Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (34 page)

That was all there was to the “media” then; the very word was unknown. There was no equivalent of
The Reader’s Digest;
rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers were yet to come; radio was in the crystal-set stage—in our house Uncle Myers’ envied toy. We were allowed to watch him listen with the earphones on his head. There was a unique occasion, however, when we were brought to my grandmother’s house to listen to a radio “event” on a big set for which you did not need earphones; that was the Dempsey-Firpo fight (September 14, 1923). Unfortunately the knock-out took place early in the second round, almost before the fight had started, and there was nothing to do but tag home to bed, sadly (at least in my case) because Luis Angel Firpo had lost.

My passion for the Bull of the Pampas was a great laugh to the family. They did not understand that I had fallen in love with his name. Names were often the reason for my preferences—what else did I have to go by? And they are not such bad indicators: a man does not choose his name, but he can change it—witness Voltaire and Muhammad Ali. That a little girl should have a passionate crush on a prize fighter may seem odd, but here again the economics of scarcity were at work. It would have been more normal to be “crazy about” a star of the silver screen, but I had never seen one, unless maybe an episode of Pearl White in the days of Mama and Daddy. During the five years in Minneapolis, the only full-length movie I saw was
The Seal of the Confessional,
shown in the church basement. It was about a handsome priest who heard a murderer’s confession and so had to keep silent, rather tiresomely, while an innocent man was going to the chair, but there was an exciting sub-plot about an atheist who was struck down by lightning when he defied God to demonstrate His existence. On Saturday mornings our neighborhood movie house let children in free to see the trailer for the coming Western, but those “tastes,” while whetting the appetite, were of course not a substitute for the real William S. Hart. By the time I left Minneapolis and could go to the movies, the great days of silent film had passed.

Stage stars we never laid eyes on, nor vaudevillians. The only music we got to hear was a few records, e.g., “Over There,” “Listen to the Mocking-bird,” occasional band concerts in parks, the church organ, and military brasses in parades; our grandmother’s “music room” contained a player piano, with rolls you inserted, but we were forbidden to work it. We knew John McCormack and Harry Lauder from their photos, Caruso, probably, too, and our great-aunts cherished a faded tintype of a figure called Chauncey Olcott, who, Webster’s tells me, was “Chancellor John Olcott, 1860-1932, American actor and tenor,” surely of Irish descent. In my grandmother’s “music room,” I eyed a big photograph of Mme. Schumann-Heink and was shocked by the monstrous bellows of her bosom.

No public figures entered our ken, except for Marshal Foch, whom we saw in person—a trim little white-haired figure—being welcomed by the city in front of the Art Institute, across from Fairoaks Park. During the Harding-Cox campaign (1920), I pedaled our little wooden wagon up and down our driveway shouting “Hurrah for Cox!” but the only basis for my support was that he was a Democrat and I thought my father had been one. I was impressed by President Harding’s death because Seattle had a part in it. Returning from Alaska, he fell sick (surely from the seafood?) in Seattle and died in San Francisco. It was exciting to see our birthplace “make” the headlines. From the McCarthy aunts, uncles, and cousins we had already heard more than once about the IWW mayor, Ole Hansen, Seattle had elected. The initials, they said, stood for “I Won’t Work,” but I was less interested by that than by his horrible first name, which I probably identified with Ole Luk Oie, the bogey in the storybook. My happy memories of boulevards and grassy terraces and continual picnics in the backyard got muddied by the McCarthy family’s Republican politics and dislike of their in-laws till I came to think of Seattle as a disreputable place that had a dangerous district called Coon Hollow (I remembered that from my father) and an “I Won’t Work” Ole for a mayor.

