Eventually, I forget how, but thanks chiefly to the cook, we got her calmed down to the point where she was crying normally. Perhaps the doctor came and administered a sedative. I sat up with her, embracing her and trying to console her, and there was something sweet about this process, for it was the first time we had ever been close to each other. But all at once she would remember Rosie and shriek out her name; no one could take Rosie’s place, and we both knew it. I felt like an utter outsider. It seemed clear to me that night, as I sat stroking her hair, that she had never really cared for anyone but her sister; that was her secret. The intellectual part of my mind was aware that some sort of revelation had taken place—of the nature of Jewish family feeling, possibly. And I wondered whether that fearful insensate noise had been classic Jewish mourning, going back to the waters of Babylon. Of one thing I was certain: my grandmother was more different from the rest of us than I could ever have conceived.
Uncle Mose was taking it well, I learned the next morning. It was only my grandmother, so unemotional normally, who had given way to this extravagant grief, and the family, I gathered, were slightly embarrassed by her conduct, as though they, too, felt that she had revealed something, which, as far as they were concerned, would have been better left in the dark. But what had she revealed, as they saw it? Her essential Jewishness? I could never find out, for I had to take the train east that very day, with my baby, and when I came back several years later, no one seemed to remember anything unusual about the occasion of Aunt Rosie’s death.
“That’s my sister,” my grandmother would exclaim, eagerly pointing when we came to a photograph of Aunt Rosie. “My sister,” she would say of Aunt Eva, in a somewhat grander tone. She always brightened when one of her two sisters turned up in the photograph collection, like a child when it is shown its favorite stuffed animal. I think she was a little more excited at the sight of Aunt Rosie. By that time, I imagine, she had forgotten that her sisters were dead, or, rather, the concept, death, no longer had any meaning for her; they had “gone away,” she probably believed, just as children believe that this is what happens to their dead relations. I used to stand ready to prompt her with the names, but she did not seem to need or want this; her sisters’ relationship to her was what mattered, and she always got that straight. “Aunt Rosie,” I would observe, showing her a picture of a small, smiling, dark woman in a big marabou hat. “My sister,” her voice would override me proudly, as if she were emending my statement.
The clothes in the old photographs amused her; she had not lost her interest in dress, and was very critical of my appearance, urging me, with impatient gestures, to pull my hair forward on my cheeks and surveying me with pride when I had done so; it gave a “softer” look. If I did not get it right, she would pull her own black waves forward, to show me what she meant. Though she could no longer go downtown, she still kept to the same schedule. Every day at twelve o’clock, the nurse would close my grandmother’s door and the doors to the nursery and the bathroom, reopening them between two and three, when the beauty preparations had been completed. “You can come in now. Your grandmother is all prettied up.” One afternoon, responding to the summons, I found my grandmother frowning and preoccupied. There was something the matter, and I could not make out what it was. She wanted me to get her something, the “whatchamacallit” from her bureau. I tried nearly everything—brush, comb, handkerchief, perfume, pincushion, pocketbook, photograph of my mother. All of them were wrong, and she grew more and more impatient, as if I were behaving like an imbecile. “Not the comb; the whachamacallit!” Finally, for she was getting quite wrought up, I rang for the nurse. “She wants something,” I said. “But I can’t make out what it is.” The nurse glanced at the bureau top and then went swiftly over to the chiffonier; she picked up the hand mirror that was lying there and passed it silently to my grandmother, who at once began to beam and nod. “She’s forgotten the word for mirror,” the nurse said, winking at me. At that moment, the fact that my grandmother was senile became real to me.
