Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (32 page)

Aunt Margaret with Preston, Mary, Kevin, Sheridan

On the pony, Preston and Sheridan, standing, Mary and Kevin

Mary on her way to college.

How I Grew

Mary McCarthy

To my grandfather, Harold Preston;
my teachers, Helen Sandison and Anna Kitchel;
my brother, Kevin McCarthy;
my son, Reuel Wilson;
and my husband, James West.
With thanks.

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Image Gallery

Brief Biographical Glossary of Lesser-Known Figures

1

I
WAS BORN
as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912. Throughout the thirteen years in between, obviously, I must have had thoughts and mental impressions, perhaps even some sort of specifically cerebral life that I no longer remember. Almost from the beginning, I had been aware of myself as “bright.” And from a very early time reasoning was natural to me, as it is to a great many children, doubtless to animals as well. What is Pavlov’s conditioned reflex but an inference drawn by a dog? The activities of incessant induction and deduction are characteristically childlike (“Why don’t we say ‘Deliver us to evil,’” I am supposed to have asked, “the way Mama does in Frederick and Nelson’s when she tells them to deliver it to Mrs. McCarthy?”) and slack off rather than intensify as we grow older. My “cute” question, quoted by my mother in a letter to her mother-in-law (apparently the last she wrote), may have been prompted by our evening prayers: did we already say the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary” besides “Now I lay me”? At six, I was too young to have had a rosary.

Someone, of course, was “hearing” our prayers; my father, probably, for I speak of “Mama” in the third person. It is Daddy I must be questioning; Gertrude, our nurse, was too ignorant. And now, writing it down more than sixty-five years later, all of a sudden I doubt the innocence of that question. There was premeditation behind it, surely; playacting. I knew perfectly well that children could not pray to be delivered to evil and was only being clever—my vice already—supplying my parents with “Mary’s funny sayings” to meet a sensed demand.

It is possible (to be fair) that the question “Why don’t we … ?” had honestly occurred to me in Frederick’s listening to Mama order and being surprised to have “deliver,” an old bedtime acquaintance, pop up in the middle of a department store. Or, conversely, as we intoned the Lord’s Prayer, my mind may have raced back to Mama at Frederick’s. Which had priority, which bulked larger in my teeming experience, which name had I heard more often, God’s or Frederick and Nelson’s? But if, in one way or another, the question had honestly occurred to me, the answer could not have been slow to follow, without recourse to a grown-up. No, that inquiry was
saved up
for an audience,
rehearsed.
For my father’s ear, I was not so much reasoning as artfully mimicking the reasoning process of a child. In any case, as far as I know, this is the last of my cute sayings on record. After the flu, there was no one there to record them any more. Nobody was writing to her mother-in-law of the words and deeds of the four of us. With the abrupt disappearance of the demand, the supply no doubt dried up. Soon our evening prayers—we knelt in a row now, wearing scratchy pajamas with feet in them—underwent expansion. To “God bless Mama and Daddy” something new was added: “Eternal rest grant unto them, o Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon them … ”

From an early time, too, I had been a great reader. My father had taught me, on his lap, before I started school—
A Child’s Garden of Verses
and his favorite, Eugene Field, the newspaperman poet. But in the new life instituted for us after our parents’ death almost no books were permitted—to save electricity, or because books could give us “ideas” that would make us too big for our boots. A few volumes had come with us, I think, from Seattle to Minneapolis; those would have been
Black Beauty,
the “autobiography” of a horse, by Anna Sewell,
Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates, Heidi,
and Dante and
Don Quixote
illustrated by Doré, but these two were for looking at the pictures on the living-room floor while a grown-up watched, not for reading. Someone, not our parents, was responsible for
Fabiola, the Church of the Catacombs,
by Cardinal Wiseman, and I remember a little storybook, which soon disappeared, about some Belgian children on a tow-path along a canal escaping from Germans—was it taken away out of deference to the feelings of our great-aunt’s husband, the horrible Uncle Myers, who was of German “extraction”? At any rate these are all the books I recall from the Minneapolis household, not counting Uncle Myers’ own copy of
Uncle Remus,
Peter Rabbit (outgrown), and a set of the Campfire Girls (borrowed).

