Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  That was Albert Parker Fitch, D.D., pastor of the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church, a handsome white-haired product of Harvard College and Union Theological Seminary, celebrated as a fighting liberal and as a preacher. It seemed that he had taught religion at Carleton College when John was an undergraduate and they had somehow kept up a friendship, partly no doubt because Dr. Fitch loved the theatre. Maybe he had gone to see The Channel Road or John had got him tickets, and on Sunday evenings John was often invited to the rectory—I guess it should be “manse” for a Presbyterian—to read poetry aloud with Dr. Fitch and drink a few highballs. One Sunday when I was down from Vassar he took me along and again on other nights. So that when Dr. Fitch came up that winter to preach in chapel, I could boast of actually knowing him, I a “lowly” freshman.

  “Known as a university preacher,” his obituary in the Times said, and I was puffed with pride in him when I went up to speak to him outside after chapel was over. He had shocked the Vassar congregation by SWEARING in the pulpit! Yes, he had thundered “God damn them!” in a wonderful voice; his sermon had been on the munitions-makers, “merchants of death.” I am not sure whether he was actually a pacifist; to denounce munitions-makers at that time you did not have to be. But he was some sort of radical; that was clear. I think Miss Kitchel was aware of him; he had been at Amherst, where Meiklejohn had been president. Certainly he knew Durant Drake, whose silly Philosophy course I was taking; “the last of a long line of maiden aunts,” Dr. Fitch recalled, and I must have quoted the mot to Miss Kitchel. It was a good description, and I have occasionally thought of it since. All the more eerie to find it, applied to quite a different Harvard figure, in a strange, slightly Jamesian novel he published in the twenties and that I have just now come upon. None So Blind, Macmillan, 1924, and all about Harvard—you would never guess a Presbyterian minister had written it.

  In any case, Dr. Fitch’s sermon really upset a lot of people at Vassar. He was not asked to preach there again. I could not understand the attitude. If you were going to pronounce an anathema sit, the pulpit was the place to do it: he had only been calling on God to do His rightful job of damnation. But if you said that, few would recognize what an anathema sit was. Vassar had a capacity for ignorance that did not suit its style, and I myself was always shocked and startled to see it displayed.

  Dr. Fitch well knew what an anathema sit was. He knew classics and had a passion for language. He and John shared a weakness for Robinson Jeffers; he loved to have John read Roan Stallion aloud. Tamar, too, one night, and The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and above all a short poem beginning “Shine, perishing republic” that was about the U.S. Both Dr. Fitch and Johnsrud were crazy about that poem (Jeffers’ best, said John), which evidently said something to them politically. Today that seems a bit odd, since to modern ears the poem, hymning the decline into the west of our setting republic, sounds slightly fascistic. Neither of them was that, but both may have been Nietzscheans, enamored of the notion of the superior individual—a far cry from Hitler, as it turned out.

  “Divine bombast!” pronounced Dr. Fitch when John had finished reading. Or was that what he would say about Marlowe, his great favorite, whom he always read aloud to us himself? In the “manse” I thrilled to his voice intoning Tamburlaine, which I was hearing for the first time; “Come live with me and be my love” was all the Marlowe we had had at Annie Wright. He would let his voice linger over the name of the fierce Timur’s captive and only love, the Egyptian sultan’s daughter: “Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate,/ Fair is too foul an epithet for thee.” “Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,/ As sentinels to warn th’immortal souls,/ To entertain divine Zenocrate.” As though he wanted to make the rafters of the paneled clerical study ring with the praises of the sultan’s daughter. I do not remember a Mrs. Fitch’s being present. Perhaps she had died. The New York Times tells me that there was one, and apparently she was English.

  I would listen raptly, too, to The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, especially the end, when Faust is waiting for the devil to come and get him. “O lente, lente currite noctis equi,” down to the awful screams for mercy: “See see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,/ One drop would save my soul, half a drop, ah my Christ.”

