Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Not his razor-strop, mind you. That is not funny. Yet if he had only that to speak for him, I do not think he would “live” as a character. The pedometer humanizes, which is the first step toward immortality. Nevertheless there are moralists who think I ought not to laugh or get an audience to laugh with me during a public reading at the figure of Uncle Myers, my old persecutor. What they overlook is the fact that as the injured party I have earned the right to laugh. My laughter is a victory over circumstances, and insofar as it betokens a disinterested enjoyment I imagine it to be a kind of pardon. I had the choice of forgiving those incredible relatives of mine or pitying myself on their account. Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady. Yet probably it does tend to dry one’s feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind. So that something must be subtracted from the compensation I seem to have received for injuries sustained. There is no dampness in my emotions, and some moisture, I think, is needed to produce the deeper, the tragic, notes.

  What I have been saying may suggest that already in Minneapolis my intelligence was at work organizing those painful experiences so as to get the upper hand of them. But that is not so. Far from jesting to myself bitterly on the theme of our deprivation, I literally did not think about it. In our parents’ lifetime, as the reader has seen, I reasoned, with childish logic, trying to put together pieces of the puzzle children live in. Now that had stopped. I made no effort to subject the thing that was happening to us to any process of understanding. Perhaps I was too stunned to use my intelligence outside of school. The fact that what was happening was incredible, not to be believed in as real by children who had been loved and spoiled by their parents, may explain the absence of thought.

  In another sense, thought—at least on this subject—was super­fluous. The explanation was always simple—no mystery. If I was beaten with a razor-strop for having won a prize in a city-wide essay contest, I had no need to ask myself why. I was told why; it was to keep me from getting stuck up—logical, given our position. And it was easy to find the cause of that; it was simply that our parents had died. They were in the cemetery, bedded side by side; we had been shown. And God was not going to send us any new parents. Nor would we want to be taken by the Protestants, out in Seattle, in comparison­ to whom Myers and Margaret were the lesser evil, and we should be thanking our stars for that.

  If you started to question any of it, you bumped up against God’s will, which was higher than thought—as every child knew. The alternative to thought was prayer. Since it would go against God’s will to ask for Mama and Daddy to come back from heaven, I suppose I prayed, in my novenas, on my rosary beads, for our grandmother McCarthy to take us (or, better still, just me) to live with her. My exploits of running away may have been aimed at that, too, though the conscious intention was to escape punishment by hiding, in the confessional box, behind the Laocoon. But on the whole it was wiser to pray for intentions that God would fully approve of, such as getting our parish priest to give in to my pleas for confirmation though I was still below the age.

  The arbitrariness of punishments was another deterrent to thought. No pattern could be discerned, and it was not worthwhile to make the effort to see one. Of course there were other things to think about, had I been inclined. For example, the German helmet and unexploded shells that our handsome uncle Louis had brought back to his parents as souvenirs of the Great War might have led me to wonder about the place of wars in God’s scheme. Children do make such general reflections. Reuel, aged seven (have I written this?), announced to me one evening that he had decided that slavery was “a good idea, but quite mean,” and, again, one summer, a few years later, he wrote me from Cape Cod: “Dwight is trying to give up progressiveness, but I think it’s too late.” No such thoughtful reflections (which are different from the logical reasoning common in children) were ever framed by my own young mind. Perhaps Reuel’s reflectiveness only showed that he was spending his impressionable years in not just one but two intellectual households. Certainly he was much occupied with distinctions, as when he observed after his first term in boarding-school: “You’re an intellectual, but my father’s a literary man.”

  In my case, dreams substituted for thought. The bits and pieces of history and legend I was picking up were fuel for my dreams, going up like bonfires, rather than building blocks for a picture of the world. I dreamed of becoming a Carmelite nun, like the great St. Teresa, who was half my name-saint; it was the reputed harshness of the discipline that appealed to me. For me, excess was attractive almost per se: not to be a mere nun, but to be a cloistered, silent, non-teaching nun, in rope sandals, with a rope around the waist, continually fasting, and praying two hours a day in her cell. At the same time, not fully satisfied by this effaced, selfless, brown-clad vision, I pictured myself as an abbess. Under my able administration were devoutly girded nuns singing the offices and at my right hand a chaplain, like Teresa’s St. John of the Cross.

