Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (21 page)

My grandfather was enthusiastic about “Marcus Tullius.” He declared, quite seriously, that it was the best play he had ever seen. I understand why a lawyer would like it, no doubt, he was on Cicero’s side.
We
stood up and clapped long and loud, and as I pick out his spare figure now in the audience, another piece in the pattern falls into place. Caesar, of course, was my grandfather: just, laconic, severe, magnanimous, detached. These are the very adjectives I might use to describe Lawyer Preston, who was bald into the bargain. Catiline was my McCarthy ancestors—the wild streak in my heredity, the wreckers on the Nova Scotia coast. To my surprise, I chose Caesar and the rule of law. This does not mean that the seesaw between these two opposed forces terminated, one might say, in fact, that it only began during my last years in the Seminary when I recognized the beauty of an ablative absolute and of a rigorous code of conduct. I was not prepared for this recognition
;
it was like an unexpected meeting. That is the reason, I suppose, for the flood of joyful emotion released in me by Caesar and the Latin language and for the fact that I feel it still.

The injustices my brothers and I had suffered in our childhood had made me a rebel against authority, but they had also prepared me to fall in love with justice, the first time I encountered it. I loved my grandfather from the beginning, but the conflicts between us (the reader will hear of them presently) somewhat obscured this feeling, which poured out with a rush on Caesar, who, in real life, would have been as strict as my grandfather (“Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”), but whom I did not have to deal with personally.

In the Seminary, we had Sacred Study under the widow of a bishop. As a Catholic, I had come to know the New Testament well—it is not true that Catholics do not read the Bible. In the Episcopalian school, we concentrated on the Old Testament. The sentence that still rings in my ears is one from Micah. “And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” This moved me powerfully when I first heard it in Mrs. Keator’s classroom
(
I believe she also wrote it on the blackboard), and it seemed to me that a new voice had spoken, the plain Protestant voice of true religion.

At the same time, I took advantage of the fact that I was still, officially, a Catholic to get out of going on Sundays with the rest of the girls to the Episcopal church, where the dean regularly delivered an hour-and-a-half sermon. The Catholic mother of some of our small day pupils took me with her to the Catholic church, where the noon Mass lasted only fifteen minutes. The school chapel services, morning and evening, I greatly enjoyed, in spite of being an atheist. I loved the hymns and the litanies and hearing our principal intone at nightfall: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”

My grandfather, during this period, used to express the hope that I would be a lawyer. But I still dreamed of becoming an actress; I had starred in three school plays, and the summer after I graduated from Annie Wright, the family let me go to drama school (the Cornish School in Seattle), which was a sorry disappointment to my ambitions, for I only learned eurhythmics and played the wordless part of a pirate in a scene that, for some reason, was supposed to take place under water: we pirates, all girls, made strange, rhythmic movements to create a subaqueous effect. In college, my hopes revived, I was in several plays and took the role of Leontes in
A Winter’s Tale
during my senior year. But the actor I later married came to see my performance and told me the truth: I had no talent. I had begun to feel this myself, so without further discussion I gave up the dream that had been with me thirteen years, ever since I had been Iris in a parochial school play about the kingdom of the flowers. I started to write instead, which did not interest me nearly so much, chiefly because it came easier. At the very time I was renouncing the stage, unknown to me Kevin at the University of Minnesota was beginning his acting career.

