Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  I don’t want you to think that I meant anything of what I said about you—didn’t. But just the same Molstad had 7 [fouls] and Stimpson 3 personal and 1 tech. What does Hattie Connor­ know about basketball to suit her for the job of keeping score? My God, on Field Day the juniors are going to have something to say about the referees. No crushes! There were four Molstad crushes keeping score or time. Oh, I’m mad.

  Better than basketball I remember our Saturday shopping trips, with a chaperon, to downtown Tacoma. We had our own bank accounts, to teach us to handle money, which we mostly spent on Christmas Night perfume and Guerlain bath powder. Then we would have tea at the Old Tacoma Hotel, which had white-haired black waiters, like a Pullman dining-car, and wonderful thin sandwiches. Or we would go to the Puss ’N Boots (or was it the Pig ’N’ Whistle?) for “sweetheart” sundaes. We saw John Barrymore and Dolores Costello and the first talking movie—Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, which I hated.

  But the best was when the Stratford-on-Avon players came to Tacoma, and Miss Preston let us go; she may even have let us go on two different nights. Despite the name, they were not a Shakespearean troupe; they were specialists in Shavian comedy and they were not English but Canadian. And Tacoma—not Seattle!—was the town they chose to visit. This was my first real theatre, nothing to do with the Henry Duffy stock company in Seattle, who were specialists in The Cat and the Canary and The Bat. I remember the philosophical old hotel waiter, played by Balliol Holoway, in You Never Can Tell, and a dazzled overall impression of perfect finish. We had had the brilliant idea of inviting Miss Preston herself to be our chaperon; she wore a low-necked dress, and the evening was a riot of pleasure. Though I had never seen highly skilled actors perform before, I had a sense of recognition—the same as with Latin—as though I had met the theatre in a previous incarnation. Miss Preston’s next venture into the theatre arts was a projection she arranged in the gymnasium of a silent Swedish film based on Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf—first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in 1909. The sub-titles were in Swedish and the action seemed to take place in the Holy Land, inhabited, peculiarly, by gaunt, mad-looking Swedish farmers—was it a story of an emigration or was it some modern religious parable? Nobody could guess.

  With the departure of Miss Dorothy Atkinson at the end of sopho­more year, I lost my audience for the stories about prostitutes and housewives with “eyes like dirty dishwater” that she had encouraged me (once) to send to H. L. Mencken. Now I wanted to be an actress, rather than a writer, whereas my grandfather thought I had the makings of a lawyer. At the same time my screen idols changed: Pola Negri and Barbara Lamarr gave way to straight-browed Eleanor Boardman­; Ricardo Cortez was replaced by Ronald Colman. And when in English­ class we read The Idylls of the King with Miss Atkinson’s­ sister, Miss Marjorie Atkinson, I encountered in literature and immediately recognized my fatal type of man. King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain. Not the mighty giant-fighter of Syr Gawayne and the Grene Knighte (a fourteenth-­century alliterative poem unknown to me even by name), but a Tennysonian figure, debonair and disabused.

  He won my heart once and for all during his visit to the countrified castle of Astolat seeking an unknown knight—in reality Sir Lancelot—who had won a tourney at Camelot and then disappeared, covered with wounds. Unaware of his identity, the Lily Maid and her father are nursing him. Gawain is quite taken with the Lily Maid—“well, if I bide, lo! this wild flower for me”—till he shrewdly senses the lie of the land: she loves the wounded knight. So he entrusts her with the diamond he is carrying to confer on the winner of the tourney and dryly tells her good-bye.

  For if you love, it will be sweet to give it;

  And if he love, it will be sweet to have it from your own hand;

  And whether he love or not,

  A diamond is a diamond. Fare you well …

  Being Sir Gawain, he cannot forgo a final trenchant hint: “Yet, if he love, and his love hold,/ We two may meet at court hereafter … ” Having guessed that it is Lancelot, he is wondering of course what Queen Guinevere will say. Saying nothing further himself, he “Leapt on his horse, and carolling as he went/ A true love ballad, lightly rode away.” Cool and dry was Sir Gawain. The faithful Sir Bedivere pronounced a fitting elegy on him after he was slain in the great battle of the west against his brother Modred, the horridest name in literature: “Light was Gawain in life and light in death was Gawain.”