Image Gallery
Roy McCarthy and Tess Preston—engagement period
Parents, again, before and after marriage
(infant is Mary)
The Preston family
Simon Manly Preston
Harold Preston
Augusta Morganstern Preston with her daughter, Tess
Augusta Morganstern Preston, her son Harold, her daughter, Tess, her sister Rose Gottstein
The McCarthy children in Seattle
Mary, Kevin, Preston, Mother, Sheridan
Mary, Kevin, Preston
Japanese houseboy with snowman (child is Kevin)
Augusta Morganstern Preston with her son Harold
Augusta Morganstern Preston with her grandson Preston
The McCarthy family
Roy McCarthy; Kevin, J. H. McCarthy, Mary, Lizzie Sheridan McCarthy, Sheridan, Tess McCarthy, Preston
Lizzie McCarthy in her sun parlor
The McCarthy children in Minneapolis
Mary in her First Communion dress; Mary dressed as a flower for a school play; Kevin
Aunt Margaret with Preston, Mary, Kevin, Sheridan
On the pony, Preston and Sheridan, standing, Mary and Kevin
Mary on her way to college.
How I Grew
Mary McCarthy
To my grandfather, Harold Preston;
my teachers, Helen Sandison and Anna Kitchel;
my brother, Kevin McCarthy;
my son, Reuel Wilson;
and my husband, James West.
With thanks.
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Image Gallery
Brief Biographical Glossary of Lesser-Known Figures
1
I WAS BORN as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912. Throughout the thirteen years in between, obviously, I must have had thoughts and mental impressions, perhaps even some sort of specifically cerebral life that I no longer remember. Almost from the beginning, I had been aware of myself as “bright.” And from a very early time reasoning was natural to me, as it is to a great many children, doubtless to animals as well. What is Pavlov’s conditioned reflex but an inference drawn by a dog? The activities of incessant induction and deduction are characteristically childlike (“Why don’t we say ‘Deliver us to evil,’” I am supposed to have asked, “the way Mama does in Frederick and Nelson’s when she tells them to deliver it to Mrs. McCarthy?”) and slack off rather than intensify as we grow older. My “cute” question, quoted by my mother in a letter to her mother-in-law (apparently the last she wrote), may have been prompted by our evening prayers: did we already say the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary” besides “Now I lay me”? At six, I was too young to have had a rosary.
Someone, of course, was “hearing” our prayers; my father, probably, for I speak of “Mama” in the third person. It is Daddy I must be questioning; Gertrude, our nurse, was too ignorant. And now, writing it down more than sixty-five years later, all of a sudden I doubt the innocence of that question. There was premeditation behind it, surely; playacting. I knew perfectly well that children could not pray to be delivered to evil and was only being clever—my vice already—supplying my parents with “Mary’s funny sayings” to meet a sensed demand.
It is possible (to be fair) that the question “Why don’t we … ?” had honestly occurred to me in Frederick’s listening to Mama order and being surprised to have “deliver,” an old bedtime acquaintance, pop up in the middle of a department store. Or, conversely, as we intoned the Lord’s Prayer, my mind may have raced back to Mama at Frederick’s. Which had priority, which bulked larger in my teeming experience, which name had I heard more often, God’s or Frederick and Nelson’s? But if, in one way or another, the question
had honestly occurred to me, the answer could not have been slow to follow, without recourse to a grown-up. No, that inquiry was saved up for an audience, rehearsed. For my father’s ear, I was not so much reasoning as artfully mimicking the reasoning process of a child. In any case, as far as I know, this is the last of my cute sayings on record. After the flu, there was no one there to record them any more. Nobody was writing to her mother-in-law of the words and deeds of the four of us. With the abrupt disappearance of the demand, the supply no doubt dried up. Soon our evening prayers—we knelt in a row now, wearing scratchy pajamas with feet in them—underwent expansion. To “God bless Mama and Daddy” something new was added: “Eternal rest grant unto them, o Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon them … ”
From an early time, too, I had been a great reader. My father had taught me, on his lap, before I started school—A Child’s Garden of Verses and his favorite, Eugene Field, the newspaperman poet. But in the new life instituted for us after our parents’ death almost no books were permitted—to save electricity, or because books could give us “ideas” that would make us too big for our boots. A few volumes had come with us, I think, from Seattle to Minneapolis; those would have been Black Beauty, the “autobiography” of a horse, by Anna Sewell, Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates, Heidi, and Dante and Don Quixote illustrated by Doré, but these two were for looking at the pictures on the living-room floor while a grown-up watched, not for reading. Someone, not our parents, was responsible for Fabiola, the Church of the Catacombs, by Cardinal Wiseman, and I remember a little storybook, which soon disappeared, about some Belgian children on a tow-path along a canal escaping from Germans—was it taken away out of deference to the feelings of our great-aunt’s husband, the horrible Uncle Myers, who was of German “extraction”? At any rate these are all the books I recall from the Minneapolis household, not counting Uncle Myers’ own copy of Uncle Remus, Peter Rabbit (outgrown), and a set of the Campfire Girls (borrowed).
