one else, I think, ever saw her in less than her corset, camisole, and petticoat.

  The big bathroom, which had a sofa covered with worn Oriental carpeting and an old-fashioned deep tub with claw feet, was the temple of her beauty, and I never went into it, even as a grown woman, without feeling as if I were trespassing. For me, as a young girl, it had all the attractions of the forbidden, and as soon as my grandmother left the house in the afternoon, I would fly in to examine her salves and ointments, buffers and pencils and swabs, brushes and tweezers, her jars and bottles from Elizabeth Arden, Dorothy Gray, Marie Earle, Helena Rubinstein, and Harriet Hubbard Ayer, her skin food, neck lotion, special astringent, and antiwrinkle emollient, Hind’s Honey and Almond, cucumber lotion, Murine, special eye lotion, Velva cream, mascara, eye shadow, dry rouge, paste rouge, vanishing cream, powders, chin strap, facial mask. One day, I found a box of something called Turkish Delight, which I took, from its name, to be a beauty preparation used in harems.

  The room had a queer, potpourri smell; my grandmother seldom threw anything away, and some of her cosmetics were so old they had gone rancid. Another odor, medicinal, sometimes hung about the room in the morning; I smelled it on the days when I was allowed to have my hair washed in the basin there, by my grandmother’s “woman.” Actually, as I learned many years later, what I smelled was bourbon whisky; my grandfather, though a temperate man, was accustomed to have two shots of bourbon before breakfast. The only other sign of his presence was a bottle of Eau Lilas Vegetal—a purple cologne—on my grandmother’s dressing table and some corn plasters in one of its drawers. He kept his shaving things, as I recall, in a small dressing room that opened off the big bathroom. You could find almost anything there: medicine, bath salts, an unopened bottle of Virginia Dare, family photographs, fishing tackle, Christmas presents
that were being hidden, newspaper clippings that dated back to the time when my grandfather had been running for United States Senator (he was defeated by Levi P. Ankeny, of Walla Walla).

  The temptation to try out some of my grandmother’s beauty aids got the better of me when I was twelve. Unfortunately (like her household hint for a successful marriage), most of them had no bearing on my particular problems. “Not for the Youthful Skin,” cautioned one astringent, and there was nothing in her crowded drawers for freckles. I did not need eyebrow pencil; my eyebrows were too thick already, and I had recently performed the experiment of shaving half of them off in the convent, while my grandparents were in California. My nose was my chief worry; it was too snub, and I had been sleeping with a clothespin on it to give it a more aristocratic shape. Also, I was bowlegged, and I was wondering about having an operation I had heard about that involved having your legs broken and reset. The dressing table offered no help on these scores, and, failing to find a lipstick and being timorous of the curling iron, I had to be satisfied with smearing a little paste rouge on my lips, putting dry rouge on my cheekbones (to draw attention away from the nose) and pink powder all over my face. I myself could see little change, but my grandmother could, and as soon as she came home that afternoon, a terrible scene took place, for I felt so guilty at what I had done that I would not admit that I had been “into” her dressing table, even when confronted with the proof in the disarrayed drawers and the rouge that came off on the handkerchief she applied firmly to my cheek.

  She did not actually, as I learned later, think that what I had done was so bad; it was the lying that offended her. But I was convinced that I had committed a real crime, so terrible that I might be sent away from home. The idea that I was not to touch my grandmother’s things had impressed itself on my excitable mind like a Mosaic commandment. I had left the well-codified Catholic world in which my young childhood had been spent, and in this new world I could no longer tell what was a mortal and what was a venial sin. The bathroom figured to me as the center of everything in the Preston family life from which I was excluded. I had begun to wonder about this family life a little; it was not as much fun as I had thought at first. In spite of the glamour that lay on it like a spell, I was not having as good a time, nearly, as my schoolmates had. Yet when I tried to determine what was different, the only thing I could put my finger on then was that, unlike other people, we did not have a regular lunch at home, and that at the time most people were lunching, my grandmother was in the bathroom with the door shut.

  This seems a small complaint, but the clue to everything was there. When I think of our house now, the strongest memory that comes back to me is of shut doors and silence. My young uncle, five years older than I was, had his own apartments, reached by a dark set of stairs that branched off the main staircase at the landing; my grandmother and grandfather had their separate chain of rooms, connected with each other by a series of inner doors; the cook had her own, on the third floor, though she had to tiptoe down to share my bathroom; the gardener lived over the garage in rooms I never saw. There was no guest room.

  During the greater part of the day, the upstairs hall was in gloom, because every door opening off it, except mine, was shut. The common rooms downstairs—the library, parlor, and living room—were seldom used in the daytime by anyone but me. The rest of the family kept to their own quarters; you would have thought the house was empty when everyone was home. I remember those summer mornings during school vacations. These mornings of the long years of my teens were so alike that they might have been one morning. The silence was profound. Every member of the family, except me, was taciturn—the cook and the gardener, too. After a wordless breakfast (my grandfather had already gone to the office), I was left to my own devices while my grandmother went out to the garden, picked flowers, then arranged them in the pantry; every vase in the house was renewed daily, but I was not allowed to help with the bouquets. Then she climbed the stairs to her bedroom; the door was shut and stayed shut for an hour or more while she talked on the telephone to her sisters and the butcher. During this period, the stillness was broken only by the hum of the vacuum cleaner and the sound of the mail dropping through the slot in the front door.