  This dream conflicted with another. I was to marry the Pretender to the throne of France, and, fighting side by side with him, commanding my own troops, I would win back his throne for him, place the crown on his head, and become queen myself. “Queen Marie Thérèse”—my name would be the same as Louis XIV’s Spanish consort’s. To choose between these high destinies was hard. But at length I saw a way to reconcile them. First I would marry the Pretender and win back his throne for him; having done that and become queen, I would abdicate and retire to a convent, where I would be elected abbess. But I could no longer be a Carmelite; none of the strict orders accepted women who had been married.

  There was another problem connected with my ambition. Should I marry the Duke de Guise, the actual Pretender, or his son, the Count de Paris, who was nearer my age? The Duke de Guise seemed the better bet; though old, he had the acknowledged kingly title, while the Count de Paris was a bird in the bush. Moreover, my source (the Sunday magazine section) did not show any pictures of the Count, so that I had no idea what he looked like. Whereas you could see plenty of photos of the Duke, gray-haired but erect in his bearing, thin-waisted and extremely tall. Or am I fusing newspaper likenesses of the modern Pretender with the old Duc de Guise, head of the anti-Protestant League, a giant seven feet tall, who was felled at Blois by order of Henri III, measuring his full length (I read somewhere) at the foot of the king’s bed? Such leakage or “running” as of non-fast colors is a common occurrence in the memory.

  There are also unaccountable holes. What made me choose “Clementina” for a confirmation name when my wish was finally granted (“Perseverance wins the crown,” said old Father Gaughan)? It must have been for St. Clement, an early pope, though I am unaware of having had any special devotion to him. In fact, I remember nothing of any Clement, only the funny fact of becoming Mary Thérèse Clementina McCarthy. What I do remember from that time is an ardent devotion to St. Agnes, symbol of purity, with her white woolly lamb. It was her name I wanted to take at confirmation, and how and why I was re-routed to St. Clement I cannot imagine. My only clue comes from San Clemente, on the Aventine, the church of the Irish Dominicans. Did a young priest on Bishop O’Dea’s staff, preparing me for the sacrament, infect me with a bug he had picked up from those Irishmen during a year in Rome? In any case, the author of the “Epistle of Clement” (ca. A.D. 96), designed to heal a rift in the church of Corinth, seems a peculiar choice.

  Otherwise my mental life consisted of dreaming, greedily reading whatever I could, telling stories to myself and my brothers. In school I wrote poems and was a champion speller, my nearest rival being a pale blond Polish-American boy named John Klosick, who sat in front of me and whom I loved for his delicacy of frame and feature. My only stage appearance was as “Iris” in a playlet about the flowers. I had wanted to be “Rose,” the heroine, but with my glasses and nervous mannerisms probably I was not pretty enough for the leading part. No doubt I consoled myself with the reminder that irises were
the fleur-de-luce, the royal flower of France; in my crepe-paper costume of purple petals and a crown I could therefore feel quite important in flower-land. For the Greeks, as I could have gleaned from The Book of Knowledge, I was the personification of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods—nobody had told me that I was also the sister of the Harpies. When the day of the performance came, I was reconciled to my part and prepared to shine. Aunt Mary had taken great pains over my costume, more elaborate than the others, the tiers of scalloped petals fitting my form like a real dress. Yet my first full-scale public humiliation was in store.

