Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Now something else comes back to me that I had entirely forgotten. Larry Judson was Jewish. I do not know how or when I learned it, certainly quite a bit after we played husband and wife. I think a Jewish friend told me, as if it were a thing I should have known already. To me, though, it was a stunning surprise. “Larry Judson?” I was shocked. I was a quarter Jewish myself and I had already had a Jewish love-object—my second cousin, Burton Gottstein, in his sophomore year at the University, velvet-eyed and lustrous as a black pearl. At the Sacred Heart I had decided that the degree of consanguinity (we were actually first cousins once removed) could not prevent our marrying in the Church if he would consent to take instruction. Now I had left the Church, so Larry’s Jewishness should not have bothered me on that score: no need to be married by a priest. Anyway marriage was no longer in my mind—a sign surely that I was maturing. Just worshipping him from not too far off was enough. Why, then, was I so taken aback? It was a sort of disillusionment, like learning the real names of one’s favorite movie stars—I could have slain the relative who brought me the tidings that Ricardo Cortez was plain Jake Krantz. On the screen he would never be the same for me. In Larry’s case, though, I was able to accept the undeception. The suit and the mature smell, I guess, had prepared me for swallowing a dose of reality. In my soul, without knowing it, I was getting ready to be sorry for the boy-man.

  At that point I had not given much thought to Jews or what it meant to be one. There were several kinds evidently (corresponding, I now see, to the degree of assimilation): the kind represented by my grandmother and her sisters; another represented by their brother, Uncle Elkan Morgenstern, and his huge-breasted little wife, Aunt Hennie (in that family girls were fat and boys went through some rite at the age of confirmation called the bar mitzvah with presents and a party afterwards, where you got sweetbreads and mushrooms in patty shells, cheese puffs, and Crab Louie); and still a stranger kind, in funny clothes, whom I used to look at from the Madrona streetcar, which went by their houses—the poor Orthodox Jews from the Pale.

  In the Pale, which Larry’s parents probably came from, little boys wore long dark trousers and resembled little men. Philip Rahv used to tell me, years later, of how he had felt marked as an immigrant in a Providence, Rhode Island, grade school by the Old Country long trousers his mother dressed him in. And I remember how Philip used to call my five-year-old Reuel “little man.” In 1925-26, in Seattle, I could have known nothing about the Pale and its customs. Yet on the broad porches of those multi-family dwellings—wooden tenements­—that I stared at from the streetcar, I had seen quite young bearded men wearing shiny black hats and thick dark suits and old bearded men in black skullcaps and their undershirts and, no doubt, pale boys, too, looking old and solemn for their size. And nearer home, our next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gerber, afflicted with heavy accents, had two long-nosed sons, Len and Sid, who dressed “old” and kept apart from the neighborhood. Unlike my young uncle Harold and his friends, they were destined for “business,” I heard, as though it were a vocation, like the priesthood. Larry’s brown suit may have spoken to me in a foreign language that I was nonetheless vaguely able to decipher of a fate in store for its wearer—a doom of premature manhood already thickening his jowls. That was the price he would have to pay for his parents’ being poor Jews—a price Burt Gottstein, who belonged to “their” best fraternity and would soon join a smart brokerage house, would know nothing about.

  I am guessing, of course. All I am certain of is that Larry, our school star, disappeared from my ken as though swallowed up. Maybe his parents moved. My memory of him stops with the suit, the hug, the piteous little “racial” realization framing the whole like a black mourning border. And I remember nothing further of those after-school dramatics. Maybe I ceased to sign up for them because the teacher failed to give me another leading part. Or spring came, and I got interested in the track team, following them to meets in the afternoons, which might have made a “conflict” with the acting workshop: I traded Larry Judson for Bill Albin.

  (A few paragraphs back, I was wondering whether anyone could tell me what became of Larry Judson. Since I wrote—and published—those words, two people have told me, one of them being Larry Judson himself. He remembers treading the boards and thinks the teacher was named Miss Aiken—Yes! But his letters, two by now and both very nice, say he is only partly Jewish, a quarter, like me. And for fifty-two years he has been married to a Miss Birdie O’Rourke. The man’s suit is explained by facts he relates: he was older than the rest of us, working his way through high school as a salesman for Pictorial Review, the way others worked their way through college.

