Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (16 page)

And I did not feel a bit sorry, even on Thursday morning, kneeling in my white veil at the altar railing to receive the Host. Behind me, the nuns, I knew, were rejoicing, as good nuns should, over the reclamation of a soul. Madame MacIllvra’s blue eyes were probably misting. Beside me, Pork Barrel was bursting her seams with envy. Louise (I had just informed her in the veiling room) had invited me to spend the night with her during Christmas vacation. My own chief sensation was one of detached surprise at how far I had come from my old mainstays, as once, when learning to swim, I had been doing the dead-man’s float and looked back, raising my doused head, to see my water wings drifting, far behind me, on the lake’s surface.

This story is so true to our convent life that I find it almost impossible to sort out the guessed-at and the half-remembered from the undeniably real. The music master, the old snoring nun, the English actor reciting “Lepanto,” the embroidery,
A Tale of Two Cities, Emma,
Lady Spindle (the other character in this playlet was Mrs. Dwindle), all this is just as it was. I am not absolutely certain of the chronology; the whole drama of my loss of faith took place during a very short space of time, and I believe it was during a retreat. The conversations, as I have warned the reader, are mostly fictional, but their tone and tenor are right. That was the way the priests talked, and those, in general, were the arguments they brought to bear on me. Even though I wrote this myself, I smile in startled recognition as I read it.

The proofs of God’s existence are drawn from the Catholic Encyclopedia. My own questions are a mixture of memory and conjecture. One bit of dialogue was borrowed from an Episcopal clergyman: “There’s a little gap that we have to fill with faith.” My son, “Reuel, came home one day and quoted this from his Sacred Study teacher. I laughed (it was so like the way
my
priests had talked) and put it in.

Actually, it now seems to me that my interview with the first priest took place not in the convent parlor but in the old priest’s study. Where this study was and how I got there, I have no idea. As for the second priest, whom I call Father Heeney, this may have been the missionary father from “The Blackguard” or it may have been someone else whom I have mixed up with him. All I really remember was that
his
attitude toward my supposed doubts was much more brusque and summary than the old priest’s. He did not take them seriously, which annoyed me, partly for reasons of vanity, but mainly because, by this time, they
had
become serious and I was frightened. This priest, if it was the same one, had small patience with girls.

The McCarthy family always held my grandfather responsible for the “atheistic ideas” I had imbibed in Seattle, yet of my three brothers, all of whom were secured from his influence, only one, the youngest, remains in the Church. In my mother’s generation, the Church made three recruits. All the Protestant daughters-in-law became converts, Uncle Florrie, Aunt Esther’s husband, held out to the end—he would drive his family to Sunday Mass and stay outside, himself, in the car, exciting wonder and envy in the children. In my generation, at least three (I am not sure about my cousins) were lost to the Faith.

Contrary to what the McCarthys believed, my grandfather Preston made it his duty to see that I kept up my religion. It was a pact between us that I would continue to go to church on Sundays until I was a little older. But he never questioned my sincerity. When I told him I had lost my faith (and by then it was true), he did not treat it as a dodge for getting out of Mass. Most families, I think, would have done this. That a person, even a child, was acting from conscientious motives seemed to him natural and fitting. His fair-mindedness rested on this assumption. Many years later, when I became a radical in my early twenties, he received this news with the same searching gravity; the car that had once taken me to church, or, rather, its replacement, now took me to meetings at the Labor Temple, by my grandfather’s orders.

I shall describe the Preston family life in subsequent chapters. At this period, while I was still in the convent, I was something of an alien at home. My school friends were all Catholics, and their parents, for the most part, were unknown to my grandparents, who were separated from them not only by religion but by the difference of a generation. None of these children ever came to my house, though I was taken to theirs. My chief interest was the stage
;
the wish to play a part and attract notice, together
w
ith a quick memory, had persuaded me that I was born for the footlights. At home, I was always giving recitations and inviting the Preston family to listen to them. My favorite pieces were “Lord Ullin’s “Daughter” and “The Inchcape “Rock.” My new uncles and my aunt and grandmother found these recitations hilarious, but for a long time I did not suspect this. Then I would not recite for them any more.

To the family, I was a curio, and so I was looked on by some of the girls in the convent, as the reader will see in the next chapter. As a child, I had had no self-consciousness; my seriousness prevented me from seeing that other people might be laughing at me. Now I had to learn this.