  When the curtains parted, we were revealed drawn up in rows simulating a flower garden. As a tall, nodding bloom, my place was at the end of the front row, stage left. During rehearsals I had learned the parts of the other flowers as well as my own. It was the same mistake—excessiveness—I had made with my first writing exercise as a first-grader in the convent by dotting my “e”s for good measure as well as my “i”s, so that instead of starring (as I had expected) I was placed at the bottom of the class. Now I let my lips move along with the voices of “Rose,” “Violet,” and “Daisy” as they stepped forward one by one and recited their lines. I am not sure whether this accompaniment was audible or just visible to the parents and relations out front. And I cannot decide whether I was aware, myself, that my lips were moving like a prompter throughout the playlet, whether in fact I intended to be noticed (“Look at Iris! She knows the whole play”) or whether I was oblivious, absorbed in the performance—the first theatre, I realize, that I had ever seen. I am inclined to think it was the second because of the slap in the face my pride received when my aunt Margaret came up to me furiously at the end of the play. I don’t recall the words she used to bring me to my senses, only the derision in her voice—typically Irish, by the way. It’s possible that she mimicked the movement of my young lips with her old ones. I suppose she felt humiliated before all those parents, and some priests, too, probably. Or she angrily considered the work Aunt Mary had put into my costume only to have me put the family to shame. At the time, though, it did not occur to me to imagine her feelings. In my fury, instead, I dared to strike at her (that must have been the time) with a Catholic periodical she was carrying, folded, under her arm and that, sobbing, I wrested from her. The sequel I don’t know. I remember only the awful impiety of hitting out at her on the street and my wild heavy breathing. Afterwards did we walk home together, heading for Uncle Myers’ razor-strop, my petals burning me like the shirt of Nessus?

  It was not the last time that my lips moved visibly during a school performance accompanying (even improving on) the other actors as they pronounced their lines. But when it happened again it was in Seattle, at the Sacred Heart, and the correction was administered kindly, softened with praise for my execution of my own assigned part. For a long time, even before I had renounced my Carmelite vocation, nothing could deter me from my wish to be an actress. My writing, though I was held to be good at it, interested me less. I now suspect that my stage ambitions were merely the vehicle for a hope to be acclaimed for my beauty; that must be a large incentive for both sexes to choose careers in the theatre. With my glasses and straight hair I was far from beautiful, but I was not resigned to that. I would study myself in the mirror, frizz my hair with leather curlers, make earrings out of wire and colored beads of glass, and decide, tossing my dark head, that I had a gypsy allure. As my looks finally improved once I had got rid of the glasses (and some braces they had fastened on my upper teeth), I invented other personae (one modeled on the Madonna), giving fuel to my dreams of the stage. It was not till my junior year in college that I began to guess the truth: that I would never be an actress.

  It came home to me in the Vassar Outdoor Theatre. We were doing a dramatization of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, put into modern English; I had been cast in the part of Arcite, the second male lead. In the last act, having just been killed by a fire-breathing dragon (a stage effect contributed by the Chemistry Department), I was lying stage center, spotlit, on the grass when I heard a great laugh from the audience—forgetting that I was supposed to be dead, I had pulled down the short tunic of my orange oilcloth costume, as though it were a skirt. And now I perceive that it was all of a piece, consistent, that stage behavior of mine: onstage, unless I was actually speaking my assigned lines (i.e., “acting”), I forgot that an audience could see me. Actors do not do that.

  Earlier in that chastening performance—with my husband-to-be, a real actor, watching critically from a front row—titters should have warned me that a cardboard tower, my prison, was noticeably shaking as I quaked with stage fright; to lean against it for support had been a mistake. In school and college, I was given leading parts (usually male) by teachers and student directors because I wanted them so badly and because by that time I had the necessary looks and voice to pass for an actor, not just the ability to learn lines. But I had no more vocation for it than I had to be a Carmelite nun or queen of France. The fact that I was so rarely given the female lead (in The Knight’s Tale I had longed to be the Fair Emily, a votive of Diana, with whom both the young knights are in love) ought to have tipped me off sooner. My stage appearances, testifying to my need for applause, belonged to my dream life; they had little to do with the life of my mind.

  When I was rescued by my Protestant grandfather from the evil spell of the house on Blaisdell Avenue, one of the immediate effects was the opening up of libraries to me. His own, in the first place, in the tall Seattle house looking out over Lake Washington where I was now taken to live. Then there was the library of Forest Ridge Convent, where he was sending me as a five-day boarder (so that I would not lose my religion) and where I had spent a few weeks as a day pupil when Mama was still alive.

