Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (26 page)

Each of the three sisters had a different attitude toward their Jewish heritage, perhaps in each case conditioned by the man they had married. Aunt Eva—Mrs. Aronson, whose husband, Uncle Sig, had long ago passed on—was a typical wealthy widow of Jewish high society. She traveled a good deal, with a rather hard, smart set who had connections in Portland, San Francisco, New York, and even Paris; she gambled, and went to resorts and fashionable hotels in season; when she was in Seattle, she was an habituée of the Jewish country club, where they golfed in the daytime and played bridge for very high stakes at night. The scale of living of these people—widows and widowers, bachelors and divorcees, for the most part—was far beyond anything conceived of by the local Christian
haute bourgeoisie,
which was unaware of their existence. This unawareness was mutual, at least in the case of Aunt Eva, who, gyrating with perfect aplomb on her roulette wheel of hotels, yachts, race tracks, and spas, her white hairdress always in order, seemed ignorant of the fact that there was a non-Jewish society right under her nose, whose doings were recorded in the newspapers, daily and Sunday, whose members were “seen lunching” at the Olympic Hotel on Mondays, or golfing at the Seattle Golf Club next to the Highlands, or sunning at the Tennis Club on the lake.

Aunt Eva, I think, hardly realized that the world contained persons who were not Jewish. She, too, never knew envy; her nature was serene and imperturbable. My grandmother’s mixed marriage never seemed to give her a qualm; her tall unawareness was sublime, a queenly attribute. If my grandfather was not “of the tribe,” as my Irish relations used to call it suggestively, she did not give any sign of perceiving it. The “unpleasant” was barred by Aunt Eva, who seldom read anything and talked in magnificent generalities. She was fond of the theater, and when she was not traveling, she used to go every week to see the Henry Duffy stock company in Seattle. My grandmother, Aunt Rosie, and I had strong opinions about these players (“He’s a perfect stick,” my grandmother almost invariably complained of the leading man), but to Aunt Eva there were no distinctions. Every play she saw she pronounced “very enjoyable.” And of the actors: “They took their parts well.” We used to laugh at her and try to get her to acknowledge that the play was better some weeks than others. But Aunt Eva would not cross that Rubicon; she smelled a rat. To her, all the plays and players were equal, and equally, blandly good.

Toward the end of her life, she suffered cruelly from indigestion (the
foie gras
and the cup of butter, doubtless), and it was an awful thing to watch her, after a Sunday luncheon at our house, majestic and erect, walk about our back living room, her lips bubbling a little and her face pale-vanilla-colored and contorting slightly from spasms of pain. “Gas,” she would say, with dignity. It tortured me to see this highly aristocratic lady reduced by her stomach to what I felt must be a horrible embarrassment for her, but her unawareness seemed to extend to the “unpleasant” aspect of her sufferings; she entertained them, as it were, graciously, like a hostess. My grandfather showed her great sympathy during these ordeals of hers; she was his favorite, I think, among my grandmother’s relations. Having helped her with her business affairs, he must have come to realize that Aunt Eva, unlike her sisters, was extremely stupid. Perhaps this regal stupidity, like that of a stately white ox, elicited his chivalry, for he was a gallant man, or perhaps the slow measured pace of her wits allowed him to forget that she was one of the Chosen (another classic epithet dear to my Irish relations).

How did my grandfather feel about the Jews? Again, I do not know; this was one of the many mysteries that surrounded our family life. He almost never attended church, except to be a pallbearer at a funeral, but he was by birth a Presbyterian Yankee, the son of a West Point man, who was head of a military college in Norwich, Vermont, commanded a Negro regiment during the Civil War, and was retired as a brigadier general. Simon Manly Preston was my great-grandfather’s name (wife: Martha Sargent, born in New Hampshire), and he lived to be ninety-nine; his last years were passed in Seattle, where he was one of the local curiosities. All his progeny, including Uncle Ed, another West Point man, who died in his fifties, were eventually drawn to Seattle; my grandfather Harold, my great-uncle Clarence, and my great-aunt Alice, who married a law partner of my grandfather’s, Eugene H. Carr, and lived for a time in Alaska. My grandfather first came west working as a geodetic surveyor during his college vacation (he started at Cornell and finished at what is now Grinnell College, Iowa), and when he had his A.B. degree, he decided to read law in Seattle. It was then that he must have first met my grandmother, aged circa seventeen, who was living in the house of the fur importer, Sigismund Aronson. Did this name ring strangely on my grandfather’s Yankee ears? Possibly not. Seattle was a frontier town, where you could expect to meet all kinds—French and Dutch and Germans, aristocrats and plebeians. Many of our first families had aristocratic pedigrees (the de Turennes, the von Phuls), yet it used to be said of every first family that the great-grandfather “came here with his pack on his back.” My grandmother was courted by a number of suitors, including one, George Preston, who had the same last name as my grandfather. She had Jewish beaux also, I discovered, and, as far as I could make out, she did not distinguish between the two kinds. They were assorted young men who took her driving; that was all.