Names

A
NNA LYONS, MARY LOUISE
Lyons, Mary von Phul, Emilie von Phul, Eugenia McLellan, Marjorie McPhail, Marie-Louise L’Abbé, Mary Danz, Julia Dodge, Mary Fordyce Blake, Janet Preston—these were the names (I can still tell them over like a rosary) of some of the older girls in the convent: the Virtues and Graces. The virtuous ones wore wide blue or green moire good-conduct ribbons, bandoleer-style, across their blue serge uniforms; the beautiful ones wore rouge and powder or at least were reputed to do so. Our class, the eighth grade, wore pink ribbons (I never got one myself) and had names like Patricia (“Pat”) Sullivan, Eileen Donohoe, and Joan Kane. We were inelegant even in this respect; the best name we could show, among us, was Phyllis (“Phil”) Chatham, who boasted that her father’s name, Ralph, was pronounced “Rafe” as in England.

Names had a great importance for us in the convent, and foreign names, French, German, or plain English (which, to us, were foreign, because of their Protestant sound), bloomed like prize roses among a collection of spuds. Irish names were too common in the school to have any prestige either as surnames (Gallagher, Sheehan, Finn, Sullivan, McCarthy) or as Christian names (Kathleen, Eileen). Anything exotic had value: an “olive” complexion, for example. The pet girl of the convent was a fragile Jewish girl named Susie Lowenstein, who had pale red-gold hair and an exquisite retroussé nose, which, if we had had it, might have been called “pug.” We liked her name too and the name of a child in the primary grades: Abbie Stuart Baillargeon. My favorite name, on the whole, though, was Emilie von Phul (pronounced “Pool”); her oldest sister, recently graduated, was called Celeste. Another name that appealed to me was Genevieve Albers, Saint Genevieve being the patron saint of Paris who turned back Attila from the gates of the city.

All these names reflected the still-pioneer character of the Pacific Northwest. I had never heard their like in the parochial school in Minneapolis, where “foreign” extraction, in any case, was something to be ashamed of, the whole drive being toward Americanization of first name and surname alike. The exceptions to this were the Irish, who could vaunt such names as Catherine O’Dea and the name of my second cousin, Mary Catherine Anne Rose Violet McCarthy, while an unfortunate German boy named Manfred was made-to suffer for his. But that was Minneapolis. In Seattle, and especially in the convent of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, foreign names suggested not immigration but emigration—distinguished exile. Minneapolis was a granary; Seattle was a port, which had attracted a veritable Foreign Legion of adventurers—soldiers of fortune, younger sons, gamblers, traders, drawn by the fortunes to be made in virgin timber and shipping and by the Alaska Gold Rush. Wars and revolutions had sent the defeated out to Puget Sound, to start a new life; the latest had been the Russian Revolution, which had shipped us, via Harbin, a Russian colony, complete with restaurant, on Queen Anne Hill. The English names in the convent, when they did not testify to direct English origin, as in the case of “Rafe” Chatham, had come to us from the South and represented a kind of internal exile; such girls as Mary Fordyce Blake and Mary McQueen Street (a class ahead of me; her sister was named Francesca) bore their double-barreled first names like titles of aristocracy from the ante-bellum South. Not all our girls, by any means, were Catholic; some of the very prettiest ones—Julia Dodge and Janet Preston, if I remember rightly—were Protestants. The nuns had taught us to behave with special courtesy to these strangers in our midst, and the whole effect was of some superior hostel for refugees of all the lost causes of the past hundred years. Money could not count for much in such an atmosphere; the fathers and grandfathers of many of our “best” girls were ruined men.

Names, often, were freakish in the Pacific Northwest, particularly girls’ names. In the Episcopal boarding school I went to later, in Tacoma, there was a girl called De Vere Utter, and there was a girl called Rocena and another called Hermoine. Was Rocena a mistake for Rowena and Hermoine for Hermione? And was Vere, as we called her, Lady Clara Vere de Vere? Probably. You do not hear names like those often, in any case, east of the Cascade Mountains; they belong to the frontier, where books and libraries were few and memory seems to have been oral, as in the time of Homer.