  But there is another stage episode of my Garfield year, which I do not know where to situate. Perhaps quite early, before Larry and the skit. The problem is that the person it happened to, the heroine of the occasion, has become unrecognizable to me, so that I cannot account for her feelings and behavior. That is not true of the convent: in my slightly spotty blue serge uniform, unrelieved by any good-conduct ribbon, I am my familiar self, younger. But in trying to describe what I can remember of the Garfield time, I have been noticing a contradiction. From the record I know that I was wild about public high, to the point of losing my head and having to be removed by my grandparents. But what I put down does not sound that way; it sounds scornful. Evidently the self that felt the attraction of Garfield’s mob scene has been sloughed like a snake’s skin. Or brutally killed, leaving me, the person I am now, as the sole survivor. “I know not the man,” St. Peter said, denying Jesus, and I can say, with greater truthfulness, of that thirteen-year-old pennant-waver, “I don’t know that child.” In what I am about to relate the disassociation is almost complete, resulting in big patches of amnesia. I do not even know what I looked like or what I wore that year—no photographs have survived from the period.

  Once upon a time, then, I appeared on the stage at Garfield before a good-sized audience and scored a real success. It was an event, I think, for freshmen, designed to bring out the talents of the entering class—something like “amateur night” in the movie theatres and vaudeville houses of those days, when volunteers mounted the stage to do solo acts and were judged by the amount of applause they received. If I reconstruct it right, you could sing or yodel or tap-dance or play an instrumen­t such as the banjo or you could recite, but it had to be something light—nothing on the order of “Lord Ullin’s Daughter.” I had chosen a comic monologue by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock: “I had a little dog and her name was Alice.” It was meant to be delivered in a doleful deadpan voice that would make the recitation all the more hilarious. Well, I brought the house down—a slightly untoward­ surprise­ (even though I had aspired to it), as I had always thought of my muse as tragic. They clapped and cheered and possibly stamped; if there was a prize, I won it. Then why does a clear recollection of that red-letter day, as if too painful, refuse to reach consciousness?

  I can see several answers. First, they were laughing at me, rather than with me, or, as we used to say in boarding-school, I was being funny-peculiar, not funny-haha. Perhaps so: the recitation may have succeeded in a partly unintended way, causing an excess of applause. Second, plagiarism. Could I have pretended to have written that skit myself? And then did some teacher confront me with my theft? Possibly. There was a precedent in my history: back in grade school, I had stolen copiously from Our Sunday Visitor for my prize-winning essay on the Irish in American history. Still, that was different: then I did not know it was wrong; now the uneasiness surrounding the blank in my memory may suggest guilty feelings. Yet a temptation to steal somebody else’s words was not my thing; perhaps I was too conceited for it. So, third, my claque.

  Probably the real answer lies there. But to explain I shall have to go back and account for the improbable fact of my having a claque. It was the crowd from Mercer Island, halfway across Lake Washington, whom I had come to know slightly the previous summer through staying with
the Berens twins from Forest Ridge. Today Mercer Island is reached by a bridge and is much like any other outlying section of the city. But in those days you took a ferry to get there; it was rural, and behind its farmland and dark spruce trees rose Seattle’s claim to fame in our geography books—snowcapped Mount Rainier. Looking across from my grandmother’s tall house on moonlit nights, I saw the moon make a silver path across the black lake water that corresponded with the daytime route of the ferryboat. The band of rooters occupying the first rows of our Garfield auditorium on the day of “Alice” came whooping to school on the ferry every morning and went home by the same means every night—the tooting ride back and forth seemed to have welded them into a vociferous unit like the anvil chorus. I shut my eyes and try to see that cheering-section individually, but they have stuck together in a lump, like candy in a coat-pocket, like their fatal watchword—“Let’s stick together, kids.” In the blur I can pick out only one face, that of Josephine Hoey (pronounced “hooey”), their leader: glasses, pale eyes, pale lashes, skin the color of junket, fish mouth. When she laughs, she chortles; her fattish shoulders shake.