“As far as I could make out—” this matter was impossible to probe with my grandmother. I don’t think I ever used the word “Jewish” in any connection when talking with her. I sensed she would not like it. I used to think about the word a lot myself, when I first came back to Seattle and was sent as a five-day boarder to a Sacred Heart convent. I thought about it partly because of the ugly innuendoes dropped by my father’s people, but chiefly because I was in love with my cousin, Aunt Rosie’s tall, ravishing son Burton, who was twenty-one, ten years older than I, and I worried, being a Catholic, about the impediments to our marriage: the fact that he was my first cousin once removed, and the difference in religion—would he have to be baptized? This passion of mine was secret (or at least I hope it was), but even if it had not been, I could not have discussed the problem with my grandmother because of that unmentionable word.

I myself had a curious attitude, I now realize, in which the crudest anti-Semitism (“Ikey-Mose-Abie,” I used to chant, under my breath, to myself in the convent) mingled with infatuation and with genuine tolerance and detachment. I
liked
Uncle Mose and Aunt Rosie far better than any other older people I knew, and “Ikey-Mose-Abie” represented what I supposed others would think of them. It was a sort of defiance. If I identified a little bit of myself with those others, my dead mother had gone much further; one day, I found a letter she had written to my grandmother McCarthy in which she spoke of an evening “with the Hebrews.” Finding this letter was one of the great shocks of my adolescence. It destroyed my haloed image of my mother, and the thought that her mother must have read it, too (for there it was, in my desk, put away for me with other family keepsakes), nearly made me ill.

Perhaps I was too sensitive on my grandmother’s behalf. No secret was ever made of the family connection with Aunt Rosie and Aunt Eva, and whenever my grandmother gave a tea, it always appeared in the paper that Mrs. M. A. Gottstein and Mrs. S. A. Aronson poured. I used to hear about some distant cousin having a
bar mizvah,
and once I was taken to a Jewish wedding, which fascinated me because it was held at night in a hotel ballroom. Nevertheless, there was
something
—a shying away from the subject, an aversion to naming it in words—so much so that I was startled, one morning, when I was about sixteen, to hear my grandmother allude to “my faith.” I had been talking to her about my disbelief in God, and to my surprise she grew quite agitated. She no longer practiced her faith, she declared, but she was certain that there was a kind God Who understood and Who watched over everything. She spoke with great feeling and emphasis—a rare thing in our relations.

It was characteristic of her queer, oblique nature that I chanced to find out that she had had Jewish suitors by idly asking her the names of the young men she had driven out with. She gave them with perfect readiness, but without any indication that such a name as Schwabacher or Rosenblatt would tell a story to me. If it had been a major step to marry outside her own people, she did not seem to recall this any more, and, of course, I could not ask her.

Yet in other respects she was remarkably frank. “How did you come to marry Grandpa?” I asked her one night, when I was home on a visit after I myself had married. “Rosie and I didn’t get along with Uncle Sig,” she answered matter-of-factly.

So that was all; I could hardly believe my ears, and wondered whether she realized the enormity of what she was saying. “But why did you pick Grandpa instead of one of the others?” I pressed her, determined, for Grandpa’s sake, that she would answer that it had been because of his eyes or his mustache or his intellect. She appeared to search her memory, in vain, “Oh, I don’t know, Mary,” she said, yawning. “You
must
know,” I retorted. She thought he would be good to her, she finally conceded.

This archaic view of the function of a husband astonished me. But to her, as I soon learned, it was the prime, the only, consideration. “Is he good to you?” she asked me, another night, on that same visit, speaking of my new husband. I had to stop and think, because marriage had never presented itself to me in this light. “Why, yes, I suppose so,” I said slowly. “Yes, of course he is.” My grandmother nodded and reopened her evening newspaper. “That’s all right, then.” The subject was closed. “Grandpa was always good to me,” she resumed tranquilly, turning to the racing column and beginning to mark her selections for the next day’s parimutuel.