Yellowstone Park

T
HE SUMMER I WAS
fifteen I was invited to go to Montana by Ruth and Betty Bent, a pair of odd sisters who had come that year to our boarding school in Tacoma from a town called Medicine Springs, where their father was a federal judge. The answer from my grandparents was going to be no, I foresaw. I was too young (they would say) to travel by train alone, just as I was too young (they said) to go out with boys or accept rides in automobiles or talk to male callers on the telephone. This notion in my grandparents’ minds was poisoning my life with shame, for mentally I was old for my age—as I was also accustomed to hearing from grownups in the family circle. I was so much older in worldly wisdom than
they
were that when my grandmother and my great-aunt read
The Well of Loneliness,
they had to come to ask me what the women in the book “did.” “Think of it,” nodded my great-aunt, reviewing the march of progress, “nowadays a fifteen-year-old girl knows a thing like that.” At school, during study hall, I wrote stories about prostitutes with “eyes like dirty dishwater,” which my English teacher read and advised me to send to H. L. Mencken for criticism. Yet despite all this—or possibly because of it—I was still being treated as a child who could hardly be trusted to take a streetcar without a grownup in attendance. The argument that “all the others did it” cut no ice with my grandfather, whose lawyer’s mind was too precise to deal in condonation. He conceived that he had a weighty trust in my upbringing, since I had come to him as an orphan, the daughter of his only daughter.

Yet like many old-fashioned trustees, he had a special, one might say an occupational, soft spot. Anything educational was a lure to him. Salesmen of encyclopedias and stereopticon sets and Scribner’s classics found him an easy prey in his Seattle legal offices, where he rose like a trout to the fly or a pickerel to the spoon. He reached with alacrity for his pocketbook at the sight of an extra on the school bill. I had had music lessons, special coaching in Latin, tennis lessons, riding lessons, diving lessons; that summer, he was eager for me to have golf lessons. Tickets for civic pageants, theater and concert subscription series, library memberships were treated by him as necessities, not to be paid for out of my allowance, which I was free to devote to freckle creams and Christmas Night perfume. Some of the books I read and plays I saw made other members of the family raise their eyebrows, but my grandfather would permit no interference. He looked tolerantly over his glasses as he saw me stretched out on the sofa with a copy of
Count Bruga
or
The Hard-Boiled Virgin.
I had been styling myself an atheist and had just announced, that spring, that I was going east to college. The right of the mind to develop according to its own lights was a prime value to my grandfather, who was as rigid in applying this principle as he was strait-laced in social matters.

The previous summer had been made miserable for me by his outlandish conduct. At the resort we always went to in the Olympic Mountains (my grandmother, who did not care for the outdoors, always stayed home in Seattle), he and I had suddenly become a center of attention. The old judges and colonels, the young married women whose husbands came up for the week end, the young college blades, the hostess with the Sweetheart haircut who played the piano for dancing, the very prep-school boys were looking on me, I knew, with pity because of the way my grandfather was acting—never letting me out of his sight, tapping me on the dance floor to tell me it was my bedtime, standing on the dock with a pair of binoculars when a young man managed to take me rowing for fifteen clocked minutes on the lake. One time, when a man from New York named Mr. Jones wanted me to take his picture with a salmon, my grandfather had leapt up from the bridge table and thundered after us down the woodland path. And what did he discover?—me snapping Mr. Jones’ picture on a rustic bridge, that was all. What did he think could have happened, anyway, at eleven o’clock in the morning, fifty feet from the veranda where he and his cronies were playing cards? The whole hotel knew what he thought and was laughing at us. A boy did imitations of Mr. Jones holding the salmon with one hand and hugging me with the other, then dropping the salmon and fleeing in consternation when my grandfather appeared.

My grandfather did not care; he never cared what people thought of him, so long as he was doing his duty. And he expected me to be perfectly happy, taking walks up to the waterfall with him and the judges’ and colonels’ ladies; measuring the circumference of Douglas firs; knocking the ball around the five-hole golf course; doing the back dive from the springboard while he looked on, approving, with folded arms; playing the player piano by myself all afternoon: torn rolls of “Tea for Two” and “Who” and one called “Sweet Child” that a young man with a Marmon roadster had sung into my radiant ear on the dance floor until my grandfather scared him off.

Sweet child, indeed! I felt I could not stand another summer like that. I had to go to Montana, and my grandfather, I knew, would let me if only I could persuade him that the trip would be broadening and instructive; that is, if in my eyes it would be profoundly boring.