  Yes, this was the reception committee that had welcomed me to Garfield, where I had thought I would know nobody. From the first day they had “taken me under their wing,” showing their pride in the act of adoption by trumpeting my convent nickname (the mysterious initials C.Y.E., which they mistook for “Si,” as in “Silas”) whenever they caught sight of me: “There’s Si McCarthy!” “Hey, Si! Hey, there, Si!” In the summer, they must have heard the twins greeting me at the ferry, and of course it was the Berens twins, known to most of Mercer Island at least by sight, who were responsible for the bit of red carpet put under my feet at Garfield.

  At Forest Ridge, the two girls were boarders, a class ahead of me, but in the summer they lived on the island with their widowed mother, a realtor who wore a beret at a sporty angle on her prematurely white hair, smoked cigarettes in a holder, and painted big circles of crimson rouge on her cheeks. That summer they had had me over two or three times to spend the night with them in their bungalow; they were sorry for me, I guess, because I could not win the popularity I coveted (the twins were very popular) or, lacking one parent themselves, they could imagine how it felt to lack two. (In fact, it was not clear whether Mr. Berens had died or whether he had deserted Mrs. Berens; he was never alluded to in my presence, and his relict had all the earmarks of what was then called a grass widow.) I loved staying with the two of them—lively Louise and studious Harriet—going to bed in the starlight on their screened sleeping porch, and I loved the island, which was woodsy and informal even for the West. I was impressed by the knowledge that Mrs. Berens “worked,” unlike other convent mothers, and wore big pearl earrings even around the house. The twins helped with the cleaning and washing up, and I envied them; in my grandmother’s house, I was not trusted to do anything of importance. On Saturday nights there was dancing—or was it a movie?—in a barn down the road, and Mrs. Berens let us go, not even bothering to look in herself as a chaperon.

  It must have been on one of those Saturdays that, thanks to the twins, I met my first “man.” His name was Armour Spaulding (which said tennis to me); he was twenty-one and smoked a pipe. One night, in his white oxfords, with the pipe glowing, he walked me home along a path through the woods, under a moon, no doubt, with the dark lake water lapping the shore. Possibly Mrs. Berens had deputized him to escort me home; he may have taken me for older than I was. Anyway he sounded quite interested by my flow of conversation and courteously drew me out when I hesitated. For about a year I lived on the memory of it, as if on stored-up energy, though I never saw him again and all I retain of him is the name, the pipe, the shoes, a close-cropped, somewhat bullet-shaped head, perhaps a white shirt and dark-blue blazer. He must have cast a spell of glamour over the whole of Mercer Island, in reality not very classy, he and the popular, kind-hearted twins and their trouper of a mother.

  At Garfield the contingent that welcomed me and seemed proud to count me among them probably knew Armour Spaulding, but I never asked. Instead, I lingered around a sporting-goods store that carried Spalding rackets, as though the surname would make him materialize like a genie reporting for duty at the rubbing of a lamp. Meanwhile I acquiesced gratefully in the sponsorship of the Mercer Island entity without being especially drawn to any of its members. But before long I became aware that I had let them take me over too quickly. Those friendly millstones were pulling me down to their level. And that dawning suspicion, I now conjecture, was what has made me efface the success of Alice and her dog from my memory: I was ashamed of it then and there, stricken in medias res. As I stood on the stage receiving plaudits, I must have wished to drop through a trap door, like the one in the Metropolitan Theatre that, according to Aunt Rosie, was utilized by Harry Houdini for his famous disappearing act. But no such luck. I was left with a hatred of Stephen Leacock, of the loyal chortlers and stampers, and of the side of myself that wanted their mindless applause. But I have no recollection of my emotions. If some psychoanalyst is moved to tell me “You felt imperiled by success,” I do not deny it: I was imperiled by success and at the age of thirteen apparently had the sense to know it.

