Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (46 page)

But wait! A thought has struck me. “Fat and shortness of stature”—who does that remind me of? Why, Aunt Hennie, of course, Uncle Elkan Morgenstern’s wife, my grandmother’s sister-in-law; it was a family we did not see as much as once a year. But though immense-breasted Aunt Hennie, no more than five feet high, could not be viewed as exactly a waddler, her daughter and granddaughters—my second cousins—had certainly inherited a tendency to put on weight. I could scarcely have been afraid of coming to resemble the Morgenstern cousins (the Preston body structure, plainly, did not come from that side); in fact, the way they looked, together and separately seemed very alien to me. Doubtless the feeling was mutual—by all indications, they were clannish, Temple-going Jews who, unlike Aunt Rosie, did not mix. Then was my ferocity, unknown to myself, directed at the “Jewish connection,” at what my mother in a letter to her mother-in-law had called “the Hebrews”? (My father, for his part, referred to “another Yiddisher fellow” when writing to his brother, Uncle Lou.) I rethink “Mose Nordstrom.” It is true that I liked Uncle Moses A. (for Abraham?) Gottstein, but it is also true that I did not much like his appearance—glasses, incipient cataracts, full, rosy cheeks, raised eyebrows, cigar in teeth, rosy lips showing gums, benign smile. It almost looks as if my impulse to write had had some relation to a juvenile anti-Semitic bias, to an anger which had to be directed against the Jewish quarter of me that I half-tried to disavow—a project all the more tempting in that “it” did not show.

As if in confirmation of this disagreeable thesis, memory suddenly presents me with the roommate—a big-hipped, hook-nosed girl from Montana—whom the school had foisted on me that first fall and whom I had asked to be separated from after two weeks. Maybe we had both asked to be separated. She did not like Annie Wright—and never returned, I think, after what must have been Christmas vacation.

But the reader must not think that our school was anti-Semitic. The position was more delicate than that. Miss Preston would never have tolerated expressions of anti-Semitism in teachers or pupils, any more than she would have accepted anti-Catholicism—we had several Catholic girls at the Seminary, including the little dark-eyed LaGasas, whose mother took me to Mass on Sunday. The little LaGasas were pets, and this was illustrative of what could happen to an attractive, appealing Jewish girl in our Christian schools. I think of darling Susie Lowenstein, with her dainty retroussé nose and finespun pale red-gold curls; that was at Sacred Heart, but at Annie Wright, after my roommate went, in junior or senior year there came the universally popular Elizabeth Staadecker from Seattle, with her deep voice, blond hair, freckles, and big, amusing teeth. It was as though the Jewish people had always to have two representatives with us, their bad angel and their good angel, and this, I think, applied—and perhaps still does—to any minority in our country. Our country needs two of each, like Noah’s Ark, for the sake of fair representation, which will allow us to be tolerant and prejudiced alternately, enable us, that is, to point to examples justifying either set of emotions. I am not sure about blacks and Catholics, but, as far as Jews are concerned, I suspect that there is a bottom layer of hostility, which then can be top-dressed or over-painted to any desired degree. Nobody in this land, certainly no Christian, can accept hating on a full-time basis; it is apt to reflect back on the hater.

So then did my impulse to write come out of my allowed quota of private, unvoiced anti-Semitism? I hope not. If it were true, I ought to quit writing. I prefer the explanation that a fierce dislike of self-deception had something to do with it. Moreover the nicer explanation is more convincing, I am relieved to see, in that self-deception remains, in my book, a major sin or vice whereas any dislike of Jews I had as a girl has been, let us say, pretty well sublimated. But I cannot let it drop there. Where did the hatred of self-deception come from? To have been so violent, it must have contained a fear. Yet, so far as I know, I never harbored such a fear. Nor can I find any grounds for it in my make-up. True, through fear of a monstrous guardian, I had become a terrible liar and I was only now getting over it; the Seminary helped, even though there were many silly rules, such as the prohibition of fountain pens (because the girls, shaking them down, could splatter the walls), that made one impatient to break them and then, when caught, deny it. Yet lying to parents and teachers is a quite different thing from lying to oneself. I suppose the first can lead to the second, but the process, I think, generally begins with the lie told to oneself and goes on to the lie told to the world. And yet, in all honesty, I don’t recall lying to myself, ever, though I do recall trying to. On the other hand, if I
had
lied, would I know? How, unless someone else caught me? And who could that be? Unless there is in each of us a
someone else
watching—what used to be called our conscience. I believe that there is: I
know
that other person. But even if I can accept that I am not a dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite, do not habitually lie to myself, it does not resolve the question of what made me so sensitive at the age of fourteen to the perils of self-deception. Perhaps I got it from reading—wasn’t Sir Roger de Coverley an example of the vice?—or had been painfully familiar with it in a previous life. I can never know the answer.

