Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Looking back on these people for the last time, I see that none of them had much effect on me and—what until now I have failed to notice—that I did not really like any of them, with the exception of Ted and her sister. Though I regarded Annie Wright as a more or less unworthy place of confinement for my rebellious spirit, it was school that was the predominant, the most powerful influence.

  So let me put Czerna Wilson behind me, leaving her to figure only as the subject of an exercise in “Description” in Miss Clare Hayward’s English course senior year, and turn back to Annie Wright. Senior year in some ways was the best of the Annie Wright years, having something of the serenity attributed to old age—Oedipus at Colonus and the late plays of Shakespeare.

  If our grades were good, we could study downstairs, unsupervised, in the senior “sorority” room rather than in study hall. There were the changes I have mentioned in the faculty. Amusing, unconventional Miss Marthe Simpson, who made puppets, came to be our art teacher and taught us some innocently naughty French songs, such as “Il était une bergère.” And, in English, replacing the pop-eyed Miss Marjorie Atkinson, we had the Viking beauty from Oxford with the perfect blue-eyed profile which she often turned to the window, looking dreamily out to nowhere.

  Her every vocable was exquisite, too. Miss Clare Hayward could have taught us Urdu without any protest, but she actually gave us a survey of English literature, starting before Beowulf, the official point of departure. We learned of a figure called the Venerable Bede (673-735), author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and listened while she read us his famous extended simile of the sparrow that flew through the king’s banqueting hall and signified the transience of mortal life: “Like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall when you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter snow or rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall and out through another … Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.”

  She took us back beyond Bede, to the wonderful Caedmon (fl. 670, at Whitby), whose strong, alliterative hymn, quoted in Bede, Miss Hayward­ said aloud to us in her beautiful, measured voice.

  Come, let us hymn the Master of Heaven,

  The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,

  He, holy Creator, he hung the bright heavens,

  He, Lord Everlasting, omnipotent God.

  I wish I knew whether she said it to us first in the Northumbrian version (a West Saxon one exists, too) or gave it to us directly in English translation. But, hearing it, the dullest of us grasped that this was the genius of English, our wonderful language.

  She gave us Chaucer, with the rules for how to pronounce him, which have stayed with me for life. It was never as well taught by poor Miss Foster at Vassar. We memorized quite a lot of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales: “Aprill with his shoures soote,” of course, and “the hooly blisful martir for to seke,/ That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke,” but not overlooking the Prioress with her coral beads “gauded” with green, her little arm from which hung the gold brooch saying Amor vincit omnia.

  Other parts of the survey I remember less well. The Pre-­Raphaelites, certainly, but what about “The Rape of the Lock”? Did we have it with her or the previous year? She gave us Thomson’s The Seasons and Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven. Our last assignment was Gals­worthy’s Justice—an odd choice.

  In French we must have been having Aucassin et Nicolette; in Latin, after Cicero, we had Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy. And I had plenty of activities to keep me busy: president of the French Club, secretary of the Latin Club, playing Catiline in Miss Mackay’s play Marcus Tullius, playing the heroine of Goldoni’s The Fan, preparing for the College Boards, riding with Major Mathews and having Miss Mackay as chaperon, reading Swinburne and Ernest Dowson and Thomas Lovell Beddoes in study hall and Sir Hall Caine and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes and Marie Corelli, memorizing early Ezra Pound, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Writing poems of my own in study hall (“ … Feet, feet tapping/ Up and down the stairs/ French heels rapping/ Of amorous affairs”) and knowing they were trashy. There was an idyllic picnic of our Physics class, only five of us, when little Miss McKay, our teacher, took us to see the Cushman Dam and first we had our basket lunch by a rushing brook—strawberries brought by a day girl, the daughter of an army surgeon, and white-meat-of-chicken sandwiches. Did Miss McKay let us wade in the clear, cold water?