  It strikes me now, nearly sixty years too late, that Sir Gawain, whose name was seldom paired with a lady’s, was the perfect type of homosexual. But the thought could not have crossed my mind then. I liked everything about Sir Gawain, even the pronunciation of his name (not “Gawáyne,” but “Gów-wain,” the first syllable accented and rhyming with “cow”); he reminded me of Ronald Colman and vice versa. To prefer Gawain, an accessory lord, to the great and somber Lancelot (“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,/ And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true”) may seem like preferring Horatio to Hamlet. Yet it was not a ploy. Far from seeking to be different through my foible, I kept trying to get others to share my craze for him, just as I had tried to get my grandmother to like Ricardo Cortez, while she remained true to Adolphe Menjou. I always sought to proselytize.

  What I thrilled to in Sir Gawain must have been his sophistication. In that he resembled “the wise youth Adrian” of Richard Feverel, another who enchanted me with his disabused ways—it has taken me most of a lifetime (see earlier) to perceive that Meredith intended him, obviously, as a caricature. Later, more nobly, there came Berowne and, best of all, Mercutio (“’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve”—dies). I ask myself now whether these blasé young men (leaving out Mercutio) were not second-­raters. Could I have fallen in love, in real life, with Sir Gawain in a red two-seater? Certainly he could have been my seducer with no trouble whatever. I wonder about love, though. Does one fall in love with an appalling second-rater? A lot of literature suggests that one does, but I do not believe it. I agree with Plato that one loves the good.

  But let me leave the discussion of love for a later chapter.

  Sticking to the spring of 1928, when I was still fifteen, I wonder whether Sir Gawain was less a light of love, really, than an alter ego—a projection of some nutty image of myself. Myself as a sophisticate and highly skilled renouncer (Gawain, seeing it is hopeless, renounces the conquest of Elaine). I was infatuated with the person I wanted to be like.

  But why a man, then? Among my own sex, Elaine the Lily Maid was not to be thought of—too pastel. But even in King Arthur, there was a fair choice of sinners: Guinevere, Iseult … Yet their lack of freedom, their passiveness, indeed their married state discouraged identification. The exceptions to that seemed to be either witches (Vivien, Queen Morgana le Fay) or women nobody would want to resemble, such as (let’s forget the dames and damsels of King Arthur’s court) Messalina, on the one hand, Carrie Nation, on the other.

  Well, there was the Maid of Orleans, but I did not want to dress in men’s clothes or have visions. For me, the attractive person in that story was Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, her brave, dissipated captain—again my fatal type. I thought I might have been Eleanor of Aquitaine, despite her slightly masculine personality. There was the rub. Though I identified myself in my reading with a certain kind of man (tending toward the rotter), I never in real life wanted to be a man or even a mannish woman.

  That was the moment when I was nearing my zenith at the Seminary. I had power; I rode Bluebell and the bay; Major and Mrs. Mathews liked me; my application had gone to Vassar with my grandfather’s check; sitting beside Miss Mackay, alone in her classroom, I was reading about the Veneti and their long boat-hooks; I had made Miss Marjorie Atkinson cry in class with my well-aimed satirical shafts; I had been invited by the Ford sisters to visit them in Montana; I had found “Sister Helen” by Rossetti in Manly’s English Poetry and recited it, changing voices the way the ch
oir did between King Wenceslas and the page in the Christmas carol. Then, all of a sudden, the whole house of bright face-cards tumbled; I was suspended from school and could count myself lucky not to be expelled.

  One day with another girl I went A.W.O.L. For no reason; just to have something to do. Probably it was in the doldrums after Easter. I remember the two of us in a streetcar; perhaps we were aiming at Point Defiance, which had an amusement park, or at any rate rides—closed, though, for the winter. Having discovered that, we might have taken the streetcar back to school and got some light penalty for the escapade. But unaccountably we didn’t. Maybe my partner in crime was running away from a promised interview with Miss Preston. Or simply we were dissatisfied with the tame result, so far, of our deed. In the streetcar, I remember, we passed a file of Annie Wright girls hatted and gloved on a walk with a teacher, and the sight somehow encouraged us, as we laughed and jeered, to maintain our distance from them. I was afraid that they might see us, whereas Molly, my associate, seemed to want them to.