Yet the aunts must have had a Lives of the Saints, full of graphic accounts of every manner of martyrdom, and where did I come upon a dark-greenish volume called The Nuremberg Stove, about a porcelain stove and illustrated with German-looking woodcuts? And another story with a lot about P. P. Rubens and a “Descent from the Cross” in Antwerp Cathedral? Not in school, certainly; the parochial school did not give us books, only readers that had stories in them. I can still almost see the fifth- or sixth-grade reader that had Ruskin’s “The King of the Yellow River,” with pages repeating themselves and the end missing—a fairly common binder’s error, but for a child afflicted with book hunger, it was a deprivation of fiendish cruelty, worse than the arithmetic manual that had the wrong answers in the back. Those school readers also gave you “tastes” of famous novels, very tantalizing, too, like the chapter about Maggie and Tom Tulliver from the start of The Mill on the Floss, which kept me in suspense for more than twenty years, Becky and Amelia Sedley leaving Miss Pinkerton’s, a sample of Jane Eyre.
Oh! Among the books at home I was nearly forgetting The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley (illustrated, with a gilt-and-green cover), which must have come from my father’s library—I can feel a consistent manly taste, like an ex libris, marking little Tom, the sooty chimney-sweep who runs away from his cruel master and falls into a river, Don Quixote and his nag, Dante and Virgil, and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, who “sailed off in a wooden shoe” one night, “Sailed on a river of crystal light,/ Into a sea of dew.” (Black Beauty, on the other hand, which was a bit on the goody side, had surely been our mother’s.)
When he died, my father (another Tantalus effect) had been reading me a long fairy tale that we never finished. It was about seven brothers who were changed into ravens and their little sister, left behind when they flew away, who was given the task of knitting seven little shirts if she wanted them to change back into human shape again. At the place we stopped reading, she had failed to finish one little sleeve. I would have given my immortal soul to know what happened then, but in all the books of fairy tales that have come my way since, I have not been able to find that story—only its first and second cousins, like “The Seven Ravens” and “The Six Swans.” And what became of the book itself, big with a wine-colored cover? Was it left behind on the train to Minneapolis when we all got sick with the flu? Or did our keepers promptly put it away as unsuitable, like my little gold beauty-pins? In Minneapolis we were not allowed fairy stories any more interesting than “The Three Bears.”
But stop! That cannot be true. Certainly I read “The Little Match Girl” and “The Snow Queen,” with the little robber girl I loved so and the piece of ice in little Kay’s eye that even then I understood to be a symbol, in other words over my head. There was a good deal of that in Hans Andersen—the feeling of morals lurking like fish eyes peering out from between stones in the depths of clear water. Except in “The Snow Queen,” where the furs and the sleigh and the reindeer and Gerda and the robber girl made up for everything, I disliked those lurking morals; I hated “The Little Match Girl.” And I was not fond of “The Ugly Duckling” either; I sensed a pious cheat there—not all children who were “different” grew up into swans. Was that why I was allowed to have Andersen, like a refined sort of punishment, in my room? And they let me have another book, printed in big type on thick deckle-edged paper and possibly not by Andersen, that contained a frightening tale about a figure named Ole Luk Oie who threw sand in people’s eyes just as they were going to sleep. Not the same as the sandman; more of a bogey. Burying my head under the covers, for nights running I used to scare myself in my pillow-less (better for the posture) bed with this runic fiction, repeating the words “Ole Luk Oie” like a horrible spell. And in the morning, sure enough, my finger found grainy particles stuck to my eyelashes showing that he had been there. But maybe, if you knew Danish, the story was more boring than spooky, and the dread sand in the eyes was just a symbol of something in society.