  This was possibly the happiest day of my young life. I loved gentle Miss McKay, Jean Eagleson, Dorothy Walker, Barbara Dole, maybe even four-eyed Mary Ellen Warner. And Dorothy Walker’s mother—wasn’t she with us, too, driving us in her car, in fact? Yet in those same spring days I was meeting a one-legged boy after supper in the woods behind the athletic field and—again—nearly got myself expelled when someone, probably Miss Mackay, caught me after lights out coming in a gym window. I have told that story elsewhere and quoted the verses I wrote about the delinquent boy, whose name was Rex Watson. He was a younger brother of one of Miss Preston’s favorites of the Class of ’25 and had been sent to the reformatory after losing a leg in a hunting accident—perhaps he had got the drug habit. He and his gang used to roam through the district called Old Town, where the school and the pulp mill and railroad tracks were; I was induced to sneak out to meet him several times in the still-daylight evenings, and we smoked, he lying on the ground beside me with his crutch next to him. That was all. I have described how I lied—or at any rate practiced suppressio veri—when, until I did, Miss Preston was left with the prospect of having to expel me on the eve of graduation. There was no denying that I had been caught coming in after hours through a window.

  The other change was that senior year I had a roommate, assigned me by the school. Marie Althen had come to Annie Wright for just the final year; she was the adopted daughter, as I have told, of elderly Alsatians and was already engaged to a Herbie Wetmore, who was in the insurance business. Maybe her parents, who lived in Tacoma, wanted to give her a little “finish” before she got married. She was a slim, pretty, bright-cheeked girl, undemanding and with no mental interests. We got along quite well. She did not mind if I left my bed at four in the morning to write a story before breakfast. On my side, I did not make her listen to it or to any of my elocution. I had just discovered Maurice Hewlett; even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers, I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-hearted, published in 1900 and so crabbed and allusive as to be almost impenetrable today. The medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an empty stomach were meant to be in his manner. I cannot remember whether I showed any of them to Miss Hayward or kept them to read aloud to myself.

  On Sunday afternoons, you may remember, parents were permitted to take girls out during the long “quiet hour” that stretched from mid-day dinner to supper. Marie’s parents, instead of taking her out themselves, arranged for her to go out with Herbie Wetmore—she already had her engagement ring. Marie was generous about inviting me, too, and we usually made up a foursome, with a friend of Herbie’s called Evans Buckley. Most of the time we took Buckley’s car, so that Herbie and Marie could use the back seat for their version of going the limit (on top of her but not inside her) while Evans drove and I sat beside him, endeavoring not to listen. But occasionally he parked, and I had to struggle hard to keep his insistent hand from going above my knee or down my neck while we hotly kissed. It turned out that his father was an undertaker, and there was one Sunday when he took me out all by myself somehow in the hearse. I think that the struggle that day was because he wanted me to lie down with him in the back, where the coffin went and where nobody could look in. I would not do it, and that was the end of Evans Buckley—­sad, because he was good-looking and so
phisticated and said funny things. I might have truly liked him except for the hearse. I did not go out with Marie and Herbie any more on Sundays.

  Totally different was our senior prom. My grandmother got me a pink moiré dress with a big deep-red velvet bow on one hip and an uneven hemline, shorter on one side—skirts were about to go down. My uncle Harold, who was twenty-one then and still in college (he was an Art major), found a friend of his to be my date—a dark, small-featured young man named Frank Reno. His full name was Benjamin Franklin Reno, and Harold maintained that he was the nephew of President Eliot of Harvard. If that was so (which I wondered about), he was T. S. Eliot’s cousin. He sent me a corsage of deep-pink camellias, to go with my dress, and this was a decided score for him, utterly outclassing the banal orchid. The lowest a boy could get was sweet peas, then roses, then orchids, and, best of all, gardenias (which the divine Donnie Fisher had sent me the year before), but camellias were something no other girl had.