  There was never any interesting mail, just the National Geographic, Vogue, and the American Boy (which my grandfather, for some reason, had subscribed to for me), some ads and charitable appeals addressed to “The Honorable Harold Preston,” and perhaps a letter from Aunt Eva or Aunt Alice Carr. After a time that seemed interminable, while I lay on the sofa reading and waiting for something to happen, the door to the old nursery upstairs, where my grandfather slept and my grandmother did her sewing, would open—a signal to me that I could come up if I wanted. Then, for another hour, we would sit opposite each other in the bay window, my grandmother mending, or looking through the latest copy of Vogue, I staring out the window and trying to start a conversation.

  “What did Aunt Rosie have to say?” I would begin. “Oh, nothing,” she would answer. “Just talk. You know Rosie.” Or, “Uncle Mose isn’t feeling so well.” Or, “She had a letter from Mortie in New York.” Silence. When she was finished with the magazine, she would pass it on to me, and I would study the society notices of weddings and engagements, but there was never anything from Seattle. New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco—that was all. You would think, to read Vogue, that nothing ever happened in Seattle, a supposition which, from where I sat, was true. Yet I never lost hope; I think I somehow expected to find my own name in these columns, just as I somehow expected that, down below, a roadster would turn the corner with a boy in it who had discovered that I existed. My interest in boys was one of the many subjects I could not discuss with my grandmother; I was not supposed to be aware of them until I was in college. Indeed, the only topics we had in common were clothes and movie actors and actresses. She disliked the kind of books I read and would have disliked the girls I saw if she had had any inkling of what they were like. She would never give her opinion of any member of the family, even those she was “mad” at. For all my fishing, I could never find out even a simple thing, such as what she thought of me.

  The liveliest time we had, in all the mornings we sat opposite each other in the nursery, was when I wrote in for a Vogue pattern to make a tennis dress. If I could have learned to sew, or she had had the patience to teach me, we might have found a medium in which we could communicate. The tennis dress, thanks to her help, did not come out too badly, and, encouraged, I wrote for another pattern, a model far too old for me, in tiers of crepe de Chine that were supposed to shade from a pale yellow, through apricot, to flame. This dress was never finished; I found the blushing remains of it in a hall cupboard on my last visit home.

  The dressmaking phase, of which my grandfather entertained great hopes, was a failure. We could never be “like mother and daughter” to each other, in spite of what people said. She could not bear to watch me sewing without a thimble and with a long thread with a slightly dirty knot on the end of it. If I started on a piece of mending, my ineptitude always drove her to finish it.

  Much of my adolescent boredom and discontent sprang from the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do but read and play the Victrola. I was not allowed in the kitchen, except to fix a sandwich for my lunch, because of an historic mess I had made with a batch of marshmallows; as with the dawn-colored dress, I had been too ambitious for a beginner. All I know today of sewing I learned in boarding school and, earlier, from the nuns in the convent, and the only person who was willing to show me anything about cooking was the old gardener-chauffeur, who used to come in and make German-fried potatoes for his lunch. On the cook’s day out, he would let me watch him and then try it myself. In our family now, we have a dish called, in his memory, chauffeur-fried potatoes; they are very good.

  My grandmother herself did not eat lunch as a regular thing, and at twelve o’clock every day, and sometimes earlier, my audience was over. She would get up from her chair and
retire to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. In a minute, her bedroom door closed, the nursery door closed. From then on till a time that varied between two and three o’clock, she was invisible; no one was allowed to disturb her. She was getting ready to go downtown. This sortie was the climax of her day. Her bedroom door would open, revealing her in festive array—every outfit she wore, like every meal, was a surprise. The car would be waiting, in front of the old carriage block, and we would set off, sometimes stopping for Aunt Rosie. The next two or three hours would be spent in the stores, trying on, ransacking counters. My grandmother was not much interested in bargains, though we never missed a sale at Helen Igoe’s or Magnin’s; what she cared about was the “latest wrinkle” in dresses or furs or notions—news from the fashion front. During these hours, she reached her highest point of laconic animation and sparkle; she shopped like an epigrammatist at the peak of form, and the extravagance of her purchases matched her brilliant hair and bobbing feathers and turkey walk and pursy pink cheeks.

  But at a quarter of five, wherever we were, my grandmother would look at her watch. It was time to pick up Grandpa, in front of his club, where he always played a rubber of bridge after leaving the office. At five o’clock, punctually, he would be on the sidewalk, anxiously surveying the traffic for us. The car would draw up; he would climb in and kiss my grandmother’s cheek. “Have a good day?” he would ask. “All right,” she would reply, sighing a little. We would get home at five-thirty; dinner was at six, punctually. During the meal, my young uncle would be queried as to how he had passed his day, and he would answer with a few monosyllables. My grandmother would mention the names of any persons she had seen on her shopping tour. My grandfather might praise the food. “Allee samee Victor Hugo,” he would say, referring to a restaurant in Los Angeles. After dinner, my married uncle would drop in with his wife, perhaps on their way out to a party. My other uncle, yawning, would retire to his quarters. The doorbell might ring. I would run to answer it, and two or three of his friends would tramp past me upstairs to his rooms. The door on the landing would shut. In a little while, he would lope down the stairs, to say that he was going out. He would kiss his mother and father, and my grandfather would say to him, “Home by eleven, son.” My grandfather and grandmother, having finished the evening papers, would start playing double Canfield, at which my grandmother nearly always won. “I’ll have to hitch up my trousers with a safety pin,” my grandfather would say to me, jesting, as he paid her over her winnings; this expression signified to him the depths of poverty.