  Having lowered myself to the limit of degradation (thank God no member of my family was there), then mercifully dropped into an oubliette, in mind, if not in body, I began to “space” my meetings with the Mercer Island crowd. They must have considered me, rightly, an ingrate. The Berens twins, too, faded from my life. Several years later, home from college for the summer, I saw Louise again; she, the pretty and vivacious one, had become an elevator-starter at Frederick’s. And didn’t my grandmother tell me that Mrs. Berens was in jail for embezzlement? My present self is shocked that I did not try to “do” something for Louise, my old desk mate. Today I would, but perhaps that only shows that today I am more of a hypocrite.

  Yet there is a little more, I suspect, to the “Alice” episode. At that very time, as I now reckon it, I had probably made my first intellectual friend, if “intellectual” is the right word for “Ted” (really Ethel) Rosenberg, whose organ of reflection was perhaps less fully developed than her bump of sensibility. She had a broad, coppery, high-cheekboned face, like an Indian’s, short, black, curly hair, like a boy’s, a thin, flat-chested figure; she wore brogues and soft loose vests of deerskin. Her green prominent eyes, flecked with brown, had a riveting gaze and widened shyly with excitement, and her voice, always husky, got softly breathless when she spoke of her culture heroes and heroines, some of whom were dead and some of whom were right there in our school.

  She came of a family of intellectuals, very close-knit and loving, who did not seem to have any other relatives. There was a sister, Matilda, called Till, who worked in a doctor’s office, a tall, gaunt, rabbinical-looking older brother, Dan, who was a graduate student in the Speech Department at the University and talked in a slow, careful voice, and a little brother, Jess, who, at least in my memory, played the violin. The father was a tailor; the mother kept the house, read, baked, and benevolently listened—she was active in Aunt Rosie’s Temple De Hirsch (Reformed). I had never met a family like this before; the nearest I had come was Aunt Rosie, who played solitaire all night in a downstairs bedroom lined with signed photographs of opera stars and pianists, and her husband, Uncle Mose, who subscribed to the New York Times.

  I am not sure how I got to know Ted, who was at least a class ahead of me. It was a question, I think, of my becoming aware of her becoming aware of me. This could have happened in the cafeteria, in the hall in front of the bulletin boards, or even on a chilly bench at the side of the sports field during football practice, for Ted’s hero worship fully embraced athletes. The intellectuals at Garfield were equipped with radar for finding each other, though they themselves, the diviners, would have been barely noticeable to eyes less skilled than their own. Among the incoming freshmen, somehow, Ted had picked me out as someone worth knowing, like a con
noisseur looking over a Whitman’s Sampler and sensing which one would have a liqueur cherry underneath the chocolate coating. Some feature of me had caught her attention—something about my appearance, something she had heard about me, something she had heard me say. However our acquaintance started, my first clear memory of Ted is connected with a book.

  In those days modern literature (like “creative writing”) was not taught in school or in college. You read it, relying on tips from friends. As with Prohibition liquor, you had to know somebody to get hold of the good stuff. Professional librarians were no help. The circulating library at Frederick’s had recommended The Peasants by some Pole who had won the Nobel Prize to my grandmother, who had been reading it for months, scarcely making any progress. I had heard of a sensational novel about flappers—Flaming Youth—and of Three Weeks, by Elinor Glyn, but the existence of modern literature, apart from such titles, was a secret “they” had succeeded in keeping from me till I met Ted. And when she introduced me to Green Mansions, by W. H. Hudson, after school in the deserted locker room, it was on a note of confidentiality. The Modern Library imprint awed me, as though it were a sort of guarantee or the password of some exclusive set. I did not notice that the book had first been published in 1904.

  Thus at a time when I was close to failing most of my subjects, my real education was getting under way. If this overlapped with “Alice,” no wonder I felt mortified. Ted could have been in the audience, and what would she have thought? Being far more a loving soul than a critical spirit, she might have tried to see the best in Stephen Leacock. The critical spirit was me. Borrowing her eyes, I would have looked on myself far more harshly than it was in her nature to do.

  In the friendship that began, she was the guide, scout, pathfinder; I was the follower. Yet my character was more decisive and sharper than hers. Once I was initiated into this new, arcane region, I promptly judged. The one-way traffic in limp leather volumes that moved from her locker to my school-bag did not always go smoothly. I did not like all her treasures. And, though I usually tried to hide it so as not to disappoint her, I think she generally knew when I felt let down.