Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (6 page)

Since we were usually running away to escape some anticipated punishment, these flights at least gained us something, but in spite of the taunts of our guardians, who congratulated us bitterly on our “cleverness,” we ourselves could not feel that we came home in triumph as long as we came home at all. The cramps and dreads of those long nights made a harrowing impression on us. Our failure to run away successfully put us, so we thought, at the absolute mercy of our guardians; our last weapon was gone, for it was plain to be seen that they could always bring us back and we never understood why they did not take advantage of this situation to thrash us, as they used to put it, within an inch of our lives. What intervened to save us, we could not guess—a miracle, perhaps; we were not acquainted with any
human
motive that would prompt Omnipotence to desist. We did not suspect that these escapes brought consternation to the family circle, which had acted, so it conceived, only in our best interests, and now saw itself in danger of unmerited obloquy. What would be the Protestant reaction if something still more dreadful were to happen? Child suicides were not unknown, and quiet, asthmatic little Kevin had been caught with matches under the house. The family would not acknowledge error, but it conceded a certain mismanagement on Myers’ and Margaret’s part. Clearly, we might become altogether intractable if our homecoming on these occasions were not mitigated with leniency. Consequently, my grandmother kept us in a kind of neutral detention. She declined to be aware of our grievance and offered no words of comfort, but the comforts of her household acted upon us soothingly, like an automatic mother’s hand. We ate and drank contentedly; with all her harsh views, my grandmother was a practical woman and would not have thought it worthwhile to unsettle her whole schedule, teach her cook to make a lumpy mush and watery boiled potatoes, and market for turnips and parsnips and all the other vegetables we hated, in order to approximate the conditions she considered suitable for our characters. Humble pie could be costly, especially when cooked to order.

Doubtless she did not guess how delightful these visits seemed to us once the fear of punishment had abated. Her knowledge of our own way of living was luxuriously remote. She did not visit our ménage or inquire into its practices, and though hypersensitive to a squint or a dental irregularity (for she was liberal indeed with glasses and braces for the teeth, disfiguring appliances that remained the sole token of our bourgeois origin and set us off from our parochial-school mates like the caste marks of some primitive tribe), she appeared not to notice the darns and patches of our clothing, our raw hands and scarecrow arms, our silence and our elderly faces. She imagined us as surrounded by certain playthings she had once bestowed on us—a sandbox, a wooden swing, a wagon, an ambulance, a toy fire engine. In my grandmother’s consciousness, these objects remained always in pristine condition; years after the sand had spilled out of it and the roof had rotted away, she continued to ask tenderly after our lovely sand pile and to manifest displeasure if we declined to join in its praises. Like many egoistic people (I have noticed this trait in myself), she was capable of making a handsome outlay, but the act affected her so powerfully that her generosity was still lively in her memory when its practical effects had long vanished. In the case of a brown beaver hat, which she watched me wear for four years, she was clearly blinded to its matted nap, its shapeless brim, and ragged ribbon by the vision of the price tag it had worn when new. Yet, however her mind embroidered the bare tapestry of our lives, she could not fail to perceive that we felt, during these short stays with her,
some
difference between the two establishments, and to take our wonder and pleasure as a compliment to herself.

She smiled on us quite kindly when we exclaimed over the food and the nice, warm bathrooms, with their rugs and electric heaters. What funny little creatures, to be so impressed by things that were, after all, only the ordinary amenities of life! Seeing us content in her house, her emulative spirit warmed slowly to our admiration: she compared herself to our guardians, and though for expedient reasons she could not afford to deprecate them (“You children have been very ungrateful for all Myers and Margaret have done for you”), a sense of her own finer magnanimity disposed her subtly in our favor. In the flush of these emotions, a tenderness sprang up between us. She seemed half reluctant to part with whichever of us she had in her custody, almost as if she were experiencing a genuine pang of conscience. “Try and be good,” she would advise us when the moment for leave-taking came, “and don’t provoke your aunt and uncle. We might have made different arrangements if there had been only one of you to consider.” These manifestations of concern, these tacit admissions of our true situation, did not make us, as one might have thought, bitter against our grandparents, for whom ignorance of the facts might have served as a justification, but, on the contrary, filled us with love for them and even a kind of sympathy—our sufferings were less terrible if someone acknowledged their existence, if someone were suffering for us, for whom we, in our turn, could suffer, and thereby absolve of guilt.