  The connection was obvious with Don Giovanni, which Johnsrud took me to that same winter at the Metropolitan, the first opera I ever saw. We were way up in the highest reaches of the gallery, in standing room, but I understood the plot and understood from the way John behaved that he attached importance to this occasion on my behalf, as an initiation. He had chosen the opera with care and not mainly for the singers; there was Rosa Ponselle, I think, and Beniamino Gigli as Don Ottavio, but I cannot even remember who sang Don Giovanni. John saw the piece as theatre certainly (which most operas aren’t) and maybe he was fond of the sulphurous ending, as in Dr. Faustus: the soul of a great sinner being carried off howling to hell. He was much taken with the devil; his broken nose and raised eyebrow gave him a devil’s face, which he treated as a saturnine mask. And possibly one thing he and Dr. Fitch had in common was a certain diabolism, which had come to John through Shaw (who had his own Luciferian set of eyebrows), while Dr. Fitch may have gone straight back to the source—Holy Writ—for an interest in damnation. In his novel, None So Blind, there is a clear representation of satanism in an epicurean graduate student (who is also given to secret drinking and reading pornography in the Latin original); he has an intensely Puritan mother and a very Bostonian sister (not badly drawn) who could stand in for Lilith. Flirtations with the prince of darkness are fairly common among religious men, though less so, I would say, among Calvinists; it is more a High Church Episcopalian proclivity. Without a mass, it is harder to have a black mass.

  But Dr. Fitch, with his love of the pomp and circumstance of the language, was a strange kind of Presbyterian anyway. Enlarging on the “O lente, lente currite noctis equi” (“Run slowly, slowly, ye horses of the night”: Faustus, awaiting the hour of his certain damnation), he explained that the quotation was from Ovid’s Amores; there the licentious Roman poet was begging the night hours, figured as swift horses, to slow down for him while he made love to his Corinna or whoever it was. “Delicious blasphemy” or words to that effect was the minister’s appreciative verdict. But Marlowe was an atheist, and Dr. Fitch, I assume, was not.

  I remember, too, the soft, reasonable, almost caressing tone of his voice as he read Mephistophiles’ “But this is hell, nor am I out of it,” shook his white head in awe, and read it again. This whispery sentence was perhaps my first intimation of what hell might be. Of course, like Johnsrud, like many a fine preacher, Dr. Fitch was a histrion.

  You may wonder why Johnsrud and I, when it finally came to the point in June 1933, did not ask Dr. Fitch to marry us. Probably John did, and that was how, on telephoning the church, he got the assistant minister, who told him that Dr. Fitch had had a stroke. “The saddest thing,” the aide confided, in lowered tones, “is that he can’t remember the Lord’s Prayer.” I used that, forty-six years later, in Cannibals and Missionaries for the old Episcopal bishop. In fact, as I have only now learned from Who Was Who, Dr. Fitch did not die for eleven more years. Eleven years without the Lord’s Prayer—hell for a minister.

  Instead of him, for our marriage, we asked the Reverend Karl Reiland, of St. George’s Church on Stuyvesant Square, another orator and rebel of the liberal sort (there was a Vassar connection), but John and I were too unimportant to rate Dr. Reiland, and he passed us on to one of his curates. That is pretty much the wedding described in The Group.

  Ever since I lost my faith, in the convent when I was twelve, I have been an unswerving atheist. Yet I have had good relations with the clergy. There is an attraction on both sides, perhaps there has been something slightly paradoxical, equivocal in the situation. In the case of Dr. Fitch, I suppose I found it piquant to spend Sunday evenings listening to quasi-erotic (and atheistic!) poetry in the book-lined s
tudy of a minister of the gospel. And the fact that it was the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church (today it is not called that) could not fail to excite my aspiring Puget Sound soul. All those mornings spent poring over Vogue opposite my grandmother with her mending in the upstairs bay window had left their mark. I still yearned for admission into the New York society I read about but which was forever barred to me by our position on the map—there was never a word in Vogue about what happened socially in Seattle, scarcely even about San Francisco unless it happened to a Spreckels. Dr. Fitch’s fashionably located fieldstone church must have made me feel I was getting warmer. John and I went once to divine service—or whatever the Presbyterians call it—on a Sunday morning; it was my only experience of the Presbyterian rite, different from the Episcopalian in that the minister made up his own prayer—at any rate the main one—instead of using the set prayers of the prayer book. To someone of Dr. Fitch’s literary gifts, this was a literally heaven-sent opportunity for rolling sonorous vowels and consonants off the tongue. I was struck by the amount of feeling, sounding more deep-dredged than our P.E. General Thanksgiving, that he put into his prayer. Of course, being a performer, he had seen that John and I were there.