It did not take divination on my part to guess what would fit these requirements: Yellowstone Park. The very yawn I had to stifle at the thought of geysers, Old Faithful, colored rock formations, Indians, grizzly bears, pack horses, tents, rangers, parties of tourists with cameras and family sedans, told me I had the bait to dangle before his kindly-severe grey eyes. It was too bad, I remarked casually, in the course of my last school letter home, that the trip was out of the question: the girls had been planning to take me on a tour of Yellowstone Park. That was all that was needed. It was as simple as selling him a renewal of his subscription to the
National Geographic.
The ease of it somehow depressed me, casting a pall over the adventure; one of the most boring things about adolescence is the knowledge of how people can be worked.

I
ought
to go to Montana, said my grandfather decidedly, after he had looked up Judge Bent in a legal directory and found that he really existed: a thing which slightly surprised me, for in my representations to my grandparents, I always had the sensation of lying. Whatever I told them was usually so blurred and glossed, in the effort to meet their approval (for, aside from anything else, I was fond of them and tried to accommodate myself to their perspective), that except when answering a direct question I hardly knew whether what I was saying was true or false. I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into terms they could understand. To keep matters straight with my conscience, I shrank, whenever possible, from the lie absolute, just as, from a sense of precaution, I shrank from the plain truth. Yellowstone Park was a typical instance. I had not utterly lied when I wrote that sentence. I entertained, let us say, a vague hope of going there and had spoken to the Bent girls about it in a tentative, darkling manner,
i.e.,
“My family hopes we can see Yellowstone.” To which the girls replied, with the same discreet vagueness, “Umm.”

At home, it was settled for me to entrain with the girls shortly after school closed, stay three weeks, which would give us time to “do” the Park, and come back by myself. It would only be two nights, my grandfather pointed out to my grandmother; and Judge Bent could put me on the train in care of the conductor. The two girls nodded demurely, and Ruth, the elder, winked at me, as my grandfather repeated these instructions.

I was mortified. As usual, my grandfather’s manner seemed calculated to expose me in front of my friends, to whom I posed as a practiced siren. My whole life was a lie, it often appeared to me, from beginning to end, for if I was wilder than my family knew, I was far tamer than my friends could imagine, and with them, too, as with my family, I was constantly making up stories, pretending that a ring given me by a great-aunt was a secret engagement ring, that I went out dancing regularly to the Olympic Hotel, that a literary boy who wrote to me was in love with me—the usual tales, but I did not know that. All I knew was that there was one central, compromising fact about me that had to be hidden from my friends and that burned me like the shirt of the Centaur: I could not bear to have anyone find out that I was considered too young to go out with boys.

But every word, every gesture of my grandfather’s seemed designed to proclaim this fact. I perceived an allusion to it in the fussy way he saw us off at the Seattle depot, putting us in our drawing room with many cautions not to speak to strangers, tipping the Pullman porter and having a “word” with the conductor, while my grandmother pressed a lacy handkerchief to her eyes and my uncle grinned and the old family gardener and handy man advised me not to take any wooden nickels. During this degrading ordeal, the Bent girls remained polite and deferential, agreeing to everything (it was always
my
tendency to argue). But as soon as the train pulled out of the station, Ruth Bent coolly summoned the conductor and exchanged our drawing room for two upper berths. They always did this on boarding the train, she explained; two could fit very comfortably into an upper, and the money they got back was clear profit.

Ruth Bent was the boldest person, for her age, I had ever met. She was seventeen, two years older than her sister, and she looked, to me, about forty. She had reddish-brown frizzy hair and she wore earrings, eyeglasses, picture hats, printed chiffon dresses, a deep purplish red lipstick, and Golliwog perfume. Her voice was deep, like a man’s; her skin was swarthy and freckled; her eyebrows, shaped with tweezers, were a dark chocolate color. She had a good figure, small, with a sort of shimmying movement to it. In school she had the name of being fast, which was based partly on her clothes and partly on the direct stare of her reddish-brown eyes, very wide open and rounded by the thick lenses of her glasses so that the whites had the look of boiled eggs. She made me think of a college widow.