Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (12 page)

It was a measure of Madame MacIllvra’s intelligence, or of her knowledge of the world, that she did not, even then, when my grandfather’s soul hung, as it were, pleadingly between us, suggest the obvious, the orthodox solution. It would have been ridiculous for me to try to convert my grandfather. Indeed, as it turned out later, I might have dropped him into the pit with my innocent traps (the religious books left open beside his cigar cutter, or “Grandpa, won’t you take me to Mass this Sunday? I am so tired of going alone”). “Pray for him, my dear,” said Madame MacIllvra, sighing, “and I will speak to Madame Barclay. The point may be open to interpretation. She may remember something in the Fathers of the Church....”

A few days later, Madame MacIllvra summoned me to her office. Not only Madame Barclay, the learned prefect of studies, but the librarian and even the convent chaplain had been called in. The Benedictine view, it seemed, differed sharply from the Dominican, but a key passage in Saint Athanasius seemed to point to my grandfather’s safety. The unbeliever, according to this generous authority, was not to be damned unless he rejected the true Church with sufficient knowledge and full consent of the will. Madame MacIllvra handed me the book, and I read the passage over. Clearly, he was saved. Sufficient knowledge he had not. The Church was foreign to him; he knew it only distantly, only by repute, like the heathen Hiawatha, who had heard strange stories of missionaries, white men in black robes who bore a Cross. Flinging my arms about Madame MacIllvra, I blessed for the first time the insularity of my grandfather’s character, the long-jawed, shut face it turned toward ideas and customs not its own. I resolved to dismantle at once the little altar in my bedroom at home, to leave off grace before meals, elaborate fasting, and all ostentatious practices of devotion, lest the light of my example shine upon him too powerfully and burn him with sufficient knowledge to a crisp.

Since I was a five-day boarder, this project had no time to grow stale, and the next Sunday, at home, my grandfather remarked on the change in me, which my feeling for the dramatic had made far from unobtrusive. “I hope,” he said in a rather stern and ironical voice, “that you aren’t using the
irreligious
atmosphere of this house as an excuse for backsliding. There will be time enough when you are older to change your beliefs if you want to.” The unfairness of this rebuke delighted me. It put me solidly in the tradition of the saints and martyrs; Our Lord had known something like it, and so had Elsie Dinsmore at the piano. Nevertheless, I felt quite angry and slammed the door of my room behind me as I went in to sulk. I almost wished that my grandfather would die at once, so that God could furnish him with the explanation of my behavior—certainly he would have to wait till the next life to get it; in this one he would only have seen in it an invasion of his personal liberties.

As though to reward me for my silence, the following Wednesday brought me the happiest moment of my life. In order to understand my happiness, which might otherwise seem perverse, the reader must yield himself to the spiritual atmosphere of the convent. If he imagines that the life we led behind those walls was bare, thin, cold, austere, sectarian, he will have to revise his views; our days were a tumult of emotion. In the first place, we ate, studied, and slept in that atmosphere of intrigue, rivalry, scandal, favoritism, tyranny, and revolt that is common to all girls’ boarding schools and that makes “real” life afterward seem a long and improbable armistice, a cessation of the true anguish of activity. But above the tinkling of this girlish operetta, with its clink-clink of changing friendships, its plot of smuggled letters, notes passed from desk to desk, secrets, there sounded in the Sacred Heart convent heavier, more solemn strains, notes of a great religious drama, which was also all passion and caprice, in which salvation was the issue and God’s rather sultanlike and elusive favor was besought, scorned, despaired of, connived for, importuned. It was the paradoxical element in Catholic doctrine that lent this drama its suspense. The Divine Despot we courted could not be bought, like a piece of merchandise, by long hours at the
prie-dieu,
faithful attendance at the sacraments, obedience, reverence toward one’s superiors. These solicitations helped, but it might well turn out that the worst girl in the school, whose pretty, haughty face wore rouge and a calm, closed look that advertised even to us younger ones some secret knowledge of men, was in the dark of her heart another Mary of Egypt, the strumpet saint in our midst. Such notions furnished a strange counterpoint to discipline; surely the Mother Superior never could have expelled a girl without recalling, with a shade of perplexity, the profligate youth of Saint Augustine and of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

This dark-horse doctrine of salvation, with all its worldly wisdom and riddling charm, was deep in the idiom of the convent. The merest lay sister could have sustained with spiritual poise her end of a conversation on the purification through sin with Mr. Auden, Herr Kafka, or
Gospodin
Dostoevski; and Madame MacIllvra, while she would have held it bad taste to bow down, like Father Zossima, before the murder in Dmitri Karamazov’s heart, would certainly have had him in for a series of long, interesting talks in her office.