  My grandfather Preston’s library was strong on sets. The oak shelves, going all the way to the ceiling, held the complete works of Dickens, Frank Stockton, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, Bulwer-Lytton, Dumas, and the complete Elsie Dinsmore books, which had belonged to my mother when she was a little girl. The convent had all of Fenni­more Cooper, some Washington Irving, and Stoddard’s Lectures, with illustrations. During the sewing hour a nun read Emma to us, Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana, and A Tale of Two Cities. I am not sure where I found Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, containing as one chapter “The Saga of King Olaf ”; I had hated “Hiawatha,” all too reminiscent of the civics of Minnehaha Park and Minnehaha Falls, but I loved those tales, and they are the main reason I know something of European history—Normans, popes, and German emperors. It was a shock, then, to discover rather recently that “Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urbane and Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine,” who learned the lesson of humility one Easter Sunday in Palermo, was not an historical figure; all my life, from the age of twelve on, I had been taking him for a minor Angevin.

  Despite the efforts of the Forest Ridge librarian to “direct” my reading (e.g., Stoddard’s Lectures), I was gobbling books in both libraries, in the same spirit as had led me to eat those thirteen bananas one right after the other in Grandma Preston’s pantry, with the result that I could never eat a banana again. It was not like that, luckily, with reading, though, now that books were multiplying before me like the loaves and fishes of the miracle, I did become somewhat more picky.

  With Dumas I had a special problem because of my religion. There was a set in the Preston library, a dozen or so purplish volumes, and I could not keep my eyes off them, though I knew that the only Dumas not on the Index was The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had already read. The craving was worst for The Queen’s Necklace, because it was about Marie Antoinette’s diamonds and the Cardinal de Rohan. Will power, however, enabled me to resist. But when I lost my faith, toward the end of my second year in the convent, there should have been no further hindrance. The pleasure path lay open. And yet by some quirk familiar to me in later life, now that Dumas had become accessible, I lost the desire for him. So far as I can remember, I
never got around to reading The Queen’s Necklace or, if I did, I never finished it. That applies to The Three Musketeers, too. To the best of my knowledge, the only book of Dumas I have read all the way through is, precisely, The Count of Monte Cristo—God is not mocked, I guess.

  I missed out on Scott’s novels (though he was not on the Index), just as I had on Dumas. I came to him too late, when my first hunger for fiction was sated. Something like that happened with the Little Colonel books and quite a number of older girls’ classics. Basing my judgment on A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, I may have decided that they were too young for me. The exception was the enchanting Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a favorite with George Orwell, too, which I read several times, having “fallen” for her handsome father, Lorenzo de’ Medici Randall. I think I had read Little Women already in Minneapolis and now I read Jo’s Boys and liked it even better, just as I liked Through the Looking-Glass better than Alice in Wonderland. My tastes were perverse.

  I preferred boys’ books to girls’ books. Like Reuel in the next generation, I loved Henty’s Along the Irrawaddy, and I made my grandfather subscribe for me (in his name) to The American Boy. Yet the only Kipling I read was The Light that Failed and “Wee Willie Winkie” (both school), and Kim when I was an adult. The Jungle Book and Just So Stories I missed, because they failed to come my way when I was “right” for them, i.e., in Minneapolis. I was a case of uneven development, like Lenin’s description of the leaps and bounds in the progress of backward countries—or I was rising on one side, like a half-baked biscuit—and thanks to that had few terms of reference in common with the schoolmates I was meeting. Unlike them, at the age of eleven, I had never seen a movie (not counting The Seal of the Confessional); the children’s books I had read dated back to my parents’ childhoods; I was unaware of the St. Nicholas magazine and, when I finally heard of it, supposed it had something to do with the St. Nicholas Day School for girls in Seattle, where the Protestant upper crust went. I arrived among my Sacred Heart contemporaries like a dropped stitch in time and in some ways I never caught up—I was twice married and driving a car before I could ride a bicycle.