  John was initiating me into the mysteries of New York. Whenever I could come down from college, he showed me not only the perennial lovers’ haunts, such as the Barnard Cloisters, the Staten Island Ferry, Fifth Avenue bus-tops, but the new Museum of Modern Art, the Yiddish Café Royal, the Russian Bear and Romany Marie’s, a speakeasy with sawdust on the floor called Julius’s, Barbetta’s restaurant. He got cut-rate tickets at Gray’s for the theatre. We saw Clayton, Jackson, and Durante in a night club called Les Ambassadeurs.

  At Vassar, my Davison friends, Ginny excepted, had rapidly lost interest for me. Even before Thanksgiving, I was tired of hearing about Alice Butler’s boarding-school roommate, and Betty Brereton’s father in the Navy. Yet something had happened between us that condemned us to stick together. It concerned a small, very pretty girl with fine-spun reddish fair hair, green eyes, and a soft childish lisping voice who was literary, like me—her name was Elinor Coleman, and she wrote short stories. She was the only one of us to come from New York, where she had gone to a school called Horace Mann, which she talked about a lot. She was also the only one who had been abroad; last summer she had gone with her mother to Le Touquet, a resort in Normandy, where her mother had made the gaffe of announcing in the hotel dining-room, “Every man who makes water here gets a medal for it.” We all liked Elly a lot, even though I took exception to the poetic prose of her stories, much too dainty for my taste. But we were still friends, all of us, when one afternoon in the dormitory someone—I no longer know who—came to tell us that Elinor Coleman was Jewish. We laughed. If charming golden snub-nosed sheltered Elly resembled anything, it was a girl straight out of a convent.

  You have guessed it; she was Jewish. But we were slow to catch on, the slowest being big fair Alice Butler from New Haven, who just could not contain her guffaws when Elly came home and was confronted by chortling Alice and the rest of us expecting her to join in the merriment. “Well, Elly, ha ha, we hear you’re Jewish, ha ha.” I think I knew almost before she said it, in a quiet voice. “Why, yes, I am.” But the disbelieving laughter continued; big Alice’s was the last to stop. Finally every face had grown as grave as Elly’s. There must have been five of us standing there; Elly had sat down and turned her unsmiling little face up to ours. It was a terrible moment; there was no way we could take those hee-haws back. If I had been the first to believe that she was serious, I was helped by a memory of darling Susie Loewenstein in the convent—red-gold curls, retroussé nose, she had looked quite a lot like Elly. And nobody would have guessed she was Jewish, if it had not been for the name.

  Out of shame, we were forced to stay friends with her. We never again mentioned her being Jewish. Neither did she. But it came up unavoidably, of its own accord, as we got to know her better, as we met her mother and her grandmother, both of whom did look Jewish, especially the grandmother. At Thanks­giving time Elly invited me to stay with her in their apartment in New York—it was on West End Avenue, which, though I did not know it, was then at the height of its fashion among better-off Jews. And as Elly’s house guest, I finally “made it” into New York society—coming-out parties with “name” bands and the young men in dinner jackets, a stag line, and a dining-room of the Hotel Plaza turned into a Childs’ at dawn to serve breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon and flapjacks (flipped before our eyes, just like in a Childs’ window) with maple syrup and sausages. Thousands and thousands of dollars spent on glamour in the first winter of the depression—in Seattle we had never even imagined anything like it. I was in high society, no question. The only thing was that it was Jewish high society.

  The young men I danced with went to Yale and Haverford (no Harvard or Princeton), yet they did not look quite the same as the Yale men Ginny knew who had names like “Huck” Aldrich and Dutton Noble and Dick Goss. These had queer names, some of them, like Justin Bijur, that seemed to go with frizzy hair and pouting lips. Looking back, I am not sure that this was in fact the summit of New York Jewish society; there were no Schiffs or Lewisohns or Seligmanns among my partners. One of the chief beaux of those dances was “Andy” Goodman, whom I later (at second-hand) knew as “Mr. Andrew” at Bergdorf Goodman when my saleslady was sending “upstairs” to the business office to know if I could have a further reduction on the sale price. It was garment money, I guess, and furniture-store money and jewelry money rather than banking money that was clasping me to its shirt front in my long ice-green satin dress. But I was unaware then of all the layers of German-Jewish society and was awed by the heavy spending.