Almost no books, but how then, while still in Minneapolis, did I learn about Loki and Balder the Beautiful and Frey and his golden sister Freya, goddess of love and beauty? That was not the kind of thing the Sisters of St. Joseph taught, and there were no comic books then to retell myths in strip language with balloons coming out of the mouths of helmeted gods and heroes—just the funny papers, which showed funny people like Olive Oyl and Miss Emmy Schmaltz. Probably the answer lies in The Book of Knowledge, a junior encyclopedia that someone finally gave us—proof that prayers were answered—and that our guardians for some reason let us keep and even use. They must have thought that it was a collection of known facts and figures and therefore no more harmful than the diagrams it carried of chemical retorts and the Bunsen burner. But to me, in that household, that red-bound set was like a whole barrel of bootleg liquor, cut but still the real stuff. Of course there were facts in it (there had to be), but you could ignore those; the main point was that it told you the plots of the world’s famous books from the Iliad through The Count of Monte Cristo. If the Trojan Horse and the Cyclops were there (and Roland and Oliver), they would have had to have Thor and his iron gloves, blind Hoder and his arrow—at least the “basics.”
Yet the suggestion leaves me unsatisfied. It does not account for the intimacy I formed with those scenes and figures of Norse mythology: how Thor lost his hammer, Odin’s raven, the bad dreams of Balder, Sif’s hair—you would think that I had had an entire “Edda for Children” hidden in the swing in our backyard.
Nor can I altogether account for the hold this material, however acquired, had on my imagination, for my so much preferring those gods and goddesses to the “sunny” Greek ones. Perhaps I liked the strong light-and-dark contrasts of the Northern tales. I was a firm believer in absolutes: the lack of shadings, of any in-between, made Asgard a more natural residence than Mount Olympus for my mythic propensity, just as clear, concise Latin was always more natural to me than Greek with all its “small, untranslatable words” (as Mrs. Ryberg at Vassa
r called them).
But there was more to it than that. For a juvenile half enamored of the dark principle, fond of frightening herself and her brothers with the stories she made up (or just a decided brunette with pale skin that she tried to see as “olive”), there was a disappointing lack of evil in Greek mythology. Obviously they did not tell children about the banquet of Thyestes, and all we knew of Jason was the Argo and the Golden Fleece, yet the crimes and horrors that were kept from us “till we were old enough” (like the watches my brothers received from our Seattle grandfather) were the work of mortals and titans, not Olympians. Even in his worst moments, no Greek god could approach the twisted cunning of a Loki. I hated his very name, and yet in a way he “made” the story of the Aesir for me.
In fact, the notion of a thoroughly evil creature sharing in the godhead was thoroughly un-Greek, and I suspect that it did not sit well with me either at the age of nine or ten despite the spell of intrigue and danger he cast on those tales. I could not quite fathom why Loki should go virtually unpunished even for the awful act of plotting the slaying of Balder; did it have something to do with his mixed ancestry, half-god and half-giant? You would think the least he deserved was permanent expulsion from Asgard, and yet he crept back, assuming new forms. The weakness of the Aesir (even Thor) in dealing with him was mystifying; they seemed to treat him and his relatives as fixtures of the establishment—his deathly daughter Hel ruled over the nether world. Being already a “confirmed” Catholic, I associated gods with goodness and could not take a standpoint that identified them simply with power—as sheer power of evil, Loki merited worship certainly. If I was unable to see that, it was doubtless because my model for badness was Satan. Proud Lucifer (Loki was a real cringer and fawner) was cast out of heaven once and for all, and such power as he retained, below, among men, was helpless before the saving action of God’s grace.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 24