Needless to say, on the visual side we were kept well below the poverty line, just as in politics, reading, entertainment. The house they had put us in was ugly, with an ugly yard and a few ugly bushes like Bridal Wreath. For a while we were allowed to use a stereopticon, with views of the pyramids, and in my room there was a “Baby Stuart” in a blue-and-white boy’s dress. In a group of schoolchildren, we could sometimes go to the museum, where, running away from home, I once hid behind the cast of the Laocoon. But our clothes, faded, continually pieced, let out, and let down, the repellent food we ate, my worn, dull black, second-hand rosary were cruelly punishing to a sense of beauty. Yet in this sphere our guardians were less effectual. They could keep books out of our hands, limit the repertory of the phonograph, restrict our intercourse with the neighbors’ children by penning us within a wire-net fence, but they could not stop us from using our eyes. The passionate pleasure I got from soap bubbles, rainbows—anything iridescent, including smears of oil on street puddles—from the funny “faces” of pansies, spurs of nasturtiums (which also concealed a nectar), freckles of foxglove, from holy pictures, spider webs, motes of dust riding on a sun ray, “Jack Frost flowers,” dew, the white vestments at Easter, Easter lilies around the altar, all that joy was beyond our guardians’ power of prevention. No more could they put a halt to it than they could keep us, fenced in our yard, from reading the sky-writing that spelled out “Lucky Strike” on the summer sky while we watched the words form.

Nature finds substitutes in the cultural realm, and how can I regret
Orphans in the Storm, Little Lord Fauntleroy,
Buster Keaton, early Harold Lloyd, the Little Pepper books, the “Patty” books, Jeritza, Mary Garden, when I had Balder and Freya, Thor and Sif,
The Book of Knowledge,
snowflakes, prismatic refractions, the seeds I planted one year on Good Friday that turned into frilly sweet peas?

The wryness I feel on looking back at Uncle Myers and the Sheridan sisters, on that jaundice-colored house with its attendant Golden Glow, Bridal Wreath, and gross rhubarb plant in the backyard, is almost wholly material. I don’t mind about the cultural sustenance that was withheld from us—rather, the contrary. They seem to have hit on a formula for child-rearing that virtually forced us to use our imaginations. What I mind is the horrible food we were made to eat, the carrots I dumped out the window, the gristle and fat, the chicken necks I sucked to draw out the little white cord, the prunes, farina, and Wheatena. Here there was no compensation, no sensibilizing of the palate to shadings of taste; the envy with which we watched Uncle Myers put bananas on his corn flakes led only to my devouring thirteen in one fevered session in my grandmother’s pantry in Seattle—a
sickening
experience and my last encounter with the fruit.

The beatings with hairbrush and razor-strop I can still resent, but abstractly, as injustice. My body does not remember them as it remembers the carrots and parsnips, still refusing more than sixty-five years later the sweetish taste of the first unless camouflaged with mint, butter, caramelized sugar, and so on, and refusing the second absolutely. As to compensation for the physical abuse I received (and I count being made to stay outdoors in the snow for two hours at a stretch in sub-zero temperatures going down to twenty), I am not sure whether Nature has seen to that or not. Certainly those people, at least in this world, never had to pay for their crimes. Yet I do not think that I have tried to avenge myself on them in what I have written—they were dead long before I could use a typewriter. As far as I can tell, I do not
feel
vindictive toward them, have not for years, maybe not since I was seated on a train for Seattle with my other grandfather; my escape was my revenge. And if I triumph over them now, still again, recalling details of their regimen, it is because the tale of it makes me smile. Perhaps that is Nature’s repair-work: over the years I have found a means—laughter—of turning pain into pleasure. Uncle Myers and Aunt Margaret, my grandmother, too, in her own style, amuse me by their capacity for being awful. It is a sort of talent, really, that people do not have nowadays or not in the same way. And, to the extent that my memory has been able to do justice to that talent in them, they have been immortalized, which is to say that Uncle Myers and his pedometer have been condemned to eternal derision.

Not his razor-strop, mind you. That is not funny. Yet if he had only that to speak for him, I do not think he would “live” as a character. The pedometer humanizes, which is the first step toward immortality. Nevertheless there are moralists who think I ought not to laugh or get an audience to laugh with me during a public reading at the figure of Uncle Myers, my old persecutor. What they overlook is the fact that as the injured party I have earned the right to laugh. My laughter is a victory over circumstances, and insofar as it betokens a disinterested enjoyment I imagine it to be a kind of pardon. I had the choice of forgiving those incredible relatives of mine or pitying myself on their account. Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady. Yet probably it does tend to dry one’s feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind. So that something must be subtracted from the compensation I seem to have received for injuries sustained. There is no dampness in my emotions, and some moisture, I think, is needed to produce the deeper, the tragic, notes.