Like all truly intellectual women, these were in spirit romantic desperadoes. They despised organizational heretics of the stamp of Luther and Calvin, but the great atheists and sinners were the heroes of the costume picture they taught as a subject called history. Marlowe, Baudelaire—above all, Byron—glowed like terrible stars above their literature courses. Little girls of ten were reciting “The Prisoner of Chillon” and hearing stories of Claire Clairmont, Caroline Lamb, the Segatti, and the swim across the Hellespont. Even M. Voltaire enjoyed a left-handed popularity. The nuns spoke of him with horror and admiration mingled: “A great mind, an unconquerable spirit—and what fearful use they were put to.” In Rousseau, an unbuttoned, middle-class figure, they had no interest whatever.

These infatuations, shared by the pupils, were brought into line with official Catholic opinion by a variety of stratagems. The more highly educated nuns were able to accept the damnation of these great Luciferian spirits. A simple young nun, on the other hand, who played baseball and taught arithmetic to the sixth and seventh grades, used to tell her pupils that she personally was convinced that Lord Byron in his last hours must have made an act of contrition.

It was not, therefore, unusual that a line from the works of this dissipated author should have been waiting for us on the blackboard of the eighth-grade rhetoric classroom when we filed in that Wednesday morning which remains still memorable to me.
“Zoe mou, sas agapo”
: the words of Byron’s last assurance to the Maid of Athens stood there in Madame Barclay’s French-looking script, speaking to us of the transiency of the passions. To me, as it happened, it spoke a twice-told tale. I had read the poem before, alone in my grandfather’s library; indeed, I knew it by heart, and I rather resented the infringement on my private rights in it, the democratization of the poem which was about to take place. Soon, Madame Barclay’s pointer was rapping from word to word: “My ... life ... I ... love ... you,” she sharply translated. When the pointer started back for its second trip, I retreated into hauteur and began drawing a picture of the girl who sat next to me. Suddenly the pointer cracked across my writing tablet.

“You’re just like Lord Byron, brilliant but unsound.”

I heard the pointer being set down and the drawing being torn crisply twice across, but I could not look up. I had never felt so flattered in my life. Throughout the rest of the class, I sat motionless, simulating meekness, while my classmates shot me glances of wonder, awe, and congratulation, as though I had suddenly been struck by a remarkable disease, or been canonized, or transfigured. Madame Barclay’s pronouncement, which I kept repeating to myself under my breath, had for us girls a kind of final and majestic certainty. She was the severest and most taciturn of our teachers. Her dark brows met in the middle; her skin was a pure olive; her upper lip had a faint mustache; she was the iron and authority of the convent. She tolerated no infractions, overlooked nothing, was utterly and obdurately fair, had no favorites; but her rather pointed face had the marks of suffering, as though her famous discipline had scored it as harshly as one of our papers. She had a bitter and sarcastic wit, and had studied, it was said, at the Sorbonne. Before this day, I had once or twice dared to say to myself that Madame Barclay liked me. Her dark, quite handsome eyes would sometimes move in my direction as her lips prepared an aphorism or a satiric gibe. Yet hardly had I estimated the look, weighed and measured it to store it away in my memory book of requited affections, when a stinging penalty would recall me from my dream and I could no longer be sure. Now, however, there was no doubt left. The reproof was a declaration of love as plain as the sentence on the blackboard, which shimmered slightly before my eyes. My happiness was a confused exaltation in which the fact that I was Lord Byron and the fact that I was loved by Madame Barclay, the most puzzling nun in the convent, blended in a Don Juanesque triumph.

In the refectory that noon, publicity was not wanting to enrich this moment. Insatiable, I could hardly wait for the week end, to take Madame Barclay’s words home as though they had been a prize. With the generosity of affluence, I spoke to myself of sharing this happiness, this honor, with my grandfather. Surely,
this
would make up to him for any worry or difficulty I had caused him. At the same time, it would have the practical effect of explaining me a little to him. Phrases about my prototype rang in my head: “that unfortunate genius,” “that turbulent soul,” “that gifted and erratic nature.”

