Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (2 page)

All her sons, as if to be ornery, married pretty wives, and all married Protestants. (Her daughter, my aunt Esther, married a widower named Florence McCarthy who, freakishly, was not a Catholic either.) My mother, Therese Preston, always called “Tess” or “Tessie,” was a beautiful, popular girl with an attractive, husky singing voice, the daughter of a prominent Seattle lawyer who had a big house overlooking Lake Washington. His family came originally from Vermont, of old New England stock. Harold Preston had run for United States senator and been defeated, as I always heard it, by “the interests.” As state senator, he framed the first Workmen’s Compensation Act passed in the United States, an act that served as a model for the workmen’s compensation laws later enacted throughout the Union. He was supposed to have had a keen legal brain and was much consulted by other lawyers on points of law. He was president of the state and the city Bar Associations. He did not aspire to a judgeship; the salaries, even on the highest level, were too low, he used to say, to attract the most competent men. In professional and business circles in Seattle, his name was a byword for honesty.

The marriage between my mother and my father was opposed by both sides of the family, partly on religious grounds and partly because of my father’s health. He had a bad heart, the result, I was told as a child, of playing football, and the doctors had warned him that he might die at any moment. The marriage took place, despite the opposition. It was a small wedding, with chiefly family present, in the house over the lake. My father survived seven years (during which my mother had four children and several miscarriages), but he was never very well. Nor did he make any money. Though he had a law office in the Hoge Building and a shadowy partner, he spent most of his time at home, often in bed, entertaining us children.

It sounds like a gloomy situation, yet in fact it was very gay. My mother’s parents were in a state of constant apprehension that she was going to be left a young widow with a handful of children to take care of, but my mother and father seemed to be completely carefree. They were very much in love, everyone agrees, and money never worried my father. He had an allowance of eight or nine hundred dollars a month from his father, and my mother had a hundred from hers. In spite of this, they were always in debt, which was my father’s fault. He was a recklessly extravagant man, who lay in bed planning treats and surprises. The reader will hear later of my little diamond rings and my ermine muff and neckpiece. I remember, too, beauty pins, picnics in the back yard, Easter egg hunts, a succession of birthday cakes and ice-cream molds, a glorious May basket my father hung on my doorknob, a hyacinth plant, parties with grab bags and fish ponds, the little electric stove on which my mother made us chocolate and cambric tea in the afternoons. My mother had a strain of extravagance in her family, too. But it was my father who insisted on turning everything into a treat. I remember his showing me how to eat a peach by building a little white mountain of sugar and then dipping the peach into it. And I remember his coming home one night with his arms full of red roses for my mother, and my mother’s crying out, “Oh, Roy!” reproachfully because there was no food for dinner. Or did someone tell me this story? If we went without dinner while we were waiting for the monthly allowance, it cannot have happened often, our trouble, on the contrary, was upset stomachs due to “fancy” food, or so I am told—I have no recollection of this myself or of all the enemas and purges we are supposed to have taken. I do remember that we could not keep maids or nurses, those that stayed longest were a raw, red, homely Irishwoman with warts on her hands, the faithful Gertrude, whom I disliked because she was not pretty, and a Japanese manservant who was an artist with the pastry bag.

My father, I used to maintain, was so tall that he could not get through a door without bending his head. This was an exaggeration. He was a tall man, but not remarkably so, as I can see from pictures, like all the McCarthy men, he had a torso that was heavy-boned and a little too long for his legs. He wore his gray hair in a pompadour and carried a stick when he walked. He read to me a great deal, chiefly Eugene Field and fairy tales, and I remember we heard a nightingale together, on the boulevard, near the Sacred Heart convent. But there are no nightingales in North America.