What I have been saying may suggest that already in Minneapolis my intelligence was at work organizing those painful experiences so as to get the upper hand of them. But that is not so. Far from jesting to myself bitterly on the theme of our deprivation, I literally did not think about it. In our parents’ lifetime, as the reader has seen, I reasoned, with childish logic, trying to put together pieces of the puzzle children live in. Now that had stopped. I made no effort to subject the thing that was happening to us to any process of understanding. Perhaps I was too stunned to use my intelligence outside of school. The fact that what was happening was incredible, not to be believed in as real by children who had been loved and spoiled by their parents, may explain the absence of thought.

In another sense, thought—at least on this subject—was superfluous. The explanation was always simple—no mystery. If I was beaten with a razor-strop for having won a prize in a city-wide essay contest, I had no need to ask myself why. I was told why; it was to keep me from getting stuck up—logical, given our position. And it was easy to find the cause of
that;
it was simply that our parents had died. They were in the cemetery, bedded side by side; we had been shown. And God was not going to send us any new parents. Nor would we want to be taken by the Protestants, out in Seattle, in comparison to whom Myers and Margaret were the lesser evil, and we should be thanking our stars for that.

If you started to question any of it, you bumped up against God’s will, which was higher than thought—as every child knew. The alternative to thought was prayer. Since it would go against God’s will to ask for Mama and Daddy to come back from heaven, I suppose I prayed, in my novenas, on my rosary beads, for our grandmother McCarthy to take us (or, better still, just me) to live with her. My exploits of running away may have been aimed at that, too, though the conscious intention was to escape punishment by hiding, in the confessional box, behind the Laocoon. But on the whole it was wiser to pray for intentions that God would fully approve of, such as getting our parish priest to give in to my pleas for confirmation though I was still below the age.

The arbitrariness of punishments was another deterrent to thought. No pattern could be discerned, and it was not worthwhile to make the effort to see one. Of course there were other things to think about, had I been inclined. For example, the German helmet and unexploded shells that our handsome uncle Louis had brought back to his parents as souvenirs of the Great War might have led me to wonder about the place of wars in God’s scheme. Children do make such general reflections. Reuel, aged seven (have I written this?), announced to me one evening that he had decided that slavery was “a good idea, but quite mean,” and, again, one summer, a few years later, he wrote me from Cape Cod: “Dwight is trying to give up progressiveness, but I think it’s too late.” No such thoughtful reflections (which are different from the logical reasoning common in children) were ever framed by my own young mind. Perhaps Reuel’s reflectiveness only showed that he was spending his impressionable years in not just one but two intellectual households. Certainly he was much occupied with distinctions, as when he observed after his first term in boarding-school: “You’re an intellectual, but my father’s a literary man.”

In my case, dreams substituted for thought. The bits and pieces of history and legend I was picking up were fuel for my dreams, going up like bonfires, rather than building blocks for a picture of the world. I dreamed of becoming a Carmelite nun, like the great St. Teresa, who was half my name-saint; it was the reputed harshness of the discipline that appealed to me. For me, excess was attractive almost per se: not to be a mere nun, but to be a
cloistered,
silent, non-teaching nun, in rope sandals, with a rope around the waist, continually fasting, and praying two hours a day in her cell. At the same time, not fully satisfied by this effaced, selfless, brown-clad vision, I pictured myself as an abbess. Under my able administration were devoutly girded nuns singing the offices and at my right hand a chaplain, like Teresa’s St. John of the Cross.

This dream conflicted with another. I was to marry the Pretender to the throne of France, and, fighting side by side with him, commanding my own troops, I would win back his throne for him, place the crown on his head, and become queen myself. “Queen Marie Thérèse”—my name would be the same as Louis XIV’s Spanish consort’s. To choose between these high destinies was hard. But at length I saw a way to reconcile them. First I would marry the Pretender and win back his throne for him; having done that and become queen, I would abdicate and retire to a convent, where I would be elected abbess. But I could no longer be a Carmelite; none of the strict orders accepted women who had been married.