  My relation with Harold had been warming up; he liked my friend Blanche Ford, from Montana, the daughter of a Federal judge, and had given up trained nurses for the time being. He came to the prom with Blanche (juniors took part, too), who wore an ice-blue satin dress—I forget what flowers Harold sent her. We ate supper as a foursome in the sacred precincts (opened for the occasion) of Miss Preston’s Cottage, which was attached to the Great Hall. I do not know why—Frank Reno was a good dancer, he was not hard to talk to, he had even read books—but that prom for me was a strained charade. I think it was mainly that I did not like his name, which belonged, I felt, to a place, not a person, and hence sounded “common.” Almost like an Italian name. The only bright spots were my dress and the camellias.

  Can it have been the same in the East, at the schools my Vassar friends went to—Walnut Hill, Miss Madeira’s, Abbott Academy (where Edmund Wilson’s mother had gone)? It does not sound so; nothing like the jumble of incompatibles I floundered in that frightens me now just to think back on: today I would not have the stamina to keep my head in that tangle of contradictions. Perhaps it was not the Northwest; perhaps it was me. My classmates Jean Eagleson and Barbara Dole—I know for a fact—did not have to spend their Sunday afternoons, before high tea in the Great Hall, in a parked car with a Herbie and a Marie in the back seat heaving and panting while they in the front seat fought to keep their thighs pressed together. When they were taken out of school during quiet hour, it was by their parents, who came bringing oranges and cookies. On the other hand, they did not have my advantages, that is, they did not read “Sohrab and Rustum” or Diana of the Crossways. Even the little bit of the Seminary we had in common consisting of Miss Hayward’s pure profile, chaperons, dance cards, senior life­saving tests was itself made up of inconsistent elements. Senior prom was an intrusion of unreality both on their innocent pursuits and on my guilty ones. It was a goofy fiction we were made to live through, like those visitors’ lists, like supervision of our mail (I think of Miss Preston in her office opening the copy I had ordered of Point Counter Point on the scene of Burlap taking a bath with his mistress and hastily closing it, to let me keep the book anyway), a borrowing from some place and time other than Tacoma, Washington­, spring 1929, when skirts were about to fall. Perhaps the most glaring discrepancy between school fact and school convention came at my graduation that June.

  Two days before Commencement, my uncle Harold with a friend—maybe again Frank Reno—drove over to Tacoma to take Blanche and me out. It was a Sunday (Commencement being on a Tuesday); classes were over. Anyway there was no problem about getting permission, because of his being my uncle. The next day—Class Day—I was going to be valedictorian in a white cap and gown, and my grandparents would come. Having signed out with Miss Browne, the four of us went for a ride.

  They had brought some liquor with them. Blanche was an accomplished drinker, but I, as I had already learned when staying with the Ford girls in Montana, was very far from it. We sat on the ground in the woods somewhere, having a sort of drinking picnic of which I remember nothing except that when I stood up, teetering, I fell into a bed of nettles. No. I fell, bare-bottomed, because I had chosen to urinate, out of sight in a thicket, and then tipped over.

  My punishment came the next morning. In the dining-room, the sight of a sugar-bowl caused me to feel violently sick, and I just made it, gagging, to a wash-basin or toilet. All morning I retched and vomited. My white wool cap and gown were waiting for me on my bed, but I was too sick to put them on. The frightened Marie concluded that I had better send to tell Miss Preston that I could not pronounce the valedictory—I could not even stand up. But I thought of my grandparents, who must have already arrived, and made up my mind to try. I knew my speech by heart, having written it myself and practiced it in our school auditorium. And in case the worst should happen in the middle of it, Marie and I would put a pail backstage.

  Moreover time was on my side. The valedictorian followed the salutatorian, and that would be Beth Griffith, who could be counted on to give a long harangue while the aromatic spirits of ammonia (which had just been procured, no doubt from the infirmary) got a chance to work in me. After Beth Griffith, there would be “On from Strength to Strength,” our school song, to the tune of “High above Cayuga’s waters.” I put on the white gown and set the white mortarboard on my trembling head. By the time we were on the stage, seated behind the podium, the waves of nausea were subsiding a bit. It was going to be all right. But when I rose to speak, noting my grandparents in the audience, a new sensation seized me—under my robes, in the seat of my pants. The nettles! An intolerable itching. And I could not scratch there, publicly.