My father was a romancer, and most of my memories of him are colored, I fear, by an untruthfulness that I must have caught from him, like one of the colds that ran round the family. While my grandfather Preston was preternaturally honest, there was mendacity, somewhere, in the McCarthy blood. Many of my most cherished ideas about my father have turned out to be false. There was the legend of his football prowess, for years I believed, and repeated, that he had been captain of the Minnesota football team, but actually it was only a high-school team in Minneapolis. I suppose I must have got this impression from the boasts of my grandmother McCarthy. For years I believed that he was a Deke at college, but I think it was really Delta Upsilon. His gold watch, saved for my brother Kevin, turned out to be plated—a great disappointment. He was at the head of his class in law school, so I always heard, but I do not think this was true. As for the legend that he was a brilliant man, with marked literary gifts, alas, I once saw his diary. It was a record of heights and weights, temperatures and enemas, interspersed with slightly sententious “thoughts,” like a schoolboy’s; he writes out for himself, laboriously, the definitions of an atheist and an agnostic.

All the same, there was a romantic aura surrounding him, a certain mythic power that made people want to invent stories about him. My grandmother Preston, for instance, who was no special partisan of his, told me that on our fatal journey from Seattle to Minneapolis, my father drew a revolver on the train conductor, who was threatening to put our sick family off somewhere in North Dakota. I wrote this, and the reader will find it, in the memoir titled “Yonder Peasant; Who Is He?” But my uncle Harry, who was on the train, tells me that this never happened. My father, he says, was far too sick to draw a gun on anybody, and who would have told my grandmother, except my uncle Harry himself, since he and his wife were the only adult survivors of our party? Or did my grandmother hear it from some other passenger, on his way east during the great flu epidemic?

My last clear personal recollection of my father is one of sitting beside him on that train trip and looking out the window at the Rocky Mountains. All the rest of the party, as my memory sees it, are lying sick in bed in their compartments or drawing rooms, and I am feeling proud of the fact that my father and I, alone and still well, are riding upright in the Pullman car. As we look up at the mountains, my father tells me that big boulders sometimes fall off them, hitting the train and killing people. Listening, I start to shake and my teeth to chatter with what I think is terror but what turns out to be the flu. How vivid all this is in my mind! Yet my Uncle Harry says that it was he, not my father, who was sitting with me. Far from being the last, my father was the first to fall ill. Nor does Uncle Harry recall talking about boulders.

It is the case of the gold watch, all over again. Yet how could I have mistaken my uncle for my father?

“My mother is a Child of Mary,” I used to tell other children, in the same bragging spirit that I spoke of my father’s height. My mother, not long after her marriage, was converted to Catholicism and though I did not know what a Child of Mary was (actually a member of a sodality of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart), I knew it was something wonderful from the way my mother spoke of it. She was proud and happy to be a convert, and her attitude made us feel that it was a special treat to be a Catholic, the crowning treat and privilege. Our religion was a present to us from God. Everything in our home life conspired to fix in our minds the idea that we were very precious little persons, precious to our parents and to God, too, Who was listening to us with loving attention every night when we said our prayers. “It gave you a basic complaisancy,” a psychoanalyst once told me (I think he meant “complacency”), but I do not recall feeling smug, exactly. It was, rather, a sense of wondering, grateful privilege. Later, we heard a great deal about having been spoiled by our parents, yet we lacked that discontent that is the real mark of the spoiled child, to us, our existence was perfect, just the way it was.

My parents’ death was brought about by a decision on the part of the McCarthy family. They concluded—and who can blame them?—that the continual drain of money, and my father’s monthly appeals for more, had to stop. It was decided that our family should be moved to Minneapolis, where my grandfather and grandmother could keep an eye on what was happening and try to curb my father’s expenditures.

At this point, I must mention a thing that was told me, only a few years ago, by my uncle Harry, my father’s younger brother. My father, he confided, was a periodical drunkard who had been a family problem from the time of his late teens. Before his marriage, while he was still in Minnesota, a series of trained nurses had been hired to watch over him and keep him off the bottle. But, like all drunkards, he was extremely cunning and persuasive. He eluded his nurses or took them with him (he had a weakness for women, too) on a series of wild bouts that would end, days or weeks later, in some strange Middle Western city where he was hiding. A trail of bad checks would lead the family to recapture him. Or a telegram for money would eventually reveal his whereabouts, though if any money was sent him, he was likely to bolt away again. The nurses having proved ineffective, Uncle Harry was summoned home from Yale to look after him, but my father evaded him also. In the end, the family could no longer handle him, and he was sent out West as a bad job. That was how he came to meet my mother.