Miss Atkinson, I see, was not my only reader in the school. On the back of “What Doth It Profit a Man,” to my mortification I come upon a penciled note in my handwriting: “If you don’t like this, why all right, neither do I. If you say you do, I
know
you’re lying.” This may have been addressed to my seat-mate, the proud, tall, languid, bronze-eyed Ellin Watts, from Portland, though I wonder whether I had the courage to take that tone with her. Or Katie Urquhart, pale, with flaring nostrils, another member of Lampie’s nightly court? In any case, if there was an answer, it was not written on the back of the story.

It seems reasonable that I sent some of my stories to Mark, but what he said I cannot guess. I
know
that I sent a story about a prostitute (not Gracia, another one, with “eyes like dirty dishwater”) to a boy named Ed Bent at the University of Idaho in Moscow. How our correspondence began, I don’t know, unless it was through an intermediary, like blind-dating by letter. Perhaps I imagined that still another male correspondent would add to my prestige. However we started writing, before long I sent him that story, and he replied more or less in kind. That is, not being up to fiction, he did the equivalent by mail of “talking dirty” to me. What this consisted of, exactly, I have forgotten; doubtless a censor has been at work. In those days there could have been no question of four-letter words between us, and I doubt whether he dealt very concretely with the subject that was on his mind, i.e., mentioned his member in so many words as excited, inflamed, etc., or gave it a Christian name. But I remember being slightly repelled by what were probably innocent or ignorant male fantasies and by the handwriting (which I can still see, though the words have faded from my memory): sloping, close-set, characterless, like a boneless handshake, running evenly across his embossed fraternity-house paper. Evidently there had been a sad misunderstanding: what had begun, on my side, as a literary encounter of minds had turned into a callow campaign on his part to paw me with smutty language. But since Moscow, Idaho, was hundreds of miles away, I felt safe: sticks and stones could break my bones but words could never hurt me. As they kept getting thicker in their envelopes (requiring extra stamps), far from arousing me, his letters “turned me off,” and eventually, when I continued not to answer them, they stopped. It was ironical that by the time my grandmother found a stack of them in my bedroom, and
read
them, they might as well have gone to the dead-letter office.

That happened when I was home on vacation, between sophomore and junior years. I am not sure why I had kept them—as trophies or because already I had a respect for the historical record that would not let me destroy any piece of paper with writing or typing on it. But there is no mystery about why I had brought them home; obviously I could not leave them at school. My grandmother had no hesitation about destroying the whole lot, but not, I think, before she had shown at least a sample to my grandfather and their married son, my uncle Frank, then a young lawyer in my grandfather’s firm. I don’t suppose any legal action was contemplated (on sending obscene matter through the mails, surely a Federal offense), but the discovery of that trove in one of the drawers of my violet and pale-green bedroom furniture brought on a full-scale family crisis—the first and last I remember in Seattle.