Yet the aunts must have had a
Lives of the Saints,
full of graphic accounts of every manner of martyrdom, and where did I come upon a dark-greenish volume called
The Nuremberg Stove,
about a porcelain stove and illustrated with German-looking woodcuts? And another story with a lot about P. P. Rubens and a “Descent from the Cross” in Antwerp Cathedral? Not in school, certainly; the parochial school did not give us books, only readers that had stories in them. I can still almost see the fifth- or sixth-grade reader that had Ruskin’s “The King of the Yellow River,” with pages repeating themselves and the end missing—a fairly common binder’s error, but for a child afflicted with book hunger, it was a deprivation of fiendish cruelty, worse than the arithmetic manual that had the wrong answers in the back. Those school readers also gave you “tastes” of famous novels, very tantalizing, too, like the chapter about Maggie and Tom Tulliver from the start of
The Mill on the Floss,
which kept me in suspense for more than twenty years, Becky and Amelia Sedley leaving Miss Pinkerton’s, a sample of
Jane Eyre.

Oh! Among the books at home I was nearly forgetting
The Water-Babies,
by Charles Kingsley (illustrated, with a gilt-and-green cover), which must have come from my father’s library—I can feel a consistent manly taste, like an
ex libris,
marking little Tom, the sooty chimney-sweep who runs away from his cruel master and falls into a river, Don Quixote and his nag, Dante and Virgil, and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, who “sailed off in a wooden shoe” one night, “Sailed on a river of crystal light,/ Into a sea of dew.” (
Black Beauty,
on the other hand, which was a bit on the goody side, had surely been our mother’s.)

When he died, my father (another Tantalus effect) had been reading me a long fairy tale that we never finished. It was about seven brothers who were changed into ravens and their little sister, left behind when they flew away, who was given the task of knitting seven little shirts if she wanted them to change back into human shape again. At the place we stopped reading, she had failed to finish one little sleeve. I would have given my immortal soul to know what happened then, but in all the books of fairy tales that have come my way since, I have not been able to find that story—only its first and second cousins, like “The Seven Ravens” and “The Six Swans.” And what became of the book itself, big with a wine-colored cover? Was it left behind on the train to Minneapolis when we all got sick with the flu? Or did our keepers promptly put it away as unsuitable, like my little gold beauty-pins? In Minneapolis we were not allowed fairy stories any more interesting than “The Three Bears.”

But stop! That cannot be true. Certainly I read “The Little Match Girl” and “The Snow Queen,” with the little robber girl I loved so and the piece of ice in little Kay’s eye that even then I understood to be a symbol, in other words over my head. There was a good deal of that in Hans Andersen—the feeling of morals lurking like fish eyes peering out from between stones in the depths of clear water. Except in “The Snow Queen,” where the furs and the sleigh and the reindeer and Gerda and the robber girl made up for everything, I disliked those lurking morals; I hated “The Little Match Girl.” And I was not fond of “The Ugly Duckling” either; I sensed a pious cheat there—not all children who were “different” grew up into swans. Was that why I was allowed to have Andersen, like a refined sort of punishment, in my room? And they let me have another book, printed in big type on thick deckle-edged paper and possibly not by Andersen, that contained a frightening tale about a figure named Ole Luk Oie who threw sand in people’s eyes just as they were going to sleep. Not the same as the sandman; more of a bogey. Burying my head under the covers, for nights running I used to scare myself in my pillow-less (better for the posture) bed with this runic fiction, repeating the words “Ole Luk Oie” like a horrible spell. And in the morning, sure enough, my finger found grainy particles stuck to my eyelashes showing that he had been there. But maybe, if you knew Danish, the story was more boring than spooky, and the dread sand in the eyes was just a symbol of something in society.