  Not to leave you in suspense, Reader, I gave the valedictory. Palely, I finished; someone put roses in my arms, like St. Elizabeth of Hungary—there must be a photo in some archive. The strange fact was that the moment I began speaking the memorized words, the itching abated. When I stopped, it was completely gone. The nausea went, too. I suppose it was a question of my nervous system: the words forming on my lips acted like leeches, drawing sensation from the rest of my body. It was odd, and even while it was happening I felt that I had learned something—a new law: you can only pay attention to one part of the body at a time.

  So our queer class graduated. In June, in Seattle, I took the College Boards, and on June 20, from her furnished room in Seattle, Miss Mackay wrote on my behalf to Vassar—a letter that stayed in the files of the Committee on Admissions unknown to me for fifty years.

  Mary McCarthy is a student of quite unusual intelligence. She has studied Latin with me for two years, and in my opinion has a remarkable aptitude for languages. I have always found her industrious and pleasant to deal with in the class-room.

  Mary also has considerable dramatic ability, and played the leading part in the senior play this year. She was president of our school French club and secretary of the classical society, and in both capacities proved very efficient, and showed the qualities necessary for leadership. She has a strong will and plenty of ambition, and a magnetic and charming personality.

  E. Mackay, M.A. Edin.

  Instructor in Latin, The Annie Wright Seminary

  Reading that, how can I fail to feel like a worm? Noble Ethel Mackay! The kindly upright woman was greatly deceived in me. In her worst nightmares that dear Latinist could not have pictured my frequentations: Rex Watson in the woods, Evans Buckley in the hearse, Kenneth Callahan in that eyrie reached by a cat-walk, to say nothing of Forrie Crosby in the Marmon roadster sophomore year, before I even knew her, when I was fourteen. Worst of all, Pelion on Ossa, the mountains of lies. Nonetheless I wonder. Invincible in her ignorance, she may have known me better than I knew myself. That is, I was deceived by the will-less, passive self I seemed to be living with, and Miss Mackay was not.

  An old program tells me that on the evening of Class Day, opposite Jean Eagleson, I played in Goldoni’s The Fan. Though this must have been a repeat performance, one would ima
gine that under the circumstances—post-throwing-up, post-nettles—it would have been memorable as an ordeal. Yet I don’t recall it in the least; nothing comes back to me until the next day—Commencement—with all of us in the chapel in our white caps and gowns and the bishop giving out the rolled-up diplomas. That was when the thunderbolt struck; no wonder I forgot everything between the valedictory and then. Miss Preston was leaving! She was not coming back next year. The reason she gave in making the announcement was that she had been asked to open a school in Arizona.

  No one believed that. Most of us, I think, supposed that the sad decision had something to do with her sister. According to one theory, Mrs. Johnson had TB, and Miss Preston was taking her to Arizona to cure it, opening a school to support the two of them. (There were two obvious objections to this: that TB victims dramatically lost weight; that a conscientious school principal would scarcely harbor a person suffering from a communicable disease—and in the infirmary, of all places!). Another suggestion was that Mrs. Johnson had cancer, which however did not explain Arizona. More plausibly there were conjectures that the trustees had given Miss Preston six months to get rid of her sister, and Miss Preston had refused. Or else, still more plausibly—forgetting Mrs. Johnson—it had to do with the drop in the enrollment, to which our pitifully shrunken class bore witness. Miss Preston was the responsible party, so she had to go. Whatever the reason, it was evident from Miss Preston’s tears, which for once she tried to master, that the choice had not been her own. Unbelievably, after sixteen years, Miss Preston had been asked to leave, like a student found cheating. That was how it looked and how it probably was. In her office, after the exercises, she took us in her arms one by one—here the fact that we were a small class was lucky—and wept without saying a word.