  She was a strange girl, that Molly Haynes, one of the several Hayneses­ in the school, all very blonde, almost albino, with long, double-jointed legs, beak noses, big protruding teeth, receding chins, dark eyes, and dead-white skins, like circus clowns’. Their father, who had the funny first name of Ancil and was said to be very self-made, had determined to put his girls in the Seminary right in the middle of a term. Molly was the oldest and had been assigned to the sophomore class; she was the only one I got to know. All the Hayneses were sloppy; there were spots on their uniforms, and the school’s black cotton stockings hung in wrinkles on their long legs. A little one, with the funny name of Ancil also, had a long, skinny, tow-colored braid, like a piece of fraying white rope. Because of the dark eyes, the suspicion arose that the whole sisterhood had dipped their bony heads in peroxide.

  Viewed on her own, apart from those weird sisters, Molly was a droll, entertaining girl. She was rather intelligent, I discovered, though you might not guess it from her grammar and pronunciation; I don’t think any of the Hayneses had ever read a book outside of school. But Molly visibly thought (tapping her teeth was the sign) and had her own wry philosophy of life.

  Before we ran away, there had been a strange episode in her room one Sunday afternoon during “quiet hour.” Visits back and forth between mid-day dinner and supper were allowed on Sunday, when many of the girls were out with their parents; you had to sign up ahead of time and not more than three to a room. Anyway, that Sunday Molly decided to show me her clothes. She had a whole closet­ful of them—very extreme, in design and cut—which she could not wear at the Seminary: at dinner we put on dress uniforms made of crepe-de-chine in three different solid colors—blue, deep pink, and green—with white collars and cuffs—and in the daytime we had our middies, skirts, and ties. Maybe Molly had been burning to model her own clothes to someone. I sat on her bed, not much interested, while she paraded them. But I could not help noticing that her underwear, slightly dirty, showed in the low-necked ones and the big raw bones of her upper chest stood out. Unable to praise, no doubt I grew uncomfortable. She must have been aware of it, for suddenly her mood changed. She turned on the dress she had been modeling—a satiny affair in zebra stripes—ripped it from her back and proceeded to attack it with a pair of pinking shears. She went at it, bare-shouldered, in her bra and slip, wildly laughing till her waste-basket was full to overflowing with ribbons of shiny black-and-white material, notched by the teeth of the pinking shears. Gasping and heaving, she explained that she had done it to satisfy me, because I had not liked the dress.

  I do not know whether it was this episode—a creeping fear, that is, of being punished for it, she as perpetrator and I as accomplice—that inspired us to run away. I do not even remember how soon the one followed on the other. And after all what rule had she broken? The dress was her own property, so that she ought to have been free to hack it to pieces. And yet it had been a sort of murder; I felt it myself then, silently watching her. Probably it was the first sign of an attack of hysteria that would come to a pitch, for her at least, in our leaving.

  For years I forgot about Molly and the dress. Then, fifty years later, the cut-up dress and the pinking shears surfaced, as if regurgitated, in a novel I was writing. In Cannibals and Missionaries one young woman remembers of another that in school on a Sunday afternoon she had cut up her clothes “in a fit of misery and boredom while her roommate looked on.” In the novel the school is Putney.

  I think we finally took the interurban to Seattle. By the time we reached there, we had been missing all day. I doubt that Molly was still with me when I arrived at 712 35th Avenue. Maybe we had telephoned from downtown. My grandfather was home from the office, and I learned that our cases had already been separated administratively. Harold Preston and Adelaide B. Preston (who considered themselves cousins, descended from a pair of brothers who had emigrated in the eighteenth century, one to western Massachusetts and the other, my grandfather’s forebear, to what is now Vermont) had been conferring by long distance and agreed that Molly, when found, was to be expelled forthwith. But I was suspended “till I could get a better attitude.”

  To the family, I managed a pert little laugh and “How am I supposed to do that?” but privately I estimated that it would take me three days, sleeping late in my own room and eating Lavinia’s cooking. More than that would be boring. On the fourth morning I could announce a change of attitude and be driven back to school. I reflected on what fools older people were. But it occurs to me as I write this that Miss Preston, who probably knew girls better than I knew adults, had counted on my absence to last just that length of time, not so long as to affect my schoolwork and not so short as to let my classmates feel that I was getting off too easy. “Well, Cousin Mary!” she said approvingly, on the prodigal’s return, taking me onto her slippery lap.