During these respites, the recollection of our parents formed a bond between us and our grandmother that deepened our mutual regard. Unlike our guardians or the whispering ladies who sometimes came to call on us, inspired, it seemed, by a pornographic curiosity as to the exact details of our feelings (“Do you suppose they remember their parents?” “Do they ever
say
anything?”), our grandmother was quite uninterested in arousing an emotion of grief in us. “She doesn’t feel it at all,” I used to hear her confide, of me, to visitors, but contentedly, without censure, as if I had been a spayed cat that, in her superior foresight, she had had “attended to.” For my grandmother, the death of my parents had become, in retrospect, an eventful occasion upon which she looked back with pleasure and a certain self-satisfaction. Whenever we stayed with her, we were allowed, as a special treat, to look into the rooms they had died in, for the fact that, as she phrased it, “they died in separate rooms” had for her a significance both romantic and somehow self-gratulatory, as though the separation in death of two who had loved each other in life were beautiful in itself and also reflected credit on the chatelaine of the house, who had been able to furnish two master bedrooms for the emergency. The housekeeping details of the tragedy, in fact, were to her of paramount interest. “I turned my house into a hospital,” she used to say, particularly when visitors were present. “Nurses were as scarce as hen’s teeth, and
high
—you can hardly imagine what those girls were charging an hour.” The trays and the special cooking, the laundry and the disinfectants recalled themselves fondly to her thoughts, like items on the menu of some long-ago ball-supper, the memory of which recurred to her with a strong, possessive nostalgia.

My parents had, it seemed, by dying on her premises, become in a lively sense her property, and she dispensed them to us now, little by little, with a genuine sense of bounty, just as, later on, when I returned to her a grown-up young lady, she conceded me a diamond lavaliere of my mother’s as if the trinket were an inheritance to which she had the prior claim. But her generosity with her memories appeared to us, as children, an act of the greatest indulgence. We begged her for more of these mortuary reminiscences as we might have begged for candy, and since ordinarily we not only had no candy but were permitted no friendships, no movies, and little reading beyond what our teachers prescribed for us, and were kept in quarantine, like carriers of social contagion, among the rhubarb plants of our neglected yard, these memories doled out by our grandmother became our secret treasures; we never spoke of them to each other but hoarded them, each against the rest, in the miserly fastnesses of our hearts. We returned, therefore, from our grandparents’ house replenished in all our faculties; these crumbs from the rich man’s table were a banquet indeed to us. We did not even mind going back to our guardians, for we now felt superior to them, and besides, as we well knew, we had no choice. It was only by accepting our situation as a just and unalterable arrangement that we could be allowed to transcend it and feel ourselves united to our grandparents in a love that was the more miraculous for breeding no practical results.

In this manner, our household was kept together, and my grandparents were spared the necessity of arriving at a fresh decision about it. Naturally, from time to time a new scandal would break out (for our guardians did not grow kinder in response to being run away from), yet we had come, at bottom, to despair of making any real change in our circumstances, and ran away hopelessly, merely to postpone punishment. And when, after five years, our Protestant grandfather, informed at last of the facts, intervened to save us, his indignation at the family surprised us nearly as much as his action. We thought it only natural that grandparents should know and do nothing, for did not God in the mansions of Heaven look down upon human suffering and allow it to take its course?

There are several dubious points in this memoir.