My grandfather turned dark red when he heard the news. His forehead grew knotty with veins; he swore; he looked strange and young; it was the first time I had ever seen him angry. Argument and explanation were useless. For my grandfather, history had interposed no distance between Lord Byron and himself. Though the incestuous poet had died forty years before my grandfather was born, the romantic perspective was lacking. That insularity of my grandfather’s that kept him intimate with morals and denied the reality of the exotic made him judge the poet as he judged himself or one of his neighbors—that is, on the merit of his actions. He was on the telephone at once, asking the Mother Superior in a thundering, courtroom voice what right one of her sisters had to associate his innocent granddaughter with that degenerate blackguard, Byron. On Monday, Madame Barclay, with tight-drawn lips, told her class that she had a correction to make: Mary McCarthy did not resemble Lord Byron in any particular; she was neither brilliant, loose-living, nor unsound.

The interviews between my grandfather and Madame MacIllvra came to an end. To that remarkable marriage of minds the impediment had at last been discovered. But from this time on, Madame Barclay’s marks of favor to me grew steadily more distinct, while the look of suffering tightened on her face, till some said she had cancer (a theory supported by the yellowness of her skin) and some said she was being poisoned by an antipathy to the Mother Superior.

This account is highly fictionalized. A Jesuit did preach such a sermon, and I really became concerned for my grandfather’s soul; I was still very devout, in a childish way, and extremely suggestible. I suppose I was still “nervous” as a result of my Minneapolis experiences. I did take the problem to the Acting Mother Superior, who was finally able to reassure me with the promise that my grandfather could be saved if he did not know the Catholic Church was the true Church. This was “invincible ignorance.” The nun I call Madame Barclay did tell me I was like Byron, brilliant but unsound. But what provoked her to say it, I don’t remember. And I did tell my grandfather, and he did demand an apology from the Acting Mother Superior, which made me utterly furious. In short, the story is true in substance, but the details have been invented or guessed at.

“My grandfather,” I say, “reduced his prospects of salvation every time he sat down in the Presbyterian church.” He cannot have reduced them very greatly, since I do not recall his ever attending church, except for weddings and funerals. But when I asked him what his religion was, he said he was a Presbyterian. I was the only churchgoer in the family, every Sunday the car took me to Mass and brought me home again. When I left Minneapolis, my grandmother McCarthy had supplied me with some works of Catholic propaganda which she instructed me to leave about the house, in the hope of effecting a conversion. But I soon saw this was out of the question. The reader may wonder why the priest’s sermon did not cause me to worry about my grandmother Preston, too. The answer is simple; she was Jewish. In other words, she had not been baptized.

This technical point about baptism was what I had seized on in the priest’s sermon. Possibly he had touched only incidentally on Protestants, but in doing so he had riveted my attention. His theme may have been that the sacrament of Baptism was at once wonderful and dangerous; it conferred duties as well as privileges. Only a baptized person could be saved, but if such a person (e.g., a Protestant) refused to avail himself of the grace conferred by the sacrament, he could be damned simply for that. I knew, of course, that anyone
—i.e.,
anyone who had been baptized—could be saved, no matter what he had done or left undone, by reciting an Act of Contrition in his last moments. But my grandfather did not
know
the Act of Contrition: “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault ...”

True repentance would doubtless have sufficed, but as a child I thought you would have to start saying the Act itself as rapidly as possible if you were hit, say, by an automobile while in a state of mortal sin. Great stress was laid on the prescribed forms by the priests and nuns who taught us. I speak of “an improper baptism.” We had been studying about this in our Catechism class. Baptism was the only sacrament that could be administered by a lay person, could be administered, in fact, by anyone, providing it was done correctly and that the person had the
intention
to baptize. (You could not be baptized accidentally.) But if a mistake were made, if the prescribed form were not followed, the baptism did not “take.” Thus not all Protestant baptisms were recognized by the Church. I have forgotten many of the finer points, but I know it was essential to use water (ice would not do), and I remember our taking up such curiously hypothetical questions as: “If a Mohammedan administered baptism would it be valid?” The answer, I believe, would be: “Yes, providing it was done correctly, and that the Mohammedan had the intention of baptizing.”