What did these words mean? Kindness, patience, forbearance—or fur coats and jewelry? Or was it all the same thing? Love, evidently, was as foreign a concept to her as this “goodness” was to me. She did not want to hear about love; it irritated her. The words “I love him” were meaningless sounds to her ears: if I uttered them in her hearing, which at length I had the sense not to do, I might as well have been talking Chinese. She did not care for love stories, which she pronounced trash, and she used to make fun of the movie actors who were my heroes as a young girl. “He has such thick lips,” she used to say of Ronald Colman, mimicking his expression by thrusting out her own lower lip. “And that mustache! Think of kissing that bristly mustache!” Ricardo Cortez, she said, mimicking his expression, looked “as if he had a stomach ache.” Yet her own favorite was Adolphe Menjou. My grandfather liked Lewis Stone.

She was not so much cynical as prosaic. She made fun of the young men who used to come to take me out when I was home from college on vacations by seizing on small detail about their appearance and relentlessly exaggerating it: curly hair, rosy cheeks, full lips, large ears. This was not done maliciously but in high-humored jest, as though
she
were the young girl mocking her suitors behind their backs to her audience of sisters. I never minded it (though I had minded about Ronald Colman), but it struck me as unfair in the abstract; the part was always greater to her than the whole, and some of the things she noticed would have escaped the attention of anyone but a phrenologist.

Her marriage had been successful, and she attributed this to a single simple recipe, like one of the household hints in the back of the Temple de Hirsch cookbook, on how to clean ermine (rub with corn meal) or how to extract grease from papered walls (flannel and spirits of wine). She had never let a quarrel continue overnight. No matter how mad she was at Grandpa, she told me, she always kissed him good night. And, a corollary, no matter how mad she was in the morning, she always kissed him good-by before he went to the office. She passed this recipe on to me gravely after I had been divorced; if I would just follow it, I would never have any more trouble, she was certain. This advice made me smile; it was so remote in its application to my case. But she shook her head reprovingly as she stood in front of her mirror, undoing her pearls for the night. “Remember, Mary,” she enjoined. “All right,” I said lightly. “I’ll remember. ‘Always kiss him good night.’” She had felt the moment as a solemn one, like the time she had spoken of “my faith”; yet in an instant she, too, was smiling broadly. An anecdote had occurred to her, and she began to tell me, acting out both parts, of a morning when Grandpa had left for his office without the usual morning salute. ... From one point of view, her entire married life was a succession of comic anecdotes, of which she was both butt and heroine.

These anecdotes began before her marriage, with the time the horse ran away with her and George Preston in the buggy, and Grandpa was terribly jealous. Then there was her honeymoon: how he had taken her back to Iowa, to visit his family, who had settled there after the Civil War. It was winter, and before they left, my grandfather had kept asking her whether she had enough clothes. She answered yes each time, but the question puzzled and offended her, for she took it as a criticism of her wardrobe. “I had very nice clothes,” she explained. What he meant, it turned out, was long underwear, but he was too delicate to name it, so she went ignorantly on to Newton, Iowa, in her fine batiste-and-lace underclothing—she could never tolerate anything else next to her skin; silk was too coarse. In the barbarous midwestern climate, she nearly froze to death, she declared, and she came out in chilblains all over. She nearly died of boredom also.

The provinciality of her in-laws horrified her. She had never met people like this, whose idea of a social evening was to stand around the stove, clad in long underwear and heavy dark clothing, the men cracking one joke after the other. She could see that her in-laws, with the exception of Great-Grandpa Preston, did not like her. “They thought I was fast and stuck-up.” She could not eat their food or put on the union suit they offered her. They were displeased by her elegant clothes and by her smiles and laughter. They only laughed, shortly, at the humorless jokes they told. Alone in her bedroom with her husband, she cried and cried, and finally she made him have a telegram sent to himself calling him back to Seattle. After the telegram came, her father-in-law, the General, took them to Chicago, which was supposed to be a treat. But they put up at an awful boarding house, where she could not eat the food, either. The two men stayed out all day, looking at sights like the stockyards, and the other boarders scared her, they were so rough and crude in their manners. That was the end of her honeymoon, and on the train going back she made my grandfather promise that he would never take her to Newton again.