I have no idea whether this story is true or not. Nor will I ever know. To me, it seems improbable, for I am as certain as one can be that my father did not drink when I was a little girl. Children are sensitive to such things, their sense of smell, first of all, seems sharper than other people’s, and they do not like the smell of alcohol. They are also quick to notice when anything is wrong in a household. I do recall my father’s trying to make some homemade wine (this must have been just before Prohibition was enacted) out of some grayish-purple bricks that had been sold him as essence of grape. The experiment was a failure, and he and my mother and their friends did a good deal of laughing about “Roy’s wine.” But if my father had been a dangerous drinker, my mother would not have laughed. Moreover, if he was a drinker, my mother’s family seem not to have known it. I asked my mother’s brother whether Uncle Harry’s story could possibly be true. His answer was that it was news to him. It is just possible, of course, that my father reformed after his marriage, which would explain why my mother’s family did not know of his habits, though as Uncle Harry pointed out, rather belligerently: “you would think they could have looked up their future son-in-law’s history.” Periodical drunkards, however, almost never reform, and if they do, they cannot touch wine. It remains a mystery, an eerie and troubling one. Could my father have been drinking heavily when he came home with those red roses, for my mother, in his arms? It is a drunkard’s appeasing gesture, certainly, lordly and off-balance. Was that why my mother said, “Oh, Roy!”?

If my father was a sort of remittance man, sent out West by his family, it would justify the McCarthys, which was, of course, Uncle Harry’s motive in telling me. He felt I had defamed his mother, and he wanted me to understand that, from where she sat, my father’s imprudent marriage was the last straw. Indeed, from the McCarthy point of view, as given by Uncle Harry, my father’s marriage was just another drunkard’s dodge for extracting money from his father, all other means having failed. My mother, “your lovely mother,” as Uncle Harry always calls her, was the innocent lure on the hook. Perhaps so. But I refuse to believe it. Uncle Harry’s derelict brother, Roy, is not the same person as my father. I simply do not recognize him.

Uncle Harry was an old man, and rather far gone in his cups himself, when he made these charges, which does not affect the point, however—in fact, might go to substantiate it. An uncanny resemblance to my father had come out in him with age, a resemblance that had not existed when he was young: his white hair stood up in a pompadour, and he had the same gray-green, electric eyes and the same animal magnetism. As a young man, Uncle Harry was the white hope of the family, the boy who went east to school, to Andover and Yale, and made a million dollars before he was thirty. It was in this capacity, of budding millionaire and family impresario, that he entrained for Seattle, in 1918, together with his pretty, social wife, my aunt Zula, to superintend our move to Minneapolis. They put up at the New Washington Hotel, the best hotel in those days, and, as my grandmother Preston told it, they brought the flu with them.

We were staying at the hotel, too, since our house had been vacated—a very unwise thing, for the first rule in an epidemic is to avoid public places. Indeed, the whole idea of traveling with a sick man and four small children at the height of an epidemic seems madness, but I see why the risk was taken from an old Seattle newspaper clipping, preserved by my great-grandfather Preston: “The party left for the East at this particular time in order to see another brother, Lewis McCarthy [Louis], who is in the aviation service and had a furlough home.” This was the last, no doubt, of my father’s headstrong whims. I remember the grave atmosphere in our hotel suite the night before we took the train. Aunt Zula and the baby were both sick, by this time, as I recall it, and all the adults looked worried and uncertain. Nevertheless, we went ahead, boarding the train on a Wednesday, October 30. A week later, my mother died in Minneapolis, my father survived her by a day. She was twenty-nine; he was thirty-nine (a nice difference in age, my grandmother always said).