  At home, during my “suspension,” I was not scolded or lectured. If my grandmother did not take me with her on her daily prowls through Frederick’s and Magnin’s, it must have been to avoid questions as to why I wasn’t in school. She was ashamed for me, I guess, while I was feeling—or acting—boastful. It must have been aggravating, as people said then, for her to hear me repeat that sentence about my attitude and follow it with that short, sarcastic laugh. But I did show one sign of repentance or at least of a sense of the fitting: I did not ask to go to the movies.

  In the long run my exile and rapid restoration did teach me a lesson, if not the one intended. I learned the utility of high marks. Wild horses, needless to say, could not have got Miss Preston to expel a junior with a straight A and A+ record (I had not yet hit Advanced Algebra and the binominal theorem) who was going to go east to college carrying Annie Wright’s name with her. I had not realized that when I “ran away.” I had thought that except for a miracle I would be kicked out. Now I knew, and knew, too, that I was getting a first real taste of unfairness. I was glad not to be expelled and sorry as well—nobody really likes to be the beneficiary of a flagrant injustice. Miss Preston doubtless argued that I had been led astray by the Haynes girl, and it was true that the idea had been hers. But it was unlike me, as Miss Preston herself pointed out, shifting my weight on her lap, to have followed Molly’s lead. I don’t know the reason. Simple boredom maybe. Maybe, weary of my successes, I really wanted to get kicked out of school for a change and so was disappointed when instead they killed the fatted calf—one wonders about the Prodigal Son’s true feelings. Still, even if I was tired of school and myself in it, could I actually have wished to try being a wild, crazy person like Molly? Most likely, I was just being companionable, which was a good side of my character.

  I never saw Molly again. I never knew whether her remaining clothes were packed up by the house-mother and sent to her or whether her family came and got them. Before long, all the Hayneses were quietly withdrawn, and no further word was heard of them. The “pool” from which the Seminary drew was so large geographic
ally and socially that it was common for girls who left (even a Pauline Paulsen!) to drop totally out of sight.

  At any rate Molly’s fate was sad to think about. It was evident that she was a white blackbird at the Seminary and so, one way or another, would have managed to get herself expelled; in school, character is fate. Still, I did not like what the episode showed me. Although a rebel, I did not care to picture authority as weak, putty in my hands, and so on. For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer. I preferred to see Miss Preston as fair and just rather than as a principal who could be bought with good marks. I would find the same problem with Dean Thompson at Vassar.

  At the time we ran away, Molly and I may in fact have been the least of Miss Preston’s worries. Every girl in the boarding department was uncomfortably aware of Miss Preston’s sister, a person totally unlike Miss Preston who had appeared in our midst in the fall of junior year. Her name was Mrs. Blanche P. Johnson, and she was a widow, grass or sod. The school function assigned to her was vague, mainly connected with the infirmary, but at times she was given the duties of house-mother.

  Except for a large bust, Mrs. Johnson was a most un-motherly person—a tall fat painted overdressed woman decked out in trailing chiffons, large swaying bobbles of “costume” earrings, bracelets, rings, beads, small handkerchiefs drenched in Toujours Moi perfume. Everything about her joggled and jiggled, even the pouches under her eyes when she laughed.

  She was the opposite of Miss Preston in her structure and in almost every other respect. Mrs. Johnson was highly talkative, too confidential with some of the seniors; Miss Preston was terse. Mrs. Johnson was tall; Miss Preston was short, and the fat she carried, unlike her sister’s, was solid and corseted. In Miss Preston’s broad, compact face, the long nose and level dark eyes rather suggested a piglet; Mrs. Johnson was a “cow.” Despite her garrulous tongue Mrs. Johnson gave us the impression of being loaded with secrets, like a chocolate box with a false bottom, while, behind the hedge of her taciturnity, Miss Preston, I think, consistently tried to be open and aboveboard with girls and parents. Her tastes and prejudices were all known to us; indeed, they were buckled onto her personality like old-fashioned jet ornaments. Her disapproval of fountain pens, her favorite hymn (117 in the hymnal, Bunyan’s “He who would valiant be,” posted on most Fridays), her favorite carol (“A Virgin Unspotted,” distributed in hectograph, not in the hymnal), her favorite anthem (“For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth”). We knew that she was partial to whole-wheat-bread sandwiches and to a macaroni-and-cheese casserole and that the dessert she thought girls liked best was chocolate ice-cream with marshmallow sauce.