Names have more significance for Catholics than they do for other people; Christian names are chosen for the spiritual qualities of the saints they are taken from; Protestants used to name their children out of the Old Testament and now they name them out of novels and plays, whose heroes and heroines are perhaps the new patron saints of a secular age. But with Catholics it is different. The saint a child is named for is supposed to serve, literally, as a model or pattern to imitate; your name is your fortune and it tells you what you are or must be. Catholic children ponder their names for a mystic meaning, like birthstones; my own, I learned, besides belonging to the Virgin and Saint Mary of Egypt, originally meant “bitter” or “star of the sea.” My second name, Therese, could dedicate me either to Saint Theresa or to the saint called the Little Flower, Soeur Thérèse of Lisieux, on whom God was supposed to have descended in the form of a shower of roses. At Confirmation, I had added a third name (for Catholics then rename themselves, as most nuns do, yet another time, when they take orders); on the advice of a nun, I had taken “Clementina,” after Saint Clement, an early pope—a step I soon regretted on account of “My Darling Clementine” and her number nine shoes. By the time I was in the convent, I would no longer tell anyone what my Confirmation name was. The name I had nearly picked was “Agnes,” after a little Roman virgin martyr, always shown with a lamb, because of her purity. But Agnes would have been just as bad, I recognized in Forest Ridge Convent—not only because of the possibility of “Aggie,” but because it was subtly, indefinably
wrong,
in itself. Agnes would have made me look like an ass.

The fear of appearing ridiculous first entered my life, as a governing motive, during my second year in the convent. Up to then, a desire for prominence had decided many of my actions and, in fact, still persisted. But in the eighth grade, I became aware of mockery and perceived that I could not seek prominence without attracting laughter. Other people could, but I couldn’t. This laughter was proceeding, not from my classmates, but from the girls of the class just above me, in particular from two boon companions, Elinor Heffernan and Mary Harty, a clownish pair—oddly assorted in size and shape, as teams of clowns generally are, one short, plump, and baby-faced, the other tall, lean, and owlish—who entertained the high-school department by calling attention to the oddities of the younger girls. Nearly every school has such a pair of satirists, whose marks are generally low and who are tolerated just because of their laziness and non-conformity; one of them (in this case, Mary Harty, the plump one) usually appears to be half asleep. Because of their low standing, their indifference to appearances, the sad state of their uniforms, their clowning is taken to be harmless, which, on the whole, it is, their object being not to wound but to divert; such girls are bored in school. We in the eighth grade sat directly in front of the two wits in study hall, so that they had us under close observation; yet at first I was not afraid of them, wanting, if anything, to identify myself with their laughter, to be initiated into the joke. One of their specialties was giving people nicknames, and it was considered an honor to be the first in the eighth grade to be let in by Elinor and Mary on their latest invention. This often happened to me; they would tell me, on the playground, and I would tell the others. As their intermediary, I felt myself almost their friend and it did not occur to me that I might be next on their list.

I had achieved prominence not long before by publicly losing my faith and regaining it at the end of a retreat. I believe Elinor and Mary questioned me about this on the playground, during recess, and listened with serious, respectful faces while I told them about my conversations with the Jesuits. Those serious faces ought to have been an omen, but if the two girls used what I had revealed to make fun of me, it must have been behind my back. I never heard any more of it, and yet just at this time I began to feel something, like a cold breath on the nape of my neck, that made me wonder whether the new position I had won for myself in the convent was as secure as I imagined. I would turn around in study hall and find the two girls looking at me with speculation in their eyes.

It was just at this time, too, that I found myself in a perfectly absurd situation, a very private one, which made me live, from month to month, in horror of discovery. I had waked up one morning, in my convent room, to find a few small spots of blood on my sheet; I had somehow scratched a trifling cut on one of my legs and opened it during the night. I wondered what to do about this, for the nuns were fussy about bedmaking, as they were about our white collars and cuffs, and if we had an inspection those spots might count against me. It was best, I decided, to ask the nun on dormitory duty, tall, stout Mother Slattery, for a clean bottom sheet, even though she might scold me for having scratched my leg in my sleep and order me to cut my toenails. You never know what you might be blamed for. But Mother Slattery, when she bustled in to look at the sheet, did not scold me at all; indeed, she hardly seemed to be listening as I explained to her about the cut. She told me to sit down: she would be back in a minute. “You can be excused from athletics today,” she added, closing the door. As I waited, I considered this remark, which seemed to me strangely munificent, in view of the unimportance of the cut. In a moment, she returned, but without the sheet. Instead, she produced out of her big pocket a sort of cloth girdle and a peculiar flannel object which I first took to be a bandage, and I began to protest that I did not need or want a bandage; all I needed was a bottom sheet. “The sheet can wait,” said Mother Slattery, succinctly, handing me two large safety pins. It was the pins that abruptly enlightened me; I saw Mother Slattery’s mistake, even as she was instructing me as to how this flannel article, which I now understood to be a sanitary napkin, was to be put on.