“... we had not known that we had carried the flu with us into our drawing rooms.” Just when we got the flu seems to be arguable. According to the newspaper accounts, we contracted it on the trip. This conflicts with the story that Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula had brought it with them. My present memory supports the idea that someone was sick before we left. But perhaps we did not “know” it was the flu.

“... we saw our father draw a revolver.” If Uncle Harry is right, this is wrong. In any case, we did not “see” it; I heard the story, as I have said, from my other grandmother. When she told me, I had the feeling that I almost remembered it. That is, my mind promptly supplied me with a picture of it, just as it supplied me with a picture of my father standing in the dining room with his arms full of red roses. Actually, I do dimly recall some dispute with the conductor, who wanted to put us off the train.

“We awoke to reality in the sewing room several weeks later.” We cannot have been sick that long. The newspaper accounts of my parents’ death state that “the children are recovering.” We must have arrived in Minneapolis on the second or third of November. My parents probably died on the sixth and seventh of November; I say “probably” because the two newspaper stories contradict each other and neither my brothers nor I feel sure. I know I was still sick on the day of the false armistice, for I remember bells ringing and horns and whistles blowing and a nurse standing over my bed and saying that this meant the war was over. I was in a strange room and did not understand how I had got there, I only knew that outside, where the noise was coming from, was Minneapolis. Looking back, putting two and two together, it suddenly strikes me that this must have been the day of my parents’ funeral. My brother Kevin agrees. Now that I have established this, or nearly established it, I have the feeling of “remembering,” as though I had always known it. In any case, I was in bed for some days after this, having had flu and pneumonia. Kevin says we were still in our grandmother’s house at Christmas. He is sure because he was “bad” that day: he punched out the cloth grill on the library phonograph with a drumstick.

“‘There is someone here to see you’—the maid met me one afternoon with this announcement.” I believe this is pure fiction. In reality, I had already seen the people who were going to be my guardians sometime before this, while we were convalescent. We were brought down, in our pajamas, one afternoon to my grandmother’s sun parlor, to meet two strangers, a man and a woman, who were sitting there with the rest of the family, like a reception committee. I remember sensing that the occasion had some importance, possibly someone had told us that these people were going to look after us while Mama and Daddy were away, or perhaps stress had merely been laid on “good behavior.” Or could it have been just that they were all dressed in black? The man evinced a great deal of paternal good humor, taking my brothers, one by one, on his lap and fondling them while he talked with my grandparents. He paid me no attention at all, and I remember the queer ebb of feeling inside me when I saw I was going to be left out. He did not like me, I noticed this with profound surprise and sorrow. I was not so much jealous as perplexed. After he had played with each of my brothers, we were carried back upstairs to bed. So far as I remember, I did not see him or his wife, following this, for weeks, even months. I cannot recall the circumstances of being moved to the new house at all. But one day I was there, and the next thing I knew, Aunt Margaret was punishing me for having spoiled the wallpaper in my room.

The reader will wonder what made me change this story to something decidedly inferior, even from a literary point of view—far too sentimental; it even sounds improbable. I forget now, but I think the reason must have been that I did not want to “go into” my guardians as individuals here; that was another story, which was to be told in the next chapter, “Yonder Peasant,” unlike the chapters that follow, is not really concerned with individuals. It is, primarily, an angry indictment of privilege for its treatment of the underprivileged, a single, breathless, voluble speech on the subject of human indifference. We orphan children were not responsible for being orphans, but we were treated as if we were and as if being orphans were a crime we had committed. Read
poor
for orphan throughout and you get a kind of allegory or broad social satire on the theme of wealth and poverty. The anger was a generalized anger, which held up my grandparents as specimens of unfeeling behavior.

My uncle Harry argues that I do not give his mother sufficient credit: if she had lifted her little finger, he says, she could have had me cut out of his father’s will. He wants me to understand this and be grateful. (I was fourteen or fifteen when my grandfather died.) This is typical McCarthy reasoning, as the reader will recognize: “... clearly, it was a generous impulse that kept us in the family at all.”