There was talk of taking me out of Annie Wright, but where they thought of sending me, short of a reformatory, I do not know. And it was not just a question of the morals of a minor; a crisis in belief was shaking the Preston family—a credibility gap. My grandmother could not accept that this twisted Ed Bent in a fraternity house in Idaho was someone I had never met. For her, the only sense in such a correspondence would have been familiarity between the two parties: somehow, while I was meant to be safely at the Seminary (my worst crime being possession of a fountain pen), we had met at “a wild party” and “gone the limit.” For her, that explanation, while not exactly an excuse, would have been more acceptable than the incredible truth, which was that her granddaughter, barely yet in silk stockings, had written some crazy story about a prostitute and sent it to a total stranger. For her, in fact, poor woman, the improbabilities
began
with my writing a story like that, for no reason (a pity I had not thought to say that I had hoped to sell it to
True Romances
),
and what did I know of prostitutes, who had told me about them? That it had all come out of my imagination was almost worse than the thought that somebody had shown me a real “house” in Seattle’s red-light district.

Finally I must have been accorded a suspension of disbelief, for I was sent back to the Seminary in September, without a word’s passing, thank God, from my grandfather to Miss Adelaide Preston on the need for keeping a watch on my mail. He was too kindly, the dear, upright man, to want me to be spied on. Nor would he have liked to have that stout spinster (with whom he had discovered a common ancestor back in northern England) learn what “Cousin Mary” had been up to while in her care. Also, it seems to me, he was not nearly as upset as my grandmother; I guess because my misstep (if I could be believed) had been a mental sin, linked to a talent for words—the real blame, he probably decided, lay with that fool boy in Idaho. My grandfather was always indulgent where my mind’s adventures were concerned. It must have been some time, though, before my grandmother could feel the same about me; I fear it is perfectly likely that she never trusted me again.

Nevertheless she let me have my first evening-dress that summer. It was made for me by her dressmaker, Mrs. Farrell, and I cannot think why, except to have in my closet just in case … I was still not allowed to go out with boys; at Lake Crescent, as she must have known, evening-dresses weren’t worn. She could not have been looking ahead to junior prom, in the spring, for I remember my prom dress, which was much more sophisticated: flame-red chiffon, straight cut, with tiers of short ruffles.
This
dress—could it have been for the wedding of a Morgenstern cousin?—was yellow chiffon, with a round neck, a fairly full skirt, and an uneven hemline that finished in picoted points. It had a narrow silver belt and a bunch of red cherries at one hip. I had silver slippers to wear with it. That first, girlish, evening dress lived on in my memory to figure in an essay I wrote on George Orwell in 1969. Orwell, when Eric Blair, aged seventeen, had written to a schoolmate describing the terrors of a night spent outdoors in a farmer’s field. That brought back to me the night I spent in the “backyard of a university student I loved,” dressed in an evening gown (“a bride of Death was the principle of my costume”) and hoping to commit suicide. The student was Mark Sullivan.

I cannot say exactly why I was roaming around his backyard with a bottle of iodine in my hand all dressed up to kill myself. It was a cold night; the house was dark. Either Mark was not home or the whole family was asleep. The time was around midnight. I think I was relieved to find, on edging softly past the garbage cans into the backyard, that the window I imagined was his showed no sign of life inside. Though my plan was to kill myself in serenade posture, so to speak, below his window, he was the last person I desired to see. It would have been awful if he had caught me parading around like a mummer. I was also afraid of waking his parents or some neighbor who might call the police. As I wrote in the Orwell essay: “Though eager to die, I was terribly fearful of being caught trespassing before I could swallow the iodine and be discovered on the premises as a corpse.” That was partly true—indeed wholly true except for “eager to die.” I no more wanted to die than I was in love with Mark.

It was all theatricals, which I was putting on for my own benefit. I would have “died” had I had any other audience, i.e., if anyone had seen me. Yet something must have put the idea of that charade in my head; there must have been a precipitating cause. I had been crossed in love, all right, but that had been some time back and in any case had nothing to do with Mark. No, it was some trivial chagrin: I had quarreled with my family that evening maybe or a friend had disappointed me or I had nothing to read, having finished my library book. Or—just possibly—Mark had promised to bring me a book that afternoon and had not come. Or had gone up to see Harold without stopping to talk to me. Something like that might account for my wish to lay my death, as tribute or blame, at his door. I knew very well that his feelings for me were kindly but not at all amorous—I was still “the Niece,” alas, and my own feelings were adjusted to that. Perhaps what was troubling me was simply general boredom and a sense of the vanity of human wishes.