  The Coleman ladies, both widows, were not rich, I could tell, but they dressed well and Elly had nice clothes, even if she didn’t seem to have any close friends in the world she took me into, or, rather, none among the girls. If she had had, I might have met Florine Klingen­stein, who became my friend later, via another route, after I was out of college. But maybe Florine, whose family were English Jews, belonged to a higher reach. It seems to me now that Elly’s mother and grandmother were launching her that year all fitted out, like a spruce little privateer, on the trade routes of upper Jewish matrimony. And the reader can rest assured that she secured her prize. She left Vassar at the end of freshman year.

  Alice Butler and Helen Edmundson left college themselves at the same time, and Betty Brereton found other friends. It strikes me that Elly’s being Jewish was the cause of our break-up. Our mass refusal to believe that she was Jewish made us look like a bunch of anti-Semites; the common memory of that was an embarrassment. Who would not feel the need to separate after such an experience? In any case, that is what happened. By sophomore year, Ginny and I were alone and glad of it.

  One question, though. Shouldn’t I have mentioned my Jewish grandmother? Apparently the appropriateness of doing so did not enter my mind. I never considered it, not even in the privacy of my thoughts. In fact, I remember noting with interest at one of those big dances that I was the only Gentile present.

  It was as though I had forgotten the flock of Morgensterns in my family tree; out of sight, out of mind. By senior year this had changed. Doubtless the rise of Hitler had something to do with it. By senior year I was well aware of having a Jewish grandmother and aware of it—let me be blunt—as something to hide. I excused myself by saying to my conscience that I could not fight on all fronts at once. In Waterbury, whenever I visited Ginny, I had to live down being Irish. To Ginny’s admirers, just out of Yale, it was a rich joke that a girl named Mary McCarthy should be drinking cocktails with them at the country club: Irish were mill workers at the Chase and the Scovill and American Brass plants. There was a dirty song, “Mary Anne McCarthy went out to dig some clams,” though I never understood what was dirty in it: “All that Mary got was oysters,/ All that Mary got was oysters,/ She didn’t get a goddamn clam.” …
Ginny’s men deeply chuckled over that name of mine, and their club-mates, driving me off in their touring-cars, loved it, too. It was not so different from that other ha, ha, ha, of “Elly, we hear you’re Jewish.”

  All this had come as such a surprise to me that I could not take it seriously; in Minneapolis and Seattle, to be Irish was to be among the “gentles,” entitled to look down on Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns. Nonetheless I did not wish to add another handicap to those I already carried. And concealing it was easier because nobody would think of asking a person named McCarthy if she was Jewish. Seattle, which knew my history, was far away.

  Not far enough, however. A bad moment came when my friend Frani Blough from Pittsburgh announced that she was planning to take a trip to Seattle with her mother the autumn after we graduated and, naturally, expected to meet my grandparents. For months before the threatened visit my guilty imagination was tortured by pictures of that meeting. I was unable to decide how Jewish my grandmother looked or didn’t look. I reviewed her glinting dark eye, her very slightly hooked, “aquiline,” nose, her still-black hair, her rouge. How would that register with Mrs. Blough and her daughter? “Why didn’t she tell us, Frani?” I could hear the dialogue begin. “As I said to your father, nobody would have thought the worse of her … ”

  I was too much ashamed of these worries to confide them in anyone—John, for instance, who by that time had met my grand­parents and would have been able to give me his objective estimate of whether my grandmother would look Jewish or not to Frani. I could not bring myself to say a word to him. My fears were the more shameful in that Frani, as I knew, was free of prejudices. That was not the problem. It was simply that if she recognized my grandmother’s Jewish traits—assuming they were recognizable—she would wonder at my never having mentioned that detail in the whole course of our friendship. And she would be right. It would be useless to plead that the subject had never happened to come up, that if I had been asked, I would have told, which was true: I would not have gone so far as to deny Augusta Preston, or, rather, her Jewishness, outright, like Peter in the Garden, whom I could never forget—“I know not the man.” Still, that did not make me better, only less bad than some famously craven apostle.